The 20th century began with the entry of the capitalist system into its phase of decadence: with the First World War, and with the first world wide revolutionary storm of the proletariat which brought that war to a halt and opened the combat for a communist society. Already at that time, revolutionary marxism announced the alternative facing humanity - socialism or barbarism - and predicted that in the event of the failure of the revolution, the First World War would be followed by a second one, and by the greatest and most dangerous regression of human culture in the history of humanity. With the isolation and strangulation of the October revolution in Russia - the result of the defeat of the world revolution - the most profound counter-revolution in history triumphed for half a century. In 1968 a new undefeated generation of proletarians brought this counter-revolution to an end, and barred the road to the inherent culmination of capitalism’s descent into a third world war and the probable destruction of humanity. Twenty years later, Stalinism was toppled - not however by the proletariat, but as the result of the entry of the decadent capitalism into its final phase of decomposition.
Ten years on, the century is ending as it begun: with economic convulsions, imperialist conflicts and developing class struggles. The year 1999 especially is already marked by a considerable aggravation in imperialist conflicts, clearly shown by the NATO military offensive unleashed against Serbia at the end of March.
Today, a capitalism in its death throes is facing one of the most difficult and dangerous moments in modern history, comparable in gravity to that of the two world wars, to the outbreak of proletarian revolution in 1917-19, or to the Great Depression which began in 1929. But today, neither world war nor world revolution are pending in the foreseeable future. Rather, the gravity of the situation is conditioned by a sharpening of contradictions at all levels:
- imperialist tensions and the development of world disorder;
- a very advanced and dangerous moment in the crisis of capitalism;
- attacks against the world proletariat unprecedented since the last world war;
- and an accelerating decomposition of bourgeois society.
In this situation, so full of danger, the bourgeoisie has placed the reins of government in the hands of that political current best able to take care of its interests: Social Democracy, the current mainly responsible for crushing the world revolution after 1917-18. The current which saved capitalism at that time, and is now returning to the controls in order to defend the threatened interests of the capitalist class.
The responsibility weighing on the proletariat today is enormous. Only by developing its militancy and consciousness can it bring forth the revolutionary alternative which alone can secure the survival and the further ascent of human society. But the most important responsibility weighs on the shoulders of the communist left, the existing organisations of the proletarian camp. They alone can furnish the theoretical and historical lessons and the political method without which the revolutionary minorities emerging today cannot attach themselves to the preparation of the class party of the future. In some ways, the communist left finds itself in a similar situation today to that of Bilan in the 1930s, in the sense that it is obliged to understand a new and unprecedented historical situation. Such a situation requires both a profound attachment to the theoretical and historical approach of marxism, and revolutionary audacity in understanding situations which are not really covered by the schemas of the past. In order to fulfil this task, open debates between the existing organisations of the proletarian milieu are indispensable. In this sense, the discussion, clarification and regroupment, the propaganda and intervention of the small revolutionary minorities is an essential part of the proletarian response to the gravity of the world situation on the threshold of the next millennium.
Furthermore, faced with the unprecedented intensification of capitalist military barbarity, the working class demands of its communist vanguard the full assumption of its responsibilities in defence of proletarian internationalism. Today, the groups of the communist left are alone in defending the classic positions of the workers’ movement against imperialist war. Only the groups which belong to this current - the only one which did not betray during World War II - can give a class response to the questioning which is bound to appear within the working class.
The revolutionary groups must give as united a response as possible, thereby giving expression to the indispensable unity of the proletariat against the unleashing of chauvinism and conflicts between nations. In doing so, the revolutionaries will adopt the tradition of the workers’ movement which figured especially in the conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, and in the policies of the left within these conferences.
Imperialist conflicts
1) The new war which has just broken out in ex-Yugoslavia with NATO’s bombardment of Serbia, Kosovo, and Montenegro, is the most important event on the imperialist scene since the collapse of the Eastern bloc at the end of the 1980s. This is because:
- this war does not just concern a peripheral country, as was the case with the Gulf War in 1991, but a European one;
- this is the first time since World War II that a European country and its capital has been massively bombarded;
- this is the also first time since World War II that the main defeated country of World War II - Germany - has intervened by committing combat troops directly in battle;
- this war is an additional major step forward in the process of the destabilisation of Europe, with an immense impact on the exacerbation of worldwide chaos.
Thus, after the breakup of Yugoslavia from 1991 onwards, its main component, Serbia, is now itself threatened with disintegration, while at the same time the eventual disappearance of the remains of the old Yugoslav federation (Montenegro and Serbia) is looming on the horizon. More generally, the present war, notably through the massive arrival of refugees in Macedonia, is bringing with it a destabilisation of this country and threatens to involve Bulgaria and Greece which both have their own pretensions to be considered as its “godfathers”. The involvement of Greece also threatens to draw in Turkey, and thus to provoke a conflagration throughout the Balkans and much of the Mediterranean.
Moreover, the war which has just broken out is likely to create serious difficulties within a whole series of European bourgeoisies.
In the first place, the intervention of NATO against a traditional ally of Russia is for the bourgeoisie of this country a veritable provocation which threatens to destabilise it still further. On the one hand, it is clear that Russia no longer has the means to weigh on the world situation as soon as the great powers, and especially the USA, are involved. At the same time, a whole series of sectors within the Russia bourgeoisie are protesting at Russia’s present impotence, especially the ex-Stalinist and ultra-nationalist sectors, which will destabilise the country’s government even more. Moreover, the paralysis of the Moscow government’s authority can only incite the different republics of the Russian Federation to contest the central government.
Furthermore, although a real homogeneity exists within the German bourgeoisie in favour of intervention, other bourgeoisies such as the French may be affected by the contradiction between their traditional alliance with Serbia, and their participation in the NATO action. Similarly, bourgeoisies like the Italian bourgeoisie have reason to fear the repercussions of the present situation in the shape of a new influx of refugees from this part of the world.
2) One aspect which most emphasises the extreme gravity of the war taking place today is precisely the fact that it is happening at the heart of the Balkans, which since the beginning of the century has been seen as the powder-keg of Europe.
The war of 1914 was preceded by two Balkan wars, which already contained some of the premises of World War I. Above all, the first world slaughter began in the Balkans with Austria’s desire to tame Serbia, and Russia’s reaction in favour of its Serbian ally. The formation of the first Yugoslav state after World War I was an expression of the military defeat of Austria and Germany. In this sense it was, like the Versailles Treaty, one of the main points of friction which opened the way to World War II. During the war the different components of Yugoslavia lined up behind their traditional allies (Croatia with Germany, Serbia with the Allies); the reconstitution of the Yugoslav state after World War II, within frontiers very close to those of the first Yugoslav state, was once again a concretisation of the defeat of the German bloc and of the fact that the Allies intended to maintain a barrier to the ambitions of German imperialism in the direction of the Middle East.
In this sense, Germany’s very offensive attitude in the direction of the Balkans immediately after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, once there was no longer any need for solidarity against the USSR (an attitude which stimulated the break-up of Yugoslavia with the formation of the independent states of Slovenia and Croatia), highlighted the fact that this region was becoming once again a major theatre of confrontation between the imperialist powers in Europe.
Today, a further factor in the seriousness of the situation is that, contrary to the First or even the Second World Wars, the USA now has a definite military presence in this part of the world. The world’s greatest power could not remain outside one of the major theatres of imperialist confrontation in Europe and the Mediterranean. It has thus demonstrated its intention to be present in all the crucial zones of confrontation between different imperialist interests.
3) Although the Balkans are an epicentre of imperialist tension, the form of the present war (all the NATO countries against Serbia) does not reflect the real antagonistic interests of the different belligerent countries. Before we put forward the real war aims of the the countries involved, it is necessary to reject the false explanations which have been given for the war.
The official justification by the NATO countries (ie that this is a humanitarian operation in favour of the Kosovo Albanian population) is utterly disproved by the mere fact that this population has never before suffered such repression on the part of the Serbian armed forces, and the fact that both the American and the other NATO bourgeoisies knew perfectly well that this would happen before the operation, as indeed some sectors of the US bourgeoisie are pointing out today. The NATO operation is not the first military intervention to dress itself up as a humanitarian action, but it is one of those where the lie appears most blatantly.
We must also reject any idea that the present NATO action represents a reconstitution of a Western camp against the power of Russia. The fact that the Russian bourgeoisie is seriously affected by the present war does not mean that this was one of the aims of the NATO countries. These countries, and particularly the USA, have no interest in aggravating the chaos reigning in Russia today.
Moreover, those explanations (which we find even amongst the revolutionary groups) which try to interpret the present NATO offensive as an attempt to control the region’s raw materials express an under-estimation of, or even a blindness towards, what is really at stake in the present situation. By trying to give a narrowly materialist explanation based solely on immediate economic interests, they are leaving the terrain of a real marxist understanding of the present situation.
This situation is determined in the first place by the need for the world’s greatest power constantly to assert its military supremacy despite the evaporation of its authority over its ex-allies following the collapse of the Eastern bloc.
Secondly, Germany’s active presence in this conflict, for the first time in half a century, is the expression of a new step in the assertion of its status as a candidate to the leadership of a future imperialist bloc. This status presupposes that Germany is recognised as a first class power, able to play a direct part at the military level. Today, NATO gives Germany the perfect cover for getting around the implicit prohibition on military intervention in imperialist conflicts, imposed on it since its defeat in World War II.
To the extent that it can only weaken Serbia, Germany’s traditional enemy in its ambitions directed towards the Middle East, the present operation corresponds to the interests of German imperialism, especially if this operation leads to the dismemberment of the Yugoslav Federation, and of Serbia itself through the loss of Kosovo.
For the other powers involved in the war, particularly for France and Britain, there is a contradiction between their traditional alliance with Serbia, clearly expressed during the period when these powers were responsible for the command of UNPROFOR, and the present operation against it. But for both these countries, a failure to take part in “Operation Allied Force” would have meant being excluded from the game in a region as important as the Balkans. For these two countries, the role that they could hope to play in the diplomatic resolution of the Yugoslav crisis will be conditioned by the scale of their participation in this military operation.
4) In this sense, the participation of countries like France or Britain in the present Operation Determined Force contains important similarities with the direct military (eg France) or financial (eg Japan) participation of countries in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. However, there remain very important differences between the present war and that in the Gulf.
One of the main characteristics of the Gulf War was the American bourgeoisie’s planning of the entire operation, from the trap set for Iraq in 1990 right up to the cessation of hostilities concretised by Saddam Hussein’s retreat from Kuwait. This expressed the fact that in the immediate aftermath of the Eastern bloc’s collapse, leading to the disappearance of the Western bloc, the USA still maintained a powerful leadership over the world situation, which permitted it to keep a complete grip on both military and diplomatic operations. Although the purpose of the Gulf War was to force the USA’s ex-allies like France and Germany to toe the line and to restrain their desire to contest American hegemony, these ex-allies had still not had the opportunity to develop their own imperialist aims in contradiction with those of the USA.
The war unfolding today does not correspond to a scenario written from first to last by the American power. Since 1991, there have been many expressions of opposition to US authority, on the part both of second-rate powers like Israel, and of the most faithful allies of the Cold War such as Great Britain. It was precisely in Yugoslavia that there occurred the unprecedented divorce between the two best allies of the 20th Century, when Britain decided to play its own hand alongside the French. The difficulties of the USA in asserting their own imperialist interests in Yugoslavia were one of the reasons for the replacement of Bush by Clinton.
The USA’s eventual victory through the Dayton Accords in 1996 was not a definitive victory in this part of the world, nor did it halt the general tendency to lose its position as the world’s dominant power.
Today, although the USA is leading the anti-Milosevic crusade, it is obliged to take into consideration far more than before the specific play of the other powers - especially Germany - which introduces a considerable factor of uncertainty into the outcome of the whole operation.
In particular, the US bourgeoisie did not have a single scenario worked out in advance, but several. The first, which the American bourgeoisie would have preferred, involved a retreat by Milosevic in the face of the threat of military strikes, as had already been the case with the Dayton Accords. This was the scenario which the US envoy Holbrooke tried to play out to the end, even after the failure of the Paris conference.
In this sense, while in 1991 the USA’s massive military intervention was the only option envisaged for the Gulf crisis (and they made sure that no others were possible by preventing any diplomatic solution), the military option taking place today is the result of the failure of the diplomatic option: the military blackmail represented by the conferences of Paris and Rambouillet.
The present war, with the new destabilisation of the European and world situation that it represents, is another illustration of the inescapable dilemma confronting the USA today. The tendency to “every man for himself” and the more and more explicit assertion of their imperialist pretensions by the ex-allies of the USA increasingly forces the latter to display and use its enormous military superiority. At the same time, this policy can only lead to a still greater aggravation of the chaos that reigns already in the world situation.
One aspect of this dilemma appears in the present case - as it did already before Dayton when the US encouraged Croat ambitions in the Krajina - in the fact that US military intervention is in some sense playing into the hands of its main potential rival. However, the respective imperialist interests of the USA and Germany are expressed on very different timescales. Germany is obliged to envisage its rise to the status of superpower in the long term, whereas America is confronted in the here and now - as it has been for several years - with the loss of its leadership and the rise of world chaos.
5) An essential feature of the present world disorder is thus the absence of imperialist blocs. Indeed, in the struggle for survival of all against all in decadent capitalism, the only form which a more or less stable world order can assume is that of the bi-polar organisation in two rival war camps. This however does not mean that the present absence of imperialist blocs is the cause of contemporary chaos, since capitalism has already undergone a period without imperialist blocs - the 1920s - without this involving any particular chaos in the world situation.
In this sense, the disappearance of the existing blocs in 1989, and the ensuing breakdown of world order, are signs that we have now reached a much more advanced stage in the decadence of capitalism than in 1914 or 1939. This is the stage of decomposition, the final phase of the decadence of capitalism.
In the last analysis, this phase is the result of the permanent burden of the historic crisis, the accumulation of all the contradictions of a declining mode of production over an entire century. But the period of decomposition was inaugurated by a specific factor: the blockage of the road to world war over two decades by an undefeated generation of the proletariat. In particular, the weaker Eastern bloc finally collapsed under the weight of the economic crisis because, in the last analysis, it was unable to fulfil its reason for existence: the march towards generalised warfare.
This confirms a fundamental thesis of marxism about 20th century capitalism: that war has become its mode of existence in its epoch of decline. This does not mean that war is a solution to the crisis of capitalism - quite the contrary. What it means is that the drive towards world war - and thus ultimately the destruction of humanity - has become the means through which imperialist order is maintained. It is the move towards global war which obliges the imperialist states to group together and accept the discipline of bloc leaders. It is this same factor which allows the nation state to maintain a minimum of unity within the bourgeoisie itself, and which, until now, has allowed the system to limit the total atomisation of a bourgeois society in its death throes by imposing on it the discipline of the barracks; which has countered the ideological void of a society without a future by creating the community of the battlefield.
Without the perspective of world war, the way is clear for the fullest development of capitalist decomposition: a development which even without world war has the potential to destroy humanity.
The perspective today is that of a multiplication and omnipresence of local wars and of interventions of the great powers, which the bourgeois states are able to develop to a certain extent even without the adherence of the proletariat.
6) Nothing allows us to exclude the possibility of the formation of new blocs in the future. The bi-polar organisation of imperialist competition, being a “natural” tendency of declining capitalism, appeared already embryonically at the very beginning of the new phase in 1989-90 with the unification of Germany, and has continued to assert itself since then through the latter’s rising power.
While remaining an important factor of the international situation, the tendency towards the formation of blocs cannot however be realised in the foreseeable future: the counter-tendencies working against it are stronger than ever before (the growing instability both of alliances and of the internal situation of most of the capitalist powers). For the moment, the tendency towards new blocs has itself mainly the effect of strengthening the dominant trend of “each for himself”.
In fact, the process of formation of new blocs is not fortuitous, but follows a certain pattern, and requires certain conditions of development, as the blocs of the two world wars and the Cold War clearly demonstrate. In each of these cases, imperialist blocs grouped on the one hand a number of “have not” nations out to contest the existing division of the world, and thus assuming the offensive role of the “trouble-makers”, and on the other hand a bloc of “satiated” powers as the main beneficiaries and defenders of the status quo. To come into existence, the challenger bloc needs a leader militarily strong enough to contest the main powers of the status quo, and behind which the other “have nots” can rally.
At present there is no power even remotely capable of militarily challenging the USA. Germany and Japan, the strongest rivals of Washington, still lack atomic weapons, an essential attribute of a modern great power. As for Germany, the “designated” leader of an eventual future bloc against the USA because of its central position in Europe, it does not at present belong to the “have not” states. In 1933, in particular, Germany was almost a caricature of such a state: cut off from its neighbouring strategic zones of influence in central and south-eastern Europe through the Versailles system; financially bankrupt and cut off from the world market through the Great Depression and the economic autarchy of the colonial empires of its rivals. Today on the contrary the rise of German influence in its former zones of influence is proving irresistible; it is the economic and financial heart of the European economy. This is why Germany, as opposed to its attitude before the two wars, belongs today to the more “patient” powers, able to develop its power in a determined and aggressive, but methodical and - to date - often discreet manner.
In reality, the manner in which the Yalta world order disappeared - an implosion under the pressure of the economic crisis and decomposition, and not through a re-division of the world via war - has given rise to a situation in which there no longer exist clearly defined and recognised zones of influence of the different powers. Even those areas which 10 years ago appeared as the imperialist backyard of certain powers (the USA in Latin America or the Middle East, France in its language zone of Africa) are being engulfed by the ambient “each for himself”. In such a situation, it is still far from decided which powers will belong in the end to the group of the “satiated” countries, and which will end up empty-handed.
7) In reality, it is not so much Germany or any of the other challengers of the world’s remaining super-power, but the United States itself which in the 1990s has assumed the role of the “aggressive” power militarily on the offensive. This in turn is the clearest expression of a new stage in the development of the irrationality of war in decadent capitalism, directly linked to the phase of its decomposition.
The irrationality of war is the result of the fact that modern military conflicts - as opposed to those of capitalist ascendancy (wars of national unification, or of colonial conquest which served the economic and geographic expansion of capitalism) - are aimed solely at the re-division of already existing economic and strategic positions. Under these circumstances, the wars of decadence, through the devastation they cause and their gigantic cost represent not a stimulus, but a dead weight for the capitalist mode of production. Through their permanent, totalitarian and destructive character they threaten the very existence of modern states. As a result, although the cause of capitalist wars remains the same - the competition between nation states - their goal changes. Rather than wars in pursuit of definite economic gains, they increasingly become wars in pursuit of strategic advantages designed to assure the survival of the nation in the case of a global conflagration. Whereas in capitalist ascendancy the military served the interests of the economy, in decadence it is increasingly the economy which serves the needs of the military. Capitalist economy becomes a war economy.
Like the other major expressions of decomposition, the irrationality of war is thus a general tendency unfolding throughout decadent capitalism. Already in 1915, Rosa Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet recognised the primacy of global strategic considerations over immediate economic interests for the main protagonists of World War I. By the end of World War II the Communist Left of France could already formulate the thesis of the irrationality of war.
But during these wars, and the ensuing Cold War, a remnant of economic rationality survived in the fact that the offensive role was mainly assumed, not by those powers that drew the main economic advantages from the existing division of the world, but by those largely excluded from these advantages.
Today, the war in ex-Yugoslavia - from which none of its belligerents can expect to draw the slightest economic advantage - only confirms what was already strikingly evident during the Gulf War in 1991: the absolute irrationality of war from the economic viewpoint.
8) The fact that war today has lost even a semblance of economic rationality, and has become simply synonymous with chaos, does not at all mean that the bourgeoisie is confronting the situation in a disorderly or empirical manner. On the contrary: this situation is forcing the ruling class to take a particularly systematic and long-term grip on its military preparations. During the recent period, this has been expressed notably by:
- the development of ever more sophisticated and expensive armaments systems in America, Europe and Japan in particular - armaments which the great powers above all require for eventual future conflicts against each other;
- the rise in “defence” budgets, with the USA taking the lead (an additional $100 billion allocated for the modernisation of the armed forces in the coming six years), reversing a certain trend towards a decline in military budgets at the end of the Cold War (the so-called “peace dividend”);
At the political and ideological level, signs of serious war preparations include:
- the development of a whole ideology to justify military interventions: that of “humanitarianism” and the defence of “human rights”;
- the coming to government, in most of the leading industrialised countries, of left wing parties, those best able to represent this humanitarian war-mongering (this is of particular importance in Germany, where the SPD-Green coalition has the task of overcoming the political obstacles to its military intervention abroad);
- the orchestration of systematic political attacks against the internationalist traditions of the proletariat against imperialist war (slandering of Lenin as an agent of German imperialism in World War I and Bordiga as collaborator of the fascist bloc in World War II, of Rosa Luxemburg - recently in Germany - as a predecessor of Stalinism etc). The more capitalism moves towards war, the more the heritage and present organisations of the communist left will become the favoured target of the bourgeoisie.
In fact, these bourgeois ideological campaigns are not aimed solely at preparing the ground politically for war. The fundamental objective of the ruling class is to turn the proletariat away from its own revolutionary perspective, a perspective which the incessant aggravation of the capitalist crisis will inevitably put more and more on the agenda.
The Economic Crisis
9) If, in the epoch of capitalist decline, the economic crisis takes on a permanent and chronic character, it has mainly been at the end of periods of reconstruction after world wars that this crisis has assumed an openly catastrophic character, with brutal drops in production, profits and workers’ living standards, and a dramatic rise in mass unemployment. This was the case from 1929 until World War II. It is the case today.
Although since the late 1960s the crisis has unfolded in a slower and less spectacular manner than after 1929, the way in which the economic contradictions of a declining mode of production have accumulated over three decades becomes today increasingly difficult to hide. The 1990s in particular - despite all the propaganda about the “economic health” and the “fantastic profits” of capitalism - have been years of tremendous acceleration of the economic crisis, dominated by faltering markets, bankrupt companies, and an unprecedented development of unemployment and pauperisation.
At the beginning of the decade the bourgeoisie hid this fact by presenting the collapse of the Eastern bloc as the final victory of capitalism over communism. In reality the ruin of the east was a key moment in the deepening world capitalist crisis. It revealed the bankruptcy of one bourgeois model of crisis management: Stalinism. Since then, one economic model after another has bit the dust, beginning with the second and third industrial powers of the world, Japan and Germany. They were to be followed by the failure of the Asian tigers and dragons, and of the “emerging” economies of Latin America. The open bankruptcy of Russia confirmed the incapacity of “western liberalism” to rejuvenate the countries of Eastern Europe.
Until now the bourgeoisie, despite decades of chronic crisis, has always been convinced that there can no longer be economic convulsions as profound as those of the Great Depression, which after 1929 shook the very foundations of capitalism. Although bourgeois propaganda still tries to present the economic catastrophe which engulfed east and south-east Asia in 1997, Russia in 1998, and Brazil at the beginning of 1999 as a particularly severe, but temporary and con-junctural recession, what these countries have in reality suffered is a depression every bit as brutal and devastating at that of the 1930s. Such figures as the trebling of unemployment or falls in production of 10% or more in one year speak for themselves. Moreover, such areas as the former USSR or Latin America are today incomparably more affected by the crisis than was the case during the 30s.
It is true that ravages on this scale are still mainly restricted to the peripheries of capitalism. But this “periphery” includes not only agricultural and raw material producers, but industrial countries containing tens of millions of proletarians. It includes the eight and the tenth economies of the world: Brazil and South Korea. It includes the largest country on Earth, Russia. It will soon include the most populous country, China, where after the insolvency of the largest investment house, the Gitic, the confidence of international investors has begun to crumble.
What all of these bankruptcies show is that the state of health of the world economy is much worse than in the 1930s. As opposed to 1929, the bourgeoisie in the last 30 years has not been surprised or inactive in the face of the crisis, but has constantly acted to control its course. This is what gives the unfolding of the crisis today its protracted, remorselessly deepening nature. It deepens despite all the efforts of the ruling class. The sudden, brutal and uncontrolled character of the crisis in 1929 is also explained by the fact that the bourgeoisie had dismantled its state capitalist control of the economy (which it was forced to introduce during World War I), and only reintroduced and enforced this regime from the early 30s on. In other words: the crisis struck so brutally because such instruments as the war economy of the 30s and the international co-ordination of the western economies after 1945 had not yet been developed. In 1929 there did not yet exist a permanent state supervision of the economy, of the stock markets and international trade agreements, no lender of last resort, no international fire brigade to bail out those in difficulties. Between 1997-99 on the contrary whole economies with considerable economic and political significance for the capitalist world have gone down the drain despite the existence of all of these state capitalist instruments. The International Monetary Fund, for instance, supported Brazil with massive funding already before the recent crisis, in pursuit of its new strategy of crisis prevention. It promised to defend the Brazilian currency “at all costs” - and failed.
10) Although the central countries of capitalism have escaped this fate until now, they are certainly facing their worst recession since the war - in Japan it has already begun.
Today the bourgeoisie tries to blame the increasing difficulties of the central economies on the “Asian”, “Russian” and “Brazilian” crises. In fact the opposite is the case: it is the growing impasse of the central economies of capitalism, due to the exhaustion of solvent markets, which has produced the successive collapse of the “Tigers” and “Dragons”, of Russia, Brazil, etc.
The recession in Japan reveals the considerable reduction of the central countries’ economic room for manoeuvre. A series of massive “Keynesian” conjunctural programmes of the government (the recipe discovered by the bourgeoisie in the 30s) have failed to refloat the economy and avoid recession;
- the latest rescue operation - $520 billion to bail out insolvent banks - has failed to restore confidence in the financial system;
- the traditional aggressive policy of maintaining employment at home through export offensives on the world market has reached its limit: unemployment is rising fast, the policy of negative interest rates to supply sufficient liquidity and maintain a weak yen favourable to exports has run out of steam; it is now clear that these goals, as well as a reduction in the public debt, can only be achieved through a return to the inflationist policy of the 70s. This trend, which other industrial countries will follow, spells the beginning of the end of the famous “victory over inflation”, and new dangers to world trade.
In America, the alleged “boom” of the past years has been achieved at the expense of the rest of the world through a veritable explosion of its balance of trade and payments deficits, and through the soaring debts of private households (household savings in the US are now virtually non-existent). The limits of such a policy are now being reached, with or without the “Asian flu”.
The situation is no better in “Euroland”, along with America the sole remaining capitalist model: in the main western European countries, the shortest and weakest post-war recovery is already coming to a close, with falling growth rates and rising unemployment in Germany in particular.
It is the recession in the central countries which at the beginning of the new century is destined to reveal the full extent of the agony of the capitalist mode of production.
11) But if historically the impasse of capitalism is much more flagrant than in the 30s, and if the present phase represents the most important acceleration in the past three decades, this does not mean we can expect an abrupt and catastrophic collapse in the heartlands of capitalism as in the 30s. This is what happened in Germany between 1929-32, when (according to the statistics of the day) industrial production dropped 50%, prices 30%, wages 60%, and unemployment increased from two to eight million within three years.
Today on the contrary, while considerably deepening and accelerating, the crisis retains its more or less controlled, protracted character. The bourgeoisie has proven its capacity to avoid a repetition of the 1929 crash. It has achieved this not only through the erection of a permanent state capitalist regime from the 30s on, but above all through an internationally co-ordinated crisis management in favour of the strongest powers. It learnt to do this after 1945 in the framework of the Western bloc, which brought together North America, western Europe and eastern Asia under US leadership. After 1989 it proved its capacity to maintain this crisis management even without imperialist blocs. Thus, whereas at the imperialist level 1989 was the beginning of the rule of world chaos and “each for himself”, at the economic level this is not as yet the case.
The two most dramatic consequences of the crisis of 1929 were:
- the collapse of world trade under an avalanche of competitive devaluations and protectionist measures leading to the autarchy of the pre-war years;
- the fact that the two strongest capitalist nations, the United States and Germany, were the first and the worst affected by industrial depression and mass unemployment.
The national state capitalist programmes which were then adopted in the different countries - the Five Year Plans in the USSR, the Four Year Plans in Germany, the New Deal in the USA etc. - in no way altered this fragmentation of the world market: they accepted this framework as their point of departure. As opposed to this, in face of the crisis of the 70s and 80s the western bourgeoisie acted rigorously to prevent a return to the extreme protectionism of the 30s, since this was the precondition for assuring that the central countries would not be the first victims like in 29, but the last to suffer the most brutal consequences of the crisis. The result of this system has been that whole portions of the world economy such as Africa, most of eastern Europe, the greater part of Asia and Latin America have been or are being for all intents and purposes eliminated as actors on the world stage and plunged into the most unspeakable barbarism.
In his struggle against Stalin in the mid 1920s, Trotsky demonstrated that not only socialism, but even a highly developed capitalism is impossible in one country. In this sense the autarchy of the 1930s was a gigantic step backwards for the capitalist system. In fact, it was only possible because the road to world war was open - something which is not the case today.
12)The present international state capitalist crisis management imposes certain rules for the commercial war between national capitals - trade, financial, currency or investment agreements and treaties, rules without which world trade under present conditions would be impossible.
That this capacity of the main powers (underestimated by the ICC at the beginning of the 1990s) has not yet reached its limits is demonstrated by the project of a common European currency, showing how the bourgeoisie is obliged by the advance of the crisis to take increasingly complicated and audacious measures to protect itself. The Euro is first and foremost a gigantic state capitalist measure to counteract one of the most dangerous weak points in the defence lines of the system: that fact that of the two centres of world capitalism, North America and western Europe, the latter is divided into a series of national capitals, each with their own currency. Dramatic monetary fluctuations between them, such as that which smashed the European Monetary System in the early 90s, or competitive devaluations like in the 30s, threaten to paralyse trade within Europe. Thus, far from representing a step towards a European imperialist bloc, the Euro project is supported by the United States, which would be one of the main victims of such a collapse of the European market.
The Euro, like the European Union itself, also illustrates the way in which this co-ordination between states, far from abolishing the trade war between them, is a method of organising it in favour of the strongest. If the common currency is a stability anchor for the European economy, it is at the same time a system designed to assure the survival of the strongest powers (above all the country which dictated the conditions of its construction, Germany) at the expense of the weaker participants (which is why Britain, due to its traditional strength as a world financial power, still affords itself the luxury of remaining outside).
We are confronted with an infinitely more developed state capitalist system than that of Stalin, Hitler or Roosevelt in the 1930s, in which not only the competition within each nation state, but to a certain extent that of national capitals on the world market assume a less spontaneous, more regulated - in fact more political character. Thus, after the debacle of the “Asian crisis” the leaders of the main industrial countries insisted that in future the IMF should adopt more political criteria in deciding which countries to bail out and at what price (and conversely which ones can be eliminated from the world market).
13) With the acceleration of the crisis, the bourgeoisie today finds itself obliged to revise its economic policy: this is one of the meanings of the establishment of left governments in Europe and the United States. In Britain, France or Germany the new left governments have developed a critique of the previous policy of “globalisation” and “liberalisation” launched in the 80s under Reagan and Thatcher, calling for more state intervention in the economy, and for a regulation of the international flow of capital. The bourgeoisie realises today that this policy has reached its limit.
“Globalisation”, by lowering trade and investment barriers in favour of the circulation of capital, was the response of the leading powers to the danger of a return to the protectionism and autarchy of the 1930s: a state capitalist measure protecting the strongest competitors at the expense of the weaker ones. But today, this measure is in turn in need of stronger state regulation, aimed not at revoking, but controlling the global movement of capital.
“Globalisation” is not the cause of the insane international speculation of the past years - but it has opened the door wide to its development. As a result, from being a refuge for capital menaced by the absence of real profitable investment outlets, speculation has itself become an enormous danger to capital. If the bourgeoisie is reacting to this danger today, this is not only because this development is capable of bringing entire, more peripheral national economies to their knees almost overnight (Thailand, Indonesia, Brazil etc) but above all because leading capitalist groupings in the main countries are likely to go bankrupt in the process. In fact, the principal goal of the IMF programmes for these different countries in the past two years was to save not the countries directly affected, but the speculative investments of western capitalists, whose bankruptcy would have destabilised the international finance structures themselves.
Just as “globalisation” never replaced the competition of the nation state by that of the multinationals, as bourgeois ideology pretended, but was a policy of certain national capitals, in the same way the policy of “liberalisation” was never a weakening of state capitalism, but a means of making it more efficient, and of justifying enormous cuts in social budgets in particular. Today’s situation of sharpened crisis, however, demands a much more direct and obvious state intervention (such as the recent nationalisation of failing Japanese banks, a measure which was publicly called for by the G7 states). Such circumstances are no longer compatible with a credible “liberal” ideology.
At this level also, the left of capital is better equipped to implement the new “corrective measures” (something the resolution of the 10th congress of the ICC 1993 already pointed out regarding the replacement of Bush by Clinton in the USA). Politically, because the left is historically less tied to the clientele of private capitalist interests than the right, and thus better able to adopt measures that go against the will of particular groupings, but which defend the national capital as a whole. Ideologically, because it was the right which invented and mainly implemented the previous policy now being revised.
This modification does not mean that the so-called “neo-liberal” economic policy will be completely abandoned. In fact, a sign of the gravity of the situation is that the bourgeoisie is compelled to combine the two policies, both of which have increasingly serious effects on the world economy. Such a combination, balancing on a tight rope between the two policies, can only further aggravate the situation.
This does not however imply that there is an economic “point of no return” beyond which the system is irretrievably doomed to disappear. Nor is there any theoretically fixed limit to the amount of debt (the main drug of dying capitalism) which the system can administer to itself without making its own existence impossible. In fact, capitalism passed its economic limits with the entry into its phase of decadence. Since then, capitalism has only been able to survive by an increasing manipulation of its own laws, a task which only the state can perform.
In this sense the limits to the existence of capitalism are political and not economic. The denouement of the historic crisis of capitalism depends on the evolution of the balance of forces between the classes:
- either the proletariat will develop its struggle until it imposes its worldwide revolutionary dictatorship;
- or capitalism, through its tendency towards war, will plunge humanity into barbarism and definitive destruction
The Class Struggle
14) In response to the first signs of the new open crisis at the end of the 60s, the return of the class struggle in 1968, ending four decades of counter-revolution, barred the road to world war, and began to open up a renewed perspective for humanity. During the first great struggles of the late sixties and early seventies a new generation of revolutionaries began to be secreted by the class, and the necessity of proletarian revolution was debated in the general assemblies of the class. During the different waves of workers’ struggles between 1968 and 1989, a difficult but important experience of struggle was acquired, and consciousness within the class developed in confrontation with the left of capital, particularly the unions, despite a series of obstacles placed in the path of the proletariat. The high point of this whole period was the mass strike of 1980 in Poland, demonstrating that in the Russian bloc also - historically condemned by its weakened position, to be the “aggressor” in any war - the proletariat was not prepared to die for the bourgeois state.
However, if the proletariat barred the road to war, it was unable to take significant steps towards its answer to the crisis of capitalism: the proletarian revolution. It was this stalemate in the balance of class forces, with neither of the two main classes of modern society able to enforce its own solution, which opened up the period of the decomposition of capitalism.
By contrast, it was the first truly world historical event of this period of decomposition - the collapse of the Stalinist (so-called Communist) regimes in 1989 - which brought the period of developing struggles and consciousness since 1968 to a close. The result of this historical earthquake was the most profound retreat in combativity and above all in consciousness since the end of the counter-revolution.
This set-back did not represent an historic defeat of the class, as the ICC already pointed out at the time. By 1992, with the important struggles in Italy, the working class had already returned to the path of struggle. But in the course of the 1990s, this path was to prove much slower and more difficult then in the previous two decades. Despite such struggles, the bourgeoisie, in 1995 in France, and soon afterwards in Belgium, Germany, and the USA, was still able to profit from the hesitant combativity and political disorientation of the class in order to organise spectacular movements aimed specifically at restoring the credibility of the unions, and which further weakened the class consciousness of the workers. Through such actions, the unions attained their highest level of popularity since more than a decade. After the massive union manoeuvres in November-December 1995 in France, the resolution on the international situation of the 12th congress of the ICC’s section in France (1996) noted: that “in the main capitalist countries, the working class has been brought back to a situation which is comparable to that of the 1970s as far as its relations to unions and unionism is concerned (...) the bourgeoisie has temporarily succeeded in wiping out from working class consciousness the lessons learnt during the 80s, following repeated experience of confrontations with the unions”.
This whole development confirmed that after 1989 the path towards decisive class confrontations had become longer and more difficult.
15) Despite these enormous difficulties the 90s has been a decade of the re-development of class struggles. This was already confirmed, in the mid-90s, through the strategy of the bourgeoisie itself:
- the highly publicised union manoeuvres aimed at strengthening the unions before an important build-up of workers’ combativity rendered such large scale mobilisations too dangerous;
- the subsequent equally artificially orchestrated “unemployed movements” in France, Germany and other countries during 1997-98, designed to divide employed from unemployed workers — making the former feel guilty, creating unionist structures for the future containment of the latter - revealed the concern of the ruling class about the long term radicalising potential of unemployment and the unemployed;
- enormous and incessant ideological campaigns - often using themes linked to decomposition such as the Dutroux affair in Belgium, ETA terrorism in Spain, the extreme right in France, Austria or Germany - calling for the defence of bourgeois democracy, were multiplied to sabotage the reflection of the workers. All this showed that the ruling class itself was convinced that the worsening of the crisis and of attacks would give rise to new expressions of working class militancy. Furthermore, all of these preventative actions were co-ordinated and publicised at the international level.
The correctness of the class instinct of the bourgeoisie was soon demonstrated by a significant increase in workers’ struggles towards the end of the decade.
Not for the first time, the first important sign of a serious development of combativity came from the Benelux countries, with strikes in different sectors during 1997 in the Netherlands, notably in the world’s largest port, Rotterdam. This important signal was soon to be confirmed in another small, but highly developed western European country, Denmark, when almost half a million employees of the private sector (a quarter of all wage labourers of that country) went on strike for almost two weeks in May 1998. This movement revealed:
- a tendency towards massive struggles;
- the necessity for the unions to revert to their task of controlling, isolating and defeating movements, so that the workers at the end were not euphoric (as in France in 1995), but had lost their first illusions;
- the necessity for the bourgeoisie to return to the policy of internationally playing down or, where possible blacking-out, news of struggles, in order not to spread the “bad example” of workers’ resistance.
Since then, this strike wave has continued in two directions:
- large scale actions organised by the unions (Norway, Greece, United States, South Korea) under the pressure of growing workers’ discontent;
- a multiplication of smaller, unofficial, sometimes even spontaneous struggles in the central capitalist nations of Europe - France, Britain, Belgium, Germany - where the unions take the lead in order to contain and isolate them.
Also noteworthy are:
- the growing national and international simultaneity of struggles, especially in western Europe;
- the outbreak of combat in response to the different aspects of the capitalist attacks: lays-offs and unemployment, falling real wages and cuts in the social wage, intolerable conditions of exploitation, reduction in holiday benefits etc;
- the embryonic beginnings of a reflection within the class about which demands to raise and how to struggle, and even about the present state of society;
- the obligation for the bourgeoisie - although the official unions have not yet been seriously discredited in the recent movements - to develop the card of “fighting unionism” and “base unionism” with the heavy involvement of leftism.
16) Despite these steps forward, the evolution of the class struggle since 1989 has remained painful and not without set-backs, above all because of:
- the weight of decomposition, a growing factor against the development of collective solidarity and of an historical and coherent theoretical reflection within the class;
- the very extent of the set-back which began in 1989, which at the level of consciousness will weigh negatively for a long time to come, since it is the perspective of communism itself which has been attacked.
Underlying this set-back - which threw the proletarian struggle back more than a decade - is the fact that in the epoch of decomposition, time is no longer on the side of the proletariat. Although an undefeated class can prevent the slide towards world war, it cannot prevent the proliferation of all the manifestations of the rotting of the social order.
In fact, this set-back was itself the expression of the fact that the proletarian struggle lagged behind the general acceleration of the decline of capitalism. In particular: despite the whole significance of Poland 1980 for the world situation, nine years later it was not the international class struggle which toppled the Stalinist regimes in eastern Europe - the working class was completely absent at the moment of their collapse.
Nevertheless, the proletariat’s central weakness between 1968 and 1989 lay not in a general backwardness (contrary to the rapid development of the revolutionary situation which emerged from World War I, the slow evolution of struggle post-1968 in response to the crisis has many advantages), but above all in a difficulty in politicising its fight.
This difficulty is the result of the fact that the generation which in 68 ended the longest counter-revolution in history was cut off from the experience of past generations of its class, and reacted to the trauma inflicted on it by Social Democracy and Stalinism with a general tendency to reject “politics”.
Thus the development of a “political culture” becomes the central question of the coming struggles. This question in fact contains the answer to a second one: how to compensate the lost ground of the past years, to overcome the present amnesia of the class concerning the lessons of its struggles before 1989?
It is clear that this cannot be done through repeating the combats of the two preceding decades: history does not permit such repetitions, least of all today when time is running out for humanity. But above all, the proletariat is an historical class, even if the lessons of twenty years are presently absent from its consciousness. In reality the process of politicisation is nothing other than that of rediscovering the lessons of the past and so developing a perspective for future struggles.
17) We have a number of good reasons for assuming that the coming period, in the long term, will in many ways be particularly favourable for such a politicisation. These favourable factors include:
- the advanced state of the crisis itself, pushing forward proletarian reflection on the need to confront and overcome the system;
- the increasingly massive, simultaneous, and generalised character of the attacks, posing the need for a generalised class response. This includes the enormous question of unemployment, the embodiment of the bankruptcy of capitalism, and a question around which struggles of the future will develop. It will also tend to include the question of inflation, a prime means of capitalism to put pressure on the working class and other layers of society;
- the increase in state repression as the bourgeoisie is more and more compelled to outlaw all real expressions of the proletarian struggle;
- the omnipresence of war, destroying the illusions in the possibility of a peaceful capitalism. The present war in the Balkans, a war at the very heart of the capitalist system, will in itself have an important impact on the workers’ consciousness. For all its humanitarian disguises, and whatever immediate effect it may have on the class struggle, this and future wars will tend to expose the catastrophic perspective that this system offers humanity. In addition to which, the accelerating slide towards war will demand increasing military budgets and thus growing sacrifices from the working class, forcing the latter to defend its own interests against the imperialist interests of the national capital.
Other favorable factors include:
- the strengthening of the combativity of an undefeated class. It is only by entering the combat that the workers can regain the experience of being part of a collective class, recover their lost self-confidence, begin to pose class issues on a class terrain, and once more cross swords with unionism and leftism;
- the entry into struggle of a second undefeated generation of workers. The combativity of this generation is still fully intact. Already born into a capitalism in crisis, it is free of some of the illusions of the generation after 68. Above all, as opposed to the workers after 68, the young workers of today can learn from a generation before them which already has a considerable experience of struggle to pass on. In this way the “lost” lessons of the past can be reconquered in struggle by the combined efforts of two generations of proletarians. This is the normal process of accumulation of historical experience which the counter-revolution brutally interrupted;
* this experience of common reflection on the past, in face of the need for generalised combat against a dying system, will give rise to proletarian discussion circles, to nuclei of advanced workers who will in particular try to reappropriate the lessons of the whole history of the workers’ movement. In such a perspective, the responsibility of the communist left will be much greater than in the past 30 years.
This potential is not wishful thinking. It is already confirmed by the bourgeoisie, which is fully aware of this potential danger, and is already taking preventive action with incessant denigrations against the revolutionary past and present of its class enemy.
Above all: in view of the degradation of the world situation the bourgeoisie is afraid that the class will discover those episodes which demonstrate the power of the proletariat, which show that it is the class which holds the future of humanity in its hands: the revolutionary wave of 1917-23; the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in Russia, the ending of World War I through the revolutionary movement in Germany.
18) This concern of the ruling class with the proletarian danger is reflected not least in the coming to government of the left in 13 of the 15 countries of the European Union.
The return of the left to government in so many important countries, beginning with the USA after the Gulf War, is made possible by the blow to proletarian consciousness inflicted by the events of 1989, as the ICC already pointed out in 1990:
“This is why, in particular, we have to update the ICC’s analysis of the ‘left in opposition’. This was a necessary card for the bourgeoisie at the end of the 70s and throughout the 80s due to the class’ general dynamic towards increasingly determined and conscious combats, and its growing rejection of democratic, electoral, and trade union mystifications. (...) By contrast, the class’ present reflux means that for a while this strategy will no longer be a priority for the bourgeoisie. This does not necessarily mean that these countries will see the left return to government: as we have said on several occasions (...) this is only absolutely necessary in periods of war or revolution. By contrast, we should not be surprised if it does happen, nor should we put t down to ‘accident’ or to a ‘specific weakness’ of the bourgeoisie in these countries” (International Review no61).
The 12th ICC congress resolution, of spring 1997, after correctly predicting the victory of Labour at the May 1997 general elections in Britain, added:
“it is important to underline the fact that the ruling class is not going to return to the themes of the 70s when the ‘left alternative’ with its programme of ‘social’ measures, even of nationalisations, was put forward in order to break the elan of the wave of struggles which had begun in 1968, by derailing discontent and militancy onto the election dead-end”.
The autumn 98 electoral victory of Schröder-Fischer over Kohl in Germany confirmed:
- that the return of left governments is in no way a return to the 70s: the SPD did not come to power in the midst of big struggles, as had once been the case under Brandt. It made no unrealistic electoral promises beforehand, and is pursuing a very “moderate” and “responsible” course in government;
- that in the present phase of the class struggle it is normally not a problem for the bourgeoisie to put the left, in particular the Social Democrats, in government. In Germany it would have been easier than other countries to leave the right in government. As opposed to most other western powers, where the right wing parties are either is a state of disarray (France, Sweden), divided on foreign policy (Italy, Britain) or weighed down by backward, irresponsible tendencies (USA), in Germany the right, although somewhat worn down by 16 years in government, is in an orderly state, and is quite capable to dealing with the affairs of the German state.
However, the fact that Germany, the country today possessing the most ordered and cohesive political apparatus (reflecting its status as potential imperialist bloc leader) brought back the SPD, reveals that the card of the left in government is not only possible today, but has become a relative necessity (just as the left in power in the 80s was a relative necessity). In other words it would be a mistake for the bourgeoisie not to play this card now.
We have already shown which necessities at the level of imperialist policy and crisis management have paved the way for left governments. But on the social front also there are above all two important reasons for such a government today:
- after long years of right wing governments in key countries like Britain and Germany, the reinforcement of the electoral mystification demands the democratic alternation now - all the more so since in the future it will become much more difficult to have the left in government. Already at the time of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, and even more so since the fall of Stalinism, bourgeois democracy is the most important anti-proletarian mystification of the ruling class, which must permanently be cultivated;
- although the left is not necessarily the most suitable for attacking the working class today, it has the advantage over the right of attacking in a more prudent and above all less provocative manner than the right. This is a very important quality at present, where it is vital for the bourgeoisie, wherever possible, to avoid important and massive struggles of its mortal enemy, since such struggles possess today an important potential for the development of the self-confidence and political consciousness of the proletariat as a whole.
International Communist Current,
April 5 1999
With the publication of the 1920 programme of the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD), we complete the section of this series devoted to the communist party programmes which came out during to the communist party programmes which came out during the height of the revolutionary wave (see International Review no.93, the 1918 programme of the KPD; International Review no.94, the platform of the Communist International; International Review no.95, the programme of the Russian Communist Party).
We have dealt elsewhere with the historic background to the formation of the KAPD (see our series on the German revolution, in particular International Review no.89). The split in the young KPD was in many ways a tragedy for the development of the proletarian revolution, but this isn’t the place to analyse its causes and consequences. Our aim here is to show the degree of revolutionary clarity this document represents, since there is no question that nearly all the best forces of communism in Germany went with the KAPD.
According to the leftist legend (unfortunately based on the false conceptions adopted by the Communist International after 1920), the KAPD was the manifestation of an insignificant, sectarian, semi-anarchist current that was trounced once and for all by the publication of Lenin’s Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder. In fact, as we have also shown elsewhere (for example in our introduction to the platform of the CI, and in the article on the degeneration of the Communist International in this issue), at the high water mark of the revolutionary tide, the positions of the left were to a great extent dominant both in the KPD and the CI itself. It is true that, by 1920, within the CI and its component parties, the first effects of the stagnation of the world revolution and of the isolation of Soviet Russia were beginning to make themselves felt, giving rise to a conservative reaction which was to increasingly place the left in an oppositional stance. But even as an opposition, the left communists were very far from being an infantile or anarchist sect. Indeed, what stands out more than anything else in this programme is the degree to which the characteristic positions of the KAPD - the rejection of the parliamentary and trade union tactics then being adopted by the CI - were based on a real assimilation of the marxist concept of the decadence of capitalism, which is affirmed in the very opening paragraph of the programme proper. This conception had been affirmed with equal insistence at the founding congress of the CI, but the International as a whole subsequently proved unable to follow through all its implications at the programmatic level.
The KAPD’s position on parliament and the trade unions had nothing in common with the moralism and anti-politicism preached by the anarchists, since, as the KAPD spokesman Jan Appel (Hempel) argued at the third congress of the CI in 1921, it was based on a recognition that participation in parliament and the unions had indeed been valid tactics in the ascendant period of capitalism but had become obsolete in the new period of capitalist decline. In particular, the programme shows that the German left had already established the theoretical bases for explaining how the unions had become "one of the main pillars of the capitalist state".
The accusation of sectarianism was also applied to what the KAPD put forward as an alternative to the trade unions. In his Infantile Disorder, for example, Lenin charges the KAPD with trying to replace the existing mass union organisations with artificially constructed "pure revolutionary unions". In fact, the KAPD’s method was the quintessentially marxist one which consists in particular of relating to the real movement of the class. As Hempel put it at the third congress, "as communists, as people who want to and must take the leadership of the revolution, we are obliged to examine the organisation of the proletariat under this angle. What we in the KAPD say was not born, as comrade Radek believes, in the head of comrade Gorter in Holland, but through the experience of the struggles we have waged since 1919" (La Gauche Allemande, Invariance, 1973, p 32). It was the real movement of the class which had given rise to the workers’ councils or soviets in the first explosion of the revolution, in direct opposition both to parliamentarism and trade unionism. With the dissolution or recuperation of the original workers’ councils in Germany, the most militant struggles had given rise to the "factory organisations" which are referred to at some length in the programme. It is true that the emphasis on these more localised, workplace organs rather than on the centralised soviets was the result of the movement going onto the defensive, and that, not fully understanding this development, the KAPD was led into the mistaken view that these factory organisations, regrouped into "Unionen", could be maintained almost as a permanent nucleus of the councils of the future. But since at the time of the programme the Unionen regrouped up to 100,000 militant workers, they were by no means an artificial construct of the KAPD.
Another accusation frequently levelled at the KAPD was that it was "anti-party". This formulation completely distorts the complex reality of the German revolutionary movement of the time. To a certain extent, the KAPD actually expressed a real high point in the clarification of the role of the communist party. We have already published the KAPD’s Theses on the Role of the Party (see International Review no.41, 1985), which are founded on the recognition - derived to no small measure from the Bolshevik experience - that in the epoch of the revolution the party could not be a "mass" organisation but was a programmatically advanced minority whose essential task, as expressed in the programme, was, through its determined participation in the class struggle, to elevate the "self consciousness of the proletariat". The programme also contains the first hints of the criticism of the idea that the dictatorship of the proletariat is exercised by the party, a conception (or rather a practise, since it was not theorised till later) which was to have such disastrous consequences for the Bolsheviks in Russia.
There is no doubt, however, that there were other trends within the KAPD at the time, and that some of these were indeed influenced by anarchism, in particular the "councilist" current around Otto Ruhle. The ransom paid to this current is reflected in the preface to the programme which contained the federalist and even individualist notion that "the autonomy of the members in all circumstances is the basic principle of a proletarian party, which is not a party in the traditional sense". Since the KAPD had to a large extent been forced out of the KPD through the manoeuvrings of an irresponsible clique around Paul Levi, this reaction against uncontrolled "chiefs" and bourgeois politicking was understandable, but it also expressed a weakness on the organisation question which, with the further retreat of the revolution, was to have catastrophic consequences for the very survival of the German left.
The "councilist" trend also expressed a tendency to break solidarity with the Russian revolution when it was faced with the difficult conditions imposed by isolation and civil war - a tendency which later expressed itself in an open renunciation of the whole Russian experience as being no more than a belated bourgeois revolution. But on this point there is no ambiguity at all in the programme: solidarity with the beleaguered Soviet power is made explicit from the beginning, and it also very correctly identifies the victory of the revolution in Germany as the key to the victory of the world revolution and thus to the salvation of the proletarian bastion in Russia.
A comparison with the "practical measures" contained in the KPD programme of 1918 shows a great deal of similarity with those of the KAPD programme, which should come as no surprise. The latter, however, is clearer on the international tasks of the German revolution. It also goes further into the question of the economic content of the revolution, emphasising the necessity to take immediate steps towards gearing production to need rather thaearing production to need rather than accumulation (even if we might question how rapidly such a transformation could take place, as well as the programme’s conception that a "socialist economic bloc" formed with Russia alone could make significant steps towards communism). Finally, the programme raises some "new" issues not dealt with by the 1918 programme, such as the proletarian revolution’s approach to art, science, education and youth. The KAPD’s concern for these questions is also interesting because it shows that it was not - as has often been argued - a purely "workerist" current blind to the more general problems posed by the communist transformation of social life.
(May 1920) (1)
It was in the whirlwind of revolution and counter-revolution that the foundations of the German Communist Workers Party were laid. But the birth of the new party doesn’t date from Easter 1920, when the "opposition", which up to then had only been united through vague contacts, came together in an organisational sense. The birth of the KAPD coincides with a phase of the development of the KPD (Spartacus League), during the course of which a clique of irresponsible leaders, placing their personal interests above those of the proletarian revolution, attempted to impose a personal conception of the "death" of the German revolution on the majority of the party. The latter energetically stood up against this manifestation of personal interest. The KAPD was born when this clique, basing itself on the personal conception that it had elaborated, tried to transform the tactic of the party, which, up to then had been revolutionary, into a reformist tactic. This treacherous attitude of Levi, Posner and Company led to the recognition of the fact that the radical elimination of any policy of leaders must constitute the first condition for the progress of the proletarian revolution in Germany. It is in reality the root of the opposition which appeared between us and the Spartacus League, an opposition of such depth that the gulf which separates us from the KPD is greater than the opposition which exists between the likes of Levi, Pieck, Thalheimer, etc., on one side, and the Hilferdings, Crispiens, Stampfers, Legiens (2) on the other. The idea that in a really proletarian organisation the revolutionary will of the masses is the preponderant factor in the taking of tactical positions is the leitmotif in the organisational construction of our party. To express the autonomy of the members in all circumstances is the basic principle of a proletarian party, which is not a party in the traditional sense.
It is thus evident to us that the programme of the party that we are conveying here. and which has been drawn up by the programme commission mandated by the congress, must remain a draft programme up until the next ordinary congress declares itself in agreement with the present version (3). Of the remainder of the proposed amendments, which could concern the fundamental positions and tactics of the party, they are hardly likely to be adopted given that the programme has faithfully formulated, in a broader framework, the content of the programmatic declaration adopted unanimously by the party congress. But eventual formal amendments will change nothing of the revolutionary spirit which animates each line of the programme. The marxist recognition of the historic necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat rests for us an immutable and steadfast guide for the international class struggle. Under this flag, the victory of the proletariat is assured.
Berlin. Mid-May 1920.
The world economic crisis, born from the world war, with its monstrous social and economic effects which produce the thunderstruck impression of a field of ruins of colossal dimensions, can only signify one thing: the Twilight of the Gods of the bourgeois-capitalist world order is nigh. Today, it is not a question of the periodic economic crises which were once a part of the capitalist mode of production; it is the crisis of capitalism itself; we are witnessing convulsive spasms of the whole of the social organism, formidable outbursts of class antagonisms of an unprecedented pitch, general misery for wide layers of populations: all this is a fateful warning to bourgeois society. It appears more and more clearly that the ever-growing antagonism between exploiters and exploited, that the contradiction between capital and labour, the consciousness of which is becoming more widespread even among those previously aparead even among those previously apathetic layers of the proletariat, cannot be resolved. Capitalism is experiencing its definitive failure, it has plunged itself into the abyss in a war of imperialist robbery; it has created a chaos whose unbearable prolongation places the proletariat in front of the historic alternative: relapse into barbarism or construction of a socialist world.
Of all the peoples of the Earth only the Russian proletariat has up to now succeeded in its titanic struggle to overthrow the domination of its capitalist class and seize political power. In a heroic resistance it has pushed back the concentrated attack of the army of mercenaries organised by international capital, and it now confronts a task of unsurpassed difficulty: that of reconstructing, on a socialist basis, an economy totally destroyed by world war and the civil war which followed it for more than two years. The fate of the Russian republic of councils depends on the development of the proletarian revolution in Germany. After the victory of the German revolution we will see the emergence of a socialist economic bloc which, through the reciprocal exchange of the products of industry and agriculture, will be capable of establishing a real socialist mode of production, no longer obliged to make economic, and thus also political, concessions to world capital. If the German proletariat doesn’t fulfil its historic task very soon, the development of the world revolution will be called into question for years, if not for decades. In fact it is Germany which is today the key to the world revolution. The revolution in the "victor" countries of the Entente can only get underway when the great barrier of central Europe has been raised. The economic conditions of the proletarian revolution are incomparably more favourable in Germany than in the "victor" countries of western Europe. The German economy, ruthlessly plundered after the signing of the Versailles Peace Treaty, has brought to a head a degree of pauperisation which demands a rapid and radical solution. Furthermore, the peace of the brigands of Versailles does not only weigh on the capitalist mode of production in Germany, but makes life increasingly unendurable for the proletariat as well. Its most dangerous aspect is that it undermines the economic foundations of the future socialist economy in Germany, and thus, in this sense, also calls into question the development of the world revolution. Only one headlong push forward by the German proletarian revolution can bring us out of this dilemma. The economic and political situation in Germany is more than ripe for the outbreak of proletarian revolution. At this stage of historic evolution, where the process of the decomposition of capitalism can no longer be artificially obscured, the proletariat has to become aware that it needs an energetic intervention in order to effectively use the power that it already possesses. In an epoch of revolutionary class struggle like this, where the last phase of the struggle between capital and labour has begun and where the decisive combat itself is already underway, there can be no question of compromise with the enemy, but only a fight to the death. In particular, it is necessary to attack the institutions which seek to make a bridge across the gulf of class antagonisms and which orient themselves towards class collaboration (4) between exploiters and exploited. At a time when the objective conditions for the outbreak of the proletarian revolution have already arrived, and when the permanent crisis can only get worse and worse, there must be reasons of a subjective nature that are holding back the accelerated progress of the revolution. In other words: the consciousness of the proletariat is still partly trapped by bourgeois or petty-bourgeois ideology. The psychology of the German proletariat, in its present aspect, shows very distinct traces of a long-standing enslavement to militarism, and is characterised by a real lack of self-awareness. This is the natural product of the parliamentary cretinism of the old Social Democracy and of the USPD on one side, and of the absolutism of the union bureaucracy on the other. These subjective elements play a decisive role in the German revolution. The problem of the German revolution is the problem of the development of the German proletariat’s consciousness of itself.
Recognising this situation and the necessity to accelerate the rhythm of the development of the revolution in the world, as well as being faithful to the spirit of the 3rd International, the KAPD is fighting for the maximum demand of the immediate abolition of bourgeois democracy and the establishment of the dictatorship of the working class. It rejects in the democratic constitution the principle, doubly absurd and untenable in the present period, of conceding to the exploiting capitalist class political rights and the power to exclusively dispose of the means of production.
In conformity with its maximalist views the KAPD equally declares itself for the rejection of all reformist and opportunist methods of struggle, which is only a way of avoiding serious and decisive struggles with the bourgeois class. The party doesn’t seek to avoid these struggles, but on the contrary actively encourages them. In a State which carries all the symptoms of the period of the decadence of capitalism, the participation in parliamentarism is also part of these reformist and opportunist methods. In such a period, to exhort the proletariat to participate in parliamentary elections can only nourish the dangerous illusion that the crisis can be overcome through parliamentary means. It means resorting to a means used in the past by the bourgeoisie in its class struggle, whereas we are now in a situation where only the methods of proletarian class struggle, applied in a resolute and forthright manner, can have a decisive effect. Participation in bourgeois parliamentarism in the thick of the proletarian revolution can only signify the sabotage of the idea of the councils.
The idea of the councils in the period of proletarian struggle for political power is at the centre of the revolutionary process. The more or less strong echo that the idea of the councils arouses in the consciousness of the masses is the thermometer which makes it possible to measure the development of the social revolution. The struggle for the recognition of the revolutionary factory councils and political workers’ councils in the framework of a given revolutionary situation logically gives rise to the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat against the dictatorship of capitalism. This revolutionary struggle, whose specific political axis is constituted by the idea of the councils, is compelled, under the pressure of historic necessity, to come up against the totality of bourgeois social order and thus also against its political form, bourgeois parliamentarism. The system of councils or parliamentarism? It is a question of historic importance. To build a proletarian-communist world or to be shipwrecked in the storms of bourgeois-capitalist anarchy? In a situation as totally revolchy? In a situation as totally revolutionary as the present situation in Germany, participation in parliamentarism thus signifies not only the sabotage of the idea of councils, but also helps to give the putrefying bourgeois order a new lease of life, and thus to obstruct the progress of the proletarian revolution.
Aside from bourgeois parliamentarism, the unions form the principal rampart against the further development of the proletarian revolution in Germany. Their attitude during the world war is well-known. Their decisive influence on the principal orientation and tactics of the old Social Democratic Party led to the proclamation of the "Union Sacrée" with the German bourgeoisie, which was equivalent to a declaration of war on the international proletariat. Their effectiveness as social-traitors found its logical continuation at the time of the outbreak of the November 1918 revolution in Germany. Here they showed their counter-revolutionary intentions by co-operating with crisis-ridden German industrialists to set up a "community of labour" (Arbeitsgemeinschaft) for social peace. They have maintained their counter-revolutionary attitude up to today, throughout the whole period of the German revolution. It is the bureaucracy of the unions which have most violently opposed the idea of the councils which was taking more and more profound root in the German working class; it is the unions who found the means to successfully paralyse all strivings for proletarian political power, which logically resulted from mass actions on the economic terrain. The counter-revolutionary character of the union organisations is so notorious that numerous bosses in Germany will only take on workers belonging to a union group. This reveals to the whole world that the union bureaucracy will take an active part in the maintenance of a capitalist system which is coming apart at the seams. The unions are thus, alongside the bourgeois substructure, one of the principal pillars of the capitalist state. Union history over these last 18 months has amply demonstrated that this counter-revolutionary formation cannot be transformed from the inside. The revolutionising of the unions is not a question of individuals: the counter-revolutionary character of these organisation is located in their structure and in their specific way of operating. From this it flows logically that only the destruction of the unions can clear the road for social revolution in Germany. The building of socialism needs something other than these fossilised organisations.
It is in the mass struggles that the factory organisation appears. It surfaces as something which hasn’t had and couldn’t have any equivalent, but that is not its novelty. What is new is that it penetrates everywhere during the revolution, as a necessary arm of the class struggle against the old spirit and the old foundations which were its base. It corresponds to the idea of the councils; that is why it is absolutely not a pure form or a new organisational trick, or even a "dark mystery"; organically born in the future, constituting the future, it is the form of expression of a social revolution which tends towards a society without classes. It is an organisation of pure proletarian struggle. The proletariat cannot be organised for the merciless overthrow of the old society if it is torn into strips by job category, away from its terrain of struggle; it must carry out its struggle in the factory. It is here that workers stand side by side as comrades; it is here that all are forced to be equal. It is here that the masses are the motor of production and are ceaselessly pushed to take control of production, to unveil its secrets. It is here that the ideological struggle, the revolutionising of consciousness, undergoes a permanent tumult, from man to man, from mass to mass. Everything is oriented towards the supreme class interest, not towards the craze for founding organisations, and the particular job interests are reduced to the measure which is due to them. Such an organisation, the backbone of the factory councils, becomes an infinitely more supple instrument of the class struggle, always an organism receiving fresh blood, owing to the permanent possibility of re-elections, revocation, etc. Going forward in the mass actions and along with them, the factory organisations will naturally have to create for themselves the centralised organs which correspond to their revolutionary development. Their principal business will be the development of the revolution and not programmes, statutes and plans in detail. It is not a credit bank or life assurance, even if - this goes without saying - it makes collections when it’s necessary to support strikes. Uninterrupted propaganda for socialism, factory assemblies, political discussions etc., all that is part of its tasks; in brief, it is the revolution in the factory.
In the main, the aim of the factory organisation is twofold. The first aim is the destruction of the unions, the totality of their bases and all the non-proletarian ideas which are concentrated around them. No doubt of course in this struggle the factory organisation will meet as desperate enemies all the bourgeois formations; but the same applies to the partisans of the USPD and the KPD, in so far as the latter are trapped unawares in the old schemas of Social Democracy (even if they adopt a politically different programme, they essentially remain a politico-moral critique of the "errors" of Social Democracy). These tendencies can even act as open enemies, inasmuch as in their eyes political trafficking and the diplomatic arts are still "above" the gigantic social struggle in general. Faced with these petty drudges one can have no scruples. There can be no agreement with the USPD (5) as they do not recognise the justification of factory organisations, on the basis of the struggle for workers’ councils. A great number of the masses already recognise them, rather than the USPD, as their political leadership. This is a good sign. The factory organisation, by unleashing mass strikes and by transforming their political orientation, basing themselves every time on the political situation of the moment, will contribute much more rapidly and much more thoroughly to unmasking and destroying the counter-revolutionary trade unions.
The second great aim of the factory organisation is to prepare for the building of communist society. Any worker who declares for the dictatorship of the proletariat can become a member (6). Moreover it is necessary to resolutely reject the trade unions, and to be resolutely free from their ideological orientation. This last condition will be the cornerstone for being admitted into the factory organisation. It is through this that one shows one’s adhesion to the proletarian class struggle and to its own methods; we do not demand adhesion to a more precise party programme. Through its nature and its inherent tendencies the factory organisation serves communism and leads to the communist society. Its kernel will always be expressly communist, its struggle pushes everyone in the same direction. On the other hand, the programme of the party has to deal with social reality in its widest sense; and the most serious intellectual qualities are demanded from party members. A political party like the KAPD, which goes forward and rapidly modifies itself in liaison with the world revolutionary process, can never have a great quantitative importance (if it is not to regress and become corrupt). But the revolutionary masses are, on the contrary, united in the factory organisations through their class solidarity, through the consciousness of belonging to the proletariat. It is this which organically prepares the unity of the proletariat; whereas on the basis of a party programme alone this unity is never possible. The factory organisation is the beginning of the communist form and becomes the foundation of the communist society to come.
The factory organisation carries out its tasks in close union with the KAPD.
The political organisation has the task of bringing together the most advanced elements of the working class on the basis of the party programme.
The relationship of the party to the factory organisation comes from the nature of the factory organisation. The work of the KAPD inside these organisations will be that of an unflagging propaganda, as well as putting forward the slogans of the struggle. The revolutionary cadres in the factory become the mobile arm of the party. Further, it is naturally necessary that the party always takes on for itself a more proletarian character, that it complies with the dictatorship from below. Through this the circle of its tasks grows wider, but at the same time it acquires the most powerful support. What has to be achieved is that the victory (the taking of power by the proletariat) ends up in the dictatorship of the class and not the dictatorship of a few party leaders and their clique. The factory organisation is the guarantee of this.
The phase of taking political power by the proletariat demands the firmest repression of capitalist-bourgeois movements. That will be achieved by putting in place an organisation of councils exercising the totality of political and economic power. In this phase the factory organisation itself becomes an element of the proletarian dictatorship, carried through into the factory. This latter moreover has the task of transforming itself into the base unit of the councils’ economic system.
The factory organisation is an economic condition for the construction of the communist community (Gemeinwesen). The political form of the organisation of the communist community is the system of the councils. The factory organisation intervenes so that political power is only exercised by the executive of the councils.
The KAPD thus struggles for the realisation of the maximum revolutionary programme, the concrete demands of which are contained in the following points:
1. Immediate political and economic fusion with all victorious proletarian countries (Soviet Russia, etc.), in the spirit of the international class struggle, with the aim of a common self-defence against the aggressive actions of world capital.
2. Arming of the politically organised revolutionary working class, setting up local military defence groups (Ortswehren), the formation of a Red Army; disarmament of the bourgeoisie, of all police, all officers,rgeoisie, of all police, all officers, of "citizens’ defence groups" (Einwohnerwehren) (7), etc.
3. Dissolution of all parliaments and all municipal councils.
4. Formation of workers’ councils as legislative and executive organs of power. Election of a central council of delegates of the workers’ councils of Germany.
5. Meeting of a congress of German councils as a supreme political authority of the Councils of Germany.
6. Taking over control of the press by the working class under the leadership of the local political councils.
7. Destruction of the bourgeois judicial apparatus and the immediate installation of revolutionary tribunals. Taking charge of the bourgeois prison system and the security services by appropriate proletarian organs.
1. Cancellation of state and other public debts, cancellation of war reparations (9).
2. Expropriation by the republic of councils of all banks, mines, foundries as well as the large firms of industry and commerce.
3. Confiscation of all wealth over a certain threshold, the latter fixed by the central council of the workers’ councils of Germany.
4. Transformation of private landed property into collective property under the leadership of the competent local and rural councils (Gutsräte).
5. The republic of councils to take charge of all public transports.
6. Regulation and central management of the totality of production by the higher economic councils, which must be mandated by the congress of economic councils.
7. Adaption of the whole of production to need, based on the most detailed statistical economic calculations.
8. Ruthless enforcement of the obligation to work.
9. Guarantee of individual existence relative to food, clothing, housing, old age, sickness, invalidity, etc.
10. Abolition of all caste, decorative and titled differences. Complete juridical and social equality of the sexesdical and social equality of the sexes.
11. Immediate radical transformation of provisions, housing and health in the interests of the proletarian population.
12. At the same time as the KAPD declares the most resolute war on the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois state, it directs its attack against the totality of bourgeois ideology and makes itself the pioneer of a world proletarian-revolutionary conception. An essential factor in the acceleration of the social revolution resides in the revolutionising of the whole intellectual world of the proletariat. Conscious of this fact, the KAPD supports all revolutionary tendencies in science and the arts, all those elements which correspond to the spirit of the proletarian revolution.
In particular, the KAPD encourages all serious revolutionary efforts which allow the youth of both sexes to express themselves. The KAPD rejects all domination over youth.
The political struggle compels the youth to attain a superior development of its forces; this gives us the certitude that it will accomplish its greatest tasks with a total clarity and resolution.
In the interests of the revolution, it is the duty of the KAPD that youth gets all the support possible in its struggle.
The KAPD is conscious also that after the conquest of political power by the proletariat, a great domain of activity falls upon youth in the construction of communist society: the defence of the republic of councils by the Red Army, the transformation of the process of production, the creation of communist labour schools which will carry out their creative tasks in close connection with the factory.
This then is the programme of the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany. Faithful to the spirit of the Third International, the KAPD remains attached to the idea of the founders of scientific socialism, according to which the conquest of political power by the proletariat signifies the destruction of the political power of the bourgeoisie. To destroy the totality of the bourgeois state apparatus with its capitalist army under the leadership of bourgeois and landed officers, with its police, its gaolers and its judges, with its priests and bureaucrats - here is the first task of the prole here is the first task of the proletarian revolution. The victorious proletariat must be steeled against the blows of the bourgeois counter-revolution. When this is imposed on it by the bourgeoisie, the proletariat must strive to crush the exploiters’ civil war with a ruthless violence. The KAPD is conscious that the final struggle between capital and labour cannot be settled inside national frontiers. As little as capitalism stops in front of national frontiers and holds back due to some national scruple or other in its incursion through the world, as little can the proletariat afford to be hypnotised by nationalist ideology and lose sight of the fundamental idea of international class solidarity. The more the idea of the international class struggle is clearly grasped by the proletariat, the more it will become the leitmotif of world proletarian policy, and the more impulsive and massive will be the blows of the world revolution which will break into pieces the decomposing capitalist world. Beyond all national particularities, beyond all frontiers and all fatherlands, the eternal beacon shines for the proletariat: PROLETARIANS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE.
Berlin. 1920.
In the last issue of the International Review we saw how, since 1967, capitalism has confronted the open reappearance of its historic crisis, by developing state intervention in the economy in order to try to slow down and push its worst effects on to the periphery, the weakest sectors of its own national capital and, of course, onto the whole of the working class. We analysed the evolution of the crisis and the response of capitalism in the 1970s. We are now going to look at the development of its evolution during the 1980’s. This analysis will allow us to understand that the state’s policy of “accompanying the crisis in order to slow it down and spread it out” resolved nothing, nor did it bring about anything but the aggravation of the fundamental contradictions of capitalism.
The crisis of 1980-82
At the 2nd International Congress of the ICC held in 1977[1], we highlighted the way that the expansionist policies employed by capitalism were becoming increasingly less effective and were comng to a dead-end. The oscillations between “recovery” which provoked inflation and sudden slow-downs ending in recession led to what was called “stagflation” (recession and inflation at the same time) and demonstrated capitalism’s serious situation and the insoluble character of these contradictions. The incurable illness of overproduction, in its turn, globally aggravated the imperialist tensions in such a way that in the last years of the decade there was a considerable aggravation of military confrontations and the development of the arms race at both the nuclear and the convention level[2].
The 1980s began with an open recession that lasted until 1982 and which in many ways was worse than the previous recession in 1974-75: production stagnated (growth rates were negative in Great Britain and the European countries), unemployment grow spectacularly (in 1982, the USA registered in one month alone half a million job losses); industrial production fell in Great Britain in 1982 to the level of 1967 and for the first time since 1945, world trade fell for two consecutive years[3]. This lead to the closure of factories and mass unemployment at levels not seen since 1929. What has been called industrial and agricultural desertification began to develop and has continued ever since. On the one hand, entire regions of old traditional industries saw the systematic closure of factories and mines and unemployment levels shooting towards 30%. This happened in such areas as Manchester, Liverpool or Newcastle in Great Britain, Charleroi in Belgium; the Lorraine in France or Detroit in the United States. On the other hand, in many countries agricultural overproduction was such that governments financed the abandoning of vast areas of agriculture, and aid for farming and fishing was brutally cut causing the increasing ruin of small and medium peasants and unemployment amongst agricultural workers.
However, after 1983, there was an economic recovery, which initially remained, limited to the United States but spread to Europe and Japan from 1984-85. This recovery was basically brought about by the United States’ colossal levels of debt which raised production and progressively allowed the economies of Japan and Western Europe to get onto the bandwagon of growth.
This was the famous “Reaganomics” which at the time was presented as the great solution to the crisis of capitalism. This “solution” was also presented as the return to the “basics of capitalism”. Faced with the “excess” of state intervention which characterised state economic policies during the 1970’s (Keynesianism) and which was called “socialism” or the “proclivity” to socialism, the new economic theoreticians presented themselves as “neo-liberals” and their recipes for “less state”, the “free market”, etc were vaunted far and wide.
In reality, Reaganomics was not a great solution (from 1985, as we will see, it was necessary to pay the price of the USA’s levels of debt) nor was it a supposed “retreat of the state”. What the Reagan government did was to launch a massive rearmament program (under the name “Star Wars”, it made a powerful contribution to bringing its rival bloc to its knees) through the classic recourse to state debt. The famous locomotive was not fuelled by the healthy combustibles of a real expansion of the market but by the adulterated fuel of generalised debt.
The “new” politics of debt.
The only new thing about Reagan’s policy was the form for achieving these levels of debt. During the 1970s, the state was directly responsible for financing the growing deficits in public spending through increasing the monetary mass. This meant that the state supplied the money that the banks needed in order to lend money to businesses, to private borrowers, or to other states. This caused money to depreciate continually and so led to an explosion of inflation.
We have already seen the growing impasse in which the world economy found itself, especially that of America at the end of the 1970s. In order to get out of this episode, in the last two years of the Carter administration, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Volker, radically changed credit policy. He closed the taps of monetary emission, this provoked the 1980-82 recession, but simultaneously opened the way for massive financing through the emission of bonds and securities that were constantly renewed in the market. This orientation was taken up and generalised by the Reagan administration and spread throughout the world.
The mechanism of “financial engineering” was as follows. On the one hand, the state issued bonds and securities in order to finance its enormous and ever growing deficits which were subscribed to by the financial markets (banks, business and individuals). On the other hand, it pushed the banks to search for loans in the financial markets, and at the same time to issue bonds and securities and to carry out successive expansions of capital (issuing of shares). It was a question of a highly speculative mechanism which tried to exploit the development of a growing mass of fictitious capital (idle surplus value incapable of being invested in new capital).
In this way, the weight of private funds became more important than public funds in the financing of debt (public and private).
The financing of public debt in the USA
in billions of dollars
|
1980 |
1985 |
1990 |
1995 |
1997 |
Public |
24 |
45 |
70 |
47 |
40 |
Private |
46 |
38 |
49 |
175 |
260 |
(Global Development Finance)
This does not mean that there was a lessening of the weight of the state (as the “liberals” proclaim), but rather there was a reply to the increasing needs of financing (and particularly immediate liquidity) which meant a massive mobilisation of all the available disposable capital.
This supposedly “liberal” and “monetarist” policy meant that the rest of the world economy financed the famous US locomotive. Japanese capitalism especially, with its enormous trade surplus, bought massive amounts of Treasury bonds and securities, as well as the different issues by companies in this country. The result was that the United States, which since 1914 had been the world’s main creditor, from 1985 was converted into a net debtor and, from 1988, it became the world’s main debtor. Another consequence was that from the end of the 80s, Japanese banks held almost 50% of American property shares. Finally this form of indebtedness meant that “while in the period 1980-82 the industrialised countries poured $49,000 million more than they received into the so-called developing countries, in the period 1983-89 the latter supplied to the former $242,000 million more” ( Prometeo no 16, organ of Battaglia Communista, article “A new phase in the capitalist crisis”, December 1998).
The method used for repay the interest and principle on the issued bonds was the issuing of new bonds and securities. This meant increasing levels of debt and the risk of borrowers not subscribing to new issues. In order to continue to attract investors there were regular re-appropriations of dollars through various artificial revaluations of foreign exchange rates. The result of this was that, on the one hand, an enormous flood of dollars entered the world economy and, on the other hand, the USA developed a gigantic trade deficit that year after year broke new records. The majority of the industrialised countries more or less followed the same policy: using money as an instrument for attracting capital.
All of this encouraged a tendency which was to deepen throughout the 90s: the complete adulteration and manipulation of money. The classic function of money under capitalism was to be the measure of value and standard of price, in order to do this the money of the different states had to be backed by a minimal proportion of precious metals[4]. These reserves of noble metals tended to reflect the growth and development of the wealth of a country, this also tended to reflected through the price of its money.
We have already seen in the previous article how capitalism throughout the 20th century has abandoned these reserves and this has meant that money has circulated without any equivalent, with all the risks that entails. Nonetheless, the 80s constituted a real qualitative leap towards the abyss: the phenomenon, already serious, of money being completely separated from a counter-part in gold or silver, worsened throughout the decade. This was joined: firstly by the game of appreciation/depreciation in order to attract capital which caused tremendous speculation in these and, secondly; the increasingly systematic recourse to “competitive devaluation”: ie, the lowering of the price of money by decree with the aim of helping exports.
The pillars of this “new” economic policy were, on the one hand, the constant snowballing of the massive emission of bonds and securities, and, on the other, the incoherent manipulation of money by means of a sophisticated and complicated “financial system” which in reality was the work of the whole state and the large financial institutions (banks, savings banks and investment companies, which have very close links with the state). In appearance it was a “liberal” and “non-interventionist” mechanism, in practice it was a typical construction of Western state capitalism, which is to say a management based on the combination of the sectors dominated by private and state capital.
This policy was presented as the magic potion capable of bringing about economic growth without inflation. In the 70s, capitalism had found itself confronted by the insoluble dilemma of inflation or recession, now, whatever their political colouring (“socialist”, “leftist” or “centre”), governments converted to the “neo-liberal” and “monetarist” credo, and proclaimed that capitalism had overcome this dilemma and that inflation had been reduced to levels of 2 to 5% without harming economic growth.
This policy of the “struggle against inflation” and of supposed “growth without inflation” was based on the following means:
1. The elimination of “surplus” industrial and agricultural productive capacity which led to the closure of numerous industrial installations and massive lay-offs.
2. The drastic cutting of subsidies to industry and agriculture that also brought with it unemployment and closures.
3. The pressure to reduce costs and to increase productivity meant in reality a masked and gradual deflation based on brutal attacks against the working class of the central countries and a permanent lowering of the price of raw materials
4. The pushing of the inflationary effects onto the most peripheral countries, through mechanisms of monetary pressure and, especially, through the devaluation of the dollar. Thus, in Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia etc, there were explosions of hyperinflation leading to price increases reaching 30% a day!
5. Above all, the repaying debts with new debts. The financing of debt went from the issuing of paper money to it being carried out by the issuing of bonds (state bonds and securities, business shares etc), which led to the slowing down of the long-term effects of inflation. The debts contracted through the issue of bonds were repaid through new issues. These bonds were the objects of unstoppable speculation. The over-valuation of their price (this over-valuation was complemented by the manipulation of the price of money) meant that the underlying enormous inflationary pressures were delayed to a future date.
Measure (4) did not resolve inflation but simply changed its location (pushing it onto the weakest countries). Measure (5) may have delayed inflation until the future but at the cost of stoking up its counter-part: the bomb of monetary and financial instability and disorder.
As for measures (1) and (3) these may have reduced inflation in the short-term but their consequences will be much more serious in the medium to long-term. In fact, these measures constitute a hidden deflation, that is, a methodical and organised reduction by the state of real productive capacity. As we underlined in International Review no59 “This production may correspond to goods that are really made, but it’s not a production of values (...) capitalism hasn’t grown richer. On the contrary, it has grown poorer” (5).
The process of industrial and agricultural desertification; the enormous reduction in costs, lay-offs and general impoverishment of the working class, was methodically and systematically carried out by all governments throughout the 1980s and this has seen a major escalation in the 1990s which has taken the form of a hidden and permanent deflation. While 1929 produced a brutal and open deflation, in the 80s capitalism unleashed a hitherto unknown tendency: controlled and planned deflation, a form of gradual and methodical demolition of the bases of capitalist accumulation, a state of slow but irreversible de-accumulation.
The cutting of costs, the elimination of obsolete, and uncompetitive sectors, the gigantic growth of productivity were not symptoms in themselves of the growth and development of capitalism. It is certain that these phenomena accompanied the phases of capitalism’s development in the 19th Century. However, then they had meaning because they were at the service of the extension and broadening of the capitalist relations of production and the growth and formation of the world market. Their function in the 80s correspondent to a diametrically opposed aim: to protect from overproduction and their results are counter-productive, making it even worse.
For this reason, if these policies of “competitive deflation”, as the economists modestly call them, in the short-term reduce the bases of inflation, in the medium to long term they will reinforce and stimulate them, since the reduction of the basis of the reproduction of global capital can only be compensated for, on the one hand, by an always increasing mass of debt, and on the other, unproductive spending (armaments, state, financial and commercial bureaucracy). As we said in the Report on the Economic Crisis to our 12th International Congress: “the real danger of ‘growth’ leading to inflation is situated elsewhere: in the fact that any such growth today, any so-called recovery, is based on a huge increase in debt, on the artificial stimulation of demand - in other words on fictitious capital. This is the matrix which gives birth to inflation because it expresses a profound tendency in decadent capitalism: the growing divorce between money and value, between what goes on in the “real” world of the production of things and a process of exchange that has become such an “extremely complex and artificial mechanism” that even Rosa Luxemburg would be astounded if she could witness it today” (International Review. No 92).
Therefore, in reality, the only thing that has sustained the fall in inflation during the 80s and 90s has been the systematic postponing of debt through the merry-go-round of the issuing of new debts which have replaced the previous ones and the explosion of global inflation in the increasingly numerous weakest countries.
All of this was illustrated clearly by the debt crisis that exploded from 1982 in the Third World countries (Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Nigeria etc). These states who had fed their expansion in the 70s through enormous debts (see the first part of this article) threatened to declare themselves bankrupt. The most important countries reacted rapidly and came to their “aid” with plans for debt “reconstruction” (the Brady Plan) or through direct intervention by the International Monetary Fund. In reality, what they were seeking to do was to avoid a brutal collapse of these states which would have destabilised all of the world economic system.
The remedies that were employed were a copy of the “new policy of debt”:
- The application of brutal plans for deflation under the direct control of the IMF and the World Bank that meant terrible attacks on the working class and the whole population. Those countries that in the 70s had lived the dream of “development” woke up to find themselves in a nightmare of generalised poverty from which they could not escape.
- The conversion of the loans in the National Debt into bonds that carried very high interest rates (10 to 20% more than the world average) and formidable speculation in them. The debt did not disappear: it was transformed into deferred debt. Far from the debt of the Third World countries falling it grew vertiginously throughout the 80s and 90s.
1929 |
1987 |
At the level of the productive apparatus: Crisis in traditional industries such as mining, textiles and railways, although subsequently there would be a strong expansion. |
Chronic crisis in sectors that continued to fall through the 90s and furthermore crisis in “modern” sectors such as white goods, automobiles, electronic. |
At the financial level: The speculation that provoked the crash was very recent (from the beginning of 1928) and was relatively new. |
Speculation had been developing since 1980 and there had been a series of precedents in the previous decade (eg. Petrodollars) |
At the level of crisis of overproduction: After several years of growth it appeared from 1929 onwards. |
The crisis preceded the crash and had lasted intermittently for 20 years. |
At the level of state capitalist policies: State intervention was very limited before the crash: widespread from 1933 onwards, it managed to thwart crisis and to restart production. |
State intervention was massive and systematic from the 30s and had had recourse to numerous measures from 1970 which had only episodically restarted production. |
The palliative of armaments: Massive war production deferred the crisis after 1934. |
Over-armament developed from 1945 and in the 80s it underwent a gigantic acceleration but as a means for palliating and deferring the crisis it was already worn-out. |
The crash of 1987
From 1985, the American locomotive began to run out of steam. Growth rates fell slowly, but inexorably and this was gradually transmitted to the European countries. Politicians and economists talked about a “soft landing”, that is to say they tried to put a break on the mechanism of debt that lay behind an increasingly uncontrollable speculation. The dollar, after years of revaluation, underwent a brutal devaluation: falling by more than 50% between 1985 and 1987. This momentarily eased the American deficit and brought about a reduction in the payment of interest on this debt, but the counter-part was the brutal 27% fall of the New York stock exchange in October 1987.
This figure was quantitatively less than the fall recorded in 1929 (more than 30%), however a comparative table of the situations in 1987 and 1929 allows one to understand that in 1987 the problems were much worse (see the bottom of this page).
The stock market crisis of 1987 meant a brutal purging of the speculative bubble that had fed the reactivation of the economy by Reaganomics. Since then, this reactivation has drained away. In the last half of the 80s we saw rates of growth between 1% and 3%: in effect, stagnation. But at the same time, the decade ended with the collapse of Russia and its satellites in the Eastern bloc, a phenomenon that although it had its roots in the particularities of these regimes was fundamentally a consequence of the brutal aggravation of the world economic crisis.
Along with the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc a very dangerous tendency appeared from 1987: the instability of the whole of the world financial system, which was to lead to increasingly frequent tremors that demonstrate its growing fragility and vulnerability.
General balance sheet of the 1980s
We are going to draw some conclusions about the whole of the decade; as with the previous article these will concern the evolution of the economy as much as the situation of the working class. A comparison with the 1970s reveals a serious decline.
Evolution of the economic situation
1. Levels of growth in production reached their peak in 1984: 4.9%. The average for the period was 3.4%, whilst that for the previous decade was 4.1%.
2. There was an severe contraction of the industrial and agricultural apparatus. This was a new phenomenon after 1945 which affected the main industrialised countries. The following table which refers to three central countries (Germany, Great Britain and the USA) demonstrates a fall in industry and mining and a growing displacement towards unproductive and speculative sectors.
Evolution of production by sectors between 1974 and 1987 (%)
|
Germany |
GB |
US |
|
Mining |
-8.1 |
-42.1 |
-24.9 |
|
Industry |
-8.2 |
-23.8 |
-6.5 |
|
Construction |
-17.2 |
-5.5 |
12.4 |
|
Trade & catering |
-3.1 |
5.0 |
15.2 |
|
Finance & insurance |
11.5 |
41.9 |
34.4 |
|
(source OECD)
3. The majority of productive sectors suffered a fall in their levels of production. This could be seen as much in cutting edge sectors (cars, electronics, white goods) as in the “tradition-al” sectors (shipyards, engineering, tex-tiles, mining). Thus, for example, levels of car production in 1987 were the same as in 1978.
4. The situation in agriculture was disastrous:
- The countries of the East and the 3rd World were obliged for the first time since 1945 to import basic foodstuffs.
- The European Union decided to leave 20 million hectares fallow.
5. Production did grow in information technology, telecommunications, and electronics, nevertheless, this growth did not compensate for the fall in heavy industry and agriculture.
6. The periods of recovery did not affect the whole of the world economy; they were also short and accompanied by periods of stagnation (for example, between 1987 and 1989).
- The recovery in the USA during the period 1983-85 was high but between 1986-89 it was well below the average of 1970.
- The recoveries were weaker (a global situation of semi-stagnation) in all the countries of Western Europe except in Germany.
- A good number of Third World countries were uncoupled from the train of growth and fell into stagnation.
- The countries of the East suffered an almost general stagnation during the whole of the decade (except Hungary and Czechoslovakia).
7. Japan and Germany managed to maintain levels of acceptable growth from 1983. This growth was higher than the average and permitted enormous trade surpluses which transformed them into important financial creditors. However, these levels of growth were not as high as in the two previous decades.
Average annual growth of GDP in Japan
1960-70 |
8.7% |
1970-80 |
5.9% |
1980-90 |
3.7% |
(source: OECD)
8. The price of raw materials fell throughout the whole decade (save the period 1987-88). This allowed the industrialised countries to alleviate the underlying weight of inflation at the cost of the “Third World” countries (producers of raw materials) that progressively collapsed into total stagnation.
9. Armaments production under went its most important historical growth: between 1980-1988 it grow by 41% in the USA according to official figures. This growth means, as the Communist Left had already demonstrated, terminally weakening the economy. This is proved by American capital: at the same time as it was unceasingly increasing its share of world armaments production; the share of its exports in the world trade of important sectors fell, as can be seen from the following table:
% of exports in world trade
|
1980 |
1987 |
Machine tools |
12.7% |
9% |
Cars |
11.5% |
9.4% |
informatics |
31% |
22% |
10. Debt underwent a brutal explosion as much at the quantitative level as the qualitative:
At the quantitative level:
- In the “Third World”, it grew in an uncontrollable way:
The total debt in millions of $ of the underdeveloped countries
1980 |
580.000 |
1985 |
950.000 |
1988 |
1,320.00 |
(source the World Bank)
- it took off spectacularly in the USA:
The total debt in $ of the USA
1970 |
450.000 |
1980 |
1,069.00 |
1988 |
5,000.000 |
(source OECD)
- however, it was moderate in Japan and Germany.
At the qualitative level:
- the USA became a debtor country in 1985 after being a creditor for 71 years;
- in 1988, the United States was transformed into the most indebted country on the planet not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. This can be clearly seen from the fact that, while Mexico’s foreign debt represented 9 months of its GDP and Brazil’s 6 months, in the USA it represented 2 years of GDP!
- in the industrialised countries, the weight interest payments on loans represented on average 19% of the state budget.
11. The financial apparatus, which had previously been relatively stable and healthy, from 1987 became to suffering increasingly server storms:
- Significant banking collapses, the most serious of which was that of the Savings and Loans banks in American in 1988 with debts of $500,000 million.
- A succession of stock exchange crashes began in 1987: in 1989 there was another crash, though it was less serious due to state measures which immediately stopped trading when prices fell by 10%.
- Speculation took on a spectacular form. In Japan, for example, excessive property speculation caused a crash in 1989 whose consequences have been felt ever since.
The situation of the working class
1. We have seen the worst wave of unemployment since 1945. Unemployment rose brutally in the industrialised countries:
The number of unemployed in the 24 countries of the OECD
1979 |
18,000.000 |
1989 |
30,000.000 |
(source: OECD)
2. The appearance in the industrialised countries of a tendency towards under-employment (temporary, part-time and precarious work) while in the “Third World” under-employment became generalised.
3. From 1985 the governments of the industrialised countries adopted measures which encouraged temporary contracts under the pretext of “the struggle against unemployment”. In this way by 1990, temporary contracts effected 8% of the workforce in the OECD, while permanent jobs were declining.
4. Nominal wages grow very modestly (the average in the OECD countries between 1980-88 was 3%) and did not compensate for inflation despite its very low level.
5. Social spending (social security systems, housing subsidies, health, education, etc) suffered its first important cuts.
This decline in the living conditions of the working class was dramatic in the “underdeveloped” countries and serious in the industrialised countries. In the latter it was not as smooth or slow as in the previous decade despite the fact that governments, in order to avoid the unification of the struggles, organised the attacks in a gradual and planned way in order to avert them being too sudden and generalised.
However, for the first time since 1945 capitalism was incapable of increasing the total work force: the number of wage earners grew at a rate lower than the increase in the world population. In 1990 the International Labour Organisation put forward a figure of 800 million unemployed. This clearly shows the aggravation in capitalism’s crisis and thoroughly exposes the lying discourse of the bourgeoisie about the recovery of the economy.
Adalen
[1] See International Review no 11 “From the crisis to the war economy”, Report on the world economic situation of the 2nd Congress.
[2] The decade closed with the invasion of Afghanistan which led to a long and destructive war.
[3] See International Review no 26.
[4] “Just as every country needs a reserve fund for its internal circulation, so too it requires one for circulation in the world market. The functions of hoards, therefore, arise in part out of the function of money as medium of payments and circulation internally, and in part out of its function as a world money” (Marx: Capital Vol 1 Part 1 chapter 3 page 243 -Penguin Books 1979-) Marx is more specific a bit further on that “Countries with developed bourgeois production limit the hoards concentrated in the strong rooms of the banks to the minimum required for the performance of their specific functions”.
Report on the Crisis from the 8th International Congress.
In the first part of this article, we answered the accusation that we have become “Leninists”, and that we have changed position on the organisational question. We have shown not only that “Leninism” is opposed to our political principles, but also that it aims to destroy the historic unity of the workers’ movement. In particular, it rejects the struggle of the marxist lefts first within, then outside, the 2nd and 3rd Internationals by setting Lenin against Rosa Luxemburg, Pannekoek, etc. “Leninism” is the negation of the communist militant Lenin. It is the expression of the Stalinist counter-revolution of the early 1920s.
We also reaffirmed that, while we have always identified with Lenin’s struggle against economism and the Mensheviks for the construction of the party, we also continue to reject his errors on the organisational question, especially on the hierarchical and “military” nature of the organisation. On the theoretical level, we disagree with Lenin on the question of class consciousness, supposedly introduced into the class from the outside. At the same time, these errors have to be situated within their historical context in order to understand their importance and their real meaning.
What is the ICC’s position on What is to be done? and on Two steps forward, one step back? Why do we say that these two texts of Lenin’s are invaluable gains on the theoretical, organisational, and political level? Do our criticisms of these texts - on points which are by no means secondary, in particular on the issue of class consciousness in What is to be done? - call into question our fundamental agreement with Lenin.
“It would be wrong and caricatural to oppose a substitutionist Lenin of What is to be done? to the clear and healthy vision of a Rosa Luxemburg or a Leon Trotsky (who during the 1920s was to become the ardent advocate of the militarisation of labour and the all-powerful dictatorship of the party!)”.[1] [8] Our position on What is to be done? begins with our method for understanding the history of the workers’ movement, based on its unity and continuity, as we explained in the first part of this article. It is not new, and dates from the foundation of the ICC.
There are two main sections to What is to be done?, written in 1902. The first deals with the question of class consciousness and the role of revolutionaries. The second deals directly with organisational questions. The whole constitutes a merciless critique of the “economists”, who thought that consciousness could develop within the working class solely on the basis of the economic struggle. They therefore tended to under-estimate revolutionary organisations, and to deny them any active political role: their task was limited to “helping” the economic struggle. As a natural consequence of this under-estimation of the role of revolutionaries, economism opposed the formation of a centralised organisation able to intervene broadly and with one voice on all questions, whether economic or political.
Lenin’s 1903 text One step forward, two steps back complements What is to be done? on the historical level, and gives an account of the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP which had just taken place.
As we have said, the main weakness of What is to be done? is on class consciousness. What was the attitude of other revolutionaries on this question? Prior to the 2nd Congress, only the “economist” Martinov opposed Lenin’s position. It was only after the Congress that Plekhanov and Trotsky criticised Lenin’s incorrect idea of a consciousness imported into the working class from outside. They were the only ones to reject explicitly Kautsky’s position, adopted by Lenin, that “socialism and the class struggle emerge in parallel, and do not engender each other [and that] science is born not by the proletariat but by bourgeois intellectuals”.[2] [9]
Trotsky’s response on this issue is correct enough, though it remains very limited. We should not forget that we are in 1903, while Trotsky’s reply (Our political tasks) dates from 1904. The debate on the mass strike had barely begun in Germany, and was only really to develop with the experience of 1905 in Russia. Trotsky clearly rejects Kautsky’s position, and stresses the danger of substitutionism inherent in it. But although Trotsky makes a virulent attack on Lenin’s organisational positions, he does not distinguish himself completely from Lenin on the consciousness issue. Indeed, he understands and explains the reasons behind Lenin’s position:
“When Lenin adopted Kautsky’s absurd idea of the relationship between the “spontaneous” and “conscious” elements in the proletariat’s revolutionary movement, he was only making a rough sketch of the tasks of his time”.[3] [10]
We should also point out that nobody amongst Lenin’s new opponents protested at Kautsky’s position on consciousness before the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, when they were all united in the struggle against economism. At the Congress, Martov, the Menshevik leader, adopted exactly the same position as Lenin and Kautsky: “We are the conscious expression of an unconscious process”.[4] [11] After the Congress, so little importance was accorded the subject that the Mensheviks were still denying any programmatic disagreement, and putting the split down to Lenin’s “crazy ideas” about organisation: “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”.[5] [12]
Plekhanov’s criticism, while true, remains somewhat general and is limited to re-establishing the marxist position on the question. His main argument is that it is not true that “the intellectuals ‘worked out’ their own socialist theories ‘completely independently from the spontaneous growth of the workers’ movement’ - this has never happened and could never happen”.[6] [13]
Before and during the Congress, when he was still in agreement with Lenin, Plekhanov limited himself to the theoretical level on the class consciousness issue. But he failed either to deal with the debates of the 2nd Congress, or to answer the central question: what kind of Party, and what role for the Party? Only Lenin gave a response.
In his polemic against economism, Lenin had one central concern on the theoretical level: the question of class consciousness and its development in the working class. We know that Lenin soon went back on his adoption of Kautsky’s position, in particular with the experience of the mass strike in 1905 and the appearance of the first Soviets. In January 1917 - before the beginning of the Russian revolution and in the midst of imperialist war - Lenin returned to the mass strike of 1905. Whole passages - on “the interlocking of economic and political strikes” - could have been written by Luxemburg or Trotsky.[7] [14] And they give an idea of Lenin’s rejection of his initial idea, itself largely the result of “overstating the case” for polemical reasons.[8] [15]
“The real education of the masses can never be separated from an independent political struggle, and above all from the revolutionary struggle of the masses themselves. Only action educates the exploited class, action alone allows it to measure its strength, broaden its horizon, increase its capacities, enlighten its intelligence and temper its will”.[9] [16] This is a far cry from Kautsky.
But even in What is to be done?, the passages on consciousness are contradictory. Alongside the incorrect position, for example, Lenin adds: “This shows us that the ‘spontaneous element’ is fundamentally nothing other than the embryonic form of the conscious element”.[10] [17]
These contradictions are the expression of the fact that Lenin, in common with the rest of the workers’ movement in 1902, did not have a very clear or precise position on class consciousness.[11] [18] The contradictions in What is to be done?, as well as his later positions, show that Lenin was not particularly attached to Kautsky’s position. In fact, there are only three passages in What is to be done? where Lenin writes that “consciousness must be imported from the outside”, and of these one has nothing to do with Kautsky.
Rejecting the idea that it is possible “to develop the workers’ political class consciousness from within their economic struggle, that is to say on the basis solely (or at least principally) of the struggle... [Lenin replies that] ...political class consciousness can only be brought to the worker from outside, in other words from outside the economic struggle, outside the sphere of the relations between workers and employers”.[12] [19] The formulation is confused, but the idea is correct and does not correspond to the two other passages where he speaks of consciousness being brought “from outside”. His thinking is much more precise in another passage: “The political struggle of the social-democracy is much wider and more complex than the economic struggle of the workers against the bosses and the government”.[13] [20]
Lenin very clearly rejects the position developed by the “economists”, that class consciousness is a direct, mechanical, and exclusive product of the economic struggle.
We stand with What is to be done? in the struggle against economism. We agree also with the critical arguments used against economism, and we believe that their theoretical and political content remains relevant today.
“The idea that class consciousness does not appear mechanically from the economic struggle is entirely correct. But Lenin’s error is to think that class consciousness cannot be developed from the economic struggle, and must be introduced from the outside by a party”.[14] [21]
Is this a new appreciation on the part of the ICC? Here are some quotations from What is to be done? that we adopted, in 1989, in a polemic with the IBRP[15] [22] in order to support then what we are saying today: “The socialist consciousness of the worker masses is the only basis that can assure our triumph (...) The party must always have the possibility to reveal to the working class the hostile antagonisms between its interests and those of the bourgeoisie. [The class consciousness attained by the party] must be infused into the working masses with an increasing fervour (...) it is necessary to concern oneself as much as possible with the development of the consciousness of the workers in general. [The task of the party is to] use the sparks of political consciousness that the economic struggle generates in the spirit of the workers to raise them to the level of social-democratic consciousness”.[16] [23]
For Lenin’s detractors, the conceptions set out in What is to be done? prefigure Stalinism. There is therefore supposedly a link between Lenin and Stalin, including on the organisational issue.[17] [24] We have already dealt with this lie, on the historical level, in the first part of this article. We also reject it on the political level, including on the questions of class consciousness and political organisation.
There is a continuity running from What is to be done? to the Russian revolution, but certainly not to the Stalinist counter-revolution. This unity and continuity exists with the whole revolutionary process which links the mass strikes of 1905 and 1917, which ran from February 1917 to the revolution in October. For us, What is to be done? heralds the April Theses of 1917: “... in view of the fact that [the masses] are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them, to explain the inseparable connection existing between capitalism and the imperialist war (...) The masses must be made to see that the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government, and that therefore our task is (...) to present a patient, systematic, and persistent explanation (...) especially adapted to the practical needs of the masses”.[18] [25] For us, What is to be done? heralds the October insurrection and the power of the Soviets.
Our present-day “anti-Leninist” detractors completely ignore this central concern of What is to be done? with consciousness, thus adopting one element of the Stalinist method which we have already denounced in the first part of this article. Just as Stalin had the images of old Bolshevik militants erased from photographs, so they erase the essential parts of Lenin’s thinking and accuse us of becoming “Leninists”, in other words Stalinist.
For Lenin’s uncritical adulators, like the Bordigist current, we are hopeless idealists because we insist on the role and importance of “class consciousness in the working class” for the proletariat’s historical and revolutionary struggle. For anyone who takes the trouble to read what Lenin wrote, and to immerse themselves in the real process of political confrontation and discussion of the time, both accusations are false.
What is to be done? brings other fundamental contributions at the political and organisational level, in particular Lenin’s clear distinction between the unitary organisations that the class creates for its day-to-day struggle, and its political organisations.
“These circles, professional associations and organisations of workers are necessary everywhere; they must be as widespread as possible, and their functions as varied as possible; but it is absurd and damaging to confuse them with the organisation of revolutionaries, to erase the line that separates them (...) the organisation of a revolutionary social-democratic party must of necessity be different in type to the organisation of the workers for the economic struggle”.[19] [26]
At this level, the distinction was not a new discovery for the workers’ movement. International, and especially German, social-democracy was clear on the question. But in its struggle against economism (the Russian variety of opportunism), and taking account of the particular conditions of the class struggle in Tsarist Russia, What is to be done? goes further and puts forward a new idea.
“The organisation of revolutionaries must include mainly and above all men whose profession is revolutionary action. This characteristic common to all members of such an organisation should efface any distinction between workers and intellectuals, and still more between different professions. Necessarily, such an organisation should not be very large, and it should be as clandestine as possible”.[20] [27]
Let us pause for a moment here. It would be wrong to see this passage as solely determined to the historical conditions within which Russian revolutionaries were working, in particular of illegality, clandestinity, and repression. Lenin puts forward three points which are universally and historically valid, whose validity has indeed been confirmed over and over to this day. The first is that to be a communist militant is a voluntary and serious act (he uses the word “professional”, which was also taken up by the Mensheviks in the debates at the Congress). We have always agreed with this conception of militant commitment, which combats and rejects any dilettante attitude.
Secondly, Lenin defends a vision of the relations between militants which goes beyond the division between worker and intellectual,[21] [28] or “leader and led” as we would say today, which goes beyond any vision based on hierarchy or individual superiority, in a community of struggle within the party. He also opposes any division between militants by trade or industrial branch. He rejects in advance the factory cells which were set up during the “Bolshevisation” of the party, in the name of “Leninism”.[22] [29]
Finally, he considered that the party should “not be very large”. He was the first to see that the period of mass workers’ parties was coming to an end.[23] [30] Certainly, this clarity was fostered by conditions inside Russia. But it was the new conditions of the proletariat’s life and struggle, expressed especially in the “mass strike”, which also determined the new conditions of the activity of revolutionaries, in particular the “smaller”, minority nature of the revolutionary organisations in the period of capitalist decadence which opened at the beginning of the century.
“But it would be (...) ‘tail-endism’ to think that under capitalism the whole class, or almost the whole class, could one day raise itself to the point of acquiring the degree of consciousness and action of its vanguard, of its Social-Democratic Party”.[24] [31]
While Rosa Luxemburg, Pannekoek, and Trotsky were among the first to draw the lessons of the appearance of the mass strike and the workers’ councils, they remained prisoners of a vision of workers’ parties as mass political organisations. Rosa Luxemburg criticised Lenin from the standpoint of a mass party,[25] [32] to such a point that she too could fall into error, as when she wrote: “in reality, the social-democracy is not linked to the organisation of the working class, it is the very movement of the working class”.[26] [33] She too was a victim of her own “over-stating the case” in polemic, and of her position alongside the Mensheviks on the organisation question during the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, and so slid unhappily onto the terrain of the Mensheviks and the “economists” by drowning the organisation of revolutionaries in the class.[27] [34] She was to correct her position later, but it was Lenin who formulated most clearly the distinction between the organisation of the whole working class and the organisation of revolutionaries.
What is to be done?, and One step forward, two steps back, are thus essential political advances in the history of the workers’ movement. More precisely, the two works represent “practical” political gains on the organisational level. Like Lenin, the ICC has always considered the organisational question as a political question in its own right. The political organisation of the class is different from its unitary organisation, and this has practical implications, at its own level. Amongst them, it is essential to have a strict definition of what it means to join and belong to the party, in other words a definition of the militant, his tasks, his duties, his rights, in short his relation to the organisation. The battle at the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP around the first article of the statutes is well known: this was the first confrontation, within the Congress itself, between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. The difference between the formulations proposed by Lenin and Martov may appear insignificant:
For Lenin, “A party member is one who accepts the Party’s programme and supports the Party both financially and by personal participation in one of the Party organisations”. For Martov, “A member of the RSDLP is one who accepts the Party’s programme, supports the Party financially, and renders it regular personal assistance under the direction of one of its organisations”.
The divergence lies in the recognition as members of the Party either militants who belong to the Party and are recognised as such by the latter — Lenin’s position — or militants who do not formally belong to the Party, but who support it at one time or another, in one activity or another, or even simply who declare themselves as Social-Democrats. This position of Martov and the Mensheviks is thus broader, more “flexible”, less restrictive and less precise than Lenin’s.
Behind this difference lies a fundamental question which quickly came to light in the Congress, and which confronts revolutionary organisations to this day: who is a member of the Party, and — still more difficult to define — who is not?
For Martov, things were clear: “The more widespread the appellation of Party member, the better. We can only be glad if every striker, every demonstrator, taking responsibility for his actions, can declare himself a member of the Party”.[28] [35]
Martov’s position tends to dissolve the revolutionary organisation into the class. It comes back to the same “economism” which he had previously fought against, alongside Lenin. His argument in favour of his proposed Statute boils down to liquidating the very idea of a vanguard, unified Party, centralised and disciplined around a precise political programme, and a rigorous collective will to action. It also opens the door to opportunist policies of unprincipled “recruitment” of militants, which puts the Party’s long term development in hock to immediate results. It is Lenin who is correct:
“On the contrary, the stronger our organisations of real social-democrats, the less will be the hesitation and instability within the Party, and the wider, more varied, richer and more fruitful will be the Party’s influence on the elements of the working class around it, and led by it. It is impossible to confuse the Party, the vanguard of the working class, with the class as a whole”.[29] [36]
The extreme danger of Martov’s opportunist position on the organisation, recruitment, and membership of the Party very quickly appeared in the Congress with the intervention of Axelrod: “It is possible to be a sincere and devoted member of the social-democratic party, and yet be completely inapt for the organisation of a rigorously centralised combat”.[30] [37]
How can one be a member of the Party, a communist militant, an yet “inapt for the organisation of a rigorously centralised combat”? To accept such an idea would be as absurd as to accept the idea of a revolutionary and militant worker “inapt” for any collective class action. Any communist organisation can only accept militants who are apt for its discipline and the centralisation of its combat. How could it be otherwise? Unless we are to accept that there is no imperative demand on militants to respect the relationships of the organisation, the decisions it adopts, and the necessity of its combat. Unless, indeed, we reduce to ridicule the very notion of a communist organisation, which must be “the most determined fraction of all the workers’ parties in every country, the fraction that pulls forward all the others”.[31] [38] The proletariat’s historic struggle is a united class combat on the historical level, collective and centralised on the international level. Like their class, the communists’ combat is historic, international, permanent, united, collective and centralised, which is opposed to any individualist vision. “While critical consciousness and initiative are of a very limited value for individuals, they are fully realised in the collectivity of the Party”.[32] [39] Whoever is unable to take part in this centralised combat is inapt for militant activity and cannot be recognised as a member of the Party. “The Party should only admit elements capable of at least a minimum of organisation”.[33] [40]
This “aptitude” is the fruit of communists’ political and militant conviction. It is gained and developed in participation in the historic struggle of the proletariat, especially within its organised political minorities. For any consistent communist organisation, every new militant’s conviction in and “practical” — not platonic — aptitude for a rigorously centralised fighting organisation are both preconditions for his membership and a concrete expression of his political agreement with the communist programme.
The definition of the militant, of what it means to be a member of a communist organisation, is an essential question today. What is to be done? and One step forward, two steps back provide the foundations for our answers to many organisational questions. This is why the ICC has always based itself on the Bolshevik combat at the 2nd RSDLP Congress to distinguish clearly and firmly between a militant, who “participates personally in one of the Party organisations”, as Lenin insisted, and a sympathiser, a fellow-traveller who “accepts the Party’s programme, supports the Party financially, and renders it regular [or irregular, we would add] personal assistance under the direction of one of its organisations”, as it is put in Martov’s definition, which was eventually adopted by the 2nd Congress. In the same way, we have always defended the principle that “once you want to be a member of the Party, you must also recognise the relationships of the organisation, and not just platonically”.[34] [41]
None of this is new for the ICC. It is at the core of its constitution, as is proven by the Statutes adopted at its first International Congress in January 1976.
It would be wrong to think that this question no longer poses any problems today. Firstly, although its last political expressions are silent or on the point of disappearing,[35] [42] councilism remains today in some sort the heir to economism and Menshevism at the organisational level. In a period of greater working class activity, there is no doubt that councilist pressure to “deceive oneself, close one’s eyes to the immensity of our tasks, restrict these tasks [by forgetting] the difference between the vanguard detachment and the masses that surround it”,[36] [43] will find a renewed vigour. Then again, even in the milieu which claims its heritage solely from the Italian Left and from Lenin, in other words the Bordigist current and the IBRP, Lenin’s method and political thought on organisation issues is far from being put fully into practice. We need only consider the Bordigist PCI’s unprincipled recruitment policy during the 1970s. This kind of activist and immediatist policy ended up provoking the PCI’s explosion in 1982. We need only consider the lack of rigour of the IBRP (which regroups the CWO in Britain and Battaglia Comunista in Italy), which sometimes has difficulty in deciding who is a militant of the organisation and who is only a sympathiser or a close contact, despite all the dangers of such organisational vagueness.[37] [44] Opportunism on the organisational question is today one of the most dangerous poisons for the proletarian political milieu. Unfortunately, the incantation of Lenin and the “compact and powerful party” are no antidote.
What does Rosa Luxemburg say in her polemic with Lenin on the question of the militant and his membership of the party?
“The conception expressed here [ie., in One step forward, two steps back] in a rigorous and exhaustive manner is that of a relentless centralism. The life-principle of this centralism is, on the one hand, the sharp accentuation of the distinction of the organised troops of explicit and active revolutionaries from the unorganised, though revolutionary, milieu which surrounds them; on the other hand, it is the strict discipline and the direct, decisive, and determining intervention of the central committee in all activities of the local organisations of the party”.[38] [45]
Although Luxemburg does not take an explicit position against Lenin’s precise definition of the militant, her ironic tone in writing of “the organised troops of explicit and active revolutionaries”, and her complete silence when it comes to the political battle in the Congress around article 1 of the Statutes, show that her position at the time was incorrect, and paralleled that of the Mensheviks. She remained a prisoner of the vision of a mass party which the German social-democracy of the day put forward as an example. She did not see the problem, and in fact avoids it by missing the point of the debate. Her silence on the debate around article 1 of the Statutes means that Lenin was right to reply that she “limits herself to repeating empty phrases without trying to give them a meaning. She holds up scarecrows without going to the heart of the debate. She has me uttering commonplaces, general ideas, and absolute truths and tries to remain silent on the relative truths which are based on precise facts”.[39] [46]
As with Plekhanov and many others, Luxemburg’s general considerations — even when they are correct in themselves — do not answer the real political questions posed by Lenin. As we said in 1979, “Luxemburg’s general concern was correct — the insistence on the collective character of the workers’ movement — but the insistence that ‘the emancipation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves’ brought with it incorrect practical conclusions”.[40] [47] She misses the political gains in the Bolsheviks’ combat.
Without the debate on article 1, the question of the party, clearly defined and clearly distinct both organisationally and politically from the working class as a whole, would not have been definitively settled. Without Lenin’s fight for article 1, the question would not be a prime political gain on organisational matters, on which today’s communists must lean in building their organisation, not just when it comes to accepting new militants, but also and above all for establishing clear, rigorous relations between the militants and the revolutionary organisation.
Is this defence of Lenin’s position on article 1 something new for the ICC? Have we changed position? “To be a member of the ICC, [the militant] must integrate into the organisation, participate actively in its work, and carry out the tasks which are allotted to him” says the article in our own Statutes which deals with the question of militant membership of the ICC. It is perfectly clear that we have adopted, without any ambiguity, Lenin’s conception, the spirit and even the letter of the Statutes that he proposed to the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, and certainly not those of Martov or Trotsky. It is a pity that the ex-members of the ICC who today accuse us of becoming “Leninists” have forgotten what they themselves adopted at the time. Undoubtedly they were guilty of doing so without thinking, in the flush of post-68 student enthusiasm. At all events, it is particularly dishonest of them to accuse the ICC of having changed position, and to claim that it is they who are faithful to the true, original ICC.
We have briefly presented our conception of the revolutionary militant, and shown how much it owes to Lenin’s contribution in What is to be done? and One step forward, two steps back. We have emphasised the importance of translating this definition of the militant as faithfully and as rigorously as possible into daily militant practice, through the organisation’s Statutes. Here again, we have always been faithful to Lenin’s method and the lessons he has left on organisational matters. The political struggle to establish precise rules regulating organisational relationships, in other words Statutes, is fundamental. The struggle to have them respected is equally so, of course. Without this, grand declarations on the Party remain mere empty words.
In the framework of this article, space prevents us from setting out our conception of the unity of the political organisation, and showing how Lenin’s struggle at the RSDLP’s 2nd Congress against the survival of circles, is a considerable theoretical and political contribution. But we want to insist on the necessity of the practical importance of translating the need for this unity into the organisation’s Statutes:: “The unitary nature of the ICC is also expressed in these Statutes” (ICC Statutes). Lenin expressed this reason and necessity very well.
“Aristocratic anarchism does not understand that formal Statutes are necessary precisely to replace the limited ties of the circles with the wider ties of the Party. The ties within or between circles neither could nor should have taken on a precise form, since it was based on camaraderie and uncontrolled and unmotivated ‘confidence’. Party ties cannot and must not be based on either the one or the other, but on formal statutes, drawn up ‘bureaucratically’[41] [48] (from the standpoint of the undisciplined intellectual), and whose strict observation will alone guard us from the whims and caprices of the circles, against their petty arguments called the free ‘process’ of ideological struggle”.[42] [49]
The same is true of the organisation’s centralisation against any federalism, localism, or vision which sees the organisation as a sum of parties or even autonomous revolutionary individuals. “The international congress is the sovereign body of the ICC” (ICC Statutes). On this level also, we consider ourselves the heirs of Lenin and of the necessary practical expression of his combat in the organisation’s statutes, both for the RSDLP of the time, and for the organisations of today.
“At the time when we are re-establishing the real unity of the 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”.[43] [50]
The same is true for internal political life: Lenin’s contribution is particularly concerned with internal debate, the duty — not merely the right — to express any disagreement within an organisational framework and to the organisation as a whole; and once debates are settled and decisions taken by the Congress (which is the sovereign body, the organisation’s general assembly in effect), then the subordination of both parts and individual militants to the whole. Contrary to the widespread ieda that Lenin was a dictator who sought only to stifle debate and political life within the organisation, in reality he consistently opposed the Menshevik vision of the Congress as “a recorder, a controller, but not a creator”.[44] [51]
For Lenin and for the ICC, the Congress is a “creator”. In particular, we utterly reject the idea of binding mandates for delegates to the Congress, which is contrary to the widest, most dynamic, and most fruitful debate, and which would reduce the Congress to being nothing but a “recorder”, as Trotsky wanted in 1903. A “recording” congress would enshrine the supremacy of the parts over the whole, the reign of “everyman master in his own house”, of localism and federalism. A “recording and controlling” congress is the negation of the congress’ sovereign nature. Like Lenin, we are for the congress as “sovereign body” of the party, and which must have the power of decision and “creation”. The “creative” congress implies delegates who are not the prisoners of binding mandates.[45] [52]
The fact that the congress is the sovereign body also implies its preponderance over all the different parts of the communist organisation, in programmatic, political, and organisational terms.
“‘The Congress is the supreme instance of the Party’. Consequently, anyone who in one way or another prevents a delegate from addressing the Congress on any question of the life of the Party, without reserve or exception, transgresses the discipline of the Party and the rule of the Congress. 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”.[46] [53]
On these points also we not only claim the heritage of Lenin’s combat, we express these conceptions whose heirs we are, and which we believe we continue, in our own organisational rules, in other words in our Statutes.
We have seen that neither Luxemburg nor Trotsky reply to Lenin on article 1 of the Statutes. They completely ignore both this question and that of the Statutes in general. They prefer to remain at the level of abstract generalities. And when they deign to evoke the Statutes, they completely underestimate them. At best, they consider the political organisation’s Statutes as nothing more than safety barriers, indicating the edge of the road and the limits not to be crossed. At worst, they see them as nothing more than tools of repression, exceptional measures to be used only with extreme caution. We should point out in passing that this vision of the statutes is the same as that of Stalinism, which also sees the statutes as instruments of repression, though without the “caution”.
For Trotsky, Lenin’s formulation of article 1 would have left “the platonic satisfaction [of having] discovered the surest statutory remedy against opportunism (...) Without a doubt this a simplistic, typically administrative way of resolving a serious practical question”.[47] [54]
Without realising it of course, Luxemburg herself answers Trotsky, when she says that in the case of a party that is already formed (eg a mass social-democratic party as in Germany), “a more rigorous application of the idea of centralism in the constitution and a stricter application of party discipline can no doubt be a useful safeguard against the opportunist current”.[48] [55] She agrees with Lenin for the German case, ie in general. By contrast, for the Russian case, she begins with “abstract truths” (“opportunist errors cannot be warded off in advance; only after they have taken on tangible forms in practice can they be overcome through the movement itself”), which are meaningless, and which in reality justify “in advance” any renunciation in the struggle against opportunism on organisational matters. Which she does not fail to do later on, still in the case of the Russian party, by making fun of the statutes as “paper paragraphs”, and “penpushers’ methods”, considering them as exceptional measures:
“The party constitution should not be seen as a kind of self-sufficient weapon against opportunism but merely as an external means through which the decisive influence of the present proletarian-revolutionary majority of the party can be exercised”.[49] [56]
We have never agreed with Rosa Luxemburg on this point: “Luxemburg continued to reiterate that it was for the mass movement to overcome opportunism; revolutionaries could not accelerate this movement artificially (...) Luxemburg never came to understand the fact that the collective character of revolutionary activity is something which grows and develops”.[50] [57] On the question of the statutes, we are and always have been in agreement with Lenin.
For Lenin, the statutes are much more than mere formal rules of functioning, rules to which we appeal in exceptional circumstances. Unlike Luxemburg, or the Mensheviks, Lenin defined the statutes as rules of conduct, the spirit which should animate the organisation and its militants from day to day. Far from understanding the statutes as a means of coercion and repression, Lenin saw them as weapons determining the responsibility of different parts of the organisation and of militants towards the whole political organisation; imposing a duty of open, public expression of political difficulties and disagreements before the whole organisation.
Lenin did not think of the expression of viewpoints, nuances, discussions, or disagreements as a right of militants, a right of the individual against the organisation, but rather as a duty and responsibility towards the whole party and its members. The communist militant is responsible, before his comrades in struggle, for the party’s political and organisational unity. The statutes are tools at the service of the unity and centralisation of the organisation, and therefore weapons against federalism, against the circle spirit, against cronyism, against any parallel life and discussion within the organisation. For Lenin, the statutes are not simply external limits, they are more than just rules: they are a political, organisational, and militant way of life.
“Controversial questions, within the circles, were not settled according to the statutes, ‘but through struggle and threats to leave’ (..) When I was only a member of a circle (...) I had the right, to justify for example my refusal to work with X, merely to invoke my uncontrolled, unmotivated distrust. Now that I am a member of the Party, I no longer have the right to invoke solely a vague suspicion, since this would open the door to the crazes and extravagances of the old circles; I am obliged to give a motive for my confidence or ‘suspicion’ with formal arguments, in other words to this or that formally established measure of our programme, our tactics, or our statutes. My duty is to no longer content myself with an uncontrolled ‘I have confidence’ or ‘I have no confidence’, but to recognise that I am accountable for my decisions, just as any fraction of the Party is for its, before the Party as a whole; I must follow a formally defined path to express my ‘distrust’, to win others over to the ideas and desires which spring from this distrust. We have risen from the uncontrolled ‘confidence’ of the circles to a party conception, which demands the observation of strict procedures and determined motives to express and verify confidence”.[51] [58]
The revolutionary organisation’s statutes are not merely exceptional measures, safety barriers. They are the concretisation of the organisational principles proper to the proletariat’s political vanguards. They are the products of these principles, at one and the same time a weapon in the fight against organisational opportunism, and the foundation on which the revolutionary organisation must be built. They are the expression of its unity, its centralisation, its political and organisational life, and its class character. They are the rule and the spirit which must guide the militants from day to day in their relations with the organisation and other militants, in the tasks entrusted to them, in their rights and duties, and in their daily personal life, which can be in contradiction neither with their militant activity nor with communist principles.
For us, as for Lenin, the organisational question is a political question in its own right. More than that, it is a fundamental political question. The adoption of statutes and the constant fight for their observance lie at the heart of an understanding of and the battle for the construction of the political organisation. The statutes are also a theoretical and political question in their own right. Is this a discovery for our organisation? A change of position?
“The ICC’s unitary nature is expressed also in the present statutes, which are valid for the whole organisation (...) These statutes constitute a concrete application of the ICC’s conceptions in organisational matters. As such, they form an integral part of the ICC’s platform” (Statutes of the ICC).
In the struggle of the proletariat, this struggle of Lenin was an essential moment in the formation of its political organ, which was finally concretised with the foundation of the Communist International in March 1919. Before Lenin, the First International (the International Workingmen’s Association) had been an equally important moment. An important moment after Lenin was the fight of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left for its own organisational survival.
There is a red thread, a continuity of organisational theory, principles, and politics, that runs through these different experiences. Today’s revolutionaries can only anchor their action in this historic continuity.
We have quoted extensively from our own texts, which show unambiguously what is our heritage as far as the organisational question is concerned. Our method, in re-appropriating the political and theoretical gains of the workers’ movement is not an invention of the ICC. We are the heirs of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left and its publication Bilan in the 1930s, and of the Communist Left of France and its review Internationalisme in the 1940s. This is the same method we have always used, and without which the ICC would not exist, or at least not in its present form.
“The most complete expression of the solution to the problem of the role of the conscious element, the Party, in the victory of socialism, has been given by the group of Russian marxists of the old Iskra, and notably by Lenin who as early as 1902 has given a definition in principle of the problem of the party in his remarkable work What is to be done? Lenin’s notion of the Party was to serve as a backbone to the Bolsheviks, and was to be one of that party’s greatest contributions to the international struggle of the proletariat”.[52] [59]
There is no doubt that the world communist party of tomorrow will not be formed without Lenin’s contributions in the matter of principle, theory, politics, and organisation. The real — and not merely verbal — re-appropriation of these gains, along with their rigorous and systematic application to today’s conditions, is one of the most important tasks for today’s little communist groups, if they are to contribute to the process of formation of this Party.
RL
[1] [60] ICC pamphlet on Communist Organisations and Class Consciousness, 1979
[2] [61] Kautsky, quoted by Lenin in What is to be done?
[3] [62] Trotsky in Our political tasks.
[4] [63] From the proceedings of the 1903 Congress
[5] [64] P. Axelrod, On the origins and meaning of our organisational differences, letter to Kautsky, 1904.
[6] [65] G. Plekhanov, The working class and the social-democratic intellectuals, 1904.
[7] [66] See Luxemburg’s 1906 Mass strike, party, and unions, and Trotsky’s 1905, written in 1908-09.
[8] [67] See the first part of this article in International Review no.96.
[9] [68] Lenin, Report on 1905, written in 1917.
[10] [69] Lenin, What is to be done?
[11] [70] Marx’s work is much clearer on the question. But much of the latter was unknown to revolutionaries of the day, being either unavailable or unpublished. A basic work on the question of consciousness, The German Ideology, was only published for the first time in 1932!
[12] [71] Lenin, What is to be done?
[13] [72] Idem.
[14] [73] Communist organisations and class consciousness, ICC pamphlet, 1979.
[15] [74] This article (International Review no.57) was written, not by the ICC but by the comrades of the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista, which was later to form the ICC’s section in Mexico.
[16] [75] “Class consciousness and the Party”, in (International Review no.57), 1989.
[17] [76] Amidst all the lies of the bourgeoisie, we should note the little contribution from RV, ex-militant of the ICC, who declares that “there is a real continuity and coherence between the conceptions of 1903 and actions like the banning of fractions within the Bolshevik Party or the crushing of the Kronstadt workers’ revolt” (RV, “Prise de position sur l’évolution récente du CCI”, published by us in our pamphlet La prétendue paranoia du CCI).
[18] [77] Lenin, April Theses.
[19] [78] Lenin, What is to be done?
[20] [79] Idem.
[21] [80] We hardly need to remind our reader here of the low educational level, and the extent of illiteracy among Russian workers at the time. This did not prevent Lenin from considering that they should and could take part in the activity of the party in just the same way as the “intellectuals”.
[22] [81] See the first part of this article in the previous issue.
[23] [82] “He also turned away from the Social Democratic conception of a mass party. For Lenin the new conditions of struggle meant that there was a need for a minority vanguard party which would work for the transformation of economic struggles into political ones” (Communist organisations and class consciousness, ICC, 1979).
[24] [83] Lenin, One step forward, two steps back.
[25] [84] “This militant, who had passed through the school of social-democracy, developed such an unconditional attachment to the mass character of the revolutionary movement that, for her, the party had to adapt itself to anything which bore this character” (Communist organisations...).
[26] [85] Rosa Luxemburg, Questions of organisation in Russian social-democracy.
[27] [86] Our reader will have remarked also that this position leaves the door wide open to the position that sees the party substituting itself for the action of the working class, to the point where it exercises state power in the name of the class, or attempts to carry out “putschist” actions, as the Stalinists were to do in the 1920s.
[28] [87] Martov, quoted by Lenin in One step forward, two steps back.
[29] [88] Lenin, One step forward, two steps back.
[30] [89] Proceedings of the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, translated from the Spanish “Era” edition by us.
[31] [90] Marx, Communist Manifesto.
[32] [91] Theses on the tactics of the Communist Party of Italy (Rome Theses), 1922.
[33] [92] Lenin, One step forward, two steps back.
[34] [93] The Bolshevik Pavlovich, quoted by Lenin in One step forward, two steps back.
[35] [94] See World Revolution no.222 for our response to the decision by the Dutch group Daad en Gedachte to cease publication.
[36] [95] Lenin, One step forward, two steps back.
[37] [96] We have already criticised the vagueness and opportunism of BC in Italy on this question with regard to the militants of the GLP (see World Revolution no.220). The case is not an isolated one. An article recently appeared on the IBRP web site (www.ibrp.org [97]) entitled “Should revolutionaries work in reactionary trades unions?”. In this unsigned article (retranslated back from the French by us), whose author could be a member of the CWO, the question of the title is answered: “materialists, not idealists, must answer in the affirmative”. Two arguments are put forward: “There are many combative workers in the unions”, and “communists should not despise organisations which regroup masses of workers” (sic). This position completely contradicts that of Battaglia at its last Congress (and therefore we presume of the IBRP), which defends the idea that “there can be no real defence of workers’ interests, even their most immediate interests, other than outside and against the union line”. Above all, the problem is that we have no idea who wrote the article: a militant or a sympathiser of the IBRP? And in either case, why no position on it, why no criticism? Did the comrades forget? Or is it out of opportunism in order to recruit a new militant who apparently has not completely broken with leftism? Or is this simply an under-estimation of the organisational question? Once again, for the groups of the IBRP this is reminiscent of Martov. Since then, the text has been withdrawn from the web site, without further comment.
[38] [98] Rosa Luxemburg, “Organisational questions of Russian social-democracy”, in Selected Political Writings, Monthly Review Press, 1971.
[39] [99] Lenin, “Reply to Rosa Luxemburg”, published in Trotsky, Nos tâches politiques, Edition Belfond.
[40] [100] Communist organisations and class consciousness.
[41] [101] Another example of Lenin’s polemical method, which took up his opponents’ accusations to turn them against them (see the first part of this article).
[42] [102] Lenin, One step forward, two steps back.
[43] [103] Idem.
[44] [104] Trotsky, Report of the Siberian delegation.
[45] [105] Eberlein, delegate of the German Communist Party to what was originally to have been no more than an international conference in March 1919, was mandated to oppose the foundation of the Third, Communist, International. It was clear for all the participants, in particular the Bolshevik leaders Lenin, Trotsky, and Zinoviev, that the International could not be formed without the German CP. Had Eberlein remained a “prisoner” of his imperative mandate, deaf to the debates and the dynamic of the conference, then the International as world party of the proletariat would never have been founded.
[46] [106] Lenin, One step forward, two steps back.
[47] [107] Trotsky, Report of the Siberian delegation.
[48] [108] Rosa Luxemburg, “Organisational questions of Russian social-democracy”.
[49] [109] Idem.
[50] [110] Communist organisations and class consciousness.
[51] [111] Lenin, One step forward, two steps back.
[52] [112] Internationalisme, no.4, 1945.
The war which has just broken out in ex-Yugoslavia, with the bombardment of Serbia by NATO forces, is the most serious event on the scene of world imperialism since the collapse of the Eastern bl of world imperialism since the collapse of the Eastern bloc in 1989. Although the forces in operation remain far fewer, for the moment, than during the Gulf War in 1991, the significance of the present conflict is of a different order of magnitude altogether. Today, the barbarity of war is unleashed in the heart of Europe, no more than a couple of hours away from its major capitals. This was already true during the previous conflicts which have ravaged ex-Yugoslavia since 1991 and which have already claimed hundreds of thousands of victims. But this time, it is the great capitalist powers themselves, including the USA, which are the direct protagonists of the war.
This war in Europe is of such importance because this is the continent where capitalism was born, which is still the worlds major industrial region, and which has been both the major prize and the epicentre of all the 20th Centurys great imperialist conflicts, from the First and Second World Wars onwards. Europe was the stake in the Cold War which opposed the US and Russian blocs for more than 40 years, even though the episodes of open war were fought out in the periphery (Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East, etc). Amongst other things, the present conflict is taking place in a particularly sensitive area of the continent: the Balkans, whose geographical (far more than its economic) position has made it one of the most fought-over places on the planet ever since World War I. We should not forget that World War I began in Sarajevo.
Finally, another element gives a particular dimension to the present conflict: the direct and active participation of Germany in the fighting, and in an important position. For more than 50 years, its defeat in World War II has forced Germany to forego any military intervention. The fact that the German bourgeoisie has today returned to the battlefield is indicative of the general aggravation of military tension, which can only get worse as decadent capitalism sinks further into its insoluble economic crisis.
The politicians and media of NATO present the war as an action in defence of "human rights", against a peculiarly revolting regime which is responsible, amongst its other misdeeds, for the "ethnic cleansing" which has stained Yugoslavia in blood since 1991. In reality, the "democratic" powers care not a jot for the population of Kosot a jot for the population of Kosovo, just as they are completely indifferent to the fate of the Kurd and Shiite populations of Iraq, which they left to be massacred by the troops of Saddam Hussein after the Gulf War. The sufferings inflicted by dictators on persecuted civilian populations have always been the pretext for the great "democracies" to unleash "just" war. This was the case, in particular, during World War II, when the extermination of the Jews by the Hitler regime (which the Allies did nothing to stop, even when they could have done so) served as a justification for the crimes committed by the "democracies": amongst others, the 250,000 killed by Allied bombardments in Dresden alone during the night of 13th-14th February 1945, or the civilian populations liquidated by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th and 9th August 1945. If the media have been inundating us for weeks with images of the tragedy of hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanian refugees fleeing Milosevics barbarity, it is to justify NATOs military campaign, which was initially greeted with considerable scepticism, if not outright hostility, by the populations of the NATO countries. It is also intended to gain their support for the last phase of Operation "Determined Force", should the bombing fail to subdue Milosevic: a ground offensive, which could lead to extensive casualties amongst Allied troops as well as the Serbs.
In reality, the "humanitarian disaster" of the refugees from Kosovo was both foreseen and desired by the "democracies", to justify their war plans: just as the massacre of the Kurds and Shiites in Iraq was provoked deliberately when the Allies called on them to revolt against Saddam Hussein during the war.
But it is not at Belgrades door, or even Washingtons, that we should lay responsibility for this war. It is capitalism as a whole that is responsible for the war, and the barbarism of war, with all the massacres, genocide, and atrocities that it brings in its wake, will only come to an end when capitalism is overthrown by the world working class. Otherwise, capitalism will drag the whole of human society down with it in its death throes.
Communists have a duty of solidarity in the face of imperialist war and all its atrocities. But this solidarity does not go to this or that nation or people, which include both victims and executioners, the exploited and the exploiters, whether the latter have the face of a Milosevic, or the nationalist clique of the KLA which is already forcibly recruiting men of fighting age from the refugee columns. Communist solidarity is class solidarity, towards the workers and exploited whether Serb or Albanian, to the workers in uniform who are killed or transformed into assassins in the name of the "Fatherland" or "Democracy". And it is first and foremost up to the world proletariats biggest battalions, the workers of Europe and North America, to demonstrate this solidarity, not by marching behind the banners of pacifism but by developing their struggles against capitalism, against their exploiters in their own countries.
Communists have the duty to denounce with equal force both the pacifists and the warmongers. Pacifism is one of the proletariats worst enemies. It cultivates the illusion that "good will" or "international negotiations" can put an end to wars. By doing so, it maintains the lie that there could exist a "goie that there could exist a "good" capitalism, respectful of "peace" and "human" rights, and so turns the workers away from the class struggle against capitalism as a whole. Worse still, they become the recruiting sergeants for military "crusades", with the argument: "Since wars are provoked by bad, nationalist, bloodthirsty capitalists, we will only have peace when we liquidate these bad capitalists... by making war on them if need be". We have seen exactly this in Germany, where the main leader of the 1980s pacifist movements, Joschka Fischer, is today the man mainly responsible for his countrys imperialist policy. He is even proud of it, declaring that "For the first time for a long time, Germany is making war in a good cause".
From the first days of the war, the internationalists, with their modest means, have spoken out against the imperialist barbarism. On 25th March, the ICC published a leaflet which it is distributing to the workers of 13 countries, and which our readers will find in our territorial publications. Nor was our organisation the only one to react in defence of the internationalist position. All the groups which consider themselves part of the Communist Left reacted at the same moment, putting forward the same internationalist principles (1). In the next issue of the International Review, we will return in more detail to the positions and analyses developed by these different groups. But we must start by emphasising everything that unites us (the defence of internationalist positions, as they were expressed at the conferences of Kienthal and Zimmerwald during World War I, as well as in the first congresses of the Communist International), and which opposes us to all those organisations (Trotskyists, Stalinists, etc.), which while claiming to belong to the working class inject the poison of nationalism or pacifism into it.
Obviously, the role of communists is not limited to defending their principles, however important and fundamental this task may be. It consists also of providing an analysis which will allow the working class to understand what is at stake, what are the elements in play, what are the main aspects of the international situation. The analysis of the war in Yugoslavia, which had only just begun, was one of the main axes of the un, was one of the main axes of the ICCs 13th Congress, held at the beginning of April. In the next issue of the International Review, we will return to this Congress, but in this issue we are publishing the resolution on the international situation which it adopted, much of which is devoted to the present war.
10th April, 1999
1) International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, Partito Comunista Internazionale -- Il Programma Comunista, Partito Comunista Internazionale --
Il Comunista, Partito Comunista Internazionale --
Il Partito Comunista.
In the previous article in this series, in International Review no 95, we showed how the capacity of the bourgeoisie to prevent the international extension of the revolution, and the reflux of the international wave of struggles, sparked off an opportunist reaction in the Communist International. This opportunistic turn by the CI met the resistance of those forces who were later to be called the communist left. The slogan of the 2nd Congress “to the masses” - rejected by the left communist groups - was already at the centre of the debate in 1920; and the 3rd Congress of the CI, held in 1921, was a vital moment in the battle of the communist left against the tendency to subordinate the interests of the world revolution to the interests of the Russian state.
The contribution of the KAPD
At the 3rd World Congress of the CI, the KAPD intervened for the first time directly in the debates, developing a whole range of criticisms of the CI’s entire approach. In its interventions in the sessions on the economic crisis and the new tasks of the CI, on the activities report of the ECCI, on the question of tactics and the union question, and above all in relation to the developments in Russia, the KAPD always stressed the leading role of revolutionaries; but in contrast to the concepts of the majority of the CI, the KAPD insisted that it was no longer possible to form mass parties.
While the delegates from Italy, who in 1920 had defended their minority position on parliamentarism so heroically against the CI, said very little on the developments in Russia and on the relationship between the Soviet government and the CI, it was the merit of the KAPD to have raised this question at the 3rd Congress.
Before we deal in more depth with the positions and the attitude of the KAPD, it should be stressed that in view of the new epoch, and the rapid unfolding of events, the KAPD was far from being a homogenous and united party. While the KAPD had the courage to start drawing the lessons of the new epoch in relation to the parliamentary and union question, and saw that it was no longer possible to maintain a mass party, it also lacked a certain caution, circumspection and political rigor in the assessment of the balance of forces and in relation to the organisation question. Rather than using all available means to struggle for the defence of the organisation, it tended to take hasty decisions.
Not surprisingly the KAPD shared many confusions of the revolutionary movement of the time. Like the Bolsheviks they also thought the party would have to seize power. And according to the KAPD the post-insurrectionary state would be made up of the workers’ councils.
At the 3rd Congress the KAPD delegation addressed the question of the relationship between the state and the party in the following manner: “We do not for a moment forget the difficulties into which Russian Soviet power has fallen owing to the postponement of the world revolution. But we also see the danger that out of these difficulties there may arise an apparent or real contradiction between the interests of the revolutionary world proletariat and the momentary interests of Soviet Russia’ (Hempel, cited in Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-23, Volume 3, p. 393). “But the political and organisational separation of the 3rd International from the system of Russian State policy is the goal that we have to work towards, if we want to meet the conditions of revolution in Western Europe (Minutes of the Congress, p224).
At the 3rd Congress the KAPD tended to underestimate the consequences of the fact that the bourgeoisie had managed to prevent the revolutionary wave from spreading. They should have seen the implications of the fact that the international extension of the revolution had been thwarted. They should have taken up the argumentation of Rosa Luxemburg, who had already understood in 1917 that “in Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia, it can only be solved internationally”. And they should have based themselves on the appeal of the Spartakusbund of November 1918, who warned that “if the ruling classes in your countries manage to strangle the proletarian revolution in Germany and in Russia, then they will turn against you with even bigger force (...) Germany is pregnant with social revolution, but socialism can only be accomplished by the world proletariat.” (Spartakusbund, November 1918). The KAPD did not place sufficient emphasis on the disastrous consequences of the failure of the revolution to extend. Instead it tended to look for the roots of the problems within Russia itself.
“The shining idea of a Communist International is and remains alive, but it is no longer tied to the existence of Soviet Russia. The star of Soviet Russia has lost much of its attraction in the eyes of revolutionary workers, to the extent that Soviet Russia is developing more and more into an anti-proletarian, petty-capitalist peasant state. It is no pleasure to say such a thing, but we have to know that the clear understanding even of the toughest facts, that the ruthless expression of such insights is the only condition for developing the atmosphere which the revolution needs to remain alive. (...) We have to understand that the Russian Communists, due to the conditions of the country, due to the composition of the population, due to the context of the international situation, had no other choice but to establish a dictatorship of the party, which was the only firmly functioning, disciplined organism in the country; we have to understand that the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks was absolutely correct despite all the difficulties, and that the workers of western and central Europe carry the main responsibility for the fact that today Soviet Russia, since it cannot rely on the revolutionary forces of other countries, is compelled to rely on the capitalist forces.
It is a fact that Soviet Russia has to rely on the capitalist forces of Europe and America (...). Since Soviet Russia is forced today to rely on capitalist forces in the area of internal and external economic policy, how long will Soviet Russia remain what it is? How long and how will the RCP still remain the same RCP that it used to be? Will it be able to do this by remaining a governing party? And if - in order to remain a communist party - it can no longer be a governing party, what do we think the further development of Russia would look like? (‘The Soviet Government and the 3rd International’, Kommunistische Arbeiterzeitung, autumn 1921).
While the KAPD had become aware of the dangers threatening the working class, it offered the wrong explanation. Instead of underlining that the lifeblood of the revolution, the activity of the soviets, was being cut off because the revolution had became more and more isolated; instead of seeing that this made it possible for the state to strengthen at the expense of the working class, leading to the disarming of the soviets, strangling the workers’ initiatives, and to the Bolshevik Party being more and more absorbed by the state - the KAPD tended to opt for a deterministic, and in reality fatalistic argumentation. By claiming, as the KAPD did, that “the Russian Communists due to the conditions of the country, due to the composition of the population, due to the context of the international situation had no other choice but to establish a dictatorship of the party”, it made it impossible to understand how the working class in Russia, organised in its soviets, was able to seize power in October 1917. The idea of the rise of a “petty-capitalist peasant state” is also a distortion of reality, since it downplayed the danger of the consequences of the international isolation of the revolution and of the rise of state capitalism. These ideas, formulated in this text only as a first explanation, were later developed into a fully fledged theoretical explanation by the council communists.
The ICC has exposed the mistaken and unmarxist ideas of the councilists in relation to the development in Russia (see our articles in International Review 12 & 13, reproduced in our pamphlet October 1917, Start of the World Revolution, and our book on the Dutch left).
In particular we reject:
-the theory of a double revolution, which arose in some parts of the KAPD in 1921 with the reflux in the revolutionary wave and the emergence of state capitalism. According to this view, a proletarian revolution had occurred in Russia in the industrial centres and at the same time there had been a democratic peasant revolution on the countryside;
-the fatalism which is hidden behind the idea that the revolution in Russia was necessarily going to succumb to the weight of the peasantry and that the Bolsheviks were predestined from the start to degenerate;
-the separation between different geographical areas (the theory of the meridian), according to which there are different conditions and means of revolution in Russia and in western Europe;
-the wrong approach to the question of trade relations with the west, because this gave rise to the illusion that money could be abolished immediately in one country and that it was possible to hold out or to even construct socialism in one country in the longer term.
We shall now go into the debate at that time and take up in a more detailed manner the positions of the KAPD, to show how much the groups of the communist left were searching for clarity.
The growing conflict between the Russian state and the interests of the world revolution
At a time when the CI was unconditionally supporting the foreign policy of the Russian state, the KAPD delegation put its finger on the real issue:
‘We all remember the incredibly strong propagandistic effect of the diplomatic declarations of Soviet Russia at a time when the Workers’ and Peasant Government did not have to take into consideration the need to sign trade deals... The revolutionary movement of Asia, which is a great hope for all of us and a necessity for the world revolution, can be supported by Soviet Russia neither officially nor unofficially. The English agents in Afghanistan, Persia, and Turkey are working very cleverly, and every revolutionary step of Russia undermines the implementation of the trade deals. Given this situation, who has to direct the foreign policy of Soviet Russia? Who has to take decisions? The Russian trade representatives in England, Germany, America, Sweden etc.? Whether they are communists or not, they have to practice a policy of agreement.
As far as the situation within Russia is concerned there are similar if not more dangerous effects. In reality political power now lies in the hands of the Communist Party (and not in the hands of the soviets) (...) whereas the scarce revolutionary masses in the party feel that their initiatives are being inhibited and look at the tactics of manoeuvring with growing suspicion; in particular there is a big apparatus of functionaries, a growing influence of those forces who joined the Communist Party not because it is a Communist Party, but because it is a governing party’
Whereas most delegates more and more uncritically backed up the Bolshevik party, which was in the process of being integrated into the state apparatus, the delegation had the courage to point to the contradiction between the working class and its party on the one hand, and the state on the other:
‘Since the RCP has eliminated the initiative of revolutionary workers and eliminates it even more, since it has to offer more space to capital than previously, it has started to change its character despite all precautionary measures; however long it remains a governing party it cannot prevent the economic basis that it is founded upon as a governing party from becoming more and more shattered, which means that the foundations of its political power are becoming more and more limited.
What would happen to Russia, and to the revolutionary development in the whole world, once the Russian party was no longer a governing party, is a question that can hardly be overlooked. And yet things are moving in a direction, whereby if there are no revolutionary risings in Europe acting as a counterweight, it will become necessary for this question to be posed in all seriousness. We have to pose the question very seriously: would it not be better to give up state power in Russia in the interest of proletarian revolution instead of clinging to it (...)
The same Russian Communist Party, which is now in such a critical situation in relation to its role as a communist and as a governing party, is also the absolutely leading party of the 3rd International (...). This is where the tragic knot can be seen, where the 3rd International has been caught up in such a way that its revolutionary lifeblood is being strangled. The Russian comrades under the decisive influence of Lenin not only do not create a counter-weight in the 3rd International against the Russian state’s policy of regression, but they do everything to synchronise the politics of the International with this curve of regression (...) Today the 3rd International is a tool of the Soviet government’s reformist policy of entente.
Surely, Lenin, Bukharin etc are real revolutionaries to the bottom of their in their hearts, but they have become like the whole central committee of the party carriers of state authority, and they thus inevitably have submitted to the law of the development of a necessarily conservative policy’ (KAZ, ‘Moscow Politics’, autumn 1921).
At the ensuing extraordinary congress of the KAPD in September 1921 Goldstein said the following: “...Will it be possible for the CP of Russia to reconcile these two contradictions in some way or other in the long-term? Today the RCP shows already a double character. On the one hand since it is still a governing party in Russia, it has to represent the interests of Russia as a state, and on the other hand it has to and wants to represent the interests of international class struggle’ (Extraordinary Congress of the KAPD, Sept. 1921, p. 59).
The German left communists were quite right to point out the role of the Russian state in the opportunistic degeneration of the Communist International, and to defend the interests of the world revolution against the interests of the Russian state.
However, as we said above, the first and principal cause of the opportunist turn of the International was not the role of the Russian state, but the failure of the extension of the revolution to the western countries, and the subsequent retreat of the international class struggle. Thus, whereas the KAPD tended to mainly blame the Russian CP for this opportunism, in reality the unprincipled “adjustment” to the social democratic illusions of the masses profoundly affected all the workers’ parties at that time. In fact, well before the Russian Communists, and in defiance of the policies of the CI at that moment, it was the leadership of the KPD in Germany itself which was the first to impose this opportunist turn after the defeat of January 1919 in Berlin, excluding the left, the future KAPD, from the party in the process.
In reality, the weaknesses of the KAPD itself were first and foremost the product of the disorientation resulting from the defeat and ensuing reflux of the revolutionary movement, particularly in Germany itself. Robbed of the authority of its revolutionary leadership, which had been murdered by Social Democracy in 1919, reacting with revolutionary impatience to the retreat of the revolution, which it long refused to recognise, and with an insufficient assimilation of the organisational traditions of the workers’ movement, German left communism, one of the clearest and most determined political expressions of the rising revolutionary wave, was unable (as opposed to the Italian Left) to cope with the defeat of that revolution. Which factors aggravated these weaknesses of the KAPD?
The weaknesses of the KAPD on the organisation question
In order to explore the reasons for the weaknesses on the organisation question in the KAPD we must go back somewhat.
We have to recall that as a result of mistaken organisational conceptions within the KPD, the Zentrale led by P.Levi had expelled the majority of the party at the October 1919 Party Congress because of its position on the union and parliamentary question. Those who had been expelled founded the KAPD in April 1920 following the gigantic struggles of the working class against the Kapp coup. This early split amongst communists in Germany, the result of a false approach to the organisation question, led to a fatal weakening of the class. And the tragedy was that the left wing in turn - after having been expelled from the KPD - became an active defender of this mistaken concept.
A few months later we can see an illustration of this weakness, when the KAPD delegation to the 2nd Congress of the CI, O. Rühle and P. Merges, withdrew from the work of the congress and “deserted”. One year later, when being confronted with the ultimatum of the 3rd Congress of the CI, either to join forces with the VKPD or face expulsion from the International, the KAPD once again showed this great weakness in relation to the defence of the organisation. The expulsion of the KAPD from the CI provoked a lot of hostility and anger within the ranks of the KAPD towards the International.
On the one hand this was to prevent the newly arising forces of the communist left from working together. The German and Dutch wing of the communist left did not manage to oppose the enormous pressure of the Bolshevik party and to build up together with the Italian left around Bordiga a common resistance from within the CI against its growing opportunism. Moreover, at the same time the KAPD had a strong inclination towards rash and hasty decisions, as the following statements of the KAPD show.
How to react to the danger of degeneration of the Comintern?
Flight or fight?
“In the future, Soviet Russia will no longer be a factor of world revolution; it will become a bastion of the international counter-revolution.
The Russian proletariat thus has already lost control over the State.
This doesn’t mean anything else but that the Soviet government now has to become the defender of the interests of the international bourgeoisie (...) The Soviet government has to become a government ruling against the working class, after having joined openly the camp of the bourgeoisie. The Soviet government is the Communist Party of Russia. Therefore the RCP has become an opponent of the working class, because being the Soviet government it has to defend the interests of the bourgeoisie at the expense of the proletariat. This won’t last long; the RCP will have to undergo a split.
It won’t last long before the Soviet government will be forced to show its real face as a national-bourgeois state. Soviet Russia is no longer a proletarian-revolutionary state, or to put it more precisely Soviet Russia cannot yet become a proletarian-revolutionary state.
Because only the victory of the German proletariat through the conquest of political power could have prevented the Russian proletariat from its present fate, could have saved it from the misery and repression imposed by its own Soviet government. Only a revolution in Germany, and then a western European revolution could have helped the outcome of the class struggle between Russian workers and Russian peasants in favour of the Russian workers.
The 3rd Congress submitted the interests of proletarian world revolution to the interests of a bourgeois revolution in a single country. The supreme organ of the proletarian International has submitted the International to the service of a bourgeois state. The autonomy of the 3rd International has thus been suppressed and submitted to direct dependence on the bourgeoisie.
The 3rd International is now lost for proletarian world revolution. In the same way as the 2nd International the 3rd International is now in the hands of the bourgeoisie.
Therefore the 3rd International will always prove its worth whenever it will be necessary to defend the bourgeois state of Russia. But it will always fail whenever it will be necessary to support proletarian world revolution. Its activities will be form a chain of continuous betrayals of proletarian world revolution...
The 3rd international is lost for the proletarian world revolution.
From being a vanguard for proletarian world revolution the 3rd International has become its most bitter enemy (...) It was because of the disastrous intertwining of the leadership of the state - whose originally proletarian character has been transformed over the past years into a totally bourgeois character - with the leadership of the proletarian International, in the hands of one and the same organ, that the 3rd International failed in its original task. Confronted with the alternative of bourgeois state policy and proletarian world revolution, the Russian communists voted for the interests of the former and they placed the 3rd International into its service’ (‘The Soviet government and the 3rd International taken in tow by the international bourgeoisie’, August 1921).
While the KAPD was right in denouncing the growing opportunism of the CI, while it detected the danger of the CI being strangled at the hands of the Russian state and being turned into its instrument, the KAPD made the mistake of considering these dangers as an already finished process.
Even if the balance of forces had already tilted in 1921 and the international wave of struggles was in reflux, the KAPD showed a dangerous impatience and an underestimation of the need for a persevering and tenacious struggle for the defence of the organisation. This is why the basic idea of the KAPD that the CI is “a tool of the Soviet government’s reformist policy of entente”, that “The 3rd International is now lost for proletarian world revolution. From being a vanguard for proletarian world revolution the 3rd International has become its most bitter enemy...” is exaggerated because premature at that time. Within the KAPD itself it led to the feeling that the battle for the CI was already over. The KAPD had sensed something which was to become true later, but the wrong estimate of the level of opportunism and degeneration that the CI had reached led to a global, indiscriminate rejection of the vital struggle against opportunism WITHIN the CI.
Although the ultimatum of the 3rd World Congress has to be taken into consideration in explaining the anger and outrage of the KAPD, this should not hide the fact that the comrades of the KAPD withdrew in a precipitous manner from the battle and failed in their duty to defend the organisation.
Once again it was a tragedy to see how false and insufficient organisational concepts can have such a disastrous effect, and how much they undermine the impact of correct political positions. This highlights once again that a correct stand on the organisation question itself can become decisive for the survival of an organisation.
Another example of this weakness can be seen through the attitude of the KAPD delegation at the 3rd Congress. While the KAPD delegation at the 2nd World Congress had left without any fight whatsoever, the delegation to the 3rd World Congress raised its voice as a minority and called for a special congress of the KAPD afterwards.
Although the KAPD delegation complained that the 3rd Congress had already started to put a brake on the debate by distorting the positions of the KAPD, by limiting speaking time, by changing the agenda, and by selecting participation at discussions (the KAPD delegation reported that it had been excluded from participation in a debate of the ECCI, which met during the Congress discussing the status of the KAPD), the KAPD delegation itself declined to take the floor during the debate on the status of the KAPD, because they said they “wanted to avoid being unwilling players in a comedy”. They withdrew from the debate under protest.
Instead of understanding that the degeneration of an organisation is a process, in which a long persevering struggle is indispensable; in which precipitous action needs to be avoided; in short, where it is necessary to lead a struggle like the Italian left did, the KAPD jumped to conclusions and condemned the CI very quickly instead of trying to continue to fight from within.
The same delegation declared the CI and the RCP to be “lost for the proletariat”. To some extent the overwhelming weight of the RCP had played a major role when the KAPD neglected the task of regrouping other delegates to form a fraction. Although there were some episodic contacts, no common line could be found between the Italian delegates and the KAPD, although the Italian left had stood up against the rising opportunism in the CI regarding the parliamentary question.
The expulsion of the KAPD from the CI meant a weakening of the position of the Italian left at the 4th Congress, when the Communist Party of Italy, under the leadership of Bordiga, was forced by the CI to fuse with the Italian Socialist Party. Thus the ‘German’ and ‘Italian’ Left always found themselves fighting in isolation against the opportunism of the CI, unable to lead a common struggle. But the current around Bordiga had grasped the need for a tenacious fight in defence of the organisation. For example when Bordiga in 1923 was thinking of writing a manifesto announcing a break with the CI, he finally withdrew the draft, because he was convinced of the need to continue his fight within the CI and within the Italian Party.
At the extraordinary conference of the KAPD in September 1921 the KAPD hardly dealt with the assessment of the balance of forces on a world scale. The party was able to see, as Reichenbach put it at the conference, that “in times where external factors, factors due to (the weight) of capital, or confusion, lack of clarity in the class, slow down the pulse of the revolution, to the extent that the belief in revolution recedes, then the proletarian party of combat, which is the carrier of the idea of revolution, will be smaller in size. But this doesn’t mean that it will disappear’ (p. 27). But the KAPD did not draw the conclusions regarding the immediate tasks of the organisation. The majority of the party still considered revolution to be immediately on the agenda. Sheer will seemed more important than an assessment of the balance of forces. Moreover a part of the KAPD was to start the adventure of the foundation of the Communist Workers International (KAI) in spring 1922.
This incapacity to grasp the retreat of the class struggle finally played a decisive role in the incapacity of the KAPD to survive after the wave of struggles went into reflux and when the rising counter-revolution imposed new conditions.
Mistaken answers from Russia:
the incapacity of the communists to draw the right lessons
Despite all its shortcomings and its wrong conclusions, the KAPD did have the merit of posing the problem of the growing conflict between the Russian state, the working class and the CI, even if it was unable to offer the right answers. The communists in Russia, on the other hand were to have the greatest difficulties in understanding the nature of this conflict.
Because of the growing integration of the party into the state apparatus they could only develop a very limited view of the problem. Lenin, who had synthethised the lessons of Marxism on the question of state and revolution in 1917 in the clearest manner, had at the same time had been part of the state leadership since 1917, and he brought these growing contradictions and difficulties to the fore.
Today, bourgeois propaganda takes great pains to present Lenin as the father of Russian totalitarian state capitalism. In reality, of all the Russian communists at the time, Lenin, with a brilliant revolutionary intuition, came closest to recognising that the transitional state which arose after the October revolution does not really represent the interests and politics of the proletariat. From this Lenin concluded that the working class must struggle to impose its policies on the state, and must have the right to defend itself against that state.
At the 11th party conference in March 1922 Lenin observed with great concern: “Well, we have lived through a year, the state is in our hands, but has it operated the New Economic Policy in the way we wanted this past year? No. But we refuse to admit that that it did not operate in the way we wanted. How did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that guided it. It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired, as if it were being driven by some mysterious, lawless hand” (volume 33, March/April 1922, 11th party conference).
Lenin had also defended this concern, in particular against Trotsky, during the trade union debate in 1921. On the surface, the issue was the role of the trade unions within the proletarian dictatorship; in reality, the central question was whether or not the working class should have the right to engage in its own class struggle to defend itself against the traditional state. According to Trotsky, since the state is by definition a workers’ state, the idea of the proletariat defending itself against the state is an absurdity. Thus Trotsky, who at least had the quality of following the logic of his position to its conclusion, openly advocated the militarisation of labour. Although he was not yet able to clearly recognise that the transitional state was not a workers’ state (a position later developed and defended by Bilan in the 30s), Lenin insisted on the necessity for the workers to defend themselves against the state.
Despite this correct concern on the part of Lenin, it is evident that the Russian communists were unable to achieve any real clarity on this question. Lenin himself, like other communists of the time, continued to consider the enormous weight of the petty bourgeoisie in Russia to be the main source of counter-revolutionary potential and not the bureaucratised state. “At the present moment the enemy is not the same as it was yesterday. The enemy is not the scores of White armies... The enemy is the grey day to day running of the economy in a country dominated by small peasants with a ruined big industry. The enemy is the petty bourgeois element; the proletariat is fragmented, split, exhausted. The ‘forces’ of the working class are not unlimited... The influx of new forces from the proletariat is weak, sometimes very weak (...) We still will have to put up with the inevitable slow-down in the growth of new forces of the working class” (‘New times, old mistakes in new form’, Lenin, 20.8.1921, volume 33, German edition).
The reflux of the class struggle - oxygen for state capitalism
After the defeats of the working class internationally in 1920 conditions for the working class in Russia were to worsen considerably. More and more isolated, the workers in Russia faced a state, headed by the Bolshevik Party, which was more and more imposing its violence on them, as in Kronstadt in 1921. The crushing of the revolt in Kronstadt led to the strengthening of those forces in the party who were aiming at the strengthening of the state at the expense of the working class and who also sought to chain the CI to the Russian state.
The Russian state was aspiring more and more to a ‘normal’ position amongst the other capitalist states.
The orientation of the Russian state towards recognition by the other capitalist states
Already in spring 1921 the German bourgeoisie had secretly made contact with Moscow in order to explore the possibility of rearming the Reichswehr (after the signing of Versailles treaty) and of modernising the Russian armaments industry once the civil war had come to an end. Above all, German heavy industry, which had modernised its equipment during WW1, was eager to co-operate with Russia. Aeroplanes were planned to be manufactured by Albatrosswerke, submarines by Blöhm & Voss, guns and shells by Krupp. The Reichswehr was to train Red Army officers, making it possible for German troops to train on Russian soil.
At the end of 1921 the Soviet state proposed a general conference to settle relations between Soviet Russia and the capitalist world, involving all the European powers and the USA. But by then secret negotiations between Germany and Russia had long been underway. Of course on the Russian side these negotiations were not led by the CI but by leaders of the state apparatus. At the Genoa conference, Chicherin, the leader of the Russian delegation, talked about the vast potential of Russia’s untapped resources, and the possibility that they could be developed and made available through the co-operation of western capitalists. While the Genoa conference broke up, Germany and Russia had concluded in nearby Rapallo a secret agreement - which - as E.H. Carr writes, “was the first major diplomatic occasion on which either Soviet Russia or the Weimar republic had negotiated as an equal”. But Rapallo was more than that.
During the winter 1917-18 the treaty of Brest-Litovsk was only signed after the German offensive against Russia because it was the aim of the Bolsheviks to protect the isolated workers’ bastion against the offensive of German imperialism. The treaty had been imposed on the Russian working class, and it was only signed after a wide and open debate in the Bolshevik party. However, this principle was to be broken with the signing of Rapallo. Not only did the treaty signed by Russian state representatives involve secret arms deals, but at the 4th World Congress in November 1922 it was not even mentioned!.
The instruction of the CI to the CP in Turkey and Persia “to support the movement in favour of national freedom in Turkey (and in Persia)” in reality led to a situation where the respective national bourgeoisies could massacre the working class much easier. The interests of the Russian state, which required firm links with these states, had prevailed.
Step by step the CI was subordinated to the needs of the foreign policy of the Russian state. Whereas in 1919, at the time of the foundation of the CI, the whole orientation had been the destruction of capitalist states, from 1921 on the orientation of the Russian state was more and more clearly towards stabilisation in foreign affairs. The failure of the world revolution to spread had given enough space for the Russian State to claim its position.
At the common conference of the ‘workers’ parties’ which met at the beginning of April 1922 in Berlin, to which the CI had invited the parties of the 2nd and 2 ½ Internationals, the CI delegation tried above all to look for support for the diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia, for the establishment of trade relations between Russia and the west, and for help for Russia to reconstruct. In 1919 the 2nd International had been denounced as the butcher of the revolution; in 1920, at the 2nd Congress, 21 conditions of admission had been adopted in order to delineate the CI from and fight against the 2nd International. Now, on behalf of the Russian state, the CI delegation sat at the same table with the parties of the 2nd International. It had become obvious that the Russian state was not interested in the extension of world revolution but aimed above all at strengthening its own position. The more the CI was taken in tow by the state, the more clearly it turned its back on internationalism.
Within Russia: cancerous growth of the state apparatus
The orientation of the Russian state towards recognition by the other states went hand in hand with the strengthening of the state apparatus within Russia.
The ever increasing integration of the party into the state, the growing concentration of power in the hands of an ever more concentrated and limited circle of ‘ruling forces’, the growing dictatorship of the state over the working class were now being accelerated by the single-minded and systematic efforts of those forces who aimed at the expansion and fortification of the state apparatus at the expense of the working class, at the strangling of working class life.
In April 1922 Stalin was nominated General Secretary of the party at the 11th party congress. By then Stalin occupied three important posts at the same time: he was head of the Peoples’ Commissariat for Nationality Questions, of the Peoples’ Commissariat for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection, and he was a member of the Politburo. By being appointed General Secretary, Stalin could quickly take over the day to day running of the party, and he managed to make the Politburo dependent on the General Secretary. Already at an earlier stage, Stalin had been appointed head of the ‘purging activities’ in March 1921 at the 10th party congress[1]. In March 1921 some members of the Workers’ Opposition group had asked the ECCI to “denounce the suppression of autonomy, of workers’ initiative, and the fight against members who had divergent opinions... The united forces of the party and union bureaucracy, by taking advantage of their power and their position, breach the principle of workers’ democracy” (Rosmer, p. 110) But after the RCP put pressure on the ECCI, the ECCI rejected the complaint of the Workers’ Opposition group.
Instead of leaving the initiative for nominating their delegates in the hands of the local party units, as the integration of the party into the state advanced, these nominations were taken over by the leadership of the party and thus the state. Elections and votes within the party on a local party unit level were no longer desired, since the power of decision was placed more and more in the hands of the General Secretary and the Org-bureau which was headed by Stalin. All the delegates for the 12th party congress in 1923 were nominated by the party leadership.
If we underline the role of Stalin here, it is not because we want to reduce the problem of the state to one person - Stalin - and thus limit and underestimate the danger flowing from the state. The reason is that the state, which had arisen out of the very survival-needs of capitalism itself, which had absorbed the Bolshevik Party into its structures, and which was now stretching out its tentacles to the CI, had become the centre of counter-revolution. But counter-revolution was not an anonymous or purely passive activity of unknown, faceless, invisible forces. It was to take shape concretely in the party and state apparatus. Stalin, the General Secretary, was an important force pulling the strings of the party on different levels - in the Politburo, in the provinces, and he became the driving force behind those forces who were fighting against any revolutionary residues in the party.
Within the Bolshevik Party this process of degeneration provoked resistance and convulsions that we have dealt with more specifically in our articles in International Review nos. 8 & 9.
Despite the above-mentioned confusions, Lenin was going to be one of the most determined opponents of the state apparatus. After Lenin was hit by a first stroke in May 1922 and a second on March 9 1923, he drafted a document - later to be known as his Testament - in which he demanded the replacement of Stalin as General Secretary. Thus Lenin, who had worked together with Stalin for years, broke with him and declared war upon him. However, being paralysed in bed, fighting against his agony, this break and declaration of war was never published in the party press, which by then was in the firm grip of the General Secretary himself - Stalin!.
At the same time it was no coincidence that Kamenev, Zinoviev and Stalin defended the typically bourgeois concept of the need for a ‘successor’ to Lenin, according to which a triumvirate composed of these three members should constitute the leadership. It was against this background of a power struggle by the ‘triumvirate’ within the party that a group of opponents to this trend issued a “Platform of the 46” in the summer of 1923, criticising the strangling of proletarian life in the party, which for the first time since October 1917 had refused to make any calls for world revolution on May 1st 1922.
In the summer of 1923 a number of strikes erupted in Russia, in particular in Moscow.
At a time when the Russian state was strengthening its position within Russia and was striving for recognition by other capitalist states, the process of degeneration in the CI after the opportunist turn at the 3rd Congress was to accelerate, due to the pressure of the Russian state.
The 4th World Congress: submission to the Russian state
By adopting the policy of the United Front, in December 1921 through the ECCI, and at the 4th Congress in November 1922, the CI was about to throw overboard the principles of the 1st and 2nd congress, during which the CI had insisted on the need for the sharpest demarcation and fight against Social Democracy.
To justify this policy, the CI argued that with the current balance of forces between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat “the broadest masses of the proletariat have lost belief in their ability to conquer power in any foreseeable time. They are driven back to the defensive.... the conquest of power as an immediate task of the day is not on the agenda” (cited in Carr, op cit,p 439) .
Therefore it was necessary to unite with the workers who were still under the influence of Social Democracy:
‘The slogan of the 3rd congress, ‘to the masses’ is more valid than ever (...) The tactics of the united front is the offer of a united struggle of communists with all workers, who belong to other parties or groups(...) Under certain circumstances communists must be ready to work together with non-communist workers’ parties and with workers’ organisation in order to form a workers’ government’.(Theses on tactics, 4th Congress).
It was the German KPD which was the first party to push for this tactic - as we shall see in the next article in this series.
Within the CI this new opportunist step, which pushed the workers into the arms of Social Democracy, met with the fiercest resistance from the Italian left.
Already in March 1922, once the theses on the united front had been adopted, Bordiga wrote in Il Comunista: “As far as the workers’ government is concerned, as ask: why do we want to ally with the Social Democrats? To do the only things that they know how to, can and will do, or to ask them to do what they don’t know how to, cannot or will not do? Are we to say to the Social Democrats that we are ready to collaborate with them, even in parliament and even in this government baptised as a ‘workers’ government? In this case, that is to say if we are asked to elaborate in the name of the Communist Party a project of a workers’ government in which communists have to participate along with the socialists, and to present this government to the masses as ‘anti-bourgeois’, we reply, and we take full responsibility for this reply, that such an attitude is opposed to all the fundamental principles of communism. To accept this political formula would in fact mean tearing up our flag, on which it its written: there can be no proletarian government which is not formed on the basis of the revolutionary victory of the proletariat” (Il Comunista, 26. 3. 1922).
At the 4th congress the Italian party declared: “ The Communist Party of Italy does not agree to taking part in organisms that are made up of different political organisations_It will thus avoid participating in common declarations with political parties when these declarations contradict its programme and are presented to the proletariat as the result of negotiations aimed at finding a common line of action... to talk about a workers’ government... amounts to denying in practise the political programme of communism, ie the necessity to prepare the masses for the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat’ (Relazione del PCI al IV Congresso dell’Internaionale Comunista, November 1922).
But after the exclusion of the KAPD from the CI in autumn 1921, and when the most critical voice against the degeneration of the Comintern was silenced, the Italian left once again had to defend the position of the communist left on its own.
At the same time an additional aggravating factor has to be taken into consideration. In October 1922 Mussolini’s troops seized power in Italy, which led to a worsening of the conditions for revolutionaries. The group around Bordiga obviously had to take a position on the rise of fascism. Being absorbed by this question, the Italian left had far less time to focus on the unfolding degeneration of the CI and the Bolshevik party.
At the same time the 4th Congress created the conditions for a further submission of the CI to the interests of the Russian state. Mixing up the interests of the Russian state and the interests of the CI, the chairman of the Comintern, Zinoviev, said this in relation to the stabilisation of capitalism and the termination of attacks against Russia: “We may now say without exaggeration that the Communist International has survived its most difficult time, and is so strengthened that it need fear no attack from world reaction” (cited in Carr, op cit, p 439).
Since the perspective of the conquest of power was no longer immediately on the agenda, the 4th Congress gave the orientation that apart from united front tactics, the working class should focus on the support for and defence of Russia. The resolution on the Russian revolution highlights the extent to which the CI analysed the situation through the spectacles of the Russian state and no longer from the point of view of the international working class. The problem of the reconstruction of Russia was pushed into the foreground:
“The 4th World Congress of the CI expresses its greatest gratitude and highest admiration to the toiling masses of Soviet Russia that they have been able (...) to defend the acquisitions of the revolution up until today against all enemies from within and from without.
The 4th World Congress observes with great satisfaction that the first workers’ state in the world (...) has fully proven its vitality and its force to develop. The Soviet state has come out of the horrors of the civil war strengthened. The 4th World Congress observes with satisfaction that the policy of Soviet Russia has created and strengthened the most important preconditions for the construction and development towards a communist society: i.e. the Soviet power, the Soviet order, i.e. the dictatorship of the proletariat. Because this dictatorship alone.... guarantees the complete overcoming of capitalism and paves the way for the realisation of communism.
Hands off Soviet Russia! Legal recognition of Soviet Russia! Each strengthening of Soviet Russia means a weakening of the world bourgeoisie’ (Resolution on the Question of the Russian Revolution).
The degree to which the CI was under the thumb of the Russian state half a year after Rapallo also became visible when, against the background of rising imperialist tensions, the possibility was considered that Russia could establish a military bloc with another capitalist state. Although the CI still asserted that such an alliance would serve the purpose of overthrowing a bourgeois regime, in reality the CI had more and more become a tool of the Russian state: “I assert that we are already great enough to conclude an alliance with a foreign bourgeoisie in order, by means of this bourgeois state, to be able to overthrow another bourgeoisie... Supposing that a military alliance has been concluded with a bourgeois state, the duty of the comrades in each country consists in contributing to the victory of the two allies”. Bukharin, cited in Carr, op cit, p. 442), A few months later the CI and the German KPD were to put forward this perspective in relation to an alliance between the ‘oppressed German nation’ and Russia. In the confrontation between Germany and the victorious countries of WW1 the CI and the Russian state took sides with Germany, calling it a victim of French imperialists interests.
Already in January 1922, at the ‘First Congress of the Toilers of the Far East’, the CI had proclaimed the need for co-operation between communists and ‘non-communist revolutionaries’ as the key orientation. The 4th Congress now decided in its theses on tactics “to support to the best of their capacities the national-revolutionary movements which are directed against imperialism”; at the same time it rejected firmly “the refusal of the communists of the colonies to take part in the struggle against imperialist violation under the pretexts of the abandoning of a supposed ‘defence’ of autonomous class interests. This is the worst type of opportunism, which can only discredit proletarian revolution in the East’ (Guidelines on the Eastern Question).
Thus the CI contributed to a major weakening and disorientation of the working class.
Once the culminating point of the revolutionary wave had been reached in 1919, once the international extension of the revolution had been prevented, permitting the Russian state to strengthen its position and subordinate the CI to its interests, the bourgeoisie felt stronger internationally and drafted plans in order to deal a final blow against that part of the working class which had remained most combative - the proletariat in Germany. We shall therefore examine the events of 1923 in Germany in the next article.
Dv.
[1] After the membership of the Bolshevik party had increased in 1920 to 600,000, between 1920-21 some 150,000 members were expelled from the party. It is obvious that not only careerists were expelled but also many workers’ elements. The ‘purging commission’ headed by Stalin was one of the most powerful organs in Russia.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/international-situation
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1937/communist-programme-revolutions-1917-1923
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1919-german-revolution
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/german-and-dutch-left
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn1
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn2
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn3
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn4
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn5
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn6
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn7
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn8
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn9
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn10
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn11
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn12
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn13
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn14
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn15
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn16
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn17
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn18
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn19
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn20
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn21
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn22
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn23
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn24
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn25
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn26
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn27
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn28
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn29
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn30
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn31
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn32
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn33
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn34
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn35
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn36
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn37
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn38
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn39
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn40
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn41
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn42
[50] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn43
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn44
[52] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn45
[53] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn46
[54] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn47
[55] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn48
[56] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn49
[57] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn50
[58] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn51
[59] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftn52
[60] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref1
[61] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref2
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[63] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref4
[64] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref5
[65] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref6
[66] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref7
[67] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref8
[68] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref9
[69] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref10
[70] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref11
[71] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref12
[72] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref13
[73] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref14
[74] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref15
[75] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref16
[76] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref17
[77] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref18
[78] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref19
[79] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref20
[80] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref21
[81] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref22
[82] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref23
[83] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref24
[84] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref25
[85] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref26
[86] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref27
[87] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref28
[88] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref29
[89] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref30
[90] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref31
[91] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref32
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[94] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref35
[95] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref36
[96] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref37
[97] http://www.ibrp.org
[98] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref38
[99] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref39
[100] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref40
[101] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref41
[102] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref42
[103] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref43
[104] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref44
[105] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref45
[106] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref46
[107] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref47
[108] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref48
[109] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref49
[110] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref50
[111] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref51
[112] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/97/leninists2#_ftnref52
[113] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[114] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[115] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/56/middle-east-and-caucasus
[116] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[117] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq