The success of the European Social Forum (ESF) in Paris last November is a striking illustration of the growing strength of the "alternative worldist"[1] [1] movement during the last decade. After some hesitation, the initially fairly limited audience (limited in kind rather than geographically, since the movement quickly attracted an audience amongst "thinkers" and academics) grew to take on all the hallmarks of a traditional ideological current: a popular reputation thanks to the radicalism of the demonstrations in Seattle 1999 during the summit of the World Trade Organisation (WTO); then the media figures, amongst whom José Bové is the uncontested star, and finally the major and unmissable events: the World Social Forum (WSF) which aimed to be an alternative to the Davos forum that brings together the world's major economic players, and whose first three meetings (2001, 2002, 2003) have been held in Porto Alegre (Brazil), a town supposed to symbolise "citizens' self-management".
Since then, the wave has continued to grow: the WSF has sprouted regional subsidiaries (the ESF is one expression, but there have been others, in Africa for example), and now is moving continents, to be held in India during January 2004. Newspapers, magazines, meetings, demonstrations, all are proliferating at a dizzying rate... It is barely possible today to give some thought to social questions without being immediately confronted by a tidal wave of "alternative worldist" ideas.
Such a rapid ascension immediately raises a whole series of questions: why has it happened so fast, so powerfully, and in so widespread a manner? And above all, why now?
For the "alternative worldists" the answer is simple: if their movement has met with such success, it is because it offers a real answer to the problems confronting humanity today. That being said, there is one thing that the "alternative worldists" need to explain: how is it that the media (largely controlled by the same "transnational companies" that they denounce so incessantly) are giving so much publicity to their words and deeds?
True, the success of the "alternative worldist" movement is a sign that it corresponds to a real need, that it serves real interests. The question then is: who really needs the "alternative worldist" movement and what interests does it serve? Does it serve the interests of the oppressed categories (poor peasants, women, pensioners, workers, the "excluded", etc.) that it claims to defend, or does it serve the interests of the social order that promotes and finances it?
The best way to answer these questions is to examine the ideological needs of the bourgeois class today. The fact is that the ruling class is looking for the best way to deal a decisive blow against working class consciousness.
The first point to consider is the economic crisis which - although it has been with us since the end of the 1960s - has now reached such a stage that the bourgeoisie is forced to adopt a relatively realistic language in this respect. The shameless lie which used the two-figure growth rates of the Asian "dragons" (South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) to demonstrate capitalism's good health in the period following the collapse of the Eastern bloc will no longer hold up: the "dragons" are no longer spitting fire. As for the "tigers" (Indonesia, Thailand, etc.) which were supposed to accompany them, they have stopped roaring and now are begging for mercy from their creditors. The lie that followed, and which replaced "emerging countries" with the "emerging new economy" lasted still less time: the cruel law of value cut its speculative flights down to size, and left a good many companies "out for the count".
Today, the "context of recession", which each national bourgeoisie blames on its neighbours, is a euphemism which can barely hide the gravity of the economic situation at the very heart of capitalism. At the same time we are endlessly told to "make an effort", to "pull in our belts" in order to return the economy to health. Such talk is unable to hide completely the attacks that the bourgeoisie is undertaking against the working class, which the gravity of the crisis demands should be harder, more widespread, and more simultaneous than ever if they are to preserve the interests of the ruling class.
Such attacks cannot but provoke a reaction from the working class, even if such a reaction takes different forms depending on the country and the moment, and lead to a development of the class struggle. And this situation is also igniting the spark of consciousness among elements of the working class. The development of class consciousness is not spectacular. Nonetheless, in the proletariat today a whole series of questions are arising as to the real reasons behind the attacks of the bourgeoisie, the real situation of the economic crisis, but also the real reasons behind the wars that are endlessly breaking out around the world. The question is also posed, of knowing how to struggle effectively against all these calamities, which can no longer simply be palmed off as due to the fatality of "human nature".
Such questions are still embryonic, and a long way from posing a threat to capitalism's political domination. They are nonetheless a concern for the ruling class, for whom it is much easier to nip the danger in the bud than to deal with it once it has bloomed. This concern lies at the heart of the "alternative worldist" ideological apparatus, which constitutes a reaction by the ruling class to the beginnings of a development of consciousness in the working class. We should remember what was the central, endlessly repeated theme after the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the so-called "socialist" regimes: "communism is dead, long live liberalism! The confrontation between the two worlds is dead, and so much the better since it was the cause of war and poverty. Henceforth, only one world exists or is possible: the liberal democratic capitalism, source of peace and prosperity".
It did not take long for this "brave new world" to show that it could still start wars, spread poverty and barbarity in its wake, even after the fall of the "Evil Empire" (to use the expression of US president Reagan). And less than ten years after the triumphant assertion that only one world was possible, we have seen the rebirth of the idea that an "alternative world" to liberalism is indeed a possibility. The ruling class has clearly taken the measure of the long-term effects that its systemic crisis is likely to have on class consciousness, and has laid down a thick smoke-screen to turn to working class away from its own perspective of "another world" where, contrary to that of the "alternative worldists", the bourgeoisie will have no place.
It is hardly surprising that the questioning expressed by elements within the working class should fall largely under the following three headings:
These three questions have been central concerns for the workers' movement since its beginnings. It is because the working class is able to understand the fundamental causes underlying the situation, because it can understand that only one perspective offers an alternative to this situation, and finally because it is able to reach an understanding of its own revolutionary role in the situation, that it will be able to arm itself to overthrow capitalism and start building communism.
There are almost two centuries of experience there to show us that we must never underestimate the bourgeoisie's ability to understand the process leading to this consciousness, and the historical dangers that it contains. This is why - despite its variegated appearance - the "alternative worldist" ideology is based essentially on these three themes.
Of these themes, the first - the reality of the world today - immediately highlights how much the "alternative worldist" ideology is an integral part of the bourgeoisie's apparatus of mystification, in that it wholly shares the lies about capitalism's current economic situation. For the "alternative worldists", as for the anarchists and leftists, the reality of capitalism's systemic crisis is hidden behind a constant denunciation of the "great trusts". When a whole region of the planet disintegrates in economic disaster, it is the fault of the multi-nationals. When poverty spreads to the very heart of the industrialised world, then it is the fault of the multi-nationals and their greed for profit. Everywhere, the world is full of endless wealth, which would be there for all if it were not seized by a heartless minority. There is one critical element missing from this apparently coherent schema, if we are to understand the reality of the world situation and its evolution: that is the crisis, the definitive crisis which marks the bankruptcy of capitalism.
It has always been a matter of critical importance for the ruling class to hide the reality that its system is not eternal, that it is condemned one day to leave the historical stage. This is why it tries to minimise capitalism's increasing economic convulsions with its talk of "light at the end of the tunnel", and the good times waiting for us just round the corner. And yet, the more they serve us up this talk, the worse the situation gets. The bourgeoisie hopes to rejuvenate the old lie by giving it a new "alternative worldist" veneer.
However, this does not prevent the "alternative worldist" movement from proposing an alternative to the present world. Or rather, several alternatives. This is its second fundamental theme. Each part of the movement has its own critique of the world today, slightly different from the others: its ideas may be coloured by ecology, by economic theory, by cultural, food, or sexual orientation... the list is endless. And these are not just criticisms: each one has to put forward its own positive solution. This is why the "alternative worldist" slogan has shifted into the plural: "other worlds are possible", from a world without GM foods to a self-managed world, by way of the most classical state capitalism.
There is obviously no danger for the ruling class in putting forward so many political alternatives, since none of them breaks out of the framework of capitalist society. They propose nothing but greater or lesser, more or less utopian improvements to capitalist society, which always remain compatible with the domination of the bourgeoisie. In fact, the latter is able to confront the working class with a whole panoply of "solutions" to the system's ills, all of which contributes to hiding the only perspective able to put an end to its barbarity and poverty: the overthrow of their fundamental cause, which is moribund capitalism.
The third theme of anti-globalisation flows naturally from the first two: after hiding the real reason behind capitalism's poverty and barbarity, after hiding the only perspective for putting an end to it, it only remains to hide the only force capable of doing so. To do so, the anti-globalists promote a multitude of revolts by the peasants in the Third World, or even in Europe as with José Bové's Confédération Paysanne, or of desperate attacks on corrupt banana republics by the local petty bourgeois strata. Obviously, all these revolts express a reaction against the misery imposed on the great mass of humanity, but none of them bears the slightest spark able to overthrow the capitalist order that they are attacking.
For more than a century and a half, the workers' movement has shown that the only force really capable of transforming society is the proletariat. It is not the only class in revolt against capitalism, but it is the only class that holds the key to overcoming it. To do so, it must not only unite internationally; it must act as an autonomous class, independently of all other classes in society. The bourgeoisie knows this perfectly well. By putting forward all these nationalist petty-bourgeois struggles, it aims to tie the proletariat up in a straitjacket where the latter's own consciousness and perspective cannot develop.
This kind of mystification responds to a danger which, for the bourgeoisie, is far from new: the proletariat has had the potential capacity to overthrow capitalism ever since the onset of its decadence at the beginning of the 20th century. The ruling class has understood the danger since the First World War, followed as it was by the revolution of October 1917, and then by the revolutionary wave that threatened capitalism's power for several years, from Germany in 1919 to China in 1927. It did not wait until 1990 to lay down its plan of campaign. The working class has already been subjected to more than a century of ideological attacks as to the real nature of the crisis, the communist perspective, and the potential of the class struggle. The anti-globalist tidal wave is thus not without precedent in the history of bourgeois thought. However, the fact that it is happening expresses a change in the confrontation between classes at the ideological level, which forces the ruling class to adapt its methods of mystification against the proletariat.
As the sports commentators like to say, "you don't change a winning team". Fundamentally, the mystifications that the bourgeoisie uses to prevent the working class from developing its revolutionary consciousness do not change, since the requirements that they have to answer do not change either, as we saw above. Traditionally, it is the parties of the left (Stalinists, social-democrats) which have served as vehicles for these mystifications aimed at hiding the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, at presenting the working class with false alternatives, and undermining any perspective in its struggles.
These parties have been completely worn out ideologically since the end of the 1960s when the present crisis began, and above all since the proletariat reappeared on the historical scene after four decades of counter-revolution (the immense strike of May 1968 in France, the Italian "hot autumn" in 1969, etc.). Faced with the impetuous rise in proletarian struggles, the left parties began by putting forward the idea of a governmental alternative, which was supposed to answer the aspirations of the working class. One theme of this "alternative" was that the state should play a much greater role in the economy, whose convulsions had been getting worse since 1967 and the end of the reconstruction period that had followed World War II. The left parties told the working class to moderate, or even call a halt to its struggles, in order to demand changes throw the ballot box and left governments which would supposedly favour the workers interests. Since then the left (particularly the social-democrats, but also the "communists" in countries like France) has participated in numerous governments, not to defend the workers but to manage the crisis by attacking their living conditions. Moreover, the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the so-called "socialist" regimes at the end of the 1980s dealt a heavy blow to the credibility of the "communist" parties which had defended these regimes, and deprived them of the greater part of their influence in the working class.
The deepening crisis of capitalism is pushing the working class to return to the struggle, while at the same time a reflection is beginning to spread within the class as to what is really at stake in society. At the same time, the parties which traditionally defended the interests of capitalism within the workers' ranks are thus seriously discredited, which makes it more difficult for them to play the same role that they used to in the past. This is why they are not in the front line of the grand manoeuvres designed to derail the questioning and the discontent within the working class. The anti-globalisation movement is in the limelight, having adopted most of the old themes that used to be the left parties' stock-in-trade. Indeed, this is why the left parties (especially the "communist" parties) are so at home in the waters of the anti-globalisation movement, even though they remain discreet and "critical" in order to allow the latter to seem really "innovative"[2] [2] and avoid discrediting it in advance.
This remarkable convergence between the mystifications of the "old left" and those of the "alternative worldists" can be seen in some of the latter's central themes.
To get an idea of the main themes of the "alternative worldist" current, we will base ourselves on the writings of ATTAC,[3] [3] which serves as the movement's main "theoretician".
This organisation was officially born in June 1998 after an upsurge of contacts that followed an editorial by Ignacio Ramonet in the December 1997 issue of the French paper Le Monde Diplomatique. An indication of ATTAC's success can be seen in the fact that it had grown to 30,000 members by late 2000. Amongst the membership are more than 1,000 organisations (unions, community groups, local council delegates' associations), some hundred French members of parliament, a large number of state employees especially teachers, and numerous political and artistic celebrities grouped in 250 local committees.
This powerful ideological organism was created around the idea of the "Tobin tax", which we owe to the Nobel prize-winner for economics, James Tobin. Tobin suggested that a tax of 0.05% on financial transactions would allow the regulation of these transactions and make it possible to avoid the excesses of speculation. According to ATTAC, this tax would above all make it possible to allocate the funds collected to aid the development of the poor countries.[4] [4]
Why such a tax? In order to both counter and profit from these exchange and other financial transactions (which is contradictory to say the least: why would one want something to disappear if one profits from it?), that symbolise the globalisation of the economy which - in short - enriches the rich and impoverishes the poor.
The point of departure of ATTAC's analysis of present society is the following: "Financial globalisation aggravates economic insecurity and social inequality. It bypasses and degrades the choice of peoples, democratic institutions, and sovereign states in charge of the general interest. It substitutes instead the strictly speculative logic that expresses the sole interests of transnational companies and financial markets".[5] [5]
What, according to ATTAC, caused this economic evolution? We find the following answers: "One of the most striking facts of the late 20th century was the rising power of finance in the world economy: this is the process of financial globalisation, the result of the political choice imposed by the governments of the G7 countries". The explanation for this change at the end of the 20th century comes later: "In the framework of the 'Fordist' compromise[6] [6], which worked until the 1970s, the leaders came to an agreement with the wage-earners, organising a share-out of the increase in productivity within the company, which made it possible to preserve the share-out of added value. The appearance of shareholder capitalism meant the end of this regime. The traditional model, known as the 'stakeholder model', considered as a community of interest within the company between three partners, has given way to a new 'shareholder model', which gives absolute priority to the interests of the holders of stock capital, in other words to the funds of the company itself".[7] [7] Moreover: "The primary objective of companies quoted on the stock exchange is to 'create shareholder value', in other words to increase the value of shares in order to generate surplus value and so increase the wealth of the shareholders".[8] [8]
Still according to the anti-globalists, the new choice of the G7 governments caused a transformation in business. The multi-nationals and great financial institutions no longer made a profit from the production of commodities, and therefore "put pressure on companies so that they distribute the greatest possible dividend at the expense of productive investment with a return in the longer term".
There is no need to go on with more quotations from the anti-globalist movement. Those we have just given demonstrate three things clearly enough:
The "transnationals" of today, which are supposedly breaking free of the authority of the state, are remarkably like the "multi-nationals" that the left-wing parties attacked for the same sins in the 1970s. in reality, whether they be called "multi-nationals" or "transnationals", these companies have a nationality: that of their majority shareholders. In fact, the multi-nationals are generally the great companies of the most powerful states - first and foremost the United States - and they are the instruments of these states' imperialist policies, along with their military and diplomatic arms. And when this or that national state (like those of the "banana republics" is subjected to the dictates of this or that great multi-national, this is fundamentally nothing but the expression of that state's domination by the great power where that multi-national is based.
Already during the 1970s, the Left was demanding "more state" in order to limit the power of these "modern monsters" and guarantee a "fairer" share-out of the wealth they produced. ATTAC and Co have invented absolutely nothing at this level. Above all, we should underline the profoundly deceitful nature of the idea that the state has ever been an instrument for the defence of the interests of the exploited. Quite the reverse: it is fundamentally an instrument for the defence of the existing order, and therefore of the interests of the ruling and exploiting class. In some circumstances, and the better to assume its role, the state may oppose this or that section of the ruling class. This is what happened at the dawn of capitalism, when the British government passed laws to limit the exploitation of the workforce, and of children in particular. Although some capitalists considered this detrimental to their interests, the measure ensured that the labour power which is the source of all capitalist wealth was not destroyed en masse before reaching adulthood. Similarly, when the Nazi state persecuted certain sections of the ruling class (notably the Jewish bourgeoisie), this was obviously not in defence of the interests of the exploited.
The Welfare State is basically a myth aimed at making the exploited accept the perpetuation of capitalist exploitation and the rule of the bourgeoisie. When capitalism's economic health declines, the state - whether "right" or "left" - shows its true face, freezing wages, slashing "social budgets", health spending, unemployment benefit and pensions. And when the workers refuse to accept such sacrifices, it is also the state which reasons with them in the language of the truncheon, teargas, arrests, and if all else fails, bullets.
The anti-globalists, in the best tradition of the classical Left, are in fact trying to spread the idea that the state could protect the interests of the oppressed from the multi-nationals, and that therefore there could exist such a thing as a "good" capitalism as opposed to a "bad capitalism".
ATTAC's "discovery" - with all their talk about "shareholders" and "stakeholders" - that the capitalists' main aim is to make a profit, is the most ludicrous caricature of such an idea. Capitalists have been investing to make a profit for a long time - ever since capitalism came into existence in fact.
As for the "strictly speculative logic" supposedly caused by "financial globalisation", this was hardly brought into being by some G7 meeting or by the arrival in power of Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher. Speculation is as old as capitalism itself. Marx had already pointed out in the 19th century that when a new crisis of overproduction approaches, the capitalists have a tendency to prefer speculation to productive investment. The bourgeois understand pragmatically that if the markets are saturated, then the commodities that they produce with the machines they have bought are likely to remain unsold, thus preventing both the realisation of the surplus-value that they contain (thanks to the exploitation of the workers who have set the machines in motion) and even the value of the initial capital. This is why, as Marx noted, commercial crises seemed to be a result of speculation, when in reality speculation is nothing but an early warning of the crisis. In the same way, the speculative movements that we witness today are not the result of this or that group of capitalists' lack of civic feeling, but an expression of the general crisis of capitalism.
Behind the ludicrous stupidity of the anti-globalist "experts'" "scientific analyses", there is an idea that capitalism's defenders have used for a long time to prevent the working class from turning towards its revolutionary perspective. In the middle of the 19th century, the petty bourgeois socialist Proudhon tried to make a distinction between the "good" and "bad" sides of capitalism, in order to promote a sort of "fair trade" and industrial self-management (the co-operatives).
Later, the reformist current in the workers' movement, like its main theoretician Bernstein, tried to to suggest that capitalism could increasingly satisfy the interests of the exploited, as long as it was forced to do so by the pressure of the working class in the framework of bourgeois institutions like parliament. The aim of the working class' struggle should therefore be to ensure the triumph of the "good" capitalists over the "bad" capitalists who whether by egoism or by short-sightedness opposed the "positive" evolution of the capitalist economy.
Today, ATTAC and its friends propose to return to the "Fordist compromise" that supposedly existed before the arrival of the brutes of "financialisation", and which "preserved the share-out of added value" between workers and capitalists. The "alternative worldist" current thus makes a choice contribution to the bourgeoisie's apparatus of mystification:
In short, the workers are being called not to fight the capitalist mode of production which is responsible for their worsening exploitation, their misery, and the barbarity unleashed on the world today, but to mobilise to defend a fantastic chimerical version of the same system. In other words, to give up the defence of their own interests in favour of defending the interests of their mortal enemy, the bourgeoisie.
The unbending denunciation of the anti-globalist movement, and the widest possible intervention in order to fight its dangerous ideas, are now priorities for all those proletarian elements who have realised that the only alternative world that is possible today is communism, and that communism can only be built through the most steadfast opposition to the bourgeoisie and all its ideologies, of which "alternative worldism" is only the latest avatar. It has to be fought as energetically as Social-Democracy and Stalinism.
Günter
1 [9] In order to get away from the somewhat negative and too overtly nationalist ring of the "anti-globalisation" slogan, a new expression has come into fashion during the last year or so: rendered in French as "alter-mondialisation", this translates roughly into English as "alternative worldism". We have thus used this latter rather barbaric expression in this article, interchangeably with "anti-globalism".
2 [10] It is worth noting that one favourite anti-globalisation theme does not figure in the classical left tradition: ecology. This is essentially because the theme of ecology is relatively recent, whereas the traditional left bases its ideology on older references (even if they are still up to date in mystifying the workers).
3 [11] Association pour la Taxation des Transactions Financières et l'Aide aux Citoyens ("Association for a tax on financial transactions and aid to citizens")
4 [12] It should be pointed out that James Tobin has refused to have anything to do with ATTAC's use of his ideas, unsurprisingly since the purpose of the tax was originally to encourage free trade (ie globalisation). Tobin himself remarked that "the loudest applause is coming from the wrong side" (see Tobin's obituary published in the New York Times of 12th March 2002.
5 [13] "Plateforme d'ATTAC", adopted by the founding assembly on 3rd June 1998, in Tout sur ATTAC 2002, page 22.
6 [14] The term refers to the ideas proposed by Henry Ford I, founder of one of today's largest multi-nationals, after World War I. Ford suggested that it was in the capitalists' interests to pay their workers high wages in order to enlarge the market for their products. Ford workers were therefore encouraged to buy the cars that they had contributed to build. These ideas could have a semblance of reality in a period of prosperity, and had the advantage of promoting social peace in "good king Henry's" factories, but they disappeared like snow in the sun when the Great Depression hit the United States in the 1930s (editor's note).
7 [15] "Licenciements de convenance boursière: les règles du jeu du capitalisme actionnarial", Paris , 2nd May 2001, in Tout sur ATTAC 2002, page 132-4.
8 [16] Idem p137.
One hundred years ago, in July/August 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party held its Second Congress - not in Russia, since the scale of repression under the Czarist regime would have made this virtually impossible - but in Belgium and in Britain. Even then the need to shift the venue in the middle of the Congress was necessitated by the close surveillance of the "democratic" Belgian police. This congress has gone down in history as the one which saw the party split into its Bolshevik and Menshevik wings.
The historians of the ruling class have interpreted this split in various ways. For one school of thought - what we might call the Orlando Figes school of history, for whom the October revolution of 1917 was an unmitigated disaster - the emergence of Bolshevism was of course a Very Bad Thing.[1] If Lenin and his band of fanatics, whose political influences had more to do with Nechayev and native Russian terrorism than international socialism, had not removed the democracy from social democracy, if Menshevism rather than Bolshevism had triumphed in 1917, then we might have been spared not only the awful civil war of 1918-21, not only the Stalinist terror of the 30s and 40s, which were the inevitable consequences of Bolshevik ruthlessness, but in all probability Hitler, World War Two, the Cold War and no doubt Saddam Hussein and the Gulf Wars as well.
Such passionate anti-Bolshevism is normally only found in one other quarter: that of the anarchists. For them, Bolshevism hijacked the true revolution in 1917; if it had not been for Lenin, with his authoritarian vision inherited from the hardly less authoritarian Marx, if it had not been for the Bolshevik party, which like all parties strives only for its own monopoly of power, why, we might be free today, living in a world wide federation of communes?. Anti-Bolshevism is the one true distinguishing feature of all varieties of anarchism, whether the crude version somewhat caricatured in this paragraph, or the infinitely more sophisticated brands which today call themselves anti-Leninist communists, autonomists, etc etc - all of them agree that the last thing the working class needs is a centralised political party on the Bolshevik model.
When bourgeois ideology and its petty bourgeois anarchist shadow is not seeing communist organisations as malign all-powerful conspiracies that have done huge harm to the interests of mankind, it is dismissing them as risible, impotent, deranged, semi-religious cults that no one listens to anyway; as utopians, armchair theoreticians cut off from reality, incurable sectarians ready to split with each other and stab each other in the back at the drop of a hat. For this line of argument, the 1903 congress provides endless amounts of fuel: didn't Bolshevism originate in an obscure debate about a simple phrase in the party rules, about who is and who isn't a party member; still worse, didn't the final rupture between Menshevism and Bolshevism take the form of a quarrel about which personalities should or shouldn't be on the editorial board of Iskra? Surely that is proof enough of the futility, the impossibility of building a revolutionary party which is not like the faction-ridden sewers, the battle grounds of egoistic ambition, which we know all bourgeois parties to be?
And yet we persist, along with Lenin, in seeing the 1903 Congress as a profoundly important moment in the history of our class, and in seeing the split between Bolshevism and Menshevism as an expression of deep underlying social tendencies in the workers' movement, not only in Russia, but across the globe.
As we have argued elsewhere in the International Review (see the article on the 1905 mass strike in International Review n°90), the early 1900s were a transitional phase in the life of world capitalism. On the one hand, the bourgeois mode of production had reached unprecedented heights: it had unified the globe to a degree never before seen in human history; it had achieved levels of productivity and technological sophistication that could hardly have been dreamed about in past epochs; and at the turn of the century it seemed to be reaching new peaks with the generalisation of electrical power, of telegraphic, radio, and telephone communication, with the development of the automobile and the aeroplane. These dizzying technical advances were also accompanied by tremendous achievements at the intellectual level - for example, Freud published his Interpretation of dreams in 1900, Einstein his General theory of relativity in 1905.
On the other hand, however, dark clouds were gathering just when what the British call the "Edwardian summer" seemed to be at its sunniest. The world had been unified, it is true, but only in the interests of competing imperialist powers, and it was becoming increasingly evident that the world had grown too narrow for these empires to go on expanding without ultimately coming up against each other in violent confrontations. Britain and Germany had already embarked upon the arms race which presaged the world war of 1914; the USA, hitherto content to expand into its own western territories, had already entered the imperialist Olympics with the war against Spain over Cuba in 1898; and in 1904, the Czarist empire went to war with the rising power of Japan. Meanwhile, the spectre of the class war began to rattle its chains: increasingly dissatisfied with the good old methods of trade unionism and parliamentary reform, feeling in their bones the growing inability of capitalism to concede to their economic and political demands, workers in numerous countries were engaging in massive strike movements which often surprised and worried the now respectable captains of Organised Labour. This movement touched many countries in the late 1890s and early 1900s, as Rosa Luxemburg chronicled in her groundbreaking work The Mass Strike, the Party and the Trade Unions; but it reached a high point in Russia in 1905, which gave birth to the first soviets and rocked the Czarist regime to its foundations. In sum, capitalism may have reached its zenith, but the indications of its irreversible historical descent were now becoming clearer and clearer.
Luxemburg's text was also a polemic directed against those in the party who were unable to see the signs of a new epoch, wanted the party to put all its weight on the trade union struggle, and saw politics as essentially restricted to the parliamentary sphere. In the 1890s she had already led the combat against the "revisionists" in the party - typified by Eduard Bernstein and his book Evolutionary Socialism - who had taken capitalism's long period of growth and relatively peaceful development as a refutation of Marx's predictions of a catastrophic crisis. They thus "revised" Marx's insistence on the necessity for the revolutionary overthrow of the system. They concluded that social democracy should recognise itself to be what, in any case, it had increasingly become: a party of radical social reform, which could obtain an uninterrupted improvement of working class living standards, even a peaceful and harmonious growing over into a socialist order. At that time Luxemburg had been more or less supported against this overtly opportunist challenge to marxism by the centre of the party around Karl Kautsky, who stuck to the "orthodox" view that the capitalist system was doomed to experience increasingly powerful economic crises and that the working class would have to prepare itself to take power into its own hands. But this centre, which saw "revolution" as an essentially peaceful and even legal process, soon revealed itself to be incapable of understanding the importance of the mass strike and the insurrection in Russia in 1905, which heralded the new epoch of social revolution, where the old structures and methods of the ascendant period would not only be insufficient, but would become positive obstacles to the struggle against capitalism.
Luxemburg's analyses showed that in this new epoch, the principal task of the party would not be to organise the majority of the class in its ranks or win a democratic majority on the parliamentary terrain, but to assume the role of political leadership in the largely spontaneous mass strike movements. Anton Pannekoek took these views one step further to show that the ultimate logic of the mass strike was the destruction of the existing state apparatus. The reaction of the union and party bureaucracies to this radial new vision - a reaction based on a profound conservatism, a fear of the open class struggle, and a growing accommodation to bourgeois society - presaged the irreversible split that was take place in the workers' movement during the events of 1914 and 1917, when first the right, then the centre of the party ended up joining the forces of imperialist war and counter-revolution against the internationalist interests of the working class.
In Russia, the workers' movement, though much younger and less "developed" than the movement in the west, also felt the same pressures and contradictions. Like the revisionists in the SPD, a "harmless" version of marxism was propagated by Struve, Tugan-Baranowski and others - a "Legal" Marxism which emptied the proletarian world-view of its revolutionary content and reduced it to a system of economic analyses. In essence, Legal Marxism argued in favour of the development of capitalism in Russia. This form of opportunism, acceptable to the Czarist regime, did not have a great appeal to the Russian workers, who were faced with conditions of appalling poverty and repression and could hardly postpone the immediate defence of their living standards while an extremely brutal form of capitalist industrialisation imposed itself on them. In these conditions, a more subtle form of opportunism began to take root - the trend which became known as "Economism". Like the Bernsteinians, for whom "the movement is everything, the goal nothing", the Economists, such as those grouped around the paper Rabochaya Mysl, also worshipped the immediate movement of the class; but as there was no parliamentary arena to speak of, this immediacy was largely restricted to the day-to-day struggle in the factories. For the Economists, the workers were mainly interested in bread and butter issues. Politics for this current was largely reduced to seeking to achieve a bourgeois parliamentary regime, and was mainly seen as the task of the liberal opposition. As the Economist Credo, written by YD Kuskova, put it: "For the Russian Marxist there is only one course: participation in, i.e. assistance to, the economic struggle of the proletariat; and participation in liberal opposition activity". In this extremely narrow and mechanical vision of the proletarian movement, class consciousness, if it was going to develop on a wide scale, would in any case emerge more or less from an accretion of economic struggles. And since the factory or the locality was the principal terrain of these immediate skirmishes, the best form of organisation for intervening within them was the local circle. This too was a way of bowing down before the immediate fact, since the Russian socialist movement had for the first decades of its existence been dispersed in a plethora of loose, amateurish and often transient local circles with only the vaguest connections to each other.
Opposing the Economist trend was the main aim of Lenin's book What is to be done?, published in 1902. Here Lenin had argued against the idea that socialist consciousness would arise simply out of the day-to-day struggle; it required the working class to intervene on the political terrain. It could not be engendered merely from the immediate relationship between employer and worker, but only from the global struggle between the classes - and thus from the more general relationship between the working class as a whole and the ruling class as a whole, as well as the relationship between the working class and all other classes oppressed by the autocracy.[2]
In particular, the development of revolutionary class consciousness required the building of a unified, centralised, and avowedly revolutionary party; a party which had gone beyond the stage of circles and the shortsighted, personalised circle spirit that went with it. Against the Economist view which reduced the party to a mere accessory or "tail" of the economic struggle, hardly distinct from other more immediate or general forms of workers' organisations such as trade unions, a proletarian party existed above all to lead the proletariat from the economic to the political terrain. To be equipped for this task, the party had to be an "organisation of revolutionaries" rather than an "organisation of workers". Whereas in the latter, being a worker seeking to defend immediate class interests was the sole criterion for participation, the former had to be comprised of "professional revolutionaries",[3] revolutionary militants who worked in strict unison regardless of their sociological origins.
Of course What is to be done? is famous, indeed notorious, for Lenin's formulations about consciousness - in particular his borrowing of Kautsky's notion that socialist "ideology" is the product of the middle class intelligentsia, leading to the view that working class consciousness is "spontaneously" bourgeois. Much has been made of his errors here, which (somewhat mirroring Economism) do indeed represent a concession to a purely immediatist view, in which the working class is seen as no more than the class as it is "now", in the workplaces, rather than as a historic class whose struggle also contains the elaboration of revolutionary theory. Lenin soon corrected most of these errors - indeed had already begun to do so at the 2nd Congress. It was here that he first admitted to "bending the stick too far" in his argument against the Economists, affirming that workers could indeed take part in the elaboration of socialist thought, and pointing out that, without the intervention of revolutionaries, spontaneously emerging class consciousness was in fact constantly being "diverted" towards bourgeois ideology by the active interference of the bourgeoisie. Lenin was to take these clarifications much further after the experience of the 1905 revolution. But in any case, the essential point of his critique of Economism remains valid: class consciousness can only be an understanding by the proletariat of its global and historic position, and cannot reach fruition without the organised work of revolutionaries.
It is also important to understand that Lenin did not write What is to be done? merely as an individual but as a representative of the current around the newspaper Iskra, which stood for terminating the phase of circles and for the formation of a centralised party with a definite political programme, organised in particular around a militant newspaper. The Iskra-ists went into the Second Congress as a unified trend, and delegates supporting this line were a clear majority, opposed mainly by a right wing made up of the Rabocheye Dyelo group around Martynov and Akimov, which was strongly influenced by Economism, and by the representatives of a form of Jewish "separatism" - the Bund. It is true, as Deutscher relates for example in the first volume of his biography of Trotsky, that there were already a number of tensions and differences within Iskra's leading group, but there was, or seemed to be, broad agreement on the approach contained in Lenin's book. This agreement continued for a large part of the Congress And yet by the end of the congress, not only had the Iskra group split, but the entire party was shaken by the historic break between Bolshevism and Menshevism, which, despite various attempts over the next ten years, was never to be healed.
In One step forward, two steps back (published in 1904), Lenin offers us a very precise analysis of the various currents within the Party Congress. It had begun as three-way split between the Iskra group, the right wing anti-Iskra-ists, and "the unstable vacillating elements", for whom Lenin used the term "the Marsh". By the end of the Congress, a section of the former Iskra-ists had itself sunk deep into the Marsh and - in the classic manner of centrism throughout the history of the workers' movement - ended up providing a new wrapping for the arguments of the openly opportunist right.[4] Furthermore, in Lenin's view, the characteristics of the Marsh coincided to a large extent to the undue influence of the intellectuals in the period of the circles - of a petty bourgeois stratum organically disposed towards individualism and the "aristocratic anarchism" which disdains the collective discipline of a proletarian organisation.
This split was later to harden into deep programmatic divergences about the nature of the coming revolution in Russia; in 1917 they were to constitute a class frontier. And yet they began not on the more general programmatic level but essentially around the question of organisation.
The main points on the agenda of the Congress were the following:
The discussion on the programme has been somewhat ignored by history, undeservedly so in fact. Certainly the 1903 programme itself strongly reflected the transitional phase in capitalism's life - the twilight phase between ascendancy and decadence, and in particular the expectation of some kind of bourgeois revolution in Russia (even if the bourgeoisie was not expected to be the leading force within it). But there is more to the 1903 programme than that: it was actually the first marxist programme to use the term dictatorship of the proletariat - an issue of some significance in that an explicit theme of the Congress was to be the combat against "democratism" in the party as well as in the revolutionary process as a whole (Plekhanov, for example, argued that should it come to that point, a revolutionary government should have no hesitation in dispersing a constituent assembly which had a counter-revolutionary majority within it, just as the Bolsheviks were to advocate in 1918 - though by this time Plekhanov had become a rabid defender of democracy against the proletarian dictatorship). The question of the "dictatorship" was also linked to the debate on class consciousness; like the councilists in a later period, Akimov saw the danger of a party dictatorship over the workers precisely in Lenin's formulations about consciousness in What is to be done?. We have already dealt briefly with this debate above; but the discussion at the Congress - particularly Martynov's criticisms of Lenin's views - will have to be taken further in another article, because, surprising as it may seem, Martynov's intervention is actually one of the most theoretical of the entire Congress and makes many correct criticisms of Lenin's formulations, without ever seizing the central point they were addressing. But this was not the issue which led to the split within the Iskra current. On the contrary: at this stage in the proceedings, the Iskra-ists were united in defending the programme, as well as the necessity for a unified party, from the criticisms of the right wing, avowedly democratist elements who distrusted the very term "dictatorship of the proletariat" and who in organisational matters favoured local autonomy against centralised decision-making.
Another important issue broached early on in the Congress also saw a unified response from the Iskra-ists: the position of the Bund in the party. The Bund demanded "exclusive rights" to the task of intervening in the Jewish proletariat in Russia; while the whole thrust of the Congress was towards the formation of an all-Russia party, the Bund's demands amounted to a project for a separate party for the Jewish workers. This was rebutted by Martov, Trotsky and others, the majority of whom themselves came from a Jewish background. They plainly showed the danger of the Bund's conceptions. If it were to be taken up by every national or ethnic group in Russia, the end result would be a worse state of dispersal than the extant fragmentation into local circles, and the proletariat would be entirely split along national lines. Of course, what was offered to the Bund still goes well beyond what would be acceptable today ("autonomy" for the Bund within the party). But autonomy was clearly distinguished from federalism: the latter meant a "party within the party", the former a body entrusted with a particular sphere of intervention but entirely subordinate to the overall authority of the party. This was therefore already a clear defence of organisational principles.
The split began - though it was not concluded - around the debate on the statutes. The actual point of contention - the difference between Martov's definition of party member, and Lenin's - was around a point of formulation that may seem extremely subtle (and indeed neither Martov nor Lenin were prepared to split over the issue). But behind it were two entirely different conceptions of the party, showing that there had not been a real agreement with What is to be done? within the Iskra group.
Let us recall the formulations: Martov's read "A member of the Russian Social-democratic Labour Party is one who accepts its programme, supports the Party financially, and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organisations".
Lenin's read: "A member of the Party is one who accepts its programme and who supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organisations".
The debate on these formulations showed the real depth of the differences on the organisation question - and the essential unity between the openly opportunist right and the centrist "Marsh". It centred around the distinction between "rendering assistance" to the party and "personally participating in it" - the distinction between those who merely support and sympathise with the Party and those who have become committed militants of the Party.
Thus, following Akimov's intervention about the hypothetical professor who supports the Party and should be given the right to call himself a Social Democrat, Martov asserted that "The more widespread the title of Party member the better. We could only rejoice if every striker, every demonstrator, answering for his actions, could proclaim himself a Party member" (1903, Minutes of the Second Congress of the RSDLP, New Park, 1978, p312, twenty second session, 2 August). Both these approaches betrayed a desire to build a "broad" party on the German model; implicitly, a party that could become a serious political force inside, rather than against, bourgeois society.
Lenin's reply to Akimov, to Martov - and to Trotsky, who had already veered towards the Marsh at this point - restated the essential arguments of What Is T o Be Done:
"Does my formulation narrow or enlarge the concept of a Party member? (...) My formulation narrows this concept, whereas Martov's enlarges it, for what distinguishes his concept is (to use his own, correct expression) its 'elasticity'. And in the period of the Party's life which we are now passing through it is just this 'elasticity' that most certainly opens the door to all the elements of confusion, vacillation and opportunism (...) safeguarding the firmness of the Party's line and the purity of its principles has now become all the more urgent because, with the restoration of its unity, the Party will recruit many unstable elements, whose numbers will increase as the Party grows. Comrade Trotsky understood very incorrectly the fundamental ideas of my book What is to be done?, when he spoke about the Party not being a conspiratorial organisation (...) he forgot that in my book I advocate a whole series of organisations of different types, from the most secret and exclusive to comparatively broad and 'loose' organisations. He forgot that the Party must be only the vanguard, the leader of the vast mass of the working class, the whole of which (or nearly the whole of which) works 'under the control and direction' of the Party organisations, but the whole of which does not and should not belong to the Party" (ibid, p 327, twenty third session, August 2). The experience of 1905 - and above all of 1917 - would thoroughly vindicate Lenin on this point. The working class of Russia would create its own general fighting organisations in the heat of the revolution - the factory committees, soviets, workers' militias etc - and it is these bodies which would regroup the entire class. But precisely because of this, the level of consciousness within these organs would be extremely heterogeneous, and they would inevitably be influenced and infiltrated by the ideologies and agents of the ruling class. Hence the necessity for the minority of conscious revolutionaries to be organised in a distinct party within these mass organs, a party which was not subject to the temporary confusions and vacillations within the class, but was armed with a coherent vision of the proletariat's historic goals and methods. The "elastic" concepts of the Mensheviks, by contrast, would make them so lacking in any firmness that they would become at best a factor of confusion, at worst a vehicle for the schemes of the counter-revolution.
It has been argued that Lenin's "narrow" conception of the party, his rejection of the broad model favoured by European social democracy at the time, was the product of specific Russian traditions and conditions: the conspiratorial heritage of the People's Will terrorist group (Lenin's brother had belonged to this tradition and had been hanged for his part in an attempt to assassinate the Czar); the conditions of intense repression which made it impossible for any legal workers' organisations to exist. But it is far more true to say that Lenin's view of the party as a politically clear and determined revolutionary vanguard corresponded to conditions that were more and more to become international - the conditions of capitalist decadence, in which the system would more and more assume a totalitarian form, outlawing any permanent mass organisations and further highlighting the minority character of the communist organisations. In particular, the new epoch was one in which the role of the party - as Luxemburg had made plain - was not to encompass and directly organise the entire class, but to carry out the role of political leadership in the explosive class movements unleashed by the crisis of capitalism. In another article, we will see that Rosa Luxemburg seriously misread the significance of the 1903 split and supported the Menshevik line against Lenin. But beyond these differences there was a deep convergence which was to become evident in the heat of the revolution itself.
To return to the debate on the statutes. At this stage of the Congress, before the exit of the Bund and the Economists, there was a narrow majority in favour of Martov's formulation. The actual split was around a seemingly far more trivial question - who was to be on the editorial board of Iskra. The almost hysterical reaction to Lenin's proposal to replace the old team of six (Lenin, Martov, Plekhanov, Axelrod, Potresov and Zasulich) with a team of three (Lenin, Martov and Plekhanov) was a real measure of the weight of the circle spirit within the Party, of the failure to grasp what the party spirit really meant, not in general, but in the most concrete sense.
In One step forward, two steps back, Lenin made a masterly summary of the difference between the circle spirit and the party spirit: "The editors of the new Iskra try to trump Alexandrov with the didactic remark that 'confidence is a delicate thing and cannot be hammered into people's hearts and minds' (...) The editors do not realise that by this talk about confidence, naked confidence, they are once more betraying their aristocratic anarchism and organisational tail-ism. When I was a member of a circle only - whether it was the circle of the six editors or the circle of the Iskra organisation - I was entitled to justify my refusal, say, to work with X merely on the grounds of lack of confidence, without stating reason or motive. But now I have become a member of a Party, I have no right to plead lack of confidence in general. For that would throw open the doors to all the freaks and whims of the old circles. I am obliged to give formal reasons for my 'confidence' or 'lack of confidence'. That is, to cite a formally established principle of our programme, tactic or Rules; I must not just declare my 'confidence' or 'lack of confidence' without giving reasons, but must acknowledge that my decisions - and generally all decisions of any section of the Party - have to be accounted for to the whole Party; I am obliged to adhere to a formally prescribed procedure when giving expression to my 'lack of confidence' or trying to secure the acceptance of the views and wishes that follow from this lack of confidence. From the circle view that confidence does not have to be accounted for, we have already risen to the Party view which demands adherence to a formally prescribed procedure of expressing, accounting for, and testing our confidence?" (p 189).
A key issue in the controversy over the composition of the editorial board was the sentimental attachment of Martov to his friends and comrades in the old Iskra, and his growing, but unfounded suspicion of Lenin's real motives in arguing that they should no longer be in the new team. The whole episode demonstrated a shocking inability of experienced revolutionaries like Martov and Trotsky to go beyond feelings of hurt pride or a purely personal sympathy and put the political interests of the movement above all ties of affinity. Plekhanov was to show the same difficulty later on: although at the Congress he had sided with Lenin, afterwards he found Lenin's denunciation of the attitude of Martov and Co. too intransigent, too harsh, and changed horses in mid-stream; and having obliged Lenin to resign from the Iskra team which had been elected by the Congress, he handed the Party organ over to the Mensheviks. All of the former Iskra-ites, who had previously defended Lenin against the charges of the right about his desire to set up a dictatorship, a "state of siege" to use Martov's term, in the Party, now could not find enough words to denounce Lenin's policies: Robespierre, Bonaparte, autocrat, absolute monarch, etc etc.
Again in One step forwards (p 201), Lenin defined this kind of reaction very eloquently, talking about the "incessant, nagging note of injury which is to be detected in all writings of all opportunists today in general, and of our minority in particular. They are being persecuted, hounded, ejected, besieged and bullied (...) you only have to take the minutes of our Party Congress to see that the minority are all those who suffer from a sense of injury, all those who at one time or another and for one reason or another were offended by the revolutionary Social Democrats". Lenin also shows the "close psychological connection" between these responses, all the grandiose denunciations of autocracy and dictatorship within the party, and the opportunist mind-set in general, including its approach to more general programmatic questions: "The predominant item consists of innocent passionate declamations against autocracy and bureaucracy, against blind obedience and cogs in wheels - declamations so innocent that it is still very difficult to discern in them what is really concerned with principle and what is really concerned with co-optation. But as it goes on, the thing gets worse: attempts to analyse and precisely define this detestable 'bureaucracy' inevitably lead to autonomism; attempts to 'lend profundity' to their stand and vindicate it inevitably lead to justifying backwardness, to tail-ism, to Girondist phrase mongering. At last there emerges the principle of anarchism as the sole really definite principle, which for that reason stands out in practice in particular relief (practice is always in advance of theory). Sneering at discipline - autonomism - anarchism - there you have the ladder which our opportunism in matters of organisation now climbs and now descends, skipping from rung to rung and skilfully dodging any definite statement of its principles. Exactly the same stages are displayed by opportunism in matters of programme and tactics: sneering at 'orthodoxy', narrowness and immobility - revisionist 'criticism' and ministerialism - bourgeois democracy" ( p200-1).
The behaviour of the Mensheviks raised the question of party discipline in another way. Although (following the departure of semi-Economists and the Bund) they had been a minority (hence the name) at the end of the Congress, they completely flouted the decisions it had made about the composition of Iskra's editorial board. Martov, in solidarity with his "ousted" friends, refused to serve on the new board, and later on his faction conducted a boycott of all the central organs as long as it was in a minority. The Mensheviks and all those who supported them internationally conducted a campaign of personal vilification against Lenin, accusing him in particular of trying to substitute an all-powerful central organ for the democratic life of the Party. Reality was very different: in fact Lenin clearly stood for the authority of the real centre of the Party, the Congress, which the Mensheviks had totally ignored. This is how Lenin defines the real issue behind the Mensheviks' cry of "democracy against bureaucracy": "Bureaucracy versus democracy is in fact centralism versus autonomism; it is the organisational principle of revolutionary Social Democracy as opposed to the organisational principle of opportunist Social Democracy. The latter strives to proceed from the bottom upward, and therefore, wherever possible, upholds autonomism and 'democracy' carried (by the overzealous) to the point of anarchism; the former strives to proceed from the top downward, and upholds an extension of the rights and powers of the centre in relation to the parts. In the period of disunity and separate circles, this top from which revolutionary Social Democracy strove to proceed organisationally was inevitably one of the circles, the one enjoying most influence by virtue of its activity and its revolutionary consistency (in our case, the Iskra organisation). In the period of the restoration of actual Party unity and dissolution of the obsolete circles in this unity, this top is inevitably the Party Congress, as the supreme organ of the Party; the Congress as far as possible includes representatives if all the active organisations, and, by appointing the central institutions?makes them the top until the next Congress" (One step forwards... p192-3).
Thus behind the "trivial" differences were in fact major questions of principle - Lenin talks about opportunism in matters of organisation, and opportunism only exists in relation to principles. The principle is centralism; as Bordiga put it in his 1922 text "The Democratic Principle": "Democracy cannot be a principle for us. Centralism is indisputably one, since the essential characteristics of party organisation must be unity of structure and action". Centralism expresses the unity of the proletariat, whereas democracy is a "simple mechanism of organisation" (ibid). For the proletarian political organisation, centralism can never mean rule by bureaucratic fatwa, since it can only live if there is an authentic, conscious participation by the entire membership in the defence and elaboration of the party's programme and analyses; at the same time it must be based on a profound confidence in the central organs elected by the highest expression of the organisation's unity - the congress - to carry out the orientations of the organisation in between congresses. "Democratic" procedures such as votes and majority decisions are of course used throughout this process, but they are only a means to an end, which is the homogenisation of consciousness, and the forging of a real unity in action within the organisation.[5]
Contrary to many in the proletarian milieu today, the issue of centralised functioning, of organisation, is by no means a secondary issue, a cover for deeper programmatic questions; it is a programmatic question in itself. The IBRP for example insists that recent splits in the ICC are not really about questions of organisation at all. They categorically refuse to address the issue of functioning, of clans, of centralisation, and look for "the real programmatic weaknesses of the ICC" which has led to the splits (for example, our alleged misreading of the class struggle or our theory of capitalist decomposition). This is an error of method, alien to Lenin's approach. Indeed it calls to mind the comments made by Axelrod after the Second Congress: "With my poor intelligence, I am unable to understand what may be meant by 'opportunism on organisational problems' posed as something autonomous, bereft of any organic tie to programmatic and tactical ideas" ("On the origins and meaning of our organisational differences", letter to Kautsky, 1904). But the struggle against organisational opportunism had already been amply demonstrated by Marx's practice in the 1st International, in particular against Bakunin's attempts to subvert centralisation by building up an array of secret organisations accountable to none but himself. At the 1872 Hague Congress, this issue was seen by Marx and Engels to be even more important to place on the agenda than the lessons of the Paris Commune - which were certainly among the most vital in the entire history of revolutionary proletarian movements.
In the same way, the Bolshevik/Menshevik split has left us with vital lessons concerning the problem of constructing an organisation of revolutionaries. Despite all the differences between the conditions faced by revolutionaries in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century, and those which have confronted the re-emerging proletarian political camp since the historic revival of class struggle at the end of the 60s, there are nonetheless many points in common. In particular, the newly emerging groups in the last part of the 20th century have been particularly encumbered by the circle spirit. The rupture between them and the previous generation of revolutionaries, with all their experience of what it is to work in a real proletarian party; the traumatic effects of the Stalinist counter-revolution, which have instilled in the working class a deep mistrust of the very notion of a centralised political party; the powerful influences of the petty bourgeoisie and the intellectual strata after 1968, echoing the disproportionate weight of the intelligentsia in the early revolutionary movement in Russia; the incessant campaigns of the ruling class against the very idea of communism and in favour of an unquestioning acceptance of democratic ideology - all these factors have made the task of constructing proletarian organisations harder than ever today.
The ICC has written about these problems many times - the most recent example in this Review being our article on the 15th Congress of the ICC (International Review n°114), which also showed how all these difficulties are exacerbated by the putrid atmosphere of capitalist decomposition. In particular, the pressures of decomposition, which tends to gangsterise the whole of society, constantly tend to turn any remnants of the circle spirit into a more pernicious and destructive phenomenon - into clans, informal, parallel internal groupings with their own destructive agendas based on personal loyalties and hostilities.
We have also noted the striking parallels between splits in our own ranks, expressions of these difficulties, and the Bolshevik/Menshevik split in 1903. When the elements who formed the "External Fraction of the ICC" deserted our ranks in 1985, we published an article in International Review n°45 which drew out the historical parallels between the EFICC and the Mensheviks. In particular, the article showed that the "Tendency" which went on to form the EFICC had been a grouping based more on personal loyalties, hurt pride, and a misplaced feeling of persecution than on real political differences.[6]
In the same way, the so-called Internal Fraction of the ICC, formed in 2001, also exhibited many of the features of Menshevism in 1903. The IFICC had its origins in a clan which was quite comfortable with the progress of the ICC as long as it was ensconced in our international central organ. Indeed, it responded with a campaign of slander and denigration to a minority of comrades who had begun to look deeper into the real situation of the organisation. And yet as soon as this clan lost what it saw as a "position of power", it immediately began posing as the hounded and persecuted defender of democracy against the usurping bureaucracy. Having previously claimed to be the most vigorous defender of our statutes, it now began shamelessly flouting all the rules of the organisation, perhaps most notably the decision of the ICC's 14th Congress which had elaborated a coherent method for dealing with the divergences and tensions which had appeared in the central organ. This was a real echo of the behaviour of the Mensheviks towards the 1903 Congress.
Like the Mensheviks, both these splits felt compelled to "lend profundity to their stand and vindicate it", rapidly discovering that they had developed important programmatic differences with the ICC - even though they had originally posed as the true guardians of the ICC's platform and fundamental analyses. Thus the EFICC ditched the heavy burden of our framework of decadence; the IFICC immediately got rid of our concept of decomposition, which is somewhat "unpopular" in the proletarian milieu that this gang is trying to infiltrate. In this context, the inability of the proletarian milieu to treat the organisation question as a political question in its own right has made it quite incapable of responding adequately to the organisational problems faced by the ICC (not to mention their own problems), and all the more vulnerable to the seductive campaigns of a group like the IFICC, which has a purely parasitic role in the milieu.
We mention these experiences not because we want to put them at the same level as the events of the 1903 Congress - for one thing, we certainly do not delude ourselves into thinking that we are already the class party. It remains the case that those who do not grasp the lessons of the past are doomed to repeat it. Without assimilating the full significance of the split between Bolshevism and Menshevism, it will be impossible to progress towards the formation of the proletarian party of the next revolution. No more than the Bolsheviks - whether in 1903, 1914, 1917, or other key historical moments - can any of the proletarian organisations of today and tomorrow avoid organisational crises and splits. But if we are armed with the lessons of the past, such moments of crisis will, as happened again and again in the history of the Bolsheviks, enable proletarian political organisations to emerge politically strengthened and invigorated, and thus more capable of facing up to the imperious demands of history.
In a second article, we will look in more detail at the debate about class consciousness at the Second Congress, and at the controversy between Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg over the split in Russian Social Democracy.
Amos
[1] A humoristic reference to 1066 and all that, a caricature of history text books used in English schools.
[2] Some of what Lenin says in What is to be done? about revolutionaries acting as "tribunes of the people" has to be seen in light of the way that the Russian social democrats understood the coming revolution, which was seen to be not the direct struggle for socialism but one aimed initially at the overthrow of the autocracy and the inauguration of a phase of "democracy". The Bolsheviks, unlike the Economists and the Mensheviks later on, were convinced that this task was beyond the capacities of the Russian bourgeoisie, and would have to be carried out by the working class. In any case, the more substantive point remained: socialist consciousness cannot arise without the working class becoming aware of its general position in capitalist society, and this necessarily involves looking beyond the confines of the factory to the entirety of class relations within society.
[3] Lenin made clear at the Congress that he didn't mean by this term "professional revolutionaries" only full time, paid Party agents; in essence, the term "professional" was used in contrast to the "amateur" approach of the circle phase where groups had no clear form, no firm plan of activities, and on average only lasted a few months before being broken up by the police.
[4] This analysis of the three main currents within the workers' political organisations - openly opportunist right, revolutionary left, and hesitant, vacillating centre - retains all its validity today, as does the term marsh or swamp which Lenin applies to the centrist trend. It is worth adding the footnote on this term from Lenin's own text, because it is so redolent of what frequently happens today when the ICC uses the term marsh or swamp to characterise the shifting zone of transition between the politics of the proletariat and the politics of the bourgeoisie: "There are people in the our Party today who are horrified when they hear this word and raise an outcry about uncomradely methods of controversy. A strange perversion of sensibility due to (...) a misapplied sense of official form! There is scarcely a political party acquainted with internal struggles that has managed to do without this term, by which the unstable elements who vacillate between the contending sides have always been designated. Even the Germans, who know how to keep their internal struggles within very definite bounds indeed, are not offended by the words versumpft ('sunk in the marsh'), are not horrified, and do not display ridiculous official prudery" (One step forwards, p 23-4)
Of course, when we use this term today, we are normally talking about an area between proletarian and bourgeois organisations, whereas Lenin is talking about the marsh inside the existing proletarian party. These differences reflect real historical changes which we can't go into here, but this should not obscure what is common between the two applications of the term.
[5] Later on Lenin used the term "democratic centralism" to describe the method of organisation he was advocating, just as later on he was to use the term "workers' democracy" to describe the mode of operation of the soviets. In our view, neither of these terms are very useful, above all because the term democracy ("rule by the people") implies a non-class standpoint. We will have to return to this question at a later date. What is interesting however is that Lenin did not use this term in 1903, and indeed his principal target was precisely the ideology of "democratism" within the workers' movement.
[6] Our 1993 orientation text on organisational functioning, published in International Review n°109 (a text which also develops an important analysis of the 1903 Congress) makes it more explicit that the EFICC was indeed a clan rather than a real tendency or fraction, while our "Theses on Parasitism" (International Review n°94) show the organic link between clans and parasitism: the clans or cliques which have been involved in splits with the ICC invariably evolve into parasitic groups which can only play a negative and destructive role within the proletarian milieu as a whole. This has been confirmed in spades by the trajectory of the IFICC.
In our article, "The proletariat confronts a dramatic deepening of all capitalism's contradictions" published in the International Review n°115, an error was made in stating that Sharon, described as the "butcher of Sabra and Shatila" "was responsible for a particularly barbaric Israeli punitive operation in two refugee camps in west Beirut, in September 1982, when thousands men, women and children were massacred." In fact, contrary to what we wrote, Sharon, who was the Israeli minister of defence at the time, did not take part in the bloody incursion in the Palestinian camps, nor did he lead them directly. It was the militias of the "Lebanese forces", with the authorisation of the Israeli troops, who did the dirty work.
This correction is clearly not intended to rehabilitate in the slightest the bloodstained Sharon, who is the direct architect and implementer of Israel's current policy "(?) based exclusively on trying to escalate the confrontation with the Palestinians in order to chase them out of the occupied territories" (ibid). Apart from our general concern to illustrate our analyses by reporting the facts as accurately as possible, it aims to remove any imprecision in our article which may have given the impression that Israel has always been the independent author of its terror policy in the Middle East, during the 1980s in particular.
The present policy of Sharon, as we show in our article in the International Review n°115, is increasingly escaping the control of the United States, often at the expense of US interests in the region; this demonstrates how difficult the foremost world power is finding it to make its turbulent ally toe the line. This was not the case prior to the dissolution of the Western bloc at the beginning of the 1990s, after the collapse of the Berlin wall. In this context, the orders for the massacre at Sabra and Shatila were not given by Sharon or by any other part of the Israeli state; they were part of the United States' plan of action, defined and directed by the US with the aim of taking a dominant position in Lebanon.
In fact, the situation up until 1958, in which Lebanon was controlled by pro-Western governments, was altered by the development of the Russian imperialist bloc's influence in the region, through the mediation of Nasser's Egypt in particular. Lebanon began to distance itself from the United States even before it was torn apart by the civil war that erupted in 1969, between pro-western and pro-Russian factions and groups, the latter being composed in large part of Palestinian and Syrian forces. Using the excuse of the attack against one of its London-based diplomats (for which the PLO has always denied responsibility), Israel invaded Lebanon on 5th June 1982 in order to eliminate the Palestinian and Syrian military presence. The military forces of the UNIFL (United Nations Interim Force for Lebanon, created after the Israeli invasion of 1978), which were present in Lebanon unconcernedly allowed Israeli troops to pass through their positions. Syria and the Palestinian resistance suffered a serious military defeat, leading to the conclusion of an agreement that forced the Syrian forces out of Beirut and back to the Bekaa valley, and the complete evacuation from Lebanon of the Palestinian fighters (towards the other Arab countries) under the "protection" of a multinational intervention force (composed of French, American and Italian units) sent there specifically for this mission. The evacuation was finished on 2nd September.
The original plan was for the multinational intervention force to remain until 21st September but the Americans gave the signal to leave on 11th September. From that moment on events escalated: the assassination on 14th September, before he could take up office, of the recently elected Lebanese President Bachir Gemayal (head of the Lebanese forces - the United Christian Militias), gave Israeli troops the excuse to enter west Beirut in order to "cleanse" that part of the city of the two thousand Palestinians who were staying there. The massacre in the Sabra and Shatila camps, carried out by the Christian phalangists under the benevolent eye of the Israeli army, was part of this cleaning-up operation. The stir caused at an international level by this barbaric act served as a pretext for the multinational force's return to Lebanon, on 24th September, clearly in the service of Western interests. The subsequent deployment of American troops to the region (in particular the battleship "New Jersey" firing the largest cannon in the world) "to support the mission" of the multinational force, enabled them to inflict a serious reversal on Syria, which was obliged to retreat behind its own frontier. At this point the Western bloc's control of Lebanon was complete.
Editorial board
Footnote
We are publishing below a reply to one of our contacts, who wrote to defend what the comrade called "the councilist balance-sheet of the Russian revolution". There no longer exists - since the disappearance of the Dutch group Daad en Gedachte - any organised expression of the councilist current within the proletarian movement. The councilist position nonetheless continues to enjoy a strong influence within the present revolutionary movement.
councilism tries to reject on the one hand, the Liberal, anarchist and Social Democratic positions, and on the other the "Leninist", Stalinist and Trotskyist positions. At a first glance this looks enormously attractive.
At the heart of the councilist position lies what has been called the "Russian enigma" this question is of the greatest importance for the present and future workers' movement. It poses the question of understanding whether the Russian revolution forms an experience that, considered in a critical manner - as is always the case with marxism - will serve as the basis for the next revolutionary attempt or rather - as the bourgeoisie say, backed up by anarchism and indirectly by councilism - it is something that has to be absolutely rejected because the monster of Stalinism had its origins in "Leninism"[1] [25]
In our view, it is important to reply to this letter since this debate allows us to refute the councilist position, and so to contribute to the clarification of the revolutionary movement.
Dear Comrade
Your text begins by posing a question that we fully share: "The understanding of the defeat of the Russian revolution is a fundamental question for the working class, because we still live under the weight of the consequences of the failure of the revolutionary cycle begun by the Russian revolution: above all, because the counter-revolution did not take the classic form of a military restoration of the former power, but of Stalinism, which called itself ?Communist?. This struck a terrible blow against the world working class. The bourgeoisie has taken full advantage of this in order to create confusion and demoralisation amongst workers and to deny communism as the historical perspective of humanity. Therefore we have to draw up a historical balance sheet based on the historical experience of the working class and the scientific method of marxism: as the fractions of the Communist Left did during 50 years of counter-revolution. A balance sheet that we can retransmit to new generations of proletarians".
Exactly! The counter-revolution was not made in the name of the "restoration of capitalism" but under the banner of "Communism". It was not the White army that imposed capitalist order in Russia but the same party that had been the vanguard of the revolution.
This outcome has traumatized the present generations of proletarians and revolutionaries leading to doubts about the capacity of their class and the validity of its revolutionary traditions. Did Lenin and Marx not contribute, even inadvertently, to Stalinist barbarity? Was there an authentic revolution in Russia? Is there a danger that "political thinking" will destroy what the workers build?
The bourgeoisie has fed these fears with its permanent campaign of denigration of the Russian revolution, Bolshevism and Lenin, all of which has been reinforced by the Stalinists' lies. The democratic ideology that the bourgeoisie has propagated to incredible levels throughout the 20th century has reinforced these feelings with its insistence on the sovereignty of the individual, "respect for every opinion" and the rejection of "dogmatism" and "bureaucracy".
The notions of centralisation, the class party and the dictatorship of the proletariat that are the fruits of bloody struggles, enormous efforts of political and theoretical clarification, are besmirched by the shameful stigma of suspicion. Not to mention Lenin who is utterly rejected and whose contribution is subjected to the most tenacious ostracism, by the use that is made of phrases torn out of context, amongst which is the famous phrase about "consciousness being imported from the outside"![2] [26]
The combination of these fears and doubts on the one hand and the pressure of bourgeois ideology on the other, contains the danger that we lose the link with the historical continuity of our class, with its programme and its scientific method without which a new revolution is impossible.
councilism is the expression of this ideological weight which concretises itself through grasping onto the immediate, the local, the economic, considering them as "the closest and most controllable" and the visceral rejection of anything that smells of politics or centralisation, which are always seen as abstractions, distant and hostile.
You talk about appropriating "the contributions of the fractions of the Communist Left who went against the current during 50 years of counter-revolution". We totally agree! However, councilism does not belong among these contributions, rather it is situated outside of them. It is necessary to differentiate council communism from councilism.[3] [27] councilism is the extreme expression and degeneration of the errors that began to be theorized in the 1930s within the living movement that was council communism. councilism is an openly opportunist attempt to give a "marxist" form to positions put forwards by the bourgeoisie thousands of times - and repeated by anarchism - about the Russian Revolution, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Party, centralisation etc.
Basing ourselves concretely on the Russian experience, we can see that councilism attacks two basic pillars of marxism: the international and fundamentally political character of the proletarian revolution.
We are going to concentrate solely on these two questions. There are many more that could be developed. How is class-consciousness formed? What is the role of the party and its links with the class etc.? However, we do not think there is enough room to deal with these and, above all, these two questions - about which you are especially insistent - appear to us to be crucial to solving the "Russian enigma".
In various passages of your text you insist on the danger of taking the "world revolution" as an excuse for putting off indefintely the struggle for communism and justifying the dictatorship of the party. "There are those who attribute all the bureaucratic deformations of the revolution to the civil war and its devastation, its isolation due to the lack of a world revolution and the backward character of the Russian economy, but this does not explain the internal degeneration of the revolution, why it was not defeated on the field of battle but from the inside. The only explanation that this gives us is that we formulate wishes about the next revolution having to take place in the developed countries and not remaining isolated". A few pages later on you remark that: "the revolution cannot limit itself to the management of capitalism until the triumph of the world revolution, it has to abolish capitalist relations of production (wage labour, commodities)".
The bourgeois revolutions were national revolutions. Capitalism first developed in cities and for a long time lived together with an agrarian world dominated by feudalism; its social relations could be developed within one country, isolated form others. Thus, in England the bourgeois revolution triumphed in 1640 whilst on the rest of the continent the feudal regime dominated.
Can the proletariat follow the same road? Can the proletariat begin to "abolish capitalist relations of production" in one country without having to wait for the "far off world revolution"?
We are certain that you are against the Stalinist position of "socialism in one country", however, when you accept that the proletariat can "begin to abolish wage labour and commodities without waiting for a world revolution" this lets back in through the window a position that has already been thrown out the door. There is no middle way between the worldwide construction of communism and the building of socialism in one country.
There is a fundamental difference between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions. The former are national in their means and aims, on the other hand, the proletarian revolution is the first world wide revolution in history both in its aim (communism) and in its means (the international character both of the revolution and the construction of the new society).
In the first place, because "big industry created a class, which in all nations has the same interest and with which nationality is already dead" (German Ideology, page 78, English students edition), proletarians have no fatherland and have nothing to lose because they possess nothing. In the second place, because this same large-scale industry "by creating the world market, has so linked up all the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilized peoples, that each people is dependent on what happens to another. Further, in all civilized countries large-scale industry has so leveled social development that in all these countries the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have become the two decisive classes of society and the struggle between them the main struggle of the day. The communist revolution will therefore be no merely national one; it will be a revolution taking place simultaneously in all civilised counties, that is, at least in England, America, France and Germany" ("The principles of communism". Marx and Engels Collected Works vol. 6, p. 351-2. Our emphasis).
Against this internationalist way of thinking, Stalinism in 1926-27 put forward the thesis of "socialism in one country". Trotsky and all the tendencies of the Communist Left (including the German-Dutch communists) considered this position as treason and the Italian Left group Bilan saw it as the death of the Communist International.
For its part, anarchism?s reasoning is basically the same as Stalinism. Its anti-centralisation makes it loath the formulation "socialism in one country", but, on the base of "autonomy" and "self-management" it proposes, "socialism in one village", or in "one factory". These formulations have a more "democratic" appearance and are more "respectful of the initiative of the masses" but they lead to the same things as Stalinism: the defence of capitalist exploitation and the bourgeois state.[4] [28] The road is different of course: in the case of Stalinism it is the brutal method of an openly bureaucratic hierarchy, whereas anarchism exploits and develops democratic prejudices about "sovereignty" and the "autonomy" of the "free" individual and calls on workers to manage their own misery through local and sectoral organs.
What is the position of councilism? As we said at the beginning there has been an evolution of the different components of this current. The "Theses on Bolshevism"[5] [29] adopted by the GIK opened the doors to the worst confusions. However, the GIK never put the nature of the world wide proletarian revolution openly in question. Nevertheless, its insistence on its "fundamentally economic" character and its rejection of the party leads it implicitly into this swamp. The later councilist groups ? particularly those in the 1970's ? openly theorized the thesis about the construction of "local and national" socialism. We have combated this in different polemical articles in our International Review, against the Third Worldism and self-management visions of various councilist groups.[6] [30]
Contrary to what you give us to understand, proletarian internationalism is not a pious wish or one option amongst others, it is the concrete response to the historical evolution of capitalism. From 1914, all revolutionaries understood that the only revolution that was posed was the socialist, international and proletarian one: "It was not our impatience, nor our wishes, but the objective conditions created by the imperialist war that brought the whole of humanity to an impasse, that placed it in a dilemma: either allow the destruction of more millions of lives and utterly ruin European civilisation, or hand over power in all the civilised countries to the revolutionary proletariat, carry through the socialist revolution." ("Letter of farewell to the Swiss Workers", April 1917, Lenin's emphasis, www.marxists.org [31]).
It is not only the maturation of the historic situation that poses the world revolution. It is also the analysis of the balance of class forces at a worldwide level. The formation, as early as possible, of the International Party of the proletariat is also a crucial element for pushing the balance of forces with the enemy in the proletariat's favour. The rapid formation of an International will make it more difficult for the bourgeoisie to isolate the revolutionary focal points. Lenin was already struggling in 1917, before taking power, for the Zimmerwald Left to immediately constitute a new International: "It is we who must found, and right now, without delay, a new, revolutionary, proletarian International, or rather, we must not fear to acknowledge publicly that this new International is already established and operating" ("The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution", 1917. Collected Works Volume 24).
In September 1917, Lenin posed the necessity of taking power, basing himself on an analysis of the international situation of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie; in a letter to the Bolshevik Congress of the Northern region (October 8th 1917) "Our revolution is passing through a highly critical period. This crisis coincides with the great crisis ? the growth of the world socialist revolution and the struggle against world imperialism (?) [the taking of power] will save the world revolution as much as the Russian Revolution". The revolution in Russia - after the aborted Kornilov revolt - was at a delicate moment: if the Soviets did not go onto the offensive (take power) Kerensky and his friends would make new efforts to paralyze them and later to liquidate them, so destroying the revolution. This took on even greater importance in Germany, Austria, France, Great Britain etc: where workers? discontent would receive a powerful impulse with the Russian example or on the contrary, run the risk of diluting itself in a series of dispersed struggles.
The taking of power in Russia was always seen as a contribution to the world revolution and not as a task of national economic management. Several months after October, Lenin spoke to the Conference of Factory Committees in the Moscow region in these terms "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 loses sight of (?) Aware of the isolation of its revolution, the Russian proletariat clearly realises that an essential condition and prime requisite for its victory is the united action of the workers of the whole world" (www.marxists.org [31]).
Basing yourself on the councilist position, you consider that the driving force from the first day of the proletarian revolution is the adoption of communist economic measures. You develop this in numerous passages in your text "in April 1918 Lenin published ?The immediate tasks of Soviet power? in which he explored the idea of the construction of a state capitalism under the control of the party, developing productivity, accountability and discipline at work, putting an end to the petty-bourgeois mentality and anarchist influence, and without a doubt propagating bourgeois methods: such as the use of bourgeois specialists, piece work, the adoption of Taylorism, one man management[7] [32]... As if the methods of capitalist production are neutral and their use by a 'workers' party will guarantee their socialist character. The ends of socialist construction justify the means" (page 9). As an alternative you propose that "the revolution cannot limit itself to the management of capitalism until some remote world wide triumph of the revolution, it must abolish capitalist relations of production (wage labour, commodities)", developing "the communisation of the relations of production, with the calculation of the necessary social labour for the production of goods" (page 15).
Capitalism has completed the formation of the world market since the beginning of the 20th century. This means that the law of value operates on the whole international economy and no country or group of countries can escape it. The proletarian bastion (the country or group of countries where the revolution has triumphed) is no exception. The seizure of power in the proletarian bastion does not mean creating a "liberated territory". On the contrary, this territory will still belong to the enemy since it will continue to be entirely submitted to the law of value of the capitalist world.[8] [33] The power of the proletariat is essentially political and the essential role of territory that has been won is to act as the bridgehead of the world revolution.
Capitalism's two principle legacies to the history of humanity have been the formation of the proletariat and the objectively international character that it has given to the forces of production. These two legacies are fundamentally attacked by the theory of the "immediate communisation of the relations of production": the supposed "abolition" of wage labour and the market at the level of each factory, locality or country. On the one hand, this turns production in to a mixture of small autonomous pieces, thus making it prisoner to the tendency towards explosion and fragmentation that capitalism contains in its historical period of decadence and which has been concretised in a dramatic form in its terminal phase of decomposition.[9] [34] On the other hand, it leads to the dividing of the proletariat through binding it to the interests and needs of each of the local, sectoral or national units of production in which the capitalist relations of production have been "liberated".
You say that "Russia in 1917 opened up a revolutionary cycle that closed in 1937. The Russian workers were capable of taking power, but not of using it for a communist transformation. Backwardness, war, economic collapse and international isolation in themselves do not explain the regression. This explanation is a political one that fetishises power and separates it from the economic transformations carried out by the class organs: assemblies and councils where the division between political and union functions is overcome. The Leninist conception gives the question of political power a privileged position in determining the socialization of the economy and the transformation of the relations of production: Leninism is the bureaucratic illness of communism. If the revolution is primarily political, it limits itself to managing capitalism in the hope of the world revolution, it creates a power that has no other function than repression and the struggle against the bourgeoisie which ends up perpetuating itself at all costs, first in the perspective of the world revolution and then for itself".
The reason why you desperately make "Communist economic measures" central is the fear that the proletarian revolution "will remain blocked at the political level" turning it into an empty shell which will not bring about any significant change in the conditions of the working class.
The bourgeois revolution was primarily economic and finished off the task of uprooting the political power of the old feudal class or arriving at an accommodation with it. "Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the medieval commune; here independent urban republic (...), there taxable 'third estate' of the monarchy (...), afterward, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of modern industry and of the world market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative state, exclusive political sway" ("Communist Manifesto", Marx: the revolutions of 1848. Penguin Books, 1973, p69). The bourgeoisie, over the course of three centuries, gained an unrivaled position on the economic level (trade, lending, manufacture, large scale industry), which enabled it to conquer political power through revolutions whose paradigm, was France 1789.
This outline of its historical evolution corresponds to its nature as an exploiting class (aspiring to install a new form of exploitation, "free" wage labour as opposed to feudal serfdom) and to the characteristics of its mode of production: private and national appropriation of surplus-value.
Should the proletariat follow the same trajectory in its struggle for communism? Its aim is not to create a new form of exploitation, rather the abolition of all exploitation. This means that it cannot aspire to raise up within the old society an economic power base from which to launch its conquest of political power rather it has to follow exactly the opposite trajectory: taking political power at the world level and from here building the new society.
The economy means the submission of human beings to objective laws independent of their will. The economy means exploitation and alienation. Marx does not talk about a "communist economy" but about the critique of political economy. Communism means the reign of freedom rather than the reign of necessity that has dominated the history of humanity under exploitation and poverty. The principle error of The principles of communist production and distribution[10] [35] a central text for the councilist current which tried to establish labour time as a neutral and impersonal economic automatism that will regulate production. Marx criticized this vision in the Critique of the Gotha Programme where he showed that the proposal of "equal work equal pay" still moves within the parameters of bourgeois rights. Long before this, in The poverty of philosophy, he had already emphasised that "In a future society, in which class antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes, use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production; but the time of production devoted to an article will be determined by the degree of social utility (Marx and Engels Collected Works vol. 6, p 134) "Competition implements the law according to which the relative value of a product is determined by the labour time needed to produce it. Labour time serving as the measure of marketable value becomes in this way the law of the continual depreciation of labour" (idem. p 135).[11] [36]
In your text you present "Leninism" as creating a "fetishisation" of the political. In reality, all of the workers' movement beginning with Marx himself would be guilty of such a "failure". It was Marx in his polemic with Proudhon (the above cited book) who showed that: "the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a struggle class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest expression is a total revolution. Indeed, is it at all surprising that a society founded on the oppression of classes should culminate in brutal contradiction, the shock of body against body, as its final denouement?".
Do not say that social movement excludes political movement. There is never a political movement, which is not at the same time social.
It is only in an order of things in which there are no more classes and class antagonisms that social evolutions will cease to be political revolutions. Till then, on the eve of every general reshuffling of society, the last word of social science will always be "Combat or death, bloody struggle or extinction. Thus the question is inexorably put" (George Sand) (idem. p 212).
Councilism bases its defence of the economic character of the proletarian revolution on the following syllogism: since the basis of the exploitation of the proletariat is economic it is necessary to take communist economic measures. in order to abolish it
In order to reply to this sophism we have to abandon the slippery ground of formal logic and situate ourselves on the solid ground of historical evolution. In the historical evolution of humanity two intimately related but independent factors intervene: on the one hand, the development of the productive forces and the configuration of the relations of production (the economic factor); and on the other, the class struggle (the political factor). The actions of the classes are certainly based on the evolution of the economic factor but they do not merely reflect this, they are not just a simple response to economic impulses like Pavlov's dog. In the historic evolution of humanity we have seen a tendency towards an increasing weight of the political factor (the class struggle): the disintegration of the old primitive communism and its replacement by slave society was an essentially violent objective process, the product of many centuries of evolution. The passage from slavery to feudalism arose from the gradual process of the crumbling of the old order and the re-composition of a new one, where the conscious factor had a limited weight. On the other hand, in the bourgeois revolutions the actions of the classes had a greater weight although "the movement of the immense majority was carried out in the interest of a minority". Nevertheless, as we have demonstrated, the bourgeoisie rode on the overwhelming strength of the enormous economic transformations that in great part were the product of an objective and ineluctable process. The weight of the economic factor was still overwhelming.
On the other hand, the proletarian revolution is the end result of the class struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie which requires a high level of consciousness and active participation from the beginning. This fundamental and principle dimension of the subjective factor (the consciousness, unity, solidarity, confidence, of the proletarian masses) signifies the primacy of the political character of the proletarian revolution that is the first massive and conscious revolution in history.
You are in favour of a proletarian revolution carried out by the active and conscious participation of the great majority of the workers, where the maximum unity, solidarity, consciousness, heroism, creative will, is expressed. Well, in this resides the political character of the proletarian revolution.
Your bilan of the Russian revolution can be reduced to this: if instead of the fetishisation of politics and the hope of "far off world revolution" they had adopted the immediate measures of workers' control of the factories, the abolition of wage labour and of the exchange of commodities, then they would not have produced "bureaucratism" and the revolution would have gone forwards. It is a lesson that tempted council communism and which councilism has vulgarised in our day.
When councilism draws this lesson it is breaking with the tradition of marxism and links itself to another: anarchism and Economism. This formulation of councilism is nothing original: Proudhon defended it - and this was taken apart by Marx in his critique; it was later taken up by cooperative theories; then by anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism and in Russia by Economism. In 1917-23 it re-emerged with Austro-marxism[12] [37] Gramsci and his "theory" of the Factory Councils;[13] [38] Otto Ruhle and certain theoreticians of the AUUD followed the same road. In Russia, in spite of the development of correct arguments, such as those by the Democratic Centrism group, Kollontai?s Workers' Opposition fell into the same ideas. In 1936, anarchism made the Spanish "collectives" the great alternative to the Bolshevik's[14] [39] "bureaucratic and state communism".
What is common to all these visions - and which is the root of councilism - is a conception of the working class as a mere economic and sociological category. It does not see the working class as an historic class, denoted by the continuity of its struggle and its consciousness, but rather as a sum of individuals who are motivated by the most narrow economic interests.[15] [40]
The calculation of the councilists is the following; in order for the workers to defend the revolution they have "to check" that it gives immediate results, that they take into their own hands the fruits of the revolution. This is seen as them taking "control" of the factories, allowing them to manage them themselves.[16] [41]
"Factory control"? What control can there be when production is submitted to the costs and rate of profit brought about by competition on the world market? This means one of two things: either declare autarchy and with this bring about a regression of incalculable proportions that will annihilate the whole revolution; or work within the world market subjugated to its laws.
The councilists propose the "abolition of wage labour", through the elimination of wages and their substitution by "labour-time vouchers". This avoids the problems with fine-sounding words: it is necessary to work a determined number of hours and however correct the voucher there will always be some hours that are paid and others that are not: in other words surplus-value. The slogan "a fair days work for a fair days pay" forms part of bourgeois law and encompasses the worst of injustices, as Marx demonstrated.
Councilism proclaims the "abolition of commodities" and their replacement by "bookkeeping between factories". But we are in the same situation: what is produced will have to adjust itself to the value of exchange imposed by competition within the world market.
Councilism tries to resolve the problem of the revolutionary transformation of society with "forms and names" avoiding the root of the problem. "Mr. Bray does not see that this equalitarian relation, this corrective ideal that he would like to apply to the world, is itself nothing but the reflection of the actual world; and that therefore it is totally impossible to reconstitute society on the basis of what is merely an embellished shadow of it. In proportion as this shadow takes on substance again, we perceive that this substance, far from being the transfiguration dreamt of, is the actual body of existing society" ("The Poverty of philosophy", Marx and Engels Collected Works vol. 6 p.144).
Anarchism and councilism's proposals about the "economic revolution" go in the same direction as Mr. Bray: when this shadow takes on substance it is nothing but the actual body of existing society. In 1936 anarchism with its collectives did nothing but implement a regimen of extreme exploitation, at the service of the war economy, embellishing the whole thing with ideas about "self-management", the "abolition of money" and other rubbish.
However, there are very serious consequences to these councilist proposals: they lead the working class to renounce its historical mission for a mess of pottage from the "immediate seizure of the factories".
In your text you underlined that "class and party do not have identical intentions. The workers' aspirations go in the direction of seizing the leadership of the factories and directing production themselves". "Seizing the leadership of the factories" means that each sector of the working class takes its share of the plunder recently grabbed from capitalism and manages it for its own benefit, while "coordinating" with workers in other factories. That is to say we will pass from the property of the capitalists to the property of individual workers. We have not left capitalism!
But worse still, it means that the generation of workers who make the revolution will have to consume the riches recently taken from capitalism for their own benefit without a thought for the future. This leads to the working class renouncing its historical mission to build communism on a world level and falling for the illusion of "having it all straight away".
This temptation to fall into the "sharing out of the factories" constitutes a real danger for the next revolutionary attempt, because today capitalism has entered its terminal phase: decomposition.[17] [42] Decomposition means chaos, disintegration, implosion of the economic and social structures into a mosaic of disarticulated fragments and at the ideological level a loss of the historical, global and unitary vision that democratic ideology seeks to systematically demonize as "totalitarian" and "bureaucratic". The forces of the bourgeoisie do this in the name of "democratic control", "self-management" and other similar phrases. The danger is that the class will be defeated due to the total loss of historical perspective and be imprisoned in each factory and locality. This will not only be an almost definitive defeat but will mean that the working class has allowed itself to be dragged down by the lack of historical perspective, by egotism, immediatism and the absolute absence of aims that is propagated by the whole of bourgeois ideology in this present situation of decomposition.
The proletarian bastion is born within a brutal and agonising contradiction: on the one hand, capitalism wages a struggle to the death against it through its economic, military and imperialist laws (military invasion, blockade, the need to trade goods under unfavorable conditions in order to survive etc); on the other, it has to break the noose around its neck with the only weapons that it possesses: the unity and consciousness of the whole proletarian class and the international extension of the revolution.
This forces it to carry out a complex, and on occasions, contradictory policy, in order to keep a society threatened by disintegration afloat (supplies, the minimal functioning of the productive apparatus, military defence etc) and, simultaneously, to dedicate the bulk of its forces to the extension of the revolution, the explosion of new proletarian insurrectionary movements.
In the first years of soviet power, the Bolsheviks firmly followed this policy. In her critical study of the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg made it very clear that: "The fate of the revolution in Russia depends fully upon international events. That the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution is the clearest proof of their political farsightedness and firmness of principles." (The Russian Revolution.) As the Resolution of the Moscow Territorial Bureau of the Bolshevik party adopted in February 1918 in relation to the Brest-Litovsk debate states: "In the interests of the international revolution we accept the risk of the soviets losing their power, that it is turned in to something purely formal; today, as yesterday, the principle task that we have is the extension of the revolution to all countries.[18] [43]
Within this policy, the Bolsheviks committed a whole series of errors. Nevertheless, these errors could be corrected whilst the force of the world revolution continued to live. It was only from 1923, when the revolution suffered a mortal blow in Germany, that the tendency of the Bolsheviks to make themselves prisoners of the Russian territorial state and of the state to come into an increasingly irreconcilable contradiction with the interests of the world proletariat, became definitive. The Bolshevik party began to be transformed into a mere manager of capital.
A marxist critique of these errors has nothing to do with the critique made by councilism. The councilist critique pushes towards anarchism and the bourgeoisie, whereas the marxist critique enables the strengthening of proletarian positions. Many of the errors committed by the Bolsheviks were shared by the rest of the international workers' movement (Rosa Luxemburg, Bordiga, Pannekoek). Our aim here is not to "wash away the sins" of the Bolsheviks but simply to show that it is a question of a problem for the whole of the international working class and not the product of "evil", "Machiavellianism" and the "hidden bourgeois character" of the Bolsheviks as the councilist think.
We do not have time to expound on the marxist critique of the Bolshevik's errors, however we have carried out a developed work within the Current around this question. We particularly want to highlight the following texts:
- the series on Communism in International Review n°s99 and 100
- the pamphlet (in English) on the Period of Transition
- the pamphlet (in English) on the Russian Revolution.
These documents can serve as the basis for the continuation of the discussion.
We hope that we have contributed to a clear and fraternal debate. Please accept our communist greetings:
Accion Proletaria/ International Communist Current.
[1] [44] The most extreme councilists do not stop at calling into question Lenin. They go as far as questioning Marx and embracing Proudhon and Bakunin. In fact, what they are doing is applying the implacable logic of the position according to which there is a continuity between Lenin and Stalin. See our article "In defence of the proletarian character of October 1917" in International Review n°12 and n°13, which is a fundamental article for the discussion of the Russian question
[2] [45] We reject the bourgeoisie's campaign against Lenin, but this in no way means that we blindly accept all his positions. On the contrary, in different texts we have taken full account of his errors and confusions about imperialism, the relationship between party and class etc. Such critiques form part of the revolutionary tradition (as Rosa Luxemburg said it is the necessary air for us to breath). But revolutionary criticism has method and an orientation that is the antithesis of the bourgeoisie's and the parasites? denigration and lies.
[3] [46] We will not develop on this question here. We have sent you the book we have published in French and English on the German and Dutch Communist Left.
[4] [47] See our article "The myth of the anarchist collectives" published in International Review nº15 and in our book 1936: Franco y la Republica aplastan al proletariado. We obviously cannot develop on this question here: faced with the supposedly bureaucratic and authoritarian Russian "model", it was the 1936 Spanish "model" that was "democratic", "self-managed" and "based on the autonomous initiative of the masses".
[5] [48] Within the framework of this reply we cannot make a response to the main affirmation of the Theses on Bolshevism - the bourgeois nature of the Russian revolution. It is a point that we have fully replied to in International Reviews no12 and no13 (see note 1) and in the "Reply to Lenin as philosopher by Pannekoek" in International Review n°s25, 27 and 30. In any case, this represents a break with the previous position defended by many members of the councilist current: in 1921 Pannekoek affirmed that "The action of the Bolsheviks is incommensurably great for the revolution in Western Europe. They have first by taking power, given example to the proletariat of the whole world?By their praxis they have posed the great principle of communism: dictatorship of the proletariat and the system of soviets or councils" (cited in our book The Dutch and German Communist Left. Footnote 69, p. 194 English Edition).
[6] [49] See "The epigones of councilism in practice" in International Review no2, "Letter to Arbetamarket" in International Review no4 and "Response to solidarity on the national question" in International Review no15, "The councilist danger" in International Review no40, "The poverty of modern councilism" in International Review no42.
[7] [50] We have always made clear that we criticise certain methods of production put forwards by Lenin and they were also criticised from inside the party by groups such as the Democratic Centralism group. See article from the the series on communism published in International Review no99.
[8] [51] The proletarian bastion will have to buy food, medicines, raw materials, industrial goods etc, at disadvantageous prices, confronted with blockades and in conditions of more than probable disorganised transport. This is not only a problem of backwards Russia; as we demonstrate in our pamphlet Russia 1917: the beginning of the world revolution the problem will be even more serious in the central countries such as Germany or Great Britain. To this has to be added the bourgeoisie's war against the proletarian bastion; trade blockades, military war, sabotage etc. And finally the proletariat's future revolutionary attempts will be faced with the heavy weight of the consequences of the continuation of capitalism in conditions of its historical decomposition; the collapse of the infrastructure, chaotic communications and supplies, the devastating effects of an interminable succession of regional wars, ecological destruction.
[9] [52] All the present harangues about the "globalisation" of capitalism that share as much the expression "neo-Liberalism" as its supposed antagonist ?the "anti-globalisation movement", hid the fact that the world market has been formed for more than a century and that today the problem that confronts the system is its irremediable tendency to explosion and brutal self-destruction through imperialist wars above all.
[10] [53] We cannot develop a critique of the Principles here. However, we would remind you of our book which we have already referred to about the history of the German and Dutch Communist Left: see pages 248 to 269, in the English edition.
[11] [54] Pannekoek, with good reason, formulated serious reservations about the Principles. See our already mentioned book.
[12] [55] See "From Austro-marxism to Austro-fascism" in International Review no2
[13] [56] See in the book Debate on the factory councils the clear critique that Bordiga makes of Gramsci's speculations.
[14] [57] See note 4
[15] [58] There is no paradox in the fact that councilism makes the same mistake that Lenin fell into in What is to be done?, in saying that "workers can only develop a trade unionist consciousness". However, there is a world of difference between Lenin and the councilists; whilst the first was capable of correcting his error (and not for the tactical reasons that you indicate) the councilists are incapable of recognising this.
[16] [59] Bearing in mind the differences and without wanting to exaggerate the comparison, the councilists see the workers as having the same role as the peasants in the French Revolution. This freed them from certain feudal burdens on agrarian property and this made them enthusiastic soldier in the revolutionary army and especially so in the Napoleonic army. Apart from this conception revealing a subordinate and unconscious vision of the proletariat that contradicts all of the protests about the "participation" and the "initiative" of the masses espoused by councilism, what is more serious is that it forgets that whilst the peasants could be freed through changes in landownership the proletariat will never free itself through changing the ownership of the factory. The proletarian revolution does not consist of the purely local and judicial freeing of the workers from the oppression of a capitalist gentleman, but from the liberating of the proletariat and the whole of humanity from the yoke of global and objective social relations that are imposed beyond personal and property relations: the relations of capitalist production based on commodities and wage labour.
[17] [60] See International Review no62 "Theses on decomposition".
[18] [61] In relation to the Brest Litovsk Treaty you say that it meant the "the rejection of the revolutionary war which, although in the short-term had meant the temporary loss of cities, had enabled the development of a popular war with the formation of militias in the countryside and the fusion of the revolutionary worker with the peasant which as the Bolshevik Left proposed created the possibility of the beginning of the constitution of a communist mode of production". We cannot develop on this question here (we refer you to our French pamphlet mentioned in note 8). However, your reflection does pose some questions. In the first place, What is the "peasant revolution"? What "revolution" can be made by the peasantry what has had to fuse with the "revolutionary worker"? The peasantry is not a class but a social category in which are mixed various social classes with diametrically opposed interests: landlords, medium land owners, small landowners, day workers...
On the other hand, How can the constitution of the "communist mode of production" be begun on the basis of guerrillas in the countryside with the cities abandoned to the enemy?
Footnote
In spite of the media hype about the arrest of the "bloody tyrant" Saddam Hussein with a scenario appropriate to a B-series western, the weakening of the foremost imperialist power in the world can be seen by the fact that the US is obviously bogged down in Iraq and is unable to impose its "road map" on the Middle East.
The principle intention of the American government in their intervention in Iraq was to continue and develop the strategic encirclement of Europe in order to counteract any attempt of their main imperialist rivals, Germany particularly, to advance towards the East and the Mediterranean. The aim of the crusade waged in the name of anti-terrorism, the defence of democracy and the struggle against the state presumed to be in possession of mass weapons of destruction was to provide an ideological cover for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and for the threat of intervention against Iran. Before intervening on Iraqi territory, the American bourgeoisie hesitated for a long time, not on the decision as such to go to war, but on the way to wage it: did the United States have to accept the dynamic that was pushing them to act in a more and more isolated way or should they try to keep and control a certain number of allies around them, even if such alliances have no stability today? In the end, the Bush team's strategy was adopted: intervene more or less alone and against all the USA's rivals.
In spite of the United States' demonstration of power, which crushed Iraq in the space of three weeks, America's world leadership has never been in such a parlous situation. Six months after the official "victory" of the intervention, this strategy has been shown to be a complete failure. The Americans are obviously incapable of securing the region. Since then the whole world has witnessed the American occupation army getting more and more bogged down in the Iraqi mire. Not a day has passed without the coalition army being the target of terrorist commandos. Increasingly murderous attacks are a regular occurrence even outside Iraq, and have gradually taken hold of the whole region (Saudi Arabia, Turkey, etc), targeting Iraqis as well as the "international community". The present occupation has already caused more deaths on the American side than the first year of the Vietnam War (225 "boys" killed in comparison with 147 in 1964). The climate of permanent insecurity among the troops and the "body bags" returning home have significantly cooled the population's patriotic ardour - which was anyway very relative - even in the heart of "Middle America".
At the time of the Vietnam War, the American bourgeoisie ended up deliberately abandoning the country but had succeeded in bringing China into the western bloc. In Iraq, nothing would compensate for an American retreat. Moreover, such a retreat would increase the ambitions of all the rivals and adversaries of the United States, big and small. In addition, the chaos which the Americans would leave behind them in Iraq, could spread throughout the region and would certainly discredit the USA definitively them in its role as world policeman. The stakes are that high. A pure and simple American retreat would mean a bitter and humiliating defeat.
The American bourgeoisie is therefore obliged to remain in Iraq militarily, while adjusting the conditions of its presence. Firstly, the White House has announced a partial and progressive withdrawal while bringing forward the proposal to set up an "autonomous" and "democratic" Iraqi government from 2007 to the spring of 2004. In the same way, it is pushing for the active participation of other Western countries in operations to maintain order and "security" in the region, whereas it had previously imposed a categorical veto on any interference in Iraqi affairs by those governments who had opposed the American intervention. The United States is now trying to force its main imperialist rivals to pay a price in human and financial terms for the Iraq war; but in order to do so, they have no choice but to reintroduce the wolves into the sheepfold, that is, to let into Iraq through the window French and German businesses and armies, which they had previously chased out the door. This is clearly a serious indication of US weakness.
In parallel with this re-orientation, the United States has attempted to take the initiative again: they have sent 3,000 men into Afghanistan to conduct a huge operation against the rebels; in Georgia they have replaced President Shevardnadze with a pro-American (a lawyer who has practised in the United States for a long period of time). This is the context in which the massively publicised arrest of Saddam Hussein was meticulously prepared and organised.
With the arrest, which is a boon for America, Bush can enjoy an immediate revenge. The "hard" line in the Bush administration, represented by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz can save face. It also enables them to take the initiative diplomatically. For the time being the Bush administration is in a more favourable position to force states like France to accept a suspension or a moratorium on Iraqi debts. It is freer to impose conditions on an eventual participation of German and French businesses in the reconstruction of Iraq. Even the interim council of the Iraqi government, largely controlled by the Americans, has gained status in the eyes of international public opinion.
The arrest of Saddam Hussein took place in the wake of a weekend marked by disagreements between European nations. During the discussions on the constitution of the enlarged European Union, France and Germany had to confront Spain and Poland, both allies of the United States in Iraq, who have benefited to some extent from the notoriety attached to the capture of Saddam Hussein. These two countries profited from the weight that their support for the United States has given them to affirm their own interests in Europe and to put a spoke in the wheel of the Franco-German alliance.
There was another small victory for American propaganda. Five days after the announcement that Saddam Hussein had been captured, and after lengthy bargaining, Ghadhafi's Libya said that it was willing to destroy its weapons of mass destruction and to put a stop to any research in this direction. So the United States was able to show the whole world that its perseverance, pressure and determination paid off.
The arrest of Saddam Hussein has definitely allowed the United States to gain points by lending a certain degree of legitimacy to its intervention in Iraq, However all the positive effects of these small victories can only be short term.
The images of the capture of the Rais[1] [66] are double edged. Although it was a demonstration of American strength, the humiliation inflicted on the dictator excited indignation and anger among the Arab populations. Moreover, the pictures show that Saddam Hussein was not secretly controlling the Iraqi resistance. On the contrary he was buried in a hole underground, with no real means of communication and supported by a few faithful followers from his own village. His arrest changes nothing as far as the security situation of Iraqis concerned. The fifty deaths in the following days are a clear confirmation of this fact.
France and Germany counter-attacked immediately. After they congratulated the White House for its success in the most hypocritical way possible, the media in these two countries did all they could to tarnish the American image. A lot of publicity was given to the attacks the day after. The humiliating images of the Rais were accompanied by harsh, more or less underhand, criticisms implying that it was a provocation for all the Arab nations. The incapacity of Hussein to lead a guerrilla war from his hole was emphasised as frequently as possible. France and Germany did not hesitate to condemn the Bush administration's pressure on the future Iraqi tribunal, demanding the death penalty for the old dictator, as an illegal process, outside the rules of international law, while at the same time spreading massively the images of the prison camp victims in Guantanaomo in order to show the barbarism and iniquity of American justice.
So the arrest of Saddam Hussein changes nothing. The attacks will continue. Anti-Americanism will develop.
The current strengthening of the American position may turn into its contrary at short notice. In fact the chaos that the United-States is unable to control cannot be attributed to the actions of Saddam Hussein agitating in the shadows. The danger for the US is that it will become increasingly obvious that it is the consequence of American intervention, a fact which the bourgeois rivals of the United-States will not hesitate to exploit. Whatever form the American presence in Iraq will be obliged to take, whatever the military involvement the European powers may eventually have in a "peace-keeping" force, the stakes and the tensions towards war between the United-States and their European rivals can only increase dramatically in the region. The Iraqi population cannot expect to benefit from the eventual effects of reconstruction, which will certainly be limited to the state infrastructure and the roads and to putting the oil fields in order. In Iraq the war will continue and extend, the attacks will multiply.
In spite of its immediate successes, the American bourgeoisie cannot reverse the historical exhaustion of its leadership. The contesting of American authority will not stop. On the contrary, every advance on the part of the Americans encourages a strengthening of anti-Americanism. As we wrote in our previous issue: "In fact the American bourgeoisie is in an impasse, itself an expression of the impasse in the world situation which, in the present historic situation, cannot be resolved by marching into a third world war. In the absence of this radical bourgeois solution to the world crisis, which would almost certainly result in the destruction of humanity, the planet is sinking into the chaos and barbarism which characterises the present phase of capitalist decomposition." (International Review n°115, "The proletariat confronts a dramatic deepening of all of capitalism's contradictions").
In Iraq as elsewhere, capitalism can only drag humanity into increasing chaos and barbarism.
Stability and peace are impossible in this society. The bourgeoisie wants to convince us to the contrary. This is the purpose of the huge ideological campaigns like the one launched in Geneva on the Middle East on the 1st December 2003. This "initiative" proposing a total solution to the problems of the Middle East, in contrast to the method of "small steps" and the "road map", was set up, even if not officially, by prominent personalities on the Palestinian side as well as that of the Israelis. It received the enthusiastic support of several Nobel Peace prize-winners, in particular ex-American president Carter and the ex-Polish president and old trades unionist, Lech Walesa. Kofi Anan, Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and even Colin Powell, albeit rather timidly in the case of the latter, have also welcomed this initiative.
The message that has been hammered into the heads of proletarians at a time when imperialist wars have never been so numerous and so violent at an international level, is clear: "peace is obtainable in capitalist society. It's enough to regroup all people of good will and to put pressure on capitalist states and international organisms".
What the bourgeoisie wants to hide at all costs from the workers is that capitalist wars are imperialist wars that are as unavoidable for dying capitalism as for its dominant class. Left to its own logic, decomposing capitalism will inevitably drag the whole of humanity into generalised barbarity and war.
W.
[1] [67] An Arabic word for president, one of the titles used by Saddam Hussein.
Between 12th and 15th November, the "European Social Forum" was held in Paris, a kind of European subsidiary of the World Social Forum which has taken place several years running in Porto Alegre, Brazil (in 2002 the ESF was held in Florence, Italy, while the 2004 event is planned in London). The ESF has attained considerable proportions: according to the organisers, there were some 40,000 participants from countries ranging from Portugal to Eastern Europe, a programme of 600 seminars and workshops in the most varied venues (theatres, town halls, prestigious state buildings) distributed across four sites around Paris, and to conclude a big demonstration of between 60 and 100,000 people in the streets of Paris, with the unrepentant Italian Stalinists of Rifondazione Comunista at the front, and the anarchists of the CNT at the rear. Though they received less media attention, two other "European forums" took place at the same time as the ESF, one for members of the European parliament, the other for trades unionists. And as if three "forums" were not enough, the anarchists organised a "Libertarian Social Forum" in the Paris suburbs, at the same time as the ESF and deliberately presented as an "alternative" to it.
"Another world is possible!". This was one of the great slogans of the ESF. And there is no doubt that for many of the demonstrators on 15th November, perhaps above all for the young people just entering political activity, there is a real and pressing need to struggle against capitalism and for "another world" to the one where we live today, with its endless poverty and its interminable and hideous warfare. Doubtless some of them drew an inspiration from this great united gathering. The problem though, is not just to know that "another world is possible" - and necessary - but also and above all to what kind of world it could be and how to build it.
It is hard to see how the ESF could offer an answer to this question. Given the number and variety of participating organisations (ranging from organisations of "young managers" and "young entrepreneurs", to Christian unions, Trotskyists like the LCR or the SWP, the Stalinists of the PCF and Rifondazione, and even anarchists like Alternative Libertaire), it is hard to see how a coherent answer, or even any kind of answer at all, could emerge from the ESF. Everybody had their own ideas to put forward, whence an enormous variety of themes expressed in leaflets, debates, and slogans. By contrast, when we look more closely at the ideas that came out of the ESF, we find first, that there is nothing new in them, and second, that there is absolutely nothing "anti-capitalist" about them either.
The extensive mobilisation around the ESF, plus the publicity given to a multitude of themes from the "anti-globalisation" tendency by so many groups of the left or far left, decided the ICC to intervene in the event with all the determination that our strength allowed. Since we suspected that the ESF's "debates" were sown up in advance (a suspicion which several participants in these debates confirmed to us), our militants from all over Europe concentrated on selling our press (in several European languages) and on taking part in informal discussions around the ESF and during the final demonstration. Similarly, we were present at the LSF in order to intervene in the debates and to put forward the perspective of communism against anarchism.
"The world is not for sale" is a fashionable slogan, with various different versions when a "realistic" slogan is called for: "culture is not for sale" for the artists and theatre workers,[1] "health is not for sale" for nurses and health workers, or again "education is not for sale" for the teachers.
Who would not be touched by such slogans? Who would want to sell his health, or his children's education?
However, when we look at the reality behind these slogans, we begin to smell a swindle. In fact, what is proposed is not to put an end to "selling the world", but just to limit it: "Free social services from the logic of the market". What does this mean, concretely? We all know that, as long as capitalism exists, everything has to be paid for, even services like health and education. All those aspects of social life that the "anti-globalists" claim to want to "free from the logic of the market" are in fact a part of the workers' overall wages, a part which is usually managed by the state. Far from being "freed from the logic of the market", the level of workers' wages, the proportion of production which returns to the working class, lies at the very heart of the problem of the market and capitalist exploitation. Capital always pays its labour power as little as possible: in other words, the minimum necessary to reproduce the next generation of workers. Today, as the world plunges into an ever deeper crisis, each national capital needs fewer hands, and must pay those hands it needs less if it is not to be eliminated by its competitors on the world market. In this situation, the working class can only resist reductions in its wages - however "social" these may be - through its own struggle, and not by calling on the capitalist state to "free" its wages from the laws of the market, something the state would be perfectly incapable of doing even if it wanted to.
In capitalist society, the proletariat can, at best, impose a more favorable division of the social product through the power of its own struggle: it can reduce the level of surplus-value extorted by the capitalist class in favour of variable capital - ie its wages. But to do this in today's context firstly demands a high level of struggle (as we saw after the defeat of the struggles in France in May 2003, which was followed by a storm of attacks on the social wage), and secondly can only be temporary (as we saw after the movement of 1968 in France).
No, this idea that "the world" is not for sale is nothing but a wretched fraud. The very nature of capitalism is precisely that everything is for sale, and the workers' movement has known this since 1848: capitalism "has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom ? Free Trade (...)The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers". This is how Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto: it just goes to show how valid their principles remain today!
"Fair trade, not free trade!" was another major theme at the ESF, given a great boost by the presence of French smallholders with their "biological" cheese and other products. Who indeed could not be touched by the hope of seeing the peasants and small craftsmen of the Third World live decently from the fruit of their labour? Who would not want to stop the steamroller of agribusiness from throwing the peasants off their land and heaping them up by millions in the slums of Mexico and Calcutta?
But here again, just as for the question of the market, fine sentiments are a poor guide.
First of all, there is absolutely nothing new about the "free trade" movement. The charity business (with companies like Oxfam, present of course at the ESF) has been practising "free trade" for handicrafts sold in its shops for more than forty years, without this in the least preventing millions of human beings from being plunged into poverty in Africa, Asia, or Latin America...
Moreover, in the mouths of the "anti-capitalists", this slogan is doubly hypocritical. Someone like José Bové, president of the French Confédération Paysanne, can play the anti-capitalist super-star all he likes with his denunciation of the food industry and the evil McDonalds: this does not prevent the militants of the same Confédération Paysanne from demonstrating to demand the maintenance of subsidies they get from the European CAP.[2] By artificially lowering the price of French products, the CAP is precisely one of the main instruments for maintaining unfair trade to the advantage of some and, inevitably, to the disadvantage of others. Similarly, "fair trade" for the American steel industry unionists who demonstrated at Seattle and who have been lionised for it ever since, means imposing tariffs on the import of "foreign" steel produced more cheaply by workers in other countries. In the end, "fair trade" is just another name for trade wars.
In capitalism, the notion of "fairness" is anyway an illusion. As Engels put it already in 1881, in an article where he criticised the notion of the "fair wage": "The fairness of political economy, such as it truly lays down the laws which rule actual society, that fairness is always on one side... that of capital".[3]
The most outrageous swindle in all this business of "fair trade" is the idea that the presence of "anti-globalist" demonstrators at Seattle or Cancun "encouraged" the negociators from the Third World countries to stand up to the demands of the "rich countries". We will not here go into detail as to the fact that the Cancun summit ended as a bitter defeat for the weaker countries, since the Europeans will not dismantle the CAP and the Americans will continue with their massive farm subsidies against the penetration of their market by cheaper countries from the poor countries. No, what is really disgusting is to credit the idea that the members of government and besuited bureaucrats of the Third World countries were present at these negotiations to defend the peasants and the poor. Quite the contrary! To take just one example, when Brazil's Lula denounces the tariffs imposed on imported orange juice to protect the American orange industry, he is thinking not of the poor peasants but of Brazil's enormous capitalist orange plantations, where the workers slave just as they do in the orange plantations of Florida.
The common thread that runs through all these themes is the following: against the "neo-liberals" and the "transnational" companies (those same evil "multi-nationals" that the anti-globalists' predecessors denounced back in the 1970s), we are supposed to place our confidence in the state, or better still to strengthen the state. The "anti-globalists" claim that business has "confiscated" power from the "democratic" state in order to impose its own "commercial" laws, and that therefore a "citizen's resistance" is necessary in order to recover the power of the state and revive "public services".
What a scam! For one thing, the state has never been more present in the economy than it is today, including in the United States. It is the state that regulates world trade by fixing interest rates, customs tariffs, etc. The state is itself the major actor in the national economy, with public spending running at between 30% and 50% of GDP depending on the country, and with ever-increasing budget deficits. More important than this, whenever the workers get it into their heads to defend their living conditions against the attacks of the capitalists, who do they find in their path right from the outset if not the police forces of the state? Demanding - as the "anti-globalists" do - that the state be strengthened to defend us from the capitalists, is really a gigantic fraud: the bourgeois state is there to protect the bourgeoisie from the workers, not the other way around.[4]
It is not for nothing that the ESF produced this call to support the state, and especially to support its left fractions presented as the best defenders of "civil society", against "neo-liberalism". As the saying goes: "He who pays the piper calls the tune", and it is wholly instructive to look at who financed the ESF's 3.7 million euro costs:
First of all, the local authorities of Seine-St-Denis, Val de Marne, and Essonne contributed more than 600,000 euros, while the town of St Denis alone forked out 570,000 euros.[5] In fact, this is the French "Communist" Party - that bunch of old Stalinist scoundrels - which is trying to buy its political virginity after years of complicity in the crimes committed by the Stalinist state in Russia, and decades of sabotaging the workers' struggles.
The French Socialist Party has been much discredited by the attacks it made against the workers during its time in government, and it is true that the audience at the ESF did not miss the chance to make fun of Laurent Fabius (a well-known Socialist leader) when he dared to turn up in the debates. One might have thought that the PS might not be too keen on the ESF, but in fact, quite the reverse! The city of Paris (controlled by the PS) contributed 1 million euros to the costs of the ESF.
And what about the French government? A right-wing, thoroughly neo-liberal French government, denounced in articles, leaflets, and posters by the whole left from the anarchists to the Stalinists - surely it would be uneasy, at the very least, to see the Forum attracting so many people? But no, not at all! It was by personal order of the president, Jacques Chirac, that the Foreign Ministry contributed 500,000 euros to the ESF.
He who pays certainly intends to profit! The ESF was liberally financed and housed by the whole French bourgeoisie, from right to left. And the whole French bourgeoisie, from left to right, intends to benefit from the undoubted success of the ESF, on two levels in particular:
First of all, the ESF is a means for the left wing of the state apparatus to renew itself (after being discredited by years spent in government dealing blow after blow to the workers' living conditions and assuming the responsibility for the imperialist policy of French capitalism). Since political parties are no longer in fashion, they are disguised as "associations" in order to give themselves a more "citizen", "democratic", "network" look: the PCF appeared in the form of its "Espace Karl Marx", the PS with its "Fondation Léo Lagrange" and "Jean Jaurès".[6] We should insist here that it is not just the left which has an interest in making us forget its past misdeeds - something which is clear enough to anybody. The whole ruling class has an interest in covering the social front, in making sure that the workers' struggles - and even more generally the disgust and questioning provoked by capitalist society - should be derailed towards the old reformist recipes, and prevented from finding the consciousness necessary to overthrow the capitalist order and put an end to all its ills.
Secondly, the whole French bourgeoisie has an interest in the extension and strengthening of the ESF's clearly anti-American atmosphere. The enormous destruction and terrible loss of life in the two world wars, then above all the renewal of the class struggle and the end of the counter-revolution in 1968, have all contributed to discrediting the nationalism which the bourgeoisie used to send the populations to the slaughter in 1914, and then again in 1939. Consequently, even though there is no such thing as a "European bloc", much less a "European nation", the bourgeoisies of the different European countries, especially in France and Germany, all have an interest in encouraging the rise of anti-American and more vaguely "pro-European" feeling with the aim of presenting of presenting the defence of their own imperialist interests against US imperialism as the defence of a "different", or even an "anti-capitalist" world view. For example, the "anti-globalist" support for a ban on the import of American GMO's into France, in the name of "ecology" and the "defence of public health", is in reality nothing but an episode in an economic war, designed to give French research time to catch up with its American rivals in this respect.[7]
Modern marketing techniques no longer sell products directly, they use a system which is both more subtle and more effective: they sell a "world view", a "style" to which they attach the products supposed to express that style. The ESF's organisers use exactly the same method: they offer us an unreal "world view", where capitalism is no longer capitalist, nations are no longer imperialist, and "another world" is possible without going through a communist revolution. Then in the name of this "vision", they propose to dump on us old products, long past their sell-by date: the so-called "communist" and "socialist" parties, disguised for the occasion as "citizen networks".
Since the French bourgeoisie coughed up the funds on this occasion, it is normal enough that its political parties should be the first to profit from the ESF. However, we should not imagine that the business was established by the French ruling class alone, far from it. The campaign to renew the credibility of the left wing of the bourgeoisie, undertaken in the various European and world "social forums" benefits the whole capitalist class world wide.
The "Libertarian Social Forum" was deliberately announced as an alternative to the more "official" forum organised by the big bourgeois parties. One might ask just how much of an alternative it really was: one of the LSF's main organisers (Alternative Libertaire) also took an active part in the ESF, while the LSF's demonstration joined the big ESF one after a brief "independent" stroll.
We do not intend here to report exhaustively on what was said at the LSF. We will simply mention some of the main themes.
Let us start with the "debate" on "self-managed spaces" (ie squats, communes, service exchange networks, "alternative cafés", etc.). If we put the word "debate" in quotes, it is because the chair did everything possible to limit any discussion to descriptions of the participants' respective "spaces", and to avoid any kind of critical evaluation even from within the anarchist camp. It very quickly appeared that "self-management" is something very relative: a participant from Britain explained that they had bought their "space" for the tidy sum of £350,000 (500,000 euros); another recounted the creation of a "space"... on the Internet, the creation, as everybody knows, of the US DARPA.[8]
Still more revealing was the action proposed by these various "spaces": free and "alternative" pharmacy (ie amateur herbal remedies), legal advice services, cafés, exchange of services, etc. In other words, a mixture of the small shopkeeper and social services abandoned by state cutbacks. In other words, the ultimate in anarchist radicalism is to underwrite the state by doing its work for free.
Another debate on "free public services" fully revealed the vacuity of "official" right-thinking anarchism. It was claimed here that "public services" could somehow involve an opposition to the market economy by satisfying the needs of the population for free - and "self-managed" of course, with consumers' committees, producers' committees, and community committees. All this as as alike as peas in a pod to the "local committees" being set up today by the French state for the inhabitants of the Paris suburbs. The question is posed as if it were possible to introduce an institutional opposition to capitalism from inside capitalist society itself, for example by establishing free public transport.
Another characteristic of anarchism which made a strong appearance at the LSF, is its profoundly elitist and educationist nature. Anarchism has no idea that "another world" could emerge from the very heart of the present world's own contradictions. As a result, it can only imagine the passage from the present to the future world by means of the "example" given by its "self-managed spaces", through an educative action on the ills of today's prevalent "productivism". But, as Marx already put it more than a century ago, if a new society is to appear thanks to the education of the people, who is to educate the educators? For those who plan to be the educators are themselves formed by the society within which we live, and their ideas of "another world" remain in reality solidly anchored in the world of today.
In effect, the two "social forums" served up, under the disguise of new and revolutionary ideas, nothing other than a bunch of old ideas which have long since revealed themselves inadequate if not downright counter-revolutionary.
The "self-managed spaces" recall the co-operative companies of the 19th century, not to mention all the "workers' collectives" of our own time (from Lip in France to Triumph in Britain) which either went bankrupt or remained ordinary capitalist companies, precisely because they were forced to produce and sell within the capitalist market economy; they also recall those "community" enterprises of the 1970s (squats, community committees, "free schools" etc.) which ended up integrated into the bourgeois state as social services.
All the ideas about carrying out a radical transformation thanks to free public services recall the gradualist reformism which was already an illusion in the workers' movement of 1900 and which fell into definitive bankruptcy in 1914 when it took the side of "its own" state to defend its "gains" against the "aggressor" imperialism. These ideas recall the creation of the "Welfare State" by the ruling class at the end of World War II, in order to rationalise the management and the mystification of the workforce (in particular by "proving" that the millions of casualties had not died in vain).
In capitalism as in any class society, it is absolutely inevitable that the dominant ideas should be the ideas of the dominant class. It is only possible to understand the necessity, and the material possibility, of a communist revolution because there exists within capitalist society a social class that embodies this revolutionary future: the working class. By contrast, if we simply try to "imagine" what a "better" society would be like, on the basis of our desires and imaginations as they are formed today by capitalist society (and following the model of our anarchist "educators"), we can do nothing other than "reinvent" the present capitalist world, by falling into either the reactionary dream of the small producer who can see no further than the end of his "self-managed space", or the megalo-monstrous delirium of a benevolent world state, à la George Monbiot.[9]
Marxism, on the contrary, aims to discover within the capitalist world today the premises of the new world which the communist revolution must bring into being if humanity is to escape its doom. As the Communist Manifesto put it in 1848, "The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes".[10]
We can distinguish three distinct, but closely interwoven major elements in this " movement going on under our very eyes".
The first, is the transformation that capitalism has already carried out in the productive process of the entire human species. The least object in daily use is today the work, not of a self-sufficient artisan or local fabrication, but of the common labour of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of men and women participating in a network that covers the entire planet. Freed by the world communist revolution of the constraints imposed on it by the capitalist market relations of production and the private appropriation of its fruits, this destruction of all local, regional, and national particularities will be the basis for the constitution of a single human community on a planetary scale. The progress of social transformation, and the affirmation of every aspect of social life in this world wide community, will lead to the disappearance of all distinctions (which the bourgeoisie encourages today in order to divide the working class) between ethnic groups, peoples, and nations. We can envisage that populations and languages will be mixed until the day when there no longer exist Europeans, Africans, or Asians (and still less Catalans, Bretons, and Basques!), but one united human species whose intellectual and artistic production will find expression in a single language understood by all, and infinitely richer, more precise, and more harmonious than those in which the limited and decomposing culture of today finds expression.[11]
The second major element, intimately linked to the first, is the existence within capitalist society of a class which embodies, and which expresses at its highest point, this reality of an international and unified productive process. This class is the international proletariat. Whether they be American steelworker, British unemployed, French office worker, German mechanic, Indian programmer, or Chinese construction worker, all are workers with this in common: that they are more and more unbearably exploited by the world capitalist class, and that they can only throw off their exploitation by overthrowing the capitalist order itself.
We should emphasise particularly here two aspects of the working class' very nature:
First of all, unlike the peasants or small artisans, the proletariat is the creation of capitalism, which cannot live without it. Capitalism grinds down the peasants and the artisans, reducing them to the status of proletarian - or rather to unemployment in the present decadent economy. But capitalism cannot exist without the proletariat. As long as capitalism exists, the proletariat will exist. And as long as the proletariat exists, it will bear within it the revolutionary communist project for the overthrow of the capitalist order and the construction of another world.
Another fundamental characteristic of the working class lies in the movement and mixing of populations to answer the needs of capitalist production. "The workers have no country" as the Manifesto said, not only because they possess no property but because they are always at the mercy of capital and its demands for labour power. The working class is, by nature, a class of immigrants. To see this, we only look at the population in any major industrialised town: the streets are full of men and women from every corner of the globe. But the same is true even in the under-developed countries: in the Ivory Coast, many of the agricultural workers are Burkinabé, South African miners come from all over the country but also from Zimbabwe and Botswana, workers in the Persian Gulf come from India, Palestine, or the Philippines, in Indonesia there are millions of foreign workers in the factories. This reality of working class existence - which prefigures the mixing of populations that we spoke of earlier - demonstrates the futility of the ideal dear to anarchists and democrats of the defence of a local or regional "community". To take just one example: what can Scottish nationalism possibly have to offer to the working class in Scotland, composed in part of Asian immigrants? Nothing, obviously. The only real community that the workers who have been ripped from their roots can find, is the planetary community that they will build after the revolution.
The third major element that we intend to emphasise here can be summarised in a single statistic: in all the class societies that preceded capitalism, 95% of the population (more or less) worked the land, and the surplus that they produced was just enough to support the other 5% (landlords and the church, but also merchants, artisans, etc). Today, this ratio has been reversed, while in the most developed countries even the production of material commodities occupies less and less of the working population. In other words, at the level of the physical capacity of the productive apparatus, humanity has achieved a level of abundance which is to all intents and purposes unlimited.
Already under capitalism, the human species' productive capacity has created a qualitatively new situation relative to the whole of previous history: whereas beforehand, scarcity, or at times outright famine, was the lot of the vast mass of the population above all because of the natural limits of production (low productivity of the land, poor harvests, etc.), under capitalism the one and only cause of scarcity is capitalist production relations themselves. The crisis that throws workers onto the street is not caused by an inadequate level of production: on the contrary, it is the direct result of the impossibility of selling everything that has been produced.[12] Moreover, in the so-called "advanced" countries, an ever-increasing part of economic activity has absolutely no utility outside the capitalist system itself: financial and stock-market speculation of all kinds, astronomical military budgets, fashion items, "planned obsolescence" designed to force the renewal of a product, advertising, etc. If we look further, it is obvious that the use of the earth's resources is also dominated by the increasingly irrational - except from the standpoint of capitalist profitability - functioning of the economy: hours spent by millions of human beings in the daily migration to and from work, or the transport of freight by road rather than by rail to respond to the unforeseen demands of an anarchic production process, for example. In short, the ratio between the quantity of time spent in producing to satisfy minimum needs (food, clothing, shelter), and that spent in producing "beyond the minimum" (if we can put it like that), has been completely overturned.[13]
When we sell our press, in demonstrations or at the factory gates, we are often confronted with the same question: "well, what is communism then, if you say it has never existed?". In such situations, we try to give an answer that is both global and brief, and we often answer: "communism is a world without classes, without nations, and without money". While this definition is very basic (even negative, since it defines communism as being "without"), it nonetheless contains the fundamental characteristics of communist society:
It will be without classes, because the proletariat cannot free itself by becoming a new exploiting class: the reappearance of an exploiting class after the revolution would in reality mean the defeat of the revolution and the survival of exploitation.[14] The disappearance of classes flows naturally from the interest of a victorious working class in its own emancipation. One of the class' first objectives will be to reduce the working day by integrating into the productive process the unemployed and the masses without work in the Third World, but also the petty bourgeoisie, the peasants, and even the members of the overthrown bourgeoisie.
It will be without nations, because the productive process has already gone well beyond the framework of the nation, and in doing so has rendered the nation obsolete as an organisational framework for human society. By creating the first planetary human society, capitalism has already gone beyond the national framework within which it was itself born. Just as the bourgeois revolution destroyed all the old feudal particularities and frontiers (taxes on the movement of goods within national frontiers, laws, or weights and measures, specific to this or that town or region), so the proletarian revolution will put an end to the last division of humanity into nations.
It will be without money, because the notion of exchange will no longer have any meaning in communism, whose abundance will allow the satisfaction of the needs of every member of society. Capitalism has created the first society where commodity exchange has been extended to the whole of production (contrary to previous societies, where commodity exchange was limited essentially to luxury goods, or certain articles which could not be produced locally such as salt). Today, capitalism is being strangled by its inability to sell on the market everything that it is capable of producing. The very fact of buying and selling has become a barrier to production. Exchange will therefore disappear. With it will disappear the very idea of the commodity, including the first commodity of all: wage labour.
These three principles are directly opposed to the commonplaces of bourgeois ideology, according to which there exists a greedy and violent "human nature" which will determine for ever the divisions between exploiters and exploited, of between nations. Obviously, this idea of "human nature" suits the ruling class down to the ground, justifying its class domination and preventing the working class from identifying clearly what is really responsible for the misery and the massacres that overwhelm humanity today. But it has nothing whatever to do with reality: whereas the "nature" (ie the behaviour) of other animal species is determined by their natural environment, the more humanity's domination over nature advances, the more "human nature" is determined by our social, not by our natural environment.
The three points we have outlined above are no more than the briefest of sketches. Nonetheless, they have profound implications for the communist society of the future.
It is true that marxists have always avoided drawing up "blueprints", first because communism will be built by the real movement of the great masses of humanity, and second because we can imagine what communism will be like even less than a peasant of the 11th century could imagine modern capitalism. This does not, however, prevent us from indicating some of the most general characteristics that follow from what we have just said (very briefly, of course, for lack of space).
Probably the most radical change will spring from the disappearance of the contradiction between the human being and his labour. Capitalist society has raised to its highest point the contradiction - which has always existed in class society - between labour, in other words the activity we only undertake because we are forced to do so, and leisure, in other words the time when we are free (in a very limited sense) to choose our activity.[15] The constraint that forces us to work is due on the one hand to the scarcity imposed by the limits of labour productivity, and on the other by the fact that a part of the fruit of labour is seized by the exploiting class. In communism, these constraints no longer exist: for the first time in history, the human species will produce freely, and production will be directed entirely towards the satisfaction of human need. We can even suppose that the words "labour" and "leisure" will disappear from the language, since no activity will be undertaken constrained by necessity. The decision to produce or not to produce, will depend not only on the utility of the thing produced, but also on the pleasure or interest of the productive process itself.
The very idea of the "satisfaction of needs" will change its nature. Basic needs (food, clothing, shelter), will occupy a proportionally less and less important place, while the needs determined by the social evolution of the species will come more and more to the fore. There will no longer be any distinction between "artistic" work and that which is not. Capitalism is a society which has exacerbated to the extreme the contradiction between "art" and "non-art". Whereas the great majority of artists in history never signed their work, it is only with the rise of capitalism that the artist begins to sign his work and that art becomes to be a specific activity separated from day-to-day production. Today, this tendency has reached its paroxysm, with an almost total separation between the "fine arts" on the one hand (incomprehensible for the great majority of the population and reserved for a tiny intellectual minority), and the industrialised artistic production of advertising and "pop culture", both of them being reserved for "leisure activity". All this is nothing but the fruit of the contradiction between the human being and his labour. With the disappearance of this contradiction, the contradiction between "useful" and "artistic" production will also disappear. Beauty, the satisfaction of the senses and the mind, will also be fundamental human needs that the productive process will have to satisfy.[16]
Education will also change its whole nature. In any society, the purpose of educating children is to allow them to take their place in adult society. Under capitalism "taking their place in adult society", means taking their place in a system of brutal exploitation, where those who are not profitable do not, in fact, have any place. The purpose of education (which the "alternative worlders" tell us should not be "for sale") is therefore above all to equip the new generation with abilities which can be sold on the market, and in this age of state capitalism to ensure that the new generation has the abilities necessary to strengthen the national capital against its competitors on the world market. It is also obvious that capitalism has absolutely no interest in encouraging a critical attitude towards its own social organisation. In short, the purpose of education is nothing other than to subdue young minds and to mould them to capitalist society and the demands of its productive process; small wonder then, that schools are more and more like factories, and teachers like workers on the line.
Under communism, on the contrary, the integration of the young into the adult world will demand the greatest possible awakening of all their physical and intellectual senses. In a system of production that has been completely freed from the demands of profit, the adult world will open to the child gradually, as his capacities develop, and the young adult will no longer be exposed to the harrowing experience of leaving school to be thrown into the ferocious competition of the labour market. Just as their will no longer be any contradiction between "labour" and "leisure" or between "production" and "art", so there will no longer be any contradiction between school and the "world of work". The very words "school", "factory", "office", "art gallery", "museum" will disappear[17] or change completely their meaning, since the whole of human activity will combine in one harmonious effort to develop and satisfy the physical, intellectual, and sensual needs of the species.
Communists are not utopians. We have tried here to give the briefest, and inevitably most limited of sketches of what must be the nature of the new human society that will be born from present-day capitalism. In this sense, the "alternative worlders'" slogan, that "another world is possible" (or even "other worlds are possible") is a pure mystification. Only one other world is possible: communism.
But there is nothing inevitable about this new world's birth. In this respect, there is no difference between capitalism and the other class societies which preceded it, where "Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, 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 reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes".[18] In other words, no matter how necessary the communist revolution is not inevitable. The passage from capitalism to the new world will not be possible without the violence of the proletarian revolution as its inevitable midwife.[19] But the alternative, in the conditions of advanced decomposition of today's society, is the destruction not just of the two "contending classes", but of the whole human species. Whence the gigantic responsibility that weighs on the shoulders of the world revolutionary class.
Seen from the situation today, the development of the proletariat's revolutionary capacity might seem such an impossibly far-off dream that there is a great temptation to "do something" now, even if it means rubbing shoulders with those old villains of the Stalinist and Socialist parties, in other words with the left wing of the bourgeoisie's state apparatus. But for the revolutionary minorities, reformism is not a stop-gap that we do "for want of anything better", on the contrary it is a lethal compromise with the class enemy. The road towards the revolution which alone can create "another world" will be long and difficult, but it is the only road that exists.
Jens
1 The teachers' strikes in France in 2003 were closely followed by strikes by theatre workers (both players and technicians).
2 Common Agricultural Policy, an enormous and expensive system for artificially maintaining the prices paid to European agricultural producers, to the fury of their competitors in other exporting countries.
4 It is particularly amusing to read in the pages of Alternative Libertaire (a French anarchist group) that "we want the demonstration to be as big as possible in order to make them hear once again that we don't want the capitalist and police Europe" (Alternative Libertaire n°123, November 2003), when in fact the ESF is entirely financed by the state and based on the mystification of strengthening the state in Europe in order supposedly to protect the "citizen" from big industry. There really is no incompatibility in practice between anarchism and the defence of the state!
5 Several of these towns or local authorities are controlled by the French "Communist" Party.
6 It is interesting to see that the British "Socialist Workers' Party" - an unreconstructed Trotskyist party of the old type - appears in France disguised as a sort of "network" under the very modern name of "Socialisme par en bas" ("Socialism from below").
7 As Bismarck said: "I have always found the word Europe in the mouth of those politicians who were demanding from other powers something that they did not dare demand in their own name" (cited in the Economist, 3/1/04).
8 Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency
9 Well-known anti-globalist personality, author of a Manifesto for a new world, and one of the leaders of the British "Globalise Resistance".
10 It is impossible to overstate the extraordinary power and prescience of the Communist Manifesto, which laid the foundations for a scientific understanding of the movement towards communism. The Manifesto itself is a part of the effort undertaken by the workers' movement since its beginnings, and which it has continued since, to understand more profoundly the nature of the revolution towards which its strength tends. We have chronicled these efforts in our series "Communism is not just a nice idea but a material necessity", published in the pages of this Review.
11 "In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature" (Communist Manifesto).
12 "In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed. And why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. 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. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them" (Communist Manifesto).
13 We cannot go into detail on this point here, but we should simply point out that this is an idea to be wielded with precaution, since even "basic" needs are socially determined: Cro-Magnon man did not have the same needs as modern man for food, clothing and shelter, nor did he satisfy those needs in the same way or with the same tools.
14 In fact, this is precisely what happened after the defeat of the October 1917 Russian Revolution: the fact that many of the new leaders (Brezhnev for example) started life as workers or as workers' children gave credence to the idea that a communist revolution that brings the working class to power would in reality do nothing other than put into power a new, "proletarian", ruling class. This idea that the USSR was communist and its leaders something other than a fraction of the world bourgeoisie, was of course knowingly encouraged by all sections of the ruling class, from right to left. In reality, the Stalinist counter-revolution put the bourgeoisie back in power: the fact that many members of this new bourgeoisie were of worker or peasant origin is of no more significance than when an individual of working-class origins becomes a company director.
15 It is significant that the origin of the French word for labour ("travail") should have originated from the Latin "tripalium", meaning an instrument of torture, and should then have passed into English with the meaning of "trouble" or "suffering".
16 An anarchist at the FSL tried, very learnedly, to explain to us that marxists only consider "homo faber" ("the man who makes"), while the anarchists consider "homo ludens" ("the man who plays"). This idea is not any the less stupid for being expressed in Latin.
17 Not to mention "prison", "gaol", and "concentration camp".
18 Communist Manifesto
19 For a much more developed view, see our series on communism mentioned previously, and in particular the article published in International Review n°70.
There has been a lot of hype in the mass media about the so-called 'Greatest Generation' -- the generation that fought in World War II. First there was "Saving Private Ryan," the Hollywood blockbuster starring Tom Hanks, which glorified the sacrifices of those who fought in the war. More recently, there has been a media campaign to erect a monument to the soldiers and sailors who "made the world safe for the American way of life." Tom Brokaw, one of the most prominent television news reporters/broadcasters in the United States, has published two books on this generation, both those who fought in the war. The television news has been inundated with "heart-warming" stories about "long overdue" medals and citations being awarded to aging veterans. Various tributes have been made to the factory workers who worked long and hard to produce the weapons and materials needed to prosecute the war. A strong dose of gratitude is handed to those men and women who were not sent into combat but who worked under often dangerous and difficult conditions to keep production for war going at a fierce pace. There has been homage to all the women who worked as nurses or factory workers or truck drivers to keep war production going.
At the start of the 21st century, more than fifty-five years after the days of the Second Imperialist World War, which pitted the newer, major industrial powers such as Germany and Italy, against the more mature, dominant capitalist powers, such as the USA, Britain, and France - the media has been intent on demonstrating that wars can be good, wars can be popular, and that war is heroic. They are trying to take advantage of the aging veterans who are reportedly dying at the rate of several thousand a day - the fathers and grandfathers of the current generations of the working class, which has not been ideologically defeated by the ruling class and convinced to sacrifice itself for imperialism -- to glorify the "honor" of imperialist slaughter.
The intervening years-between the end of the Second World War and today- has seen disaffection among the population in America, and in other major powers, with the notion of major war. For years now, the US as the strongest military power and the dominant imperialist power on the planet, has been doing battle in small theaters- like the infamous war in Vietnam and as well as in the former component parts of Yugoslavia. Recently, the US has striven to 'ideally' win quickly through the use of incredibly overwhelming power. This follows the 'Powell Doctrine' that was used in the Gulf War. A televised war, which is over very quickly, is thought to be more palatable to the general population. We cannot help but note, that the former general is serving as Secretary of State for the new Bush administration.
Imperialist war is never, in the current period of capitalist decadence and social decomposition, in the interests of the working class. While certain 'generations' of the proletariat have been enlisted by the capitalist state to fight wars for capitalism during the twentieth century, it has not been in interests of the working class. Historically, the working class has recognized that the matters of imperialist conquest and war entail the destruction of millions of lives and of many of the accomplishments of humanity made over many centuries. Rather than celebrate the imperialist butchery as the bourgeois ideological campaign tries to do, to genuinely honor the suffering and hardships of our fathers and grandfathers requires that the working class today guarantee that capitalism will never again lead humanity into another orgy of destruction and murder, that the working class today destroy the capitalist system.
This generation, and the generations to come have challenges awaiting. There is a real need to fight the most important war, the war against the decadent capitalist system. Such a revolutionary struggle, on an international scale, can develop the basis for a new society freed from the rule of capital and controlled by the vast majority of the population - the proletariat.
Eric Fischer
The end of the year 2003 saw world capitalism take a new step towards the abyss - a step represented by the second Gulf war and the creation of a military quagmire in a strategically vital area of the globe. This war has been crucial in determining the new imperialist equilibrium, with the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq and the opposition to this move from various imperialist powers who are more and more adopting positions antagonistic to those of the USA. In the face of this new butchery, the main revolutionary groups who make up the international communist left have once again shown that they are capable of responding to the propaganda of the bourgeoisie by taking up resolutely internationalist positions. Against the ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie, which are aimed at disorienting the proletariat, these groups defended the ABC of marxism. This does not of course mean that these organisations all defend the same positions. Indeed, from our point of view, the intervention of most of them has shown important weaknesses, in particular concerning the understanding of the phase of imperialist conflicts opened up by the collapse of the eastern bloc and the resulting dissolution of its western rival, and also when it comes to discerning what is at stake in these conflicts. These differences must be understood as the expression of the heterogeneous and difficult process through which consciousness ripens within the working class - a process which also affects the groups of the political vanguard. In this sense, as long as class principles are not abandoned, these differences should not constitute an element of frontal opposition between the components of the same revolutionary camp; rather they prove the need for a permanent debate between them. A public debate is not only the precondition for clarification within the revolutionary camp, but is also a factor of clarification which makes it possible to draw the line between revolutionaries and the groups of the extreme left wing of capital (Trotskyism, official anarchism, etc). It can thus help the new elements searching for class positions to orient themselves vis-a-vis the different elements of the proletarian camp.
It is in this spirit that our organisation launched an appeal to other revolutionary organisations when the second Gulf war began, the aim being to promote a joint initiative (documents, public meetings) which would make it possible "for internationalist positions to be heard as widely as possible":[1] [75] "the existing groups of the communist left all share these fundamental positions, whatever the divergences that may exist among them. The ICC is well aware of these divergences and has never tried to hide them. On the contrary, it has always tried in its press to point out these disagreements with the other groups and combat the analyses that we consider incorrect. This being said, and in line with the attitude of the Bolsheviks in 1915 at Zimmerwald and of the Italian Fraction during the 1930s, the ICC considers that real communists today have the responsibility of presenting as widely as possible to the class as a whole, in the face of imperialist war and the bourgeoisie?s campaigns, the fundamental positions of internationalism. From our point of view, this presupposes that these groups of the communist left do not restrict themselves to their own intervention, but that they join together in order to express in common their common positions. For the ICC a common intervention of the communist left would have a political impact which would go well beyond the sum of their respective forces which, as we all know, are only too weak at the present time. This is why the ICC is proposing to the following groups to meet in order to discuss what means could permit the communist left to speak with once voice in defence of proletarian internationalism, without hindering or calling into question the specific intervention of any group" (ibid).
This appeal was sent to:
- the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP);
- the International Communist Party (Il Comunista, Le Proletaire);
- the International Communist party (Il Partito, so-called "Florence" party);
- the International Communist party (Il Programma Comunista).
Unfortunately, the appeal was rejected either through written replies (ICP/Le Proletaire and the IBRP) or was simply ignored. In International Review n°113 we already noted the replies and took position on them or on the silence of other groups.
In the present article, we have two objectives. On the one hand, to show through an analysis of the positions taken up by the main proletarian groups towards the war that there really is such a thing as a proletarian political milieu, whatever the level of understanding reached by the groups who comprise it. This is a milieu which because of its loyalty to proletarian internationalism is clearly distinct from the various leftist formations and their revolutionary verbiage and from all the more openly bourgeois or inter-classist organisations. On the other hand, we will focus on certain divergences we have with these groups, showing that they correspond to erroneous views on their part while also arguing that they are not an obstacle to a certain unity of action against the world bourgeoisie. In particular, we will try to show that however sincerely these different views may be held, they are being used as a pretext for rejecting any such unity of action.
Whatever its different elements may think, the proletarian political milieu does exist
In the letter of appeal to revolutionary groups, we put forward the criteria which, in our opinion, represented a minimal basis which, notwithstanding the divergences that may exist on other points, were enough to distinguish the revolutionary camp from the camp of the counter-revolution:
"a) Imperialist war is not the result of a ?bad? or ?criminal? policy of this or that government, or of this or that sector of the ruling class; capitalism as a whole is responsible for imperialist war.
b) In this sense, the position of the proletariat and communists against imperialist war can in no way line up, even ?critically? behind one or other of the warring camps; concretely, denouncing the American offensive against Iraq in no way means offering the slightest support to this country or its bourgeoisie.
c) The only position in conformity with the interests of the proletariat is the struggle against capitalism as a whole, and therefore against all the sectors of the world bourgeoisie, with a perspective not of a ?peaceful capitalism? but of overthrowing the capitalist system and setting up the dictatorship of the proletariat.
d) Pacifism is at best a petty bourgeois illusion which tends to turn the proletariat away from its strict class terrain; more often it is nothing but a ploy cynically used by the bourgeoisie in order to drag the proletariat into the imperialist war in defence of the ?pacifist? and ?democratic? sectors of the ruling class. In this sense, the defence of the internationalist proletarian position is inseparable from the unsparing denunciation of pacifism" (ibid).
All the groups to whom this appeal was addressed have, as we will now show, satisfied these minimum criteria in the positions they have taken up:
The ICP (Programma) gives a very correct framework for the current phase when it says that "the agony of a mode of production based on class divisions is much more ferocious than we could imagine. History teaches us that when the social foundations are shaken by incessant tensions and contradictions, the energies of the ruling classes are mobilised towards survival at any cost ? and thus antagonisms grow sharper, the tendency towards destruction increases, confrontations multiply at the commercial, political and military level. At every level, in all classes, society is gripped by a fever which devours it and spreads to all its organs".[2] [76]
Il Partito and Le Proletaire also contribute towards developing a framework which shows that the war is not the fault of this or that "bad" side, but results from imperialist conflict on a global scale:
- "The Euro front, to the extent that it resists, is not a force for peace, opposed to the war-like dollar front; it is one of the camps in the general inter-imperialist confrontation which the regime of capital is rushing towards"[3] [77]
- "the war against Iraq, in spite of the disparity of forces, cannot be considered as a colonial war; it is from every point of view an imperialist war on both sides, even if the state being fought is a far less developed one, it is nevertheless bourgeois and the expression of a capitalist society"[4] [78]
- "the so-called ?peace camp?, ie the imperialist states who judge the American attack on Iraq to be prejudicial to their interests, are concerned that, emboldened by its rapid victory, the US will make them pay dearly for their opposition, if only by beginning to evict them from the region. The sordid imperialist rivalries which are the cause of the opposition between states are coming out into broad daylight. The Americans declare that France and Russia must generously renounce the gigantic credits they have bestowed on Iraq, while the other side is indignant that the contracts for the ?reconstruction? of the country are being handed out to the big US companies and that oil sales will be in the same hands?As for this famous ?reconstruction? and the prosperity promised to the Iraqi people, it suffices to look at the ?reconstruction? of Afghanistan and the situation in ex-Yugoslavia ? two regions where western troops are still present ? to understand that for the bourgeoisie on both sides of the Atlantic, it?s merely a question of reconstructing the installations needed to make production profitable and ensure the prosperity of capitalist enterprises".[5] [79]
These positions thus leave no place for the defence, even critical, of either camp. They constitute, in fact, the granite foundation for a denunciation of all the countries and political forces which hypocritically camouflage the defence of their own imperialist designs behind the defence of peace.
Thus for Il Partito "the common and united condemnation of the war [on the part of the western countries, editor?s note] is based on an undeniable equivocation since this aspiration has an origin and a significance which is different, if not frankly opposed, for the antagonistic classes.
The ?European party? represents big capital and big finance as established on this side of the Atlantic ? today more and more in competition with the Americans and opposed to this war. The finance magnates may not personally wave banners in the street but they have a solid control of the apparatus of the media, parties and unions which are loyal to the regime and which are used to orient fragile Public Opinion on the right and the left. For Capital, in fact, even if the wars are often ?unjust?, they are sometimes ?necessary?. It?s extremely easy to distinguish one from the other: those which are ?necessary? are the ones which your side wins, those which are ?unjust? are those which the other side wins. For example: for the European capitalisms which were involved in the horrible carve-up in Yugoslavia, the bombing of Belgrade (which was almost worse than the current bombing of Iraq) was ?necessary?; the bombing of Iraq, by contrast, where these powers are seeing rich oil contracts annulled by the ?democratic administration? imposed by Iraq?s ?liberators?, is ?unjust?".[6] [80]
For Programma Comunista "Not a man not a penny for imperialist wars: open struggle against our own national bourgeoisie, whether it be Italian or American, German or French, Serbian or Iraqi" .[7] [81]
For Il Partito Comunista, "The governments of France and Germany, supported by Russia and China, are against this war today but only in order to defend their own imperialist interests, threatened by the US offensive in Iraq and the region".[8] [82]
For the IBRP: "the real enemy of the USA is the Euro, which is beginning to be a dangerous threat to the absolute hegemony of the dollar".[9] [83]
The only attitude consistent with these principles is a struggle to the death against capital, whatever garb it wears, and an unconditional denunciation of pacifism. This is what these groups have done, the IBRP in particular:
- "Europe ? the Franco-German axis in particular ? is trying to counter the USA?s military plans by playing the pacifist card and has thus set an ideological trap which many have fallen for. We know quite well, and the facts are there to prove it, that whenever it has felt the need to do so, no European state has hesitated to defend its economic interests by force of arms. What we are seeing today is the formation of a new nationalism ? a European supranationalism. This is already at the heart of many declarations by the ?dissident? camp. The very reference to a Europe of human rights and social values, opposed to the exacerbated individualism of the Americans, is the basis for a future alignment around the objectives of the European bourgeoisie in its final confrontation with the American bourgeoisie"[10] [84]
- "in wide sections of the parliamentary ?left? and their appendices in the ?movement? (a large part of the ?anti-globalisation? movement), reference is made to the Europe of human rights and social values, opposed to the exacerbated individualism of the Americans. They try to make us forget that this Europe is the same which ? when we?re talking about ?social values? ? has already made, and demands with ever greater insistence, new cuts in pensions (the so-called reforms); it?s the same Europe which has already laid off millions of workers and which is now pressing to more than ever reduce labour power to a disposable commodity, via the devastating and increasing precariousness of employment".[11] [85]
All this testifies to the existence of a camp which has remained faithful to the principles of the proletariat and of the communist left, regardless of how far the various groups within it are aware of this.
As we have said, this does not mean that there are no important divergences between the ICC and these groups. The problem is not the existence of these divergences in themselves but the fact that these groups use them as a justification for rejecting a common response to a particularly grave historical situation. Moreover, using these divergences in this way prevents them from being clarified through a serious public debate.
In International Review n°113, we replied to Le Proletaire?s charge of frontism and the IBRP?s accusation of idealism, which is supposed to explain the alleged errors in many of the ICC?s analyses. We have not received any response to our arguments with the exception of an article published in Le Proletaire n°466. For this latter organisation, our differences on the question of revolutionary defeatism - and the fact that we do not consider these a barrier to working together - fully justify the criticism of frontism levelled at our appeal for joint action.
In the light of this article in Le Proletaire, we have to come back to this question of revolutionary defeatism. The article contains a new element which we will concentrate on here:
"It is not true that the organisations ranged in this category are basically in agreement on the essentials, that they share a common position, even on the one question of war and internationalism. On the contrary they are opposed on programmatic and political positions which tomorrow will be vital for the proletarian struggle and for the revolution, just as today they are opposed on the orientations and directives for action that need to be given to the rare elements searching for class positions. On the question of war in particular, we have stressed the notion of revolutionary defeatism because since Lenin this is what has characterised the communist position in imperialist wars. Now the ICC is precisely opposed to revolutionary defeatism. How then would it be possible to express a common position which, when you rub it a bit, when you look beyond the grand and beautiful phrases about overthrowing capitalism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, you find that it doesn?t exist. Common action would only be possible in such circumstances by agreeing to paste over or attenuate irreconcilable differences, ie, by hiding them from the workers we want to address, by presenting a false image of a ?communist left? united on the essential to militants in other countries we are trying to reach, ie by deceiving them. Camouflaging one?s positions ? that?s what it amounts to whether you will or no ? making unitary proposals with the aim of finding some immediate or contingent success: isn?t that the classic definition of opportunism?"[12] [86] (their emphases).
The ICP persists in ignoring our argument that "To talk of ?frontism? and a ?lowest common denominator? not only does nothing to clarify the disagreements among the internationalists, it is a factor of confusion inasmuch as it places the real divergences, the class frontier that separates the internationalists from the whole bourgeoisie, from far right to extreme left, at the same level as the disagreements among the internationalists" (International Review n°113). At the same time, out of ignorance (that is by refusing to acquaint itself with the critique of political positions, which is no minor fault for a revolutionary organisation) or simply for reasons of easy polemic, it does not report the ICC?s position on the question of revolutionary defeatism. It simply states that "the ICC is precisely opposed to revolutionary defeatism", leaving the door open to all kinds of interpretations, including, why not, the idea that the ICC is for the defence of the fatherland in case of attack by another power. Thus we need to recall our position on this question, which we developed at the time of the first Gulf war. In the article "The proletarian political milieu faced with the Gulf war in 1991"[13] [87] we said the following:
"This slogan was put forward by Lenin during the first world war. It was designed to respond to the sophistries of the ?centrists?, who while being ?in principle? against any participation in imperialist war, advised that you should wait until the workers in the ?enemy? countries were ready to enter the struggle against the war before calling on workers in ?your? country to do the same. In support of this position, they put forward the argument that if workers of one country rose up before those in the opposing countries, they would facilitate the imperialist victory of the latter.
Against this conditional ?internationalism?, Lenin replied very correctly that the working class of any given country had no common interests with ?its? bourgeoisie. In particular, he pointed out that the latter?s defeat could only facilitate the workers? struggle, as had been the case with the Paris Commune (following France?s defeat by Prussia) and the 1905 revolution in Russia (which was beaten in the war with Japan). From this observation he concluded that each proletariat should ?wish for? the defeat of ?its? bourgeoisie.
This last position was already wrong at the time, since it led the revolutionaries of each country to demand for ?their? proletariat the most favourable conditions for the proletarian revolution, whereas the revolution had to take place on a world-wide level, and above all in the big advanced countries, which were all involved in the war. However, with Lenin, the weakness of this position never put his intransigent internationalism in question (we can even say that it was precisely his intransigence which led to the error). In particular, Lenin never had the idea of supporting the bourgeoisie of an ?enemy? country ? even if this might be the logical conclusion of his ?wishes?.
But the incoherence of the position was used later on a number of occasions by bourgeois parties draped in ?Communist? colours, in order to justify their participation in imperialist war. Thus, for example, after the signing of the Russo-German pact in 1939, the French Stalinists suddenly discovered the virtues of ?proletarian internationalism? and ?revolutionary defeatism?, virtues which they had long ago forgotten and which they repudiated no less rapidly as soon as Germany launched its attack on the USSR in 1941. The Italian Stalinists also used the term ?revolutionary defeatism? after 1941 to justify their policy of heading the resistance against Mussolini. Today, the Trotskyists in the numerous countries allied against Saddam Hussein use the same term to justify their support for the latter".
Thus it is not the ICC?s approach which is in question here but that of our critics, who have not assimilated in any real depths of the slogans of the workers? movement during the first revolutionary wave of 1917-23.
Once we have made this clarification on the question of revolutionary defeatism, are we to continue thinking that the divergences we have pointed to do not constitute an obstacle to a common response to the war by the different groups? We do not think that the mistakes of the groups to whom we addressed our appeal, put their internationalism into question. The groups who defend revolutionary defeatism are not like the Stalinist and Trotskyist traitors who use the ambiguity of Lenin?s slogans to legitimise war. They are simply proletarian political formations who for different reasons have not all put their clocks right on a certain number of questions facing the workers? movement.
The IBRP, let us recall, thinks that its differences with the ICC are too important for a common response on the question of war.
However, the following passage from a leaflet by Bataglia Comunista, one of the groups of the IBRP, expresses a profound convergence on the way to analyse the dynamic of the balance of forces between proletariat and bourgeoisie - a question on which, the IBRP insists, our differences are particularly wide:
"In some ways, there is no longer a need in war to mobilise the working class at the front: it is enough for it to remain at home, in the factories and the offices, working for the war. The problem is posed when this class refuses to work for the war and thus becomes a serious obstacle to the development of the war itself. It is this ? and not demonstrations, however large, of pacifist citizens, and still less vigils blessed by the Pope ? which is an obstacle to war: that really could stop the war"[14] [88] (emphasis in the original).
This passage expresses the perfectly correct idea that war and the class struggle are not two independent variables but are antithetical, in the sense that the more the proletariat is enlisted the more the bourgeoisie has a free hand to make war. In the same way, the more "the working class refuses to work for the war", the more "it becomes a serious obstacle to the development of the war itself". This idea as formulated by Battaglia Comunista[15] [89] is very similar to what underlies our notion of the historic course, the historic result of the two dynamics mentioned above: the permanent tendency of capitalism to go to war and the historic tendency of an undefeated working class towards a decisive confrontation with its class enemy. However, Battaglia has always contested the validity of this position and accused it of being idealist. As with other points on which Battaglia has raised this charge of idealism and of failing to grasp the current situation, we have responded in detail with many articles and directly in a number of polemics.[16] [90]
We might expect that an organisation which is such a stickler for detail when it comes to examining its divergences with the ICC would have a similar attitude towards other groups. This is not the case.
We refer here to the attitude of the IBRP via its sympathising group and political representative in North America, the Internationalist Workers Group (IWG) which publishes Internationalist Notes. This group intervened alongside anarchists and held a joint public meeting with Red and Black Notes, some councilists and the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCP), which seems to be a typically leftist and activist group. Recently the IWG published a statement of solidarity with "comrades" of the OCP arrested and jailed for vandalism during the last demonstrations against the war in Toronto. It also held a joint public meeting with "anarcho-communist comrades" in Quebec.
While we ourselves fully recognise the need to be present in the debates between the political groups of the swamp, those who oscillate between revolutionary and bourgeois positions, in order to promote the influence of the communist left within these debates, we were to say the least disconcerted by the "method" employed here. It seems to display a "broadmindedness" quite at odds with the policy of rigour which the European IBRP claims to adopt. Given the difference in method here, and thus in principle, we thought it necessary to address the appeal for a joint initiative to the IWG through a letter which, among other things, said:
"If we understand correctly, the IBRP?s refusal is based essentially on the fact that the differences the IBRP has with our positions are too great. To cite the letter we received from the IBRP: ? a united action against the war or on any other problem could only be envisaged between partners that are well defined and politically identified in an unequivocal manner, and who share positions which all consider essential?. However, we have learned through the IBRP?s website (the last issue of Internationalist Notes and leaflets by Black and Red) that Internationalist Notes in Canada has held a joint meeting against the war with anarcho-communists in Quebec and with some libertarian/councilist and anti-poverty activists in Toronto. It seems evident to us that while there are substantial differences between the ICC and the IBRP on a certain number of questions, these become insignificant compared to the differences between the communist left and anarchists (even when they stick the word ?communist? to their name), and anti-poverty activists who on their website don?t even appear to take an ?anti-capitalist? position. On this basis, we can only conclude that the IBRP has two different strategies towards its intervention on the war: one on the North American continent and one in Europe. It would appear that the reasons the Bureau gives for rejecting common action with the ICC in Europe are not applicable in Canada and America. We are thus addressing this letter specifically to Internationalist Notes as the representative of the IBRP in North America in order to reiterate the proposal we have already made to the IBRP as a whole".[17] [91]
We never received any reply to this letter ? which already expresses an approach alien to revolutionary communist politics, an approach in which you only take political positions according to one?s mood and according to what troubles one the least.[18] [92] If there was no reply to this letter, this is no accident: it?s because there could not be a coherent response without some kind of self-critique. Furthermore, the policy carried out by the IWG in North America is certainly not a specificity of the American comrades but bears the typical mark of the IBRP which is well-versed in reconciling sectarianism with opportunism: sectarianism in its relations with the communist left, opportunism towards everyone else.[19] [93]
More generally, the rejection of our appeal is not based on the existence of real divergences between our organisations, but rather on a concern which is both sectarian and opportunist: to remain separate from others in order to carry out one?s own activity in a nice quiet corner without worrying about facing any criticisms or having to deal with the incurable trouble-makers of the ICC.
Such an attitude is neither fortuitous nor unprecedented. It cannot help but remind us of the attitude of the degenerating Third International which closed itself off from the communist left ? ie the current which was clearest and most determined in the definition of revolutionary positions ? while opening itself out to the right, with its policy of fusion with the centrist currents (the "Terzini" in Italy, the USPD in Germany) and of the "United Front" with social democracy, which had shown itself to be the butcher of the revolution. In the 1940s, Internationalisme, the organ of the Communist Left of France, the ancestor of the ICC, referred to this opportunist approach of the CI when it was criticising, the foundation of Internationalist Communist Party of Italy (Int CP), the common ancestor of all the Bordigist ICPs and of Battaglia: "It is no less astonishing that today, 23 years after the discussion between Bordiga and Lenin around the formation of the Communist Party of Italy, we are seeing the same error repeating itself. The CI?s method, which was so violently combated by the Left Fraction, and which had such disastrous consequences for the proletariat, is today being adopted by the Fraction itself through the construction of the PC in Italy".[20] [94]
In the 1930s, we saw the same opportunist approach from the Trotskyists, not least in its relations towards the Italian left.[21] [95] And when there was a split in the latter at the time of the foundation of the ICP, the attitude of the new party towards the GCF could only recall to mind the attitude of Trotskyism towards the Italian left. Even at the time it would not have been correct to have talked about the degeneration of the newly-created Int CP, contrary to Trotskysim and the CI before that; and today we can?t talk about the degeneration of the IBRP or the ICPs. But it still remains the case that the foundation of the Int CP was a step backwards compared to the activity and clarity of the Italian Left Fraction in the days of Bilan, in the 1930s. This opportunism was criticised by Internationalisme as follows:
- "There are, comrades, two methods of regroupment: there is the one used at the first congress of the CI, which invited all the groups and parties that claimed to be communist to take part in a confrontation of positions. And there is the method of Trotsky who, in 1931, and without any explanation, ?reorganised? the International Opposition and its Secretariat by carefully eliminating the Italian Fraction and other groups who had previously belonged to it (older comrades will remember a letter of protest sent by the Italian Fraction to all sections of the International Opposition, attacking this arbitrary and bureaucratic action by Trotsky)"[22] [96]
- "The PCInt was created during the feverish weeks of 1943 (?) Not only did it set aside the positive work that the Italian Fraction had done during the long period between 1927 and 1944, but on a number of points, the position of the new party was well behind that of Bordiga?s abstentionist fraction in 1921. Notably on the political United Front, where certain proposals for a United Front were made locally towards the Stalinist Party, on the participation in municipal and parliamentary elections, abandoning the old abstentionist position; on antifascism where the doors of the party were opened wide to elements from the Resistance; not to mention on the union question where the party went all the way back to the old position of the CI ? trade union fractions whose task was to struggle for the conquest of the unions, and, going even further, the policy of forming minority unions (the position of the Revolutionary Trade Union Opposition). In a word, in the name of a party of the International Communist Left, we have an Italian formation of a classic Trotskyist type, minus the defence of the USSR. The same proclamation of a party in a reactionary period, the same opportunist political practise, the same sterile activism, the same contempt for theoretical discussion and confrontation of ideas, both within the party and with other revolutionary groups".[23] [97]
Thus, to this day Battaglia Comunista and the ICPs bear the marks of this original opportunism. Nevertheless, as we have already said, we still believe in the possibility and the necessity for a debate between the different components of the revolutionary camp, and we will certainly not abandon this conviction because of yet another refusal, no matter how irresponsible it may be.
Ezechiele, December 2003.
[1] [98] "The responsibility of revolutionaries faced with war: ICC proposal to revolutionary groups for a common intervention faced with the war and the replies to our appeal" International Review n°113
[2] [99] "From war to war", Il Programma Comunista, n°3. July 2003. It is remarkable that these lines were written by an organisation which thinks that the conditions and means of the proletarian struggle have been invariant since 1848 and which thus rejects the notion of the decadence of capitalism. We can only celebrate the fact that, in this case, perception of reality is stronger than the dogma of invariant positions.
[3] [100] In "Against the war and against the peace of capital", Il Partito Comunista n°296, February 2003. In this article we have deliberately put to one side the expression of differences that are "secondary" when it comes to the essential question of internationalism. We will point out however that we have already argued in our press that it is incorrect to characterise the two imperialist camps in this situation as being those of the Euro and the Dollar respectively, as can be seen from the major dissensions that exist within the EU and the Euro zone. Does Il Partito seriously think that Holland, Spain, Italy and Denmark are part of the same anti-American coalition as Germany and France?
[4] [101] "The dirty war in Iraq between the Euro and the Dollar", Il Partito Comunista n°297, March-April 2003
[5] [102] "The war in Iraq is over?capitalist domination continues" leaflet by Le Proletaire, May 2003
[6] [103] "Pacifism and the trade union struggle", Il Partito Comunista no. 297, March-April 2003
[7] [104] "Class response to imperialist war", leaflet by Programma Comunista, March 2003
[8] [105] "Imperialist pacifism", Il Partito Comunista no. 296, February 2003
[9] [106] "Neither with Saddam, nor Bush, nor Europe", leaflet by Battaglia Comunista, March 2003
[10] [107] "Despite the neo-fascist filth, the enemy remains capital and its wars", leaflet by Battaglia Comunista, March 2003
[11] [108] "Neither with Saddam, nor Bush, nor Europe" Battaglia Comunista March 2003
[12] [109] "News of political frontism: unitary proposals on the war", Le Proletaire n°466, March-May 2003
[13] [110] International Review n°64
[14] [111] "Despite the neofascist filth, the enemy remains capital and its wars", Battaglia Comunista.
[15] [112] The words we would have used would have been a bit different and we would have talked about "the refusal of the working class to sacrifice itself for the war effort", a less restrictive formulation than the IBRP?s, which could make it appear that only arms production is involved in the war effort.
[16] [113] See, among some more recent examples: "The class struggle in the countries of the periphery of capitalism", International Review n°100; "Discussions in the proletarian milieu: the need for rigour and seriousness", International Review n°101; "Debate with the IBRP: the Marxist and opportunist visions in the politics of building the party", International Review n°101.
[17] [114] Letter sent by the ICC, 6 June 2003
[18] [115] This is a "normal" practise among a certain number of Bordigist groups, coherent with the view they have of themselves as the sole depositories of class consciousness and the only nuclei of the future party. But even within this component of the proletarian political milieu, there are more responsible groups which in spite of themselves cannot ignore the fact that they are not alone in the world and who respond to the correspondence of other groups, either through letters or articles in their press.
[19] [116] See in particular the articles "Debate with the IBRP: the Marxist and opportunist visions in the politics of building the party", International Review n°103 and n°105.
[20] [117] Internationalisme n°7, February 1946 "On the Congress of the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy".
[21] [118] See our book The Communist Left of Italy, particularly the part dealing with the relations between the Left Fraction of the CP of Italy and the International Left Opposition.
[22] [119] Internationalisme no. 10, May 1946, "Letter to all the groups of the International Communist Left".
[23] [120] Internationalisme no. 23, June 1947, "Current problems of the international workers? movement".
Thursday, 11th March, 7 o'clock in the morning: bombs blast a train in a working-class district of Madrid. The bombs of capitalist war have once again struck a defenceless civilian population, just as blindly as they did when they dropped on Guernica, or during the bombardments of World War II. The bombs “dropped” indiscriminately against men, women, children, adolescents, and even against immigrants from “muslim” countries who in some cases - to render tragedy still more tragic - did not even dare to come forward to claim the bodies of their dead for fear of being arrested and expelled from the country as a result of their illegal status.
Just like the attack on the Twin Towers, this massacre is a real act of war. Nonetheless, there is a major difference between the two: whereas on 11th September, the target was a major symbol of the power of US capitalism - although there was an obvious intention to kill in order to reinforce the horror and the terror of the act - this time the act had no symbolic value: this strike against a civilian population was merely another killing in an ongoing war. The 11th September was an event of world importance, an unprecedented massacre on American soil whose main victims were the workers and office employees of New York. It gave a pretext to the American state - a pretext fabricated by those who deliberately allowed the preparations for the attack to go ahead, despite being informed about them in advance - to inaugurate a new period in the deployment and exercise of its imperialist power: henceforth, the US announced that, in the “war against terror” they would strike alone, anywhere in the world, to defend their interests. The 11th March does not open a new period, it makes a banality out of horror. It is no longer a matter of choosing targets for their symbolic propaganda value, but of direct strikes against the working population. While the rich and the powerful were killed in the Twin Towers, there were none in the 7:00 train in the suburb of Atocha.
It is of course the “done thing” today, to denounce the crimes of the Nazis and Stalinists. But during World War II, the democratic powers also bombarded the civilian population, and especially the working class, with the aim of spreading terror, reducing the enemy's ability to fight, and even, at the end of the war, deliberately devastating working-class districts in order to put an end to any possibility of a proletarian uprising. The increasingly massive bombardments, night and day, of German cities towards the end of the war, are in themselves a stinging condemnation of the nauseating hypocrisy of all those governments who denounce those acts on the part of others, which they themselves have never hesitated to undertake (Iraq, Chechnya, Kosovo, are only some of the most recent examples of occasions when the civilian population has been targeted as a result of the rivalries between great powers). The terrorists who struck in Madrid were well schooled indeed.[1]
Contrary to all prior predictions, the right-wing Aznar government was defeated in the elections that followed the Atocha bombing. According to the press, the socialist Zapatero's victory was made possible essentially by two factors: a much greater turn-out by workers and young people, and a profound anger against the maladroit attempts by the Aznar government to avoid the question of the war in Iraq and to put all the blame on the Basque terrorist organisation ETA.
We have already recounted how the attack on the Twin Towers was followed, in some cases, by spontaneous reactions of solidarity and the rejection of warmongering propaganda in the working class districts of New York,[2] but also how these reactions of solidarity, unable to express themselves independently, proved inadequate to provoke a class reaction and were turned into support for the pacifist movement against the intervention in Iraq. Similarly, many of those who voted against Aznar did so to condemn the government's shameless attempts at manipulation - when the very fact of voting represents a victory for the bourgeoisie which in this case used it to give credence to the idea that it is possible to “vote against war”.
For the revolutionary working class, it is vital to understand reality in order to change it. Communists therefore have a great responsibility to analyse the event, to take part as much as they are able in the effort of understanding that the whole proletariat must engage in, if it is to oppose an adequate resistance to the danger that the decomposition of capitalist society represents.
The terror attack on Madrid was an act of war. But it is war of a new kind. The bombs no longer carry the label of their country of origin, or of any particular imperialist interest. The first question we must ask is therefore: who could profit from the crime of Atocha?
We can say from the outset - just for once - that the American bourgeoisie had nothing to do with it. True, the very fact of the attack gives credence to the central idea of US propaganda that all are involved in the same “war on terror”. However, it totally discredits any suggestion by the US that the situation in Iraq is improving to the point where they will soon be able to give up power to a duly constituted Iraqi government. More important still, the arrival in power of the Spanish bourgeoisie’s socialist fraction is a threat to the United States’ strategic interests. In the first place, if Spain withdraws its troops from Iraq, then this will be a bad blow to the US: it will be a blow not, of course, at the military but at the political level against their claims to be leading a “coalition of the willing” against terrorism.
The Spanish socialists represent a wing of the bourgeoisie which has always been turned more towards France and Germany, and which intends to play the card of European integration. Their arrival in power immediately opened up a period of discreet negotiations, whose conclusions it would be difficult to predict at the time of writing. After his post-election declaration that Spanish troops would be withdrawn from Iraq Zapatero almost immediately back-peddled and announced that they would remain, on condition that the United Nations should take over responsibility for the occupation. This hedging by the Spanish, not only calls into question Spain’s participation in the US coalition in Iraq, but also its role as America’s Trojan Horse in Europe, as well as the whole deck of alliances within the European Union. Up to now, Spain, Poland, and Britain – each for its own reasons – have formed a “pro-US” coalition against the ambitions of France and Germany to rally the rest of Europe to their policy of opposition to Uncle Sam. For Poland, the despatch of troops to Iraq was essentially designed to buy America’s good graces, and thereby a powerful support against German pressure, at the critical moment of Poland’s entry into the European Union. If Spain really does leave the US coalition and returns to a pro-German orientation in Europe, which seems more than likely, then it remains to be seen whether Poland has the bottle to oppose France and Germany without the support of its Spanish ally. The latest “private” – and of course immediately denied – declarations by the Polish PM, complaining that the US had “taken him for a fool” certainly cast a certain doubt over such a possibility.
The USA has thus suffered a serious blow, and is likely to lose not just an ally – or even two – in Iraq, but above all a foothold in Europe.[3] The defection of Spain and Poland is likely seriously to weaken the American bourgeoisie’s ability to play world cop.
The United States and the Aznar fraction of the Spanish bourgeoisie are the main losers from the attack. Who then are the winners? France and Germany, obviously, along with the “pro-socialist” fraction of the Spanish bourgeoisie. Could we then imagine a “dirty trick”, using Islamist salafists as pawns, by the French, German or Spanish secret services?
Let us begin by eliminating the argument that “such things aren’t done” in democratic states. We have already shown[4] how the secret services can be led to play a direct role in the internecine conflicts and settling of scores within the national ruling class. The example of the kidnapping and murder of Aldo Moro in Italy is particularly edifying in this respect. Presented by the media as a crime committed by the leftist Red Brigades, the Aldo Moro assassination was in fact carried out by the Italian secret service that had infiltrated the group: Aldo Moro was killed by the dominant, pro-American fraction of the Italian bourgeoisie because he proposed to bring the Italian Communist Party (which at the time was wholly in the orbit of the USSR) into a coalition government.[5] However, to try to influence the results of an election – in other words the reactions of a large part of the population – by dynamiting a suburban train, is an operation of an altogether different dimension from the assassination of one man to eliminate an awkward element within the bourgeoisie. Too many uncertainties and imponderables affect the situation. The intended result (the defeat of the Aznar government and its replacement by a socialist one) depended in large part on the reaction of the Aznar government itself: all the electoral analysts agree that the result of the elections was in large part influenced by the incredible ineptitude of the government’s increasingly desperate attempts to pin responsibility on the ETA.[6] The result could well have been completely different had Aznar been able to profit from the event by trying to rally the electorate around a struggle for democracy and against terrorism. Moreover, the risks of the operation going wrong were far too great. When we consider the inability of the French DGSE[7] to carry out small-scale operations with any success (the mining of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, or the lamentable failure of the attempt to recover Ingrid Bettancourt from the Colombian FARC) and without being discovered, it is hard to imagine that the French government would allow it to undertake such an operation as the Atocha bombing on the territory of a European “friend”.
We have said that the attack in Atocha, like that on the Twin Towers, is an act of war. But what kind of war? During the first period of capitalism’s decadence, imperialist wars declared themselves openly as such: the great imperialist blood-letting of 1914 and 1939 called into play the Great Powers, with all the panoply of their national, military, diplomatic, and ideological arsenals. In the period of the great imperialist blocs (1945-1989), the rival blocs confronted each other via their proxy pawns: even then, it was more difficult to identify who was really behind the wars that were often presented as movements of “national liberation”. With capitalism’s entry into its phase of decomposition, we have already identified several tendencies which are to be found intertwined in today’s terrorist attacks:
- “the development of terrorism, or the seizure of hostages, as methods of warfare between states, to the detriment of the ‘laws’ that capitalism established in the past to ‘regulate’ the conflicts between different ruling class factions…
- the development of nihilism, despair, and suicide amongst young people…
- the tidal waves of drug addiction, which has now become a mass phenomenon and a powerful element in the corruption of states and financial organisms…
- the profusion of sects, the renewal of the religious spirit including in the advanced countries, the rejection of rational, coherent thought…” (“Theses on decomposition, 1990, reprinted in International Review no107).
These “Theses” were published in 1990, at a time when the use of terrorist attacks (for example the bombs in the streets of Paris during 1986-87) were essentially the responsibility of third- or fourth-rate states such as Syria, Libya, or Iran: terrorism was, as one might say, the “poor man’s atom bomb”. Fifteen years later, the rise of so-called “islamist” terrorism presents us with a new phenomenon: the disintegration of the states themselves, and the appearance of warlords using young kamikazes, whose only perspective in life is death, to advance their interests on the international chessboard.
Whatever the details – which still remain obscure – of the attack in Madrid, it is obviously linked to the American occupation in Iraq. Presumably, those who ordered the attack intended to “punish” the Spanish “crusaders” for their participation in the occupation of Iraq. However, the war in Iraq today is far from being a simple movement of resistance to the occupation conducted by a few irreconcilable supporters of Saddam Hussein. On the contrary, this war is entering a new phase, that of a kind of international civil war which is spreading throughout the Middle East. In Iraq itself, there are increasingly frequent confrontations not only between the “resistance” and US forces, but also between the “Saddamites”, Wahhabite Sunnis (the sect which gave birth to Bin Laden), Shiites, Kurds, and even Turkmen. In Pakistan, a discreet civil war is in progress, with the bomb attack against a Shiite procession (40 dead), and a large-scale military operation in progress as we write in Waziristan. In Afghanistan, all the reassuring declarations about the consolidation of the Kabul government cannot hide the fact that the latter’s writ runs no farther than Kabul itself, and that only with difficulty, while civil war continues to rage throughout the southern part of the country. In Israel and Palestine, the situation is going from bad to worse, as Hamas has started to use young children to carry its bombs. In Europe itself, the resurgence of violence between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo is a sign that the wars in ex-Yugoslavia have not come to an end, but have merely been smothered temporarily by the massive presence of occupying troops.
We are no longer faced here with an imperialist war of the “classic” sort, but with a general disintegration of society into warring bands. We might draw an analogy with the situation in China at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The phase of capitalism's decomposition is characterised by a blockage in the balance of forces between the reactionary bourgeois class and the revolutionary proletariat; the situation of the Middle Empire was characterised by a blockage between on the one hand the old feudal-absolutist class and its caste of mandarin bureaucrats, and on the other a rising bourgeoisie which nonetheless remained too weak, due to the specificities of its evolution, to overthrow the imperial regime. As a result, the empire disintegrated into a multitude of fiefdoms, each one dominated by its warlord, and whose incessant conflicts were bereft of any rationality on the level of historical development.
This tendency towards the disintegration of capitalist society will in no way hinder the strengthening of state capitalism, still less will it transform the imperialist states into society's protectors. Contrary to what the ruling class in the developed countries would like to make us believe – for example by calling the Spanish population to vote “against terrorism” or “against war” – the great powers are in no way “ramparts” against terrorism and social decomposition. On the contrary, they are the prime culprits. Let us not forget that today’s “Axis of Evil” (Bin Laden and his kind) are yesterday’s “freedom fighters” against the “Evil Empire” of the USSR, armed and financed by the Western bloc. And this is not finished, far from it: in Afghanistan, the United States used the unsavoury warlords of the Northern Alliance to topple the Taliban, and in Iraq the Kurdish peshmergas. Contrary to what they would like us to think, the capitalist state will be increasingly armoured against external military threats and internal centrifugal tendencies, and the imperialist powers – whether they be first- , fourth-, or nth-rate – will never hesitate to use warlords and terrorist gangs to their own advantage.
The decomposition of capitalist society, precisely because of capitalism’s worldwide domination and its vastly superior dynamism in transforming society compared to all previous social forms, takes on more terrible forms than ever in the past. We will highlight just one of them here: the terrible obsession with death weighing on the young generations. Le Monde of 26th March quotes a Gaza psychologist: “a quarter of young boys over 12 have only one dream – to die as a martyr”. The article continues: “The kamikaze has become a respected figure in the streets of Gaza, and young children dress up in play explosive waistcoats in imitation of their elders”.
As we wrote in 1990 (“Theses on decomposition”): “It is vital that the proletariat, and the revolutionaries within it, grasp the full extent of the deadly threat that decomposition represents for society as a whole. At a moment when pacifist illusions are likely to develop, as the possibility of world war recedes, we must fight with the utmost energy any tendency within the working class to seek for consolation and to hide from the extreme gravity of the world situation”. Since then, sad to say, this call has gone largely unheeded – or even treated with contempt – by the meagre forces of the communist left. Consequently, we are beginning in this issue of the Review a series on the marxist basis of our analysis of capitalism’s phase of decomposition.
The Spanish bourgeoisie was not directly responsible for the bombing at Atocha. This did not stop it from seizing on the workers corpses like a flock of vultures. Even in death, the workers served the ruling class to feed its machine of propaganda for the nation and for democracy. To cries of “Spain united will never be defeated”, the whole bourgeois class – left and right together – used the emotion provoked by the bombing to push the workers into the voting booths that many would otherwise have deserted. Whatever the electoral outcome, the particularly high rate of participation is already a victory for the bourgeoisie because it means – temporarily at least – that a large part of the Spanish working class believed that they could rely on the bourgeois state to protect them from terrorism, and that for it to do so, they should defend the democratic unity of the Spanish nation.
Worse still, and quite apart from the national unity around the defence of democracy, the aim of the different fractions of the Spanish bourgeoisie has been to use the bombings to win the support of the population, and of the working class, for their opposing strategic and imperialist choices. By designating Basque separatism as the guilty party – despite all proof to the contrary – the Aznar government wanted to associate the proletariat to the strengthening of the Spanish state police. By denouncing the responsibility of Aznar’s support for Bush and the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq, the socialists aim to make the workers’ endorse another strategic choice – the alliance with the Franco-German tandem.
An understanding of the situation created by capitalism’s decomposition is thus more necessary than ever for the proletariat, if it is to recover and defend its class independence against the bourgeois propaganda which aims to transform the workers into mere “citizens”, dependent on the democratic state.
The bourgeoisie may have won a victory during the elections in Spain. It remains totally incapable of putting a break on the economic crisis in which its system is plunged. Today, the attacks on the working class are no longer at the level of this or that company, or even this or that industry, but of the working class as a whole. In this sense, the attacks on pensions and social security in all the European countries (and in a different form in the United States, through the disappearance of pension schemes in stock-exchange disasters such as Enron), are creating a new situation to which the working class must respond. Our understanding of this situation, which provides the global framework for our analysis of the class struggle today, is presented in the report on the class struggle published in this issue.
Faced with the barbarity of war and the decomposition of capitalist society, the working class can and must rise to meet the danger that threatens it, not just at the level of an immediate resistance to economic attacks, but above all at the level of a general political understanding of the mortal danger threatening the human species with capitalism’s continued survival. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1915: “World peace cannot be maintained by utopian or frankly reactionary plans, such as international tribunals of capitalist diplomats, diplomatic conventions on ‘disarmament’ (…) etc. It will never be possible to eliminate, or even to hold back, imperialism, militarism, and war as long as the capitalist classes continue to exercise their uncontested class domination. The only way to resist them successfully and to preserve world peace, is the international proletariat’s capacity for political action, and its revolutionary determination to throw its weight into the balance”.
Jens, 28/03/04
[1]. See the article “Massacres and crimes of the great democracies” in International Review no 66. The democrats who today denounce Stalin's crimes were less particular during World War II when “Uncle Joe” was their valued ally against Hitler. Another example, nearer to our own time, is given by the most holy and Christian Tony Blair, who has just visited that well-known benefactor of humanity, Muammar Gaddafi. Never mind that the latter is considered to be responsible for the lethal aircraft bombing over Lockerbie in Scotland, still less the brutal and repressive nature of the Libyan regime. There is oil in Libya, and an opportunity for Britain to gain a strategic position in North Africa through military agreements with the Libyan army.
[2]. See International Review no 107.
[3]. This article does not have the ambition to analyse the configuration of the rivalries between the European Union’s national ruling classes. However, we can say in passing that the reorientation of the Spanish government also deals a heavy blow to British interests. Not only does Britain lose its Spanish ally against France and Germany in the muted conflicts that traverse the instances of the EU bureaucracy, its Polish ally is also weakened by Spain’s defection.
[4]. See “How the bourgeoisie is organised” in International Review no 76-77.
[5]. A similar case is that of the attack, on 12th December 1969, against the Banco di Agricoltura in Milan, which left fifteen dead. The bourgeoisie immediately laid the blame on the anarchists. To give credence to this idea, they even “suicided” the anarchist Pio Pinelli who had been arrested directly afterwards, by organising his “flight” from a window of the Milan Questura (police station). In fact – though of course there is no official version of the facts – the attack was carried out by fascists linked to the Italian and American secret services.
[6]. Terrorist movement for the independence of the Basque country.
[7]. Direction Généale de Sécurité Extérieure (spying abroad).
The massive eruption of workers’ struggles May 1968 in France, followed by the movements in Italy, Britain, Spain, Poland and elsewhere signified the end of the period of counter-revolution that had weighed so heavily on the international working class since the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave. The proletarian giant stood once again on the stage of history, and not just in Europe. These struggles had a powerful echo in Latin America, beginning with the “Cordobaza” in Argentina in 1969. Throughout the region, between 1969 and 1975, from Chile in the South to Mexico on the US border, workers put up an intransigent fight against the bourgeoisie’s efforts to make them pay for the unfolding economic crisis. In the waves of struggle that followed, that of 1977-80 culminating in the mass strike in Poland, that of 1983-89 marked by massive struggles in Denmark and Belgium, and by large-scale struggles in many other countries, the proletariat of Latin America continued to struggle, albeit not in such a spectacular manner. In doing so, it demonstrated that whatever its different conditions, the working class is one and the same international class in one and the same fight against capitalism.
Today, these struggles appear like a distant dream. The present social situation in the region is not marked by massive strikes, demonstrations and armed confrontations between the proletariat and the forces of repression, but by widespread social instability. The “uprising” in Bolivia in October 2003, the massive street demonstrations that swept five presidents from power in a matter of days in Argentina in December 2001, the Chavez “popular revolution” in Venezuela, the ultra-mediatised struggle of the Zapatistas in Mexico – these and similar events are what predominate. In this maelstrom of social discontent the working class appears to be just another discontented stratum of society, one which if it wants to have any chance of defending itself needs to merge with the other non-exploiting strata. Revolutionaries cannot simply resign themselves to these difficulties in the class struggle, their responsibility is to defend unbendingly the proletariat’s class independence.
“The autonomy of the proletariat in the face of all the other classes of society is the first precondition for the extension of its struggle towards the revolution. All alliances with other classes or strata and especially those with fractions of the bourgeoisie can only lead to the disarming of the class in the face of its enemy, because these alliances make the working class abandon the only terrain on which it can temper its strength: its own class terrain” (Point 9, Platform of the ICC).
The working class is the only revolutionary class. It alone bears a perspective for humanity as a whole. Today, when the proletariat is surrounded on every side by the increasing decomposition of a moribund capitalism, when it has great difficulty in imposing its own autonomous class struggle with its own interests to defend, it is more than ever necessary to remember the words of Marx in The Holy Family: “The question is not what goal is envisaged for the time being by this or that member of the proletariat, or even by the proletariat as a whole. The question is what is the proletariat and what course of action will it be forced historically to take in conformity with its own nature”.
The history of the class struggle in Latin America over the last 35 years, along with that of the rest of the international working class, has been one of hard struggles, violent confrontations with the state, temporary victories and bitter defeats. The spectacular movements of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s have given way to more difficult and tortuous struggles, where the central question of how to defend and develop class autonomy is posed more sharply than ever.
Of particular importance was the struggle by the workers of the industrial city of Cordoba in 1969. This struggle witnessed a week of armed confrontation between the proletariat and the Argentinean army and gave a formidable stimulus to struggles throughout Argentina, Latin America and the world. It was the beginning of a wave of struggles that culminated in Argentina in 1975, with the struggle of the steelworkers in the town of Villa Constitución, the most important steel-producing centre in the country. The workers of Villa Constitución faced the full force of the state. The ruling class wanted to use the crushing of their militancy as an example. The town was put “under a military occupation of 4,000 men ...The systematic combing of each neighborhood and the imprisonment of workers (....) simply provoked the anger of the workers: 20, 000 workers in the region came out on strike and occupied the factories. Despite assassinations and bomb attacks against workers' houses, a Committee of Struggle was immediately created outside the union. Four times the leadership of the struggle was arrested; but each time the committee re-emerged stronger than before. As in Cordoba in 1969, groups of armed workers took charge of the defence of working class neighbourhoods and put an end to the activities of the paramilitary bands. The action of the iron and steel workers who demanded a wage increase of 70% quickly gained the solidarity of the workers in other factories in the country, in Rosario, Cordoba, and Buenos Aires. In the latter city, for example, the workers of Propulsora, who went on solidarity strike and won all the wage increases they demanded (130.000 pesos a month), decided to donate half their wages to the workers in Villa Constitución” (“Argentina six years after Cordoba”, World Revolution n°1 1975, page 15-16).
In Chile likewise, in the early 1970’s, the workers fought to defend their own class interests, and refused to sacrifice their interests in the name of the Allende’s Popular Unity government: “Working class resistance to Allende began in 1970. In December 1970, 4,000 Chuquicamata miners struck, demanding higher wages. In July 1971, 10,000 coal miners struck at the Lota Schwager mine. New strikes at the mines of El Salvador, El Teniente, Chuquicamata, La Exotica and Rio Blanco spread at around the same time, demanding higher wages... In May-June 1973, the miners began to move again. 10,000 struck at the El Teniente and Chuquicamata mines. The El Teniente miners asked for a 40% wage rise. Allende put the O'Higgins and Santiago provinces under military rule, because the paralysis at El Teniente seriously threatened the economy" (“The irresistible fall of Allende”, World Revolution n°268).
Major struggles also took place in other important proletarian concentrations in Latin America. In Peru in 1976, semi-insurrectional struggles in Lima were bloodily suppressed. A few months later, the Centramin miners were on strike. In Ecuador, a general strike broke out in Riobamba. Mexico was hit by a wave of strikes in January of the same year, then in 1978 a new wave of general strikes swept Peru. In Brazil, ten years of relative social calm was broken when 200,000 steelworkers took the lead in a wave of strikes that lasted between May and October. In Chile in 1976, strikes broke out among the metro workers in Santiago, and in the mines. In Argentina, strikes broke out again in 1976, despite repression by the ruling military junta, in the electricity industry, and in the car industry in Cordoba, which witnessed violent confrontations between the workers and the army. The 1970s were also marked by important episodes of struggle in Bolivia, Guatemala, and Uruguay.
During the 1980’s the proletariat was fully involved in the international wave of struggles that began in Belgium in 1983. The most developed of these struggles were marked by determined efforts by workers to spread their movement. In 1988, for example, education workers in Mexico fought for an increase in wages: “The demand of the education workers from the beginning posed the question of the extension of the struggles, because there was a general discontent against the austerity plans. 30,000 public employees were holding strikes and demonstrations outside of union control, though the movement was dying down by the beginning of the movement in the education sector. The education workers themselves showed a recognition of the need for extension and unity: at the beginning of the movement, those in the south of Mexico City sent delegations to other education workers, calling on them to join the struggle, and they also took to the streets in demonstrations. Similarly they refused to restrict the fight to teachers alone, regrouping all education workers (teachers, manual and administrative workers) in mass assemblies to control the struggle” (“Mexico worker’s struggle and revolutionary intervention” World Revolution n°124, May 1989).
The same tendencies appeared in other parts of Latin America: “Even the bourgeois media has been talking about a ‘strike wave’ in Latin America, with workers’ struggles breaking out in Chile, Peru, Mexico (…) and Brazil; in the later case there have been simultaneous strikes and demonstrations against a wage freeze by bank, dock, care and education workers” (“The difficult path to unification of class struggle”, World Revolution n°124, May 1989).
Between 1969 and 1989, the working class in Latin America took its place fully within the historic renewal of the working class’ international struggle, with its advances and retreats, its difficulties and its weaknesses.
The collapse of the Berlin wall, and the subsequent tidal wave of bourgeois propaganda about the “death of communism”, caused a profound ebb in workers’ struggles internationally, characterised essentially by the proletariat’s loss of its own class identity. The effects of this ebb were all the more damaging for the proletariat in the peripheral countries, such as in Latin America, inasmuch as the development of the crisis and social decomposition thrust the wretched, oppressed and pauperised masses into inter-classist revolts, making it even more difficult for the workers to assert their own class autonomy and to keep their distance from “people power” and popular revolts.
The collapse of the Eastern bloc was both a product and an accelerating factor of capitalism’s decomposition, against a background of deepening economic crisis. Latin America was hit hard. Tens of millions were forced from the countryside into the shantytowns of the major cities in a desperate search for non-existent jobs, whilst at the same time millions of young workers were being excluded from the process of wage labour. Over the course of 35 years, with a particularly brutal acceleration during the last ten years, this has led to a massive growth in those strata of society who, whilst not exploiting others' labour power, have been left to starve and eke out a hand-to-mouth existence on the edges of society.
In Latin America as a whole, 221 million (44% of the population) live in poverty. This represents a 7 million increase over last year (of these, 6 million live in extreme poverty) and a 21 million increase since 1990. This means that 20% of the population of Latin America now live in extreme poverty (according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean – ECLAC).
The impact of this social decay can be seen in the growth of the informal, self-employed economy of street-selling. The pressure of this sector varies according to the economic strength of the country. In Bolivia, in 2000, the self-employed outnumbered wage earners (47.8% of the working population were self-employed compared to 44.5% wage earners); in Mexico the ratio was 21.0% compared to 74.4% (ECLA).
In the continent as a whole 128 million people live in slums; that is, 33% of the urban population (“UN: Slums increase a 'time bomb'", October 6 2003. ONE news[1]). These millions are faced with little or no sanitation or electricity and their lives are plagued by crime, drugs and gangs. The slums of Rio have been the battleground for rival gangs for years, a situation graphically portrayed in the film City of God. Workers in Latin America, especially in the slums, are also faced with the highest murder and crime rates in the world. The ripping apart of family relations has also led to a massive growth in the number of abandoned street children throughout the region.
Tens of millions of peasants are finding it increasingly difficult to scrape a miserable living from the soil. In some tropical areas, this has served to accelerate the process of environmental destruction spearheaded by the logging companies and others, as land-hungry peasants are forced to encroach on the soil of the rainforest. This in turn offers only a temporary respite since its thin soil is quickly exhausted, resulting in a spiral of deforestation.
The increase in the numbers of the pauperised masses has had a serious impact on the proletariat’s ability to defend its class autonomy. This appeared clearly at the end of the 1980’s when hunger revolts broke out in Venezuela, Argentina and Brazil. In response to the revolt in Venezuela, which left over one thousand dead and as many injured, we warned of the danger to the proletariat of such revolts. “The vital factor for nourishing this social tumult was blind rage, without any perspective, accumulated over long years of systematic attacks against wage levels and living conditions of those still at work; it expressed the frustration of millions of unemployed, of youths who have never worked and are being pitilessly driven into the swamp of lumpenisation by a society which, in the countries of capitalism's periphery, is incapable of offering these elements any prospect for their lives...
“The lack of proletarian political orientation, opening up a revolutionary perspective, meant that it was this rage and frustration which was the motor force behind the street riots with their burning of vehicles, impotent confrontations with the police and, later on, the pillaging of food and electrical goods shops. The movement which began as a protest against the 'package' of economic measures thus rapidly disintegrated into looting and destruction without any perspective” (“Venezuela: communiqué to the whole working class”, from Internacionalismo, ICC publication in Venezuela, reproduced in World Revolution no124 May 1989).
In the 1990’s the desperation of the non-exploiting strata has been increasingly utilised by parts of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. In Mexico, the Zapatistas initially proved particularly adept at this, with their ideas about “popular power” and representing the oppressed. Whilst in Venezuela, Chavez has mobilised the non-exploiting strata, especially the slum dwellers, with the idea of a “popular revolution” against the former corrupt regime.
These popular movements have had a real impact on the proletariat, especially in Venezuela where there is a real danger of the working class being dragged into a bloody civil war behind different fractions of the ruling class.
The dawning of the 21st century has not seen a lessening of the destructive impact of the escalating desperation of the non-exploiting strata. In December 2001 the proletariat of Argentina – one of the oldest and most experienced in the region – was swept up in a popular revolt which despatched five successive presidents from power in the space of 15 days. In October 2003, the main sector of the proletariat in Bolivia, the miners, were sucked into a bloody “popular revolt” led by the petty-bourgeoisie and the peasantry, which left many dead and wounded, all in the name of defending Bolivian gas reserves and the legalisation of coca production!
The fact that significant parts of the proletariat have been sucked into these revolts is of the greatest importance, because it marks a profound loss of class autonomy. Instead of seeing themselves as proletarians with their own interests, workers in Bolivia and Argentina saw themselves as citizens sharing common interests with the petty-bourgeois and non-exploiting strata.
With the deepening world economic crisis and advancing social decay, there will be other such revolts, or as in the case of Venezuela, possibly bloody civil wars – massacres that could physically and ideologically crush important parts of the international proletariat. Faced with this grim prospect it is the duty of revolutionaries to insist on the need for the proletariat to struggle to defend its own specific class interests. Unfortunately, not all revolutionary organisations have lived up to their responsibilities at this level. Thus the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, faced with the explosion of “popular” violence and demonstrations in Argentina, completely lost its political bearings and turned reality on its head. “Spontaneously proletarians went out onto the streets, drawing with them young people, students and substantial sections of the proletarianised petty-bourgeoisie who are pauperised like themselves. Together they directed their anger against capitalist sanctuaries: banks, offices, but above all the supermarkets and shops in general, which were attacked like the bakeries in medieval bread riots. The government, hoping to intimidate the rebels, couldn’t find a better response than to instigate a savage repression resulting in dozens of deaths and thousands wounded. The revolt wasn’t extinguished but instead spread to the rest of the country and increasingly began to assume a class character. Even the government buildings, symbolic monuments to exploitation and financial robbery, were attacked. (“Lessons from Argentina, Statement of the IBRP: Either the revolutionary party and socialism or generalised poverty and war”, Internationalist Communist n°21, Autumn/Winter 2002).
More recently, faced with the growing social turmoil in Bolivia that culminated with the bloody events of October 2003, Battaglia Comunista published an article praising the Bolivian Indians’ ayllu (communal councils) “The ayllu could only have played a role in the revolutionary strategy if they had counter-posed to the present institutions the proletarian content of the movement and overcame their archaic and local aspects, that is, only if they had operated as an effective mechanism for unity between the Indian, mixed and white proletariat in a front against the bourgeoisie, overcoming all racial rivalry (…) The ayllu could have been the point of departure for the unification and mobilisation of the Indian proletariat, but this in itself is insufficient and too precarious for providing the foundation for a new society emancipated from capitalism”. This article was published in November 2003 (Battaglia Comunista n°11, also available on their web site), after the bloody events of October when it was precisely the Indian petty-bourgeoisie that had led the proletariat, particularly the miners, into a desperate confrontation with the armed forces. A massacre where proletarians were sacrificed to allow the Indian bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie to grab a bigger “slice of the cake” in the redistribution of power and profits on the basis of the redistribution of power and profits gained from the exploitation of the miners and the rural workers. As one of their leaders, Alvero Garcia clearly admitted, the Indians as such have no misty dreams about the ayllu being a starting point for a better society.
The IBRP’s enthusiasm for the events in Argentina is merely the logical conclusion of their analysis of the “radicalisation of consciousness” of the non-proletarian masses in the periphery: “The diversity of social structures, the fact that the imposition of the capitalist mode of production upsets the old equilibrium and that its continued existence is based on and translated into increasing misery for the growing mass of proletarianised and disinherited, the political oppression and repression which are therefore necessary to subjugate the masses, all this leads to a potential for a greater radicalisation of consciousness in the peripheral countries than in the societies of the metropoles (…) In many of these [peripheral] countries the ideological and political integration of the individual into capitalist society is not yet the mass phenomenon it is in the metropolitan countries” (“Theses on communist tactics for the periphery of capitalism”, available on the IBRP web site www.ibrp.org [128]).[2] Thus, the violent, massive demonstrations by the masses have to be seen as something positive, and in the IBRP’s imagination the proletariat’s submerging under a tide of inter-classism was not the expression of a sterile and futureless revolt, but the concretisation of “a potential for a greater radicalisation of consciousness”. And as a result the IBRP has shown itself utterly incapable of drawing the real lessons from events such as those of December 2001 in Argentina.
Both in its “Theses”, and in its analyses of concrete situations, the IBRP makes two major mistakes which mirror the commonplaces of the leftist and anti-globalisation movement. The first, is a theoretical vision according to which bourgeois or petty-bourgeois movements for the defence of national interests directly antagonistic to those of the proletariat (like the recent events in Bolivia or the Argentine uprisings of December 2001), can somehow be transformed into proletarian struggles. And the second – merely empirical – mistake, is to think that such miraculous transformations have actually taken place in real life, and to imagine that movements dominated by the petty bourgeoisie and nationalist slogans are somehow real proletarian struggles.
We have already undertaken polemics with the IBRP over their political disorientation faced with the events in Argentina in an article in International Review n°109 (“Argentina: Only the proletariat fighting on its own class terrain can push back the bourgeoisie”). At the end of this article we summed up our position as follows: “Our analysis absolutely does not mean that we despise or under-estimate the struggles of the proletariat in Argentina, or in other zones where capitalism is weaker. It simply means that revolutionaries, as the advance guard of the proletariat, with a clear vision of the line of march of the proletarian movement taken as a whole, have the responsibility to contribute to the clearest and most exact vision of the strengths and limitations of the working class struggle, of who are its allies, and of the direction its struggle should take. To do so, revolutionaries must resist with all their strength the opportunist temptation – as a result of impatience, immediatism, or a historical lack of confidence in the proletariat – to mistake an inter-classist revolt (as we have seen in Argentina) for a class movement”.
The IBRP has answered this critique (see Internationalist Communist n°21 Autumn/Winter 2002) by restating their position that the proletariat led this movement and condemning the ICC’s position “The ICC emphasises the weaknesses in the struggle and points to its inter-classist and heterogeneous nature and its bourgeois leftist leadership. They complain about the intra-class violence and the domination of bourgeois ideology such as nationalism. For them this lack of communist consciousness makes the movement a ‘sterile and futureless revolt’” (“Workers’ struggles in Argentina: polemic with the ICC”). Clearly the comrades have not understood our analysis, or rather they prefer to see in it what they want to see. We can only encourage readers to read our article.
Against this standpoint, the Nucleo Comunista Internacional – a group formed in Argentina in late 2003[3] – draws wholly different lessons from these events, on the basis of a very different analysis. In the second issue of their bulletin the comrades conduct a polemic with the IBRP over the nature of the events in Argentina: “...the IBRP wrongly says that the proletariat pulled the students and other social layers behind it; this is a really gross error and one which they share with the comrades of the GCI. The fact is that the workers’ struggles that took place throughout 2001 demonstrated the incapacity of the Argentine proletariat to assume the leadership not only of the whole of the working class, but also to put itself at the head, as the ‘leader’, of the social movement that went into the streets to protest, pulling along with it the whole of the non-exploiting social strata. On the contrary what happened was that the non-proletarian layers led the events of the 19th and 20th of December; therefore we can say that the development of these movements had no historical future as has been demonstrated in the year that followed” (“Two years since the 19-20th December 2001”, Revolucion Comunista n°2).
Speaking of the proletarians' involvement in the looting the GCI[4] says: “while there was a search for money and above all trying to take as much as possible from businesses, banks…, there was more to it than that: it was a generalised attack against the world of money, private property, banks and the state, against this world that is an insult to human life. It is not only a question of expropriation but of affirming the revolutionary potential, that is the potential for the destruction of a society that destroys human beings” (“Concerning the proletarian struggle in Argentina” Comunismo 49).
To this vision, the NCI oppose a very different analysis of the relationship between these events and the development of the class struggle:
“The struggles in Argentina in the period 2001/2002 were not a one-off event, they were the product of a development which we can divide into three moments:
a) The first was in 2001; as we said above, this was marked by a series of struggles for typical workers’ demands, their common denominator being their isolation from other proletarian detachments, and the imprint of the counter-revolution: mediation produced by the hegemony of the political leadership of the union bureaucracy.
However, despite this limitation, important expressions of workers’ self-organisation took place, such as the miners of Rio Turbio, in the south of the country, Zanon, in Neuquen, Norte de Salta with the unity of the construction workers and the unemployed former oil workers. These small workers' detachments were the vanguard putting forwards the necessity for the ‘UNITY’ of the working class and the unemployed proletarians (…)
b) Secondly, there were the specific days of 10th and 20th of December 2001, which, we repeat, were not a revolt led either by sections of the working class, or by the unemployed workers, but an inter-classist revolt; the petty-bourgeoisie was the element that held it together, since the economic blow by the De La Rua government was aimed directly against their interests, and against their electoral base and political support, through the December 2001 decree freezing bank accounts (…)
c) In the third moment, we must be very careful not to make a fetish out of the so-called popular assemblies, which took the lead in the petty-bourgeois neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires City far from the workers’ centres and neighbourhoods. Nonetheless, at this moment there was a very modest development of struggles on the workers’ terrain, and these continued to grow: municipal workers and teachers demonstrated, demanding to be paid their wages, industrial workers struggled against lay-offs by the employers’ organisations (for example lorry drivers).
It was at this moment that the employed and unemployed workers were faced with the possibility not only of a real unity, but also of sowing the seeds for an autonomous organisation of the working class. Against this the bourgeoisie tried to divide and divert the proletariat and this was done with the complicity of the new piquetera bureaucracy, throwing to the ground the experiment that had been a great weapon in the hand of the proletariat, as was the case with the so-called National Assembly of employed and unemployed workers.
For these reasons we think that it is an error to identify the struggles that developed throughout 2001/2202 with the events of the 19 and 20th December 2001, since they are different from each other, and one is not the consequence of the other.
The events of the 19th and 20th December had absolutely no working class character, since they were not led by the proletariat nor by the unemployed workers; rather the latter rode shotgun for the slogans and interests of the petty bourgeoisie of Buenos Aires City, which differ radically from the goals and aims of the proletariat (…)
It is fundamental to say this, because in this period of capitalism’s decadence, the proletariat runs the risk of losing its class identity and its confidence as the subject of history and the decisive force of social transformation. This is due to the downturn of proletarian consciousness as a consequence of the explosion of the Stalinist bloc and the impression on workers’ thinking of capitalist propaganda about the failure of the class struggle. In addition to this the bourgeoisie has been inculcating the idea that class antagonisms no longer exist, rather people are united or divided according to whether they have been inserted into the market or excluded from it. It thus tries to erase the river of blood that separates the proletariat from the bourgeoisie.
This danger has been seen in Argentina during the events of 19th and 20th December 2001, where the class was incapable of transforming itself into an autonomous force struggling for its own class aims, but rather was sucked into the whirlpool of inter-classist revolt under the leadership of non-proletarian social layers (…)” (op. cit.).
The NCI places the events in Bolivia squarely within the same framework: “Starting from the premise of saluting and completely supporting the Bolivian workers in struggle, it is necessary to make clear that the combativeness of the class is not the only criterion for determining the balance of the forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, since the Bolivian working class has not been able to develop a massive and unified movement that could draw behind it the rest of the non-exploiting sectors in this struggle. The opposite in fact has happened: it was the peasants and the petty-bourgeoisie that have led this revolt.
This means that the Bolivian working class has been diluted in an inter-classist ‘popular movement’, and we affirm this for the following reasons:
a) because it was the peasantry that directed this revolt with two clear objectives: the legalisation of coca-production and preventing the sale of natural gas to the USA;
b) because of the use of the demand for a constituent assembly as the means for getting out of the crisis and as the means for ‘the reconstruction of the nation’;
c) and because nowhere did the movement put forward the struggle against capitalism.
The events in Bolivia have a great similarity to those in Argentina in 2001, where the proletariat was also submerged under the slogans of the petty-bourgeoisie. These ‘popular movements’ have in fact had a quite reactionary aspect, raising the slogan of reconstructing the nation, or expelling the ‘gringos’ and returning natural resources to the Bolivian state (…)
Revolutionaries must speak clearly and base themselves on the concrete facts of the class struggle, without deluding or deceiving themselves. It is necessary to adopt a revolutionary proletarian position, and therefore it would be a serious error to confuse what is a social revolt with narrow political horizons, with an anti-capitalist proletarian fight”. (“The Bolivian Revolt” Revolucion Comunista. n°1).
The NCI’s analysis is based on real events; it demonstrates clearly that the IBRP’s idea of the “radicalisation of consciousness” among the non-exploiting strata is idealist wishful thinking. The concrete reality of the situation in the periphery is the growing destruction of social relations, the spread of nationalism, populism and similar reactionary ideologies, all of which are having a very serious impact on the proletariat’s ability to defend its class interests.
Fortunately, this reality appears not to have gone completely unnoticed by the IBRP, or at least by parts of it. In Revolutionary Perspectives n°30, the Communist Workers’ Organisation comes a good deal closer to reality in its analysis of events in Argentina and Bolivia: “As in the case of Argentina, these protests were inter-classist and without a clear social objective and will be contained by capital. We have seen this in the case of Argentina, where the violent upheavals of two years ago have given way to austerity and pauperisation(…). Whilst the explosion of revolt shows the anger and desperation of the population in many of the peripheral countries, such explosions cannot find a way out of the cataclysmic social situation which exists. The only way forwards is to return to the struggle of class against class and link it with the struggles of the metropolitan workers” (“Imperialist tensions intensify – class struggle needs to intensify”).
That said the article does not denounce the role either of nationalism or of the Indian petty-bourgeoisie in Bolivia. So “officially” the IBRP still defends a position that the Indian “ayllu could be the starting point for the uniting and mobilisation of the Indian proletariat”. The reality was that the ayllu was the departure point for the mobilisation of the proletarians of Indian origin behind the Indian petty-bourgeoisie, peasants and coca growers in their struggle against the bourgeois fraction in power.
This aberrant position of Battaglia Comunista, attributing a possible role in the development of the class struggle to “communal Indian councils” has not gone unnoticed by the NCI, who considered it necessary to write to Battaglia (in a letter dated 14th November 2003) in order to raise precisely this point. After pointing out that the ayullu are part of “a caste system dedicated to maintaining the social differences between the bourgeoisie – whether it be white, coloured, or indigenous – and the proletariat”, the NCI goes on to criticise Battaglia Comunista as follows:
“In our opinion, this position is a serious mistake, inasmuch as it tends to attribute to this traditional indigenous institution the ability to provide a starting point for the workers’ struggles in Bolivia, even if afterwards it was to determine their limits. We consider that these appeals by the leaders of the popular revolt for the reconstitution of the mythical ayullu amount to nothing less than the creation of artificial differences between white and indigenous sectors of the working class, as do the fact of demanding from the ruling class a bigger share of the cake produced from the surplus-value extorted from the Bolivian proletariat no matter what its ethnic make-up.
Contrary to your declaration, we are firmly convinced that the ‘ayullu’ could never act as an ‘accelerator and integrator into one and the same struggle’, given both its own reactionary nature, and the fact that the ‘indigenous’ approach is itself based on an idealisation (a falsification) of the history of those same communities: as Osvaldo Coggiola (in Indigenismo Boliviano) says ‘in the Inca system, the ayullu’s communal elements were integrated into an oppressive caste system in the service of the upper stratum, the Incas’. This is why it is a serious mistake to think that the ayullu could act to accelerate or integrate the struggle.
It is true that the Bolivian revolt was led by the indigenous peasant communities and the coca-leaf farmers, but there lies precisely its extreme fragility and not its strength, since it was purely and simply a popular revolt where the proletarian sectors played a secondary role, and consequently the inter-classist Bolivian revolt suffered from the absence of any revolutionary or even working class perspective. Contrary to what some currents of the so-called Trotskyist or Guevarist camp think, we can in no way characterise this revolt as a ‘revolution’, at no time did the indigenous and peasant masses adopt the objective of overthrowing the system of Bolivian capitalism. On the contrary, as we have already said, the events in Bolivia were strongly marked by chauvinism: the defence of national dignity, the refusal to sell gas to Chile, opposition to attempts at eradicating coca cultivation”.
The role played by the ayullu is strikingly similar to the way the ZNLA (Zapatista National Liberation Army) has used the indigenous “communal organisations” to mobilise the Indian petty-bourgeoisie, peasants and proletarians in Chiapas and other areas of Mexico, in its struggle with the main fraction of the Mexican bourgeoisie (a struggle which is also integrated into the inter-imperialist conflict between the US and the European powers).
Those sectors of the Indian populations in Latin America who have not been integrated into the proletariat or bourgeoisie have been cast into extreme poverty and marginalisation. This situation “has led intellectuals and petty-bourgeois and bourgeois political currents to try to develop arguments to explain why the ’Indians’ are a social body that offers a historical alternative and to involve them, as canon fodder, in the so-called struggles for ethnic defence. In reality these struggles hide the interests of bourgeois forces, as we have seen not only in Chiapas, but also in ex-Yugoslavia, where ethnic questions have been manipulated by the bourgeoisie to provide the formal pretext for the struggle of imperialist forces” (“Only the proletarian revolution will emancipate the Indians”, in Revolucion Mundial, the ICC publication in Mexico, n°64, Sept-Oct 2001).
The proletariat is faced with a very serious deterioration of the social environment in which it has to live and fight. Its ability to develop its confidence in itself is threatened by the growing weight of the desperation of non-exploiting strata and the use of this by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces for their own ends. It would be a terrible dereliction of our revolutionary duty to underestimate this danger in any way whatever.
Only by developing its independence as a class, by asserting its class identity, by strengthening its confidence in its ability to defend its own interests will the proletariat be able to transform itself into a force capable of rallying behind it the other non-exploiting social strata.
The history of the proletarian struggle in Latin America demonstrates that the class has a long and rich experience to draw on. The efforts of the Argentine workers to return to the path of independent class struggle (described in the quotations above from the NCI)[5] demonstrate that the proletariat’s militancy remains intact. Nevertheless, enormous difficulties remain, testimony both to the long-standing weaknesses of the proletariat in the peripheries of capitalism, and to the tremendous material and ideological force of the process of decomposition in these regions. It is no accident that the most important expressions of class autonomy in Latin America take us back to the 1960s and 70s, in other words before the process of decomposition had made such profound inroads into the proletariat’s sense of class identity. This only underlines that the key to the global balance of class forces remains with the proletariat of the most powerful capitalist economies, where its most advanced detachments are better able to resist the damaging effects of decomposition. The signal for the end of fifty years of counter-revolution in the late sixties was rung in Europe and was then answered in Latin America; by the same token, the reconstitution of the proletariat as a historical antidote to capitalist putrefaction will necessarily radiate out from the most concentrated and politically experienced battalions of the working class, in the first place those of western Europe. But there is no question that the workers of Latin America will have a vital role to play in the future generalisation and internationalisation of struggles. Of all the sectors of the working class in the peripheries of the system, they are certainly the most advanced politically, as witness the existence of revolutionary traditions within it in the past, and the appearance of new groups searching for revolutionary clarity today. These minorities are the tip of a proletarian iceberg which promises to sink the unsinkable Titanic of capital.
Phil
[1]. onenews.nzoom.com/onenews_detail/0,1227,226422-1-9,00.html
[2]. See our critique of these Theses published in International Review n°100.
[3]. See their web site at www.geocities.com/ncomunistainternacional/ [129]
[4]. The GCI (Groupe Communiste Internationaliste) is an anarcho-leftist group, fascinated amongst other things by violence for its own sake, in all its forms. Some of its most “radical” positions – of anarchist inspiration – dress themselves up in historico-theoretical justifications which make them look remarkably like the positions of some groups in the communist left.
[5]. See also World Revolution n°247, September 2001
In 1904, the Russian empire was on the verge of revolution. The lumbering Czarist war machine was experiencing a humiliating defeat at the hands of a far more dynamic Japanese imperialism. The military debacle was fuelling the discontent of all strata of the population. In her pamphlet The Mass Strike, The Party and the Trade Unions, Rosa Luxemburg recounts how, already in the summer of 1903, at the very time that the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was holding its s famous Second Congress, southern Russia had been shaken by “a colossal general strike”. The war brought a temporary halt in the class movement, and for a while the liberal bourgeoisie took centre stage with its “protest banquets” against the autocracy; but by the end of the 1904 the Caucasus was again aflame with massive workers’ strikes around the issue of unemployment. Russia was a tinder box, and the spark that set it aflame was soon to be lit: the Bloody Sunday massacre in January 1905, when workers humbly petitioning the Czar to alleviate their appalling conditions were slaughtered in their hundreds by the Little Father’s Cossacks.
As we recounted in the first part of this article, the party of the proletariat, the RSDLP, was to confront this situation in the aftermath of a momentous split that had separated it into the Bolshevik and Menshevik fractions.
In his pamphlet Our Political Tasks, his overview of the Second Congress of the RSDLP where the split had taken place, Trotsky described the “nightmare” of the split, which had seen former comrades driven into hostile camps, and which now, as the working class faced the issue of war, of mass strikes and street demonstrations, left the marxist revolutionaries arguing bitterly about the internal organisation of the party, about rules of functioning and the composition of central organs. He laid the blame for this situation squarely on the shoulders of the man with whom he had worked closely in the exiled Iskra group, but who he now identified as the “head of the reactionary wing of our party” and as the arch disorganiser of the RSDLP – Lenin.
With many workers in Russia complaining that the party seemed to have lost itself in internal wrangling and was incapable of responding to the most pressing needs of the hour, Trotsky’s view seemed to have the backing of immediate reality. But with the hindsight of history, we can see that, although he made a number of important errors, it was Lenin who at that moment was the incarnation of the party’s most forward looking, revolutionary tendency, and Trotsky who had, along with other distinguished militants, fallen into a backward-looking position. The organisational questions posed by this split were in reality no abstraction divorced from the needs of the working class; they shared a common root with the issues posed by the growing social and political upheaval in Russia. The mass strikes and workers’ uprisings which swept Russia in 1905 were harbingers of a new epoch in the history of capitalism and the proletarian struggle: the end of the period of capitalist ascendancy and the opening of its period of decadence (see our article “1905: the mass strike opens the way to proletarian revolution.” in International Review 90), which would require the working class to go beyond its traditional forms of organisation, suited to the struggle for reforms within the capitalist system, and discover new forms of organisation capable of unifying the entire class and preparing it for the revolutionary overthrow of this system. In a nutshell, at the level of the mass organisations of the class, this transition was expressed in the passage from the trade union form of organisation to the soviet form, which made its first appearance in 1905.
But this profound change in the forms and methods of class organisation necessarily had its implications for the political organisations of the proletariat as well. As we tried to show in the first part of this article, the fundamental question posed at the Second Congress was the necessity to prepare for the coming revolutionary period by breaking from the old social democratic model of the party - a broad party, with the emphasis on “democracy” and the fight for improving the conditions of the working class within capitalist society – and constructing what Lenin called a revolutionary party of a new type, a narrower, more disciplined, centralised party, armed with a socialist programme for the overthrow of capitalism, and composed of committed revolutionaries.
In the next two articles, we are going to substantiate this view by examining the polemics that raged though 1904 between Lenin on the one hand and Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg on the other. In that period, as for most of his political career, Lenin was obliged to face criticisms from the entire spectrum of the workers’ movement. Not only from the Menshevik leaders like Martov, Axelrod and later Plekhanov, who accused him of acting like Robespierre at best and Napoleon at worst; not only from the acknowledged international leaders of social democracy like Kautsky and Bebel, who instinctively sided with the Mensheviks against this relatively unknown upstart, but also from those who were clearly on the left of the international movement – Trotsky and Luxemburg, both of whom were deeply influenced by the groundswell of revolution in Russia, both of whom were to make indispensable contributions to an understanding of the methods and forms of organisation appropriate to the new period, and both of whom signally failed to understand what Lenin’s organisational combat really meant.
In contrast to many of today’s revolutionaries, both Trotsky and Luxemburg did grasp one vital point about the organisation question: that it was a political question in its own right and a worthy subject for debate between revolutionaries. In publishing their criticisms of Lenin, they were consciously taking part in a profoundly significant international confrontation of ideas. Their contributions to this debate, furthermore, have left us with many brilliant flashes of insight. And yet for all these flashes, the arguments of both these militants remain fundamentally flawed.
In his autobiography My Life Trotsky recounts the arrival to his place of exile in Siberia in 1902 of Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? and news of the Iskra paper “which had as its object the creation of a centralised organisation of revolutionaries who would be bound together by the iron discipline of action” (chap 9, “My First Exile”, p136, Penguin Books,1975) It was this perspective above all which convinced him of the necessity to escape and seek out the group of exiles which was publishing it. A weighty decision indeed, because it meant leaving his wife and two young daughters behind (even though his wife was a party comrade and had insisted that it was his duty to go) and undertaking an extremely hazardous journey across the wastes of Russia in order to reach western Europe.
Trotsky also tells us that upon arriving in London, where Lenin, Martov and Zasulitch were then living, he “fell in love with Iskra” and immediately threw himself into its work. The Iskra editorial board was made up of six members: Lenin, Martov, Zasulitch, Plekhanov, Axelrod and Potresov. Lenin soon proposed Trotsky as a seventh member, partly because six was an unworkable number when it came to making decisions, but perhaps more importantly because he knew that the older generation, in particular Zasulitch and Axelrod, were becoming an obstacle to the progress of the party, and wanted to inject into it some of the revolutionary fire of the new generation. This proposal was stymied by the opposition of Plekhanov, largely for personal reasons.
At the Second Congress, Trotsky had been one of the most consistent supporters of the Iskra line, vigorously defending it - and in particular Lenin’s positions - against the nit-picking or outright opposition of the Bundists, Economists and semi-Economists. And yet by the end of the Congress, Trotsky had thrown in his lot with the massed ranks of the “anti-Leninists”; in 1904 he produced two of the most vituperative polemics against Lenin, Report of the Siberian Delegation and Our Political Tasks, and had joined the “new Iskra”, reclaimed by the Mensheviks after Plekhanov had turned his coat and Lenin had resigned from it. We turn to Trotsky’s own reflections to gain some understanding of this extraordinary transformation.
It will be recalled that the actual split had not taken place over the famous differences about the party statutes, but over Lenin’s proposal to change the composition of Iskra’s editorial board. In My Life (chapter 12, “The Party Congress and the Split”, p166-8) Trotsky confirms that this was the decisive issue:
“How did I come to be with the “softs” at the congress? Of the Iskra editors, my closest connections were with Martov, Zasulitch and Axelrod. Their influence over me was unquestionable. Before the congress there were various shades of opinion on the editorial board, but no sharp differences. I stood furthest from Plekhanov, who, after the first really trivial encounters, had taken an intense dislike to me. Lenin’s attitude towards me was unexceptionally kind. But now it was he who, in my eyes, was attacking the editorial board, a body which was, in my opinion, a single unit, and which bore the exciting name of Iskra. The idea of a split within the board seemed nothing short of sacrilegious to me.
Revolutionary centralism is a harsh, imperative and exacting principle. It often takes the guise of absolute ruthlessness in its relation to individual members, to whole groups of former associates. It is not without significance that the words ‘irreconcilable’ and ‘relentless’ are among Lenin’s favourites. It is only the most impassioned, revolutionary striving for a definite end – a striving that is utterly free from anything base or personal – that can justify such personal ruthlessness. In 1903 the whole point at issue was nothing more than Lenin’s desire to get Axelrod and Zasulitch off the editorial board. My attitude to them was full of respect, and there was an element of personal affection as well. Lenin also thought highly of them for what they had done in the past. But he believed that they were becoming an impediment for the future. This led him to conclude that they must be removed from their position of leadership. I could not agree. My whole being seemed to protest against this merciless cutting off of the older ones when they were at last on the threshold of an organised party. It was my indignation at his attitude that really led to my parting with him at the Second Congress. His behaviour seemed unpardonable to me, both horrible and outrageous. And yet, politically it was right and necessary, from the point of view of organisation. The break with the older ones, who remained in the preparatory stages, was inevitable in any case. Lenin understood this before anyone else did. He made an attempt to keep Plekhanov by separating him from Zasulitch and Axelrod. But this, too, was equally futile, as subsequent events soon proved.
My break with Lenin occurred on what might be considered ‘moral’ or even personal grounds. But this was merely on the surface. At bottom the separation was of a political nature and merely expressed itself in the realm of organisation methods. I thought of myself as a centralist. But there is no doubt that at that time I did not fully realise what an intense and imperious centralism the revolutionary party would need to lead millions of people in a war against the old order. …At the time of the London Congress in 1903, revolution was still largely a theoretical abstraction to me. Independently, I still could not see Lenin’s centralism as the logical conclusion of a clear revolutionary concept…..”
In One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back, in a passage we cited in the previous article about the difference between the party spirit and the circle spirit, Lenin characterises Iskra too as a circle; and while it is perfectly true that within this circle there was a clear tendency which consistently argued in favour of proletarian centralism, the weight of personal differences, of the exile mentality, and so on, was still very strong. Lenin was aware of Martov’s “softness”, his tendency to vacillate and conciliate, and Martov was equally aware of Lenin’s intransigence and was not always comfortable with it. Not being posed politically, this resulted in much unspoken tension. Plekhanov the father of Russian Marxism, and close to Lenin on many key issues right up until after the Second Congress, was deeply attached to his reputation and at the same time aware that he was being by-passed by a new generation (which included Lenin). He responded to Trotsky’s “invasion” of the Iskra circle with such hostility that all the other members found it deeply unworthy of him. And Trotsky? Again, despite his respect for Lenin, Trotsky had lived in the same house as Martov and Zasulitch; he developed an even closer friendship with Axelrod in Zurich and indeed dedicated Our Political Tasks to “my dear teacher, Pavel Bortsovich Axelrod”. To this extent “my break with Lenin occurred on what might be considered ‘moral’ or even personal grounds”. He sided with Martov and co. because they were more his friends than Lenin; he could not bear to be in the same camp as Plekhanov because of the latter’s personal slights against him; perhaps even more important, he displayed a truly conservative sentimentality towards the “old guard” which had served the revolutionary movement in Russia for so long. Indeed his personal reaction to Lenin at that time was so strong that many were shocked by the sharpness and uncomradely tone of his polemics against him (in his biography of Trotsky, Deutscher mentions that Iskra readers in Russia, in the period when the paper had fallen into Menshevik hands, had strongly objected to the tone of Trotsky’s diatribes against Lenin. See The Prophet Armed p 86, OUP edition).
But at the same time, “at bottom the separation was of a political nature and merely expressed itself in the realm of organisation methods”.
This formulation leaves room for ambiguity, for the idea that “organisation methods” is a secondary and non-political question, whereas the preponderance of personal ties and antagonisms in the old circles was precisely the political problem that Lenin was posing in his defence of the party spirit. In fact, all of Trotsky’s 1904 polemics have the same character: they reveal some very general political divergences, but again and again they come back to the question of organisational methods, or of the relationship between the revolutionary organisation and the working class as a whole.
Trotsky’s Report of the Siberian Delegation poses the main organisational issue straight away, and straight away reveals Trotsky’s failure to understand what was at stake in the Congress, since it insists that “The Congress is a register, a controller, but not a creator”. Which means – despite Trotsky’s qualification that “the party is not the arithmetical sum of local committees. The party is an organic totality” (ibid) – that the Congress is no longer the highest and most concrete expression of party unity. As Lenin put it in One Step Forwards, Two Steps Back: “At the time when we are re-establishing the real unity of our Party, and dissolving in this unity the circles which have outlived their usefulness, this summit is necessarily the Congress of the Party, which is its supreme organism”. Or again: “The controversy thus boils down to the dilemma: circle spirit or party spirit. Limitation of the rights of the delegates to the Congress, in the name of the imaginary rights or rules of all sorts of colleges or circles, or the complete, effective, and not merely verbal dissolution of all inferior instances, of all the little groups, before the Congress”.
Despite all the accusations made against Lenin’s conception of centralism, against his alleged desire to concentrate all power in the hands of an unaccountable central committee, or simply in his own hands as the Robespierre of the coming revolution, Lenin was absolutely clear that the supreme instance of a revolutionary proletarian party could only be its congress; this was the true centre to which all other parts of the organisation, whether central committee or local section, were subordinate; and this is what Lenin defended against the “democratist” view that the congress is simply a gathering place of representatives of the local sections, charged with a binding mandate which means they can do no more than act as the mouthpieces of those sections. This is what he defended against the anarchist revolt of the Mensheviks who refused to abide by its decisions.
Trotsky is right to say that at the time of the congress he had not yet fully grasped the question of centralism. This is also evident in another theme of the polemics – the old battle between Iskra and the Economists. In Report of the Siberian Delegation, Trotsky uses the argument that many of the Bolsheviks were former Economists who had simply flipped over towards hyper-centralism and the parroting of Lenin’s organisational “plans” (it was axiomatic for Trotsky at this stage that Lenin was the only real mind in the majority, the rest simply followed him like sheep, while the minority which he had joined was for real critical thinking). And yet this accusation turned reality on its head: having been united with Lenin against the Economists at the beginning of the Congress, the Mensheviks took up the bulk of the criticisms of Lenin initially raised by the likes of Akimov and Martynov, including the view that Lenin’s view of the party was preparing the ground for a dictatorship over the proletariat (indeed, Martynov himself even returned to the fold once Lenin had resigned from Iskra). By the same token, it had been the Economists who had advocated that the bourgeoisie had the task of carrying out the political revolution against Czarism, while social democrats should focus on the bread and butter of the daily class struggle. By 1904, Mensheviks like Zasulitch and Dan were talking more and more openly of the need for an alliance with the bourgeoisie in the coming revolution. And even Trotsky – who soon broke from the Mensheviks on the latter question above all, since it was not long before he began formulating his theory of permanent revolution, according to which the proletariat would necessarily take the leading role even in the approaching Russian revolution – by siding with the Mensheviks in 1903-4, also took on board their apology for the Economists’ positions.
This comes across very strongly in both texts: Trotsky spends a great deal of time in both waxing ironic about the time being wasted on discussing the minutiae of organisational detail while the masses in Russia are posing burning issues like mass strikes and demonstrations; like Axelrod, he also ridicules Lenin’s thesis that there can be opportunism on organisational questions: “Our intrepid polemicist (Lenin in One Step Forwards) still does not decide to put Axelrod and Martov in the category of opportunists in general (such an attractive idea from the standpoint of clarity and simplicity!), he creates for them the rubric ‘opportunist on organisational questions’. The concept of opportunism is then emptied of all political content. It becomes a ‘bogeyman’ for frightening little children….Opportunism in organisational questions! Girondism on the question of co-option by two-thirds in the absence of a motivated vote! Jauresism on the right of the Central Committee to fix where the administration of the League is to be!” (Our Political Tasks, part III). Behind the sarcasms, this argument actually represents a slide towards Economism because it downplays the distinct position and needs of the political organisation, whose mode of functioning is indeed a political question which cannot be simply side-stepped and drowned in talk about the class struggle in general. The question of functioning involves issues of principle which can indeed, under the pressure of bourgeois ideology, be subjected to opportunist interpretations.
Trotsky’s texts, in fact, completely call into question the work of Iskra to which he had formerly been so attracted – its call for a centralised party with formal rules of functioning, its vital effort to pull the revolutionary movement away from the mire of terrorism, populism, Economism and other forms of opportunism. The Economists, Trotsky now implies, had their faults, but at least they had a real practise within the class, whereas Iskra’s main focus had been to win over the intelligentsia to marxism while issuing vague “proclamations” or focusing almost exclusively on distributing its press.
In the period before the Congress, Trotsky argues, “the organisation oscillated between two types: it was either conceived of as a technical apparatus for massive diffusion of published literature, be it within the country or abroad; or as a revolutionary ‘lever’ to involve the masses in an intended movement, that is, to develop in them pre-existing capacities for autonomous activity. The ‘craft’ organisation of the Economists was particularly close to the second type. Good or bad, this type of organisation was adapted to given forms of ‘practical resistance to capitalists by the workers’. Good or bad, it directly contributed to uniting and disciplining the workers in the ‘economic struggle’, that is, essentially, strike movements”. (Our Political Tasks, part II).
Here Trotsky completely passes by the central problem with this conception: that it reduces the revolutionary organisation to the level of a trade union type body. It’s not a question of good or bad, because there is obviously a need for the class to develop general organisations for the defensive struggle against capital. The problem is that the revolutionary minority cannot, by its very nature, play this role, and in attempting to do so, will forget its central role of political leadership within the movement.
But Iskra, Trotsky insists in this text, unlike the Economists, was not in the movement at all. “It is true that the party is now at least drawing closer to the proletariat for the first time. In the time of ‘Economism’ the work was entirely directed towards the proletariat, but in the first place it was not yet Social Democratic political work. During the period of Iskra, the work took on a Social Democratic character, but it was not directed straight towards the proletariat” (ibid, part I). In other words, Iskra’s main focus was not intervention in the immediate movement of the class, but conducting polemics within the intelligentsia. Trotsky thus counsels his readers to recognise the historical limitations of Iskra: “It is not enough to recognise the historical merits of Iskra, still less to enumerate all its unfortunate or ambiguous statements. We have to go further still: to understand the historically limited character of the role played by Iskra. It has contributed a lot to the process of differentiating the revolutionary intelligentsia; but it has also hampered its free development. The salon debates, the literary polemics, the intellectual disputes over a cup of tea, were all translated by it into the language of political programmes. In a materialist sense, it gave form to the multitude of theoretical and philosophical support for given class interests; and it was in using this ‘sectarian’ method of differentiation that it won to the cause of the proletariat a good part of the intelligentsia; finally it consolidated its ‘booty’ with the various resolutions of the Second Congress on the questions of programme, tactics and organisation” (ibid).
Trotsky’s references to “salon debates” and “intellectual disputes over a cup of tea” betray his temporary conversion to an immediatist, activist, and workerist suspicion for the tasks of the political organisation. By defining Economism and Iskra as equally valid and equally limited moments in the history of the party, he downplays the decisive role of the latter in the struggle for an organisation of revolutionaries capable of playing a leading role in the massive struggles of the class - a leading role, and not one of merely “assisting” strike movements.
This is more than an observation about Iskra’s sociological make-up, more than a mere flirtation with ouvrierism. It is connected to a theory that was to have a long history: the notion that the political vanguard is essentially the representative of an intelligentsia that seeks to impose itself on the working class. Of course this theory had its highest incarnation in the councilist critique of Bolshevism after the defeat of the Russian revolution, but it was certainly anticipated by Trotsky’s “dear teacher” Axelrod who argued that Lenin’s demand for ultra-centralism demonstrated that the Bolshevik current was actually an expression of the Russian bourgeoisie, since the latter also needed centralism to carry out its political tasks.
Trotsky’s re-interpretation of the contribution of Iskra is also linked to his criticisms of substitutionism and Jacobinism, which make up a large part of Our Political Tasks. In Trotsky’s view at this point, Iskra’s whole political conception, with its emphasis on political polemics against false revolutionary trends, was founded on a notion of acting on behalf of the proletariat:
“But how is it to be explained that the ‘substitutionist’ method of thought – substituting for the proletariat – practised in the most varied forms…throughout the whole period of Iskra, did not arouse self-criticism in the ranks of the Iskraists themselves? The reader has already found the explanation in the preceding pages. Hanging over all Iskra’s work was the task of fighting for the proletariat, for its principles, for its final goal – in the milieu of the revolutionary intelligentsia” (Part III).
It is in Our Political Tasks that Trotsky made his famously “prophetic” passage about substitutionism: “Lenin’s methods lead to this: the party organisation at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the central committee substitutes itself for the organisation; and finally a single ‘dictator’ substitutes itself for the central committee” (part II). Here, as Deutscher notes in The Prophet Armed, Trotsky seemed to intuit the future degeneration of the Bolshevik party. Trotsky is equally perceptive when he outlines the danger of substitutionism with regard to the class as whole in the future revolution (dangers which he himself was to fall into more thoroughly than Lenin at certain moments): “The tasks of the new regime will be so complex that they cannot be solved otherwise than by way of a competition between various methods of economic and political construction, by way of long ‘disputes’, by way of a systematic struggle not only between many trends inside socialism, trends which will inevitably emerge as soon as the proletarian dictatorship poses tens and hundreds of new problems. No strong ‘domineering’ organisation will be able to suppress these tends and controversies…A proletariat capable of exercising its dictatorship over society will not tolerate any dictatorship over itself” (part III).
Trotsky also makes valid criticisms of Lenin’s analogy, made in What Is To be Done, between proletarian revolutionaries and Jacobins, showing the essential differences between the bourgeois and the proletarian revolutions. Moreover, he notes that in polemicising against the Economists who saw class consciousness as the simple reflection or product of the immediate struggle, Lenin made the error of resorting to Kautsky’s “absurd idea” of socialist consciousness originating in the bourgeois intelligentsia. Given that on many of these questions, Lenin admitted to “bending the stick” in his assault on Economism and organisational localism, it is not surprising that some of Trotsky’s polemics do contain real insights, theoretical contributions which can still be used today.
But it would be a real error, as the councilists do, to take these insights out of their overall context. They remain part of an essentially flawed argument which expressed Trotsky’s failure, at that moment, to understand the real stakes in the debate.
With regard to Trotsky’s intuitions about substitutionism in particular, we have to bear in mind, first and foremost, that their point of departure is to confuse Lenin’s principled fight for centralism with a Machiavellian “will to power” on his part, and thus to interpret all his actions and proposals at the Congress as part of a grand manoeuvre to ensure that he ended up as the single dictator over the party and perhaps over the class as a whole.
The second weakness of Trotsky’s critique of substitutionism is that it does not trace its roots in the general pressure of bourgeois ideology, which can affect the proletariat no less than the petty bourgeois intellectuals. Rather it puts forward a workerist, sociological analysis, according to which Iskra’s key failing was that it was constituted mainly by intellectuals and directed the bulk of its political activity towards the intellectuals. And last but not least: although substitutionism was to become a real danger, both in theory and practise, with the isolation and decline of the revolution in Russia, it was not the principal danger on the eve of 1905, when the tide of the class struggle was on the rise. The real danger which had been exposed at the Second Congress, the principal obstacle to the development of the revolutionary movement in Russia, was not that the party would act in the place of the masses; it was that the underestimation of the distinctive role of the party, so intrinsic to both Economism and Menshevism, would prevent the very formation of a party capable of playing its proper role in the forthcoming social and political upheavals. In this sense, Trotsky’s dire warnings about substitutionism were a false alarm. To a certain degree, the situation can be compared to the phase of the class struggle which opened up in 1968: throughout this period, characterised by an ascending curve of the class struggle and by the extreme weakness of the revolutionary minority, by far the greater danger to the class movement is not that the organised revolutionaries will somehow violate the virginity of the class, but that the proletariat will be hurled into massive confrontations with the bourgeois state in a context where the revolutionary organisation is too small and isolated to influence the course of events. This is why the ICC has argued since the mid-80s that the main danger today is not substitutionism but councilism, not the exaggeration of the role and capacities of the party but its underestimation or neglect.
Trotsky’s flirtation with the Mensheviks in 1903 was a serious mistake, and would result in a rupture between him and Lenin that lasted until the eve of the October revolution. But it was to prove temporary nonetheless. By the end of 1904 Trotsky had fallen out with the Mensheviks – mainly over their vision of the impending revolution: he could never stomach their view that the Russian working class would be obliged to subordinate its struggle to the demands of the bourgeois liberals. Trotsky’s fundamentally proletarian responses were to be demonstrated in the key events of 1905, in which he played an absolutely crucial role as chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. But perhaps even more important were the theoretical conclusions he drew from this experience, in particular the theory of permanent revolution, and the elucidation of the historic role of the soviet form of class organisation.
Trotsky rejoined Lenin and the Bolshevik party in 1917 and recognised, as we have seen, that in 1903 Lenin had been right on the organisational question. However, he never returned to the question in any depth, in particular to his mistakes in the two major contributions which we have just examined (Report of the Siberian delegation and Our political tasks).
Despite the importance he accorded to these problems of organisation, he continued to underestimate them throughout his later political life, unlike other opposition currents to Stalinism such as the Italian left. With hindsight, an examination of these disagreements still has much to teach us, not only on the questions themselves, but also on the way in which the polemic between true representatives of marxist thinking can give birth to a clarity that goes beyond the individual contributions of the thinkers themselves. As we will see in the next article, this was equally true of the debate on organisational questions between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg.
Amos
As we saw at the end of the previous article in this series (see International Review n°115), by the end of World War I the development of Zionist nationalism, and its manipulation by the British in their struggle against their imperialist rivals for domination in the Middle East, had introduced a new and growing factor of instability to the region.
In this article, we intend to examine how Zionist and Arab nationalism came to play an increasingly important role in the Middle East, both as pawns in the complex balance of forces between the great imperialist powers, and as weapons against the threat posed by the working class in the period following the Russian revolution.
The capitalist class has always sought to use and even to exaggerate ethnic, cultural, and religious difference within the working class in order to "divide and rule".
It is nonetheless true that in most countries, capitalism in its ascendant phase was able to integrate different ethnic and religious groups into society by proletarianising most of their members, thus substantially reducing racial, ethnic and religious divisions within the population. Modern Zionism however is profoundly marked by its emergence at the end of the ascendant phase of capitalism, once the formation of nation states had come to an end, and when no more “Lebensraum”[1] [134] was available for the formation of new nations, when the survival of capitalism was only possible through war and destruction.
In 1897, when the first Zionist congress in Basel put forward the claim to a Jewish national territory, the Left wing in the Second International had already begun to reject the formation of new separate territorial entities.
In 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) rejected the existence of an independent, separate Jewish organisation within its ranks, demanding that the existing Jewish organisation - the Bund - should merge with the territorial Russian party. The second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 not only put the question of the Bund as the first point on the agenda, even before the debate on the statutes, but it “rejected as absolutely inadmissible in principle any possibility of federal relations between the RSDLP and the Bund”. The Bund itself, at the time also rejected the formation of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine.
The left wing of the Second International before World War I thus clearly rejected the formation of a national Jewish entity in Palestine.
The birth of political Zionism was contemporaneous with an increase in Jewish immigration to the Middle East, and especially to Palestine. The first big wave of Jewish settlers arrived in Palestine after the pogroms and repression in Tsarist Russia in 1882; the second wave of refugees from Eastern Europe arrived following the defeat of the revolutionary struggles in Russia in 1905. In 1850 there were 12,000 Jews in Palestine, in 1882 their number rose to 35,000, while in 1914 their number stood at 90,000.
Britain was now planning to use the Zionists as a reliable ally in the region against its European rivals, most notably France, and against the Arab bourgeoisie. Britain was in the position to make promises to both the Zionists and the Pan-Arab bourgeoisie, playing to the hilt the card of “divide and rule”, a policy which Britain managed to practice successfully in the region until the period before World War II. During World War I both the Zionists and the incipient Pan-Arabists were promised they would gain Palestine in return for supporting Britain in the war. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 promised this to the Zionists at precisely the same time as T.S. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia") of the British Foreign Office was promising it to the Arab tribal leaders in return for staging the Arab revolt against the collapsing Ottoman empire.
In 1922, when Britain took over the "Palestine Mandate" from the League of Nations, some 650,000 inhabitants were registered in Palestine, of which 560,000 were Muslims or Christians, while some 85,000 were Jewish. The Zionists now tried to increase the number of Jewish settlers as quickly as possible, regulating their influx for their imperialist purpose. A "colonial bureau" was established, which was to foster the Jewish colonisation of land in Palestine.
Zionism however was not merely a tool of British interests in the Middle East: it also pursued its own capitalist project of expansion, the establishment of its own Jewish state – a project which in decadent capitalism can only be implemented at the expense of its local rivals and which is inevitably linked to war and destruction.
The appearance of modern Zionism is thus a typical expression of the decadence of this system. It is an ideology which cannot be implemented without military methods, in other words Zionism without war, without total militarisation, without exclusion and “containment” is impossible.
Thus by supporting the establishment of a Jewish home, the British “protectors” gave the go-ahead for nothing else but ethnic cleansing, the violent displacement of the local inhabitants. This policy has become a permanent and widely applied practice in all war-torn countries. It has become a classical feature of decadence.[2] [135]
While the policy of ethnic cleansing and segregation was not limited to the territories of the former Ottoman empire, this region has become a centre for these bloody practices. Throughout the 20th century the Balkans have suffered a series of ethnic cleansings and massacres – all of them supported or manipulated by the European powers and the US. In Turkey the ruling class launched a terrible genocide against the Armenians – the bloodbath began in 1915 when Turkish troops slaughtered some 1.5 million Armenians, and continued after World War I. In the war between Greece and Turkey between March 1921 and October 1922 some 1.3 million Greeks were displaced from Turkey, and some 450,000 Turks were displaced from Greece.
The Zionist project of setting up its own territorial unit was necessarily based on segregation, division, discord, displacement, in short on military terror and annihilation – all this long before a Zionist state was proclaimed in 1948.
In fact Zionism is a particular form of settler colonialism, which is based not on the exploitation of local labour power, but on its exclusion, its displacement. Arab workers were not to be part of the "Jewish community", but were rigorously excluded on the basis of the slogan "Jewish soil, Jewish work, Jewish goods!".
The rules laid down by the British "protectorate" required that the Jewish settlers buy their land from the Arab landowners. Property rights were above all in the hands of rich Arabic landowners, for whom land was mainly an object of speculation. Moreover, they were willing to evict the Palestinian day labourers and tenant farmers if the new landlords wished it. This is how many Arab peasants and agricultural workers lost both their jobs and their land: the creation of a Jewish settlement not only meant being driven off the land, it meant being thrust into even greater misery.
Once the land was sold to Jewish settlers, the Zionists prohibited the resale of land to non-Jews. It was no longer just a piece of Jewish private property, a commodity, it had become a part of Zionist territory, which had to be defended militarily as a conquest.
In the economy, Arab workers were being expelled from their jobs. The Zionist trade union Histadrut, in close co-operation with other Zionist organisations, did everything to prevent Arab workers from selling their labour power to Jewish capitalists. The Palestinian workers were thus pushed into conflicts with the growing numbers of Jewish immigrants, who were also looking for jobs.
The establishment of a Jewish national home, as promised by the British "protectorate", meant nothing else but constant military confrontations between the Zionists and the Arab bourgeoisie – with the working class and peasants pulled onto this bloody terrain.
What was the position of the Communist International towards the imperialist situation in the Middle East and the formation of a "Jewish home"?
As Rosa Luxemburg had concluded during World War I: “In the era of raging imperialism there can no longer be an national wars. National interests only serve to fool the working masses, in order to push them into the arms of their deadly enemy- imperialism”. (Draft for the Junius pamphlet, adopted by the Spartacusbund on 1st January 1916).
When the Russian workers seized power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks tried to ease the pressure of the bourgeoisie and its White Armies on the working class, and win the support of the "toiling masses" in neighbouring countries, by spreading the slogan of "national self-determination", a position of the RSDLP which had already been criticised by the current around Rosa Luxemburg before World War I (see our the articles in the International Review n°34, 37, 42). But instead of succeeding in weakening the pressure of the bourgeoisie and pulling the "toiling masses" over to their side, the policy of the Bolsheviks had the opposite, disastrous effect. Again, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote in her pamphlet The Russian Revolution: “while Lenin and his comrades clearly expected that, as champions of national freedom even to the extent of ‘separation’, they would turn Finland, the Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, the Baltic countries, the Caucasus, etc., into so many faithful allies of the Russian revolution, we have witnessed the opposite spectacle. One after another, these ‘nations’ used their freshly granted freedom to ally themselves with German imperialism against the Russian revolution as its mortal enemy, and under German protection to carry the banner of counter-revolution into Russia itself... Instead of warning the proletariat in the border countries against all forms of separatism as mere bourgeois traps, and instead of squashing the separatist movements in their germ with an iron hand, the use of which in THIS case truly corresponded to the sense and spirit of the proletarian dictatorship, they did nothing but confuse the masses in all the border countries by their slogan and delivered them up to the demagogy of the bourgeois classes. By this nationalistic demand they brought on the disintegration of Russia itself, pressed into the enemy’s hand the knife which it was to thrust into the heart of the Russian Revolution” (The Russian revolution, Pathfinder Press).
As the revolutionary wave started to recede, in July 1920 the 2nd Congress of the Communist International began to develop an opportunist position on the national question in the hope of winning the support of the workers and peasants in the colonial countries. At this point, the support for allegedly "revolutionary" movements was not yet "unconditional" but remained dependent on certain criteria Point 11 of the Theses stresses: “A determined fight is necessary against the attempt to put a communist cloak around revolutionary liberation movements that are not really communist in the backward countries. The Communist International has the duty to support the revolutionary movement in the colonies only for the purpose of gathering the components of the future proletarian parties (...) and training them to be conscious of their special tasks (...) of fighting against the bourgeois democratic tendencies within their own nation. The Communist International should accompany the revolutionary movement in the colonies and the backward countries for part of the way, should even make an alliance with it, it may not, however, fuse with it, but must unconditionally maintain the independent character of the proletarian movement, be it only in embryo” (“Theses on the National Colonial Question adopted by the 2nd Congress of the Communist International, July 1920).
Point 12 of the Theses went on: “It is necessary to unmask the continuous manipulation of the broad masses of all the workers and in particular of those of the backward countries and nations, which the imperialist powers commit with the help of the privileged classes by proclaiming the existence of states under the mask of politically independent states, which, however, are totally dependent on them economically, financially and militarily. A crass example of the manipulation of the working class of an oppressed nation, that the imperialism of the Entente and the bourgeoisie of the nations concerned are trying to achieve together, is the Palestine-affair of the Zionists (...) In today’s international situation there is no other salvation for the dependent and weak nations than an alliance with the Soviet republics.”
But as the isolation of the revolution in Russia grew and the Comintern[3] [136] and the Bolshevik party became more and more opportunist, the initial criteria for supporting certain ‘revolutionary movements’ were dropped. At its 4th Congress in November 1922, the International adopted the disastrous policy of the "united front", insisting that:
“The main task that all national-revolutionary movements have to fulfil, is the realisation of national unity and the establishment of independence as a state...”.
While the Communist Left around Bordiga in particular waged a bitter struggle against the policy of the "united front", the Comintern declared that “the refusal of the communists of the colonies to participate in the struggle against imperialist violation by claiming to ‘defend’ autonomous class interests, is opportunism of the worst kind, which can only discredit the proletarian revolution in the East” (the two thesis are from the Thesis (?) on the Orient question – 4th Congress, Nov. 1922 – check for original translation).
But it was the International that was falling into opportunism. This opportunist course had already become visible at the Congress of the Peoples of the East, held at Baku in September 1920 shortly after the 2nd Congress of the Comintern. The Baku Congress addressed itself particularly to national minorities in countries adjacent to the besieged Soviet Republic, where British imperialism was threatening to strengthen its influence and thus create new springboards for armed intervention against Russia.
"As a result of colossal, barbarous slaughter, imperialist Britain has emerged as the sole and omnipotent master of Europe and Asia" ("Manifesto of the Congress to the Peoples of the East"). Starting from the mistaken assumption that "imperialist Britain has beaten and rendered powerless all its rivals, it has become the omnipotent master of Europe and Asia", the Comintern fatally underestimated the new level of imperialist rivalries, which the onset of capitalism's decadence had unleashed.
Had World War I not shown that all countries, whether large or small, had become imperialist? Instead, the Baku Congress focussed the perspective on a struggle against British imperialism. "Britain, the last powerful imperialist predator left in Europe, has spread its dark wings over the Eastern Moslem countries, and is trying to turn the peoples of the East into its slaves, into its booty. Slavery! Frightful slavery, ruin, oppression and exploitation is being brought by Britain to the peoples of the East. Save yourselves, peoples of the East! (...) Stand up and fight against the common enemy, imperialist Britain!" (idem).
Concretely, the policy of support for the "national-revolutionary" movements and the call for an "anti-imperialist front" meant that Russia and the Bolshevik party, which was increasingly being absorbed into the Russian state, entered into an alliance with nationalist movements.
Already in April 1920 Kemal Ataturk[4] [137] had urged Russia to form an anti-imperialist alliance with Turkey. Shortly after the crushing of the workers’ rising of Kronstadt in March 1921, and the outbreak of war between Greece and Turkey, Moscow signed a treaty of friendship between Russia and Turkey. After repeated wars, for the first time a Russian government supported the existence of Turkey as a nation state.
The workers and peasants of Palestine were also pushed into a nationalist dead-end: “we consider the Arab national movement one of the essential forces which fight British colonialism. It is our duty to do all we can to help this movement in its struggle against colonialism.”
The Communist Party of Palestine, which was founded in 1922, appealed for support for the Mufti Hafti Amin Hussein. In 1922 the latter had become mufti of Jerusalem and Chairman of the Supreme Muslim Council; he was one of the most vocal in claiming an independent Palestinian state.
As in Turkey in 1922, in Persia, and 1927 in China, this policy of the Comintern turned out to be a disaster for the working class – because by supporting the local bourgeoisie, the Comintern drove the workers into the bloody arms of a bourgeoisie praised as “progressive”. The scope of the rejection of proletarian internationalism can be seen in an appeal of 1931 by the Comintern, which had by then become a mere tool of Stalinism in Russia: “We appeal to all communists to wage a struggle for national independence and for national unity, not only within the narrow boundaries which imperialism and the interests of the ruling family clans of each Arab country artificially created, but to wage this struggle on a broad pan-Arab front for the unity of the entire orient”.
The struggle within the Comintern, between opportunist concessions to movements of "national liberation" on the one hand, and the defence of proletarian internationalism on the other, can be seen in the opposition of different Jewish delegations to the Baku Congress
A “delegation of Mountain Jews” could still give voice to a veritable contradiction in terms, declaring that “Only the victory of the oppressed over the oppressors will bring us to our sacred goal – the creation of a Jewish communist society in Palestine”. The Jewish Communist Party delegation (Poale Zion, previously linked to the Jewish Bund) put forward the call to “settle and colonise Palestine on communist principles”.
The Central Bureau of the Jewish Sections of the Communist Party of Russia vigorously opposed the dangerous illusions of setting up a Jewish communist community in Palestine and the way the Zionists used the Jewish project for their own imperialist purposes. Against the division between Jewish and Arab workers, the Jewish Section of the Communist Party of Russia underlined: “With the assistance of imperialism’s Zionists servants, Britain’s policy aims at drawing away from communism a portion of the Jewish proletariat by arousing in it national feelings and sympathies for Zionism (...) We also sharply condemn the attempts by certain Jewish left Socialist groups to combine communism with adherence to Zionist ideology. This is what we see in the program of the so-called Jewish Communist Party (Poale Zion). We believe that in the ranks of fighters for the rights and interests of the working people there is no place for groups that have in one form or another maintained Zionist ideology, concealing behind the mask of communism the nationalist appetites of the Jewish bourgeoisie. They are using communist slogans to exert bourgeois influence on the proletariat. We note that during all the time that the mass Jewish workers’ movement has existed, the Zionist ideology has been foreign to the Jewish proletariat (...) We declare that the Jewish masses envisage the possibility of their social-economic and cultural development not in the creation of a ‘national centre’ in Palestine, but in the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the creation of socialist Soviet republics in the countries where they live.” (Baku Congress, September 1920).
But as tensions between Jewish settlers and Palestinian workers and peasants grew, the degeneration of the Comintern as it slid into subservience to the Russian state led to a split between the increasingly stalinised Comintern and the communist left, on the Palestine question as on others. While the Comintern pushed the Palestinian workers to support "their own" national bourgeoisie against imperialism – the Left Communists recognised the effects of the British policy of divide and rule and the disastrous consequences of the Comintern position, which led the workers into a blind alley: “ British capital has managed to hide class antagonisms. The Arabs only see the yellow and white race and the Jewish as the protégés of the latter” (Proletarier, May 1925, paper of the German Communist Workers’ Party, KAPD).
“For a true revolutionary there is of course no ‘Palestine question’, there can only be a struggle of all the exploited of the Middle East, Arabs and Jewish workers included, and this struggle is part of the general struggle of all the exploited of the whole world for communist revolution” (Bilan, no 32, 1936, Bulletin of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left; see the International Review n°110 for a reprint of two articles by Bilan on the Palestine question).
DE
[1] [138] The need for "Lebensraum" (literally, "living space") was the Hitlerian justification for the eastward expansion of the German "race" into regions occupied by the Slavic "subhumans".
[2] [139] According to the logic of ethnic cleansing, the Germans and Celts would have to leave Europe and return to India and Central Asia, from where they once departed; Latin Americans of Spanish origin would have to be sent back to the Iberian peninsula. This absurd logic knows no limits: South America would have to kick out all South Americans with European or other origin, North America would have to deport all the black African slaves, not to mention the entire European population which arrived during the 19th century. Indeed we might ask whether the whole human species should not return to the African cradle from where it once started its emigration....?
Since World War II there has been an endless series of displacements: in the former Czech republic some 3 million ethnic Germans were displaced; the partition of India and Pakistan after World War II gave rise to the biggest displacement of populations in history, in both directions; the Balkans has been a permanent laboratory of ethnic cleansing; in the 1990s Ruanda offered a particularly bloody example of the massacres between Hutus and Tutsis, with between 300,000 and 1 million people massacred in the space of 3 months.
[3] [140] ie the Communist International.
[4] [141] Kemal Ataturk, born in Salonica in 1881, military hero in World War I as a result of his success against the Allied attack on Gallipoli in 1915, organised the Turkish National Republican Party in 1919 and overthrew the last Ottoman sultan. Subsequently was largely instrumental in founding the first Turkish republic in 1923 after the war against Greece, remaining president until his death in 1938. Under his rule, the Turkish state crushed the power of the religious schools and undertook an extensive programme of "europeanisation", including the replacement of Arabic script by Latin.
We are publishing below the report on the class struggle presented and ratified at the autumn 2003 meeting of the ICC’s Central Organ.[1] [142] This report confirms the organisation’s analysis of the persistence of the course towards class confrontations (a course opened by the international recovery in the class struggle in 1968), despite the serious setback to the proletariat’s consciousness since the collapse of the Eastern bloc; its task in particular was to evaluate the impact of the present and long-term aggravation of the economic crisis and of capitalism’s attacks on the working class. It analyses “The large scale mobilisations of spring 2003 in France and Austria [as] a turning point in the class struggles since 1989. They are a first significant step in the recovery of workers militancy after the longest period of reflux since 1968”.
We are still a long way from an international wave of massive struggles, since on the international level the degree of workers’ militancy remains embryonic and very uneven. Nonetheless, it is important to emphasise that the obviously serious aggravation in the perspectives for capitalism’s evolution, in terms of the dismantling of the Welfare State, the increase in exploitation in all its forms, and the growth of unemployment, cannot help but encourage the development of working class consciousness. The report particularly insists on both the depth, and the slow rhythm of this recovery in the class struggle.
Since this report was written, the evolution of events has not invalidated its characterisation of the changing dynamic within the working class. Indeed, they have revealed a tendency, outlined in the report, for isolated expressions of the class struggle to break out of the limits imposed by the trades unions. The ICC’s territorial press has published accounts of such struggles towards the end of 2003, in Italian public transport and in the Post Office in Britain, which obliged the rank-and-file unionists to act to sabotage the struggle. There has also been a continued tendency – which the ICC had already identified prior to this report – towards the emergence of minorities in search of a revolutionary coherence.
The working class still has a long road ahead of it. Nevertheless, the struggles it will have to undertake will also be the crucible for a process of reflection, spurred on by the deepening crisis and encouraged by the intervention of revolutionaries, which will allow the proletariat to recover its class identity and self-confidence, develop its class solidarity and renew the ties with its historical experience.
The report on the class struggle to the 15th congress of the ICC[[2]] [143] underlined the quasi inevitability of a still undefeated generation of the proletariat, in response to the qualitative development of the crisis and attacks, responding with a slow but significant recovery of its militancy. It identified an embryonic, but tangible, broadening and deepening of the torturous and heterogeneous process of subterranean maturation of its consciousness. It insisted on the importance of the tendency towards more massive combats for the recuperation of class identity and self confidence. And it highlighted the fact that, with the evolution of the objective contradictions of the system, the crystallisation of a sufficient class consciousness within the proletariat – in particular concerning the re-conquest of a communist perspective - becomes more and more the decisive question for the future of humanity. It pointed out the historic importance and responsibility of the emergence of a new revolutionary generation, reaffirming that this process had already begun after 1989, despite the reflux in militancy and consciousness of the class as a whole. The report thus showed up the limits of this reflux, affirming the maintenance of an historic course towards massive class confrontations, and the capacity of the working class to overcome the set backs it has suffered. At the same time, the report placed this evolution in the context of our understanding of the ability of the ruling class to understand and respond to this perspective, as well as the terrible – and growing – negative effects of worsening capitalist decomposition. It thus concluded on the enormous responsibility of revolutionary organisations, both towards the effort of the working class to move forward and towards the new emerging generation of workers and revolutionaries.
Almost immediately after the 15th congress, and in the aftermath of the war in Iraq, the workers’ mobilisations in France (among the largest in that country since 1968) and in Austria (the most massive since World War II) rapidly confirmed these perspectives. In drawing a first balance sheet of these struggles, International Review no114 notes that these struggles have refuted the alleged disappearance of the working class. It asserts that the present attacks “constitute the yeast for a slow rising of the conditions for the massive struggles which will be necessary for the working class to recover its identity. Little by little, they will tear down the illusions in the possibility of reforming the system. It is the action of the masses themselves which will make possible the re-emergence of the consciousness of being an exploited class that bears within it a different historical perspective for society. This being said, the road the working class must travel in order to assert its own revolutionary perspective is no motorway: it will be terribly long and difficult, strewn with pitfalls that its enemy will innevitably put in its path.”. The perspectives drawn up by the report on class struggle to the 15th ICC Congress are confirmed not only by the international evolution of a new, searching revolutionary generation, but also by these workers’ struggles.
This report on the class struggle will essentially be an update of its predecessor, together with a closer examination of the long term significance of certain aspects of the recent proletarian combats.
The large-scale mobilisations of the spring of 2003 in France and Austria represent a turning point in the class struggles since 1989. They are a first significant step in the recovery of workers militancy after the longest period of reflux since 1968. Of course the 1990s had already seen sporadic but important manifestations of this militancy. However, the simultaneity of the movements in France and Austria, and the fact that in their aftermath the German trade unions organised the defeat of the metal workers in the east[3] [144] as a pre-emptive deterrent to proletarian resistance, show the evolution of the situation since the beginning of the new millennium. In reality, these events bring to light the growing impossibility for the class – despite its continuing lack of self confidence – to avoid the necessity of struggle faced with the dramatic worsening of the crisis and the increasingly massive and generalised character of the attacks.
But this change affects not only the militancy of the class, but also the mood within its ranks, the perspective within which its actions are placed. We are witnessing signs of loss of illusions not only concerning the typical mystifications of the 1990s (new technological revolution, individual enrichment via the stock exchange, the profitability of “wars for oil”), but also regarding the hopes of the post World War II generation about a better life for the coming generation and a decent pension for those who survive the horrors of wage labour.
As International Review n°114 recalls, the massive return of the proletariat in 1968 to the stage of history, and the reappearance of a revolutionary perspective, was in response, not only to the immediate level of attacks, but above all to the crumbling of the illusions in a better future which post war capitalism had appeared to offer. As opposed to what the vulgarised, mechanistic deformation of historical materialism would have us believe, such turning points in the class struggle – even if they are triggered off by an immediate worsening of material conditions, are always the result of underlying alterations in outlook towards the future. The bourgeois revolution in France exploded not with the emergence of the crisis of feudalism (which was already long standing) but when it became clear that the system of absolutism could no longer cope with that crisis. Similarly, momentum towards the first proletarian revolutionary wave began, not in August 1914, but when the illusions in a rapid military solution to the world war were dissipated.
This is why the understanding of their long term, historical significance is the main task posed by the recent struggles.
Not every turning point in the class struggle is as significant, or as dramatic, as that of 1917 or 1968. These dates stand for alterations in the historic course, whereas 2003 merely marks the beginning of the end of a phase of reflux within the continuity of a course towards massive class confrontations. Between 1968 and 1989, the class struggle had already been marked by several ebbs and recoveries. In particular, the dynamic that began at the end of the 1970s rapidly culminated in the mass strike of the summer of 1980 in Poland. This altered the situation to such an extent that the bourgeoisie found itself forced into an abrupt change in its political orientation, putting the left into power the better to sabotage the class struggle from within.[4] [145] It is also necessary to distinguish the present recovery in working-class militancy from the recovery during 1970-80.
More generally, we must be able to distinguish between situations where, so to speak, the world wakes up the next morning and it is no longer the same world, and changes that take place at first almost unnoticed by the world at large, like the almost invisible alteration between the ebb and flow of the tide. The present evolution is undoubtedly of the latter kind. In this sense, the recent mobilisations by no means signify a spectacular immediate alteration of the situation, which would require a sudden and fundamental deployment of the political forces of the bourgeoisie.
Indeed, we are still far from the presence of an international wave of massive struggles. In France, the massive nature of the spring mobilisation was essentially restricted to one sector, that of education. In Austria the mobilisations were more widespread, but basically limited to a couple of days of action mainly in the public sector. The metal workers strike in eastern Germany was not at all an expression of immediate workers militancy, but a trap laid for one of the least combative sections of the class (still traumatised by the almost overnight mass unemployment that followed German “reunification”) in order to reinforce the general message that struggle doesn’t pay. Moreover, in Germany news of the movements in France and Austria were only partly blacked out, and in the end were used to enforce this deterrent message. In other central countries of the class struggle such as Italy, Britain, Spain or the Benelux countries there have as yet been no recent, more massive mobilisations. Outbreaks of militancy, such as that of British Airways staff at Heathrow, or of the Alcatel workers in Toulouse or of the workers in Puertollano (see World Revolution n°269), remain very sporadic and isolated.
In France itself, the insufficient development, and above all the absence of a more widespread militancy meant that the extension of the movement in the education section was not immediately on the agenda.
Therefore, both internationally and within each country, the level of militancy is still embryonic and very heterogeneous. Its most important manifestation to date – that of the teachers in France – was first and foremost the result of a provocation by the bourgeoisie, which consisted of a violent attack on one sector, in order that the workers’ response to the pensions’ “reforms”, which concerned all workers, should be limited to that one sector.[5] [146]
It is important to note that the class as a whole (including the searching groups, much of the proletarian milieu – essentially the groups of the communist left – and even many of our sympathisers) has proven enormously gullible in face of the large scale manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie. For the moment, the ruling class is not only well able to contain and isolate the first manifestations of workers unrest, it can also, with more or less success (more in Germany, less in France) use this still relatively weak will to struggle against the long term development of general militancy.
Most significant of all, however, is the fact that the bourgeoisie is not yet obliged to revert to the strategy of the left in opposition. In Germany, the country where the bourgeoisie has the most freedom of choice between a right or a left administration, on the occasion of the “Agenda 2010” offensive against the workers, 95% of the delegates of both SPD and the Greens came out in favour of maintaining the left government. Britain which, with Germany, was in the forefront of the world bourgeoisie during the 1970-80’s in putting the left into opposition in order to confront the struggle, is today perfectly capable of covering the social front with a left government.
In particular, as opposed to the situation around 1998, we can no longer speak of the deployment of left governments as a dominant orientation of the European bourgeoisie. Today this is not only due to decomposition, and in fact in countries like France and Austria the bourgeoisie has been able to momentarily respond to the problem of political populism. Whereas five years ago, the wave of left electoral victories was also connected to illusions about the economic situation, in the face of the present gravity of the crisis the bourgeoisie must be concerned about maintaining a certain governmental alternation, and thus playing out the card of electoral democracy. We should recall in this context that, already last year, the German bourgeoisie, while welcoming the re-election of Schröder, showed that it would also have been happy with a conservative Stoiber government.[6] [147]
The fact that the first skirmishes in a long and difficult process towards more massive struggles took place in France and Austria may not be as fortuitous as it might appear. If the French proletariat is known for its tempestuousness, which may partly explain it having taken the lead in 1968, the same can hardly be said for the post-war Austrian working class. What these two countries have in common, however, is that the recent massive attacks were centred on the question of pensions. It is also noteworthy that the German government, which presently is probably launching the most generalised attack in Western Europe, is still preceding extremely prudently on the pensions question. As opposed to this, France and Austria are among the countries where – due to a large extent to the political weakness of the bourgeoisie, particularly the right – the most concessions to the class on the pensions question were made, so that the raising of the pension entry age and the slashing of benefits now must be felt all the more bitterly.
The aggravation of the crisis has forced the bourgeoisie to raise the retirement age. In doing so, it has sacrificed a social shock-absorber, which played a large part in making the working class accept the increasingly intolerable levels of exploitation imposed in recent decades, and in hiding the full extent of unemployment.
The bourgeoisie responded to the return of mass unemployment in the 1970s with a series of state capitalist welfare measures, which made absolutely no sense from an economic standpoint and which are today one of the main factors underlying the enormous rise in state debt. The current dismantling of the Welfare State can only provoke a profound questioning of the real perspective that capitalism offers society.
Not all capitalist attacks provoke the same defensive reactions from the working class. It is easier to struggle against wage cuts or the lengthening of the working day, than against the reduction in the relative wage as a result of the growth in labour productivity (thanks to technical improvements), which is part of the process of capital accumulation. As Rosa Luxemburg put it: “A wage cut, leading to the reduction of the real living standard of the workers, is a visible assault of the capitalists against the workers and as a rule (...) it will be replied to as such with immediate struggle, and in the best of cases be beaten back. As opposed to this, the lowering of the relative wage apparently takes place without the least personal involvement of the capitalists, and against this the workers, within the wage system, i.e. on the terrain of commodity production, have not the slightest possibility of struggle and resistance” (Introduction to national economy).
The rise in unemployment poses the same difficulties for the working class as the intensification of exploitation (the attack on the relative wage). When unemployment affects young people who have never worked, it does not have the same explosive effect as do redundancies. The existence of mass unemployment tends, indeed, to inhibit the immediate struggles of the working class not only because it is a constant threat for a growing number of those still in work, but also because it tends to pose questions which cannot be answered without raising the issue of radically changing society. Concerning the struggle against the relative decline in wages, Luxemburg added: “The struggle against the lowering of the relative wage therefore also signifies the struggle against the commodity character of the labour force, in other words against the capitalist production as a whole. The struggle against the fall of the relative wage is thus no longer a struggle on the terrain of commodity production, but a revolutionary, insurrectional movement against the existence of this economy, it is the socialist movement of the proletariat” (idem).
The 1930s revealed how, with mass unemployment, absolute pauperisation explodes. Without the prior defeat of the proletariat, the “general, absolute law of capitalist accumulation” risked becoming its opposite, the law of the revolution. With the re-emergence of mass unemployment from the 1970s on, the bourgeoisie responded with measures of state capitalist welfarism; measures which economically make no sense, and which today are one of the main causes of the unfathomable public debt. The working class has an historical memory. Despite the loss of class identity, with the deepening crisis, this memory slowly begins to be activated. Mass unemployment and the slashing of the social wage today conjure up memories of the 1930s, visions of generalised insecurity and pauperisation. The demolition of the “Welfare State” will confirm the marxists’ predictions.
When Luxemburg writes that the workers, on the terrain of commodity production, have not the slightest possibility of resistance against the lowering of the relative wage, this is neither resigned fatalism, nor “the revolution or nothing” pseudo radicalism of the later Essen tendency of the KAPD, but the recognition that this struggle cannot remain within the boundaries of the “minimum programme” (immediate economic demands) and must be entered into with the greatest possible political clarity. In the 1980s the questions of unemployment and the increase in exploitation were already posed, but often in a narrow and local manner: “saving British miners’ jobs”, for example. Today the qualitative advance of the crisis can permit questions like unemployment, poverty, exploitation, to be posed more globally and politically, as are the questions of pensions, health, the maintenance of the unemployed, working conditions, the length of a working life and the generational link. This, in a very embryonic form, is the potential revealed by the recent movements in response to the pension attacks. This long term lesson is by far the most important one, of greater significance than questions such as the pace with which the immediate militancy of the class is likely to recover. In fact, as Luxemburg explains, being directly confronted with the devastating effects of the objective mechanisms of capitalism (mass unemployment, the intensification of relative exploitation) makes it more difficult to enter the struggle. For this reason, even if the development of struggles becomes slower and more torturous, the struggles themselves become politically more significant.
Because of the deepening crisis, capitalism can no longer rely on its ability to make major material concessions in order to improve the image of the unions, as it did in France in 1995.[7] [148] Despite the present illusions of the workers, there are limits to the bourgeoisie’s ability to utilise nascent militancy for large scale manoeuvres: these limits are revealed by the fact that the unions are gradually being obliged to resume their role of sabotaging the struggle: “We thus find ourselves today in a classic schema of the class struggle: first the government attacks, and the trade unions preach union unity in order to start the massive movement of the workers behind the unions and under their control. Then the government opens negotiations where the unions divide amongst themselves in order to spread division and disorientation in the workers' ranks. This method, which plays on the trade unions’ division in the face of rising class struggle, has been thoroughly proven by the bourgeoisie as a means to preserve union control overall by concentrating as far as possible the loss in credibility on one or other trade union apparatus appointed in advance. This also means that the unions are once again put to the test, and that the inevitable development of the struggles to come once again poses the problem for the working class of the confrontation with its enemies in order to assert its class interests and the needs of its struggle” (International Review n°114, op. cit.).
Although today, the bourgeoisie has virtually no difficulty in the execution of its large-scale manoeuvres against the working class, the deteriorating economic situation will tend to cause increasingly frequent, though sporadic, spontaneous and isolated, confrontations between the workers and the unions.
The return to a classic schema of confrontation with union sabotage is henceforth on the agenda, and will make it easier for workers to refer to the lessons of the past.
But this should not lead us to a schematic application of the framework of the 1980s to the struggles and our intervention today. The present combats are those of a class which has still to recover even a rudimentary class identity. The other side of the coin of being unaware of belonging to a social class is not recognising the confrontation with the class enemy. And although these workers still have an elementary sense of the need for solidarity (since this is basic to the condition of the proletariat), they have still to regain a vision of what class solidarity really is.
To put through its pension “reforms” in France, the bourgeoisie had no need for the unions to sabotage the extension of the struggle. The core of its strategy was to make the teachers adopt their own specific demands at the centre of the struggle. In order to put this strategy into operation, the teachers – who had already been seriously hit by previous attacks – were subjected to another, specific attack: the proposed decentralisation of the employment of the non-teaching personnel, around which the whole mobilisation in effect polarised. The adoption of core demands which in fact ensure the struggle’s defeat is always a sign of weakness in the working class, which it must overcome if it is to take any significant steps forward. We can see an example a contrario of this necessity in the struggles in Poland in 1980, where the illusions in Western-style democracy made it possible to introduce the demand for “free trade unions” at the heart of the movement, and so open the door to its defeat and repression.
During the struggles of spring 2003 in France, it was the loss of acquisitions about the existence of the class and the nature of its solidarity which led the teachers to accept that their specific demands should come before the general question of the attack on pensions. Revolutionaries must not be afraid to recognise this weakness of the class, and adjust their intervention accordingly.
The report on the class struggle to the 15th Congress strongly insisted on the importance of the resurgence of militancy for the advance of the proletariat. But this has nothing in common with a workerist cult of militancy in itself. In the 1930s the bourgeoisie was able to divert workers’ militancy down the path of imperialist war. The importance of struggles today is that they can be the scene for the development of class consciousness. The basic issue at stake – the recovery of class identity – is an extremely modest one. But behind class identity, there is the question of class solidarity – the only alternative to the mad competitive bourgeois logic of each for himself. Behind class identity there is the possibility of reappropriating the lessons of past struggles, and reactivating the collective memory of the proletariat.
The bourgeoisie, for its part, does not allow itself to be lulled by the “modesty” of this issue. Until now, through a “left” and democratic avoidance of provocations, it has done what it can to avoid triggering off the kind of movements which would remind workers that they belong together. The lesson of 2003 is that, with the acceleration of the crisis, workers combat will nonetheless inevitably develop. It is not this militancy as such which worries the ruling class, but the risk that these conflicts generate class consciousness. The bourgeoisie is not less but more worried about this than in the past – precisely because the crisis is graver and more global. Its main concern is that, whenever struggles cannot be avoided, that they should not contribute to, but damage the development of the self confidence, solidarity and reflection of the class. During the 1980s, in face of workers’ combats, the ICC learnt to identify, in each particular case, the brake on the advancement of the movement, around which the confrontation with the left and the unions could take place. Often this was the question of extension. Concrete motions, presented to general assemblies, to go towards the other workers – this was the dynamite with which we attempted to clear the way for the advancement of the cause. The central questions of today – what is the workers’ struggle, what are its goals and methods, who are its opponents, what are the obstacles it must overcome? – appear to be the antithesis of the 1980s: more “abstract” and “backward”, less immediately realisable, a return even to the point of departure for the whole workers’ movement. It demands of our intervention more patience, a longer term vision, more profound political and theoretical capacities. In reality, the central questions of today are not more abstract, they are more global. There is nothing abstract or backward in intervening, at a workers assembly, on the question of the demands of the movement, or unmasking the way the unions prevent a real perspective of extension. The global character of these questions shows the way forward. Before 1989, the proletariat failed to sufficiently advance precisely because it posed the issues of class struggle too narrowly. And it is because it began to feel, from the mid-1990s onwards, that the proletariat – through the minorities within it – had begun to feel the need for this more global vision, that the bourgeoisie, aware of the danger that this could represent, developed the anti-globalisation movement to provide a false answer to these questions.
Moreover, the left of capital, especially the leftists, have become masters of the art of employing the effects of decomposition against workers struggles. If the economic crisis favours the posing of questions as globally as possible, decomposition has the opposite effect. During the spring 2003 movement in France, and the steel workers’ strike in Germany, we saw how the union activists, in the name of “extension” or “solidarity” cultivated the mentality of minorities of workers attempting to impose the struggle on other workers, and blaming them for the defeat of the movement when they refuse to be dragged into action.
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 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; 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, 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.
Here we see tasks worthy of communist intervention: To “patiently explain” (Lenin) why solidarity cannot be imposed, but requires mutual confidence between the different parts of the class. To explain why the left, in the name of workers’ unity, are out to destroy workers’ unity.
All the components of the proletarian political milieu agree on the importance of the crisis for the development of workers militancy. But the ICC is the only current presently existing that understands how the crisis stimulates the class consciousness of the broad masses. The other groups restrict the role of the crisis to the purely physical compulsion to struggle which it exercises. For the councilists, the crisis more or less forces the class to make the revolution. For the Bordigists the awakening of class instinct carries the party as the bearer of class consciousness to power. For the IBRP, revolutionary consciousness is introduced from outside by the party. Along the searching groups, the autonomists (who take from Marxism the idea that the proletariat must be autonomous from other classes) and the operaists believe that the revolution is the product of a workers’ revolt, and of the individual desire for a better life.
These incorrect approaches have been reinforced by the incapacity of these currents to understanding that the failure of the proletariat to respond to the 1929 crisis was due to the prior defeat of the revolutionary wave begun in Russia in 1917. One of the consequences of this inability is the continuing theorisation of imperialist war rather than the crisis as creating the most favourable conditions for revolution (see our article on the alternative of “War or Revolution” in International Review n°30).
As opposed to these visions, Marxism poses the question as follows: “It is an acknowledged fact that the scientific explanation of socialism bases itself on three results of capitalist development: above all on the growing anarchy of the capitalist economy, making its demise an unavoidable consequence, secondly on the progressive socialisation of the process of production, creating the positive germs of the future social order, and thirdly on the growing power and class knowledge of the proletariat, constituting the active factor of the upcoming upheaval”.[8] [149]
Underlying the link between these three aspects, and the role of the crisis therein, Luxemburg writes: “Social Democracy deducts its final goal neither from the victorious violence of a minority, nor from the numerical superiority of the majority, but from economic necessity and from the understanding of this necessity, leading to the overthrowing of capitalism by the popular masses, and which expresses itself above all in capitalist anarchy”.[9] [150]
Whereas reformism (and nowadays the left of capital) promises improvements through the intervention of the state, through laws protecting the workers, the crisis helps to reveal that “the wage system is not a legal relationship, but a purely economic one” (idem).
It is through the attacks it suffers that the class as a whole begins to understand the real nature of capitalism. This, Marxist point of view, does not at all deny the role of revolutionaries and of theory in this process. In Marxist theory the workers will find the confirmation and explanation of what they are themselves experiencing.
[1] [151]. This text was written for internal debate within the organisation, and is therefore likely to contain certain formulations which are insufficiently explicit for our readers. We think nonetheless that these defects will not be a barrier to our readers grasping the essential points of the analysis contained in the report.
[2] [152]. We were unable, due to lack of space, to publish this report in our press. However, International Review n°113 contains the resolution on the class struggle adopted at the congress, which puts forward the main lines of the report.
3. The IG Metal union pushed the steelworkers in the Eastern Länder into striking for the implementation of the 35-hour week planned to come into force in 2009. Not only is the 35-hour week an attack on the working class because of the flexible working practices that come with it, the whole mobilisation of the unions was designed to divert attention from the need to respond to the austerity measures contained in the “2010 Agenda”.
[4] [153]. This card of the left in opposition was used by the ruling class at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. It takes the form of a systematic division of labour between the different sectors of the bourgeoisie. The right in government has the job of “speaking the truth” and imposing brutal attacks on the working class, while the left– in other words the fractions of the bourgeoisie which, thanks to their history and their language, have the specific task of controlling the working class – has the job in opposition of stifling the development of the workers’ struggles and consciousness provoked by these attacks. More elements can be found in International Review n°26.
[5] [154]. For a more detailed analysis of this movement see our article “Class Struggles in France, Spring 2003: The Massive Attacks of Capital Demand a Mass Response From the Working Class [155]” in International Review n°114.
[6] [156]. There is another reason for the presence of the right in power, which is the need to counter the rise of political populism (whose development is closely linked to that of decomposition) and whose representative parties are generally maladapted to the management of the national capital.
[7] [157]. In December 1995, the unions were at the forefront of a manoeuvre of the entire bourgeoisie against the working class. The unions had no difficulty in bringing out masses of workers against the Juppé Plan – a massive attack against the social security system – and another aimed more especially at the railway workers, whose violence gave it the character of a veritable provocation. The economic situation was not then so serious as to force the bourgeoisie to maintain its attack on the rail workers’ pensions : the measure could thus be withdrawn, and presented as a great victory for the workers mobilised in the unions. In reality, the Juppé Plan went through, but the greatest defeat lay in the fact that the bourgeoisie was able to renew the unions’ credibility, and to pass off a defeat as a victory. For more details, see the articles in International Review n°84-85.
[8] [158]. Luxemburg: Social Reform or Revolution (“Anti-Bernstein”)
[9] [159]. Luxemburg, ibid.
In the “Theses on Decomposition” (published for the first time in International Review no 62 and republished in International Review no107) as well as in the article “The decomposition of capitalism” (published in the International Review no57) we argued that capitalism had entered into a new and final stage of its decadence, that of its decomposition, a phase characterised by the aggravation and culmination of all the contradictions of the system.
Unfortunately, the effort by our organisation to analyse this important evolution in the life of capitalism either aroused the indifference of certain groups of the Communist Left, or met with complete incomprehension, or accusations of abandoning Marxism and the like.
The most caricatural attitude was probably that of the Parti Communiste International (PCI, which publishes Le Proletaire and Il Comunista). Thus, in a recently published pamphlet, “The International Communist Current: against the current of Marxism and the class struggle”, this organisation described our analysis of decomposition in these terms: “Neither will we make a definitive critique here of this hazy theory, content to note that this brainwave has nothing to do with Marxism and materialism”
And this is all that the PCI finds to say on our analysis even when it consecrates 70 pages to polemicising with our organisation.
It is however a primary responsibility for an organisation that pretends to defend the historic interests of the working class to undertake a theoretical reflection on the conditions of the class’ combat and to criticise those analyses of society that it judges erroneous, particularly when the latter are defended by other revolutionary organisations.[1] [160]
The proletariat and its vanguard minorities need a global framework to understand the situation. Without it they are condemned to only give blow-by-blow and empirical responses to events, and to be buffeted by the consequences of them.
For its part, the Communist Workers' Organisation (CWO), the British branch of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP), has taken up our analysis of the decomposition of capitalism in three articles in its publications.[2] [161] We will return later to the precise arguments put forward by the CWO. We note for the moment that the principle critique which is made of our analysis of decomposition is quite simply that it is situated outside of Marxism.
Faced with this type of judgement (which the CWO is not alone in making) we consider it necessary to argue for the Marxist roots of the theory of the decomposition of capitalism, to make it precise and to develop different aspects and implications. That is why we are undertaking a series of articles entitled “Understanding Decomposition” that is in continuity with those we produced some years ago entitled “Understanding the decadence of capitalism”[3] [162]. In the last analysis decomposition is a phenomenon of decadence and cannot be understood outside of it.
The Marxist method provides both a materialist and historical framework to characterise the different moments in the life of capitalism, whether in its phase of ascendance or of decadence.
“In fact, just as capitalism itself traverses different historic periods - birth, ascendancy, decadence - so each of these periods itself consists of several distinct phases. For example, capitalism's ascendant period can be divided into the successive phases of the free market, shareholding, monopoly, financial capital, colonial conquest, and the establishment of the world market. In the same way, the decadent period also has its history: imperialism, world wars, state capitalism, permanent crisis, and today, decomposition. These are different and successive aspects of the life of capitalism, each one characteristic of a specific phase, although they may have pre-dated it, and/or continued to exist after it.”[4] [163] The best known illustration of this phenomenon undoubtedly concerns imperialism which “properly speaking begins after 1870, when world capitalism configures itself in a significantly new way: the period of the constitution of national states in Europe and North America is completed and in place of Britain as the world factory, we have several national capitalist factories developing in competition with it for the domination of the world market - in competition not only for the internal markets of others but also for the colonial market”. (“On imperialism”, International Review no19). However, “it is only in the decadent period that imperialism became predominant within society and in international relations, to the point where revolutionaries of the period identified it with the decadence of capitalism itself”.[5] [164]
Moreover, the period of capitalist decadence has contained since its origin elements of decomposition characterised by the dislocation of the social body and the putrefaction of economic, political and ideological structures. Nevertheless, it is only at a certain stage of this decadence and in well-determined circumstances that decomposition becomes a factor, if not the decisive factor, in the evolution of society, opening up a specific phase, that of the decomposition of society. This phase is the completion of the phases that have preceded it ititduring decadence attested by the history of this period.
The first congress of the Communist International (March 1919) argued that capitalism had entered into a new epoch, that of it's historic decline. It identified in the latter the germs of the internal decomposition of the system: “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” (Platform of the CI). Humanity as a whole is faced with the threat of destruction if capitalism survives the proletarian revolution:
“Humanity, whose whole culture has been devastated, is threatened with destruction (...) The old capitalist 'order' is no more. It can no longer exist. The final result of the capitalist process of production is chaos”. (ibid) “Now its not only social pauperisation, but a physiological, biological impoverishment that is presented to us in all its hideous reality” (Manifesto of the CI to the proletariat of the entire world).
This new epoch carries the stigmata of the historical event which opened it, the First World War: “If free competition, as regulator of production and distribution, was replaced in the principle areas of the economy by the system of trusts and monopolies several dozen years before the war, the very course of the war has transferred the role of regulating and directing the economy to the military and governmental powers.” (ibid). What is described here is not a conjunctural phenomenon linked to the supposed exceptional character of the war situation, but a permanent and irreversible tendency: “If the absolute subjection of political power to financial capital has driven humanity into the imperialist butchery, this butchery has allowed financial capital not only to militarise the state, but to militarise itself, in a way that it can no longer fulfil its essential economic functions except by blood and iron (...) The statisation of economic life, against which liberal capitalism protests so much, is an accomplished fact. It is no longer possible to return to the domination of trusts, syndicates and other capitalist octopuses, let alone to return to free competition. The question to know is uniquely what form statised production will take: the imperialist state or the state of the victorious proletariat”. (ibid)
The following eight decades have only confirmed this decisive turning point in the life of society. They have seen: the massive development of state capitalism and the war economy after the crisis of 1929; the Second World War; the reconstruction and beginning of an insane nuclear arms race; the “cold” war which left as many dead as in the two world wars combined; and, from 1967, which marked the end of the post-war reconstruction, the progressive collapse of the world economy into a crisis which has so far lasted more than 30 years and been accompanied by an endless spiral of military convulsions. A world, in sum, which offers no other perspective than an interminable agony created by destruction, poverty and barbarism.
Such an historical evolution can only favourise the decomposition of the capitalist mode of production at all levels of social life: the economy, political life, morality, culture, etc. This is what is illustrated on the one hand by the irrational savagery of Nazism with its extermination camps and of Stalinism with its gulags; and on the other by the cynicism and moral hypocrisy of their democratic adversaries with their murderous bombardments responsible for hundreds of thousands of victims amongst the German population (in the town of Dresden particularly) and in Japan (particularly the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) even though these two countries had already been defeated. In 1947 the Communist Left of France argued that the tendencies toward decomposition within capitalism were the product of its insurmountable contradictions: “The bourgeoisie is faced with its own decomposition (...) it always looks for the lesser evil, it patches up here, and stops a leak there, all the while knowing that the storm is gaining more force”. (Internationalisme no23, “Instability and capitalist decadence”).
The contradictions and manifestations of decadent capitalism, which successively mark its different phases, don't disappear with time, but continue. The phase of decomposition which opened up in the 80s appeared “as the result of an accumulation of all the characteristics of a moribund system, completing the 75-year death agony of a historically condemned mode of production. Concretely, not only do the imperialist nature of all states, the threat of world war, the absorption of civil society by the state Moloch, and the permanent crisis of the capitalist economy all continue during the phase of decomposition, they reach a synthesis and an ultimate conclusion within it.”[6] [165]
Thus the opening of the phase of decomposition (Decomposition[7] [166]) doesn't appear like a bolt from the blue, but is the crystallisation of a slow process at work in the preceding stages of capitalist decadence, which becomes, at a given moment, the central factor of the situation. Thus the elements of decomposition which, as we have seen, accompany the whole of capitalist decadence, cannot be put on the same level, quantitatively and qualitatively, as those that appeared after the 1980s. Decomposition is not simply a “new phase” succeeding the others within the period of decadence (imperialism, world wars, state capitalism) but is the final phase of the system.
This phenomenon of generalised decomposition, of the putrefaction of society is caused by the fact that the contradictions of capitalism can only worsen, the bourgeoisie being incapable of offering the least perspective to the whole of society and the proletariat unable to affirm its own perspective in an immediate way.
In class societies, individuals act and work without really consciously controlling their own lives. But that doesn't at all mean that society can function in a totally blind way, without orientation or perspective. “In fact, no mode of production can live, develop, maintain itself on a viable basis and ensure social cohesion, if it’s unable to present a perspective for the whole of the society which it dominates. And this is especially true of capitalism, which is the most dynamic mode of production in history.” [8] [167]
This growing loss of compass to guide the fate of society is an important difference between the present phase of decomposition of capitalism and the period of the Second World War. The second great war was a terrifying manifestation of the barbarism of the capitalist system. But barbarism is not synonymous with decomposition. At the heart of the barbarism of the Second World War society was not lacking an “orientation” since the capitalist states were able to hold the whole of society in an iron grip and mobilise it for war. At this level, the cold war had similar characteristics: the whole of social life was contained by the states engaged in a bloody struggle between the two blocs. The whole of society was enveloped by an “organised” barbarism. By contrast, what has changed since the opening of the phase of decomposition, is that “organised” barbarism is replaced by an anarchic and chaotic barbarism, dominated by each for himself, the instability of alliances, the gangsterisation of international relations...
For Marxism “the social relations of production, change, are transformed, with the change and development of the material means of production, the productive forces. The relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society, and, specifically, a society at a definite stage of historical development, a society with a peculiar, distinctive character. Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois society are such totalities of production relations, each of which at the same time denotes a special stage of development in the history of mankind” (Marx, Wage Labour and Capital in Collected Works Vol 9, p.212). But equally these relations of production constitute the framework within which the class struggle acts as a motor force of their evolution and that of humanity: “…economic production and the structure of society of every historical epoch necessarily arising therefrom constitute the foundation for the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that consequently (ever since the dissolution of the primeval communal ownership of land) all history has been a history of class struggles, struggles between exploited and exploiting, between dominated and dominating classes at various stages of social development….” (F. Engels, Preface to the 1883 German edition of the Communist Manifesto in Collected Works Vol 26, p.118).
The links between, on the one hand, the relations of production and the development of the productive forces and, on the other hand, the class struggle has never been understood by Marxism in a simple, mechanical way: the first being determinant and the second determined. On this question in response to the Left Opposition, Bilan warned against the vulgar materialist interpretation of the fact that “the whole evolution of history can be reduced to the law of the evolution of the economic and productive forces”, the new element of Marxism in relation to all the historical theories which preceded it and fully confirmed by the evolution of capitalist society. For such a vulgar materialist interpretation, “the productive mechanism represents not only the source of the formation of classes but it automatically determines the action and policy of classes and the men that constitute it; thus the problem of social struggles would be singularly simplified: men and classes would only be puppets operated by economic forces.” (“Principles, weapons of the revolution”, Bilan no5)
Social classes don't act according to a scenario fixed in advance by economic evolution. Bilan adds that “the action of classes is only possible as a result of a historic intelligence of the role and means appropriate to their triumph. Classes, their birth and disappearance are due to an economic mechanism, but to triumph (...) [they] must be able to give themselves a political and organic configuration, without which, even though they are selected by the evolution of the productive forces, they risk remaining prisoners of the old class which, in its turn - to resist - imprisons the course of economic evolution” ibid. [9] [168]
At this stage, two very important conclusions must be drawn.
Firstly, while being determinant, the economic mechanism is also determined because the resistance of the old class - condemned by history - imprisons the course of its evolution. Humanity today has behind it nearly a century of the decadence of capitalism which illustrates this reality. In order to avoid brutal collapses and to assume the constraints of the war economy, state capitalism has cheated the law of value in a permanent way[10] [169] while locking the economy into more and more insurmountable contradictions. Far from being able to resolve the contradictions of the capitalist system, such escapism has had no other consequence than to aggravate these contradictions considerably. According to Bilan, it has imprisoned the course of historical evolution in a Gordian knot of insurmountable contradictions.
In the second place, the revolutionary class, while being invested by history with the mission of overthrowing capitalism, has not, until now, been able to accomplish this historic mission. The long period of the past thirty years is a luminous confirmation of this analysis of Bilan which is situated along the same line as all the positions of Marxism. If the historical resurgence of the proletariat in 1968 has prevented the bourgeoisie from dragging society toward generalised war, it has not however been able to orientate its defensive struggles toward an offensive combat for the destruction of capitalism.
This setback, which is the result of a series of general and historic factors that we cannot analyse here,[11] [170] has been determinant in the entry of capitalism into its phase of decomposition.
Moreover, if Decomposition is the result of the difficulties of the proletariat, it also contributes actively to their aggravation: “the effects of decomposition…have a profoundly negative effect on the proletariat’s consciosuness, on its sense of itself as a class, since in all their different aspects - the gang mentality, racism, criminality, drug addiction, etc - they serve to atomise the class, increase the divisions within its ranks, and dissolve it into the general social rat race”.[12] [171] In fact:
- intermediate classes like the petit bourgeoisie, or even the lumpens, tend, under Decomposition to have a behaviour that is more and more linked to the worst aberrations of capitalism or even of systems that preceded it. Their revolts without hope or future may contaminate the proletariat or drag some sectors of the latter with them;
- the general atmosphere of moral and ideological decomposition affects the capacities of the proletariat to become conscious, to unify, to solidarise and generate confidence: “a Chinese wall does not separate the working class from the old bourgeois society. When the revolution breaks out it's not like taking away a dead man and burying him. At the moment when the old society perishes, one cannot gather its remains and put them in a coffin. It decomposes among us, it rots, and its putrefaction surrounds us. No great revolution in the world has been accomplished otherwise and never can be. That is why we must fight to safeguard the germs of the new [world] within this stinking, poisonous atmosphere of a body in decomposition”. [13] [172]
- the bourgeoisie may utilise the effects of decomposition against the proletariat. That has been particularly the case at the time of the collapse, without war or revolution, of the old soviet bloc, a major and typical manifestation of Decomposition. This event allowed the bourgeoisie to unleash an enormous anti-communist campaign resulting in an important reflux in consciousness and combativity in the proletarian ranks. All the effects of this campaign are still far from having been overcome.
The passage from one mode of production to a superior mode of production is not the fatal product of the evolution of the productive forces. This passage can only be effected through a revolution by which the new dominant class overthrows the old and constructs new relations of production.
Marxism defends historical determinism but that doesn't mean that communism will be the inevitable result of the evolution of capitalism. Such a vision is a vulgar materialist deformation of Marxism. In fact, for Marxism historical determinism signifies that:
a) A revolution is only possible when the preceding mode of production has exhausted all its capacities to develop the productive forces: “A social order never perishes before all the productive forces for which it is broadly sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the womb of the old society.” (Marx, Preface to the Contribution to the critique of political economy. Peking 1976)
b) Capitalism cannot return to the past (toward feudalism or other pre-capitalist modes of production): either it is replaced by the proletarian revolution, or it drags humanity to destruction.
c) Capitalism is the last class society. The “theory” defended by the group “Socialism or Barbarism” or by certain splits from Trotskyism[14] [173] announcing the rise of a neither capitalist nor communist “third society” is an aberration from the point of view of Marxism. The latter strongly underlines the fact that The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production…The prehistory of human society therefore closes with this social formation”. (ibid).
Marxism has always posed in alternate terms the denouement of historical evolution: either the revolutionary class imposes itself and opens the way to the new mode of production, or society falls into anarchy and barbarism. The Communist Manifesto shows how the class struggle manifests itself through “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.” (Collected Works, vol.6, p.482)
Against all the idealist errors which try to separate the proletariat from communism, Marx defines the latter as its “real movement” and insists on the fact that the workers “have no ideals to realise, but to set free elements of the new society with which the old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant.” (The Civil War in France in Collected Works, vol.22, p.335)”[15] [174]. The class struggle of the proletariat is not the “instrument” of an “historical destiny” (the realisation of communism). In the German Ideology, Marx and Engels strongly criticise such a vision: “History is nothing but the succession of the separate generations, each of which uses the materials, the capital funds, the productive forces handed down to it by all preceding generations, and thus, on the one hand, continues the traditional activity in completely changed circumstances and, on the other modifies the old circumstances with a completely changed activity. This can be speculatively distorted so that later history is made the goal of earlier history, e.g. the goal ascribed to the discovery of America is to further the eruption of the French Revolution.” (Collected Works, vol. 5, p.50).
Thus, applied to the analysis of the actual phase of capitalism's evolution, the Marxist method permits us to understand that, despite its real existence, Decomposition is not a “rational” phenomenon in historical evolution. Decomposition is not a necessary link in the chain leading to communism. On the contrary, it contains the danger of a progressive erosion of the material bases of the latter. Firstly because Decomposition signifies a slow process of destruction of the productive forces up to the point at which communism would no longer be possible: “Thus we cannot say, as the anarchists do for example, that a socialist perspective would still be open if the productive forces were in regression. We cannot ignore the level of their development. Capitalism has been a necessary, indispensable stage towards the establishment of socialism to the extent that it has sufficiently developed the objective conditions for it. But, as this text will attempt to show, just as in its present phase capitalism has become a fetter on the development of the productive forces, so the prolongation of capitalism in this phase will lead to the disappearance of the conditions for socialism”[16] [175]
Consequently, because it erodes the bases of the unity and identity of the proletarian class: “The process of disintegration created by massive and prolonged unemployment particularly among the young, by the break up of the traditional combative concentrations of the working class in the industrial heartlands, all that reinforces the atomisation and the competition among the workers (...) The fragmentation of the identity of the class during the last decade in particular is in no way an advance but a clear manifestation of the decomposition which carries profound dangers for the working class”.[17] [176]
The historical stage of Decomposition carries within it the threat of the obliteration of the conditions for the communist revolution. In this sense it is no different from the other stages of the decadence of capitalism that also contained such a threat as put forward by revolutionaries at the time. In relation to the latter, there are however a certain number of differences:
a) the war led to a reconstruction, while the process of the destruction of humanity, under the effects of Decomposition, even though long and disguised, is irreversible;[18] [177]
b) the threat of destruction was linked to the outbreak of a third world war, while today, in Decomposition, different causes (local wars, destruction of ecological equilibrium, slow erosion of the productive forces, progressive collapse of the productive infrastructure, the gradual destruction of social relationships) act in a more or less simultaneous way as factors of the destruction of humanity;
c) the threat of destruction presented itself in the brutal form of a new world war, while today, it is cloaked in a less visible costume, more insidious, much more difficult to appreciate, and even less easy to combat. [See note * at the end of the article].
d) the fact that decomposition is the central factor of the evolution of the whole of society signifies, as we have already argued, that it has a permanent and direct impact on the proletariat at all levels: consciousness, unity, solidarity, etc.
However, “understanding the serious threat that the historical phenomenon of decomposition poses for the working class and for the whole of humanity should not lead the class, and especially its revolutionary minorities, to adopt a fatalist attitude.”[19] [178] In fact:
- the proletariat has not suffered important defeats and its combativity remains intact;
- the same factor which is the fundamental cause of decomposition - the inexorable aggravation of the crisis - is also “the essential stimulant for the class' struggle and development of consciousness, the precondition for its ability to resist the poison distilled by the social rot”. [20] [179]
But, to the extent that only the communist revolution can definitively overcome the threat of decomposition weighing on humanity, the workers struggles of resistance to the effects of the crisis are not sufficient. In fact, the consciousness of the crisis, in itself, cannot resolve the problems and difficulties that the proletariat confronts and must confront more and more. That's why it must develop:
- “an awareness of what is at stake in the present historical situation, and in particular of the mortal danger that social decomposition holds over humanity;
- its determination to continue, develop and unite its class combat;
- its ability to spring the many traps that the bourgeoisie, however decomposed itself, will not fail to set in its path. “[21] [180]
Decomposition obliges the proletariat to develop its weapons of consciousness, unity, self-confidence, its solidarity, its will and its heroism, the subjective factors which Trotsky, in the History of the Russian Revolution considered were enormously important in the victory of the latter. On all the fronts of the class struggle of the proletariat (Engels spoke of three fronts: economic, political, and theoretical), revolutionaries and the most advanced minorities of the proletariat must cultivate and develop these qualities in a profound and extensive way.
The phase of decomposition reveals that, of the two factors which direct historical evolution - the economic mechanism and the class struggle - the first is more than mature and contains the danger of the destruction of humanity. As a result the second factor becomes decisive. More than ever, the class struggle of the proletariat is the motor of history. Consciousness, unity, confidence, solidarity, will and heroism, qualities that the proletariat is capable of raising through its class struggle to a completely different and superior level to other classes in history, are the forces which, developed to the highest degree, will allow it to overcome the dangers contained in Decomposition and to open the way to the Communist liberation of humanity.
C.Mir
* In a leaflet entitled “Questions to the militants and sympathisers of the ICC today” and distributed at the door of our public meetings as well as in the pacifist demonstration of 20th March in Paris, the parasitic self-styled “Internal Fraction of the ICC” (composed of some ex-members of our organisation) commented on extracts from the resolution on the International Situation adopted by our 15th International Congress.
First extract:
“Although capitalism's decomposition results from this historic ‘stand-off’ between the classes, this situation cannot be a static one. The economic crisis, which is at the root both of the drive towards war and of the proletariat's response, continues to deepen; but in contrast to the 1968-89 period, when the outcome of these class contradictions could only be world war or world revolution, the new period opens up a third alternative: the destruction of humanity not through an apocalyptic war, but through the gradual advance of decomposition, which could over a period of time undermine the proletariat's capacity to respond as a class, and could equally make the planet uninhabitable through a spiral of regional wars and ecological catastrophes. To wage a world war, the bourgeoisie would first have to directly confront and defeat the major battalions of the working class, and then mobilise them to march with enthusiasm behind the banners and ideology of new imperialist blocs; in the new scenario, the working class could be defeated in a less overt and direct manner, simply by failing to respond to the crisis of the system and allowing itself to be dragged further and further into the cesspool of decay.” (emphasis by the FICCI)
Commentary of the FICCI: “This clearly opportunist introduction of a 'third way', is opposed to the classical thesis of Marxism of an historic alternative. As with Bernstein, Kautsky, and their epigones, the very idea of a third way is opposed to the historic alternative, to the 'simplism' according to opportunism of 'war or revolution'. Here there is an explicit, open, revision of the a classical thesis of the workers' movement...”.
Second extract:
“What has changed with decomposition is the possible nature of a historic defeat, which may not come through a frontal clash between the major classes so much as a slow ebbing away of the proletariat's ability to constitute itself as a class, in which case the point of no return will be harder to discern, coming as it would be before any final catastrophe. This is the deadly danger faced by the class today.”
Commentary of the FICCI: “Here the opportunist, revisionist tendency 'liquidates' the class struggle. “
In fact, what is expressed in these lines of the FICCI is the deliberate intention of this regroupment to harm our organisation (for want of destroying it) by any means. Effectively the members of the FICCI, who after several decades as militants within our organisation have lost their communist convictions and in blaming the loss on the ICC for this loss are ready to stoop to the lowest acts to achieve their ends: theft, police informing (see our article on this subject “The police methods of the FICCI” on our Internet site and in our territorial press) and obviously the most shameful lies. The ICC has in no way “revised” its positions since the white knights of the FICCI are no long there to prevent it “degenerating”.
Thus the 13th Congress of the ICC adopted, with the full support of the militants who would later form the FICCI, a report on the class struggle where one can read:
“The dangers of the new period for the working class and the future of its struggle cannot be underestimated. While the class struggle was definitely a barrier to war in 70s and 80s, the day to day struggle does not halt or slow down the process of decomposition. To launch a world war, the bourgeoisie would have had to have inflicted a series of major defeats on the central battalions of the working class; today the proletariat faces the more long term, but in the end no less dangerous threat of a 'death by a thousand cuts', in which the working class is increasingly ground down by the whole process to the point where it has lost the ability to affirm itself as a class, while capitalism plunges from catastrophe to catastrophe (local wars, ecological breakdown, famine, disease, etc.).” (International Review no99)
Moreover, in the report on the class struggle adopted by the 14th Congress of the ICC in the spring of 2001 (with the support of the same future members of the FICCI) one can read:
“...this evolution has created a situation in which the bases of the new society may be sapped without world war or thus without the necessity to mobilise the proletariat for war. In the preceding scenario, it was a nuclear world war which would have definitively compromised the possibility of communism (...) The new scenario envisages the possibility of a slower but no less deadly slide into the situation where the proletariat would be fragmented beyond all possible repair and where the natural and economic bases for the social transformation would be equally ruined through a growth of local and regional military conflicts, ecological catastrophes and social collapse” (International Review no107).
As for the resolution adopted by this congress, it evoked in point 3 “the danger that the most insidious process of decomposition may bury the class without capitalism inflicting a frontal defeat upon it.” (International Review no106).
Were the glorious defenders of the “true ICC” (as they define themselves) asleep when these documents were adopted or did they raise their arms mechanically to give it their support? If the former then they must have been asleep for more than 11 years since in a report adopted in January 1990 by the central organ of the ICC (and which these elements supported without the least reserve) one can read: “Even if world war is no longer a threat to humanity at present, and perhaps for good, it may be replaced by the decomposition of society. This is all the more true in that, while the outbreak of world war requires the proletariat's adherence to the bourgeoisie's ideals (...) decomposition has no need at all of this adherence to destroy society”. (International Review no61).
[1] [181]. For our part, we have devoted numerous articles in our press to the critique of visions that we consider mistaken, beginning with the “innovation” of Marxism known paradoxically as “invariance”. In the name of the latter, the Bordigist current (like the ICC a current of the communist left) dogmatically refused to recognise the reality of the profound evolution of capitalist society since 1848, and thus the entry of this system into its decadent period (cf the article “The rejection of the theory of decadence” in International Review no 77 and 78).
[2] [182]. In the following articles: “War and the ICC” in Revolutionary Perspectives (RP), “Workers' struggles in Argentina: Polemic with the ICC” in Internationalist Communist 21 and “Imperialism’s New World Order” in RP27
[3] [183]. See the following numbers of the International Review: 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, and 56.
[4] [184]. “Theses on decomposition” point 3, International Review, no 62 and 107.
[5] [185]. ibid.
[6] [186]. ibid
[7] [187]. When we refer to Decomposition as a proper name, we are referring to the phase of decomposition, a distinct expression of the phenomenon of decomposition. The latter, as we have seen, accompanies the whole process of decadence, in a more or less marked way, and becomes dominant in the phase of decomposition.
[8] [188] “Theses on decomposition” point 5, International Review no 62 and 107.
[9] [189] We are well aware that an idea put forward by the Italian Communist Left doesn't give it an irrefutable Marxist character in the eyes of the reader. However, it should cause reflection among comrades and sympathisers of organisations that today defend this historical current, such as the IBRP or the different groups called International Communist Party.
[10] [190]See the article “The proletariat in decadent capitalism” in International Review no23.
[11] [191]. See, amongst others, the article “Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism” International Review no 103 and 104.
[12] [192]. Report on the class struggle - the concept of the historic course in the revolutionary movement, adopted by the 14th Congress of the ICC; International Review no107.
[13] [193]. “Lenin: the struggle for bread” (speech by Lenin at the CCE Pan Russian CCE of the Soviets) cited by Bilan no 6.
[14] [194]. Burnham and his theory of the new “managerial” class.
[15] [195]. “The proletariat in capitalism decadent” International Review no23
[16] [196]. “The evolution of capitalism and the new perspective”, Communist Left of France, Internationalisme no 46 May 1952, republished in International Review no 21.
[17] [197]. Report on the class struggle adopted by the 14th Congress of the ICC. International Review no107
[18] [198]. The period of the “cold war” with its insane nuclear arms race already marked the end of all possibility of reconstruction following the outbreak of a third world war.
[19] [199]. “Theses on decomposition”, point 17 International Review no62 and 107
[20] [200]. ibid
[21] [201]. ibid
We are beginning a new series devoted to the theory of decadence.[1] [204] For some time now, various criticisms of this concept have been piling up. To a large extent they have been the work of academic or parasitic grouplets. Others, however, express real incomprehension inside the revolutionary milieu,[2] [205] or come from searching elements who are posing genuine questions about the evolution of capitalism on a historic scale. We have already replied to the bulk of these criticisms.[3] [206] Today, however, we are seeing a change in their nature. They are no longer questions, misunderstandings or doubts; they no longer simply put certain aspects into question. Rather, we are seeing a total rejection, a type of criticism which amounts to an excommunication from marxism.
However, the theory of decadence is simply the concretisation of historical materialism in the analysis of the evolution of modes of production. It is thus the indispensable framework for understanding the historical period we are living in. Knowing whether society is still progressing, or whether it has had its day historically, is decisive for grasping what is at stake on the political and socio-economic levels, and acting accordingly. As with all past societies, the ascendant phase of capitalism expressed the historically necessary character of the relations of production it embodies, that is, their vital role in the expansion of society’s productive forces. The phase of decadence, by contrast, expresses the transformation of these relations into a growing barrier to this same development. This is one of the main theoretical acquisitions left us by Marx and Engels.
The 20th century was the most murderous in the entire history of humanity, both in the scale, the frequency and length of the wars which took up a large part of it, and in the incomparable breadth of the human catastrophes which it produced: from the greatest famines in history to systematic genocide, taking in economic crises which have shaken the whole planet and hurled tens of millions of proletarians and human beings into abject poverty. There is no comparison between the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Belle Epoque, the bourgeois mode of production reached unprecedented heights: it had united the globe, reaching levels of productivity and technological sophistication which could only have been dreamed about before. Despite the accumulation of tensions in society's foundations, the last 20 years of capitalism's ascendancy (1894-1914) were the most prosperous yet; capitalism seemed invincible and armed conflicts were confined to the peripheries. Unlike the “long 19th century”, which was a period of almost uninterrupted moral, intellectual and material progress, since 1914 there has been a marked regression on all fronts. The increasingly apocalyptic character of economic and social life across the planet, and the threat of self-destruction in an endless series of conflicts and ever more grave ecological catastrophes, are neither a natural fatality, nor the product of simple human madness, nor a characteristic of capitalism since its origins: they are a manifestation of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production which, from being, from the 16th century to the First World War,[4] [207] a powerful factor in economic, social and political development, has become a fetter on all such development and a threat to the very survival of humanity.
Why is humanity faced with the question of survival at the very moment that it has achieved a level of development in the productive forces that would enable it to start moving, for the first time in its history, towards a world without material poverty, towards a unified society capable of basing its activity on the needs, desires and consciousness of mankind? Does the world proletariat really constitute the revolutionary force that can take humanity out of the impasse into which capitalism has led it? Why is it that most of the forms of workers’ struggle in our epoch can no longer be those of the last century, such as the fight for gradual reforms through trade unionism, parliamentarism, supporting the constitution of certain nation states or certain progressive fractions of the bourgeoisie? It is impossible to find one's bearings in the current historical situation, still less to play a vanguard role, without having a global, coherent vision which can answer these elementary but crucial questions. Marxism – historical materialism – is the only conception of the world which makes it possible to give such an answer. Its clear and simple response can be summed up in a few words; just like the modes of production which came before it, capitalism is not an eternal system: “Beyond a certain point, the development of the productive forces becomes a barrier to capital, and consequently the relation of capital becomes a barrier to the development of the productive forces of labour. Once this point has been reached, capital, ie wage labour, enters into the same relation to the development of social wealth and the productive forces as the guild system, serfdom and slavery did, and is, as a fetter, necessarily cast off. The last form of servility assumed by human activity, that of wage labour on the one hand and capital on the other, is thereby shed, and this shedding is itself the result of the mode of production corresponding to capital. It is precisely the production process of capital that gives rise to the material and spiritual conditions for the negation of wage labour and capital, which are themselves the negation of earlier forms of unfree social production.
The growing discordance between the productive development of society and the relations of production hitherto characteristic of it, is expressed in acute contradictions, crises, convulsions” (“Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy” [also known as the Grundrisse], Collected Works Vol. 29, 133-4).
As long as capitalism fulfilled a historically progressive role and the proletariat was not sufficiently developed, proletarian struggles could not result in a triumphant world revolution; they did however allow the proletariat to recognise itself and assert itself as a class through the trade union and parliamentary struggle for real reforms and lasting improvements in its living conditions. From the moment when the capitalist system entered into decadence, the world communist revolution became a possibility and a necessity. The forms of the proletarian struggle were radically overturned; even on the immediate level, defensive struggles could no longer be expressed, either in form or content, through the means of struggle forged last century such as trade unionism and parliamentary representation for workers’ political organisations.
Brought into being by the revolutionary movements which put an end to the First World War, the Communist International was founded in 1919 around the recognition that the bourgeoisie was no longer a historically progressive class: “II – The period of the decadence of capitalism. After analysing the world economic situation, the Third Congress has noted with the greatest precision that capitalism, having completed its mission of developing the productive forces, has fallen into the most implacable contradiction with the needs not only of present historical evolution, but also with the most elementary requirements of human existence. This fundamental contradiction is both particularly reflected in the last imperialist war, and was further deepened by the war, which shook the whole system of production and circulation to its foundations. Capitalism has outlived itself, and has entered the phase where the destructive action of its unleashed forces ruins and paralyses the creative economic conquests already achieved by the proletariat in the chains of capitalist slavery (...) Capitalism today is going through nothing less than its death agony”.[5] [208] From then on, the understanding that the First World War marked the entry of the capitalist system into its decadent phase has been the common patrimony of the majority of the groups of the communist left who, thanks to this historical compass, have been able to remain on an intransigent and coherent class terrain. The ICC has only taken up and developed the heritage transmitted and enriched by the German and Dutch lefts in the 1930s and 40s and then by the Gauche Communiste de France in the 1940s and 50s.
Decisive class combats are on the horizon. It is therefore more than ever vital for the proletariat to re-appropriate its own conception of the world, which has been developed over nearly two centuries of workers’ struggles and theoretical elaboration by its political organisations. More than ever, the proletariat must understand that the present acceleration of barbarism and the uninterrupted increase in its exploitation are not a fact of nature, but are the result of the economic and social laws of capital which continue to rule the world even though they have been historically obsolete since the beginning of the 20th century. It is more vital than ever for the working class to understand that while the forms of struggle it learned in the 19th century (minimum programme of struggle for reforms, support for progressive fractions of the bourgeoisie etc) had a sense in the period of capitalism’s ascent when it could “tolerate” the existence of an organised proletariat within society, these same forms can only lead it into an impasse in the period of decadence. More than ever, it is vital for the proletariat to understand that the communist revolution is not an idle dream, a utopia, but a necessity and a possibility which have their scientific foundations in an understanding of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production.
The aim of this new series of articles on the theory of decadence will be to respond to all the objections raised against it. These objections are an obstacle in the way of the new revolutionary forces moving towards the positions of the communist left; they are also undermining political clarity among the groups of the revolutionary milieu.
From Marx to the communist left
In the first article in this series we will thus begin by reiterating – against those who claim that the concept and even the term decadence are absent from or are accorded no scientific value in the works of Marx and Engels – that this theory is nothing less than the core of historical materialism. We will show that this theoretical framework, as well as the term “decadence”, are indeed amply present throughout their work. Behind this critique or abandonment of the notion of decadence what is at stake is a rejection of the very core of marxism. It is perfectly understandable that the forces of the bourgeoisie should oppose the idea that their system is in decadence. The problem is that at the very time when it is vital to show the real dangers facing the working class and humanity, currents which claim to be marxist are rejecting the very tools supplied by the marxist method to grasp reality.[6] [209]
Contrary to what is generally asserted, the main discoveries in the work of Marx and Engels are not the existence of classes, or of the class struggle, or the labour theory of value, or surplus value. All these concepts had already been advanced by historians and economists at a time when the bourgeoisie was still a revolutionary class fighting against feudal resistance. The fundamentally new element in the work of Marx and Engels resides in their analysis of the historical character of the division into classes, of the dynamic underlying the succession of modes of production; this is what led them to understand the transitory nature of the capitalist mode of production and the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat as an intermediate phase towards a classless society. In other words, what constitutes the core of their discoveries is none other than historical materialism: “Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.” (Marx to J. Weydemeyer, March 5th, 1852, Collected Works, vol.39, p.62-5, our emphasis).
According to our critics, the notion of decadence is not at all marxist and is not even to be found in the work of Marx and Engels. A simple reading of the latter's main texts shows on the contrary that this notion is indeed at the very heart of historical materialism. To the point, indeed, that for Engels, in his Anti-Dühring[7] [210] written in 1877, the most essential thing that Fourier and historical materialism have in common, is none other than the notion of the ascendancy and decadence of a mode of production, which are valid for the whole of human history: “But Fourier is at his greatest in his conception of the history of society (...) Fourier, as we see, uses the dialectic method in the same masterly way as his contemporary, Hegel. Using these same dialectics, he argues against the talk about illimitable human perfectibility, that every historical phase has its period of ascent and also its period of descent, and he applies this observation to the future of the whole human race” (Anti-Dühring, 1877, Socialism I, Collected Works Vol.25, p.248, our emphasis).
It is perhaps in the passage from the Outline of a Critique of Political Economy, quoted in the opening section above, that Marx gives the clearest definition of what lies behind this notion of a phase of decadence. He identifies this phase as particular step in the life of a mode of production – “Beyond a certain point” – when the social relations of production become an obstacle for the development of the productive forces – “the relation of capital becomes a barrier to the development of the productive forces of labour”. Once economic development has reached this point, the persistence of these social relations of production – wage labour, serfdom, slavery – form a fundamental barrier to the development of the productive forces. This is the basic mechanism in the evolution of all modes of production: “Once this point has been reached, capital, ie wage labour, enters into the same relation to the development of social wealth and the productive forces as the guild system, serfdom and slavery did, and is, as a fetter, necessarily cast off”. Marx defines the characteristics of this very precisely “The growing discordance between the productive development of society and the relations of production hitherto characteristic of it, is expressed in acute contradictions, crises, convulsions”. This general theoretical definition of decadence would be used by Marx and Engels as an “operational scientific concept” in the concrete analysis of the evolution of modes of production.
Having devoted a good part of their energies to decoding the mechanisms and contradictions of capitalism, it was logical for Marx and Engels to make a substantial study of its birth within the entrails of feudalism. Thus in 1884 Engels produced a complement to his study The Peasant War in Germany, the aim of which was to provide the overall historical framework of the period in which the events he had analysed took place. He entitled this complement very explicitly “On the decline of feudalism and the emergence of national states”. Here are some highly significant extracts: “While the wild battles of the ruling feudal nobility filled the Middle Ages with their clamour, the quiet work of the oppressed classes had undermined the feudal system throughout Western Europe, had created conditions in which less and less room remained for the feudal lord (…) While the nobility became increasingly superfluous and an ever greater obstacle to development, the burghers of the towns became the class that embodied the further development of production and trade, of culture and of the social and political institutions.
All these advances in production and exchange were, in point of fact, by today’s standards, of a very limited nature. Production remained enthralled in the form of pure guild crafts, thus itself still retaining a feudal character; trade remained within the limits of European waters, and did not extend any further than the coastal towns of the Lavant, where the products of the Far East were acquired by exchange. But small scale and limited though the trades – and hence the trading burghers – remained, they were sufficient to overthrow feudal society, and at least they continued to move forward, whereas the nobility stagnated. (...) In the fifteenth century the feudal system was thus in utter decline throughout Western Europe (...) But everywhere – in the towns and in the country alike – there had been an increase in the elements among the population whose chief demand was to put an end to the constant, senseless warring, to the feuds between the feudal lords which made internal war permanent even when there was a foreign enemy on their native soil (...)
We have seen how the feudal nobility started to become superfluous in economic terms, indeed a hindrance, in the society of the later Middle Ages – how it already stood in the way, politically, of the development of the towns and the national state which was then only possible in a monarchist form. In spite of all this, it had been sustained by the fact that it had hitherto possessed a monopoly over the bearing of arms: without it no wars could be waged, no battles fought. This too was to change; the last step would be taken to make it clear to the feudal nobles that the period in which they had ruled society and the state was now over, that they were no longer of any use in their capacity as knights – not even on the battlefield” (Collected Works, Vol.26, p 556 – 562, our emphasis).
These long developments by Engels are particularly interesting in the sense that they take us back both to the process of the “decadence of feudalism” and at the same time to the “rise of the bourgeoisie” and the transition to capitalism. In a few phrases they announce the four main features of any period of decadence of a mode of production and of transition to another:
a) The slow and gradual emergence of a new revolutionary class which is the bearer of new social relations of production within the old declining society: “While the nobility became increasingly superfluous and an ever greater obstacle to development, the burghers of the towns became the class that embodied the further development of production and trade, of culture and of the scoail and political institutions”. The bourgeoisie represented the new, the nobility stood for the Ancien Regime; it was only once its economic power had been somewhat consolidated within the feudal mode of production that the bourgeoisie would feel strong enough to dispute power with the aristocracy. Let’s note in passing that this formally refutes the Bordigist version of history, a particularly deformed vision of historical materialism which postulates that each mode of production experiences one perpetually ascendant movement which only a brutal event (revolution? crisis?) suddenly drags to the ground, almost vertically. At the end of this “redemptive” catastrophe, a new social regime emerges from the bottom of the abyss: “the marxist vision can be represented as a series of branches, of curves ascending to the summit and then succeeded by a violent, sudden, almost vertical fall; and, at the end of this fall, a new social regime arises” (Bordiga, Rome meeting of 1951, published in Invariance n°4).[8] [211]
b) The dialectic between old and new at the level of the infrastructure: “All these advances in production and exchange were, in point of fact, by today’s standards, of a very limited nature. Production remained enthralled in the form of pure guild crafts, thus itself still retaining a feudal character; trade remained within the limits of European waters, and did not extend any further than the coastal towns of the Lavant, where the products of the Far east were acquired by exchange. But small scale and limited though the trades – and hence the trading burghers – remained, they were sufficient to overthrow feudal society, and at least they continued to move forward, whereas the nobility stagnated. (...) In the fifteenth century the feudal system was thus in utter decline throughout Western Europe”. However limited (“small scale”) the material progress made by the bourgeoisie, they were still enough to overturn a “stagnant” feudal society which was “thus in utter decline throughout Western Europe”, as Engels said. This also formally refutes another totally absurd, invented theory which holds that feudalism dies out because it was faced by a more effective mode of production which had, so to speak, outrun it in a race:
- “We have seen, in the preceding pages, that there are various ways a given mode of production can disappear (…) It can also be broken through from within by a rising form of production, to the point where the quantitative movement becomes a qualitative leap and the new form overturns the old one. This was the case with feudalism which gave birth to the capitalist mode of production” (Revue Internationale du Mouvement Communiste – RIMC);[9] [212]
- “Feudalism disappeared due to the success of the market economy. Unlike slavery, it did not disappear because of a lack of productivity. On the contrary: the birth and development of capitalist production was made possible by the increasing productivity of feudal agriculture, which made the mass of peasants superfluous and enabled them to become proletarians and create enough surplus value to feed the growing population of the towns. Capitalism replaced feudalism not because the productivity of the latter became stagnant, but because it was inferior to the productivity of capitalist production” (Internationalist Perspectives, “16 theses on the history and state of the capitalist economy”).[10] [213]
Marx, by contrast, speaks clearly about “the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free development of production” , about “feudal lordship and its revolting prerogatives”: “The industrial capitalists, these new potentates, had on their part not only to disgrace the guild masters of handicrafts, but also the feudal lords, the possessors of the sources of wealth. In this respect, their conquest of social power appears as the fruit of a victorious struggle both against feudal lordship and its revolting prerogatives, and against the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free development of production and the free exploitation of man by man” (Capital Vol. 1, Abstract of Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation. Lawrence and Wishart edition, p.669).
The analysis made by the founders of historical materialism, amply confirmed on the empirical level by historical studies,[11] [214] is diametrically opposite to the ramblings of those who reject the theory of decadence. The analysis of the decadence of feudalism and the transition to capitalism was clearly enunciated in the Communist Manifesto when Marx tells us that “modern bourgeois society (…) has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society”; that world trade and colonial markets have given “an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.
The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants of the new markets… We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organization of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder” (Collected Works, Vol. 6, p.485 – 489). For those who know how to read, Marx is very clear: he talks about a “tottering feudal society”. Why was feudalism in decadence? Because “the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters”. It is within this feudal society in ruin that the transition to capitalism was to begin “modern bourgeois society… has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society”. Marx again developed this analysis in the Critique of Political Economy: “Only in the period of the decline and fall of the feudal system, but where it still struggles internally – as in England in the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centuries – is there a golden age for labour in the process of becoming emancipated”.[12] [215] In order to characterise feudal decadence, which went from the beginning of the 14th century to the 18th century, Marx and Engels used numerous terms which admit of no ambiguity to anyone with a minimum of political honesty: “the feudal system was thus in utter decline throughout Western Europe”, “the nobility stagnated”, “the ruins of feudal society”, “tottering feudal society”, “the feudal relations of property (...) became so many fetters”, “the guilds and the fetters they laid on the free development of production”.[13] [216]
c) The development of conflicts between different fractions of the ruling class: “While the wild battles of the ruling feudal nobility filled the Middle Ages with their clamour (...) the constant, senseless warring, (…) the feuds between the feudal lords which made internal war permanent even when there was a foreign enemy on their native soil”. What it could no longer procure through its economic and political domination over the peasantry, the feudal nobility tried to get hold of through violence. Confronted with growing difficulties in extracting enough surplus labour through feudal rents, the nobility began to tear itself apart in endless conflicts which had no other consequences than to ruin themselves and to ruin society as a whole. The Hundred Years War, which halved Europe's population, and the incessant monarchical wars, are the most striking examples.
d) The development of struggles by the exploited class: “the quiet work of the oppressed classes had undermined the feudal system throughout Western Europe, had created conditions in which less and less room remained for the feudal lord”. In the domain of social relations, the decadence of a mode of production takes the form of a quantitative and qualitative development of struggles between antagonistic classes: the struggle of the exploited class, which feels its misery all the more when exploitation is pushed to the limit by a desperate ruling class; struggles of the class which is the bearer of the new society and which comes up against the forces of the old social order (in past societies, this was always a new exploiting class; under capitalism, the proletariat is both the exploited class and the revolutionary class).
These long quotes about the end of the feudal mode of production and the transition to capitalism already fully demonstrate that the concept of decadence was not only theoretically defined by Marx and Engels, but that it was an operational scientific concept which they used to uncover the dynamic of the succession of modes of production which they had studied. It was thus perfectly logical for them to use this concept when they looked at primitive, Asiatic or ancient societies. Thus when they analysed the evolution of the slave mode of production, Max and Engels highlighted, in The German Ideology (1845-46) the general characteristics of decadence in this system: “The last centuries of the declining Roman Empire and its conquest by the barbarians destroyed a number of productive forces; agriculture had declined, industry had decayed for want of a market, trade had died out or been violently interrupted, the rural and urban population had decreased.” (The German Ideology, Part I: Feuerbach, Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook. Collected Works Vol.5 ,p.34, our emphasis). Similarly, in the analysis of primitive societies, we find the very core of Marx and Engels’ definition of the decadence of a mode of production: “The history of the decline of primitive communities …has still to be written. All we have so far are some rather meagre outlines… (secondly), the causes of their decline stem from economic facts which prevented them from passing a certain stage of development.” (First Draft of Letter To Vera Zasulich, 1881, Collected Works, Vol.24, p.358-359).
Finally, with the decadence of the Asiatic mode of production,[14] [217] this is what Marx says in Capital when he compares the stagnation of Asiatic societies with the transition to capitalism in Europe: “Usury has a revolutionary effect in all pre-capitalist modes of production only in so far as it destroys and dissolves those forms of property on whose solid foundation and continual reproduction in the same form the political organization is based. Under Asian forms, usury can continue a long time, without producing anything more than economic decay and political corruption. Only where and when the other prerequisites of capitalist production are present does usury become one of the means assisting in establishment of the new mode of production by ruining the feudal lord and small-scale producer, on the one hand, and centralizing the conditions of labour into capital, on the other.” (Capital Vol. III Part V, Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest-Bearing Capital, Chapter 36. Pre-Capitalist Relationships. Lawrence and Wishart edition, p.597).
There are those, who know perfectly well that Marx and Engels made abundant use of the concept of decadence for the modes of production that preceded capitalism, and yet who claim that “Marx only gave capitalism a progressive definition in the historic phase in which it eliminated the economic world of feudalism, engendering a vigorous period of development of the productive forces which had been inhibited by the previous economic form; but he did not go any further forward in a definition of decadence except for a one-off in his famous introduction to the Critique of Political Economy” (Prometeo n°8, December 2003). Nothing could be less true! Throughout their lives Marx and Engels analysed the evolution of capitalism and constantly tried to determine the criteria for the moment of its entry into decadence.
Thus, as early as the Communist Manifesto, they thought that capitalism had accomplished its historic mission and that the time was ripe for the passage to communism: “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. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them (…) Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society”.[15] [218]
We know that Marx and Engels later recognised that their diagnosis had been premature. Thus at the end of 1850 Marx wrote: “While this general prosperity lasts, enabling the productive forces of bourgeois society to develop to the full extent possible within the bourgeois system, there can be no question of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible at a time when two factors come into conflict: the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production (...) A new revolution is only possible as a result of a new crisis; but it will come, just as surely as the crisis itself” (Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May-October 1850).
And in a very interesting letter to Engels, dated 8th October 1858, Marx went into the qualitative criteria for determining the passage to the phase of the decadence, ie “the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market”. In his opinion, these two criteria had been met for Europe – in 1858 he thought that the time for socialist revolution was ripe on the continent – but not yet for the rest of the globe where he still considered capitalism to be in its ascendant phase: “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. Since the world is round, the colonisation of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan would seem to have completed this process. For us, the difficult question is this: on the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character. Will it not necessarily be crushed in this little corner of the earth, since the movement of bourgeois society is still, in the ascendant over a far greater area?” (Correspondence, Marx To Engels in Manchester, 8 October 1858).
In Capital, Marx said that capitalism “thus demonstrates again that it is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived” (Capital Vol. 3, Part 3: The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, Chapter 15: Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law). And again in 1881, in the second draft of his letter to Vera Zasulitch, Marx argues that capitalism had entered its decadent phase in the West: “the capitalist system is past its prime in the West, approaching the time when it will be no more than a regressive social regime” (cited in Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, RKP, p103). Again, for those who know how to read and have a basic degree of political honesty, the terms Marx uses to speak about the decadence of capitalism are unambiguous: period of senility, regressive social system, fetter on the development of the productive forces, system which has “more and more outlived” itself, etc.
Finally, Engels concluded this inquiry in 1895: “History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development on the Continent at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the removal of capitalist production; it has proved this by the economic revolution which, since 1848, has seized the whole of the Continent (…) this only proves, once and for all, how impossible it was in 1848 to win social reconstruction by a simple surprise attack” (The Class Struggles In France, Introduction by Engels, 1895). In the words of Marx and Engels themselves, that “proves once and for all” the stupidity of the endless pages produced by parasitic elements about the possibility of the communist revolution from 1848 onwards: “We have on several occasions defended the thesis that communism has been possible since 1848” (Robin Goodfellow, ‘Communism as a historic necessity’, 1/2/04[16] [219]). Stupidities unfortunately shared to a large extent by the Bordigists of the PCI, who in a very bad polemic reproach us for affirming, along with Marx and Engels, that “the conditions for the overthrow of a social form do not exist at the moment of its apogee”, claiming that this “throws into the dustbin a century of the existence and struggle of the proletariat and its party (…) all of a sudden neither the birth of communist theory, nor the meaning and lessons or the revolutions of the 19th century, can be understood” (PCI pamphlet n°29, Le Courant Communiste Internationale: a contre-courant du marxisme et de la lutte de classe).
Why is this argument totally inept? Because at the moment that Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, there were indeed periodic slow-downs in growth, taking the form of cyclical crises, and in examining these crises, they were able to analyses all the expressions of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism. But these “revolts of the productive forces against modern relations of production” were simply youthful revolts. The outcome of these regular explosions was the strengthening of the system which, in a vigorous phase of growth, was able to rid itself of its childhood clothes and the last feudal obstacles in its path. In 1850, only 10% of the world population was integrated into capitalist social relations. The system of wage labour had its whole future in front of it. Marx and Engels had the brilliant perspicacity to see in capitalism’s crises of growth the essence of all its crises and thus to predict a future of profound convulsions. If they were able to do this, it is because, from its birth, a social form carries within itself in germ all the contradictions which will lead to its demise. But as long as these contradictions had not developed to the point where they became a permanent barrier to growth, they constituted the very motor of this growth. The sudden slow-downs in the capitalist economy in the 19th century were not at all like these permanent and growing barriers. Thus, taking forward Marx’s intuition about when capitalism would enter into decadence – with “the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market” – Rosa Luxemburg was able to draw out the dynamic and the moment: “we have behind us the, 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 (…) If the world market has now more or less filled out, and can no longer be enlarged by sudden extensions; and if, at the same time, the productivity of labour strides relentlessly forward, then in more or less time the periodic conflict of the forces of production with the limits of exchange will begin, and will repeat itself more sharply and more stormily” (Social Reform or Revolution, 1899; the second part of the quote is from the 1908 edition).
We saw above that Marx and Engels made abundant use of the notion of decadence in their main writings on historical materialism and the critique of political economy (the German Ideology, Communist Manifesto, Anti-Dühring, Critique of Political Economy, the post-face to The Peasant War in Germany), but also in a number of letters and prefaces. What about the book that the IBRP considers to be Marx’s masterpiece? They claim that the term decadence “never appears in the three volumes of Capital”.[17] [220] Apparently the IBRP has not read Capital very well because in all the parts where Marx deals either with the birth or the end of capitalism, the notion of decadence is indeed present!
Thus in the pages of Capital Marx confirms his analysis of the decadence of feudalism and within the latter, the transition to capitalism: “The economic structure of capitalistic society has grown out of the economic structure of feudal society. The dissolution of the latter set free the elements of the former (…) Although we come across the first beginnings of capitalist production as early as the 14th or 15th century, sporadically, in certain towns of the Mediterranean, the capitalistic era dates from the 16th century. Wherever it appears, the abolition of serfdom has been long effected, and the highest development of the Middle Ages, the existence of sovereign towns, has long been on the wane (...) The prelude of the revolution that laid the foundation of the capitalist mode of production, was played in the last third of the 15th, and the first decade of the 16th century” (Capital, Vol 1, Lawrence and Wishart edition, p. 668-9 and 672). Similarly, when Marx looks at capitalism’s insurmountable contradictions and when he envisages its replacement by communism, he indeed talks of “capitalism becoming senile”: "Here the capitalist mode of production is beset with another contradiction Its historical mission is unconstrained development in geometrical progression of the productivity of human labour. It goes back on its mission whenever, as here, it checks the development of productivity. It thus demonstrates again that it is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived" (Marx, Capital, Vol III, Part III, Chapter 15, Exposition of the internal contradictions of the law, our emphasis).[18] [221]
Let us note in passing that Marx envisages the period of capitalism’s senility as a phase where it has more and more “outlived itself”, where it becomes an obstacle to the development of productivity. This once again gives the lie to another theory invented wholesale by the group Internationalist Perspectives, according to which the decadence of capitalism (but also of feudalism, see above) is characterised by a full development of the productive forces and of the productivity of labour![19] [222]
Finally, in another passage from Capital, Marx recalls the general process of the succession of historical modes of production: “But each specific historical form of this process further develops its material foundations and social forms. Whenever a certain stage of maturity has been reached, the specific historical form is discarded and makes way for a higher one. The moment of arrival of such a crisis is disclosed by the depth and breadth attained by the contradictions and antagonisms between the distribution relations, and thus the specific historical form of their corresponding production relations, on the one hand, and the productive forces, the production powers and the development of their agencies, on the other hand. A conflict then ensues between the material development of production and its social form” (Marx, Capital, Vol III, Part VI, Chapter 51 “Distribution Relations and Production Relations”).[20] [223]
Here he takes up the terminology he used in the Critique of Political Economy which we will examine below. But first let us just point out that what is true for Capital is also true for the various preparatory works for it, where the notion of decadence is amply present.[21] [224] The best advice we can give the IBRP is to go back to school and learn how to read.
This is how Marx summarises the main results of his research in 1859 in the Preface to the Critique of Political Economy: “The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies, can be summarised as follows.
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.
The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or – what is but a legal expression for the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.
Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production.
No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production — antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonisms, but of one arising form the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of society to a close” (our emphasis).
Our critics have the habitual dishonesty of avoiding the question of decadence by systematically transforming and reinterpreting the writings of Marx and Engels. This is especially the case with this extract from the Critique of Political Economy, which they claim – wrongly as we have already seen to be the only place where Marx talks about decadence! Thus for the IBRP, Marx, in this passage, is talking, not about two clearly distinct phases in the historical evolution of the capitalist mode of production, but about the recurrent phenomenon of the economic crisis: “It’s the same when the defenders of this analysis [of decadence -ed] are pushed to cite the other phrase by Marx, according to which, at a certain level of the development of capitalism, the productive forces enter into contradiction with the relations of production, thus developing the process of decadence. The fact is that the expression in question relates to the phenomenon of the general crisis and the break in the relationship between the economic structure and the ideological superstructures which can generate class episodes heading in a revolutionary direction, and not to the question under discussion” Prometeo n°8, December 2003).
In itself, the quote from Marx leaves no room for ambiguity. It is clear, limpid, and follows the same logic as all the other extracts referred to in this article. From his letter to J Wedemeyer, we know how much Marx saw historical materialism as his real theoretical contribution, and when he summarises “the general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies”, he is talking precisely about the evolution of modes of production, their dynamics and contradictions articulated around the dialectical relation between the social relations of production and the productive forces. In a few phrases, Marx sums up the whole arc of human evolution: “In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production (…) This social formation brings, therefore, the prehistory of society to a close”. Nowhere, contrary to the IBRP’s claims, does Marx invoke recurrent cycles of crises, periodic collisions between the productive forces and the social relations of production, or periods of changes in the rate of profit; Marx is working on another scale, on the grand scale of the evolution of modes of production, of historical “epochs”. In this extract, like all the others we have cited, Marx clearly defines two broad phases in the historical evolution of a mode of production: an ascendant phase where the social relations of production push forward and facilitate the development of the productive forces, and a decadent phases in which “from forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters”. Marx makes it clear that this change takes place at a precise moment – “at a certain stage of their development” and does not speak at all about “recurrent and ever-increasing collisions” as in the IBRP’s improper interpretation. Furthermore, on several occasions in Capital Marx uses formulae that are identical to those in the Critique of Political Economy; and when he refers to the historically limited character of capitalism, he talks about two distinct phases in its evolution: “capitalist production meets in the development of its productive forces a barrier which has nothing to do with the production of wealth as such; and this peculiar barrier testifies to the limitations and to the merely historical, transitory character of the capitalist mode of production; testifies that for the production of wealth, it is not an absolute mode, moreover, that at a certain stage it rather conflicts with its further development” (Capital, Vol III, Part III, Chapter 15, op.cit.), or again when he argues that capitalism “demonstrates again that it is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived” (op cit).
We can forgive the IBRP for having some trouble in understanding Marx’s Critique of Political Economy – anyone can make a mistake. But when errors are repeated, even when it comes to quotes from what the IBRP sees as its Bible (Capital), this is more than a one-off failing.
As for our parasitic critics, they like to go in for long syntactical dissections. For RIMC, “the ICC takes the trouble to underline the phrase ‘So begins’, no doubt in order to put the accent, like the good gradualists they are, on the progressive character of the movement which it thinks it has identified. But we could just as well underline the words ‘social revolution’, which signifies precisely the opposite, since a revolution is the violent overturning of the existing order, in other words, a brutal and qualitative break in the ordering of things and events” (RIMC, ‘Dialectique’, op cit). Again, for anyone who can read, Marx talks about the opening of an “epoch of social revolution” (an “epoch” is a whole period in which a new order of things is established) and he argues that this change can last some time since he tells us that “With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed”. Farewell to the “sudden, violent, almost vertical fall, and, in the end, a new social regime arises”, Bordiga’s phrase repeated by the RIMC! Unlike the latter, Marx does not confuse a “change in the economic foundations” and a political revolution. The first slowly unfolds within the old society; the second is briefer, more circumscribed in time, although it can also stretch out for some time since the overthrow of the political power of an old ruling class by a new ruling class usually takes place after numerous aborted attempts, which may include temporary restorations after short-lived victories.
As far as the parasitic grouplets are concerned, their essential function is to cloud political clarity, to set Marx against the communist left and thus to create a barrier between the new searching elements and the revolutionary groups. With them things are clear. We only have to show how central was the theory of decadence in the work of Marx and Engels to annihilate all their claims that this is “a theory which deviates totally from the communist programme (…) such a method of analysis has nothing to do with communist theory (…) from the point of view of historical materialism the concept of decadence has no coherence. It is not part of the theoretical arsenal of the communist programme. As such it has to be totally rejected (…) No doubt the ICC will use this quote (from Marx’s first draft letter to Vera Zasulitch) since it uses the word ‘decadence’ twice, which is rare in Marx, for whom the term had no scientific value”. (RIMC, ‘Dialectique’, op cit). Such assertions are totally absurd. Motivated by a parasitic, anti-ICC concern, the only thing these allegations have in common is to exclude the concept of decadence from the work of Marx and Engels. Thus for Aufheben,[22] [225] “the theory of capitalist decline appeared for the first time in the Second International”, whereas for the RIMC (‘Dialectique’) it was born after the First World War: “the goal of this work is to make a global and definitive critique of the concept of ‘decadence’ which, as one of its major deviations born after the first post-war period, poisons communist theory and because of its obviously ideological character hinders any scientific work aimed at restoring communist theory”. Finally, for Internationalist Perspectives (“Towards a new theory of the decadence of capitalism”), Trotsky was the inventor of this concept: “the concept of the decadence of capitalism arose in the Third International, where it was developed in particular by Trotsky…”. Who can understand this? If there is one thing that must be obvious by now to the reader who has looked at the extracts from Marx and Engels used in this article, it is that the notion of decadence has its real origins precisely there, in their historical materialist method. Not only is this notion right at the heart of historical materialism and is defined very precisely at the theoretical and conceptual level, but it is also used as an operational scientific tool in the concrete analysis of the evolution of different modes of production. And if so many organisations of the workers’ movement have developed the notion of decadence, as the writings of the parasitic groups recognise despite themselves, it is simply because this notion is at the heart of marxism!
The Bordigists of the PCI have never accepted the analysis of decadence developed by the Italian Communist Left in exile between 1928 and 1945,[23] [226] despite their claim of historical continuity with it. Bordigism’s act of birth in 1952 was marked by the rejection of the concept;[24] [227] while Battaglia Comunista[25] [228] maintained the principal acquisitions of the Italian left on this point, the elements around Bordiga moved away from them when they founded the Parti Communiste Internationale. Despite, this major theoretical regression, the PCI has nevertheless always remained in the internationalist camp of the communist left. It has always been rooted in historical materialism and in fact, whatever its level of awareness, has always defended the broad lines of the analysis of decadence! To prove this, we need only cite its own basic positions on the back of all its publications: “Imperialist world wars show that capitalism’s crisis of disintegration is inevitable owing to the fact that it has entered definitively into the period in which its expansion no longer historically exalts the growth of the productive forces, but ties their accumulation to repeated and growing destructions” (basically, the ICC says nothing different!).[26] [229] We can cite a number of passages from their own texts where the very notion of the decadence of capitalism is recognised implicitly or explicitly: “while we insist on the cyclical nature of the crises and catastrophes of world capitalism, that in no way affects the general definition of its present stage, a stage of decadence in which ‘the objective premises for the proletarian revolution are not only ripe, but overripe’ as Trotsky put it” (Programme Communiste no. 81). And yet today, in its pamphlet criticising our positions, it tries over several pages to make a (very bad) polemic against the concept of decadence, without realising that it is once again contradicting itself: “because since 1914 the revolution and only the revolution has everywhere and always been on the agenda, i.e that the objective conditions are present everywhere, it is impossible to explain the absence of this revolution except by resorting to subjective factors: what’s lacking for the revolution to break out is only the consciousness of the proletariat. This is a deformed echo of the false positions of the great Trotsky at the end the 1930s. Trotsky also thought that the productive forces had reached the maximum possible under the capitalist regime and that consequently the objective conditions for the revolution were ripe (and that they had even begun to be ‘over-ripe’): the only obstacle was therefore to be found at the level of the subjective conditions” (PCI pamphlet no. 29). The mysteries of invariance!
As for Battaglia Comunista, it has to be said, despite its claims of continuity with the positions of the Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left,[27] [230] that it is heading back to its Bordigist roots. Having rejected the positions of Bordiga in 1952 and having re-appropriated certain lessons from the Italian left in exile, today its explicit abandonment of the theory of decadence, developed precisely by the Fraction,[28] [231] takes Battaglia back to the sides of the Parti Communiste Internationale. It’s a return to sources, since both in the founding platform of 1946 and the platform of 1952, the notion of decadence is absent. The political vagueness of these two programmatic documents when it comes to understanding the period opened by the First World War has always been the matrix of the weaknesses and oscillations of Battaglia Comunista in the defence of class positions.
Finally, this examination has also allowed us to see that the writings of the founding fathers of marxism are very far from the different versions of historical materialism defended by all our critics. We are waiting for them to demonstrate, with the aid of the writings of Marx and Engels as we have done in this article with the concept of decadence, the validity of their own vision of the succession of modes of production! In the meantime, their rather grandiose pretensions to being experts in marxism make us smile a bit; knowing the works of Marx and Engels, we are assured of never losing our sense of humour.
For page after page the IFICC[29] [232] claims that it is fighting against a supposed degeneration of our organisation, focusing on our analysis of the balance of class forces, our orientation for intervention in the class struggle, our theory of the decomposition of capitalism, our attitude towards the regroupment of revolutionaries, our internal functioning, etc. It argues that the ICC is in its death agony and that now the IBRP represents the pole of clarification and regroupment: “With the opening of the course towards opportunism, sectarianism and defeatism by the official ICC, the IBRP is now at the centre of the dynamic towards the construction of the party”. This declaration of love is even accompanied by a pure and simple political alignment on the positions of the IBRP: “We are conscious that divergences exist between this organisation and ourselves, particular, on questions of methods of analysis more than on political positions” (Bulletin n°23). With a stroke of the pen, the IFICC, valiant defender of the orthodoxy of the ICC’s platform, eliminates all the important political divergences between the ICC and the IBRP. But there’s something even more significant. At a time when something which is at the very heart of the ICC platform – the question of decadence – has for two years been more or less openly put into question by the IBRP,[30] [233] and has been subjected to a very dishonest critique by the PCI (Programme Communiste), the IFICC finds nothing better to do than keep quiet in all languages and even to regret that we are taking up the defence of the analytical framework of decadence against the deviations of the PCI and the IBRP: “This is how they put into question the proletarian character of this organisation and of the IBRP by rejecting both of them to the margins of the proletarian camp (see International Review n°115)” (presentation to the IFICC Bulletin n°22)!
So far, the IFICC has managed to write no less than four articles on the subject of the decadence of capitalism (Bulletin n°19 ,20, 22 and 24). These articles are pompously entitled ‘Debate within the proletarian camp’, but the reader will not find the slightest reference to the IBRP’s abandonment of the concept of decadence! He will however find the habitual diatribe against our organisation claiming in the most ridiculous way that we are the ones abandoning the theory of decadence! Not a word on the IBRP which is explicitly putting the theory of decadence into question, and, on the other hand, bitter attacks on the ICC which intransigently defends this concept!
Four months after the publication by the IBRP of a new and long article explaining why it is putting into question the theory of decadence as elaborated by the communist left (Prometeo n°8, December 2003), the IFICC, in the presentation to its Bulletin n°24, April 2004, devotes a single line to applauding this “fundamental contribution”: “We salute the work of the comrades of the PCInt who have shown their concern to clarify the question. No doubt we will have occasion to come back to this”. The article by the IBRP is obviously not seen for what it is – a serious retreat on the programmatic level – but is played up as a contribution to the combat against our supposed political deviations: “the crisis into which the ICC is more and more sinking today is pushing the groups of the proletarian camp to go back over this question of decadence; this expresses their involvement in the combat against the opportunist slide of a group of the proletarian political milieu, their participation in a struggle to save what can be saved from the disaster of the opportunist slide of our organisation. We salute this effort…”
When flattery takes the place of a political line, it’s no longer just opportunism, it’s arse-licking. To cover up their behaviour as thugs and informers with a pseudo-political varnish, the IFICC rapidly ‘discovered’ important differences with the ICC, notably by ridding itself of our analysis of the decomposition of capitalism.[31] [234] The IFICC has had to eliminate what is politically most “unpopular” among the groups of the revolutionary milieu in order to approach them and get recognised by them. Thus it bends the knee to those it flatters. But they don’t seem to be taking the bait: “While we don’t exclude the possibility that individuals could come out of the ICC and join our ranks, it is quite impossible for there to arise from within it groups or fractions which, in the debate with their own organisation, arrive en bloc at positions which converge with ours (…) Such a result could only come from a complete questioning, or rather, a break with the practical, political and general programmatic positions of the ICC and not just their modification or improvement” (ICP pamphlet n°29). We couldn’t put it better ourselves! Having rid itself of the theory of decomposition, the IFICC is ready to reduce all the political divergences between the ICC and the IBRP to a few minor questions of “method of analysis”; tomorrow it will be quite prepared to dump the theory of decadence in order to seduce groups hostile to these two concepts, and thus to continue its dirty and thoroughly dishonest work of trying to isolate the ICC from the rest of the groups of the proletarian political milieu.
C. Mcl.
[1] [235] See the preceding series of 8 articles entitled ‘Understanding the decadence of capitalism’ in International Review n°48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 58 and 60.
[2] [236] See our articles in International Review n°77 and 78 on the rejection of the theory of decadence and war by the International Communist Party /Programme Communiste, and the articles in International Review n°79, 82, 83 and 86 on the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party and war, the historic crisis of capitalism and globalisation.
[3] [237] See International Review n°105 and 105 in response to a letter from Australia and n°111 and 112 in response to new revolutionary elements emerging in Russia
[4] [238] Properly speaking from the 16th century up to the bourgeois revolutions in the context of feudal decadence, and from the bourgeois revolutions to 1914 in the context of the ascendant phase of capitalism.
[5] [239] Manifestes, thèses, et résolutions des quatre premiers congrès mondiaux de l'Internationale Communiste 1919-23, Maspero, our translation from the French, our emphasis.
[6] [240] In the article “The economic crisis shows the bankruptcy of capitalist social relations of production” in International Review n°115, we already had occasion to show that the refusal of the IBRP and the PCI (Programme Communiste) to base themselves on his framework of analysis is at the root of their tendency to slide towards leftism and alternative worldism and away from the marxist analysis of the crisis and the social position of the working class.
[7] [241] To those who like to set Marx and against Engels, note the following: “I must note in passing that inasmuch as the mode of outlook expounded in this book was founded and developed in the far greater measure by Marx, and only to an insignificant degree by myself, it was self-understood between us that this exposition of mine should not be issued without his knowledge. I read the whole manuscript to him before it was printed, and the tenth chapter of the part on economics (“From Kritische Geschicte”) was written by Marx but unfortunately had to be shortened somewhat by me for purely external reasons”. (Preface by Engels, to the second edition, 23rd September 1885, Collected Works, Vol. 25, p.9).
[8] [242] For a critique of the Bordigist conception of historical evolution, see our article in International Review n°54, pp 14-19).
[9] [243] “Dialectique des forces productives et des rapports de production dans la theorie communiste” published in the Revue Internationale du Mouvement Commmuniste, written jointly by Communisme ou Civilisation, Communismo L’Union Proletarien and available at the following address: membres.lycos.fr/rgood/formprod.htm
[10] [244]users.skynet.be/ippi/4discus1tex.htm
[11] [245] See the interesting book by Guy Bois, La grande depression médiévale, XIVe et XV siècle, PUF.
[12] [246] Grundrisse, “Forms which precede capitalist production”. See www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch09.htm#iiie2 [247]
[13] [248] Simply recalling the analyses of Marx and Engels is enough to reply to the limitless historical stupidities of parasitic groups like Internationalist Perspectives, Robin Goodfellow (ex-Communisme ou Civilisation and RIMC) etc, who end up affirming the exact opposite of the founders of historical materialism and of undeniable historical facts. We will however take the opportunity to come back in more detail to their meanderings in future articles because, unfortunately, they can have a negative influence on young elements who are not solidly rooted in marxist positions.
[14] [249] This type of mode of production was identified by Marx in Asia, but it was not at all limited to this geographical region. Historically, it corresponds to the megalithic or Egyptian societies, etc, going back to 4000 years BC, the culmination of a slow process of society dividing into classes. The social differentiation which developed with the appearance of an economic surplus and the emergence of material wealth led to a political power in the form of a royal state. Slavery could exist within it, even to a considerable degree (servants, labourers on great public works, etc), but it only rarely dominated agricultural production; it was not yet the dominant form of production. Marx gave it a clear definition in Capital: “Should the direct producers not be confronted by a private landowner, but rather, as in Asia, under direct subordination to a state which stands over them as their landlord and simultaneously as sovereign, then rent and taxes coincide, or rather, there exists no tax which differs from this form of ground-rent. Under such circumstances, there need exist no stronger political or economic pressure than that common to all subjection to that state. The state is then the supreme lord. Sovereignty here consists in the ownership of land concentrated on a national scale” (Vol III, Part VI, “Genesis of Capitalist Ground-Rent”). All these societies disappeared between 1000 and 500 BC. Their decadence was manifested in recurrent peasant revolts, in a gigantic development of unproductive state expenditure and in incessant wars between states trying through plunder to find a solution to internal blockages of production. Endless political conflicts and internecine rivalries within the ruling caste exhausted society’s resources, and the geographical limits to the expansion of empires showed that the maximum degree of development compatible with the relations of production had been reached.
[15] [250] These same disgruntled characters, in order to limit the significance of this sentence from the Manifesto, like to argue that this extract refers not to the general process of the passage from one mode of production to another but to the periodic return of conjunctural crises of overproduction that open up the possibility of a revolutionary outcome. Nothing could be further from the truth; the context of the extract is unambiguous, coming just after Marx has recalled the historic process of the transition between feudalism and capitalism. Furthermore, the whole argument distorts the objectives of the Manifesto, which was entirely devoted to showing the transitory character of modes of production and thus of capitalism; it did not seek to provide a detailed examination of the functioning of capitalism and its periodic crises, as would be the case with Capital later on.
[16] [251] Or again, the theory of decadence takes “the whole of communist theory to the realm of ideology and utopia since it would be posed outside any material base [in the ascendant phase – ed]. Humanity does not set itself problems which it cannot resolve practically. In these conditions, why lay claim to the positions of Marx and Engels? We would have to make the same criticism of them that they made of the utopian socialists. Scientific socialism would not be a break with utopian socialism but a new episode within the latter” (Robin Goodfellow, members.lycos.fr/resdint).
[17] [252] “What role then does the concept of decadence play in terms of the militant critique of political economy, ie 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. It is not through the concept of decadence that one can explain the mechanics of the crisis…” (“Comments on the Latest Crisis of the ICC”, Internationalist Communist n°21, p.23)
[19] [255] “Finally, the propensity of capital to increase productivity, and thereby to develop the productive forces, does not decrease in its decadent phase (...) The existence of capitalism in its decadent phase, tied to the production of surplus value extracted from living capital but faced with the fact that the mass of surplus value tends to diminish as the level of surplus labour increases, forces it to accelerate the development of the productive forces at an increasingly frenetic pace” (Perspective Internationaliste, "Valeur, décadence et technologie, 12 thèses", users.skynet.be/ippi/3thdecad.htm, our translation).
[21] [258] "The relations of domination and slavery (...) constitute a necessary ferment for the development and decline of all the original relations of property and production, just as they express their limited nature. For all that, they are reproduced in capital – in a mediated form – and they thus also constitute a ferment for its dissolution and are the emblem of its own limited nature” (Grundrisse, Editions Sociales, 1980, tome I : 438, our translation from the French). Later on, Marx writes: "From an ideal point of view, the dissolution of a given form of consciousness should be enough to kill an entire epoch. From a real point of view, this limit on consciousness corresponds to a given degree of the development of the material productive forces and therefore of wealth. In reality, the development did not take place on the old basis, it was the basis itself that developed. The maximum development of this basis itself (...) is the point where it has itself been elaborated to take the form in which it is compatible with the maximum development of the productive forces, and therefore also with the richest development of the individual. Once this point has been reached, further development appears as a decline and the new development begins on a new basis" (Grundrisse, Editions Sociales, 1980, tome II : 33, our translation from the French). Then again, in 1857, in the Grundrisse Marx speaks of the historical evolution of different modes of production and their ability to understand and criticise themselves in these terms: "The so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only rarely and only under quite specific conditions able to criticize itself—leaving aside, of course, the historical periods which appear to themselves as times of decadence—it always conceives them one-sidedly" (“The method of political economy [259]”).
[22] [260] “On decadence: theory of decline or decline of theory” is a text by the British group Aufheben.
[23] [261] See our book The Italian Communist Left.
[24] [262] Read Bordiga’s critical reflections on the theory of decadence, written in 1951: ‘La doctrine du diable au corps’, republished in le Proletaire no. 464 (the PCI’s paper in France); also ‘Le renversement de la praxis dans la theorie marxiste’, republished in Programme Communiste no. 56 (the PCI’s theoretical review in French), as well as the proceedings of the 1951 Rome meeting published in Invariance no. 4
[25] [263] Battaglia Comunista, along with the Communist Workers’ Organisation, is one of the founding organisations of the IBRP.
[26] [264] In a recent pamphlet, entirely devoted to the critique of our positions (‘le Courant Communiste Internationale: a contre courant du marxisme et de la lutte de classe’), the PCI, carried away by its own prose, contradicts its own basic positions by arguing that “the ICC sees a whole series of phenomena such as the necessity for capital to periodically destroy itself as a condition for a new phase of accumulation…for the ICC these phenomena are supposedly new and are interpreted as the manifestations of decadence…and not as the expression of the development and strengthening of the capitalist mode of production “ (page 8). The PCI should tell us yes or no, as its basic statement of positions would seem to indicate, whether “imperialist world wars show that capitalism’s crisis of disintegration is inevitable owing to the fact that it has entered definitively into the period in which its expansion no longer historically exalts the growth of the productive forces, but ties their accumulation to repeated and growing destructions” - or whether, as it argues in its pamphlet “the necessity for capital to periodically destroy itself” is not a “manifestation of decadence” but “the expression of the development and strengthening of the capitalist mode of production”! Apparently programmatic invariance depends on what you happen to be saying at one moment or another!
[27] [265] “In conclusion, while the political émigrés, those who took on the entire work of the Left Fraction, did not take the initiative to form the Internationalist Communist Party in 1943, the party was founded on the bases which the Fraction defended from 1927 until the war” (introduction to the political platform of the Internationalist Communist Party, publications of the International Communist Left, 1946)
[28] [266] “The historical stakes under decadent capitalism. Since the opening of the imperialist phase of capitalism at the beginning of the present century, evolution has oscillated between imperialist war and proletarian revolution. In the epoch of the growth of capitalism, wars cleared the way for the expansion of the productive forces through destroying obsolete relations of production. In the phase of capitalist decadence, wars have no other function than to carry out the destruction of an excess of wealth…” (Resolution on the constitution of the International Bureau of the Fractions of the Communist Left, Octobre no. 1, February 1938); “the 1914-18 war marked the final end of the phase of expansion of the capitalist regime…In the ultimate phase of capitalism, the phase of decline, it’s the fundamental stakes of the class struggle which determines historical evolution” (Manifesto of the International Bureau of the Fractions of the Communist Left, Octobre no. 3, April 1938).
[29] [267] A so-called “Internal Fraction” of our organisation which regroups a few ex-members whom we had to expel because they behaved like informers (having previously stolen money and material and slandered our organisation). See “The police-like methods of the IFICC” on our website.
[30] [268] We responded as early as October 2002 to the appearance of the first indications that the IBRP was abandoning the notion of decadence (cf International Review nº111). A year later we made a substantial critique in International Review nº115
[31] [269] These elements shared the analysis of decomposition when they were still members of the ICC (see our article “Understanding the decomposition of capitalism” in International Review n°117).
Ever since 1968, and especially since the collapse of the Eastern bloc, many of those who want to work for the revolution have turned their backs on the experience of the Russian revolution and the 3rd International, to look for lessons for the proletariat's struggle and organisation in another tradition: “revolutionary syndicalism” (sometimes known as “anarcho-syndicalism”).[1] [272]
This current appeared at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and in some countries played an important role up until the 1930s. Its main characteristic was its rejection (or at the least, its considerable underestimation) of the proletariat's need to create a political party, whether for the struggle within capitalism, or in capitalism's revolutionary overthrow: the union was considered to be the only possible form of organisation. In fact, the approach of those who turn towards the syndicalist tradition springs in large part from the discredit that the very idea of political organisation has suffered as a result of the experience of Stalinism: first, the brutal repression in the USSR itself, then of the workers' revolts in East Germany and Hungary during the 1950s; the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; the French CP's sabotage of the workers' struggles during May 1968; then the repression once again of the Polish workers' struggles at the beginning of the 1970s, etc. This situation has worsened since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the ruling class' disgusting campaigns aimed at identifying the collapse of Stalinism with the bankruptcy of communism and of marxism, thereby dealing a heavy blow at any idea of political regroupment on the basis of marxist principles.
One of the proletariat's great strengths is its ability to return constantly to its past defeats and errors, in order to understand them and to draw out the lessons that they hold for the present and future struggle. As Marx said: “proletarian revolutions (...) constantly criticise themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts” (The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). The experience of revolutionary syndicalism in the workers' movement is no exception to this necessity of critical examination in order to understand its lessons. To do so, we need to place syndicalist ideas and action in their historical context, which alone allows us to place their origins within the history of the workers' movement as a whole.
This is why we have decided to undertake a series of articles (to which this one serves as introduction), on the history of revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism. We will try to give an answer to the following questions:
- What principles and methods distinguish the syndicalist current?
- Has syndicalism left any valid lessons for the historic struggle of the working class?
- What conclusions should we draw from its betrayals, most notably in 1914 (the French CGT takes part in the national “Sacred Union” government from the very outset of the war), and in 1937 (participation of the Spanish CNT in the governments of both the Catalan Generalitat and the Madrid Republic during the civil war)?
- Has syndicalism any perspective to offer the working class today?
We will base our reply on the working class' concrete experience of syndicalism, through an analysis of several important periods in the life of the proletariat:
- The history of the French Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), strongly influenced if not dominated by the anarcho-syndicalists, from its formation until the war of 1914-18.
- The history of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the United States up until the 1920s.
- The history of the shop-stewards' movement in Britain before and during World War I.
- The history of the Spanish Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) during the revolutionary wave that followed the Russian revolution, until it collapsed in the civil war of 1936-37.
- Finally, we will conclude with an examination of the concrete reality of syndicalism today, and of the currents that claim to belong to this tradition.
The purpose of this series is not to provide a detailed chronology of the various syndicalist organisations, but to demonstrate how syndicalism's principles have not only proven themselves inadequate as a compass for the proletariat's struggle for its emancipation, but in certain circumstances have even contributed to dragging it onto the terrain of the bourgeoisie. This historic, materialist approach will demonstrate the profound difference between anarchism and marxism, which is expressed particularly in their different attitudes towards the betrayals that have occurred within both the socialist and the anarchist movements.
The anarchists never hesitate to point the finger at the great betrayals of the socialist and communist movements: the socialist parties' participation in the war of 1914-18, and the Stalinist counter-revolution during the 1920s and 30s. They claim that this is the inevitable result of the “authoritarian” heritage passed from Marx to Stalin via Lenin; in short, a kind of “original sin”, in which they agree completely with all the bourgeoisie's propaganda about the “death of communism”. Their attitude is very different when it comes to the anarchists' own betrayals: neither the anti-German patriotism of Kropotkin or James Guillaume in 1914, nor the French CGT's unfailing support for the government of Sacred Union during the 1914-18 war, nor the CNT's participation in the bourgeois governments of the Spanish republic, can in their eyes, call into question the eternal “principles” of anarchism.
In the marxist movement, by contrast, the betrayals have always been fought and explained by the left.[2] [273]
The struggle of the lefts was never limited to a mere “reminder” of marxist principles. It was always a practical and theoretical effort to understand and to demonstrate where the origins of the betrayal lay, how it could be explained by changes in the historical, material situation of capitalism and especially how the change in situation had rendered obsolete the methods of struggle which up to then had proven appropriate in the struggle of the working class.
There is no equivalent amongst the anarchists and the anarcho-syndicalists, who continue to accord their principles an eternal, purely moral value, empty of any historic content. Faced with a “betrayal”, there is therefore nothing to be done but to reassert the same eternal values, and this is why, unlike marxism, the anarchist movement has never produced any left fractions. This is also why the real revolutionaries in the French syndicalist movement of 1914 (around Rosmer and Monatte) did not try to form a left current within the syndicalist movement, but turned instead towards bolshevism.
As we have seen above, at the heart of the divergence between the revolutionary syndicalist current and marxism lies the question of the organisational form that the working class needs for its struggle against capitalism. In fact, this question could not be understood overnight. The proletariat is the revolutionary class whose historic task is the overthrow of capitalism: that does not mean that it sprang fully formed into capitalist society, like Athena from the head of Zeus. On the contrary, the working class has had to win its consciousness at the price of enormous efforts and often bitter defeats. From the outset of the long road to its emancipation, the proletariat has had to confront two fundamental requirements:
- the need for all the workers to struggle collectively in the defence of their interests (first of all within capitalism, then for its overthrow);
- the need to bend their thinking towards the general goals of their struggle, and how these can be achieved.
Indeed, the whole history of the workers' movement throughout the 19th century was marked by constant efforts to find the most appropriate forms of organisation to answer these two fundamental needs, which, concretely, were to develop both a general organisation in order to regroup all the workers in struggle, and a political organisation, one of whose essential tasks is to give a clear perspective to these struggles.
The period from the early formation of the working-class until the Paris commune was marked by a whole series of efforts at proletarian organisation, in general strongly influenced by the specific history of the workers' movement in each country. During this period, one of the main tasks of the working-class and its organisational efforts was still to assert itself as a specific class separate from other classes in society (the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie), with which it might still occasionally share common objectives (such as the overthrow of the feudal order).
In this historical context, marked by the immaturity of a still-developing and inexperienced proletariat, these two fundamental needs of the working class found expression in organisations which either tended to turn towards the past (like the French "compagnons" who looked back to the feudal Guild system), or else failed to understand the need for a general organisation of the class in order to combat the capitalist order, despite their effective radical critique of capitalist society. Thus the proletariat's first political organisations were often characterised by a "sectarian" vision, which saw the revolution as the task, not of the class as a whole, but of a minority of plotters who would seize power in a coup d'etat, to place it afterwards in the hands of people. From this tradition come such great figures of the workers' movement as Gracchus Babeuf and Auguste Blanqui. During the same period, the Utopian socialists (the best-known being Fourier and Saint-Simon in France and Robert Owen in Britain) worked out their plans for a future society designed to replace that capitalist society, which they denounced mercilessly, and often with great insight.
The first mass working-class organisations often expressed both the tendency to seek an illusory return to the past, and also on occasions an intuition of the class' destiny which went well beyond its capacities at the time: on the one hand, for example, the clandestine trade union organisation in Britain at the end of the 18th century (which went under the name of the "Army of Redressers" under the command of the mythical General Ludd) often expressed a longing by the workers for a return to their artisan status; on the other hand, we find the Grand National Consolidated Union,[3] [274] which aimed, at the beginning of the 19th century, to unite the various corporatist movements in a revolutionary general strike, in a Utopian anticipation of the Soviets which were to be created a century later.
The bourgeoisie recognised very early on the danger that the mass organisation of workers represented for it: in 1793, in the midst of the French Revolution, the “Loi Chapelier” banned all forms of workers' association, including simple friendly societies for mutual economic assistance in the face of unemployment or illness.
As it developed, the proletariat asserted itself more and more as an autonomous class in relation to the other classes in society. In British Chartism, we can see both the embryo of the political class party as well as the first separation of the proletariat from the radical petty bourgeoisie. The wave of struggles which ended with the defeat of the revolutions of 1848 (and therefore also of Chartism) has left us the principles incorporated in the Communist Manifesto. Nonetheless, the idea of a true proletarian political party was still to emerge, since the First International created in the 1860s combined the characteristics both of the political party and of the unitary mass organisation.
The Paris Commune of 1871, followed by the Hague Congress of the First International in 1872, marked a watershed in the development of workers' organisations. The ability of the working masses to go beyond the conspiratorial practice of the Blanquists was clearly demonstrated by their capacity for organisation, both in the success of the economic struggles of the workers organised in the International Workingmen's Association, and in the creation of the Commune, the first working-class power in history. Henceforward, only the anarchists with their ideology of the "exemplary act", in particular the followers of Bakunin,[4] [275] remained adepts of the ultra-minority conspiracy as a means of action. At the same time, the Commune had demonstrated the absurdity of the idea that the workers could simply ignore political activity (in other words, immediate demands made on the state and the revolutionary perspective of the seizure of political power).
The ebb in both the struggle and in class consciousness following the crushing defeat of the Commune meant that these lessons could not be drawn immediately. But the 30 years which followed the Commune witnessed a decantation within the proletariat's understanding of how to organise: on the one hand, the trade union organisation for the defence of the economic interests of each corporation or trade,[5] [276] and on the other hand the organisation of the political party both for the defence of the immediate general interests of the working class through parliamentary political action (struggles to impose a legal limit on the work of children and women, or on the working day, for example), and for the preparation and propaganda for the "maximum programme", in other words for the overthrow of capitalism and the socialist transformation of society.
Because capitalism as a whole was still in its period of ascendancy, as demonstrated notably by an unprecedented expansion of the productive forces (the last 30 years of the 19th century witnessed both the expansion and the extension of capitalist production relations world wide), it was still possible for the working class to win lasting reforms from the bourgeoisie.[6] [277] Pressure on the bourgeois parties within the parliamentary framework made possible the adoption of laws favourable to the working-class, as well as the repeal of the anti-socialist laws banning the organisation of workers in trade unions and political parties.
Nonetheless, the very success of the workers' parties within capitalism also proved extremely dangerous. The reformist current considered that this situation, which had seen the influence of workers' organisation develop on the basis of real reforms won in favour of the working class, was definitive, when in fact it was merely temporary. The reformists, for whom "the movement is everything, the goal is nothing", found their main expression at the end of the 19th century, either in the political parties or in the trade unions, depending on the country. Thus in Germany, the attempt by the current around Bernstein to have an opportunist policy abandoning the revolutionary goal officially adopted as party policy, was vigorously fought within the Social Democratic party by the left wing around Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek. By contrast, the revisionist current more readily gained a strong influence in the great German trade union organisations. In France, the situation was reversed, the socialist party being much more profoundly marked than in Germany by reformist and opportunist ideology. This was demonstrated by the inclusion in the Waldeck-Rousseau government of 1899-1901, of the socialist minister, Alexandre Millerand.[7] [278] This participation in government was rejected by the whole Social Democracy in the congresses of the Second International, but was only abandoned with difficulty (and for some with many regrets) by the French Socialists themselves. It is therefore no accident that in 1914, in the break with the workers' organisations that had gone over to the enemy (the socialist parties and trade unions), the internationalist left emerged from the German party (the Spartacus group around Luxemburg and Liebknecht), and from the French unions (the internationalist tendency represented by Rosmer, Monatte, and Merrheim, amongst others).
Generally speaking, opportunism was most present in the parliamentary fractions of the socialist parties, and in a whole apparatus involved in parliamentary work. This apparatus also exercised the greatest attraction on all those careerist elements who joined the party in the hope of profiting from the growing influence of the workers' movement, but who of course had no interest in the revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. As a result, there was a tendency within the working-class to identify political work with parliamentary activity, parliamentary activity with opportunism and careerism, careerism with the petty bourgeois intelligentsia of lawyers and journalists, and finally opportunism with the very notion of the political party.
Faced with the development of opportunism, the response of many revolutionary workers was to reject political activity as a whole, and, so to speak, to withdraw into the trade unions. And so, inasmuch as the revolutionary syndicalist movement was a truly working-class current, its aim, as we shall see, was to build trade unions which would be the unitary organs of the working-class capable of regrouping it for the defence of its economic interests, of preparing it for the day when it was to take power through the general strike, and of serving as the organisational structure of the future communist society. These unions were to be class unions, free of the careerism of an intelligentsia which wanted to use the workers' movement in order to make room for itself on the parliamentary benches, and independent – as the French CGT's 1906 Congress at Amiens emphasised – of all political parties.
In short, as Lenin said: "In Western Europe revolutionary syndicalism in many countries was a direct and inevitable result of opportunism, reformism, and parliamentary cretinism. In our country, too, the first steps of “Duma activity” increased opportunism to a tremendous extent and reduced the Mensheviks to servility before the Cadets (…) Syndicalism cannot help developing on Russian soil as a reaction against this shameful conduct of 'distinguished' Social-Democrats".[8] [279]
What then was this revolutionary syndicalism whose development Lenin foresaw? First of all, its different components shared a common vision of what a trade union should be. To summarise this conception, we cannot do better than to quote the preamble to the second constitution of the International Workers of the World (IWW), adopted in Chicago in 1908: "It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism.[9] [280] The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old".[10] [281]
The union is therefore to be the unitary organisation of the class for the defence of its immediate interests, for the revolutionary seizure of power, and for the organisation of the future communist society. According to this vision, the political party is at best irrelevant (Bill Haywood considered that the IWW was "socialism in overalls"), and at worst a breeding ground for bureaucrats.
There are two major criticisms to be made of this syndicalist vision, to which we will return in greater detail later.
The first concerns the idea that it is possible "[to form] the structure of the new society within the shell of the old". This idea that it is possible to begin to build the new society within the old springs from a profound incomprehension of the degree of antagonism between capitalism, the last exploiting society, and the classless society which must replace it. This serious error leads to underestimating the depth of social transformation necessary to carry out the transition between these two social forms, and it also underestimates the resistance of the ruling class to the seizure of power by the working-class.
Any idea that it is possible to find an artificial shortcut, and so to avoid the inevitable constraints imposed by the transition from capitalism to classless society, in fact plays into the hands of such reactionary conceptions as self-management (in reality self-exploitation), or the construction of socialism in one country so dear to Stalin. When today's anarcho-syndicalists criticise the Bolsheviks for not having adopted radical measures of social transformation in October 1917, when capitalism's economic domination still covered the entire planet, including Russia, they merely reveal their reformist vision both of the revolution and of the new society which the revolution is to establish. This is hardly surprising since the syndicalist vision is in fact limited to changing the ownership of private property: the private property of the capitalists becomes the private property of a group of workers, since each factory, each enterprise, is to remain autonomous in relation to the others. This vision of the future social transformation is so limited that it foresees the same workers continuing to work in the same industries, and so necessarily in the same conditions.
Our second criticism of revolutionary syndicalism is that it completely ignored the real revolutionary experience of the working class. For the Marxists, the Russian Revolution of 1905 was a crucial moment, particularly in its spontaneous creation of the workers councils. For Lenin, the Soviets were "the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat". Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, Pannekoek, in fact the whole left wing of the Social-Democracy which was later to form the Communist International, paid great attention to the analysis of these events, and of others such as the great strikes in Holland in 1903. Through the propaganda of the Second International's left currents, the political experience of 1905 thus became a vital element of working-class consciousness, which was to bear fruit in October 1917 in Russia (where the anarchists moreover played a minimal role) and throughout the revolutionary wave which saw the emergence of Soviets in Finland, Germany, and Hungary. The "revolutionary" syndicalists, on the contrary, remained stuck in abstract schemas which were based on the experience of reformist trade union struggle during capitalism's ascendant period, and which thus proved completely inadequate for the revolutionary struggle in decadent capitalism. It is true that the anarchists like to claim that the Spanish "revolution" was much deeper than the Russian Revolution in terms of social change. As we will see, nothing could be further from the truth.
Today's revolutionary syndicalists continue in the same tradition, completely ignoring the real experience of workers' struggles since 1968. In particular they take no account of the fact that, on the one hand, the organisational form adopted by the struggle is not the trade union but the sovereign general assembly with its elected and revocable delegates,[11] [282] while, on the other hand, the bourgeois state itself has directly incorporated the trade unions within it.[12] [283]
We have seen that the revolutionary syndicalists and anarcho-syndicalists share a common vision of the union as the place where the working-class organises. Let us now look at three key elements which turn up regularly in syndicalist organisations, and which we will examine in greater detail in the next articles.
One might think that today, the question of direct action had been resolved by history. When revolutionary syndicalism first made its appearance, direct action was put forward in opposition to the action of "the leaders", in other words of the parliamentary leaders of the socialist parties or the trade union bureaucrats. However, since capitalism entered its decadent period not only have the "socialist" and "communist" parties definitively betrayed the proletariat, but also the very conditions of the class struggle mean that any action on the terrain of parliament or the conquest of political "rights" has become impossible. In this sense, the debate between "direct action" and "political action" is completely irrelevant. Some might conclude that history had settled the question, and that Marxists and anarchists could therefore agree to defend the direct action of the working-class in the struggle.
This is not in fact the case. The question of "direct action" goes to the heart of the divergence between the Marxist and anarchist conceptions of the role of the revolutionary minority. For the Marxists, the action of the revolutionary minority is that of the political vanguard of the working class and has absolutely nothing to do with the kind of minority action inherited from the "exemplary act" of the anarchists, which substitutes itself for the action of the class as a whole. The political orientations that the Marxist organisation puts forward to its class always depend on the level of the class struggle as a whole, on the greater or lesser capacity at any given moment of the whole proletariat to act as a class against the bourgeoisie, and to adopt the principles and the analyses of the communists in the struggle (to “seize the weapon of theory" as Marx put it). Anarcho-syndicalism, by contrast, remains infected by the essentially moral and minority vision of the anarchists. For this current there is no distinction between the "direct action" of the mass of workers, and that of a minority, however small.
The idea of the general strike is not specific to anarcho- syndicalism, since its first expression is to be found in the writings of the Utopian socialist Robert Owen at the beginning of the 19th century. This being said, it has become one of the major characteristics of syndicalist theory, and can be presented in three main aspects:[13] [284]
- the working-class' ability to carry out the general strike with success depends on the growth in number and in power of the union organisations (revolutionary ones, of course);
- the revolution is not a question of politics: in the anarcho- syndicalist vision, the general strike will simply paralyse the bourgeois state, which will then leave the workers undisturbed to carry out the transformation of society;
- the theory of the general strike is closely linked to that of self-management, which is put forward above all at the level of the factory or the workplace.
In reality, none of these ideas has survived the test of the concrete experience of the working-class itself.
First of all, the theory according to which the revolutionary period would be preceded by the continuous development in trade unions' strength has proven completely false. In neither the Russian nor the German revolutions were the trade unions organs of struggle or of the exercise of proletarian power. On the contrary, they turned out at best to be a conservative brake on the revolution (for example the railway workers' union in Russia, which opposed the revolution in 1917). In all the countries involved in World War I, the unions controlled the working class on behalf of the bourgeois state, in order to guarantee war production and to prevent any development of resistance to the slaughter. This role was adopted without hesitation by the leadership of the anarcho-syndicalist CGT as soon as France entered the war.
The result of revolutionary syndicalism's refusal of "politics" was to disarm the workers completely in confronting those questions, which are really posed in the critical moments of war and revolution. All those questions posed between 1914 and 1936 were political questions: what was the nature of the war that broke out in 1914, an imperialist war or a war for the defence of democratic rights against German militarism? What attitude should be adopted towards the "democratisation" of absolutist states in February 1917 (Russia) and in 1918 (Germany)? What attitude should be adopted towards the democratic state in Spain in 1936 – was it a bourgeois enemy or an antifascist ally? In every case, revolutionary syndicalism proved incapable of giving an answer, and ended up in a de facto alliance with the bourgeoisie.
Experience of the strike in Russia in 1905 called into question the theories that had been put forward up to then by both the anarchists and the Social-Democrats (the Marxists of their day). But only the left wing of Marxism proved capable of drawing the lessons from this crucial experience. "The Russian Revolution, which is the first historical experiment on the model of the class strike, not merely does not afford a vindication of anarchism, but actually means the historical liquidation of anarchism (...) Thus has historical dialectics, the rock on which the whole teaching of Marxian socialism rests, brought it about that today anarchism, with which the idea of the mass strike is indissolubly associated, has itself come to be opposed to the mass strike which was combated as the opposite of the political activity of the proletariat, appears today as the most powerful weapon of the struggle for political rights. If, therefore, the Russian Revolution makes imperative a fundamental revision of the old standpoint of Marxism on the question of the mass strike, it is once again Marxism whose general method and points of view have thereby, in new form, carried off the prize. 'The Moor’s beloved can die only by the hand of the Moor'" (Rosa Luxemburg, The mass strike, on marxists.org; the quotation is a reference to Shakespeare's play Othello).
At first sight, it might seem purely academic to distinguish between internationalism and anti-militarism. After all, anyone who is against the army must surely be for brotherhood among the peoples? Are these not, when it comes down to it, the same struggle? In reality, these two principles spring from two profoundly different approaches. 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. Ever since 1848, the principal slogan of the workers' movement has not been anti-militarist, but internationalist: "Workers of all countries, unite!".[14] [285] But for the revolutionary Marxist left the social democracy before 1914, it was impossible to conceive the struggle against militarism as anything other than an aspect of a much wider struggle. "Social-democracy, in accordance with its conception of the essence of militarism, regards the complete abolition of militarism alone as impossible: militarism can only fall together with capitalism, the last class system of society (…) the goal of Social-Democracy's anti-militarist propaganda is not to fight the system as an isolated phenomenon, nor is its final aim the abolition of militarism alone" (Karl Liebknecht, Militarismus und anti-militarismus).
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. For the anarcho-syndicalists in the French CGT prior to 1914, anti-militarist propaganda was motivated above all by the immediate experience of the army being used against strikers. They considered it necessary both to give moral support to young proletarians during their military service, and to convince the troops to refuse to use their weapons against strikers. In itself, there is nothing to criticise in such an aim. But anarcho-syndicalists remained incapable of understanding militarism as a phenomenon integral to capitalism, a phenomenon which was to get worse in the period before 1914 as the great imperialist powers prepared for World War I. Typical of this incomprehension is the idea that militarism is in fact nothing but an excuse to justify the maintenance of an anti-working class repressive force, an idea expressed by the anarcho-syndicalist leaders Pouget and Pataud: "the government wanted to preserve warfare – for the fear of war was, for them, the best of devices for domination. Thanks to the fear of war, skilfully maintained, they could maintain standing armies throughout the country which, under the pretext of protecting the frontier, in reality only threatened the people and only protected the ruling class" (Comment nous ferons la révolution, Pouget and Pataud).
In fact the anti-militarism of the CGT was very like pacifism, in its ability to execute a 180° turn as soon as "the fatherland is in danger". In August 1914, the anti-militarists discovered overnight that the French bourgeoisie was "less militarist" than the German bourgeoisie, and that it was therefore necessary to defend the French "revolutionary tradition" of 1789 against the barbarous jackboot of the Prussian militarist, rather than "transforming the imperialist war into a civil war" to use Lenin's words.
Obviously, the question of militarism could no longer be posed in the same way after the awful slaughter of 1914-18, which far surpassed in horror anything that the anti-militarists of 1914 could have imagined. Anti-militarist ideology was thus superseded, as we might say, by the ideology of anti-fascism, as we will see when we come to consider the role of the CNT during the war in Spain in the 1930s. In both cases, syndicalists chose one camp – the more democratic bourgeoisie – against another, that of the more authoritarian, dictatorial bourgeoisie.
It was not necessarily obvious to their contemporaries that any differentiation existed between these two currents, which moreover were linked in many ways. Indeed, before 1914 one could say that the French CGT served as a beacon for the other syndicalist currents, in much the same way as the German SPD did for the other parties of the Second International. It nonetheless seems necessary, with historical hindsight, to distinguish between the positions of the anarcho-syndicalists and the revolutionary syndicalists. This distinction largely coincides with the difference between the industrially less developed countries (France and Spain), and two most important and most developed capitalist countries respectively of the 19th century (Britain) and of the 20th century (United States). Whereas anarcho-syndicalism is closely linked to the greater influence, within the workers' movement of the less developed countries, of the anarchism characteristic of the petty bourgeoisie and small artisan strata in the process of proletarianisation, revolutionary syndicalism was more a response to the problems of the proletariat highly concentrated in large-scale industry.
We will examine briefly three important elements which allow us to distinguish between these two currents.
For or against centralisation. Anarcho-syndicalism has always had a federalist vision whereby the federation is no more than the grouping of independent unions: the confederation has no authority at the level of each union. In the CGT in particular, this situation suited the anarcho-syndicalists perfectly since they dominated above all in the small trade unions and the system whereby each union had one vote at the level of the confederation gave them a weight in the CGT far greater than their real numerical importance.
The revolutionary syndicalism of the IWW was founded, by contrast, both implicitly and explicitly on the international centralisation of the working-class. It is no accident if one of the IWW's slogans is: "one big union". Even the union's name ("Industrial Workers of the World") declares clearly – even if the reality did not always live up to the ambition – its intention to regroup the workers of the whole world in one single organisation. The IWW statutes adopted in Chicago in 1905 established the authority of the central organ: "The subdivision International and National Industrial Unions shall have complete industrial autonomy in their respective internal affairs, provided the General Executive Board shall have power to control these Industrial Unions in matters concerning the interest of the general welfare" (see “Jim Crutchfield's IWW Page” cited above for the full text).
There was a considerable difference between anarcho-syndicalists and revolutionary syndicalists in their attitude towards political action. Although there were members of socialist parties in some of the CGT unions, the anarcho-syndicalists themselves were "anti-political" seeing nothing in these parties but parliamentary manoeuvring or the manipulation of "leaders". The famous charter adopted by the Amiens Congress in 1906 declared the CGT's total independence from any parties or "sects" (a reference to anarchist groups). This refusal of any political vision (understood explicitly in terms of the parliamentary activity of the day) is one of the reasons why the CGT found itself completely unprepared politically for the war of 1914, which failed to follow the schema of the general strike on a purely "economic" terrain. The anarchist rejection of "politics" had no real equivalent during the foundation of the IWW, even if the founders considered themselves to be building a unitary organisation of the working-class and intended to maintain their entire freedom of action in relation to political parties. On the contrary, the best-known founders and leaders of the IWW were often also members of a political party: Big Bill Haywood was not only secretary of the Western Federation of Miners but also a member of the Socialist Party of America, as was A. Simons. Daniel De Leon of the Socialist Labor Party also played a leading role in the formation of the IWW. In the somewhat specific context of the United States, the IWW were often considered by the bourgeoisie and by the reformist AFL union (American Federation of Labour) as a trade union expression of political socialism. Even after the split of 1908, at the congress where the IWW modified their constitution to ban any acknowledgement of political (that is to say essentially electoral) action, members of the SPA continued to play a fundamental role within the IWW. Haywood in particular was elected to the executive committee of the SPA in 1911: his election represented moreover a victory for the revolutionaries against the reformists within the socialist party itself.
Similarly it would be impossible to explain the influence of revolutionary syndicalism among the shop stewards in Britain without mentioning the role played by John MacLean and the Scottish SLP. Nor is it any accident that the bastions of the shop stewards' movement (the coal and steel industry of South Wales, the industry along the Clyde River in Scotland, the region around Sheffield in England) were also to become bastions of the Communist Party in the years that followed the Russian Revolution.
Finally, the position that each of these two currents took towards the war is not the least of the differences between them. If we situate the period of syndicalism's greatest influence between 1900 and 1940, we can see a major difference between anarcho-syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism in their attitudes towards imperialist war:
- Anarcho-syndicalism foundered body and soul in its support for imperialist war: in 1914 the CGT enrolled the French working-class for war, while in 1936-37 Spanish CNT, through its antifascist ideology and its participation in government, became one of the main pillars of the bourgeois republic.
- Revolutionary syndicalism, on the other hand, remained true to its internationalist positions: the IWW in the United States, and the shop stewards in Britain, were at the heart of the workers resistance to the war.
Obviously, this distinction should be nuanced: revolutionary syndicalism had its weaknesses (notably a strong tendency to see the question of war solely through the narrow prism of the economic struggle against its effects). Nonetheless at the level of the organisations the distinction remains valid.
In short, while revolutionary syndicalism, despite its weaknesses, provided some of the working-class' most determined militants in the struggle against the war, anarcho- syndicalism provided ministers for the governments of Sacred Union in the bourgeois republics of France and Spain.
"Comrade Voinov is quite correct in taking the line of calling upon the Russian Social-Democrats to learn from the example of opportunism and from the example of syndicalism. Revolutionary work in the trade unions, shifting the emphasis from parliamentary trickery to the education of the proletariat, to rallying the purely class organisations, to the struggle outside parliament, to ability to use (and to prepare the masses for the possibility of successfully using) the general strike, as well as the 'December forms of struggle',[15] [286] in the Russian revolution – all this comes very strongly into prominence as the task of the Bolshevik trend. And the experience of the Russian revolution immensely facilitates this task for us, provides a wealth of practical guidance and historical data making it possible to appraise in the most concrete way the new methods of struggle, the mass strike, and the use of direct force. These methods of struggle are least of all ‘new’ to the Russian Bolsheviks, the Russian proletariat. They are ’new’ to the opportunists, who are doing their utmost to erase from the minds of the workers in the West the memory of the Commune, and from the minds of the workers in Russia the memory of December 1905. To strengthen these memories, to make a scientific study of that great experience, to spread its lessons among the masses and the realisation of its inevitable repetition on a new scale - this task of the revolutionary Social-Democrats in Russia opens up before us prospects infinitely richer than the one-sided "anti-opportunism" and "anti-parliamentarism" of the syndicalists" (Lenin, op. cit.). For Lenin, revolutionary syndicalism was a proletarian response to the opportunism and parliamentary cretinism of Social-Democracy, but it was a partial and schematic response, unable to grasp the watershed period of the early 20th century in all its complexity. Despite the historic differences which produced the different syndicalist currents, all had this defect in common. As we will see in the articles to come, this weakness proved fatal: at best the syndicalist current was unable to contribute fully to the development of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23; at worst, it foundered in open support for the imperialist capitalism which it had once thought to combat.
Jens, 4th July 2004
[1] [287] We will return later to the distinction between revolutionary syndicalism and anarcho-syndicalism. To put it briefly, we can say that anarcho-syndicalism is a branch of revolutionary syndicalism. All the anarcho-syndicalists consider themselves to be revolutionary syndicalists, whereas the reverse is not the case. Where we use the term “syndicalism”, we refer to both currents indifferently.
[2] [288] The socialist parties' betrayal in 1914 was already being fought by the left wing in the socialist parties (Rosa Luxemburg, Pannekoek, Gorter, Lenin, Trotsky) from the beginning of the 20th century; the betrayal by the communist parties (who were to lead the counter-revolution in the 1920s-30s) was fought by the left communists (the KAPD in Germany, the GIK in Holland, the left of the Italian CP around Bordiga, then the fractions of the international Left in Bilan and Internationalisme).
[3] [289] The Grand National Consolidated Union was created in 1833, with the active participation of Robert Owen; according to the press of the day, it organised 800,000 British workers (see JT Murphy, Preparing for power).
[4] [290] The anarchists like to oppose the “libertarian” and “democratic” Bakunin to the “authoritarian” Marx. In reality, the aristocrat Bakunin had a profound contempt for the “people” who were to be led by the invisible hand of a secret conspiracy: “for the real revolution, we need not individuals placed at the head of the crowd commanding it, but men hidden invisibly within it, linking invisibly one crowd with the next, thus giving invisibly one and the same leadership, one and the same spirit and character to the movement. The secret preparatory organisation has no other meaning than that, and that is the only reason it is necessary” (Bakunin, The principles of revolution). See International Review n°88, “Questions of organisation”. For more details on Bakunin's organisational ideas, see the excellent biography by EH Carr.
[5] [291] In this period, the unions were organised by trade; moreover, union membership was generally limited to skilled workers.
[6] [292] As an example of the difference between capitalism's ascendant and decadent periods, we can cite the evolution of the working day. From 16-17 hours a day at the beginning of the 19th century, it had fallen towards ten hours or even eight hours in certain industries by the beginning of the 20th century. Since then, the working day (apart from swindles like the 35-hour week in France, which today is being called into question) has remained obstinately stuck around eight hours, and that despite a fantastic increase in productivity. In countries like Britain, the working day is now on the rise, the typical “9-5” job of the 1960s being replaced by a working day that ends at 6 o'clock or later.
[7] [293] Millerand was a lawyer much valued in the French workers' movement for his qualities in defending trade unionists in the courts. A protégé of Jaurès, he entered parliament in 1889 as an independent socialist. But his participation in the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet alienated him from the socialists, from whom he increasingly separated from 1905 onwards. He became Minister of Public Works in 1909, then served as Minister for War between 1912 and 1915.
[8] [294] Lenin's preface to a pamphlet by Voinov (Lunacharsky) on the party's attitude towards the unions (1907). In reality, syndicalism developed very little in Russia, and for one reason: the Russian workers turned towards a truly revolutionary marxist political party, the Bolsheviks. See www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1907/nov/00.htm [295]
[9] [296] It should be noted that this vision of a historic mission of the working class is much more closely related to marxism than to anarchism.
[10] [297] “Jim Crutchfield's IWW Page” contains useful material for the history of the IWW. See here [298] for the IWW's 1908 Constitution.
[11] [299] See our articles on the class struggles in Poland in 1980-81, in International Review n°24-29.
[12] [300] For those who doubt the reality of this incorporation, we need only look at the extent to which the unions in “democratic” countries are financed by the state. For example, according to the French paper La Tribune of 23/02/2004, there are 2,500 civil servants paid by the Ministry of Education alone to take part in full-time union work. The same article gives details of the various subsidies paid to the unions, including some €35 million per year paid in the name of “union-management cooperation”.
[13] [301] The anarcho-syndicalist vision of the general strike is described in novel form, in the book Comment nous ferons la révolution written by two CGT leaders, Pouget and Pataud, in 1909 (Editions Syllepse).
[14] [302] The Communist Manifesto.
[15] [303] In other words, the Soviets.
The Bush administration has been very assertive in pushing its plan to build a National Defense System (NDS). Not one day passes without the bourgeois media mentioning this issue, and during the second week of June, George W. Bush made his first diplomatic trip to Europe, trying to persuade the "allies" that the American missile defense system would help the US protect them from potential missile attacks by rogue powers. What's going on? Why does the US want to scrap the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) -the treaty made with the old USSR in the height of the cold war? What's new in the imperialist, geopolitical scenario of the post-Cold War period?
First of all, it is is important to point out the Reagan administration had already posed the question of trashing the ABM treaty and building a space shield in what had come to be known as the Star Wars project during the 1980s. In continuity with this long-term design, the Clinton administration started the remodernization of the US military and went on with the testing of the technology necessary for the actual building of NDS. Clinton did not push the issue because of the repeated failures during tests of the military technology involved. But already in September 2000, Le Monde Diplomatique, a French bourgeois publication, concluded that Clinton's hesitations did not count much, since the choice of whether to go ahead or not rested ultimately with the new administration to be elected in November. Bush, then, is merely reviving a project that the American bourgeoisie has had for a long time. The question is, why right now?
If we are to believe the ideological justifications we find in the bourgeois press, NDS is a strategy that aims first and foremost at arms cuts. According to the bourgeoisie, NDS would discourage the production and use of nuclear arms. As a result, the working class is supposed to feel good about it, safe, and supportive of the project. The 1972 ABM treaty explicitly banned the building of a national defense system, reflecting the bourgeoisie's commitment to maintaining a "balance of power" as part of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). According to this doctrine, neither the US nor USSR would risk initiating a nuclear attack, because such an attack would prompt a retaliatory nuclear strike, that would lead to the destruction of both sides. A nuclear shield, or missile defense system, capable of shooting down the other side's missile, would have nullified the mutually assured destruction that was supposed to maintain the peace. Today the American bourgeoisie insists that the ABM treaty is outdated. What the US government is saying in essence is that they are no longer interested in a "balance of power." In fact, the existence of a US national defense system that can knock out another nation's missiles effectively destroys the concept of a "balance of power" and would establish an American military hegemony over the rest of the world.
Of course, the ABM treaty did not really provide for a safer world, and the US and Russia continued their arms race. Just like its predecessor, the NDS won't stabilize the world or provide safety. Quite the contrary. In the period of capitalist decadence, no nation is spared from having an interest in developing ever more sophisticated means of destruction with the hope of being up to the imperialist challenge of redividing the world and getting a slice of it for themselves. Today, the US uses the fact that nuclear weapons have or may spread to very unstable regions, especially so-called "rogue" states like, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea, as an excuse to justify the implementation of NDS. In reality, NDS will help the US assert its control and hegemony all over the world.
The Bush administration correctly points out that the world has changed. What they are lying about is the reasons. The threat that the US faces is not just from the "rogue" states, but above all from the challenge to its domination by its former allies. Since the collapse of the Eastern bloc, the US has remained the sole superpower in the world. Its domination of the world, however, has remained uncontested. Starting from the Gulf war, down to the implementation of the various "rapid reaction forces" to "take care" of mulitiple smaller conflicts breaking out at the same time, to the "humanitarian" interventions, it's clear the US is facing not only a much more unpredictable and unstable world, but all, contestation. Such contestation, however, does not worry the American bourgeoisie so much when it springs from minor imperialist powers as when it is voiced by its European "allies." It is essentially in response to such a situation that the US is pushing NDS.
At the same time as the ruling class has cut social benefits, as the economic crisis deepens leaving hundreds of thousands jobless and hopeless, as the decomposition of this rotting system spreads epidemics, desperation, and wars, the bourgeoisie proposes to spend billions of dollars on new military systems of mass destruction. The working class needs to denounce the total irrationality of NDS, or any imperialist project of this bankrupt ruling class, even as ruling class propaganda will tell us that this new round of militarization of society will help the working class by creating jobs.
An, 23/7/01.
In the previous article in this series, we saw how the future Bolshevik, Trotsky, had failed to grasp the significance of the birth of Bolshevism, siding with the Mensheviks against Lenin. In this article, we look at how another great figure of the left wing of social democracy, Rosa Luxemburg – who in 1918 was to declare that “the future everywhere belongs to Bolshevism” – also used her considerable polemical skills to support the Mensheviks against the so-called ‘ultra-centralism’ personified by Lenin.
Rosa Luxemburg’s response to Lenin’s One Step Forward was published in Neue Zeit (and the new Iskra) under the title ‘Organisational questions of Russian social democracy’. This work has subsequently been published under the title ‘Leninism or marxism’ and (often through selective quoting) has served as a reference point for councilists, anarchists, left social democrats and other ‘anti-Leninists’ for many decades.
In fact, it was not at all Rosa’s intention to place Lenin outside of marxism or the workers’ movement, however strong her criticisms of him were: they were offered in the spirit of vigorous but fraternal polemic. The article displays none of the personal tone contained in Trotsky’s texts of the same period.
Furthermore, Luxemburg begins by affirming the positive contribution made by Iskra prior to the Congress, in particular its consistent advocacy of the need to go beyond the phase of the circles “The problem on which Russian social democracy has been working during the last few is years is the transition from the dispersed, quite independent circles and local organisations, which corresponded to the preparatory and primarily propagandistic phase of the movement, to a form of organisation such as is required for a unified political action of the masses throughout the whole state.
Since, however, the most prominent trait of the old form of organisation, now grown unacceptable and politically outmoded, was dispersion and complete autonomy, or the self-sufficiency of the local organisations, it was quite natural that the watchword of the new phase of the preparatory work for the larger organisation should become centralism. The emphasis on centralism was the leitmotif of Iskra in its brilliant three-year campaign for preparing the last really constituent party congress, and the same thought dominated the entire 1903-4: the young guard of the party”.
And yet Luxemburg had few hesitations in siding with the Mensheviks in the dispute that arose during the Second Congress. Thus the rest of the text is a critique of the “ultra-centralist wing of the party”, led by Lenin.
There are various factors which could be invoked to explain this: certainly there were differences of approach and theory between Luxemburg and Lenin, especially on the key issue of class consciousness, which we will return to. Luxemburg, as well, had already clashed with Lenin on the national question, which may have predisposed her to argue against his method – she believed that his thinking was often rigid and scholastic. In particular, Luxemburg was, as the text shows, already grappling with the question of the mass strike and the spontaneity of the working class. Lenin’s insistence on the limitations of spontaneity must have seemed totally counter-productive, especially as she herself was faced with a real battle within the German party in defence of spontaneous mass action and against the rigid, bureaucratic view of the social democratic right wing and the trade union leaders, who feared the uncontrolled upsurge of the masses more than they feared capitalism. As we shall see, some of her polemic tends to project the experience of the German party onto the situation in Russia, which certainly led her to misinterpret the real significance of the divergences in the RSDLP.
Finally, we cannot discount the problem of a certain conservatism about authority. We have seen this in Trotsky’s reactions to the split. The Mensheviks had, in fact, been very quick to conduct a personalised campaign against Lenin with the aim of winning the German party to their positions: “The question is how to beat Lenin…Most of all, we must incite authorities like Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg against him” (cited by Peter Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, OUP, 1969, p193) And there is no doubt that Kautsky and other German ‘leaders’ were swayed by the idea that Lenin was little more than an ambitious upstart. When Lyadov came to Germany to explain the Bolshevik case, Kautsky told him: “look, we do not know your Lenin. He is an unknown quantity for us, but we do know Plekhanov and Axelrod very well. It is only thanks to them that we have been able to obtain any light on the situation in Russia. We simply cannot just accept your contention that Plekhanov and Axelrod have turned into opportunists all of a sudden” (ibid). At this stage, Luxemburg’s polemic within the German party had been directed mainly at the openly revisionist wing led by Bernstein; she may have had her doubts about the ‘orthodox’ leadership, but she still saw it as an ally against the right, and may well have been influenced by this view of the split in Russia, based not on real political analysis but on a false ‘confidence’ in the old guard of the RSDLP. Later on, she would recognise the German leadership’s own slide into opportunism, not least on the question of the mass strike and the spontaneity of the class.
Be that as it may, Luxemburg, like Trotsky, seized on Lenin’s phrases in One Step Forward about Jacobinism (the revolutionary social democrat, Lenin had said, is “the Jacobin inseparably linked with the organisation of the class-conscious proletariat”), to argue that his “ultra-centralism” appears to be a regression to outmoded approaches to revolutionary activity, inherited from an immature phase of the workers’ movement: “To support centralisation in social democracy on these two principles – on the blind subordination of all party organisations and their activity, down to the last detail, to a central authority which alone thinks, acts and decides for all, and on a sharp separation of the organised nucleus of the party from the surrounding revolutionary milieu, as championed by Lenin – appears to us therefore as a mechanical carrying over of the organisational principles of the Blanquist movement of conspiratorial circles into the social democratic movement of the working masses” Like Trotsky, she rejects Lenin’s appeal to the proletarian discipline of the factory as a counter to the gentlemanly anarchism of the intellectuals: “The ‘discipline’ which Lenin has in mind is impressed upon the proletariat not only by the factory, but also by the barracks, and by the modern systems of bureaucracy, in short through the whole mechanism of the centralised bourgeois state”.
Luxemburg opposes Lenin’s view of the relationship of party to class with the following passage, whose significance we will return to in due course: “As a matter of fact, however, Social Democracy is not linked to or connected with the organisation of the working class, but is the movement of the working class itself. Social Democratic centralism must therefore be of an essentially different nature from that of the Blanquist. It can be nothing other than the over-riding general will of the enlightened and fighting vanguard of the workers as contrasted with the individual will of its different groups and individuals; it is, so to speak, a ‘self-centralism’ of the leading elements of the proletariat and their majority rule within their own party organisation”
Luxemburg also takes issue with Lenin’s explanation of opportunism and the methods he advocates to oppose it. She argues that he overemphasises the role of the intellectuals as a principal source of the opportunist trend in social democracy, and thus detaches the danger from its historical background. She accepts that opportunism may be strong amongst the academic element in the western parties, but she sees this as inseparable from the influences of parliamentarism and the reform struggle, and more generally the historic conditions in which social democracy is working in the west. She also notes that opportunism is not necessarily tied either to decentralisation or centralisation as forms of organisation, precisely because it is characterised by its lack of organisational principles. In fact, Luxemburg goes further than this, stressing that in the early phases of its life, in the face of conditions of economic and political backwardness, the opportunist trend in the German party, the Lasalle wing, favoured ultra-centralism over the Marxist Eisenach tendency - the implication being that in backward Russia opportunism would also be more likely to identify itself with the same ultra-centralising zeal.
Echoing an intervention by Trotsky at the Second Congress, Luxemburg argues that while precise rules and statutes are all very necessary, they can hardly act as a guarantee against the development of opportunism, which is a product of the very conditions in which the struggle of the working class is fought out: the tension between the necessity to struggle for its daily self-defence, and the historic goals of its movement. Having thus posed the problem in the broadest historical framework, Luxemburg feels free to make fun of Lenin’s supposed notion that “rigorous paragraphs on paper” can, in the battle against opportunism, make up for the absence of a revolutionary proletarian majority in the party. In the final analysis, neither the strictness of the central organs, nor the best party constitution, can replace the creativity of the masses when it comes to maintaining a revolutionary course against the temptations of opportunism. Hence her oft-quoted conclusion to the article: “let us say openly, that mistakes made by a really revolutionary working class movement are, historically, infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the most excellent ‘central committee’”
Lenin responded to Luxemburg in ’One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, reply by N Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg’, written in September 1904 and submitted to Neue Zeit. Kautsky however refused to publish the article and it was not published at all until 1930. Lenin welcomes the intervention of the German comrades into the debate, but regrets the fact that Luxemburg’s article “does not acquaint the reader with my book, but with something else” (Lenin, Collected Works, volume 7, op cit, p 472). Since he considers that Luxemburg has entirely missed the point in her polemic, he does not engage with her in a discussion about the general issues raised by it, but sticks to a restatement of the principal facts surrounding the split. He quietly thanks Rosa for “explaining the profound idea that slavish submission is very harmful to the party” (p474), but points out that he is not an advocate of a particular form of centralism, but simply defends “the elementary principles of any conceivable system of party organisation” (p 472) – the issue posed by the RSDLP Congress being not slavish submission to a central organ, but the domination of a minority, a circle within the party, over what should have been a sovereign Congress. He also shows how qualified was his use of the Jacobin analogy, which had in any case been frequently employed by Iskra and by Axelrod in particular. To make a comparison between the divisions in the proletarian party and the divisions between right and left wings in the French revolution, he insists, is not to argue that there is an identity between social democracy and Jacobinism. By the same token he waves aside the charge that his model of the party is based on the capitalist factory: “Comrade Luxemburg declares that I glorify the educational influence of the factory. That is not so. It was my opponent, not I, who said that I pictured the Party as a factory. I properly ridiculed him and proved with his own words that he confused two different aspects of factory discipline, which, unfortunately, is the case with Comrade Luxemburg to” (p 474). In fact, the squeamishness shown by both Trotsky and Luxemburg about the phrase ‘factory discipline’ obscures an important element of truth in Lenin’s use of the term. For Lenin, the positive aspect of what the proletariat learns through the ‘discipline’ of factory production is precisely the superiority of the collective over the individual – the necessity, in fact, for the association of the workers and the impossibility of the workers defending themselves as disparate individuals. It is this aspect of ‘factory discipline’ which has to be reflected not only in the general organisations of the working class, but also in its political organisations, through the triumph of the party spirit over the circle spirit and the gentlemanly anarchism of the intellectuals.
This leads on to Lenin’s central point: that Rosa’s critique of opportunism is far too general and abstract. Of course she is right to identify its fundamental roots in the historic conditions of the class struggle; but opportunism takes many forms and the specific Russian forms that manifested themselves at the Congress was an anarchist revolt against centralisation, a reversion by a part of the old Iskra group to views which it had come to the Congress to settle scores with in the first place, above all, the positions of the specifically Russian brand of Bernstein’s “the movement is everything, the goal nothing” – Economism. It is noticeable that Rosa remains silent on these questions, which is why Lenin devotes the second part of his article to providing a succinct account of how this relapse took place.
Lenin brushes aside Luxemburg’s “grandiloquent declamation” about the impossibility of fighting opportunism with rules and regulations “in themselves”; statutes cannot have such an autonomous existence, but they are nonetheless indispensable weapons for waging the combat against concrete manifestations of opportunism. “Never and nowhere have I talked such nonsense as that the party rules are weapon ‘in themselves’” (p 476). What Lenin does advocate is the conscious defence of the party’s own organisational principles, and the necessity for these principles to be codified in unambiguous statutes. This distinctive task of revolutionaries cannot be replaced by abstract appeals to the creative struggle of the masses to overcome the opportunist danger.
As we have said, Lenin chose not to go into some of the deeper issues posed in Rosa’s text: her errors on class consciousness and her identification between party and class, but it is necessary to deal with them briefly here.
In Luxemburg’s argument, the questions of class consciousness, centralism, and the relationship of party and class are inextricably connected.
“The paucity of the most important presuppositions for the full realisation of centralism in the Russian movement at the present time may, to be sure, have a very baneful effect. Nevertheless it is false, in our opinion, to believe that the majority rule of the enlightened workers within their party organisation, although as yet unattainable, may be replaced ‘temporarily’ by an assigned autocracy of the central authority of the party, and that the hitherto undeveloped public control on the part of the working masses over the acts and omissions of the party organs would be just as well replaced by the opposite control of the activity of the revolutionary workers by a central committee.
The history of the Russian movement itself furnishes many examples of the dubious value of centralism in this latter sense. The central committee with its almost unlimited authority of interference and control according to Lenin’s idea would evidently be an absurdity if it should limit its power to the purely technical side of the social democratic activity, to the outer means and accessories of agitation – say, to the supplying of party literature and suitable distribution of agitational and financial forces. It would have a comprehensible political purpose only if it were to employ its power in the creation of a unified fighting tactic and in arousing great political action in Russia. What do we see, however, in the phases through which the Russian revolution has already passed? Its most important and fruitful tactical turning points of the last decade were not by any means ‘invented’ by appointed leaders of the movement, and much less by leading organisations, but were in each case the spontaneous product of the unfettered movement itself.
This was so in the first stage of the genuine proletarian movement in Russia, which began with the elemental outbreak of the great St Petersburg strike in 1896 and which for the first time had inaugurated the economic mass action of the Russian proletariat. Similarly, the second phase, that of the political street demonstrations, was opened quite spontaneously as a result of the student unrests in St Petersburg in March 1901. The further significant tactical turning point, which opened up new horizons, was the mass strike which broke out ‘all of itself’ in Rostov-on-Don, with the ad hoc improvised street agitation, open air meetings, public addresses – things which the boldest blusterer among the Social Democrats would not have ventured to consider a few years earlier. In all these cases, in the beginning was ‘the deed’. The initiative and conscious leadership of the social democratic organisations played an exceedingly small role. This was not, however, so much the fault of defective preparations of these special organisations for their role, even though this factor may have been a considerable contributing cause, and certainly not of the lack at that time, in the Russian Social Democracy, of an all-powerful central committee in accordance with Lenin’s plan. On the contrary, such a committee would in all probability only have had the effect of making the indecision of the various party committees still grater, and of creating dissension between the storming masses and the procrastinating Social Democracy.
The same phenomenon, the small part played by the conscious initiative of the party leadership in the shaping of tactics, is still more observable in Germany and elsewhere. The fighting tactic of Social Democracy, at least as regards its main features, is definitely not ‘invented’, but is the result of a progressive series of great creative acts in the course of the class struggle which is often elemental and always experimenting. Here also the unconscious precedes the conscious, the logic of the objective historical process precedes the subjective logic of its carriers. The role of the social democratic leadership is one of an essentially conservative character, in that it leads to working out empirically to its ultimate consequences the new experience acquired in the struggle and quickly converting it into a bulwark against a further innovation in the grand style”.
The historical development of the communist programme has often taken the path of polemic between revolutionaries, of fierce debate between different currents within the movement. This has certainly been so in the case of the debates between Lenin and Luxemburg. On the national question, for example, it is Luxemburg who provides the fundamental framework for understanding the role of national struggles in the imperialist epoch, often in opposition to Lenin’s attachment to formulae left in abeyance from the previous epoch. And yet during the test of fire of the first world war, it was Lenin who articulated the clearest answer to all concessions to patriotism with his slogan “turn the imperialist war into a civil war” and Luxemburg who, in the Junius Pamphlet, weakened the clarity of her own arguments by toying with the idea of a ‘proletarian’ form of national defence.
When we look at the debate on organisation at the beginning of the century, we can see similar twists and turns of the dialectic. The long passage just quoted contains much that would form the backbone of her brilliant text The Mass Strike, the Party and the Trade Unions, which analyses the conditions of the class struggle in the newly-dawning historical epoch. Luxemburg, sooner than any other revolutionary of the day, saw that in this period, the proletariat would be compelled to develop its tactics, methods, and organisational forms in the heat of the struggle itself; they could not be planned in advance or organised down to the last detail by the revolutionary minority or indeed by any pre-existing organism. In 1904 she had already advanced towards these conclusions by observing recent mass movements in Russia; she would be vindicated even more definitively by the strikes and uprisings of 1905. True to Luxemburg’s diagnosis, the movement of 1905 was a general social explosion in which the working class went almost overnight from humble petitions to the Czar to mass strike and armed insurrection; equally consistent with her standpoint, the revolutionary vanguard often found itself lagging behind the movement. In particular, when the proletariat spontaneously discovered the form of organisation appropriate for the epoch of proletarian revolution – the workers’ councils, the soviets – many of those who thought they were applying Lenin’s theory of organisation reacted at first by demanding that these creations of unpredictable workers’ spontaneity either adopt the Bolshevik programme or dissolve, forcing Lenin himself to fulminate against the rigid formalism of his fellow Bolsheviks, to defend the necessity for both the soviets and the party. What further proof could there be of the tendency of the ‘revolutionary leadership’ to play a conservative role? And let us recall that Luxemburg’s battle to convince German social democracy of the importance of spontaneity was directed above all at the right wing of the party concentrated in the parliamentary fraction and the trade union hierarchy, who could not even conceive of a struggle that was not rigidly pre-planned and directed by the party/union Zentrum. Small wonder that she tended to see Lenin’s centralism as a ‘Russian’ variant of this bureaucrat’s vision of the class war.
And yet - exactly as we saw with Trotsky’s polemic - for all Luxemburg’s insights, there are two key flaws in this passage, flaws which confirm that, on the question of the revolutionary organisation, of its role and position within the mass upsurges of the new epoch, it was Lenin and not Luxemburg who had grasped the essentials.
The first flaw is connected to an oft-quoted sentence in the passage we have cited: “the unconscious precedes the conscious, the logic of the objective historical process precedes the subjective logic of its carriers”. This is of course the case as a general historical proposition; as Marx put it, man makes his history, but not in conditions of his own choosing. Hitherto, he has been at the mercy of the unconscious forces of nature and of the economy, which predominate over his conscious volition and ensure that all his best-laid plans have very different outcomes from those which he had intended. And for the same reasons, humanity’s understanding of its own position in the world remains under the sway of ideology – of myths, evasions and illusions perpetually reproduced by its own divisions, both at the individual and the collective level. In short, the unconscious necessarily precedes and dominates the conscious. But this approach ignores a fundamental characteristic of man’s conscious activity: its capacity to see ahead, to mould the future, in short, to submit the unconscious powers to his deliberate control. And with the proletariat and the proletarian revolution, this fundamental human characteristic can for the first time come to fruition. The proletariat is the class of consciousness, the class which, to emancipate itself, can and must reverse Luxemburg’s formula and subject the whole of social life to its conscious control. True this can only be fully realised in communism, when the proletariat will have dissolved itself; true that in its most elemental struggles for self-defence, its consciousness is no less elemental. But this does not alter the fact that it has a tendency to become more and more conscious of its historic goals, which implies the development of a consciousness that is able to foresee and shape the future. This domination of the conscious over the unconscious can only reach full flower in communism, but the revolution is already a qualitative step towards it. Hence the absolutely indispensable role of the revolutionary organisation, which has the specific role of analysing the lessons of the past in order capacity to foresee, as Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, “the general line of march of the proletarian movement”, in short, to point the way towards the future.
Luxemburg, trapped in an argument which made it necessary to emphasise the domination of the unconscious, sees the role of the organisation as essentially conservative: to preserve the acquisitions of the past, to act as the memory of the working class. But while this is clearly vital, its ultimate purpose is anything but ‘conservative’: it is to anticipate the real direction of the future movement and actively influence the process leading towards it. Examples from the history of the revolutionary movement are not lacking. It was this capacity, for example, which enabled Marx to understand why humble, limited, even apparently anachronistic skirmishes such as those fought by the Silesian weavers in a semi-feudal Germany were indicators of the future class war, the first tangible evidence of the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. We could equally point to the decisive intervention of Lenin in April 1917, who, even against the conservative elements ‘leading’ his own Bolshevik party, was able to announce and thus prepare for the coming revolutionary confrontation between the Russian working class and the ‘democratic’ Provisional Government. It was this tendency in Luxemburg’s approach to reduce consciousness to a passive reflection of an objective movement that led the Gauche Communiste de France – who were certainly not afraid to take Luxemburg’s side against Lenin on other crucial issues, such as imperialism and the national question – to argue that Lenin’s approach to the problem of class consciousness was more precise than that of Rosa:
“Lenin’s thesis of ‘socialist consciousness injected into the workers by the Party’ in opposition to Rosa’s thesis of the ‘spontaneity’ of the coming to consciousness, engendered during the course of a movement departing from the economic struggle and culminating in a revolutionary socialist struggle, is certainly more precise. The thesis of ‘spontaneity’, with its democratic appearance, reveals at root a mechanistic tendency towards rigorous economic determinism. It is based on a cause and effect relationship, with consciousness as merely an effect, the result of an initial movement, ie the economic struggle of the workers which gives rise to it. In this view, consciousness is see a, 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 their character as an essentially active factor and principle. It does not detach itself from life and the movement but is included within it” (Internationalisme no. 38, ‘Sur la nature et la function du parti politique du proletariat’. The comrades of the GCF abstain here from criticising the polemical exaggerations in Lenin’s argument – its Kautskyite side which sees socialist consciousness as the literal creation of the intelligentsia. Despite the fact that much of this text is taken up with rejecting the substitutionist/militarist conception of the party, criticising Lenin’s mistakes about class consciousness was obviously secondary for them at this point. This is because the fundamental issue was to emphasise the active role of class consciousness against any tendency to reduce it to a passive reflection of the immediate resistance struggles of the workers.
A further error in Luxemburg’s remarks about the inherently conservative tendency of the party leadership is that it fails to place it in its proper historical context, thus virtually turning it into an original sin of all centralised organisations (a sentiment which would certainly be shared by the anarchists). Luxemburg, we saw earlier, correctly argued that the roots of opportunism must be sought in the most basic conditions of the proletariat’s life within bourgeois society. It follows that, since all proletarian political organisations must operate inside this society, they are therefore subject to the perpetual pressure of the dominant ideology; that there is an ‘unchanging’ danger of conservatism, of opportunist adaptations to immediate appearances, of resistance to making the challenging advances demanded by the evolution of the real movement. But it is certainly insufficient to leave this observation here. To begin with, we must emphasise that this danger is by no means limited to the central organs and can just as easily manifest itself among the local branches. This was clearly the case in the German SPD, where certain regions (such as Bavaria) were notoriously ‘permeable’ to various expressions of revisionism. Secondly, the opportunist menace, though permanent, is stronger in certain historical conditions than others. In the case of the Communist International, it was without doubt the decline of the revolutionary wave and the isolation of the proletarian regime in Russia which reinforced the threat to the point where it irreversibly condemned its parties to degeneration and betrayal. And in the period in which Luxemburg is elaborating her polemic against Lenin, the growing conservatism of the social democratic parties was precisely the reflection of definite historical conditions: capitalism’s epochal shift from its ascendant to its decadent phase, which while not yet completed, was already revealing the inadequacy of the old forms of class organisation, both general (the trade unions) and political (the ‘mass’ party). In these circumstances any serious critique of the conservative tendencies in social democracy would have to have been accompanied by a new conception of the party. The irony here is that Luxemburg’s analysis of the new forms and methods of the class struggle prepared the ground for such a new conception, as we already pointed out in the first article in this series. This was especially true of the Mass Strike pamphlet which stresses the role of political leadership which the party has to play within the mass movement. Indeed, the profound hostility it incurred from the ‘orthodox’ party centre was in itself proof that the old social democratic forms were tied to methods of struggle that were utterly unsuited to the new epoch. But it was Lenin who supplied the missing piece of the jigsaw by insisting on the need for a “revolutionary party of a new type”. This theoretical leap by Lenin was by no means fully elaborated, and we know only too well that the old social democratic conceptions continued to haunt the movement well into the epoch of wars and revolutions. But the fact remains that his brilliant intuition surged from the depths of the new reality: that the old mass parties could not, by definition, play the role of politically orienting the revolutionary struggle of the working class, any more than the trade unions could provide its general organisational framework.
Time and again, Luxemburg’s polemic against Lenin blurs the distinction between the party leadership, the party as a whole, and the class as a whole. In particular, the argument that it is the masses themselves (or the ‘masses’ within the party) who must lead the struggle against conservatism and opportunism is a generalisation which skates over the indispensable role of the organised political vanguard in this struggle. At the root of this argument is the false identification between party and class which we cited earlier on: “Social Democracy is not linked to or connected with the organisation of the working class, but is the movement of the working class itself”.
It is true that social democracy, the proletarian political fraction, group or party, is not something outside the class movement, that it is an organic product of the proletariat. But it is a particular and unique product; any tendency to merge it with the ‘movement in general’ is harmful both to the political minority and to the movement as a whole. In certain circumstances the erroneous identification between party and class can be used to justify substitutionist theories and practise: this was a marked tendency in the phase of the decline of the revolution in Russia, when some of the Bolsheviks began to theorise the idea that the class should unquestioningly submit to the directives of the party (in reality, the party-state), because the party could not but represent the real interests of the class in all circumstances and conditions. But in Luxemburg’s polemic against Lenin, we are looking at the symmetrical error, in which the particular life and tasks of the political organisation are lost in the mass movement - precisely what Lenin was opposing in his fight against Economism and Menshevism. Indeed, Luxemburg’s opposition to Lenin’s “sharp separation of the organised nucleus of the party from the surrounding revolutionary milieu,” her insistence that “an absolute dividing line cannot be erected between the class-conscious kernel of the proletariat already organised as a party cadre, and the immediate popular environment which is gripped by the class struggle”, could only, in the circumstances of the debate going on at the time, give succour to Martov’s argument that it would be perfectly fine for “every striker to declare himself a social democrat”. And as we pointed out in the previous article, the most important danger facing revolutionaries at this moment was not, as Trotsky was arguing, substitutionism, but its anarchist, ‘democratist’, Economist twin.
Thus Rosa Luxemburg – who would be attacked again and again as an ‘authoritarian’ within the SPD and the Polish social democracy precisely because of her consistent defence of centralisation – was at this particular moment in history swayed by the ‘democratic’ backlash against Lenin’s rigorous advocacy of organisational centralisation. Thus Rosa, who was at the heart of the struggle against opportunism within her own party, was to identify the ‘wrong’ wing as the source of the opportunist danger in the Russian party. History would not take long – less than a year in fact - to prove Lenin right in seeing the Mensheviks as the real crystallisation of opportunism in the RSDLP, and Bolshevism as the expression of the “revolutionary proletarian trend” in the party. But that will have to examined in a future article.
Amos
The initiative has been taken by three organisations (International Communist Current, the Moscow organisation of the Confederation of revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists, Russia, and the Group of the revolutionary proletarian collectivists, Russia) to set up an internationalist discussion forum [308]. The first subject submitted for debate is that of the lessons to be learned from the defeat of the October Revolution.
The terrible defeat of the October revolution by the Stalinist counter-revolution decimated the proletariat's revolutionary forces that followed, the long night of the counter-revolution and the bloodiest war that humanity has ever witnessed, left the tiny groups who remained faithful to the principles of proletarian internationalism scattered and terribly weakened.
The situation of the emerging revolutionary minorities and searching elements is thus doubly difficult today. Not only do they have to struggle to develop ideas and intervention, to understand the situation in which they act and to find an echo in the working class, they must also struggle against the terrible isolation and dispersal of revolutionary forces across the world.
It has always been a fundamental principle of the ICC that the future world wide unity of proletarian revolutionaries can never be forged unless the groups that exist today are able to debate the issues that both divide and unite them in an open and fraternal spirit. Such debate is necessary, not only for the vital clarification of the principles of working-class action, but also to break down the dominant isolation, to create confidence amongst the different groups that exist today, to help them learn what it means to work together internationally as fighters for a single class.
This is why we have undertaken to participate in an Internationalist Discussion Forum set up jointly with groups in Russia, and which for the moment is grouped around an Internet site.
The purpose of this forum is by no means to create an artificial political organisation, or to provide an unprincipled recruiting ground. On the contrary, as the founding address for the forum puts it: "Its purpose is to undertake a systematic discussion, with a view to clarification, of those questions which proved crucial for the workers' movement and which will continue to be so in the future confrontations between the classes: internationalism, the reasons for the defeat of the world revolutionary wave, the degeneration of the Russian revolution, state capitalism, national liberation, the role of the trade unions etc. Its purpose is to gather and to make known contributions on these questions, which put forward different approaches that have already appeared within the workers' movement, as well as differences of view, disagreements, or questionings that may exist amongst the participants in the forum. The forum is therefore an open place for the discussion and confrontation of political ideas, with the sole aim of clarification through political argument, following the proletarian method which excludes any approach in contradiction with the disinterested aim of the emancipation of the working class. In particular, it is not a "hunting ground" for unprincipled recruitment as this is habitually practised by organisations situated on the extreme left of the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie (Trotskyists, etc)".
Such a forum can only be based on principles which separate it clearly from the left wing of capitalism. In this period, marked by generalised imperialist war, we consider that the question of internationalism is critical in separating those who seek to work for the revolutionary emancipation of the working class, and those who merely seek to strengthen the hold of the bourgeois state and its apparatus of control and mystification. Participation on the site is therefore dependent on certain political criteria in this sense.
As it stands today, the discussion group is still at its first, hesitant steps. We cannot know in advance whether it will be a success - there are no guarantees in revolutionary politics.But we remain convinced that only through such patient, unspectacular efforts can we help to lay the groundwork for the future political and organisational unity of the working class, that will be a vital weapon in its effort to overthrow capitalism and establish a new, communist society.
The capitalist class spares no expense when it comes to putting on a show to make the oppressed and exploited accept their fate. In ancient Rome, the Emperors knew that bread and circuses (“panem et circenses”) were necessary to reconcile the plebs to their situation. And when bread ran short, they added to the circus. In the Christian epoch, the ceremonial of the mass played essentially the same role. And, as with the Roman circus, the purpose was not only to divert the oppressed to make them forget the misery of their daily lives, but also to praise the strength and generosity of the ruling power of the day.
From this point of view, the bourgeoisie has invented nothing new. It has only developed vastly more sophisticated shows, adding its own mastery of capitalism's science and technology to all the experience of the ruling classes that preceded it.
Every day, and thanks above all to television, the “people” is treated to every imaginable kind of “reality show”, sporting event, and other celebrations of the luxury of modern society (even including royal weddings, centuries after the overthrow of the aristocracy's political power!). And on appropriate occasions, the bourgeoisie also uses important historical events not only to “amuse the people”, but to brainwash the population with lies and false lessons drawn from the events.
The 60th anniversary of the Normandy landings (6th June 1944) was a new example, and a particularly significant one.
All the journalists who covered the events noted that the ceremonies for the 60th anniversary far outdid those for the 50th in expense, media coverage, the participation of famous “personalities”, and “popular enthusiasm”. The same journalists have offered varied and sometimes surprising explanations for the paradox: the ceremonies were supposed to seal the new-found friendship between France and the USA after the disputes over the invasion of Iraq; or they were the last opportunity to express gratitude to the survivors and to treat those old men covered in medals, whether Appalachian miner, Oklahoma farmer or London truck driver, as VIPs for once in their lives.
Communists do not celebrate the D-Day Landings, as they might the Paris Commune or the revolution of October 1917. It is nonetheless their duty to explain what really happened in 1944, and what it meant, and to raise a small dam against the incoming tide of bourgeois lies, in the service of that tiny minority who are ready, today, to listen.
The history of humanity is rich in wars, yet never before 6th June 1944 had the world seen a military operation on the scale of the Normandy Landings.
On the night of 5th- 6th June, 6,939 ships crossed the English Channel: 1,213 warships, 4,126 landing barges, 736 supply ships and 864 merchant ships. Above their heads, the sky was criss-crossed with the vapour trails of 11,590 aircraft: 5,050 fighters, 5,110 bombers, 2,310 transport aircraft, 2,600 gliders and 700 reconnaissance craft. In terms of manpower, 132,715 men went ashore on D-Day, to join the 15,000 American and 7,000 British paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines the night before by 2,395 aircraft.
The figures are enormous, but they are far from revealing the full extent of the operation. Even before the landings, minesweepers had cleared five huge sea-lanes to allow the Armada through. The landings themselves only aimed at establishing a bridgehead, which would make it possible to unload far greater numbers of troops and quantities of equipment. In less than a month, 1.5 million Allied troops disembarked with their equipment, including tens of thousands of armoured vehicles (the Americans built 150,000 Sherman tanks alone). This meant mobilising gigantic material and human resources. For the ships to unload men and cargo, the Allies needed a deep-water harbour such as Cherbourg or Le Havre. But since these towns could not be taken immediately, two artificial ports had to be built offshore from the villages of Arromanches and Saint-Laurent by towing hundreds of huge concrete caissons across the Channel, then sinking them to create piers and jetties.[1] [311] For several weeks, Arromanches became the world's largest port by tonnage, until the Allies took Cherbourg a month after D-Day, shipping double the tonnage of New York harbour in 1939. By the 12th August, the Allies were able to begin using PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean), a submarine pipeline for fuel running from the Isle of Wight to Cherbourg.
These colossal human and material resources are in themselves symbolic of what the capitalist system has become, swallowing vast quantities of technical prowess and human labour in the service of destruction. But over and above the enormous scale of “Operation Neptune” (as the Normandy Landings were code-named), we should remember that it was merely a preparation for some of the worst carnage in history: “Operation Overlord”, the whole military operation throughout the European theatre in mid-1944. All along the Normandy coast, one can still see the unending lines of white crosses that bear witness to the terrible price paid by a whole generation of young Americans, British, Germans, Canadians, etc., some of them barely 16 years old. The military cemeteries give no account of the civilian dead, the old, women, and children, who were killed during the fighting, sometimes in even greater numbers than the soldiers. The battle of Normandy, during which the Germans tried to prevent the Allies from gaining a foothold and then advancing into France, cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
The bourgeois media hides none of this. One sometimes even gets the impression that they are laying it on a bit thick when they describe the terrible massacre of that summer of 1944. The lie is in the interpretation of events.
The soldiers who disembarked on the 6th June 1944 and the days that followed are presented as the soldiers of “liberty” and “civilisation”. That is what they were told before the Landings, to persuade them to sacrifice their lives and it is what the numerous politicians, Bush, Blair, Chirac, Putin, Schröder, & Co, who visited the Normandy beaches on 6th June 2004 repeated. And all the commentators add: “where would we be today had these soldiers not made that terrible sacrifice? We would still be under the Nazi jackboot!”. What more need be said? However awful the slaughter may have been, it was a “necessary evil” to save “democracy and civilisation”.
These lies are repeated by all the enemies of yesteryear (the German chancellor was invited to the ceremony), and by practically the whole political spectrum, from the most reactionary right to the Trotskyists. Against these lies, it is necessary to repeat a few elementary truths.
The first truth that needs to be remembered is that World War II was not a struggle between a “democratic camp” and a “totalitarian camp” - unless one continues to consider Stalin as a great champion of democracy. This indeed is what the “communist” parties of the day pretended, and the others made little effort to give them the lie. The real communists, for their part, had long since denounced the Stalinist regime as the gravedigger of the October revolution and the spearhead of the world wide counter-revolution. In reality, in World War II just as in World War I, two imperialist camps fought over markets, raw material supplies and spheres of influence. And if Germany appeared as the aggressor, the “warmonger”, then this is simply because it had come out worst from the imperialist share-out that followed the Versailles treaty at the end of World War I, aggravating still further the unfavourable situation of Germany prior to 1914 that resulted from its late arrival on the imperial scene (small countries like Belgium and Holland had larger empires than Germany).
The second truth is this: despite all the talk about the “defence of civilisation”, it was hardly a preoccupation for the Allied leaders who demonstrated, on occasions, a capacity for barbarism wholly comparable to that of the Axis countries. Nor are we talking only of the Stalinist gulags, which were fully equal in horror to the Nazi concentration camps. The “democratic” countries have also demonstrated their talents in this domain. We will not review here all the crimes and acts of barbarity committed by the valiant “defenders of civilisation” (see, in particular, our article “Crimes and massacres of the great democracies” in International Review n°66). It is enough to remember that before World War II, and long before the Nazis came to power, these countries had “exported” their “civilisation” not only by the gospel, but also and above all by the sword, the gunship, and the machine gun, not to mention poison gas and torture. As for World War II, let us recall some of the Allies' indubitable demonstrations of “civilisation”. The first to spring to mind are of course the bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6th and 9th August 1945, when atomic bombs were used for the first and only time in history, killing more than 100,000 civilians in a matter of seconds and leaving more than 100,000 others to die of radiation sickness after months or years of suffering.
The terrible toll exacted by Allied bombardments was not limited to the effects of nuclear weapons. The slaughter of the civilian population by the defenders of “civilisation” was also conducted using perfectly classical methods:
· the bombardment of Hamburg during July 1943: 50,000 dead;
· the bombardment of Tokyo in March 1945: 80,000 dead;
· the bombardment of Dresden on the 13th and 14th February 1945: 250,000 dead.
The last of these bombardments is particularly significant. Dresden contained no troop concentrations, no economic or industrial objective. It was crowded with refugees from the bombing of other cities. The Allies had already virtually won the war. But they intended to sow terror in the population, and above all among the workers, to discourage any return to the ideas of the end of World War I: that capitalism could be overthrown by revolutionary struggle.
The Nazi “war criminals” were judged in the Nuremberg trials that followed the war. They owed their condemnation not to the extent of their crimes, but to the fact that they belonged to the defeated camp. Otherwise, Churchill and Roosevelt, responsible for the decision to carry out the slaughter we have just mentioned, should have shared a place with their German counterparts in the dock.
Finally, there is another truth that needs to be established against the argument that if the Allies had not liberated Europe, then the suffering would have been still worse.
It is generally pointless to try to rewrite history with “ifs”; it is far more fruitful to understand why history took one course rather than another. This argument (“supposing the Allies had lost the war?”) is generally used by those whose intention is to justify the existing order on the grounds that it is the “lesser evil” (as Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others”).
In reality, the victory of “democracy” and “civilisation” in World War II did not put an end to the barbarity of the capitalist world. Since 1945, wars have taken as many victims as both world wars combined. The continued survival of the capitalist mode of production, whose obsolescence is demonstrated by the two world wars, the economic crisis of the 1930s that came between them, and the crisis of today, has subjected humanity to an unending series of deadly disasters (famine, epidemics, all the “natural” disasters whose worst effects could easily be avoided, etc.). Not to mention the fact that the continued survival of capitalism is mortgaging the survival of the human species through the irreversible destruction of the environment, thus preparing new natural – especially climatic – disasters, with all their terrifying consequences. And if the capitalist system has been able to survive for 50 years since World War II, it is because the “victory of democracy” was a terrible defeat for the working class: an ideological defeat which completed the counter-revolution that followed the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23.
It is precisely because the bourgeoisie, with the help of all the so-called “workers' parties” (from socialists to Trotskyists, via the “communists”), succeeded in making the workers of the world's major capitalist nations – especially in the great industrial concentrations of Europe – believe that the victory of democracy was “their victory”, that they did not undertake a revolutionary struggle during and after the war, as they had done during World War I. In other words, the “victory of democracy” in general, and the D-Day landings that have been so lauded this June, offered a reprieve to decadent capitalism, allowing it to continue its bloody and catastrophic course for another half century.
Needless to say, none of the media mention this truth. On the contrary, the special zeal with which the powerful and their lackeys have celebrated this “great moment of Liberty” is a measure of the renewed unease with which the ruling class is beginning to envisage the perspective of a reawakening of the class struggle, as every day the crisis of capitalism demonstrates the system's historical bankruptcy and the necessity of overthrowing it.
Indeed, if there is one other lesson that the working class should learn from operations “Neptune” and “Overlord”, it is the bourgeoisie's remarkable capacity for deception.
At the Tehran conference of Allied leaders in December 1943, Churchill remarked to Stalin, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies”. The idea is not a new one. In the 6th century BC, the Chinese strategist Sun Zi described the main rule in the art of war thus: “All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near”.[2] [312] In order to ensure the success of the greatest military operation in history, it was necessary to undertake one of the most gigantic enterprises of deception ever imagined. This was the operation codenamed “Fortitude”, designed to deceive the German High Command when the landings took place. It was developed by the London Control Section (LCS) set up by Churchill, which brought together the main British and American intelligence chiefs.
We will not describe in detail here all the means used to deceive the Germans, and will limit ourselves to some of the most important.
During the first half of 1944, the German leaders realised that the Allies intended to open a second front in Europe, in other words that a landing was planned. Thus far, the Allies knew that it was impossible to deceive the enemy. However, the question remained of exactly when and where the landings were planned, and the objective of “Special means” (to use the British term) was to make believe that they would take place at a date and location other than the Normandy beaches on 6th June 1944. In theory, the landings could take place anywhere between the Bay of Biscay and the north of Norway, a coastline several thousand miles long. However, inasmuch as the Allies had established the vast majority of their military bases in Britain, it seemed logical to expect a landing somewhere between Brittany and Holland. Hitler himself was convinced that it would take place in the Pas de Calais, where the Channel is narrowest: in particular, this would allow British fighter aircraft to take part in the operation despite their limited range.
Allied espionage had already reported this belief of the German High Command, and the aim of “Operation Fortitude” was to make sure that they continued to believe it for as long as possible, even after the Normandy landings, which were presented as no more than a diversion to prepare the “real” landing in the Pas de Calais. Indeed, Hitler still expected this “real” landing several weeks after the Allies had established the Normandy beachhead, and consequently refused to send the men and equipment massed in Northern France and Belgium to counter-attack in Normandy. When he understood what was happening, it was too late: the Allies had already landed enough troops and equipment to take Normandy and to advance on Paris and then into Germany.
The Allies spared no expense to deceive their enemy. Some of the means employed verged on the comical: take the example of Meyrick Edward Clifton James, a provincial actor in civilian life, who in May 1944 played the most important role of his career, when he impersonated General Montgomery, Britain's leading field general and the man in charge of the operational side of the Normandy landings. An almost perfect double for the general, dressed and made-up by specialists, James arrived in Gibraltar on 26th May on his way to Algiers, with the aim of making the Germans believe that the landings planned in the south of France (which followed D-Day by more than two months, on 15th August in Provence) were in fact to precede those in Normandy.[3] [313]
There existed a whole series of other episodes of the same kind, but the most decisive measure designed to convince the German leadership that the landings were to come in the Pas de Calais, was the formation of the First US Army Group (FUSAG) under the command of General Patton, one of America's best-known generals. FUSAG was encamped in South-East England, and so opposite the Pas de Calais, and comprised no less than one million men with all their equipment. However, FUSAG's main particularity was, that it was completely fictitious. The tanks that the German reconnaissance aircraft photographed were inflatable dummies, the aircraft were wooden models, the military camps were of cardboard, etc. The radio traffic generated by FUSAG was imitated by American and Canadian actors.[4] [314]
Some of the methods used to strengthen the German conviction that an attack on Northern France was imminent are indicative of the degree of cynicism of which the ruling class is capable. “Free French” agents working for the British were sent on a mission to sabotage the canons protecting that part of the coast. What they did not know, was that British double agents (whom the Germans thought were working for them) had betrayed them to the Gestapo, knowing that under torture they were bound to reveal their supposedly “sensitive” information.[5] [315]
What is striking, when we consider the “Special means” used by both camps during World War II, but especially by the Allies, is the incredible degree of Machiavellianism deployed to deceive the enemy. Indeed, for a long time after the war the US government tried to keep them hidden (in a memorandum of 28th August 1945, Truman banned any publication of information on the subject). The leading spheres of the ruling class have no interest in letting it be known how Machiavellian they are capable of being, especially not in a period when war has become permanent. After all, if a stratagem has not been revealed, it can be used again. As an example, we can point to the Japanese attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, deliberately engineered by the British and American leadership with a view to bouncing a recalcitrant American population, as well as the isolationist sections of the American bourgeoisie, into World War II. This has always been denied by the American authorities (who have surrounded the events with a “bodyguard of lies”). If, as seems highly likely, the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11th 2001 was intended to happen by an American secret service which left Al Qaeda free to operate, in order to prepare the way for the war in Iraq, then we can understand their interest in keeping the reality of Pearl Harbor a secret today.[6] [316]
Finally, the working class should never forget that if the bourgeoisie is capable of incredible Machiavellianism in its imperialist wars, it is that much more so in the class war. One could even say that it is against the proletariat that the bourgeoisie deploys its greatest sophistication in the art of deception, for what is at stake then is not merely a matter of imperialist supremacy, but a question of life or death. In other words, even more than in wars between nations, it is in the class war that the bourgeoisie will “protect the truth with a bodyguard of lies”.
The fanfares that celebrated the Normandy landings are silent today, but the working class must never forget the real lessons of this event:
· that decadent capitalism can never put an end to war, it can only heap ruin upon ruin and wage war on an ever more terrible scale;
· that the ruling class is capable of every infamy, every lie, to preserve its domination over society;
· and that the proletariat must never underestimate the intelligence of the exploiting class, nor its ability to use the most sophisticated machinations to protect its power and privileges.
Fabienne
[1] [317] These were the famous “Mulberry Harbours”. The most spectacular feature of the Mulberry project was without doubt the construction of the huge, hollow blocks of concrete, or Phoenix caissons, to form the roadstead. Before being flooded, they each weighed between 1,600 and 6,000 tonnes, while the largest ones measured sixty metres by seventeen, and were the height of a five-storey building. A total of 40,000 workers were involved in this gigantic project, which required the opening of special building sites across England.
[2] [318] From the English text reproduced at https://www.chinapage.com/sunzi-e.html [319]
[3] [320] In the same vein, it is also worth mentioning “Operation Mincemeat”, aimed at deceiving the German High Command into the belief that the Allied landings in Sicily were only the prelude to much larger landings in Greece and Sardinia. A British submarine left drifting on the Spanish coast the corpse of a man identified by his papers as a Major William Martin – who had never in fact existed – with chained to his wrist an attaché case containing false documents intended to lend credibility to this story. The Spanish authorities (Spain was at this time under Franco's fascist regime, but had not joined Germany in the war) handed the documents back to the British embassy, but not before they had been photographed by the German secret service. Combined with other manoeuvres of the same kind, “Operation Mincemeat” proved a brilliant success, since it caused Hitler to send one of his most brilliant officers, Rommel, to Athens, in order to prepare for a landing in Greece that never happened.
[4] [321] FUSAG was supported by the equally fictitious British 4th Army of 350,000 men, based in Scotland supposedly in readiness for the invasion of Norway. The fact that the 4th Army did not exist did not prevent it, once the Normandy landings began, from moving south to join FUSAG in preparation for an attack on Calais...
[5] [322] This inglorious exploit of “Special means” is recounted in novel form by the American journalist Larry Collins (co-author of Is Paris burning) in his book Fortitude. Needless to say, this episode is not the only illustration of Allied cynicism. It is worth remembering the Dieppe landings of 19th August 1942. This operation involved 5,000 Canadian and 2,000 British troops, and had no intention of taking position in France. The Allied leadership knew from the outset that they were sending these young men into a bloodbath. The operation's sole objective was to conduct a “live test” of the German defence, and to gather information on the problems that would have to be solved for the Normandy landings to succeed.
[6] [323] See our article “Pearl Harbor 1941, the Twin Towers 2001, and the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie” in International Review n°108. Those who criticise our articles that highlight the Machiavellianism of the ruling class, on the grounds that it is incapable of undertaking the activity that we describe, should read The spy who came in from the cold, by ex-British agent John Le Carré, which is an excellent remedy for the naivety that afflicts our critics.
The first two articles in this series on the imperialist conflicts in the Middle East highlighted the manipulation of Arab and Zionist nationalism by the great powers, and especially by Britain, in order to dominate the region. They were also used as a weapon against the threat from the working class in the period immediately following the Russian revolution. In this article, we continue the study of imperialist rivalries in the region during the lead-up to World War II and the war itself, to reveal the utter cynicism of the imperialist policy of every faction of the bourgeoisie.
Both Palestinian peasants and workers, as well as Jewish workers were confronted with the false alternative of taking sides for one wing or the other of the bourgeoisie (Palestinian or Jewish). This false alternative meant that the workers were pulled onto the terrain of military confrontations for purely bourgeois demands. During the 1920s a series of violent clashes between Jews and Arabs and between Arabs and the British occupying forces occurred.
These clashes intensified after the world economic crisis of 1929. One of the factors responsible for their intensification was the increased immigration of Jewish refugees, who had fled from the effects of the world economic crisis and the repression the Nazis had started to unleash against Jews and the repression exercised by Stalinism. Between 1920 and 1930 the number of immigrants doubled, between 1933-39 some 200,000 new immigrants reached Palestine so that by 1939 the Jews made up 30% of the population.
The broader historical and international framework was the general, world wide sharpening of imperialist conflicts. Palestine and the Middle East as a whole were profoundly affected by the realignment of forces on the world arena during the 1930s.
On the one hand, the catastrophic defeat of the proletariat (victory of the Stalinist counter-revolution in Russia, of fascism and nazism in Italy and Germany, enrolment of the workers under the banner of "anti-fascism" and the united front in France and Spain in 1936) made it almost impossible for either Jewish or Arab workers to oppose an internationalist class front to the increasingly bloody struggles between the Jewish and Palestinian bourgeoisies. The world wide defeat of the working class had left the bourgeoisie's hands free to open the road to a new generalised world war. At the same time, increasing numbers of Jews were fleeing repression and pogroms in Europe, sharpening the conflicts between Arabs and Jews in Palestine.
On the other hand, the traditional imperialist rivalries in the area (between the French and the British) were fading as new and more dangerous rivals to those old bandits entered the area. Italy, already present in Libya after a war with Turkey in 1911, invaded Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in 1936, threatening to encircle Egypt and the strategic Suez Canal. Germany, the most powerful member of the fascist Axis, worked in the background to extend its influence by offering support for local nationalist and imperialist ambitions, especially in Turkey, Iraq, and Iran.[1] [324]
The historical course towards generalised war was going to engulf the Middle East.
Since the end of World War I the Zionists had demanded the general arming of Jews. In fact, this armament had already begun in secret. The Zionist "self-defence" organisation, Hagan, which was founded during World War I, was turned into a proper military unit. In 1935 a separate terrorist group Irgun Zwai Leumi – known as Ezel – with some 3,000-5,000 fighters was founded. General "conscription" in the Jewish community was introduced; all young men and women between the ages of 17 and 18 had to take part in this underground military service.
The Palestinian bourgeoisie for its part received armed backing from neighbouring countries.
In 1936 there was another escalation of clashes between Zionists and Arab nationalists. In April 1936 the Palestinian bourgeoisie called for a general strike against the British rulers, whom they wanted to force to abandon their pro-Zionist stand. The Arab nationalists with Amin Hussein at their head, called upon the workers and peasants to support their struggle against the Jews and British. The general strike lasted until October 1936 – and was only called off after an appeal by neighbouring countries such as Transjordan, Saudi-Arabia and Iraq, which had started to arm a Palestinian guerrilla.
The violent clashes continued until 1938. The British "protectors" mobilised 25,000 troops to defend their strategic Palestinian outpost.
In view of the general destabilisation of the situation, in 1937 the British bourgeoisie proposed a division of Palestine into two parts (report of the Peel Commission).
The Jews were to receive the fertile northern part of Palestine, the Palestinians should receive the less fertile south-east, Jerusalem should be put under an international mandate and be linked to the Mediterranean through a corridor.
Both Zionists and Palestinians nationalists rejected the Peel Commission plan. One wing of the Zionists insisted on total independence from Britain, they continued to arm themselves and intensified guerrilla action against the British occupying forces.
By presenting a plan of dividing Palestine into two parts, Britain was hoping to maintain its domination over Palestine in this strategically vital part of the world, which also saw a sharp increase of imperialist tensions – especially with Germany and Italy trying to penetrate into the region.
While the French Popular front granted Syria independence in 1936, which, however was only to become effective 3 years later, in 1939 France once again declared Syria to be a French ‘protectorate’.
This new alignment of imperialist forces was a real source of difficulty for the British bourgeoisie, which now had every interest in calming the situation in Palestine, and in preventing any of the parties to the conflict from seeking support from one of Britain's imperialist rivals. But as the conflict between Jewish immigrants and Arabs grew increasingly bitter, the pigeons of the old "divide and rule" policy came home to roost.
Britain had to try to ‘neutralise’ the Arab nationalists and force the Zionists to restrain themselves in their demand for a ‘national home’ for Jews.
Britain adopted a White book, which declared the territories occupied by the Jews constituted a “national home” for the Jews, that after a period of 5 years, during which annual immigration of Jews should not exceed 75,000, Jewish immigration should cease altogether – at a time when the massacres of Jewish people in Europe went into millions... At the same time the purchase of land by Jews should be limited.
These announcements were meant to curb rising Arab protests and were aimed at preventing the Arabs from turning against the British.
In view of the increasing violence between Zionists and Arab nationalists the further escalation of this conflict was only thwarted because an ‘overriding’ conflict – the confrontation between Germany and Italy and its enemies, i.e. the formation of the axis in Europe - pushed this conflict into the background for another 10 years.
And the looming world war once again forced the nationalists on both sides – the Arab bourgeoisie and the Zionists – to choose their imperialist camp.
With the outbreak of World War II, the Zionists decided to take sides with Britain and take position against German imperialism. They suspended their demand for a Jewish state proper as long as Britain was under threat by German attacks.
Within the Arab bourgeoisie the war led to a split – some of its fractions took sides with the British, others sided with Germany.
Even if the major battlefields during the Second World War were Europe and the Far East, the Middle East played a vital role for Britain and for Germany’s long-term strategic planning.
For Britain the defence of its positions in the Middle East continued to be a matter of life and death for the maintenance of its colonial empire, because once Egypt was lost, India would run the risk of falling into German and Japanese hands. Even as the Germans seemed about to invade Britain in 1940, Britain mobilised some 250,000 troops for the defence of the Suez-canal.
German military planning concerning the Middle East saw several about-turns.
At the beginning of the war, for some time at least, Germany’s strategy was to strike a secret deal with Russia over Eastern Anatolia. Similar as the secret deal between Stalin and Hitler over Poland (Russia and Germany settled to divide Poland amongst themselves), the German Foreign Secretary Ribbentrop suggested in November 1940 to Stalin that Russia and Germany divide up their zones of interests at the Iranian border and along the northern and south-eastern Anatolian flank. (The Palestine Question 1917-1948, Palestine and the Middle East policy of European Powers and the USA, 1918-48, p.193). But the German invasion into Russia in summer 1941 finally put an end to such plans.
One of Germany’s long-term military goal was, as elaborated in the Reichswehr headquarters in 1941, that once Russia was successfully defeated, Germany would kick Britain out of the Middle East and India. Immediately after the expected defeat of Russia, the Reichswehr planned a global offensive to occupy Iraq, find access to the Iraqi oil resources and threaten British positions in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.
However, Germany alone was unable to launch such an offensive.
In order to be able to ‘reach’ Iraq, Germany still had to remove some obstacles: It had to pull Turkey on its side – which was wavering between Britain and Germany. German troops had to march through Syria (which was still under French occupation) and Lebanon. This meant that Germany had to ask the Vichy regime for permission before the Reichswehr could cross Syria and Lebanon.
And it had to count on the help of the weaker parts of its alliance – namely Italy, which had insufficient military resources to attack Britain.
As long as German military planning had to focus on the priority of mobilising its troops against Russia, it was unable to dedicate more forces in the Mediterranean.
Much against its will, after Italian troops were defeated by the British in Libya in 1940-41, in 1942 the German Afrika-Korps under Rommel intervened and tried to drive out the British army of Egypt and conquer the Suez Canal. But Germany did not have the means to sustain another front in Africa and the Middle East, all the more so since its offensive against Russia had come to a halt.
At the same time German capital confronted its own insurmountable contradictions. On the one hand it aimed at the “Endlösung” (Holocaust, the displacement and annihilation of all Jews), which meant that German capital was forcing the Jews to flee, hence driving many of them to Palestine. Thus Nazi policy was to a large extent responsible for the increase of the number of Jewish refugees arriving in Palestine – a situation which brought German capital into contradiction with the interests of the Palestine and Arab bourgeoisie.
On the other hand German imperialism had to look for allies amongst the Arab bourgeoisies to fight against the British. This is why the Nazis propagated the call of the Arab bourgeoisie for national unity and supported their rejection of a national home for the Jews.[2] [325]
In several countries, German imperialism managed to pull towards its side some factions of the Arab bourgeoisie.
In April 1941 parts of the army overthrew the government in Iraq and formed a government of national defence under Rachid Ali al-Kailani. This government deported all those who were considered to be pro-British. The Palestinian nationalists who had gone into exile in Iraq, formed volunteer brigades under the leadership of al-Hussein and these units participated in the struggle against the British.
When the British army intervened against the pro-German government in Iraq, Germany sent two air craft squadrons. However, the German army did not have adequate logistics at its disposal to support its troops at such a distance. To the great disappointment of the pro-German Iraqi government, Germany had to withdraw its squadrons. The British army in turn did not only mobilise its own troops, they also used a Zionist special unit against Germany. Britain released the Zionist terrorist David Raziel, a leader of the Zionist organisation Irgun Zvai Leumi from British internment and entrusted him with a special mission. His unit was to blow up oil fields in Iraq and assassinate members of the pro-German government.
However, at that stage the German bomber squadron managed to shoot down the Zionist terrorist flying in a British plane. This incident – despite its limited military significance – reveals, however, which fundamental interests Britain as the declining “superpower” at the time and Germany as the “challenger” were fighting for, which limits they were confronted with and which allies they relied upon in the region.
The mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Hussein, who had fled to Iraq and the leader of the pro-German Iraqi government Ali al-Keilani had to flee from Iraq. Via Turkey and Italy they managed to escape to Berlin, where they stayed in exile. Palestinian and Iraqi nationalists enjoying protection and exile offered by the Nazis!
At the same time the pro-German parts of the Arabic bourgeoisie only tended to take sides with Germany, as long as German imperialism was on the advance. Following its defeat at el-Alamein in 1942 and at Stalingrad in 1943, as soon as the tide turned against German imperialism, the pro-German parts of the Arabic bourgeoisie changed sides or were ousted by the pro-British parts of the local bourgeoisie.
The defeat of the Germans also forced the Zionists to change their tactics. While they had supported Britain as long as the colonial power was under Nazi threat, they now resumed their terror campaign against the British in Palestine, which was to last until 1948. A leading figure amongst the Zionist terrorists was Menachem Begin (who later became Prime Minister of Israel and who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with Yasser Arafat). Amongst others, the Zionists assassinated the English Minister Lord Moyne in Cairo.
In order to win Arab sympathy and prevent the Arab nationalists from moving closer to its German imperialist rival, Britain established a naval blockade around Palestine to curb the influx of Jewish refugees. Western democracy was willing to regulate the influx of refugees for the sake of its imperialist interests. The Jews may have felt thankful to have escaped death in the Nazi concentration camps, but the British bourgeoisie was unwilling to let the Jews settle in Palestine – because the arrival of the Jews at that moment did not fit into their imperialist plans.[3] [326]
The similarity between the situation of World War I and World War II is striking.
All the local contending imperialist factions had to choose between one imperialist camp or other. The dominant imperialist camp, Britain, challenged by Germany, defended its power tooth and nail.
However, Germany was faced with insurmountable obstacles in this region: its weaker military capabilities (having to intervene at such large distances overstrained its military and logistic resources) and its lack of strong and reliable allies. Germany was not in the position to offer any reward to any of its allies, nor did it have the military means to coerce a country into its bloc or offer any protection against the other bloc.
Thus it could only play a ‘challenging’ role vis-à-vis the still dominant power at the time – Britain. It could never do more than undermine British positions and it was unable to establish a firm strategic outpost of its own or keep a country firmly in its orbit.
At the same time, the balance of forces between the “Allied Forces” changed during World War II.
The USA strengthened their position at the expense of Britain. Britain, which was bled white by the war and on the verge of bankruptcy, became indebted to the USA. Thus as with any war, the imperialist pecking order was transformed.
As a result, from 1942 on the Zionist organisations turned towards the USA in order to win their support for the setting up of a Jewish home in Palestine. In November the Jewish Emergency Council met in New York and rejected the British White book of 1939. The key demand was the transformation of Palestine into an independent Zionist state – a demand directed against British interests.
Until World War II it was above all the western European powers that clashed over the Middle East (Britain, France, Italy, Germany). And while France and Britain were the main beneficiaries of the Ottoman empire's collapse after World War I, these two countries were now to be “toppled” by American and Russian imperialism, which both aimed was to curb British and French colonial influence.
Russia undertook everything to support any power which was aiming at a weakening of the position of the British. Via Czechoslovakia it supplied arms to the Zionist guerrilla forces. The USA also delivered arms and money to the Zionists – although the latter fought against their British war allies.
After the Far East became a second centre of war in World War II, the Middle East remained in the periphery of the worldwide imperialist confrontations. However, the beginning of the Cold War was to pull the Middle East into the centre of imperialist rivalries. While the Korean War (1950-53) was one of the first major confrontations between the Eastern and Western block, the formation of the State of Israel on May 15th 1948 was to open another theatre of war, which was to remain in the centre of East-West confrontations for decades.
The first half of the 20th century in the Middle East showed that national liberation had become impossible, and that all local bourgeois factions were sucked up in the global imperialist conflicts between the bigger imperialist rivals. More than ever the proletariat had no imperialist side to choose.
The formation of the state of Israel in 1948 marked the opening of another round of 50 years of bloody confrontation. More than 100 years of conflicts in the Middle East have illustrated irrefutably that the declining capitalist system has nothing else to offer but war and annihilation.
DE
[1] [327] The Shah of Iran (father of the Shah deposed by Khomeini) was removed by the British in 1941 because of his supposed pro-Nazi sympathies.
[2] [328] Already in World War I for strategic reasons German imperialism had fostered the idea of an Arabian “jihad” against Britain, because it could hope to weaken British domination in the Middle East – even if the contradiction could not be overcome – because any Arabian ‚jihad‘ would also necessarily have to be turned against Turkish imperialism, Germany’s ally in the Middle East.
[3] [329] Britain for example prevented a ship with more than 5,000 Jewish refugees on board from entering Palestinian ports, because this would have been against British imperialist interests. In its odysee the boat was sent back to the Black sea, where it was sunk by the Russian army – more than 5,000 Jews drowned. In Mai 1939 930 Jewish refugees on board of the Hapag-Lloyd steamer ‘St-Louis’ sailed for Cuba. Having reached Cuban waters, they were refused entry. The ship was prevented from entering Miami harbour by the US-coast guard – despite of repeated appeals by many ‘personalities’. Finally the ship was sent back to Europe – where most of the Jewish refugees were massacred in the holocaust. Even after World War II, at the time of the blockade of the Palestine coast by British ships, 4.500 refugees on board of the ship “Exodus” tried to break the blockade. The British occupying forces didn’t want to let the ship enter Haifa, the Jewish terrorist organisation Haganah wanted to use the ship with all the refugees on board as a means to break the British blockade. The passengers were deported by the British to Hamburg.
The cynicism of the western bourgeoisie in relation to the fate of the Jews has been exposed by the PCI Le Prolétaire in its text Auschwitz – the great alibi).
All the great leaders of the capitalist world invited us to commemorate, with them, the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings in Normandy on 6th June 1944. As one man, Bush, Putin, Schröder, Blair, Chirac... the allies and enemies of yesteryear, in a moving spirit of unity, invited us to remember what, according to them, was a heroic epic in defence of liberty and democracy. The ruling ideology would have us believe, that these one-time allies and enemies have reflected on their past errors and corrected them, so that now it is possible to live in a world at peace, stable, and controlled. This world of peace – this “new world order” - is what we were promised already after the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989.
And yet, the 1990s have witnessed not only a continued development of military barbarism, but an increasing world wide social instability. The collapse of the Eastern bloc, which represented about a sixth of the world economy, marked capitalism's complete entry into its phase of decomposition. Imperialist tensions are no longer polarised by the confrontation between the Eastern and Western blocs but this does not mean that they have disappeared. They have taken the form of a war of each against all, unleashing armed conflict across the planet on a scale unseen since World War II. The perspective of peace and prosperity announced by the dominant American power has long since disappeared, to give way to the nightmare of a society tearing itself apart across the world, at the risk of dragging all humanity down to its ruin. Although this aspect of a “war of each against all” was already a determining feature of the first Gulf War in 1991, it remained hidden inasmuch as the USA succeeded in rallying the other great powers behind its leadership thanks to its remaining authority. The war of each against all, the defence by each power of its own imperialist interests to the detriment of its rivals, appeared more explicitly in the conflicts in Rwanda, ex-Yugoslavia, and Zaire. And the new millennium has seen a further intensification of these conflicts. After the 9/11 attack, the United States solemnly announced that they would make war on terrorism, free Afghanistan from the backward Taliban, and bring democracy and prosperity to Iraq. Today, the result is an increasingly bloody instability spreading not only to Iraq but to the rest of the region as well. What is new, is that the planet's greatest military power is beginning to lose its grip on the situation. The triumphant images of US troops entering Baghdad and overturning Saddam's statue, have been succeeded by daily killings that demonstrate the Americans' inability to stabilise the situation in which the population is subjected to appalling living conditions.
The bitter struggle between local warlords, more or less tied to different world or regional powers, already dominates Iraq and Afghanistan and is now beginning to spread to Saudi Arabia, with a wave of attacks on foreigners, oil installations, and the government. Instability in Saudi Arabia threatens the world's main source of oil (25% of proven world reserves), and creates a further risk for an already unstable world economic situation: that of an explosion in oil prices, already standing (as we write) at over $40 / barrel. The dynamic is such that even the great powers are no longer able to imprint their orientation on society, still less to offer it the slightest perspective.
The heart of Europe has not been spared the eruption of chaos in its midst, with the bomb attacks in Madrid on 11th March 2004. All this is an expression of “the world’s entry into a period of unprecedented instability” (Introduction to the “Theses on Decomposition”, 1990, in International Review n°107), which is accelerating today. In fact, the 1991 Gulf War already demonstrated that “faced with the tendency towards generalised chaos specific to the period of decomposition, and which has been considerably accelerated by the collapse of the Eastern bloc, there is no other way out for capitalism, in its attempts to hold together a disintegrating body, than to impose on society the iron straitjacket of military force. In this sense, the very means it uses to try to limit an increasingly bloody chaos are themselves a factor aggravating the barbarity of war into which capitalism is plunged” (“Militarism and decomposition”, International Review n°64).
The anti-Bush demonstrators, and all the honeyed words to the UN from powers like France and Germany, even the cries of despair from some fractions of the bourgeoisie in the United States, all propose to reverse this tendency and return to a stable world thanks to governments that would be less greedy and cynical, more generous and intelligent.
The bourgeoisie would indeed like to make us believe that peace and stability depend on those who rule us. In this sense, the preferred argument for the various national bourgeoisies who opposed the war in Iraq – because it went against their interests – is to say that if only Bush had respected “international law”, if he had respected the legitimacy of the UN, then Iraq would not have become the bloody quagmire that it is today, and the United States would not be in the mess it is in. Although the American bourgeoisie was generally in favour of the war, more and more voices are being raised to say that the present situation is the result of the incompetence of Bush and his administration, who have proven unable to stabilise Iraq. In fact, both these arguments are false. For the ruling class, they are born of a need to deceive, and to deceive themselves. Today's spreading anarchic instability is a pure product of capitalism's historic situation today. It has nothing to do with any one person's greater or lesser competence or personality. In reality: “As regards the international policy of the USA, the widespread use of armed force has not only been one of its methods for a long time, but is now the main instrument in the defence of its imperialist interests, as the ICC has shown since 1990, even before the Gulf war. The USA is faced with a world dominated by "every man for himself", where its former vassals are trying to withdraw as much as possible from the tight grip of the world cop, which they had to put up with as long as the threat from the rival bloc existed. In this situation, the only decisive way the US can impose its authority is to resort to the area in which they have a crushing superiority over all other states: military force. But in doing so, the US is caught in a contradiction:
– on the one hand, if it gives up using or extending the use of its military superiority, this will only encourage the countries contesting its authority to contest even more;
– on the other hand, when it does use brute force, even, and especially when this momentarily obliges its opponents to rein in their ambitions towards independence, this only pushes the latter to seize on the least occasion to get their revenge and squirm away from America's grasp” (“Resolution on the international situation at the 12th ICC Congress”, International Review n°90, 1997).
To lay the responsibility for war at the door of this or that head of state's incompetence, allows the ruling class to hide the reality, to hide the appalling responsibility of capitalism and with it the whole ruling class world wide. This logic makes it possible to absolve the system for its crimes by laying the blame on its scapegoats: Hitler's madness was responsible for World War II; Bush's incompetence is responsible for the war in Iraq and its attendant horrors. In reality, in each case the man, his temperament and his specificities, corresponds to the demands of the ruling class that put him in power. Both have done nothing other than apply the policies required by their class, in defence of their class interests. Hitler received the support of the whole German ruling class because he showed himself capable of preparing the war rendered inevitable by the crisis of capitalism and the defeat of the revolutionary wave that had followed October 1917. The German rearmament programme of the 1930s, followed by the World War against the USSR and the other Allies, was both inevitable, given the situation of Germany after the Versailles Treaty of 1919, and doomed to failure. It was, in this sense, profoundly irrational. Hitler's unbalanced mentality – or rather, the fact that such a mentality could become head of state – was nothing other than an expression of the irrationality of the war that the German bourgeoisie was preparing to wage. The same is true for Bush and his administration. They are, today, carrying out the only possible policy, from a capitalist standpoint, to defend US imperialist interests and world leadership: war, and a descent into militarism. The incompetence of the Bush administration, notably the influence within it of the neo-con warmongering faction represented by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, its inability to find a long-term vision on which to base its action, are expressions of the fact that the White House's foreign policy is both the only one possible, and doomed to failure. The fact that Colin Powell, also a member of the administration and one who knows what war is about, had his warnings about the lack of preparation for the conflict and its aftermath ignored, is further confirmation of this tendency to irrationality. The whole US bourgeoisie defends a militarist policy because it is the only one possible. Indeed, the disagreements within the US ruling class, faced with the catastrophe that the situation in Iraq represents for the credibility and world leadership of the United States, are purely of a tactical order, but in no sense a condemnation of the war itself. So true is this, that John Kerry, Democratic candidate at the next presidential elections, has no alternative policy to propose other than reinforcing the American troops already in Iraq. If the choice and success of government policy depended solely on the capacities of those in power, how could we explain the fact that the imperialist policy of Ronald Reagan – no less intellectually disadvantaged than Bush – encountered such success against Russian imperialism, especially in Afghanistan? The reason is to be found in the different underlying conditions: because, under Reagan, the USA was at the head of one of two rival imperialist blocs that dominated the world, and as a result enjoyed a far greater authority over the other members of its bloc. As for the “peace party” over Iraq, the attitude of Chirac or Schröder has nothing to do with their greater human or political qualities compared with Bush, and everything to do with the fact that war in Iraq directly threatened their own imperialist interests. For Germany, the fact that the USA has taken position in the region is an obstacle to its own advance into the region, which has always been a traditional target of German imperialism. France has been stripped of the influence it had in Iraq on the basis of its support for Saddam Hussein. It is not the capacities of those with influence in the bourgeois state, still less their good or ill will, that will put an end to war, but the class struggle.
The policy of the bourgeoisie is solely and implacably determined, in every country, by the defence of the national capital. To this end, it puts in power those who seem best able to meet its requirements. And if Kerry replaces Bush as president, this will be to breath new life into a policy which will remain essentially the same. Changing governments will not put an end to war: only destroying capitalism can do that.
Neither the planned (as we write) transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government, nor the unanimous UN vote in favour of this transfer, herald any greater stability in the future. No more than the project for a “Greater Middle East”. Still less the grand celebrations of the D-Day landings and all the declarations of good intentions that accompanied them.
Could Europe be an antidote to this disorder, or at least limit its extent? At the entry of the new member countries to the European Union, on 1st May 2004, and during the last European elections, France and Germany presented the construction of Europe as a factor for peace and stability in the world. If Europe could unite, this would be a guarantee of peace, so we are told. This is a lie. Supposing that all the states of Europe managed to march in step, a European bloc would also be a factor of world conflict, because it would be a rival to the United States. The proposed European constitution in fact expresses, in veiled terms, the ambition of certain states to use the European Union in order to play a role on the world imperialist arena: “Member States shall actively and unreservedly support the Union's common foreign and security policy in a spirit of loyalty and mutual solidarity and shall comply with the acts adopted by the Union in this area. They shall refrain from action contrary to the Union's interests or likely to impair its effectiveness” (Article 15-2 of the Draft Treaty[1] [330]). Such an orientation can only be a threat to America's leadership, and this is why the US is constantly putting spanners in the works of the construction of any kind of European unity, for example by supporting the Turkish candidature for membership of the Union. This being said, European unity only exists at the level of propaganda. To have an idea of the absurdity of the notion of a “European bloc”, we need only look at the reality of the European Union: the European budget is a puny 4% of European GNP, most of which is destined not for military spending but for the Common Agricultural Policy; there is no military force under European command capable of vying with NATO or the American armed forces. Nor does the EU include a military super-power able to impose its will on the other members (one expression of this is the cacophony that reigns in the negotiations for the adoption of the new constitution).[2] [331] To cap it all, the policy of one of the main members of the Union, Britain, is aimed precisely (as it has been for the last 400 years) at maintaining divisions amongst the other European powers, its “allies” within the EU. In these circumstances, any European alliance can never be anything but a temporary and necessarily unstable agreement. The wars in Yugoslavia and Iraq have highlighted the disintegration of Europe's political unity as soon as the imperialist interests of its various member bourgeoisies are at stake. If there is currently a tendency for countries like Spain or Poland, or others in Central Europe, to turn towards Germany, then this can only be limited in time, as indeed are the different episodes in the on-off love affair between France and Germany. Whether the tendency of the moment is towards political union or towards open discord, the underlying exacerbation of tensions between the European Union's member states cannot be overcome. In the context of the bankruptcy of capitalism and the decomposition of bourgeois society, reality demonstrates that the only possible policy for each major power is to try to create difficulties for its rivals in order to gain the advantage for itself. This is the law of capitalism.
The growing, spreading anarchy and instability are not a specificity of this or that backward or exotic region: they are the product of capitalism in its present, irreversible phase of decomposition. And since capitalism dominates the planet, then it is the whole planet which is increasingly subject to chaos.
Only the world proletariat bears a perspective in itself, since it is not only the exploited class, but above all the revolutionary class in this society: in other words, the class which bears in itself other social relations free of exploitation, war, and poverty. Condensing within itself every misery, every injustice, and every exploitation, it potentially wields the force to overthrow capitalism and build a truly communist society. But if the working class is to live up to what history demands of it, then it must understand that war is a product of bankrupt capitalism; that the bourgeoisie is a cynical and deceitful class of exploiters, whose greatest fear is that the proletariat should see reality as it is, and not as it is presented by the exploiters. Only the development of the class struggle, for the defence of the workers' living conditions and, ultimately, the overthrow of capitalism, will allow the proletariat to hold back the bloody hand of the bourgeoisie. Let us remember that it was the class struggle of the workers of the early 20th century that put an end to World War I. The proletariat has a great historical responsibility before it. The development of its consciousness of what is at stake, and of its unity in struggle, will determine its ability to live up to this responsibility. The future of all humanity depends on it.
G. 15/07/2004
[2] [334]The new constitution is itself a defeat for the “federalists” who hoped to see a greater degree of European unity, since it avoids any notion of creating a real “European government” in favour of the existing inter-governmental snake-pit.
In the previous issue of the International Review (n°118) [335], we recalled at length, and with the support of passages from their major writings, how Marx and Engels defined the notions of the ascendance and decadence of a mode of production. We saw that the notion of decadence lies at the very heart of historical materialism in the analysis of the succession of different modes of production. In a forthcoming article, we will also demonstrate that this concept was central to the political programmes of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, and of the marxist left that emerged from them, in which the groups of the Communist Left today have their origins.
We have begun the publication of a new series of articles,[1] [336] on “The theory of decadence at the heart of historical materialism”, in response both to perfectly legitimate questions on the subject and, above all, the confusions which are being put about by those who have given in to the pressure of bourgeois ideology and abandoned this basic tenet of marxism. The article published by Battaglia Comunista and blushingly titled “For a definition of the concept of decadence”[2] [337] is a prime example. We have already had the occasion to criticise some of its main ideas.[3] [338] However, the publicity given to this article, its translation into three languages, the fact that it has opened a discussion within the IBRP on the question of decadence, and the introduction that the CWO has published in its own review,[4] [339] prompt us to return to the subject and to respond more thoroughly to it.
According to Battaglia, two reasons make it necessary to “define the notion of decadence”:
· firstly, to remove certain ambiguities in the currently accepted definition of capitalism's decadence, the most serious of these being a view of the disappearance of capitalism as something “economically ineluctable and socially predetermined” (Revolutionary Perspectives n°32), in other words a “fatalist” view of capitalism’s death;
· secondly, to establish the idea that, as long as the proletariat has not overthrown capitalism, “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” (ibid). The idea of decadence thus supposedly “makes no sense if it is used to refer to the mode of production’s capacity for survival” (Internationalist Communist n°21).
We challenge the idea that marxism contains the slightest ambiguity which might lead one to a fatalist vision of capitalism's death, and thence to the idea that, under the pressure of ever more overwhelming contradictions, the system would simply retire from the historical stage. For marxism, on the contrary, in the absence of a “revolutionary reconstitution of society at large” the outcome could only be “the common ruin of the contending classes” (Communist Manifesto), in other words the disappearance of society itself. As we intend to demonstrate, the only ambiguity exists in the ideas of Battaglia Comunista. We should point out that Battaglia involuntarily acts as spokesman for all the bourgeois ideologues who claim that marxism is “fatalist”, and who emphasise the role of “human will” in the unfolding of history. Battaglia does not, of course, call marxism into question. On the contrary, in the name of marxism (or at least, of its own version of marxism), it sets out to refute as “fatalist” a conception which, in reality, as we saw in the previous article, lies at marxism's very heart.
As for the second reason that Battaglia gives for defining the notion of decadence, this is completely contrary to marxism, for which capitalism “demonstrates again that it is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived”,[5] [340] it becomes a “regressive social system”,[6] [341] “it checks the development of productivity”.[7] [342]
Its methodological errors lead Battaglia into the worst kind of aberration: “Even in the progressive phase (...) crises and wars arrived punctually, just like the attacks on the conditions of labour-power”.[8] [343] Battaglia thus ends up adopting the old bourgeois banalities, which minimise the qualitative extensions of these scourges during the barbaric 20th century, on the grounds that war and poverty have always existed. In so doing, Battaglia ends up pretending that the main expressions of capitalism's decadence simply do not exist.
According to Battaglia then, there are not two fundamental phases in the evolution of the capitalist mode of production, but successive periods of ascendancy and decadence which follow the major phases of the evolution of the rate of profit.
Using this approach, the wars of the decadent period – which are one of the expressions of the system's mortal crisis, and which are a growing threat to humanity's survival – take on the role of “the regulation of relations between the sections of international capital” (ibid.). This inability to understand reality is a major factor in a serious under-estimation of the gravity of the world situation. The IBRP is thus increasingly at odds with reality, which can only compromise its ability to understand the world, whose analysis is a part of its intervention in the working class. It diminishes the impact of this intervention by basing it on lame and unconvincing arguments.
Battaglia begins its article with the claim that the concept of decadence contains ambiguities and that the first of these lies in a fatalist view of the end of capitalism: “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. Nothing is more false” (ibid.). Let us say straight away that this ambiguity exists only in Battaglia's head. Marx and Engels, who were the first to develop this notion of decadence and to put it to extensive use, were in no way fatalists. For the founders of marxism, there is no ineluctable and automatic mechanism behind the succession of modes of production; socio-economic contradictions are settled by the class struggle, which constitutes the motive force of history. To paraphrase Marx, men make their own history, but within predetermined historical conditions: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past” (The 18[th] Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852, Chapter 1 [344]).[9] [345] As Rosa Luxemburg put it: “Scientific socialism has taught us to comprehend the objective laws of historical development. Men do not make history according to their own free will. But they make history nonetheless. Proletarian action is dependent upon the degree of maturity in social development. However, social development is not independent of the proletariat but is equally its driving force and cause, its effect and consequence. Proletarian action participates in history. And while we can as little skip a stage of historical development as escape our shadow, we can certainly accelerate or retard history” (The Junius pamphlet, 1915, Chapter 1 [346]).[10] [347]
An old ruling class never abdicates power, it defends it to the limit by force of arms. The notion of decadence thus contains no ambiguity as to the possibility of an “ineluctable process of self-destruction”. However much an old mode of production may have disintegrated on the economic, social, and political levels, if no new social force has emerged from within the old society, or if it has been unable to develop sufficient strength to overthrow the old ruling class, then there can be no death of the existing society, or construction of the new. The power of the ruling class and its attachment to its privileges are significant factors in the survival of a social form. The decadence of a mode of production creates the possibility and the necessity of its overthrow, but not the automatic emergence of the new society.
There is therefore no “fatalist ambiguity” in the marxist analysis of the succession of modes of production, as Battaglia leaves us to understand. Marx even points out that, if the outcome of the class struggle is not settled by the victory of a new class, bringing with it new relations of production, then the period of a mode of production's decadence can mutate into a period of generalised decomposition. This historical possibility is developed at the very outset of the Communist Manifesto [348], where Marx, after declaring that “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”,[11] [349] continues with an “either... or” to illustrate the two possible alternative outcomes to class contradictions: “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, 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 reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes”. There are many historical examples of civilisations which have undergone such a stalemate in the class struggle, condemning them to “the common ruin of the contending classes”, and therefore to stagnation, collapse, or even a return to previous stages of development.
Battaglia's anathemas, according to which the concepts of decadence and decomposition are “foreign to the method and arsenal of political economy” (Internationalist Communist n°21), are thus nothing short of ridiculous. The militants of this organisation would do better to return to their classics, beginning with the Manifesto and Capital where the two notions have an important place (see International Review n°118). Some groups or individuals may have developed incomprehensions or opportunist deviations around the notion of decadence – and the “fatalist” vision is certainly one of them. This is another question. But the method which consists of discrediting the notion of decadence by attributing to it the errors which others have committed in its name is the same as that used by the anarchists to discredit the notions of the party or the dictatorship of the proletariat on the basis of the crimes of Stalinism. Another question is the frequent impatience, or the optimism, of many revolutionaries, Marx amongst them. How many times has capitalism not been prematurely buried in the texts of the workers' movement! This was the case notably for the Communist International and its affiliated parties, including the Italian Communist Party (whether the Bordigists like it or not): “Capitalism's crisis is still open, and will inevitably deepen until capitalism dies” (Lyon Theses, 1926).[12] [350] This understandable and minor sin, which should nonetheless be avoided as much as possible, is only a danger if revolutionaries prove unable to recognise their mistakes when the balance of forces between the classes is reversed.
In its struggle against the “fatalism” which is supposedly intrinsic to the marxist idea of decadence, Battaglia unveils its own vision of historical materialism: “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”. For Battaglia then, as long at has not been destroyed by the class struggle, capitalism continues to “receive new blood through the destruction of excess capital and means of production”, and so “the economic system reproduces itself, posing, once more and at a higher level, all of its contradictions”. Battaglia here is at the antipodes of Marx's view of the decadence of a mode of production, and of capitalism in particular: “Beyond a certain point, the development of the productive force becomes a barrier for capital; in other words, the capitalist system becomes an obstacle for the expansion of the productive forces of labour”.[13] [351] In his second draft of a letter to Vera Zassoulitch, Marx considered that “the capitalist system is past its prime in the West, approaching the time when it will be no more than a regressive social regime” (cited in Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, RKP, p103), and in Capital he tells us that capitalism “is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived” (see above). The terms that Marx uses to describe the decadence of capitalism are unambiguous: “senile”, “regressive social regime”, “an obstacle for the expansion of the productive forces of labour”, etc. And yet Battaglia can still say that “decadence (...) is meaningless when we refer to the ability of a mode of production to survive” (Internationalist Communist n°21).
These few reminders of the marxist definition of decadence will let the reader judge for himself the difference between the historical and materialist vision of capitalism's decadence developed by Marx, and Battaglia's own special viewpoint where, while capitalism certainly undergoes crises and growing contradictions,[14] [352] it is continually renewed (unless the class struggle intervenes), “receives new blood”, and “reproduces itself, posing, once more and at a higher level, all of its contradictions”. It is true that Battaglia has the excuse of not knowing that Marx wrote about decadence – “To the extent that the word itself never appears in the three volumes constituting Capital” (Internationalist Communist n°21, p23) – and that Marx only mentions the idea of decadence once in his entire work: “Marx limited himself to giving a definition of capitalism as progressive only in the historical phase in which it eliminated the economic world of feudalism, proposing itself as a powerful means of development of the productive forces inhibited by the preceding economic form, but he never went beyond this in the definition of decadence except for the famous introduction to A contribution to the critique of political economy”.[15] [353] In our opinion, rather than pronouncing grandiloquent excommunications aimed at the notions of decadence and decomposition, supposedly foreign to marxism, Battaglia would do better to consider what Marx had to say about Weitling: “Ignorance is not an argument”. Then they might go back to their classics, and in particular to Capital, which they apparently consider as their bible.[16] [354] For our part, we refer the reader to the description of Marx's concept of decadence in International Review n°118.
The process of decadence as Marx defines it goes far beyond a mere “coherent economic explanation”: it corresponds, first and foremost, to the historical obsolescence of the social relations of production (wage labour, serfdom, slavery, tribalism, etc.) at the basis of different modes of production (capitalism, feudalism, slave-owning societies, the Asiatic mode of production, etc.). The entry into a period of decadence means that the very foundations of a mode of production are in crisis. The secret, the hidden foundation of a mode of production, is “The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers”. “Upon this (...) is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves”, and it is this that “reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure”.[17] [355] Marx could not be more explicit: “The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer”.[18] [356] The social relations of production are thus much more than mere “economic mechanisms”: they are above all social relations between classes since they give material form to the different forms historically taken by the extortion of surplus labour (wages, slavery, serfdom, tribute, etc.). When a mode of production enters into decadence, it means that these specific relations between classes are in crisis, have become historically inappropriate. This is the very heart of historical materialism, in a world quite unknown to Battaglia, obsessed as they are with their “coherent economic explanation”.
As Battaglia puts it, “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” (Revolutionary Perspectives n°32, our emphasis). On the one hand, the implication here is that there exists today no coherent economic explanation of decadence, while on the other Battaglia decrees peremptorily that those phenomena which, classically, have been used to characterise the decadence of a mode of production, are irrelevant.
Before we consider a particular economic explanation, we should point out that the notion of decadence means that the social relations of production have become too narrow to contain the continued development of the productive forces, and that this collision between the social relations of production and the productive forces affects every aspect of society. The marxist analysis of decadence does not refer to a quantitative economic level of any kind, determined outside the social and political mechanisms of a given social form. On the contrary, it refers to the qualitative level of the relation that ties the relations of production themselves to the development of the productive forces: “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto (...) Then begins an era of social revolution [357]”.[19] [358] The era of the old society's decadence opens, not with the blockage of the development of the productive forces, but with the definitive and irreparable “conflict”. Marx is precise as to the criteria: “From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters”. To be rigorous, we should take this to mean that a society never expires until the development of the productive forces has begun to be definitively hindered by the existing relations of production. Decadence can be defined as a series of dysfunctions, whose effects accumulate from the moment that the system has exhausted its capacity for development. From the marxist viewpoint, the period of a society's decadence is characterised, not by a complete and permanent halt in the growth of the productive forces, but by quantitative and qualitative upheavals caused by this constant conflict between obsolete relations of production and the development of the productive forces.
Whenever Marx tries to determine the criteria for capitalism's entry into its decadent period, he never gives any precise economic explanation, but only at most this or that general criterion in coherence with his analysis of crises; he proceeds more by historical comparisons and analogies (see our article in the previous issue of this Review). It may not make Battaglia happy, but Marx did not need the national statistics or the economic reconstructions of profitability that Battaglia uses[20] [359] to pronounce on capitalism's maturity or obsolescence. The same is true for the other modes of production; Marx and Engels used very little in the way of precise economic mechanisms to explain their entry into decadence. They characterised these historical turning points on the basis of unequivocal qualitative criteria: the appearance of an overall process hindering the development of the productive forces, a qualitative development of conflicts within the ruling class, and between the ruling class and the exploited classes, the hypertrophy of the state apparatus, the emergence of a new revolutionary class bearing new social relations of production and driving a period of transition that heralded revolutionary upheavals, etc. (see our article in the previous issue).
This was also the method adopted by the Communist International, which did not need to wait for the discovery of all the components of a “coherent economic explanation” to identify the opening of the period of capitalism's decadence with the outbreak of World War I.[21] [360] The war, and a whole series of other qualitative criteria on other levels (social, economic, and political), allowed the CI to see that capitalism had completed its historical mission. The whole communist movement agreed on this general diagnosis, even though there were major disagreements as to its economic causes and its political implications. The economic explanations varied between those put forward by Rosa Luxemburg on the basis of the saturation of world markets,[22] [361] and Lenin's explanation on the basis of his arguments developed in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism.[23] [362] And yet all, Lenin first amongst them, were convinced that the “epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie” had ended, and that the world had entered “the epoch of the reactionary obsolete bourgeoisie”.[24] [363] Indeed the differences were such in the analyses of the economic causes of decadence that Lenin, although profoundly convinced of the fact, nonetheless defended the idea that “On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before”.[25] [364] Trotsky, working from the same theoretical basis as Lenin, concluded shortly afterwards that the development of the productive forces had come to a halt, while the Italian Left considered that “The 1914-18 war marked the extreme point in the phase of expansion of the capitalist regime (...) In the ultimate phase of capitalism, that of its decline, historical evolution will be settled fundamentally by the class struggle” (Manifesto of the “Bureau international des Fractions de la Gauche communiste”, Octobre n°3, April 1938).
It might seem illogical to identify the decadence of a mode of production on the basis of its expressions, and not on the basis of a study of its economic foundations, as Battaglia would like, since the former are no more “in the last instance” than a product of the latter. This is, however, the way in which revolutionaries – including Marx and Engels – have worked in the past, not because it is generally easier to recognise the superstructural expressions of a phase of decadence, but because this is where the first expressions appear historically. Before it appears on the quantitative economic level as a hindrance to the development of the productive forces, the decadence of capitalism appears above all as a qualitative phenomenon on the social, political, and ideological levels, through the aggravation of conflicts in the ruling class leading to the First World War; through the betrayal of the Social-Democracy, and the unions' passage into the capitalist camp; through the eruption of a proletariat capable of overthrowing bourgeois rule and establishing the first measures of working class social control. On the basis of these characteristics, revolutionaries at the beginning of the 20th century identified capitalism's entry into decadence. Nor did Marx wait for the “coherent economic explanations” contained in Capital to pass sentence on the historically obsolete nature of capitalism in the Communist Manifesto: “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 (...) The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them (...) Society can no longer live under this bourgeoisie, in other words, its existence is no longer compatible with society”.
Battaglia thus refuses to define the decadence of a mode of production according to the method adopted by our predecessors, starting with Marx and Engels. Apparently under the impression that they are more marxist than Marx, they think that they can set up as materialists by endlessly repeating that the concept of decadence must be economically defined if it is not to be rendered null and void. In doing so, Battaglia demonstrates that its materialism is of the most vulgar kind, as Engels would have told them, in the same vein as he wrote, in a letter to J Bloch [365]: “According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas - also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (...), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary (...) Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree (...) 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 (...) 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”.[26] [366] Whether it be in defining decadence, explaining the causes of wars, analysing the balance of class forces or the present evolution of the capitalist economy, vulgar materialism is Battaglia's trademark.[27] [367] And let it be said in passing, that Battaglia's plea for a “coherent economic explanation” of capitalism's decadence hardly does justice to all those revolutionaries who have already proposed one, from Rosa Luxemburg, to the Italian Fraction,[28] [368] to the ICC, and even to the CWO whose first pamphlet is titled The economic foundations of decadence! It is characteristic of marxism to take as a starting-point the previous theoretical gains of the workers' movement, to deepen them, or to criticise them and propose alternatives... But marxist method is not Battaglia's strong suit: thinking that revolutionary coherence starts with themselves, they prefer to reinvent everything from scratch.
After casting doubt on the value of the (supposedly “fatalist”) concept of decadence, after peremptorily declaring that there is no coherent economic explanation of decadence, and that without it the concept is worthless, and after redefining the marxist method, Battaglia goes on to reject its main expressions: “it is absolutely insufficient to refer to the fact that, in the decadent phase, economic crises and war, like the attacks on the world of labour-power, occur with a constant and devastating rhythm. Even in the progressive phase (...) crises and wars arrived punctually, just like the attacks on the conditions of labour-power. An explicit example of this is given by the wars between the great colonial powers at the end of the 18th century and over the whole of the 19th century, up to the outbreak of the First World War. The example could be extended by listing the social attacks and the frequent military attacks on class revolts and insurrections, which played themselves out in the same period” (Revolutionary Perspectives, n°32). In other words, all the wars and crises since the beginning of the 20th century don't mean anything – they've always existed!
With incredible carelessness as to both marxism and plain historical reality, Battaglia simply throws overboard all the theoretical gains of the past workers' movement. What does Battaglia tell us? That wars and social struggles have always existed – which is blindingly obvious – but what conclusion do they draw from this? That there is consequently no qualitative break in the history of capitalism – and that is just plain blind!
When they deny any qualitative break in the development of a mode of production, Battaglia rejects Marx's and Engels' analysis, dividing the existence of each mode of production into two qualitatively different phases. For anyone who knows how to read, the language used by Marx and Engels demonstrates without the slightest ambiguity that there are two distinct historic periods within a mode of production: "dependent upon the degree of maturity in social development", "At a certain stage of their development", "the capitalist system is past its prime in the West, approaching the time when it will be no more than a regressive social regime", capitalism “demonstrates again that it is becoming senile and that it is more and more outlived”, etc. In the first article in this series, we have also seen that Marx and Engels identified a decadent phase for each mode of production that they defined (primitive communism, the Asiatic mode of production, slavery, feudalism and capitalism), and that they considered this phase as qualitatively different from the one that preceded it. In an article on the feudal mode of production, entitled “The decadence of feudalism and the rise of the bourgeoisie”, Engels demonstrates the power of historical materialism by defining feudal decadence through its major expressions: stagnating productive forces, a hypertrophied (monarchical) state, the qualitative development of conflicts within the ruling class, and between the ruling class and the exploited classes, the emergence of a transition between the old and the new social relations of production, etc. The same is true for Marx's definition of capitalism's decadence, that is to say a period where “The growing discordance between the productive development of society and the relations of production hitherto characteristic of it, is expressed in acute contradictions, crises, convulsions”,[29] [369] and he considers these conflicts, crises, and convulsions as qualitatively different from the preceding period, since he uses terms such as “regressive social regime", “becoming senile”, etc.
Only a minimum of historical knowledge is necessary to understand the absurdity of Battaglia's assertion that there is no qualitative break between ascendancy and decadence, expressed in their crises, wars, and social struggles.
1 – Throughout capitalism's ascendant phase, its economic crises certainly grew in both depth and extent. But you have to have Battaglia's nerve (or ignorance) to believe that the enormous crisis of the 1930s can be seen as merely in a continuum with the crises of the 19th century! To start with, Battaglia simply forgets the way that the revolutionaries of the time analysed the relative diminution of the crises of the last twenty years (1894-1914) of capitalism's ascendant period (which encouraged the growth of reformism): According to the Communist International [370], “The two decades preceding the [First World] War were the epoch of an exceptionally powerful capitalist ascension. The periods of prosperity were marked by their intensity and long duration, the periods of depression, of crisis, were marked by their brevity”;[30] [371] this hardly coincides with Battaglia's “theory” of the continuous aggravation of economic crises. Moreover, a truly remarkable dose of bad faith is needed to avoid seeing that the crisis of the 1930s is out of all proportion compared to those of the 19th century, both in terms of its duration (some ten years), its depth (halving of industrial production), and its extent (more international than ever). More fundamentally, whereas the crises during capitalism's ascendancy were resolved through increased production and an extension of the world market, the crisis of the 1930s was never overcome, and ended only with World War II. Battaglia confuses here the heartbeats of a growing organism, and the death rattles of one in its last agony. As for the present crisis, it has lasted for thirty years, and the worst is still to come.
2 – As far as social conflicts are concerned, it is certainly true that the whole ascendant period witnessed increasing tensions between the classes, culminating in general political strikes (for universal suffrage and the eight-hour day) and in the mass strike of 1905 in Russia. But one would have to be blind not to see that the revolutionary movements between 1917 and 1923 are of a different order altogether. These are no longer local or national movements, or even insurrections, but a six-year international wave whose duration has nothing in common with the movements of the 19th century. There is also a vital qualitative difference: these movements were not, for the most part, economic but directly revolutionary, posing the problem, not of reform, but of the seizure of power.
3 – Finally, as far as war is concerned, the contrast is still more striking. During the 19th century, the function of war was to assure each capitalist nation the unity (wars of national unification) and/or the territorial expansion (colonial wars) necessary to its development. In this sense, despite the disasters that it brought in its wake, war was a moment in capitalism's progressive advance; its cost was simply a necessary expense in the widening of the market and therefore of production. This is why Marx considered certain wars to be progressive. The wars of this period were generally: a) limited to two or three contiguous countries; b) of short duration; c) caused little damage; d) fought between standing armies which mobilised only a small part of the economy or of the population; e) undertaken for rational prospects of economic gain. For both victors and vanquished, they determined a new economic expansion. The Franco-Prussian war (1870) is a typical example: it was a decisive step in the formation of the German nation, in other words it laid the foundations for a formidable expansion of the productive forces and formation of the largest sector of Europe's industrial proletariat. Moreover, the war lasted less than a year and caused relatively few casualties, nor did it constitute a serious handicap for the defeated country. During the ascendant period, wars are essentially the product of an expanding system: a) 1790-1815, wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic empire (which contributed to the overthrow of feudal power throughout Europe); b) 1850-1873, Crimean War, the American Civil War, wars for national unification (Germany, Italy), Mexican and Franco-Prussian wars; c) 1895-1913 Spanish-American, Russo-Japanese, and Balkan wars. By 1914, there had been no major war for a century. Most of the wars between the great powers had been relatively short, lasting months or even weeks (war between Prussia and Austria in 1866). Between 1871 and 1914, no European power had been invaded. There had never been a world war. Between 1815 and 1914, no war between the great powers had been fought outside their neighbouring region. All this changed in 1914, which inaugurated an age of slaughter.[31] [372]
In the period of decadence, by contrast, wars are the product of a system whose dynamic leads only to a dead-end. In a period where there can no longer be any question of the formation of truly independent nation-states, all wars are imperialist. The wars between the great powers: a) tend to become world wars because their roots lie in the contraction of the world market relative to the requirements of capital accumulation; b) their duration is far longer; c) they are immensely destructive; d) they mobilise the entire world economy, and the whole population of the belligerent countries; e) from the viewpoint of global capital, they lose any progressive economic function and become wholly irrational. They are no longer elements in the development of the productive forces, but of their destruction. They are no longer moments in the expansion of the mode or production, they are the convulsions of a dying system. In the past, wars ended with a clear winner and the outcome of the war did not prejudice the future development of the protagonists, whereas in the two world wars, both victors and vanquished emerged exhausted from the war, to the profit of a third gangster, the United States. The victors were unable to force the vanquished to pay war reparations (contrary to the huge ransom in gold paid by France to Prussia after 1870). This shows how, in the period of decadence, the expansion of one power can only be on the ruins of others. Previously, military power guaranteed the conquest of economic positions. Today, the economy is increasingly at the service of military strategy. The division of the world into rival imperialisms, and the resulting military conflicts between them, have become permanent aspects of capitalism's existence. This was the analysis of our predecessors of the Italian Left: “Since the opening of the imperialist phase of capitalism at the beginning of the century, evolution oscillates between imperialist war and proletarian revolution. In the epoch of capitalist growth, wars opened the way for the expansion of the productive forces through the destruction of outmoded relations of production. In the phase of capitalist decadence, wars have no other function than the destruction of excess wealth...” (“Resolution on the formation of the International Bureau of the Fractions of the Communist Left”, in Octobre n°1, February 1938, p5). Battaglia today rejects this analysis, and yet still claims to be the heir of the Italian Left.
All this is contained in the analyses of the revolutionaries of the previous century,[32] [373] and Battaglia only makes itself ridiculous in trying to ignore our predecessors with a sarcastic question: “And when, according to this mode of posing the question, did the transition from the progressive to the decadent phase occur? At the end of the 19th century? After the First World War? After the Second?”. They know – or they should know – perfectly well that for the whole communist movement, including for their fellow founder of the IBRP, the Communist Workers Organisation, World War I signs capitalism's entry into decadence: “At the time of the formation of the Comintern in 1919, it appeared that the epoch of revolution had been reached and its founding conference declared this”.[33] [374]
In this article, we have tried to show that there is nothing fatalist about the marxist vision of capitalism's decadence, and that the history of capitalism is not an endless repetition of cycles. In the next article, we will continue our critique of Battaglia, above all to point out the implications of abandoning the notion of decadence on the level of the proletariat's political struggle.
C.Mcl
[1] [375]See also the previous series “Understanding decadence”, published in International Review n°48-50, 54-56, 58, 60.
[2] [376]Published in Italian in Prometeo n°8, Series VI (December 2003), and in English in Revolutionary Perspectives n°32, third series, summer 2004. A French version is available on the IBRP web site. Other references to the theory of decadence can be found in the article “Comments on the latest crisis of the ICC”, in Internationalist Communist n°21.
[3] [377]See International Review n°111, 115, and especially n°118.
[4] [378]The Communist Workers Organisation was a co-founder, with Battaglia Comunista, of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP). In its introduction to the article from Prometeo, the CWO writes: “We are publishing below a text from one of the comrades of Battaglia Comunista which is a contribution to the debate on capitalist decadence. The notion of decadence is a part of Marx's analysis of modes of production. The clearest expression of this is given in the famous preface to A critique of political economy in which Marx states: “At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production or – what is but a legal expression of the same thing – with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution”. At the time of the formation of the Comintern in 1919, it appeared that the epoch of revolution had been reached and its founding conference declared this. 85 years later this at least appears questionable. Within the 20th century capitalist property relations have, despite the unprecedented destruction and suffering caused by two world wars, enabled the productive forces to develop to levels never previously seen, and have brought hundreds and hundreds of millions of new workers into the ranks of the proletariat. Can it be argued that under these circumstances these relations are a fetter to the productive forces in the general sense outlined by Marx? The CWO has previously argued that it was not the absence of growth of the productive forces, but the overheads associated with such growth which needed to be considered, when assessing decadence. Such an argument, while recognising massive growth of the productive forces, opens the door to a subjective assessment of the overheads which have allowed such growth to occur. The text below argues for a scientific approach to the question namely an economic definition of decadence. We hope to publish further texts on this issue in future” (Revolutionary Perspectives n°32, our emphasis). We will return later in this series to the arguments that the CWO puts forward to challenge the notion of decadence as defined by Marx: the dynamic of the development of the productive forces, the numerical growth of the working class, and the significance of the two world wars. For now, the publication of this introduction is enough to give our readers an idea of the evolution of the thinking of the CWO, which in the past has always made the marxist definition of decadence one of the central planks in its platform. Indeed, the CWO's first pamphlet was entitled The economic foundations of capitalist decadence. Are we to understand today that the economic foundations of this pamphlet were not scientific?
[5] [379]Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Part III, Chapter 15, “Exposition of the internal contradictions of the law”
[6] [380]Marx, letter to Vera Zassoulitch, 1881
[7] [381]Capital, op. cit.
[8] [382]Revolutionary Perspectives n°32, op. cit.
[12] [386] These Theses were published in Paris by the “Imprimerie spéciale de la Librairie du Travail” under the title Plate-forme de la Gauche. Another French translation is available from Editions Programme Communiste: “The crisis of capitalism remains open and its continued aggravation is inevitable”, published in the anthology n°7 of texts of the Parti Communiste International entitled Défense de la continuité du programme communiste.
[13] [387] Grundrisse, La Pléiade – Economie, tome II, p272-273 (our translation from the French).
[14] [388] We should point out to the reader, that not even Battaglia is sure of this! Apparently, they are not even certain that capitalism suffers from growing crises and contradictions: “The shortening of the upswing phase of accumulation might also be considered an aspect of ‘decadence’, but the experience of the last cycle shows that the shortening of the ascendant phase does not necessarily entail the acceleration of the total cycle of accumulation, crisis/war, new accumulation” (Internationalist Communist n°21).
[15] [389] Revolutionary Perspectives n°32
[16] [390] In Internationalist Communist n°21, the IBRP said that it was “distributing an international document/manifesto (…) [which] besides being an urgent call for the international party, this aims to be a serious invitation to all those claiming to be the class vanguard”. If the IBRP really want to be taken seriously, then they might start by understanding the foundations of historical materialism and conducting polemics on the basis of real political arguments, instead of talking to themselves and launching anathemas whose origin lies in an access of typically Bordigist megalomania of imagining themselves the only guardians of marxist truth and the world's only pole of revolutionary regroupment.
[17] [391] Capital, vol III, part VI
[18] [392]Capital, vol I, Part III
[20] [394]“In simple terms, the concept of decadence solely concerns the progressive difficulties in the valorisation process of capital (...) The ever-growing difficulties in the valorisation process of capital have as their presupposition the tendential fall in the average rate of profit (...) Even at the end of the 60s, according to statistics released by international economic organisations like the IMF, the World Bank and even the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and present in the research of economists of the Marxist area like Ochoa and Mosley, profit rates in the USA were 35% lower than they were in the 50s...” (Revolutionary Perspectives n°32).
[21] [395]“The Period of Capitalist Decline: On the basis of its assessment of the world economic situation the Third Congress was able to declare with complete certainty that capitalism had fulfilled its mission of developing the productive forces and had reached a stage of irreconcilable contradiction with the requirements not only of modern historical development, but also of the most elementary conditions of human existence. This fundamental contradiction was reflected in the recent imperialist war, and further sharpened by the great damage the war inflicted on the conditions of production and distribution. Obsolete capitalism has reached the stage where the destruction that results from its unbridled power is crippling and ruining the economic achievements that have been built up by the proletariat, despite the fetters of capitalist slavery (...) What capitalism is passing through today is nothing other than its death throes” (Fourth Congress of the Communist International, Theses on Comintern Tactics, 5 December 1922 [396]).
[22] [397]“The historic decline of capitalism begins when there is a relative saturation of pre-capitalist markets, since capitalism is the first mode of production which is unable to exist by itself, which needs other economic systems to serve it as a mediation and breeding ground. Although it tends to become universal, and therefore because of this tendency, it must be overthrown, because it is by essence incapable of becoming a universal form of production” (Luxemburg, The accumulation of capital).
[23] [398]“From all that has been said in this book on the economic essence of imperialism, it follows that we must define it as capitalism in transition, or, more precisely, as moribund capitalism (...) It is precisely the parasitism and decay of capitalism, characteristic of its highest historical stage of development, i.e., imperialism (...) Imperialism is the eve of the social revolution of the proletariat. This has been confirmed since 1917 on a world-wide scale” (Chapter X and Preface to the French and German editions)
[24] [399]“The Russian social-chauvinists (headed by Plekhanov), refer 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 together, 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 (...) Whoever refers today to Marx’s attitude towards the wars of the epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie and forgets Marx’s statement that “the workers have no fatherland”, a statement that applies precisely to the epoch of the reactionary, obsolete bourgeoisie, to the epoch of the socialist revolution. shamelessly distorts Marx and substitute, the bourgeois for the socialist point of view” (Socialism and war, Chapter 1 [400]).
[25] [401]“It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not. In the epoch of imperialism, certain branches of industry, certain strata of the bourgeoisie and certain countries betray, to a greater or lesser degree, now one and now another of these tendencies. On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before; but this growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general, its unevenness also manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which are richest in capital (Britain)” (Lenin, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism).
[26] [402]Engels to Bloch, September 21, 1890.
[27] [403]For these questions, see our critique of Battaglia Comunista's political positions in the pages of n°36 of this Review: “The 1980s are not the 1930s”; n°41 “What method for understanding the class struggle?”; n°50 “Reply to Battaglia on the historic course”; n°79 “The IBRP's conception of the decadence of capitalism and the question of war”; n°82 “Reply to the IBRP: the nature of imperialist war”; n°83 “Reply to the IBRP: theories of the historic crisis of capitalism”; n°86 “Behind the 'globalisation' of the economy, the aggravation of the capitalist crisis”; n°108 “Polemic with the IBRP: the war in Afghanistan, strategy or oil profits?”.
[28] [404]“Crises et cycles dans l'économie du capitalisme agonisant”, published in Bilan n°10-11, 1934, and reprinted in International Review n°102-103.
[29] [405]“Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy”, Collected Works Vol. 29, 133-4
[30] [406]Communist International, Theses of the Third World Congress On the International Situation.
[31] [407]This was predicted by Engels well before the end of the 19th century: “Friedrich Engels once said: 'Bourgeois society stands at the crossroads, either transition to socialism or regression into barbarism'. What does 'regression into barbarism' mean to our lofty European civilization? Until now, we have all probably read and repeated these words thoughtlessly, without suspecting their fearsome seriousness. A look around us at this moment shows what the regression of bourgeois society into barbarism means. This world war is a regression into barbarism. The triumph of imperialism leads to the annihilation of civilization. At first, this happens sporadically for the duration of a modern war, but then when the period of unlimited wars begins it progresses toward its inevitable consequences. Today, we face the choice exactly as Friedrich Engels foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilisation as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration - a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war. This is a dilemma of world history, an either/or; the scales are wavering before the decision of the class-conscious proletariat. The future of civilisation and humanity depends on whether or not the proletariat resolves manfully to throw its revolutionary broadsword into the scales” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius pamphlet).
[32] [408]“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” (Platform of the Communist International, adopted by the First Congress in 1919 [409]). “Theoretically clear communism, on the other hand, will correctly estimate the character of the present epoch: highest stage of capitalism; imperialist self-negation and self-destruction; uninterrupted growth of civil war, etc.” (Theses on the Communist Parties and Parliamentarism, Second Congress of the International, 1921 [410]). “The Third (Communist) International was formed at a moment when the imperialist slaughter of 1914-1918, in which the imperialist bourgeoisie of the various countries sacrificed twenty million men, had come to an end. Remember the imperialist war! This is the first appeal of the Communist International to every toiler wherever he may live and whatever language he may speak. Remember that owing to the existence of the capitalist system a small group of imperialists had the opportunity during four long years of compelling the workers of various countries to cut each other’s throats. Remember that this imperialist war had reduced Europe and the whole world to a state of extreme destitution and starvation. Remember that unless the capitalist system is overthrown a repetition of this criminal war is not only possible but is inevitable (...) The Communist International considers the dictatorship of the proletariat an essential means for the liberation of humanity from the horrors of capitalism” (Statutes of the CI, adopted at the Second Congress [411]).
[33] [412]The CWO's introduction to Battaglia's article in Revolutionary Perspectives n°32.
The international wave of workers’ struggles of 1968-72 put an end to the long period of counter-revolution which descended on the proletariat following the defeat of the revolutionary attempts of 1917-23. One of the clearest expressions of this was the re-appearance of a whole number of proletarian groups and circles who, despite enormous inexperience and confusion, tried to repair the broken links with the communist movement of the past. During the 1970s, when the immediate (and indeed immediatist) optimism generated by the revival of the class struggle was still very much alive, proletarian political currents like the ICC or the Bordigist ICP went through a phase of accelerated and even spectacular growth. However, the construction of a communist organisation – as with the progress of the class struggle as a whole - proved to be a much more difficult and painful process than many of the ‘generation of 68’ first believed; and not a few of that generation of militants or ex-militants have gone from facile optimism to an equally superficial pessimism, concluding that the period of counter-revolution never came to an end, or expressing their disappointment in the working class by abandoning revolutionary politics altogether.
This is not the place to go into all the reasons for the huge difficulties and seemingly endless crises that revolutionary organisations have faced over the last two decades. They include the ideological fall-out from the collapse of the Eastern bloc; the subsequent reflux in the class struggle; the pernicious effects of capitalism’s ever-advancing decomposition – all subjects requiring a much deeper development than we can attempt here. But throughout all these difficulties the ICC has held fast to what it proclaimed back in the 1970s: that the working class has not suffered a fundamental historical defeat, and that there has been, despite the general narrowing in the extent of overt class consciousness, a process of real “subterranean maturation” of consciousness going on at a deeper level, a process which expresses itself most visibly in the re-appearance of a whole new generation of elements seeking once again to re-appropriate the essentials of the communist programme.
The ICC has written numerous articles in its territorial press about the evolution of the zone of transition between the politics of the bourgeoisie and the politics of the working class. This has certainly been an extremely heterogeneous process and is hampered by any number of ideological pitfalls, in particular anarchism and the various forms of “alternative world” ideologies. But it has been extremely widespread, indeed global, in its ramifications. At the same time we have been seeing the emergence of groups and discussion circles which from the very beginning define themselves as sympathetic to the positions of the communist left.
In this overall context, a particularly significant development has been the appearance of this new generation in the two countries which – precisely because the revolution reached its greatest heights there – experienced the very nadir of the counter-revolution: Russia and Germany. Our sections in Germany and Switzerland have been particularly active in intervening in this new German milieu, as can be seen from the large number of articles devoted to it in the territorial press in that language (some of which have also been published in English, French and other languages. See for example World Revolution n°269 and 275).
At the same time, the ICC as a whole has made a major effort to follow and participate in the development of the milieu in Russia. From the Moscow conference on Trotsky in 1997, which we wrote about in International Review n°92, readers of our press will be aware of the considerable number of articles we have published on the new groups in Russia – debates with the Southern Bureau of the Marxist Labour Party on decadence and the national question, on similar issues with the International Communist Union; the publishing of internationalist statements against the Chechen war by the Moscow revolutionary anarcho-syndicalists (KRAS) and the Group of Proletarian Revolutionary Collectivists; an account of the ICC public meeting held in Moscow in October 2002 to mark the publication in Russian of our book on decadence (see for example International Review n°101, 104, 111, 112, 115 and World Revolution n°260 [414]). More recently, as recounted in International Review n°118, we have helped to set up an internet discussion site [308] with some of the internationalist elements in Russia (KRAS [415], GPRC [416] and more recently the ICU), with the aim of broadening and deepening the key debates animating this milieu.
In June 2004 we continued this work by sending a delegation to the conference convened by the Victor Serge Library and the Praxis study and research centre, which outlined the aims of the meeting as follows: “…to discuss the character, the goals and the historic experience of democratic and libertarian socialism as a complex of ideas and social movements (…):
- Socialism and democracy (…)
- Socialism and freedom (…)
- The international character of democratic and libertarian socialism (…)
- The actors in the socialist transformations (…)
- Socialist education (…)”.
It goes without saying that we have a number of fundamental differences with the “democratic” and “libertarian” ideas put forward in this circular and with the Praxis group; indeed we have already mentioned some of these in our description of the October 2002 public forum, notably with regard to the Chechen war. However, it has been our experience that this group has been consistently able to provide a forum for open debate for the emerging elements in Russia, and the June conference was a good example of that. Not only were many of the key themes announced in the circular deeply relevant to the problems facing revolutionaries, but as with previous conferences this one attracted a very wide range of participants. Thus, alongside a number of Russian and “Western” academics putting forward varieties of democratic ideology from social democracy to Trotskyism and “alternative worldism”, there were also several representatives of the authentically internationalist milieu growing up in Russia today.
The ICC submitted three texts to the conference which were aimed at outlining a communist response to the questions posed in the circular – on the real meaning of proletarian internationalism, on the mythology of democracy and the proletarian alternative of workers’ councils, and on the reactionary character of all trade unions in this historical epoch (see our web site). We were not surprised to find that the debates at this conference tended to highlight the dividing line between those for whom internationalism means class solidarity across and against all national divisions, and those for whom it means “friendship between nations” or support for “national liberation movements”; nor that this divide also coincided with the gap between those for whom the revolutionary and worldwide overthrow of capitalism is the only progressive step for humanity in this period, and those who can still see the benefits of all kinds of partial movements and struggles for ‘reforms’ inside the system.
At the same time, as confirmed by the many discussion meetings which took place alongside the formal conference, there remain major disagreements among the internationalists themselves – on the question of the decadence of capitalism, on the nature of the October revolution, on the organisation question and indeed on the fundamental method of marxism. In this issue of the International Review we are publishing a brief critique of the contributions made by the KRAS (on the October revolution) and by the GPRC (on their idea that computerisation is a necessary precondition for the proletarian revolution), and there is no question that discussions on these and many other issues will continue (the initial contributions on these questions are already on the internationalist website.
We have just completed the publication in this Review of a short series on ‘The birth of Bolshevism’ in 1903-1904. One hundred years later, it is still possible to make fruitful comparisons between the situation facing Russian revolutionaries in Lenin’s day, and the one confronted by today’s milieu. The tasks of the hour remain fundamentally the same: reappropriate (or learn for the first time) marxist positions and understand the necessity to build a centralised organisation of revolutionaries which has overcome the extreme dispersal of the existing groups and circles. Also comparable is the overall social context, in that we can discern on the horizon (even if a more distant one than in 1903) huge social conflicts and mass strikes which will certainly be as significant historically as those of 1905 in Russia; the significance of this being that revolutionaries today do not have infinite time at their disposal for the work of constructing a political organisation capable of intervening in and influencing such movements. One thing, however, has evolved since the early years of the 20th century, and that is that the building of such an organisation will not take place separately in each country in relative isolation from the international communist movement: it is already being posed on an international level. The issues facing revolutionaries in Russia are essentially the same as those facing revolutionaries in all countries; and this is precisely why the debates we have talked about in this article need to be approached not only within a general framework of internationalist principles, but also in a concretely international sense. We therefore actively encourage all those - inside Russia and outside it – who agree with the basic framework of the internationalist discussion forum to begin sending their own contributions to the site and to participate in future conferences organised by the Russian milieu.
ICC, August 2004
The acceleration of the world crisis of capitalism is more and more reducing the margin of manoeuvre open to the bourgeoisie, which, in the logic of capitalist exploitation, has no choice but to attack the living standards of the entire working class head-on and with increasing violence.
Each national bourgeoisie is adopting the same measures: redundancy plans which don’t leave any economic sector untouched; relocation of plant and investment; increasing hours of work; dismantling of social protection (pensions, health, unemployment benefits); wage cuts; the growing precariousness of employment and housing; deterioration of working and living conditions. All workers, whether at work or on the dole, whether still active or retired, whether they are in the private sector or the public sector, will from now on be confronted with these attacks on a permanent basis.
In Italy, following attacks on pensions similar to those in France and a wave of redundancies in the FIAT factories, there have been 3,700 job cuts (over a sixth of the workforce) at the Alitalia airline.
In Germany, the Socialist and Green government led by Schroeder, with an austerity programme baptised “Agenda 2010”, has begun to cut health insurance, increase the policing of work stoppages, increase sickness contributions for all employees, increase pension contributions and raise the retirement age which is already set at 65. At Siemens, with the agreement of the IG-Metall union and under the threat of relocating to Hungary, it is making the workers work between 40 and 48 hours instead of the previous 35 without any wage increase. Other big enterprises are negotiating similar agreements: DeutscheBahn (the German railways), Bosch, Thyssen-Krupp, Continental, as well as the entire automobile industry (BMW, Opel, Volkswagen, Mercedes-Daimler-Chrysler). The same is true in Holland, a state where workers have for a long time been supposed to have worked shorter hours. The Dutch minister of the economy has announced that the return to the 40 hour week (with no compensatory payments) would be a good way of re-launching the national economy.
The “Harz IV plan”, which is due to come into effect at the beginning of 2005 in Germany, shows the direction that all bourgeoisies, and first and foremost those in Europe, have begun to take: reducing the length and amount of unemployment benefits and making it harder to obtain them, notably by forcing people to accept offers of employment which pay a lot less than the jobs they have lost.
These attacks are not limited to the European continent but are taking place on a world scale. While the Canadian aircraft builder Bombardier Aerospace intends to cut between 2,000 and 2,500 jobs, the US telecommunications firm AT&T has announced 12,300 lay-offs, General Motors 10,000 more, posing a threat to its Swedish and German plants, and the Bank of America has announced 4,500 lay-offs in addition to the 12,500 planned last April. Thus in the USA, where unemployment is reaching record levels (they are talking about “growth without jobs”), more than 36 million people, 12.5% of the population, live below the poverty line. In 2003 1.5 million more people had precarious jobs while 45 million are deprived of any social protection. In Israel, whole municipalities are bankrupt and municipal employees have not been paid in months. Not to mention the frightful conditions of exploitation facing workers in the third world, where there is a race to lower wages as a result of frenzied competition on the world market.
Most of these attacks are presented as indispensable “reforms”. The capitalist state and each national bourgeoisie claim that it is acting in the general interest, for the good of the community, to preserve the future for our children and future generations. The bourgeoisie wants us to believe that it is trying to save jobs and guard unemployment, sickness and pension benefit funds, whereas in fact it is in the process of dismantling social protection for the working class. In order to get workers to accept such sacrifices, it claims that these “reforms” are all about “solidarity” between “citizens”, that they will make society fairer and more equal, as opposed to any defence of egoistic privileges. When the ruling class talks about greater equality, its real aim is to reduce the living standards of the working class. In the 19th century, when capitalism was still in full expansion, the reforms carried out by the bourgeoisie really did tend to raise the living standards of the working class; today capitalism can’t offer any real reforms. All these pseudo-reforms are not the sign of capitalism’s prosperity, but of its irreversible bankruptcy.
The resolution we are publishing below was adopted by the central organ of the ICC last June.
The central aim of this text is to demonstrate the existence of a “turning point” in the evolution of the class struggle, an analysis we already put forward after the struggles of spring 2003 in France and Austria against the “reform” of pensions. Through this text we want to answer the questions posed by some of our readers and sympathisers who have expressed doubts about the validity of this analysis.
Since 2003, the reality of the class struggle in the shape of a number of social movements has given a much more tangible confirmation that there is indeed a turning point in the class struggle at an international level.
Despite the strength and omnipresence of union control over the struggles, despite workers’ hesitation to enter into struggle faced with bourgeois manoeuvres aimed at intimidating them, despite the proletariat’s lack of self-confidence, it has become clear that the working class is beginning to respond to the attacks of the bourgeoisie, even if this revival is still a long way below the level of the attacks themselves. The mobilisation of the Italian tram drivers and the British postal workers and firemen in the winter of 2003, then the movements of the FIAT workers at Melfi in the south of Italy in the spring against redundancy plans - in spite of all the weaknesses and isolation of these struggles - were already signs of a revival of class militancy. But today there are many more examples and they are more significant. In Germany last July, more than 60,000 workers at Mercedes-Daimler-Chrysler took part in strikes and demonstrations against threats and ultimatums by the bosses. The latter demanded that workers either accept certain “sacrifices” regarding their working conditions, increase productivity (this applied in particular to the workers of the Sindelfingen-Stuttgart factory in Bade-Wurtemberg), and accept job-cuts at Sindelfingen, Unturkheim and Mannheim – or face the relocation of the plants to other sites. Not only did the workers of Siemens, Porsche, Bosch and Alcatel, who all faced similar attacks, take part in these mobilisations; at the same time, when the bosses tried to foment divisions between the workers of different factories, many workers from Bremen, to where the jobs were to be relocated, associated themselves with the demonstrations. This is a very significant embryo of workers’ solidarity. In Spain, the workers at the shipyards of Puerto Real near Cadiz in Andalusia, as well as in Sestao in the Bilbao region, launched a very hard movement against privatisation plans which involved thousands of job-cuts – plans set in motion by the left-wing government despite its previous promises to the contrary.
More recently, a demonstration organised by the unions and “alternative worldists” in Berlin on 2 October, which was supposed to “close” a series of “Monday protests” against the government’s Hartz IV plan, attracted 45,000 people. On the same day, a gigantic demonstration took place in Amsterdam against the government’s plans, and it had been preceded by important regional mobilisations. Officially there were 200,000 participants, constituting the biggest demonstration in the country for ten years. Despite the main slogan of the demo, “No to the government, yes to the unions”, the most spontaneous reaction of the participants themselves was surprise and astonishment at the size of the demo. It should also be remembered that Holland, alongside Belgium, was one of the first countries to see a revival of workers’ struggles in the autumn of 1983.
Each of these movements is a sign of the reflection going on in the working class. The accumulation of attacks by the bourgeoisie is bound to sap the illusions that the ruling class is trying to spread. Workers are becoming increasingly anxious about the future which this system of exploitation is reserving for their children, for the future generations. Conscious of its responsibility in the slow maturation of consciousness going on in the class, the ICC has intervened very actively in these struggles. It produced leaflets and distributed them widely in Germany in July and in Spain in September. On 2 October, both in Berlin and Amsterdam, it achieved record sales for its press, which had already been the case during the struggles of spring 2003 in France. These are further illustrations of the significance and potential of the current turning point.
Wim 11.10.04
At its plenary meeting in Autumn 2003, the central organ of the ICC highlighted the fact that there is a change in the evolution of the international class struggle: “The large-scale mobilisations of the spring of 2003 in France and Austria represent a turning point in the class struggles since 1989.” However the report adopted by the plenary meeting judged that “both internationally and within each country, the level of militancy is still embryonic and very uneven” and it goes on to say that: “More generally, we must be able to distinguish between situations where, so to speak, the world wakes up the next morning and it is no longer the same world, and changes that take place at first almost unnoticed by the world at large, like the almost invisible alteration between the ebb and flow of the tide. The present evolution is undoubtedly of the latter kind. In this sense, the recent mobilisations by no means signify a spectacular immediate alteration of the situation…”
Eight months after these perspectives were adopted by our organisation, we must ask to what extent they have been verified. That is the aim of the present resolution.
1. One thing that has certainly been confirmed is the absence of any “spectacular immediate alteration of the situation” given that following the struggles in Spring 2003 in various European countries, France in particular, there has been no massive or striking movement in the class struggle. In this sense, there is no decisive element that enables us to confirm the idea that the struggles of 2003 represent a real change in the development of the balance of class forces between the classes. So it is not by looking at the situation in the class struggle over the last year that we can establish the validity of our analyses, this must rather be done by examining all the elements of the historic situation which determine the present phase of the class struggle. The basis for this kind of examination is the analytical framework that we have developed for understanding the present historic situation.
2. In the context of this resolution, we can give no more than a summary of the determinant elements in the situation of the class struggle:
- The entire world situation from the end of the 1960s has been marked by the end of the counter-revolution which weighed on the proletariat during the 1920s. The historic resurgence of the workers' struggles, characterised in particular by the general strike of May 68 in France, the “Italian hot autumn” of 69, the “Cordobazo” in Argentina the same year, the strikes in the winter of 1970-71 in Poland, etc, opened up a course towards the confrontation between classes. Faced with the worsening of the economic crisis, the bourgeoisie was unable to use its “classic” response - world war - because the exploited class no longer marched behind the flag of its exploiters.
- This historic course towards class confrontations, and not towards world war, has been maintained to the extent that the proletariat has not suffered a direct defeat or a profound ideological defeat leading to its mobilisation behind bourgeois banners such as democracy or anti-fascism.
- However this historic resurgence has encountered a series of difficulties, especially during the 80s, because of the manoeuvres used by the bourgeoisie against the working class but also because of the organic break experienced by the communist vanguard following the counter-revolution (absence or lateness in the emergence of the class party, lack of politicisation of the struggles). One of the growing difficulties encountered by the working class is the increasing decomposition of moribund capitalist society.
- It is the most spectacular manifestation of this decomposition - the collapse the so called “socialist” regimes and of the Eastern bloc at the end of the 1980s - that is at the root of the serious reflux in consciousness within the class, as a result of the impact of the campaigns around the “death of communism” which the collapse made possible.
- This reflux of the class was further aggravated at the beginning of the 1990s by a series of events which accentuated the feeling of impotence on the part of the working class:
· the crisis and the Gulf war in 1990-91;
· the war in Yugoslavia from 1991 onwards;
· the plethora of wars and massacres in many other places (Kosovo, Rwanda, East Timor, etc) with the frequent participation of the big powers in the name of “humanitarian principles”.
- The massive use of humanitarian themes (as in Kosovo in 1999 for example), which exploit the most barbarous expressions of decomposition (such as “ethnic cleansing”), has added another source of disorientation for the working class, especially for those in the more advanced countries who are invited to applaud the military adventures of their governments.
- The attack on the United States on 11th September 2001 has allowed the bourgeoisie of the advanced countries to develop a new series of mystifications around the theme of the “terrorist threat”, and of the necessary fight against this threat; these mystifications were used in particular to justify the war in Afghanistan at the end of 2001 and the Iraq war of 2003.
- On the other hand, during the 1990s there was a pause (in the form of a certain downturn in unemployment) in the inevitable worsening of the economic crisis, which could otherwise have offered an antidote to the campaigns that followed 1989 around the “failure of communism” and the “superiority of liberal capitalism”; because of this the illusions created by these campaigns persisted throughout the decade and were reinforced by those created around the “success stories” of the Asian “dragons” and “tigers” and around the “new technological revolution”.
- Finally, the fact that the left parties came to power in the vast majority of the European countries in the second half of the 1990s, an event that was made possible both by the reflux in the consciousness and the combativity of the class and also by the relative calm at the level of the intensification of the economic crisis, has enabled the ruling class (and that was its main aim) to carry out a series of economic attacks against the working class while avoiding the massive mobilisations of the latter, which are one of the conditions for the renewal of its self-confidence.
3. On the basis of all of these elements we can identify a real change in the balance of forces between the classes. We can get an initial idea of this alteration simply by observing and comparing the situation prevailing at the time of two important episodes in the class struggle during the last decade in France, a country which has acted as a sort of “laboratory” at the level of the class struggle and the bourgeoisie's manoeuvres to counter it, ever since 1968 (but also during the 19th century). These two important episodes are the struggles of autumn 1995, mainly in the transport sector, against the “Juppé plan” to reform the Welfare system and the recent strikes in the public section in spring 2003 against the reform of the pension system obliging workers in this sector to work a greater number of years to receive a lower pension.
As the ICC stressed at the time, the struggles of 1995 were an elaborate manoeuvre on the part of different sectors of the bourgeoisie to refurbish the unions’ prestige at a time when the economic situation did not yet oblige them to undertake violent attacks, and in order to allow the unions to encapsulate and sabotage the future struggles of the proletariat more effectively.
By contrast, the strikes of spring 2003 followed a massive attack against the working class that was necessary to deal with the deepening capitalist crisis. The unions did not intervene in these struggles in order to polish up their image, but rather did their best to sabotage the movement and ensure that it ended in a bitter defeat for the working class.
However, in spite of the differences, these two episodes in the class struggle have characteristics in common: the main attack affected all sectors or broad sectors of the working class (in 1995 the “Juppé plan” for reform of the Welfare system, in 2003 reform of public sector pensions) and was accompanied by a specific attack against a particular sector (in 1995 reform of the pension system for railway workers, in 2003 the “decentralisation” of a number of staff within the national education system) which appeared to be the spearhead of the movement because it expressed greater and broader combativity. After several weeks of the strike the “concessions” made in relation to the specific attacks made it possible to get the sectors concerned back to work, which aided the general return to work because the “vanguard” had stopped struggling. In December 1995, the movement of the rail workers came to a halt when the proposed reform of their pension system was abandoned; in 2003, the government's “backdown” on the “decentralisation” measures concerning certain categories in the school system, contributed to the return to work in the education sector.
In spite of this, the return to work took place in a completely different atmosphere on these two occasions:
- in December 1995, although the government retained the “Juppé plan” (which had also received the support of one of the main unions, the CFDT), the prevailing mood was one of “victory”: on one point at least, the pension system of the railway workers, the government had quite simply withdrawn its proposal;
- at the end of spring 2003 on the other hand, the insignificant concessions made on the position of certain categories of personnel in the national education system, was in no way felt as a victory, but quite simply as the reluctance of the government to give way on anything else, and the feeling of defeat was aggravated further by the authorities’ announcement that the strike days would be deducted in their entirety from wages, contrary to what had previously happened in the public sector.
To try and make a general assessment of these two episodes in the class struggle, the following points can be emphasised:
- in 1995, the feeling of victory that was spread forcefully throughout the working class, greatly helped to renew the credibility of the unions (a phenomenon that was not restricted to France but involved most of the European countries, especially Belgium and Germany where bourgeois manoeuvres similar to those used in France were put into operation, as we have pointed out in our press);
- in 2003, the marked feeling of defeat which was produced by the spring strikes (in France but also in other countries such as Austria) did not discredit the unions as they managed not to drop their mask and, in certain situations, even came across as being more “militant” than the rank and file. However, the workers’ feeling of having been defeated marks the beginning of a process in which the unions will lose credibility, once the sheer extent of their manoeuvring makes it possible to demonstrate that under their leadership the struggle is always defeated, and that they always work towards such a defeat.
In this way, the perspective for the development of the struggles and the consciousness of the proletariat is much better after 2003 than after 1995 because:
- the worst thing for the working class is not a clear defeat but rather the sense of victory after a defeat that is masked (but real): it is this sense of “victory” (against fascism and in defence of the “socialist fatherland”) which has been the most efficient poison to plunge and maintain the proletariat in the counter-revolution during four decades of the 20th century;
- the union, the main instrument of control over the working class and for sabotage of the struggles, has entered into a trajectory in which it will be weakened.
4. If the existence of a transformation in the struggles and the consciousness of the working class can be assessed in an empirical way by means of the simple examination of the differences between the situation in 2003 and that of 1995, the question is raised: why has this change taken place now and not, for example, five years ago?
It is already possible to give a simple answer to this question: for the same reasons that the anti-globalisation movement, which began just five years ago, has now become a real institution whose demonstrations mobilise hundreds of thousands of people and the attention of the whole media.
To be more precise we can present the following elements in reply:
After the enormous impact of the campaigns around “the death of communism” from the end of the 80s, an impact that was in proportion to the enormous importance of the event marked by the internal collapse of those regimes that were presented for more than half a century as “socialist”, “workers”, “anti-capitalist”, a certain period of time, in fact a decade, was necessary for the fog of confusion created by these campaigns to evaporate, for the impact of their “arguments” to diminish. Four decades were necessary for the world proletariat to emerge from the counter-revolution, a quarter of this time was necessary for it to raise its head from the blows received from the spearhead of this same counter-revolution, Stalinism, whose “stinking corpse has continued to poison the atmosphere that it breathes” (as we wrote in 1989).
It was also necessary to counter the idea, promoted by Bush senior, that the collapse of the “socialist” regimes and of the Eastern bloc would make possible the opening up of a “new world order”. This idea was brutally belied from 1990-91 onwards by the crisis and the Gulf war and then by the war in Yugoslavia which lasted until 1999 with the offensive in Kosovo. After this came the September 11th attacks and now the Iraq war, while at the same time the situation in Israel-Palestine continues to degenerate. Day after day it becomes increasingly evident that the ruling class cannot put an end to these imperialist confrontations and to world chaos, any more than it can put an end to the economic crisis that constitutes the backdrop to the former.
The recent period, mainly since the start of the 21st century, has once more brought to the fore the obvious fact of capitalism’s economic crisis, after the illusions of the 1990s about the “resurgence”, the “dragons” and the “new technological revolution”. At the same time, this new evolution of the capitalist crisis has led the ruling class to intensify the violence of its economic attacks against the working class, to generalise the attacks.
However, the violence and the increasingly systematic nature of the attacks against the working class has not yet provoked any massive or spectacular response or even a response comparable in breadth to that of 2003. In other words, why did the “alteration” in 2003 appear in the form of a change in direction and not as an explosion (such as was seen for example in 1968 and the years that followed)?
5. There are various levels of response to this question.
In the first place, as we have often pointed out, there is the slow development of the historic resurgence of the proletariat: for example, there were 12 years between the first major event of this historic resurgence, the general strike in May 1968 in France and its culmination, the strikes in Poland in the summer of 1980. Likewise, there were 13½ years between the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 and the strikes of spring 2003; that is, a longer period of time than between the beginning of the first revolution in Russia in January 1905 and the revolution of October 1917.
The ICC has already analysed the reasons for the slowness of this development in comparison with that which preceded the 1917 revolution: today the class struggle is provoked, not by imperialist war, but by the economic crisis of capitalism, a crisis which the bourgeoisie is quite capable of slowing down, as it has amply shown.
The ICC has also highlighted other factors which have contributed to slowing down the development of the struggle and the consciousness of the proletariat, factors linked to the organic break imposed by the counter-revolution (and which has delayed the construction of the party) and to the decomposition of capitalism, especially the tendency towards despair, to flight and to cocooning which has affected the proletariat.
In other ways, to understand the slowness of this process we must also take into account the impact of the crisis itself. In particular the fact that it is expressed by a rise in unemployment, which constitutes an important inhibition on the working class, especially on those of the new generation, who are traditionally the most combative but who are today often thrown into unemployment without even being able to experience associated work and solidarity between workers. When workers are made redundant as a result of massive lay-offs, this can create an explosive situation, although this is not easily expressed in the classic form of the strike because the strike is by definition ineffective against redundancies. But insofar as the rise in unemployment is simply a result of not replacing those who retire, as is often the case today, workers who fail to find a job often have difficulty knowing how to react.
The ICC has often demonstrated that the inexorable rise in unemployment is one of the most conclusive demonstrations of the definitive failure of the capitalist mode of production, one of whose essential historic functions was the massive and world wide extension of wage labour. However, at the moment unemployment is mainly a factor of demoralisation for the working class, one that inhibits its struggle. Only in a much more advanced stage of the class movement (in fact, when the perspective for overthrowing capitalism reappears, if not massively, then at least significantly within the ranks of the proletariat) will the subversive character of this phenomenon become a factor in the development of the class’ struggle and consciousness.
6. This is in fact one of the reasons for the slow development of workers' struggles today; the relative weakness of the class’ response to the growing attacks of capitalism: the feeling, still very confused but which can only develop in the coming period, that there is no solution to the contradictions of capitalism today, whether at the level of its economy or other expressions of its historic crisis, whose irresistible character is shown up more clearly by each passing day, such as the unending military confrontations, the growth of chaos and barbarism.
This phenomenon of the proletariat's hesitation before the greatness of its task has been stressed by Marx and marxism since the middle of the 19th century (in particular in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). This phenomenon partly explains the paradox in the present situation: on the one hand the struggles have difficulty spreading despite the violence of the attacks that the working class is suffering. On the other hand, there is evidence of a development within the class of a deepened reflection, even if this mainly below the surface today, which can be seen in the appearance of a series of elements and groups, often young, who are turning towards the positions of the Communist Left.
In this situation, it is important to take a clear position on the scope of the two aspects of the present situation which contribute to the relative passivity of the proletariat:
- the impact of the defeats that it suffered during the recent period, which the bourgeoisie has done all in its power, in particular through its arrogant declarations, to ensure leads to the greatest level of demoralisation possible;
- the systematic blackmail used around the question of “delocalisation” to oblige the workers of the more developed countries to accept major sacrifices.
For some time to come, these elements will work in favour of “social peace” to the benefit of the bourgeoisie, and the latter will not hesitate to exploit this “vein” to the full. However, when the hour of massive struggles comes, as it will because the mass of workers cannot do otherwise faced with the breadth of the attacks, then the sum of humiliations suffered by the workers, the enormous feeling of impotence and demoralisation, the “every man for himself” which has weighed it down throughout the years, will be turned into its opposite; the refusal to submit, the determined search for class solidarity, between sectors, between regions and between countries, the opening up of a new perspective, that of the international unity of the proletariat with the aim of overturning capitalism.
ICC, June 2004
We are publishing below extracts from a long article by the comrades of the Nucleo Comunista Internacional in Argentina which makes an in-depth analysis of the so-called “piquetero” movement, denouncing its anti-working class nature and the self-interested lies with which leftist groups of every hue “have dedicated themselves to deceiving the workers with false hopes to make them believe that the aims and means of the piquetero movement contribute to advancing their struggle”.
This task of deception, falsifying events, and preventing the proletariat from drawing the real lessons of this movement and thus arming themselves against the traps of the class enemy, which is aided by the invaluable contribution of the semi-anarchist group the GCI[1] [419] with its pseudo-Marxist language, is clearly denounced by the comrades of the NCI.
There may be those who consider that many of the organisations of the unemployed have their origins in the poverty, unemployment and hunger that have worsened in the large slums of Gran Buenos Aires, Rosario, Cordoba, etc, over the last 5 or 6 years. This is not the case. The origin of the piquetero movement lies in the so-called “Manzaneras” which were controlled by the wife of the then governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Eduardo Duhalde, in the 1990s. These had a dual function: on the one hand, social and political control and providing the means to mobilise extensive layers of the desperate poor to support the bourgeois fraction represented by Duhalde, and on the other hand, the control of the distribution of food to the unemployed (one egg and half a litre of milk a day), since there were no unemployment plans, benefits etc, then. But as the unemployment figures grew geometrically, along with the protests of the unemployed, the Manzaneras began to disappear from the scene. This left a political vacuum that had to be filled. This was done by a choice bunch of organisations, most of which were run by the Catholic Church, leftist political organisations and so on. The last to appear on the scene was the Maoist Partido Comunista Revolutionario with its Corriente Clasista y Combativa; the Trotskyist Partido Obrero had formed its own apparatus for the unemployed (Polo Obrero) and was followed by other organisations.
These first organisations had their baptism of fire in Buenos Aires, at a mass level, with the blockading of the strategic Route 3, which links Buenos Aires with Patagonia in the extreme south . They demanded increased unemployment benefits: benefits that were to be controlled and managed by the consultative councils that included the municipality, the piqueteros, the Church, etc, or to put it another way: the bourgeois state.
These “work plans” and the different benefits thus allowed the bourgeoisie to exercise social and political control of the unemployed through the various piquetero organisations, be they Peronist, Trotskyist, Guevarist, Stalinist or trade unionist run by the CTA.[2] [420] These organisations then began to fan out throughout the working class districts hardest hit by unemployment, hunger and marginalisation. The spreading of these structures was above all carried out with money from the bourgeois state. They demand only two things of the unemployed in order to be able to receive benefits and food parcels (5Kg): to mobilise behind the flags of the organisation, and to take part in political actions if the organisation possessed a political structure, and to vote for the propositions of the group that they “belong to”. All this on pain of losing their wretched benefits of 150 pesos a month (50 dollars).
But these movements’ demands on the unemployed did not stop there. The unemployed also found themselves obliged by some of these organisations to carry out a series of duties where fulfilment is recorded in a ledger where those with the highest score gained by participating in meetings, demonstrations, and voting for the official position kept their benefits, while those who disagreed with the official position lost points, benefits, and eventually the right to take part in the plan. Moreover, these organisations also extract a percentage or a fixed sum from the unemployed with the idea of “dues”. This money is used to pay the officials of these organisations, to pay for locals (meeting rooms) – which were used by the unemployed organisations and the political groups upon which the former depend etc. The handing over of these dues is obligatory, and to this end, the so-called “referees” from each district local of the various unemployed movements accompany the unemployed to the bank where they have handover their money as soon as they have received their benefits.
In 2001, before the inter-classist events of 19th and 20th December, the so-called piquetero assembly was dominated by the Polo Obrero, the Maoist Corriente Clasista y Combativa, and the Federación de Tierra y Vivienda.
The positions adopted by these assemblies and those that followed clearly demonstrated the nature of the different piquetero groups, as an apparatus in the service of the bourgeois state. This nature did not change later after the split between the Polo Obrero and the other two currents, leading to the formation of the Bloque Piquetero.
The Partido Obrero says that the aim of the unemployed or the “piquetero subject” as the Partido Obrera like to call it in its monthly publication Prensa Obreara, is to turn the piquetero movement into a movement of the masses, which is understood to be the mass of the unemployed, active workers and all the middle sectors that are being pushed into the working class and the dispossessed. This means that the working class must integrate itself into a wide inter-classist front and must struggle, not on its own terrain, but, on a totally alien terrain. This shows the correctness of the ICC's position, which we defend, when its classifies the events of the 19th and 20th December as an inter-classist revolt.
The Partido Obrero does not mince its words in a shameless paragraph from its XIIIth Congress where it says “Whoever controls the masses food controls the masses....”. In other words, despite the PO’s declamations, about its control of the food being used to try and stop the bourgeoisie's control of the masses, what this shows in reality is the same attitude as that of the bourgeoisie, which is to control the social plans, to control the food parcels, in order thus to control the unemployed. This attitude is not exclusive to the Partido Obrero, but is that of all the piquetero movements, groups and regroupments.
These few examples show that the unemployed movements which have occupied the mass media, nationally and internationally, and which have led the radicalised petty-bourgeoisie to imagine that they are seeing the beginning of “a revolution”, the existence of “workers's councils” etc, are a perfect swindle.
To consider, as the Partido Obrero does, that the piquetero movement is the most significant workers' movement since the Cordobazo,[3] [421] and the other struggles of the same period, is to discredit the latter which were not a popular rebellion or in anyway inter-classist, but on the contrary were working class struggles that developed workers' committees, which took charge of various functions, such as defence, solidarity committees etc.
A critic might say that this is the position of the leadership of the piquetero movements and organisations, but that what is important is the dynamic process or the piquetero phenomena: its struggles, its demonstrations, its initiatives.
The answer is simple, and is the same we gave in Revolución Comunista n°2,[4] [422] with, our critique of the IBRP’s[5] [423] positions on the “Argentinazo” of the 19th and 20th December: that this current’s positions are simply idealist wishful thinking. The piquetero organisations are its leaders, its bosses, nothing more. The rest of the piqueteros with their masked faces burning tyres, are prisoners of the 150 pesos a month and the 5kg of food that the bourgeois state grants them via these organisations. And as we have said above, all this must be done on pain of loosing said “benefits”.
To summarise, the piqueteros absolutely do not represent a development of consciousness, on the contrary, they are a regression in workers' consciousness, since they introduce an alien ideology into the working class: that whoever manages the food manages consciousness, as the PO put it. This bourgeois position, this perverse logic, can only lead to the defeat of the working class and of the unemployed, since the function of leftism is to defeat the working class and extinguish class autonomy; no matter how “revolutionary” the slogans it adopts.
Inaccuracies, half-truths, and mystifications are of no help to the world proletariat; on the contrary, they further worsen the errors and limitations of the struggles to come. However this is the attitude of the GCI when it writes in its journal Comunismo (n°49, 50 and 51), that “for the first time in the history of Argentina the revolutionary violence of the proletariat has brought down a government (…) the distribution of expropriated goods amongst the proletariat and the ‘popular’ kitchens supplied with the result of the recuperations (…) Confrontations with the police and other forces of the state, such as mercenary Peronist street gangs, especially on the day that Duhalde assumed the presidency of the government....”. The GCI, with its attitude and its lies sows confusion in the international working class, stopping it from drawing the necessary lessons from the events in Argentina in 2001.
In the first place it was not “revolutionary violence” that overthrew the De La Rua government, on the contrary, this bourgeois government fell as the result of inter-bourgeois faction fights. Neither have the “expropriated goods” been shared out, the looting was not as the GCI says “a generalised attack on private property and the state”, but the actions of desperate, starving people, who never thought, even momentarily, about attacking private property, but were rather concerned with quelling their hunger for a couple of days.
In the same way, they continue with their falsifications, when they talk about the rise of Duhalde as a struggle between the “movement” of the proletariat and the Peronist street gangs, this is false, this is a lie, the confrontation that took place on the day that Duhalde became president, was between factions of of the bourgeois state apparatus, on the one hand Peronism, and on the other the leftist MST,[6] [424] the PCA[7] [425] and other less important Trotskyist and Guevarist groups. The working class was absent that day.
Perhaps for a moment one might think that these “errors” of the GCI are due to an excess of revolutionary enthusiasm, in all good faith. But when one reads the rest of this journal it is possible to see that this is not the case: its role is to sow confusion that serves the interests of the bourgeoisie. The GCI lies to the international working class and feeds the piquetero mystification, when it says that: “...The affirmation of the proletariat in Argentina could not have taken place without the development of the piquetero movement, the spearhead of the proletarian associationism, during the last ten years.” and “In Argentina, the development of this class force in recent months has such a potential that proletarians in work are joining it (…). During the last years a whole great struggle has been coordinated and articulated through the pickets, the assemblies and coordinating structures of the piqueteros...”. It would be worrying if these affirmations were being made by groups within the Proletarian Political Milieu, but they are not strange coming from the mouth of the GCI, a semi-anarchist group that adopts the petty-bourgeois and racist ideology of Bakunin. But what concerns us is the deception that this publication is carrying out on its readers.
The piquetero movement, as we have already said above (with the exceptions of Patagonia and Norte de Salta) is heir to the Manzaneras, and the supposed associationism that was generated by the pickets, is nothing more than the obligation imposed upon each of those benefiting from the “work plan” or benefits in order not to lose the crumbs that the bourgeois states throws them. There exists no solidarity within them, quite the contrary, it is each against all, seeking to obtain benefits to the detriment and at the cost of the hunger of others.
Therefore, we cannot, in any way, classify the pickets as something of great significance for the working class and it is a shameless lie to talk of the “coordination” of the employed workers with the piqueteros. The GCI continues with its mendacity when it says that “the generalised associationism of the proletariat in Argentina is without a doubt an incipient affirmation of the autonomization of the proletariat (…) direct action, a powerful organisation against bourgeois legality, an action without the mediation of intermediaries (…) an attack on private property (…) these are extraordinary affirmations of the tendency of the proletariat to constitute itself as a destructive force against the whole of the established order...”. These affirmations are without a doubt a clear demonstration of their open intent to deceive the international working class in order to avoid it drawing the necessary lessons. The GCI definitely carry out a great service for the bourgeoisie and the ruling class. It cannot swindle the working class without distorting the meaning of events, actions and slogans: the slogan “get rid of them all” (ie, the politicians) is not a revolutionary call, but rather, a call for everyone to look for an “honest bourgeois government”.
We have ask ourselves what the GCI means when it refers to the proletariat. For this group the proletariat is not defined by the role it plays in capitalist production, that is, if they are the owners of the means of production or if they sell their labour power. For the GCI, the proletariat is a category that includes the unemployed (which are indeed part of the working class) as well as the lumpenproletariat and other non-exploiting social strata and layers, as we can see in its publication Comunismo n°50.
The position of the GCI, considering the lumpen as within the category of the proletariat, is nothing more than a veiled effort to present it as a new revolutionary social subject, in order to separate the unemployed from belonging to the working class. Far from being against the Left, the GCI, has many similar positions to those adopted by Argentinean leftism, such as the Partido Obrero when it creates a sub-category of workers, the “piquetero workers”. And we see this when the GCI tries to explain its vision (which is semi-anarchist and “guerrilaist” and has nothing to do with Marxism) about this proletarian subject and says about the lumpen that they are “the most decided elements against private property” due to being the most desperate elements.
What has to be asked about this formulation is: is the lumpenproletariat a social layer distinct from the proletariat? For the GCI it is not, for them the lumpen is the most put upon sector of the proletariat. Here the GCI are clearly assimilating the unemployed with the lumpenproletariat, which is absolutely false. This absolutely does not imply that the bourgeoisie does not try to demoralise these detachments of workers without work through isolation and that it likewise tries to lumpenise them in order that they lose their class consciousness. However, there is a great difference between this and the GCI's position, since to think, no matter how tangentially, that the lumpen is the most desperate sector of the proletariat and that this desperation implies “no respect for private property”, is false. The lumpenproletariat is fully integrated into the present capitalist society with its “take what you can, every man for himself”. As for its “no respect for private property” this is nothing but the desperation of this social layer.
The GCI's underhand proclamation about the end of the proletariat, does nothing but echo the ideologies and theories spread by the bourgeoisie in the 1990's, when it says that these futureless social strata are part of the proletariat, and denies the character of the working class as the only revolutionary social class in our epoch and the only class that has the perspective of communism and the destruction of the system of exploitation that capitalism imposes.
It is false to characterise the revolt of 2001 as proletarian and revolutionary; it is a lie that the proletariat challenged private property. The associative structures to which the GCI refer are an integral part of the state apparatus, used to divide the working class, since whatever the structure of the piquetero groups, they never thought about or posed the destruction of private property nor did they pose the communist perspective.
In reality, the GCI bally-hoo about the pickets and the piquetero groups, is used to divide the working class, and to deny the revolutionary character of the proletariat. The GCI uses a marxist phraseology, but this group is nothing more than a deformation of bourgeois ideology.
Furthermore, the GCI has launched an open attack on the ICC, and against the position that this Current defends about the events of 2001. We firmly consider that the position adopted by the ICC on the events in Argentina is the only one able to draw the correct lessons from this popular revolt, whilst that of the IBRP is purely and exclusively based on the fetish of the “new vanguard” and the “radicalised masses of the peripheral nations”. The GCI (like the Internal Fraction of the ICC) adopted a non-proletarian and clearly anarchist petty-bourgeois position. (…)
Our little group draws the same lessons on the inter-classist revolt in Argentina as the comrades of the ICC, without being blinded by the IBRP's Third World impressionism, nor by the “proletarian revolutionary action” of the lumpen put forward by the GCI.
It is absurd to assimilate the Argentinean inter-classist rebellion with the Russian revolution of 1917. What are reference to Kerensky doing in the analysis of the 2001 rising? The answer is they are meaningless. (…) The analogy of the GCI's is clearly self-serving. It is not a matter of errors or hasty analysis or idealist visions, quite the opposite, it is purely and simply the product of its ideology that distances it from dialectical materialism and historical materialism, whilst it embraces anarchist positions, that are a difficult mix to swallow, in its superficial terminology it adopts the petty-bourgeois ideology of the desperate and futureless middling strata.
It is worth mentioning here the positions of the IFICC.[8] [426] This group, despite its pretence of being the “real ICC”, its self-proclamation as “the only continuity with the revolutionary programme of the ICC”, clearly demonstrates that it is doing nothing but tailing along behind the IBRP and the latter’s incorrect analyses of Argentina. This group’s answer to a note published in Revolucion Comunista gives a clear idea of its positions: “…unlike all the other communist forces, the present-dat ICC has rejected the reality of the workers’ struggles in Argentina (…) we think that the movements in Argentina were a movement of the working class (…) a schematic vision thinks that the proletariat of the peripheral countries has nothing else to do but to wait for the proletariat of the central countries to open the road to revolution. Such a vision obviously has implications, consequences for one’s orientations and even for the militant attitude towards the struggle. Already in the 1970s, this incorrect, vulgar, mechanical incomprehension tended to find expression in the ICC’s press. Today, we think that this vision has returned in strength in the present-day ICC’s positions, in the an absolute, and therefore idealist, vision of decomposition, which has led ‘our’ organisation to adopt an indifferent, even defeatist position towards, and even to denounce, the struggles of the Argentine workers en 2001-2002 (see the ICC’s press of the time)”.[9] [427]
These long quotations from the IFICC’s publication clearly show the same errors as those of the IBRP, and of the GCI, behind which the IFICC trails along in a completely unprincipled way. They all agree that the popular revolt in Argentina was a workers’ struggle. Nothing could be more false.
It is true that the position of the ICC, and of our little group, is different from that of the other communist currents, notably the IBRP. But this is not, as the IFICC falsely claims, a defeatist position. We are tired of repeating that it is necessary to learn the lessons of the struggles, in order not to make mistakes and to fall into impressionism, as apparently has happened to these groups with respect to the piquetero experience. To say that there was not a workers’ struggle in Argentina on 19th December 2001 in no way implies being a deserter of the class struggle, as the IFICC pretends. Their position is typical of the despairing petty bourgeois who try at any cost to see workers’ struggles where they do not exist.
The most industrialised are in a more favourable position for a revolutionary workers’ struggle than the nations on the periphery. The conditions for proletarian revolution, understood as a break with the ruling class, are more favourable in countries where the bourgeoisie is strongest, and where the productive forces are most developed (…)
Like the GCI, the IFICC has done nothing but develop a policy of slander and insults against the ICC. And such an approach has led it to deny the undeniable, and to accept the unacceptable, in the first place that the struggle of 2001 in Argentina was a workers’ struggle, and to put forward the mystification that the unemployed movement, the “pickets”, etc., are class organs when the concrete practice of the class struggle demonstrates the opposite.
The piquetero currents which as a whole control around 200,000 unemployed workers, are not unions in the exact meaning of the word, but they have union aspects: paying dues, blind obedience to the group managing the plan, or the one delivering the food parcels etc., and fundamentally above all their permanent character. It does not matter that they are controlled by the Leftist parties or by the CTA in the case of the FTV. Thus, since the early struggles of the unemployed in 1996 and 1997 in Patagonia where the unemployed organised themselves through committees, assembles etc., the leftist parties have managed to infiltrate themselves, as organs of capital and have sterilised the struggle of the employed and unemployed workers.
But some critics could say: “Could not these groups be regenerated by the action of the rank and file? Do you mean that the unemployed should abandon the struggle?” The answer to these questions is quite simply: NO. The piquetero organisations,are appendages of the parties of the Left, whether they are “independent” or arms of the main unions, as is the case of the CTA with the FTV and its official leader D'Elia, are irretrievably part of capital, the bourgeois apparatus. Their purpose is the division and dispersal of the struggles, sterilising the unemployed until they are transformed into an integral part of the urban landscape, without revolutionary perspective, and isolated from their class.
In the same way, we are not saying that the unemployed should abandon the struggle, on the contrary they have to redouble it. Nevertheless, it is necessary to constantly explain that unemployed workers cannot gain their demands or reforms within this system, therefore, the unemployed have to struggle shoulder to shoulder with the employed against this system, and that in order to do this it is necessary to break with isolation, not only in relation to the employed but among the unemployed themselves. An isolation that the bourgeoisie has skilfully created through the leftist parties and the piquetero currents which have established their own separate groupings, and have thus introduced divisions within the unemployed, which has generated a way of thinking that sees one’s neighbour or comrade in the district as a potential adversary and enemy that could take your benefits and food.
This trap has to be broken. The unemployed have to break out of the isolation that capital has imposed on them and unite with the whole of the working class, of which they are part. But this means a great transformation in the way it organises itself: not by means of permanent organs, but by following the examples of the workers in Patagonia in 1997, or in Norte de Salta, where there was unity within the class and where the organisation of the struggle was through assembles, general assemblies with revocable mandates, even though they were eventually brought under the control of the Leftist parties.
Nevertheless, the experience of these struggles is valid, since the unemployed have to struggle against the miserable benefits they are given, against the price increases in public services, etc., which in a certain way is the same struggle as that carried out by the employed for wages. The unemployed must participate as a support in the class struggle and transform its struggles into an integral part of the general struggle against capital.
The piquetero currents have created the term “piquetero” in order to establish not only a separation from the employed, but also with those unemployed who are not controlled by their organisations. Through the creation of new social categories and new social subjects such as the “unemployed piquetero”, these groups of the unemployed try to divide and exclude millions of employed and unemployed workers, which only benefits the ruling class.
The pipueteros, as is the case with the Zapatistas, were and are tools in the service of capital., Their “fashion” of balaclavas, burning tyres in the middle of motorways, is only a “marketing” by capitalism in order to say two things to the class as a whole: on the one hand that there are millions of unemployed ready to take the jobs of the employed for less money, and in this way to paralyse the development of class struggle, and on the other hand, by means of the programmes set up by the various piqueteros groups – more food parcels and 150 pesos a month in benefits, genuine work in capitalist factories – that nothing is possible outside capitalism, even when they talk about a workers’ and popular government.
It is thus necessary for unemployed workers to break free from the traps of the bourgeoisie, and break from the piquetero organisations by abandoning them, because as with the unions and the Left parties they are integral to capital. Despite what leftism says, the unemployed are workers and not “piqueteros”. Such a description means dividing the unemployed from the rest of the working class, and their transformation into a caste; this is what the positions of the Left of capital mean.
Employed and unemployed workers as a whole have to tend towards class unity, since both sectors belong to the same social class: the working class, and there is no solution within this system, since it is bankrupt. Only the proletarian revolution can destroy this system that can only bring poverty, hunger, marginalisation. This is the challenge.
Buenos Aires June 16th 2004.
[1] [428] Groupe Communiste Internationaliste
[2] [429] Central de los Trabajadores Argentinos, which has set up its own union for the unemployed under the name “Federación de Tierra y Vivienda” (FTV)
[3] [430] Workers’ uprising in the industrial town of Cordoba, Argentina, in 1969.
[4] [431] The journal of the NCI
[5] [432] International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party.
[6] [433] Movimiento Socialista de los Trabajadores, qui siege au parlement sous le nom de Izquierda Unida.
[7] [434] Partido Comunista de la Argentina (Argentine Stalinists).
[8] [435] The self-styled “Internal Fraction of the ICC”.
[9] [436] IFICC bulletin n°22, 23rd December 2003. The translation from the French is ours.
The latest developments on the international scene have plunged the world still further into “an endless fear”, an insane succession of terrorist attacks, bombings, kidnappings, hostage taking and murder. In Iraq, this has reached levels that could have barely been imagined only a few years ago. The savage killings in the Russian town of Beslan in North Ossetia bear witness to the fact that the rest of the world, especially its most strategic areas, will not be spared either. The situation is so bad that talk of chaos is no longer the domain of a few “catastrophists”, but has become an ever more present subject in the media and the political world.
The Beslan massacre reveals the depths of the barbarity into which capitalist society is sinking: children taken as hostages and tortured[1] [438] by Chechen terrorists whose contempt for their fellow human beings is almost beyond belief. The terrorists' behaviour is an expression of hatred, no longer for institutions or governments, but for other human beings whose misfortune it is to belong to a different nationalist clique. On the opposite side, the Russian state has not hesitated for an instant to massacre civilians in order to defend its authority. The result is only too obvious: the destabilisation of the whole Russian Caucasus, unleashing a whole series of ethnic or religious confrontations, the organisation in the different republics of gangs whose proclaimed purpose is the persecution of rival ethnic groups.
Iraq is riven by a war of each against all. The media and certain leftist groups talk of “national resistance”.[2] [439] It is nothing of the kind. There is no such thing as a “national liberation struggle against the American invader”. There is, on the contrary, a flourishing of all kinds of groups based on clan, local, or tribal loyalties, on ethnic or religious group, who are fighting both amongst each other and against the occupying forces. Each religious group is divided into opposing cliques. The recent attacks against journalists, or against people from countries not even involved in the war, highlight still further the blind and anarchic nature of this war. In total confusion, the whole population is taken hostage, deprived of drinking water and electricity, victim of attacks from all sides, subjected to a terror still more cruel than in the days of Saddam.
This situation cannot be understood on the basis of its immediate, local, partial aspects. Only a world wide, historical framework allows us to grasp its roots and its perspectives. We have regularly contributed to this framework, and we will simply retrace some of its main elements here.
Immediately after the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989, and against the grandiose promises of a “new world order” made by George Bush senior, we declared that the perspective was, on the contrary, that of a new world disorder. In an orientation text published in 1990,[3] [440] we predicted that the end of the bloc system would “open the door to a still more savage, aberrant, and chaotic form of imperialism”, characterised by “more violent and more frequent conflicts, especially in areas where the proletariat is weak”. This tendency has been constantly confirmed during the last 15 years. It is not simply the mechanical result of the disappearance of the bloc system, but one of the results of capitalism's entry into its terminal phase of decadence, characterised by a generalised decomposition [441].[4] [442] In terms of military activity, chaos is the most obvious mark of decomposition. It is expressed, on the one hand by a proliferation of conflicts where imperialist tensions have broken out into open warfare,[5] [443] and by the proliferation of multiple, contradictory imperialist interests within each zone of conflict; and on the other hand, by the growing instability of imperialist alliances, making it impossible for the great powers to stabilise the situation, even temporarily.[6] [444]
On the basis of this analytical framework, we declared at the time of the first Gulf War that “only military force will be able to maintain a minimum of stability in a world threatened by rising chaos” (ibid) and that, in this world “of murderous disorder, the American cop will try to maintain a minimum of order by the increasingly massive use of its military power” (ibid).
However, in today's conditions, the use of military force can only spread the conflicts and make them still more difficult to control. We can see this in the USA's failure in the Iraq war, where it is caught in a quagmire with no way out. The difficulties confronting the world's major power damage its authority as the world's policeman, and encourage the activities of all the rival imperialisms, including even those – like Al-Qaeda and some of the Iraqi and Chechen gangs – who do not even aspire to control a state. The chessboard of international relations has become an enormous scrum of merciless conflicts, turning into a nightmare the lives of vast sections of the world's population.
This chaos, and the generalised disintegration of social relations, explain the extension of terrorism today as a weapon in the wars between imperialist rivals.[7] [445] During the 1980s, terrorism [446] was the “poor man's H-bomb”, used by weaker states (Syria, Iran, Libya, etc.) to gain a hearing in the imperialist arena. During the 1990s, it became a weapon in the imperialist competition between the great powers, with their secret services using – more or less directly – the activity of gangs like the IRA or ETA. With the bomb attacks of 1999 in Russia, and the attack on the Twin Towers, we see that “the great powers use blind terrorist attacks by kamikaze fanatics, aimed directly at the civilian population, to justify the unleashing of imperialist barbarism” (ibid). Increasingly, the tendency today is for some of these gangs, notably the various Chechens and Islamists, to declare their independence of their previous patrons, to play their own cards at the imperialist poker game.[8] [447]
This is the most striking expression of the chaos reigning in the relations between imperialisms, and of the inability of the great powers, playing sorcerer's apprentice, to control them. Nonetheless, however megalomaniac their pretensions, these little warlords cannot play an independent role, since they are infiltrated by the secret services of other powers who are each trying to use them for their own ends, which only adds to the general and unprecedented confusion at the level of imperialist rivalries.
The Middle East, bounded in the east by Afghanistan, in the north by Turkey and the Caucasus, in the south by Saudi Arabia, and in the west by the eastern coast of the Mediterranean (Syria, Palestine, etc.), lies at the strategic heart of the planet, both because it contains the world's largest energy reserves, and because it lies at the crossroads of the sea and land routes of imperialist expansion.
The states in this region are under pressure to break up in a civil war between different bourgeois fractions. The epicentre is Iraq, whose shock waves are spreading in all directions: constant terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, which are only the tip of the iceberg in a hidden struggle for power; open war between Israel and Palestine; warlordism in Afghanistan; the destabilisation of the Russian Caucasus; terrorist attacks and armed conflict in Pakistan; bomb attacks in Turkey; a critical situation in Iran and Syria.[9] [448] We have already noted this fact in the editorial of this Review (n°117) [449], concerning the situation in Iraq, which continues to degenerate as we write: “the war in Iraq (...) is entering a new phase, that of a kind of international civil war which is spreading throughout the Middle East. In Iraq itself, there are increasingly frequent confrontations not only between the “resistance” and US forces, but also between the “Saddamites”, Wahhabite Sunnis (the sect which gave birth to Bin Laden), Shiites, Kurds, and even Turkmen. In Pakistan, a discreet civil war is in progress, with the bomb attack against a Shiite procession (40 dead), and a large-scale military operation in progress as we write in Waziristan. In Afghanistan, all the reassuring declarations about the consolidation of the Kabul government cannot hide the fact that the latter’s writ runs no farther than Kabul itself, and that only with difficulty, while civil war continues to rage throughout the southern part of the country. In Israel and Palestine, the situation is going from bad to worse, as Hamas has started to use young children to carry its bombs”.
We have seen the same phenomenon in many African countries (Congo, Somalia, Liberia, etc.), which have foundered in interminable civil wars, but that this should be happening at the world's strategic heart has immensely serious repercussions, which will dominate the world situation.
At the strategic level, German imperialism's “natural” needs for expansion into Asia are thus partly blocked. British interests are also threatened by the destabilisation in the Middle East. This chaos is like a shrapnel bomb whose blast is affecting Russia (as we can see in the Caucasus, the tragedy of Beslan being only one example among many), Turkey, India, and Pakistan, and which may end up affecting regions still further away: Eastern Europe, China, North Africa. The Middle East is also the planet's main energy reserve, and its destabilisation cannot help having serious consequences for the economic situation in the industrialised states, as a result of the rise in oil prices. But the most striking factor in the present situation, is the inability of the great powers to put even a temporary stop to the process of destabilisation. This is true for the USA, whose “war against terror” has shown itself to be a powerful means for spreading terrorism and military conflict. On the other side, the honeyed appeals of the rival powers (France, Germany) for establishment of a “multilateral” world order based on “international law” and “international co-operation” are mystifications designed to sow confusions in the heads of the workers concerning the bourgeoisie's real intentions. These banana skins slipped under the feet of the American mammoth are also the only real means of opposition that these countries possess, given their utter military inferiority.
The United States, as we have seen, is confronted with a “black hole” which not only threatens to swallow up a large proportion of its troops,[10] [450] but also threatens its authority and prestige.
World capitalism is up against an insurmountable contradiction: the brute force of militarism, applied by the world's greatest power, is the only way to contain the spread of chaos, while its continued use will not only be unable to stop the latter, but is becoming a major agent in its spread.
Although the US Army is by far the most powerful force on the planet, demoralisation is setting in among the troops and replacements are more and more limited. The world is not in the same situation as it was when World War II broke out, and when the proletariat – defeated in the first revolutionary wave and enrolled under the flags of nationalism – provided enormous reserves of cannon fodder.
Today, the proletariat is not beaten and even the world's most powerful state does not have the room for manoeuvre to enlist millions of workers. The balance of class forces is thus a key element in society's evolution.
Only the proletariat can put an end to capitalism's decline into barbarism. It is the only force able to offer humanity another perspective. The development of revolutionary minorities around the world is the expression of a subterranean maturation of class-consciousness within the working class. They are the visible part of the proletariat's efforts to give a class response to the situation. The road is hard, and there is no shortage of obstacles in the way. And one of these obstacles is all the illusions in all the false “solutions” proposed by different factions of the bourgeoisie. Many workers mistrust Bush's shameless warmongering, and realise that the “war on terror” has done no more than encourage war and terrorism. But they have greater difficulty in seeing through the pacifist mystifications put forward by Bush's rivals – Schröder, Chirac, Zapatero and Co. - and still more in seeing through the bourgeoisie's ardent supporters in defending these themes: the leftists and anti-globalists. We can have no illusions: all these factions of the bourgeoisie are cogs in the deadly machine that is driving all of society to the abyss.
The entire history of the last century confirms the analysis put forward by the first congress of the Communist International [409]: “Human culture has been destroyed and humanity is threatened with complete annihilation (...) The old capitalist ‘order’ has ceased to function; its further existence is out of the question. The final outcome of the capitalist mode of production is chaos. This chaos can only be overcome by the productive and most numerous class - the working class. The proletariat has to establish real order - Communist order. It must break the rule of capital, make wars impossible, abolish the frontiers between states, transform the whole world into a community where all work for the common good and realise the freedom and brotherhood of peoples ”.[11] [451]
If it is to raise itself to the level necessary for this titanic task, the proletariat must patiently and tenaciously develop its class solidarity. Capitalism in its death throes wants to accustom us to horror, to make us consider the barbarism for which it is responsible as somehow “normal”. The workers can only react with indignation against such cynicism, and with solidarity towards the victims of these endless wars and the massacres perpetrated by all the capitalist gangs. Disgust and the rejection of everything that decomposing capitalism imposes on society, solidarity among members of a class all of whose interests are common, are essential factors in the development of a consciousness that another perspective is possible, and that a united working class has the strength to impose it.
Mir, 26/09/2004
[1] [452]There is no other term for keeping the children penned up for three days without food or water under the constant threat of death.
[2] [453]The parasitic GCI even has the incredible gall to talk about “class struggle”!
[3] [454]“Militarism and decomposition”, in International Review n°64.
[4] [455]See the “Theses on decomposition” (International Review n°62), and also “The marxist roots of the concept of decomposition” in International Review n°117) [441].
[5] [456]According to UN statistics, there are currently 41 regional wars in progress around the world.
[6] [457]A striking illustration is the impossibility of imposing a settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whose only perspective is a continual worsening of the conflict.
[7] [458]We have analysed its evolution in the article “Terrorism: a weapon and a justification for war", in International Review n°112 [446].
[8] [459]It is worth remembering that these warlords, during the 1980s, were the faithful servants of the great powers: Bin Laden worked for the Americans in Afghanistan, while Balayev, who was probably behind the carnage at Beslan, was previously an office in the Soviet army.
[9] [460]Even Israel, the strongest state in the region, is not spared by the tendency, though in much attenuated form. The most radical right-wing factions are now calling for desertion from the police and the army in response to Sharon's plan to evacuate Gaza.
[10] [461]“The Army has fallen from 18 divisions in 1991 (710,000 soldiers) to 10 today (486,000) even as its commitments have expanded exponentially (...) The generals won't ask for many reinforcements because they know they don't exist. Just sustaining the current level of 135,000 troops in Iraq is proving almost impossible. Nine of the Army's divisions are either in Iraq and Afghanistan or just returning from there. The only additional one that can be dispatched is the 3rd Infantry Division, which left Iraq less than a year ago after spearheading the drive on Baghdad (...) We are also relying heavily on National Guard and reserve units that were never intended for such long-term deployments overseas. Overusing them could lead to a recruitment and retention crisis” (Los Angeles Times, 29[th] April 2004, published on the Council for Foreign Relations web site [462])
[11] [463]Platform of the Communist International [409].
What is the most effective means of struggle, when one’s “own” job or plant is no longer considered to be profitable? Does the strike weapon lose its effectiveness, where the capitalist in any case intends to close the plant, or when whole companies are on the verge of bankruptcy? Such questions are being posed today very concretely, not only at Opel, Karstadt or Volkswagen, but everywhere, as a result of the capitalist economic crisis, plants and companies are being “rescued” or shut down. And nowadays, that is taking place everywhere. Not only in Germany, but in America and also in China. Not only in industry, but also in the hospitals or the civil services.
Already during the mid 1980s big defensive struggles took place against mass redundancies. For instance at Krupp Rheinhausen or in the British coal mines. At that time, whole branches of industry such as mining, steel or ship building were virtually shut down.
But today, unemployment and plant closures have become ever-present. This has led, at first, to a widespread feeling of intimidation. Lay-offs have mostly been accepted without resistance. However, the struggle this summer at DaimlerChrysler set a new signal. There, the employees hit back spectacularly against the attempts of the bosses to blackmail them. The solidarity actions, in particular of the workers in Bremen, with their fellow workers under direct attack in the Stuttgart-Sindelfingen plant, demonstrated that the workers are fighting back against the attempts to play them off against each other.
And now, the strike action at Opel above all in Bochum, as a first response to the announcement of mass lay offs, has again underlined the determination not to passively accept mass redundancies.
Nevertheless, the question of the possibilities and goals of the struggle under such circumstances has to be posed. We know that the struggle at DaimlerChrysler, like the ones at Krupp Rheinhausen or of the British miners in the 1980s, ended in defeat. And we have seen again and again – today also – how the trade unions and the factory council, whenever the workers put up resistance, also adopt the language of struggle, but at the same time declare that there is no alternative to submitting to the logic of capitalism. What is at stake, they claim, is to avoid things coming to the worst. They want to put through the “rescue” of the company, they say, and therefore the necessary sackings, in the most “social” manner possible. Thus the settlement at the Karstadt-Quelle department store chain, where the direct elimination of 5,500 jobs, the selling off of 77 stores, and horrendous wage cuts (“saving” 760 million Euros up to 2007) were agreed to, was presented by the Verdi union as a victory for the workers.
For at least two centuries, wage labour and capital has been fighting over wages and working conditions i.e. about the degree of exploitation of wage labour by capital. Had the exploited not always struggled, from one generation to the next, the workers of today would be little better than slaves who can be exploited at the bosses’ will or even worked to death.
But in addition to this question of the degree of exploitation, which was also posed for the slaves and serfs of earlier times, the modern economy poses a second problem, which only appears when the market economy and wage labour are dominant. Here, the question is: what is to be done, when the owner of the means of production is no longer able to profitably exploit the labour power of the labourer? Throughout the history of capitalism, this question has always been directly posed to the unemployed. But today, with a chronic crisis of overproduction on the world market, when the bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production is becoming increasingly visible, this becomes a question of life or death for all wage labourers.
The employers, the politicians, but also the trade unions and the factory councils – all those who are involved in the management of the plant, the company or the state – consider the workers and employees as part of a given company, whose welfare is inseparably dependent on the interests of the employer. From this point of view, it is of course always harmful when “company members” oppose the profit interests of the company. After all, the company only exists in order to make profits. Following on from this logic, the chairman of the general factory council of Opel, Klaus Franz, declared categorically, from the outset: “We know that lay-offs cannot be avoided.” That is the logic of capitalism. But it is not the only possible standpoint, from which one can consider the situation. If you approach things, not as the problem of Opel or of Karstadt, or of Germany, but as a problem of society as a whole, completely different perspectives emerge. If you consider the world, not from the point of view of a single plant or company, but from the point of view of society, from the point of view of human well being, the victims no longer appear as belonging to Opel or Karstadt, but as part of a social class of wage labourers, who are the main victims of the capitalist crisis. Seen from this perspective, it then becomes clear that the sales woman at Karstadt in Herne, the production line man at Opel in Bochum, but also the unemployed worker in eastern Germany or the almost enslaved, illegal construction worker who has come from the Ukraine, share a common fate and interest – not with their exploiters, but with each other.
The side of capital is aware that this other perspective exists. It is precisely this other perspective which it fears. The ruling class knows: As long as the workers at Opel or Volkswagen see the problem only from the point of view of Opel or VW, they will in the end “come to reason”. But when the workers find their own perspective, when they discover their common interest, completely different perspectives of struggle arise.
This is why the representatives of capital are always trying to persuade us that the catastrophes caused by their economic system are the result of the “inadequacies” and “specificities” of each company or country. Thus they claim that the problems at Karstadt are the result of bad sales strategies. Opel, for its part, is supposed to have failed to follow the example of DaimlerChrysler or Toyota, who have been successful with the development of new, attractive, often diesel run models. It is also claimed that the fact that 10,000 of the 12,000 jobs scheduled by General Motors for elimination in Europe will be in Germany, is a kind of revenge of the American bourgeoisie for the German Iraq policy! As if DaimlerChrysler had not similarly blackmailed its employees just a few months ago! As if German companies, for instance Karstadt-Quelle, don’t sack their workers just as mercilessly! Reality itself disproves such arguments. On October 14th, not only the elimination of thousands of jobs at Karstadt was decided on, and announced at Opel, but the perspective of similar cuts at the “Spar” supermarket chain was revealed. And the same day, news of a new “rescue” round at the Dutch company Philips was leaked.
When, on the “black Thursday” of October 14th, it was announced that in all 15,500 jobs are to be axed at Karstadt-Quelle and Opel in the coming three years, the “negotiating partners”, the politicians and the “commentators” were in a great hurry to carefully distinguish between the two cases.
One might expect that where the employees of two major concerns are facing exactly the same fate, the similarity of the situation and the interests of the workers affected, would predominate. But exactly the opposite is presented. As soon as the leading negotiator for the Verdi trade union, Wiethold, had, on Thursday afternoon, almost joyfully announced the “rescue” of Karstadt, the media immediately gave out the message: Now that the future of Karstadt has been assured, Opel is left as the remaining worry. While the staff of the department store chain are thus supposed to go back in “relief” to their jobs, it is allegedly only the workforce at Opel which has to worry about its future.
But the only difference in the situation of the employees of the two companies is that the terrible attacks, which are already decided on at Karstadt-Quelle – mass redundancies, partial closures, massive blackmail of the work force – are still pending at Opel. Both work forces are expected to accept wage cuts to the tune of a total of 1.2 billion Euros, are in part to lose their livelihood, in order to save profits – not jobs!
The assertion that the situation of the Karstadt employees is fundamentally different from that at Opel is completely unfounded. For the Karstadt workers, in any case, nothing has been “saved”. Verdi speaks of a “rescue job, which deserves the name”, and a “success for the workers” because an “employment guarantee” has been given, and the wage contract saved. That is what it sounds like when the defeats of the working class are sold as victories. What value do “job guarantees”, wage contracts and other promises have, when even multi-national companies are fighting for their survival? In reality the victims of the rescue of Karstadt are still in exactly the same situation as the workers at Opel, but also Volkswagen, DaimlerChrysler, Siemens or in the public sector.
The negotiations at Karstadt were concluded in such a hurry because it was known that General Motors was going to announce its salvaging plan for Europe October 14th. Until now, it always belonged to the unwritten laws of the ruling class never to simultaneously attack several big sectors of the working class, in order to avoid encouraging the appearance of a feeling of workers’ solidarity. But today, the sharpening of the crisis of world capitalism limits more and more this consecutiveness of attacks. Under such circumstances, the bourgeoisie at least wanted to assure that on the day, when the bad news broke from Detroit, Karstadt could be presented as a “success”.
Mass redundancies, the threat of bankruptcy, do not mean that the strike weapon has become superfluous. The downing of tools at Mercedes or Opel are an important signal, a call to struggle.
Nevertheless, it is unfortunately true that in such situations, the strike as a means of intimidating one’s opponent, loses much of its effectiveness. The struggle of the unemployed, for instance, has in any case to do without this weapon. But also, where the exploiters intend to get rid of those whom they exploit, the strike loses a good part of its menacing power.
The means which we need in face of the present level of the attacks of capital is the mass strike of all workers. Such a defensive action of the whole working class would give the class the self confidence it needs to counter the arrogance of the ruling class. Moreover, such massive mobilisations would be able to change the social climate, promoting the recognition that human needs have to become the guideline of society.
This putting in question of capitalism would in turn increase the determination of the employees and the unemployed, to defend their interests in the here and now.
Of course, such massive, common, solidarity actions are not yet possible. But this in no way means that one cannot struggle and achieve something now. But it is necessary to recognise that the strike is not the only weapon of the class struggle. Everything which, here and now, promotes the recognition of the common interests of all workers, and everything which revives the tradition of workers’ solidarity, scares the ruling class, makes it less self-assured in its attacks, making our opponent more obliged to make at least temporary concessions.
In 1987 the workers at Krupp Rheinhausen, threatened with the closure of the plant, opened up their daily assemblies to the population, to the workers of other plants and to the unemployed. Today it is even more unacceptable that the workers at Opel, Karstadt, Spar or Siemens don’t come together to discuss their common situation. During the mass strike of 1980 in Poland, the workers of a whole city came together on the grounds of the biggest factory in each town. There, they raised common demands and took their struggle in their own hands.
The struggle at Mercedes already demonstrated, what the attacks at Opel or Karstadt have confirmed – the great feeling of solidarity of the working population with those under attack. Under such circumstances, demonstrations through the cities can become a means of calling out the workers of other plants and the mobilising of the unemployed, developing a common solidarity.
The Mercedes struggle also showed that the workers are beginning to understand that, in face of mass redundancies, they must not allow themselves to be divided up. Even the capitalists have had to realise that they can no longer try and split the workers in such a gross manner as between Stuttgart and Bremen last summer. The Opel general factory council announced, in face of the attacks, the priority of the unity of the different General Motors plants. But what does it mean when Social Democrats and Trade Unionists speak of solidarity? Since these institutions are part and parcel of capitalist society, “unity” in their mouths can only mean that the different plants, while competing against each other, try to agree on prices. The chairman of the Opel factory council thus declared that he would be meeting with his Swedish colleague from Saab, to discuss which bid each of the plants would be making (against each other!) for the new GM models. The factory councils, like the trade unions, are themselves part of the capitalist competitive struggle.
The common struggle of the workers can thus only be waged by the workers themselves.
Faced with the depth of the crisis of contemporary capitalism, the workers also have to overcome their unwillingness to deal with political questions. We don’t mean bourgeois politics here, but that the workers deal with the problems of society as a whole, and with the question of power.
The mass redundancies of today confront us with the reality of a society, in which we are not part of this or that company, but objects of exploitation, “cost factors” who can be pitilessly tossed aside. These attacks make clear what it means that the means of production do not belong to society as a whole, and do not at all serve the needs of society. Instead, they belong to a tiny minority. Above all, they are submitted to the blind and more and more destructive laws of competition and the market, which plunge an ever growing part of humanity into pauperisation and unbearable insecurity. Laws which undermine the most elementary rules of human solidarity, without which, in the long run, no society is possible. And the wage labourers, who produce almost all the goods and services which humanity needs to live, slowly are beginning to realise that under this social order they have nothing to say.
The crisis at Karstadt or Opel is not the result of bad management, but the expression of a long drawn-out, chronic, destructive overproduction crisis developing from decade to decade. This crisis leads to the dwindling of the purchasing power of the working population. This in turn hits retailing, the car industry, the whole of industry harder and harder. Accentuated competition obliges the capitalists to lower their costs, which further reduces mass purchasing power, and further sharpens the crisis.
Within capitalism, there is no way out of this vicious circle.
ICC. 15.10.2004
“Why, 80 years after the October revolution, does capitalism still dominate the world”. To reply to this question, according to the GPRC [308], it is necessary to use the method of historical materialism and pose another question: “was the level of the development of productive forces of mankind (first of all in the most highly-developed countries) in the 19th - first half of 20th centuries sufficient to make proletarians capable to organise the ruling over production, distribution & exchange by all the society as a whole?”
In other words “had the process of the capitalist production disciplined, united, organised the working class before the beginning of the 20th century sufficiently to make it capable not only to ‘expropriate the expropriators’ - take away the means of production from the capitalists - but also to keep them in its hands, organise the ruling over economics and not lose the control over the leaders, not let leaders become new exploiters?”
The GPRC invites us to understand the characteristics of the working class in the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century, imprinted on it by the process of production: It “practised associated labour” but “To lead all the labour-process of the factory as a whole, somebody which stands over the workers & manages them is necessary. It doesn’t mean that industrial & agricultural workers before the 2nd half of the 20th century never, nowhere & in no cases had interacted in the process of ruling their labour.” Such relations are characterised first and foremost “inter-contacts, but by solitude of workers which rule their operations, in their inter-relations … Manufacture, and later - large machine industry cooperate labour-process, but don’t unite workers in collective … So, workers, which are not united in collective, can`t elaborate ruling decisions. May be, they could if only control their leaders, elect them & change, & those elections not should be only decoration, behind of which the leaders` manipulation over subordinates is hiding?”
For the GPRC, the basic problem is the following: “the more people collect themselves in a group, the more difficult them to communicate with each other & the more time they must give to try discuss and solve their problems. To overcome this barrier, such technical means are necessary which allow very many people to receive the same information, change information & make common decisions in so short terms as those which are necessary for several people to do all it without any technical means. At the 19th - the 1st half of 20th centuries the development of the production forces still had not given such means for people. But without them the workers` control over leadership & the self-governing of labourers on the whole are possible just on the level of very little enterprises…”
The GPRC cites Lenin in State and Revolution:
“The workers, after winning political power, will smash the old bureaucratic apparatus, shatter it to its very foundations, and raze it to the ground; they will replace it by a new one, consisting of the very same workers and other employees, against whose transformation into bureaucrats the measures will at once be taken which were specified in detail by Marx and Engels: (1) not only election, but also recall at any time; (2) pay not to exceed that of a workman; (3) immediate introduction of control and supervision by all, so that all may become ‘bureaucrats’ for a time and that, therefore, nobody may be able to become a ‘bureaucrat’”
But for the GPRC, although these measures are valid, they can have no real effect in the conditions of the development of the productive forces at the time of the Russian revolution. This changed in the second half of the 20th century because of the qualitatively new level of the development of the productive forces, which allowed in particular for the computerisation of production, a far more rapid way of dealing with an important mass of information coming from the great mass of workers; it meant that the analysis of this information could be disseminated among all the workers, and this could be repeated as often as necessary in order to arrive at a synthesis of individual opinions and elaborate the final decision.
“The computer is what can unite workers practising associated labour in a collective whole….”. The more their work is computerised the more they can take collective decisions and the easier it is for them to control the leaders who remain necessary to coordinate actions and decisions, in cases where the collective can’t do this itself
“When humanity will enter again into the period of great social shocks, similar to the 1st half of the 20th century… much will repeat itself - the treachery of many workers` leaders and organisations which enjoyed the trust of proletarian masses before it, and the defeat of the revolutionary movement in many countries. “The objective causes which caused such phenomena 70 - 80 years ago, are still actual today, and any kind of lectures about ‘lessons of history’ read to workers can’t remove their effect”.
“Computer systems can’t create socialism just by themselves. The world proletarian revolution is necessary for transition of mankind to socialism. But proletarian revolution can become world & socialist only in the epoch of computers & computer systems. Such is the dialectics of the transition to socialism”.
The GPRC poses a vital question: “why 80 years after the October revolution, does capital still dominate the world?” And to reply, there is indeed no other method than historical materialism.[1] [465]
The aim of the proletarian revolution is to replace relations of production based on scarcity with relations of production based on abundance. It is therefore necessary for capitalism to have sufficiently developed the productive forces to make it possible to lay down the material conditions for such a transformation of society. This is the first condition for the victory of the proletarian revolution; the second is provided by the development of an open crisis of bourgeois society, proving that capitalist relations of production need to be replaced by other relations of production.
Revolutionaries have always paid particular attention to the evolution of the life of capitalism in order to evaluate whether the level attained by the development of the productive forces, and the insurmountable contradictions resulting from this development, permit the victory of the communist revolution. In 1852, Marx and Engels recognised that the conditions for the proletarian revolution were not yet ripe at the time of the revolutionary upsurges of 1848 and that capitalism still had to go through a whole process of development for this to be the case. In 1864, when they took part in the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association, they thought that the hour of the revolution was nigh, but even before the Paris Commune of 1871, they realised that the proletariat was not yet ready because capitalism still had an enormous capacity for the development of its economy.
Thus, the two revolutions which had taken place up to that point, 1848 and the Commune, failed because the material conditions for the victory of the proletariat did not exist. It was during the course of the period that followed, which saw the most powerful development of capitalism in its entire history, that the conditions really did begin to ripen. At the end of the 19th century, the whole of the non-capitalist world had been divided up among the old bourgeois nations. From now on, for each one of them to gain access to new outlets and territories they had to muscle in on their rival’s spheres of influence. At the same time as a growth in military tensions, fuelled behind the scene by the great powers, the latter began to arm themselves to the teeth. This rise in imperialist tensions and militarism prepared the conditions for the outbreak of the First World War, and with it the outbreak of the revolutionary crisis of society. The first imperialist world butchery of 1914-18, as well as the international revolutionary wave which arose in reaction to this barbarism, demonstrated that the objective conditions for the revolution had now been established. For the proletarian vanguard at the time of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave, the First World War marked the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist system and its entry into its phase of decadence, signifying clearly that the only possible alternative for society from now on was “socialism or barbarism”.
Despite the evidence of this fundamental change in the world situation, the GPRC thinks that the capitalist system still had a progressive role to play in aiding the maturation of the conditions for the revolution. For the GPRC, it was still necessary for capitalism to permit the invention of the computer and to generalise its use, because this is the only thing that can counter the tendency for leaders to betray the workers, a betrayal which is seen as the main reason for the failure of the Russian revolution. Thanks to this formidable technological progress, which makes it possible to “synthesise” the opinion of a considerable number of workers, the latter will finally be able to do without representatives in the taking of decisions. Before stopping to consider this singular explanation for the failure of the Russian revolution, we have to point to a problem of method which derives precisely from an inadequate application of historical materialism
The 80 years and more which have passed since the failure of the revolutionary wave have shown that not only has the prolongation of capitalism’s death-agony not created better conditions for the revolution, but, on the contrary, the material conditions for such a society have become increasingly fragile, as is shown by the present situation of chaos and generalised decomposition across the planet. The revolutionary proletariat will be able to take many inventions realised under capitalism, including those developed in its decadent phase, and use them in the interests of the revolution and the liberation of the human species. This applies to the computer and many others. Nevertheless, however important such discoveries have been, their existence should not obscure the real dynamic of decadent capitalism, which is leading towards the ruin of civilisation. If the first revolutionary wave had succeeded in defeating the bourgeoisie not only would this have spared humanity from the worst epoch of barbarism in the whole of history, but it would also have allowed for inventions which would have enabled mankind to free itself from the reign of necessity; and alongside such developments the current computer would have looked like a prehistoric tool.
The living experience of the revolution, seen in all its true grandeur, refutes the GPRC’s theory of the inevitable betrayal of the leaders. In the ascendant phase of the revolution, the workers councils, with their system of elected and recallable delegates, showed that they were the organs par excellence that allowed the proletariat to develop its struggle both on the economic and political levels, that they constituted the “finally discovered for of the proletarian dictatorship”. The movement gave rise to proletarian leaders who expressed and defended, with courage and abnegation, the general interests of the proletariat. As for the party it did nothing less than put itself at the head of the revolution, to guide it towards victory in Russia while working for the extension of the world revolution, particularly at its most decisive point - Germany.
The world revolutionary wave receded as a result of a series of major defeats for the proletariat, not least the crushing of the uprising of January 1919 in Berlin. Isolated, exhausted by civil war, the Russian revolution could only perish and this is effectively what happened, with the extinction of the power of the workers’ councils and of all proletarian life within them, the process of bureaucratisation and the rise of Stalinism in Russia and the Bolshevik party in particular. In this counter-revolutionary process, many former revolutionaries betrayed and joined the ranks of Stalinism; workers placed in positions of responsibility in the state became servile defenders of the interests of the bureaucracy or even outright members of it.
Betrayals of the proletarian cause by its leaders, by organisations which had thitherto been proletarian, is not a specificity of the period of the reflux of the international revolutionary wave; it is a basic given of the historic combat of the working class. It is the consequence of a growing opportunism towards the ideology of the ruling class, leading to complete capitulation in front of it. Nevertheless, in the face of opportunism, such an outcome is not fixed in advance and is not dependent on whether or not the proletariat can use computers. It depends on the general balance of forces between the classes, as has been illustrated, in opposite directions, by the upsurge and then the reflux of the revolutionary wave. But it also depends on the intransigent political combat which revolutionaries are able to wage against all the manifestations of concessions to bourgeois ideology.
The tasks which the proletariat and its revolutionary minorities faced at the beginning of the century were huge. They had to fight the growing opportunism within the Second International, the result of which was the passage of most of its parties into the camp pf the bourgeoisie at the decisive moment of the world imperialist war. At the same time those revolutionaries who remained loyal to marxism and the historic struggle of the proletariat had to understand, and get their class to understand, nothing less than the implications for the class struggle of the dawn of a new epoch – the entry of capitalism into decadence. If the revolutionary wave was defeated, it was to a large extent because the working class at the time had not understood in a broad and deep enough way that its former parties had gone over to the enemy and had become spearheads of reaction against the revolution, that the trade unions had become organs of the capitalist state in the workers’ ranks; and it was also because the world party of the revolution, the Communist International, had appeared on the scene too late. It was thus the subjective conditions of the revolution which weren’t ripe, not the objective conditions. Hence the importance of the political combat for the generalisation of lessons drawn by generations of revolutionaries about what remains the greatest experience the proletariat has ever been through.
It is also the case that the weight of hierarchy on the brains of the living cannot be fought outside the struggle for the abolition of classes and can only disappear totally when a communist society has been created. The division of labour is not a characteristic unique to class societies. It existed in the societies of primitive communism and it will exist in developed communist society. It is not the division of labour which engenders hierarchy; it is class society which imposes a hierarchical character on the division of labour, making it a way of dividing the exploited and ensuring the domination of the ruling class. The problem with the contribution of the GPRC is precisely that by polarising around the problem of hierarchy seen in itself, outside of any consideration of class antagonisms, it situates itself outside the field of political combat.
In fact, the GPRC is desperately looking for a purely technical solution to a problem which is fundamentally political and which the living experience of the working class had already solved, even before the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, with the first appearance of the soviets in 1905. Discussions in such workers’ assemblies don’t have the aim of “democratically” drawing out an average opinion based on a synthesis of all the individual opinions of the workers. They are on the contrary an indispensable means for debate and political combat, enabling the mass of workers to advance away from the influence of the left and extreme left of the bourgeoisie. In taking decisions and electing delegates it’s not a question of each worker working alone in front of a computer screen, but of voting with raised hands in general assemblies alongside their comrades in the struggle. This is the basic mode of operation for all workers’ assemblies from the lowest to the highest level of centralisation. The GPRC’s recipe is the antithesis of this kind of unitary organ of the working class and can only lead to the negation of the values the proletariat needs to develop in its struggle: confidence in your class comrades and in your elected delegates; creative activity through collective and contradictory discussion. In fact the GPRC is mixing up two ideas: consciousness and knowledge. For the workers to become conscious, they need a certain amount of knowledge: in particular, they have to know about the world in which they are waging their struggle, the enemy they are fighting in all its many guises (official bourgeoisie, state, forces of repression, but also unions and left parties), the goals and means of this struggle. However, consciousness can by no means be reduced to knowledge: in general, a university specialist in history, sociology or economics will have much more knowledge of these subjects than a conscious revolutionary worker. However, his class prejudices, his adherence to the ideals of the ruling class, prevent him from using this knowledge in the interests of a real consciousness. By the same token, what allows workers to become conscious is not an excess of knowledge as such, but above all their ability to free themselves from the grip of the dominant ideology. And this capacity is not acquired in front of a computer screen displaying all the statistics in the world, or all possible and imaginable syntheses. It is acquired through the experience of the class, past and present, through action and collective debate. All things to which the specific contribution of the computer is minimal, in any case less than the press which the working class already had at its disposal in the 19th century.
The GPRC argues that it is useless to go back to the lessons of history to understand the defeat of the Russian revolution. It would be the worst thing for the proletariat if it was to turn away from the essential lessons bequeathed to it by the Russian revolution[2] [466] above all concerning the conditions for its degeneration, because these lessons are a vital contribution to the capacity of the next revolutionary wave to overcome capitalism:
- isolated in one proletarian bastion, the revolution is doomed;
- the state of the period of transition, or semi-state, which will inevitably arise after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, has an essentially conservative function of guaranteeing the cohesion of society, within which class antagonisms still exist.[3] [467] Thus, it’s not an emanation of the proletariat and cannot be the instrument for the forward march towards communism. This role falls exclusively to the working class organised in workers’ councils, and to its vanguard party. Furthermore, in periods of reflux in the class struggle, this state will tend to fully express its intrinsically reactionary nature against the interests of the revolution;
- this is why the identification between the workers’ councils and the state can only result in the proletariat losing its class autonomy;
- for the same reason the identification between the party and the state can only lead to the party losing its essential role as the political vanguard of the proletariat and to its transformation into an organ of state management. The fact that the Bolshevik party fell into this situation led to it carrying out the repression of Kronstadt, a tragedy for the proletariat, and to gradually embodying the rising counter-revolution.
ICC
[1] [468] For our part, we have already devoted an article to this question, called “At the dawn of the 21st century, why has the proletariat still not overthrown capitalism?” in International Reviews n· 103 and 104.
[2] [469] One of the most important expressions of proletarian reaction against the counter-revolution was the publication of Bilan, organ of the Italian Communist Left in the 1930s. Bilan’s main activity was precisely one of drawing the lessons of the first revolutionary wave. The programmatic positions of the ICC are to large extent the product of this work. The ICC has also devoted a number of articles to the Russian revolution in this Review, n· 71,72,75,89,90 , 91 and 92
[3] [470] See our pamphlet The State in the Period of Transition.
Essentially, the purpose of the KRAS' text [308],[1] [471] is to highlight the reasons for the defeat of the Russian revolution: “For most of the 'lefts', the Russian revolution of 1917-21 remains an 'unknown revolution', as it was described by the exiled anarchist Voline, 60 years ago. The main reason for this situation is not a lack of information, but the great number of myths that have been built around it. Most of these myths are a result of the confusion between the Russian revolution and the activities of the Bolshevik party. It is not possible to free oneself from these confusions without understanding the real role of the Bolsheviks in the events of this period (...) A widespread myth holds that the Bolshevik party was not just a party like any other, but the vanguard of the working class (...) All the illusions on the 'proletarian' nature of the Bolsheviks are disproved by their systematic opposition to the workers' strikes as early as 1918, and the crushing of the Kronstadt workers in 1921 by the guns of the Red Army. This was not a 'tragic misunderstanding', but the crushing by armed power of the 'ignorant' rank and file. The Bolshevik leaders pursued concrete interests and carried out a concrete policy (...) Their vision of the state as such, of the domination over the masses, is significant of individuals without any feeling for equality, for whom egoism dominates, for whom the masses are merely a raw material without any will of their own, without initiative and without consciousness, incapable of creating social self-management. This is the basic trait of Bolshevik psychology. It is typical of the dominating character. Arshinov spoke of this new stratum as a 'new caste', the 'fourth caste'. Willy-nilly, with such a viewpoint the Bolsheviks could not carry out anything other than a bourgeois revolution (...) Let us try first of all to see what revolution was on the agenda in Russia in 1917 (...) the Social-Democracy (including of the Bolshevik variety) always overestimated the degree of development of capitalism and the extent of Russia's 'Europeanisation' (...) In reality, Russia was more a 'third-world' country, to use a present-day term (...) The Bolsheviks became the protagonists of a bourgeois revolution without the bourgeoisie, of capitalist industrialisation without private capitalists (...) Once in power, the Bolsheviks played the part of a 'party of order' which did not try to develop the social character of the revolution. The programme of the Bolshevik government had no socialist content...”
The KRAS also puts forward other arguments, which we will deal with in the body of this article. The main elements of its thesis can be summed up as follows:
- The Bolshevik party was in continuity with the old Social-Democracy, and was a bourgeois, anti-working class party.
- The Russian revolution was a bourgeois revolution, because no other sort of revolution was possible in Russia in 1917.
- The economic measures adopted after 1917, and the policy of the Bolshevik party, were not really socialist, because they failed to achieve a true self-management in the hands of the working class.
One thing that a large number of apparently radical critiques of the Bolshevik party have in common, is the flagrant lack of an international framework for understanding the situation in Russia. This methodological error ignores the essential distinction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Capitalism as a mode of production dominates the entire planet, and can therefore only be overcome on a worldwide scale by an international class: the proletariat. The existence of the bourgeois class, on the contrary, is inseparable from the framework of the nation state. Thus, the Russian revolution was not simply the concern of the Russian proletariat, but the response of the whole proletariat to the contradictions of capitalism in this epoch, and in particular to the first sign of the system's bankruptcy, threatening the very existence of human civilisation: the First World War. The Russian revolution was the advance guard of the international revolutionary wave (1917-23), and the proletarian dictatorship in Russia was thus right to turn for help to the international proletariat, and first and foremost to the proletariat in Germany, which held the keys to the fate of the world revolution.
The relations of production can only be transformed after the proletariat has taken power on a world scale. Contrary to periods of transition in the past, the transition from capitalism to communism will not be the result of a necessary process independent of human will, but will demand the conscious action of a class that uses political power to extirpate from society, little by little, all the components of capitalism: private property, the market, wage labour, the law of value, etc. But it will only be possible to put this into operation once the proletariat has beaten the bourgeoisie militarily. Until this definitive victory has been won, the demands of a worldwide civil war will take priority over the transformation of relations of production where the proletariat has already seized power, no matter what the degree of development of these countries. We cannot therefore have any illusions about the possibility of immediate social transformation after the revolution, especially when it has not yet spread to enough countries to significantly alter the international balance of class forces. There are certainly measures that must be taken wherever possible immediately after the seizure of power: expropriation of private capitalists, equality of wages, help for the disabled and the poor, free distribution of certain goods and services, and a reduction in working hours, above all so that workers can involve themselves in the taking of decisions. But these are not in themselves measures of socialisation, and they can perfectly well be recuperated by capitalism.
The ideas by the KRAS are not unique to anarchists. They are very close to the positions of the councilist current, as they were formulated notably in 1934 by the GIK (Gruppe Internationaler Kommunisten) in their famous Theses on Bolshevism. The same kind of critique was developed by the Workers' Opposition group in Russia itself. The latter criticised the lack of self-management in the factories in Russia immediately after the revolution. Obsessed as they were with the possibility of putting in place socialist measures in production, which in their eyes would have been a real “proof of socialism”, it is no accident that members of the Workers' Opposition like Alexandra Kollontai were to be found, at the end of the 1920s, in the Stalinist camp. There is a common logic underlying the illusion of “socialism in one factory”, and the counter-revolutionary Stalinist slogan of “socialism in one country”. In both cases, this is nothing other than the perpetuation, under another name or even another form, of relations of exploitation which cannot be abolished until the rule of capital has been broken on a world scale.
The questions raised in the KRAS' text are thus not new; they belong to the history of the workers' movement. The inability of the GIK or the Workers' Opposition to deal with events in Russia in an international framework led them into a dead-end, which meant that they were unable to draw the real lessons from events, and led to the discouragement of their members. In the end, councilism fell into the method of fatalism: if the revolution was defeated, then this is because it was condemned to failure from the start. From there it was but a step to the idea that only a bourgeois, not a proletarian, revolution was possible at the time. In a sense, the GIK's Theses on Bolshevism are a rewriting of history and the conditions of the time, in order to “explain” a posteriori that the Russian revolution was defeated because it was an adventure doomed to failure.
The approach adopted by Rosa Luxemburg was the opposite to that of the councilists.[2] [472] In the final chapter of her pamphlet The Russian revolution [473], devoted to a critique of certain aspects of Bolshevik policy, she summed up the problems confronting the Bolsheviks in these words: “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'”.[3] [474]
Just as each revolution has its own specific geographical framework (national for the bourgeoisie, world wide for the proletariat), the revolution is not possible at any point in time, but is determined by historical factors. First among these is the dynamic of the dominant mode of production, and the level of contradictions affecting it. The historical function of revolutions has always been to break the chains of the old mode of production, which has become a fetter on the development of the productive forces, and as a result an active factor in the crisis of society. This was the case for the great bourgeois revolutions against feudalism, for example in England in the 17th century or in France at the end of the 18th century, but it was also the case for the Russian revolution against capitalism in 1917. To be more precise, every mode of production goes through an ascendant phase, during which it is able to encourage the development of the productive forces and allows society to advance. But the ascendant phase is followed by a decadent phase, when it becomes a hindrance to the development of the productive forces and a factor of social stagnation. Historically, capitalism in its ascendant phase was the first mode of production which has been able to conquer the entire planet, and to build a world market. This task accomplished, the beginning of the 20th century opens a new epoch characterised by the development of unprecedented rivalries between the great powers to share out the world market. The most important expression of this new period was the First World War, which marked the brutal beginning of capitalism's decadent phase. Such a change in society cannot be without consequences for the function of the ruling class of a system which is decadent, and whose continued existence constitutes a threat to human survival, everywhere in the world including Russia!
The KRAS does not position itself clearly as regards the historical and international context of the Russian revolution, whose outcome was precisely determined by this context. Its argument contains certain ambiguities. While on the one hand, its critique of the Bolsheviks remains stuck within the Russian framework, the same article contains other passages which deal with the problem in another, more correct, light: “Nor should we forget the international social situation. World capitalism was in a very specific historical situation, at the watershed of a period of primary industrialisation [frühindustrielle Stufe] and a new 'taylorist-fordist' stage of capitalist industrialisation (...) It was still possible to eliminate world capitalist industrialism before it began to destroy the bases of human life and to atomise society”.
This passage contains a correct idea: that World War I and the Russian revolution both took place in a historical period characterised by a profound change in the life of capitalism as a whole. Why not then draw the logical conclusion for the analysis of the revolution in Russia, and stop treating it as something specifically Russian? And why not, therefore, conclude that with this change in the life of capitalism, the worldwide overthrow of the capitalist order was henceforth on the agenda? Despite their loyalty to the proletarian cause, the councilists and the Workers' Opposition failed to understand this. With quite different motives, the Mensheviks used the same method to condemn the proletarian revolution, on the grounds of Russia's insufficient industrialisation and the enormous weight of the peasantry. They ended up declaring that Russia was not yet ripe for revolution, and handing the power over to the bourgeoisie. We do not intend to compare the KRAS to the Mensheviks, but we do want to highlight the dangers of the method that it shares with the councilists and the Workers' Opposition. Today, in 2004, the same method would lead to the conclusion that the proletarian revolution is impossible anywhere in the Third World. Such a conclusion would obviously be absurd: capitalism is a global system, which has never succeeded in completely industrialising the world during its ascendant phase, and is obviously not going to do so in its decadent phase.
The Russian revolution was not an exclusively Russian event: it was the first assault by the world working class on the barbaric social system responsible for World War I.
“Let us first try to see what revolution was on the agenda in Russia in 1917”. We entirely agree with this way of posing the question of the Russian revolution. The problem is, that the KRAS does not stick to the method it proposes.
The KRAS declares several times that, due to Russia's insufficient economic development, the Bolsheviks' task was limited to carrying out a bourgeois revolution. This is nonsense, from the standpoint of a historical vision of capitalism as a decadent system world wide. By contrast, certain passages in their text contradict this declaration, and show clearly that a proletarian revolution was on the march in Russia: “Nonetheless, one cannot understand the Russian revolution merely as a bourgeois revolution. The masses rejected capitalism, and fought it vehemently – including the Bolsheviks' state capitalism (...) From their efforts and desires sprang the form that the world social revolution had to take in Russia. The combination of a revolution of the workers in the cities, with the revolution of the peasant communes [Gemeindebauern] in the countryside (...) The events of October 1917, through which the Petrograd Soviet overthrew the bourgeois provisional government were the result of the development of the movement of the masses after February, and in no way a Bolshevik conspiracy. The Leninists simply used this revolutionary atmosphere among the workers and peasants”. Perfectly true: the events of October 1917, during which the Petrograd soviet overthrew the bourgeois provisional government, were the result of the masses’ development after February, and in no way a Bolshevik conspiracy.
But the KRAS proves itself unable to draw the logical conclusion from this approach, and to “understand which revolution was really on the agenda”. It stops half-way, to defend the idea of two parallel revolutions, of different kinds: the first (bourgeois), supposedly justified by Russia's underdevelopment and incarnated by the Bolsheviks, and the other (“from below”), apparently motivated by the rejection of capitalism, set in motion by the masses: “in parallel with this 'bourgeois' (political) revolution which revolves around state power, another revolution developed from below. The slogans of self-management of labour and the socialisation of the land developed and became more and more popular, the working masses began to carry it out from below in a revolutionary way. New social movements developed: workers and peasants councils...”.
A simultaneous bourgeois and proletarian revolution is a contradiction in terms, from the viewpoint of the maturation of the conditions underlying each respective revolutionary form: the former corresponds to capitalism's ascendancy, the latter to its decadence. And the World War, whose fires were still raging at the very moment of the October 1917, is the most striking illustration of the historical bankruptcy and decadence of the capitalist mode of production. The Russian proletariat's overthrow of the bourgeoisie is first and foremost the direct consequence of the latter's participation in the worldwide slaughter.
Once we have established the proletarian nature of the 1917 Russian revolution, the question is obviously posed of the class nature of the Bolshevik party, and the role it played in the death of the Revolution and the victory of the counter-revolution.
The degeneration of the revolution, and of the Bolshevik party whose transformation into the spearhead of the counter-revolution was encouraged by the mistakes of the Bolsheviks – which, however, were in many cases not specific to the Bolsheviks but characteristic of the immaturity of the workers' movement as a whole.
It is thus true that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had an incorrect vision, which owed something to the schematism of bourgeois ideology, that the seizure of political power by the proletariat consisted in the seizure of power by the party. But they shared this idea with the all the currents of the Social Democracy, including its left wing. It is precisely the experience of the revolution in Russia, and of its degeneration, which made it possible to understand that in this domain, the schema of the proletarian revolution is fundamentally different from that of the bourgeoisie. Despite her well-known differences with the Bolsheviks on the organisational question, Rosa Luxemburg, for example, continued until her death in January 1919 to hold to this incorrect viewpoint: “The Spartacus League will never take over governmental power except in response to the clear, unambiguous will of the great majority of the proletarian mass of all of Germany, never except by the proletariat's conscious affirmation of the views, aims, and methods of struggle of the Spartacus League” (“What does the Spartacus League want?”, published 14[th] December 1918, in Die Rote Fahne [475][4] [476]). Should we conclude that Rosa Luxemburg was also a “bourgeois Jacobin”, as the anarchists and councilists describe Lenin? And if this were the case, where was the “bourgeois revolution” taking place in the industrial Germany of 1919?
The victory of the counter-revolution in Russia was the result first and foremost of the defeat of the world revolutionary wave, and of the isolation of the proletarian bastion in Russia, and it would be an error of method to attribute the primary responsibility to false conceptions within the workers' movement. If the world revolution had spread, these conceptions would have been overcome in the course of the proletariat's forward march to revolution, on both the practical and the theoretical level, through the critique of what had already been accomplished.
The degeneration of the Bolshevik party was the result of a false conception of its role as regards the state, which led it to see its role as the vanguard of the proletariat as being identical with managing the state. This put it in a situation of increasing antagonism towards the proletariat, which led to the crushing of the Kronstadt revolt, led and justified by the Bolsheviks.[5] [477]
Understanding the Bolshevik party's mistakes, and the process of its degeneration, is not to excuse them but on the contrary to take part in the clarification which will be vital to the outcome of the workers' struggles in the future. But simply to declare from the outset that the Bolshevik party was bourgeois, as the KRAS does, is a very simplistic and at the same time convenient way to avoid posing certain questions, and calling into question certain prejudices. It is certainly not the means to apprehend the living process of the class struggle.
ICC
[1] [478]Published in Russian and German on the internationalist forum. The quotations from the KRAS are translated by us.
[2] [479]We cannot, in this text, make a developed critique of councilism. We refer our readers to the texts published in International Review n°37-40, and to the ICC's text on the web site of the internationalist forum.
[5] [482]The ICC has written several articles on this subject: see “Understanding Kronstadt” in International Review n°104 [483]
At the beginning of 2004, we had an exchange of e-mails with the CRI[1] [484] which claims to be breaking from the logic of official Trotskyism in the name of a return to “authentic” Trotskyism. This group also sent us a collection of documents, which we studied along with the texts published on its web site. As a result, we sent the group a detailed reply, which we reproduce below. In it, we demonstrate on the basis of Lenin’s writing that there is no possibility of defending proletarian positions within Trotskyism today. Breaking with a particular Trotskyist organisation without making a complete break with the whole logic of Trotskyism, can only, as far as the question of war is concerned, lead to supporting one bourgeois faction against another.
We recognise the fact that you declare, both in your correspondence and in your texts as a whole, that your action aims to take part in the struggle of the working class, and that your “historical objective” is the communist revolution. However, the history of the workers' movement has, tragically, taught communists that there have been parties which claim to defend the working class and the victory of socialism or communism, yet whose real objective – whether or not their militants were conscious of the fact – was the defeat of the working class, the continuation of capitalist exploitation, and the sacrifice of millions of proletarians for the interests of their national bourgeoisies in the imperialist wars of the 20th century.
The history of the 20th century has amply demonstrated that there is one essential criterion which determines the real class nature of any organisation that claims to belong to the proletariat: that is, internationalism. It is no accident that we find the same currents which took clear positions against the imperialist war in 1914, and which pushed forward the conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal (especially the Bolsheviks and the Spartakists), at the head of the revolution, while the social-chauvinist, or even the centrist currents (Ebert and Scheidemann, or the Mensheviks), formed the spearhead of the counter-revolution. Nor is it by chance that both the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and the Inaugural Address of the First International in 1864, end with the words: “Workers of all countries, unite!”.
Today, war continues to lay waste the planet, and the defence of internationalism continues to be the decisive criterion for deciding whether or not an organisation belongs to the camp of the working class. In these wars, the only attitude true to the interests of the working class is to reject any participation in either of the warring camps, to denounce all those bourgeois forces which call on the workers, under any pretext whatsoever, to give their lives for any of the capitalist camps, and to put forward, as the Bolsheviks did in 1914, the only possible perspective: intransigent class struggle for the overthrow of capitalism.
Any attitude which leads to calling the workers to line up behind one or other armed camp comes down to adopting the role of recruiting sergeant for capitalist war, an accomplice of the bourgeoisie, and therefore a traitor. This was exactly how Lenin and the Bolsheviks considered the social democrats who, in the name of the struggle against “Prussian militarism” on one side, and against “Tsarist oppression” on the other, called the workers to mutual murder in 1914. And, unfortunately, whatever the CRI's good intentions may be, it has adopted in relation to Iraq precisely the same nationalist policy that Lenin denounced in 1914.
When, in its press, the CRI gives its “unconditional support to the Iraqi people's armed resistance to the invader”, in reality it is doing nothing other than calling on the Iraqi proletarians to become canon-fodder in the service of this or that fraction of the national bourgeoisie, which today considers its capitalist and imperialist interests outside or against an alliance with the United States (whereas other bourgeois fractions prefer to ally themselves with the US in defence of their interests). We should point out, moreover, that the dominant fractions of the Iraqi bourgeoisie (which lined up for decades behind Saddam Hussein) have been, depending on the circumstances of the moment, either the best allies of the USA (especially during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s), or members of the “axis of evil” supposedly devoted to the destruction of the same.
To justify this policy of support for certain fractions of the Iraqi bourgeoisie, the CRI (as it did in its forum at the Fête de Lutte ouvrière) invokes Lenin's position during World War I, when he wrote, for example in Socialism and War [400]: “if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, India on England, Persia or China on Russia, and so forth, those would be 'just', 'defensive' wars, irrespective of who attacked first; and every Socialist would sympathise with the victory of the oppressed, dependent, unequal states against the oppressing, slave-owning, predatory 'great' powers” (Chapter 1, “The Principles of Socialism and the War of 1914-1915”).
However, what the CRI forgets (or chooses to forget) is precisely that a major axis of this text (as indeed of all Lenin's writing in this period) is the ferocious denunciation of the pretexts put forward by the social-chauvinists to justify their support for imperialist war on the basis of this or that country or nationality's “national independence”.
Thus, on the one hand, Lenin can declare that: “In fact, the German bourgeoisie has launched a robber campaign against Serbia, with the object of subjugating her and throttling the national revolution of the Southern Slavs...” (War and Russian Social-Democracy [485]) and he can also write that “In the present war the national element is represented only by Serbia’s war against Austria (...) It is only in Serbia and among the Serbs that we can find a national-liberation movement of long standing, embracing millions, ‘the masses of the people’, a movement of which the present war of Serbia against Austria is a ‘continuation’. If this war were an isolated one, i.e., if it were not connected with the general European war, with the selfish and predatory aims of Britain, Russia, etc., it would have been the duty of all socialists to desire the success of the Serbian bourgeoisie as this is the only correct and absolutely inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the national element in the present war”. On the other hand, however he continues: “Marxist dialectics, as the last word in the scientific-evolutionary method, excludes any isolated examination of an object, i.e., one that is one-sided and monstrously distorted. The national element in the Serbo-Austrian war is not, and cannot be, of any serious significance in the general European war. If Germany wins, she will throttle Belgium, one more part of Poland, perhaps part of France, etc. If Russia wins, she will throttle Galicia, one more part of Poland, Armenia, etc. If the war ends in a ‘draw’, the old national oppression will remain. To Serbia, i.e., to perhaps one per cent or so of the participants in the present war, the war is a ‘continuation of the politics’ of the bourgeois-liberation movement. To the other ninety-nine per cent, the war is a continuation of the politics of imperialism, i.e., of the decrepit bourgeoisie, which is capable only of raping nations, not freeing them. The Triple Entente, which is ‘liberating’ Serbia, is selling the interests of Serbian liberty to Italian imperialism in return for the latter’s aid in robbing Austria. All this, which is common knowledge, has been unblushingly distorted by Kautsky to justify the opportunists” (The Collapse of the Second International, 1915, Chapter 6 [486]).
As far as Serbia is concerned, we should point out that in 1914 the Serb Socialist Party categorically rejected and denounced, “the resistance of the Serb people against the Austrian invader”, just as the latter was bombarding the civilian population of Belgrade and also that the internationalists of the time saluted it for doing so.
To return to the present day, it is “common knowledge” (and we could add that those who refuse to acknowledge the fact “unblushingly distort” reality) that the war waged by the United States and Britain against Iraq (just like the war launched in August 1914 by Austria and Germany against “little Serbia”) has imperialist implications which go far beyond Iraq itself. Concretely, in opposition to the countries of the “coalition”, there is a group of countries, such as France and Germany, with antagonistic imperialist interests. This is why France and Germany did everything they could to prevent the American invasion last year, and have since refused to send any troops to Iraq. And the fact that they have just voted in the United Nations for a resolution presented by Britain and the US means nothing other than that diplomatic agreements, are just as much part of the latent war between the great powers as their diplomatic disputes.
Despite all its declarations of friendship with the United States, trumpeted notably on the occasion of the ceremonies to commemorate the 1944 Normandy Landings, French imperialism stands to gain from the USA's difficulties in Iraq. In the final analysis, what the CRI's support for the “resistance of the Iraqi people” boils down to, is to take the side of “its” own bourgeoisie. And there can be no question of calling on Lenin to justify such a policy, since Lenin himself called on socialists “primarily to strive against the chauvinism of their “own” bourgeoisie” (Position and Tasks of the Socialist International [487], 1st November 1914).
If the CRI really wants to follow Lenin's example in the defence of internationalism, then they must take account of reality and give up on fairy tales: support for the “resistance of the Iraqi people against the invader” is purely and simply a betrayal of internationalism, and therefore a chauvinist, anti-proletarian policy. It is against such policies that Lenin wrote: “The social-chauvinists repeat the bourgeois deception of the people that the war is being waged to protect the freedom and existence of nations, and thereby they go over to the side of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat” (Socialism and war, Chapter 1).
That said, support for the “resistance of the Iraqi people”, in other words for the anti-American fractions of the Iraqi ruling class, is not merely a betrayal of internationalism from the standpoint of what is at stake in Iraq in terms of the antagonisms between the great imperialist powers; and it is not only a betrayal of internationalism from the standpoint of the proletariat of the great powers but it is equally a betrayal of internationalism from the standpoint of the Iraqi workers, who are being invited to buy a pig in a poke and get themselves killed in the defence of the imperialist interests of their own bourgeoisie. For there can be no question that the Iraqi state is anything other than imperialist. In fact, in today's world, all states are imperialist, from the most powerful right down to the smallest of them. Thus “little Serbia”, which historically has been a favourite prey for the imperialist appetites of greater powers such as Germany and Russia (and France), behaved during the 1990s as a model imperialist state, complete with massacres and “ethnic cleansing” in order to build a “Greater Serbia” at the expense of the other nationalities of ex-Yugoslavia. All that, of course, within a European context dominated by the antagonisms between the various powers which “defended” either Croatia (Germany and Austria), or Bosnia (the United States), or again Serbia (France and Britain).
The Iraqi state is in no way an exception to this general rule. On the contrary, it is one its most edifying examples.
Ever since its independence from the British sphere of influence following World War II, Iraq, thanks to its strategic location and its oil resources, has constantly been a stake in the rivalries between the great powers. After a period as a “client” of the USSR, it switched to the Western bloc (notably through a spectacular rapprochement with Germany, and especially France) during the 1970s, as Soviet influence in the Middle East declined. Between 1980 and 1988, in one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts since 1945 (1,200,000 dead), Iraq was the spearhead of the Western offensive against Khomeini's Iran, which had declared holy war on the American “Great Satan”. The Western powers, and especially the US, gave Iraq their unfailing support, notably through the despatch to the Persian Gulf, in 1987, of a large fleet which engaged the Iranian forces on a daily basis, and finally forced Iran to agree to a ceasefire in the summer of 1988, despite the heavy defeats that it had inflicted on Iraq.
Obviously, Saddam Hussein did not send hundreds of thousands of Iraqi workers and peasants in uniform to get killed on the Iranian front from 1980 onwards (and in passing massacre 5,000 Kurdish civilians at Halabja on 16th March 1988), just to give pleasure to the United States. In fact, the Iraqi bourgeoisie was pursuing its own war aims. Apart from subjugating by terror the Kurdish and Shi'ite populations, its objective was to seize the Shatt al-Arab waterway (the estuary of the Tigris and Euphrates) from Iranian control. The war was also intended to allow Saddam Hussein, and Iraq, to pose as the leader of the Arab world. In short, this war was a perfectly imperialist one.
The war of 1990-91 was of the same nature. The imperialist objectives of the USA and its allies at the time, in “Operation Desert Storm”, have already been amply demonstrated and denounced. But the pretext for the crusade against Iraq was the latter’s invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990. Obviously, marxists have no interest in the question of who was the “aggressor” and who was the “aggressed”, nor do they leap to the defence of Sheikh Jaber's bank account and oil reserves. That said, Iraq's military expedition against Kuwait in August 1990 was nothing other than the operation of one imperialist bandit (to use Lenin's expression) against another. The fact that these are little bandits makes no difference whatever to the fundamental nature of their policies, nor to the attitude the proletariat should take towards this kind of war.
One last remark on the imperialist nature of states today. An argument often given to support the idea that states like Iraq are not imperialist, is that they do not export capital. This argument claims to follow Lenin's analysis developed in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which lays particular emphasis on this aspect of imperialist policy. But the use of this one-sided view of imperialism by self-styled “Leninists” in order to justify their betrayal of internationalism is of the same vein as the use made by the Stalinists of another of Lenin's articles during World War I (taken totally out of context moreover): “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world—the capitalist world—attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states” (On the slogan for a United States of Europe [488]).
For the Stalinists (who generally leave out the last sentence in this quotation), “This was the greatest discovery of our epoch. It became the guiding principle for all the action of the Communist Party in its struggle for the victory of the socialist revolution and the construction of socialism in our country. Lenin's theory on the possibility of the victory of socialism in a single country laid down a clear perspective for the proletariat's struggle, gave free rein to the energy and initiative of the proletarians in every country to march against their national bourgeoisie, and filled the communist party and the working class with a firm confidence in victory” (from the Preface to the selected works of Lenin published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, attached to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, Moscow, 1975).
This method is not new. It has always been used by the renegades, the falsifiers of marxism. The German Social Democrats used this or that incorrect or ambiguous formulation from the founders of marxism to justify their reformist politics and their betrayal of socialism. In particular, they completely wore out this quotation from Engels' 1895 preface to Marx's pamphlet The class struggles in France [489]: “The war of 1870-71 and the defeat of the Commune transferred the centre of gravity of the European workers’ movement in the meantime from France to Germany, as Marx had foretold. In France it naturally took years to recover from the blood-letting of May 1871. In Germany, on the other hand, where industry – fostered, in addition, in positively hothouse fashion by the blessing of the French milliards – developed at increasing speed, Social-Democracy experienced a still more rapid and enduring growth. Thanks to the intelligent use which the German workers made of the universal suffrage introduced in 1866, the astonishing growth of the party is made plain to all the world by incontestable figures (...) With this successful utilisation of universal suffrage, however, an entirely new method of proletarian struggle came into operation, and this method quickly took on a more tangible form. It was found that the state institutions, in which the rule of the bourgeoisie is organised, offer the working class still further levers to fight these very state institutions. The workers took part in elections to particular diets, to municipal councils and to trades courts; they contested with the bourgeoisie every post in the occupation of which a sufficient part of the proletariat had a say. And so it happened that the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the workers’ party, of the results of elections than of those of rebellion”.
Rosa Luxemburg denounced the anti-proletarian use to which an incorrect idea of Engels had been put, at the founding congress of the KPD: “Engels [had] no chance to see the practical results of this application of his theory. I am certain that those who know the works of Marx and Engels, those who are familiar with the living, genuine revolutionary spirit that inspired all their teachings and their writings, will he convinced that Engels would have been the first to protest against the debauch of parliamentarism-only, against the corruption and degradation of the labour movement which was characteristic of Germany before the 4th of August. The 4th of August did not come like thunder out of a clear sky; what happened on the 4th of August was the logical outcome of all that we had been doing day after day for many years. I am certain that Engels and Marx, had he been alive – would have been the first to have protested with the utmost energy, and would have used all his forces to keep the vehicle from rolling into the swamp. But Engels died in the same year that he wrote the Preface” (Our programme and the political situation [490]).
To return to the idea that the export of capital is the only expression of imperialist policy, we should point out that this is wholly foreign to what Lenin himself wrote in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism. Quite the contrary: “To the numerous "old" motives of colonial policy, finance capital [which according to Lenin was the major driving force behind imperialism] has added the struggle for the sources of raw materials, for the export of capital, for spheres of influence, i.e., for spheres for profitable deals, concessions, monopoly profits and so on, economic territory in general” (Chapter X, “The place of imperialism in history” [491]).
In reality, the one-sided deformation of Lenin's analysis of imperialism has much the same aim as the use made by the Stalinists of the short passage quoted above concerning the “construction of socialism in a single country”: to try to make us believe that the system set up in the USSR after the revolution of October 1917 and the defeat of the world wide revolutionary wave which followed it was neither capitalist nor imperialist. Since the USSR did not have the financial wherewithal to export capital (other than on a completely insignificant scale compared to the Western powers), then according to this view, its policies could not be imperialist. And this would supposedly remain true, even when these policies took the form of territorial conquest, the extension of the USSR's “spheres of influence”, the pillage of raw materials and agricultural resources, even the dismantling of the industrial capacity of occupied countries. Policies, in short, that are very similar to those carried out by Nazi Germany in occupied Europe (which involved very little exportation of capital, and much plain pillage). This analysis of the nature of imperialism was obviously put to good use by Stalinist propaganda, against all those who denounced the imperialist behaviour of the Soviet Union. But we should also remember that the Stalinists were not alone in refusing any idea that the USSR could be capitalist or imperialist. Their work of mystification received the loyal support of the Trotskyist movement, with Trotsky's analysis of the USSR as a “degenerated workers' state” where capitalist social relations had disappeared.
This article is not the place to demonstrate the incoherence of Trotsky's analysis of the relations of production in the USSR. We refer the reader to various articles already published in these pages (notably, to “The unidentified class: Soviet bureaucracy as seen by Leon Trotsky”, in International Review n°92). However, it is important to point out that it was in the name of the “defence of the USSR and the workers' victories” that the Trotskyist movement supported the Allied camp during World War II, notably by taking part in the “resistance” movements: in other words, it adopted the same policies as the social-chauvinists in 1914. In short, it betrayed the workers camp and joined that of the bourgeoisie.
The “arguments” used by the Trotskyist movement to justify its participation in imperialist war are not the same as those used by the social-chauvinists during World War I, but that makes not a jot of difference to the question. In reality, their nature is the same, since both come down to making a fundamental distinction between two forms of capitalism, and calling for the support of one against the other in the name of a choice of the “lesser” between two evils. During World War I, the avowed chauvinists called for the defence of the fatherland. The social chauvinists called for the defence of “German civilisation” against “Tsarist despotism” on the one hand, and for the defence of the “France of the great French Revolution” against “Prussian militarism” on the other. During World War II, De Gaulle defended “eternal France”, while the Stalinists (who also referred to “eternal France”) called for the defence of democracy against fascism and of the “socialist fatherland”. As for the Trotskyists, they came hot on the heels of the Stalinists and called for participation in the “Resistance” in the name of the “defence of the workers' victories in the USSR”. In doing so they became, like the Stalinists, recruiting sergeants for the Anglo-American camp in an imperialist war. By giving their support to National Unity governments during World War I, the socialist parties passed definitively into the bourgeois camp. By adopting the theory of “building socialism in one country”, the Stalinist parties made a decisive move towards the service of their national capitals during the 1930s, a move completed with their support for their respective bourgeoisies' rearmament programmes, and their active preparation for the coming war. The Trotskyist current passed into the capitalist camp by participating in World War II. This is why, to return to the proletariat's class terrain, there is no alternative to a definitive break with Trotskyism. There is certainly no future in any attempt to rediscover “real Trotskyism”. The currents within the 4th International who were determined to remain true to proletarian internationalism understood this: currents like those of Munis (Trotskyism's official representative in Spain), of Scheuer in Austria, of Stinas in Greece, or of the “Socialisme ou Barbarie” group in France. It was also true for Trotsky's own widow, Natalia Sedova, who broke with the 4th International at the end of World War II, on the question of the defence of the USSR and the latter's participation in imperialist war.
If you, yourselves, sincerely want to undertake the struggle for the working class, as you say you do, then there is no other alternative than to break clearly with the whole Trotskyist movement, and not just with this or that current within it.
You can turn the problem whichever way you like, you can invoke Trotsky, Lenin, or even Marx, you can recite by heart Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, you can close your eyes and block your eyes, you can put your head in the sand or anywhere, nothing can change this hard reality: a group which today, in France, gives its support to the “Iraqi resistance”, not only works as a recruiting sergeant to turn Iraqi workers into cannon-fodder in the service of the most retrograde fractions of the Iraqi bourgeoisie (whether they be Sunni or Shi'ite), but also offers its support to the imperialist interests of its own bourgeoisie, while at the same time encouraging the growth of anti-American feeling among the French workers. It is no different from those that Lenin described as social-chauvinists: socialist in words, bourgeois and chauvinist in action.
As for those arguments that seek to adopt a “marxist” air by using this or that phrase from Lenin or Marx to justify participation in imperialist war, Lenin has already answered them: “From the liberator of nations that capitalism was in the struggle against feudalism, imperialist capitalism has become the greatest oppressor of nations. Formerly progressive, capitalism has become reactionary; it has developed the forces of production to such a degree that mankind is faced with the alternative of going over to Socialism or of suffering years and even decades of armed struggle between the “great powers for the artificial preservation of capitalism by means of colonies, monopolies, privileges and national oppression of every kind” (Lenin, Socialism and war, Chapter 1, “The present war is an imperialist war” [400]).
“The Russian social-chauvinists (headed by Plekhanov), refer 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 together, it would be the duty of the German Socialists to defend their fatherland; and lastly, the social-chauvinists of the Kautsky type, who want to reconcile and legitimatise international chauvinism, refer to the fact that Marx and Engels, while condemning war, nevertheless, constantly, from to 1870-1871 and 1876-1877, took the side of one or another belligerent state once war had broken out. All these references are outrageous distortions of the views of Marx and Engels in the interest of the bourgeoisie and the opportunists (...) Whoever refers today to Marx’s attitude towards the wars of the epoch of the progressive bourgeoisie and forgets Man’s statement that “the workers have no fatherland”, a statement that applies precisely to the epoch of the reactionary, obsolete bourgeoisie, to the epoch of the socialist revolution. shamelessly distorts Marx and substitute, the bourgeois for the socialist point of view” (ibid, “False references to Marx and Engels”).
We hope that these arguments will help you to continue your reflection, and to make a complete break with Trotskyism in general and all the bourgeois conceptions that it brings with it, rather than merely breaking with a particular Trotskyist organisation.
Communist greetings, ICC (June 2004)
[1] [492] Groupe Communiste révolutionnaire Internationaliste [493], which is a split from the French Trotskyist organisation Parti des Travailleurs.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_altworld.html#sdfootnote1sym
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[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/anti-globalisation
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/social-forums
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1865/birth-bolshevism
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1903-foundation-bolshevik-party
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[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/56/middle-east-and-caucasus
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/57/israel
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/58/palestine
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftn1
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftn2
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftn3
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftn4
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftn5
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftn6
[31] http://www.marxists.org
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftn7
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftn8
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[40] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftn15
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftn16
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftn17
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[44] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftnref1
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[48] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftnref5
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftnref6
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[60] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftnref17
[61] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_russian_enigma.html#_ftnref18
[62] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[63] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/26/revolutionary-wave-1917-1923
[64] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[65] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[66] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_edito.html#_ftn1
[67] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_edito.html#_ftnref1
[68] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/05/07.htm
[69] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1848/mexico
[70] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
[71] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-ii
[72] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[73] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/war
[74] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/263/culture
[75] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_ppmsect.html#_ftn1
[76] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_ppmsect.html#_ftn2
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[98] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_ppmsect.html#_ftnref1
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[120] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/116_ppmsect.html#_ftnref23
[121] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/bordigism
[122] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/international-bureau-revolutionary-party
[123] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/international-communist-current
[124] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[125] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/spain
[126] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/32/decomposition
[127] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/911
[128] http://www.ibrp.org
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[413] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/battaglia-comunista
[414] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/260_moscow.htm
[415] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_kras.html
[416] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_gprc.html
[417] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[418] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[419] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_piqueteros.html#_ftn1
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[435] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_piqueteros.html#_ftnref8
[436] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_piqueteros.html#_ftnref9
[437] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/heritage-communist-left/partial-struggles
[438] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_edito.html#_ftn1
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[446] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200411/141/terrorism-weapon-and-justification-war
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[448] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_edito.html#_ftn9
[449] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200412/306/bombings-madrid-capitalism-sows-death
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[451] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_edito.html#_ftn11
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[462] https://www.cfr.org
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[464] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/germany
[465] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_gprc.html#_ftn1
[466] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_gprc.html#_ftn2
[467] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_gprc.html#_ftn3
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[469] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_gprc.html#_ftnref2
[470] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_gprc.html#_ftnref3
[471] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_kras.html#_ftn1
[472] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_kras.html#_ftn2
[473] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/russian-revolution/ch08.htm
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[475] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/14.htm
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[482] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_kras.html#_ftnref5
[483] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/104_kronstadt.html
[484] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/119_cri.html#_ftn1
[485] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/sep/28.htm
[486] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/csi/vi.htm
[487] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/oct/x01.htm
[488] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/aug/23.htm
[489] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1895/03/06.htm
[490] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1918/12/31.htm
[491] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch10.htm
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[493] http://groupecri.free.fr/
[494] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[495] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/trotskyism