70 years after ‘Victory in Europe’ day, we are republishing an article that first appeared in Révolution Internationale no. 15, in 1975.
This anniversary is always celebrated by the bourgeoisie and its media with an intense barrage of propaganda, aimed at preserving nationalist feelings and travestying what the Second World War really was: not a struggle between democratic humanity and fascist barbarism but a struggle between capitalist nations who, in the defence of their sordid interests, were quite ready to shed the blood of millions of proletarians, to whip up hatred and commit the worst kind of atrocities.
This is what is pointed out by this short text written by our comrade Marc Chirik, a militant of the communist left who, during the war, firmly defended the principle of proletarian internationalism, producing leaflets calling for the fraternisation of the workers of all countries.
In a whole number of countries, the bourgeoisie has made a big noise about the 30th anniversary of the victory over Germany. The left variety of this noise has been particularly virulent: in Eastern Europe, there were huge ceremonies marking the 8 May. In France, where the government has decided to remove this date from the official calendar, the guardian of the historic past of La Patrie, the so-called Communist Party, has thrown all its strength into a great national battle to annul this “scandalous”, “monstrous”, “ignoble and infamous” decision (cf L’Humanité 12 May 1975). Having stirred up chauvinism between the two world wars around the figure of Joan of Arc, the same party disputes with the rest of the bourgeoisie the right to speak for the nationalist cult and denounces the “anti-national policy of Giscard d’Estaing”. It is calling on all the “national and democratic forces” to fight this decision by Giscard “as a national duty for all patriots”. It reminds us that “the Communists fought in the Resistance alongside the Gaullists. They took the same risks. They shared a certain idea about France, its role, its future…” And it concludes that “the policy of M Giscard d’Estaing is leading to the betrayal of the common struggle that Communists and Gaullists waged against fascism for the independence and grandeur of France!”
Far more than the Gaullists, to whom it is extending its hand, the Communist Party is scaling the heights of the most repulsive nationalist hysteria.
For the bourgeois faction that displays the most virulent chauvinism, especially when it’s combined with antifascism, this is a time to remember. “Let’s remember”, it says to the proletarians, “how heroic you were in the defence of our interests”.
And indeed: let’s remember!
First, let’s remember the cause of this war, the crisis which began in 1929 and which plunged the whole world into unbearable poverty alongside stocks of goods which couldn’t be sold! Let’s remember the tens of millions of starving unemployed workers, going from town to town looking in vain for work!
Let’s remember the fascist barbarism with which the bourgeoisie responded to this crisis, as well as the antifascist hysteria, which both together led the workers of Spain, and then of the main countries of the world, to the slaughter.
Let’s remember the Stalinist and Hitlerite concentration camps, where tens of millions of human beings were exterminated!
Let’s remember the pact of September 1939 between the two brigands, Hitler and Stalin, between Nazi Germany and “socialist” Russia - the first clause of this pact being the dividing up of Poland, which directly resulted in the war.
Let’s remember the massacres between 1939 and 1945: 55 million dead, the greatest holocaust in the history of humanity!
Let’s remember the way this war ended: with the explosion of two atomic bombs which, in a fraction of a second, razed two Japanese cities to the ground, killing without distinction several hundred thousand individuals – either immediately or after atrocious suffering!
Let’s remember the “Liberation”, the purges and the sordid settling of scores, the slogans of the Communist Party: “á chacun son Boche!” – everyone should kill a German - “long live eternal France”, all the cries about freedom from fascism from the Trotskyists and the anarchists, the latter entering Paris with the Leclerc division, brandishing the image of Durruti!
Let’s remember the “Reconstruction”, the brutal super-exploitation for a crust of bread, with Stalinist ministers telling the workers “pull up your sleeves”, while the militants of the same party played the role of cops in the factories!
Workers, let’s remember the role the Stalinists played in the past as butchers, cops, torturers, exploiters, and be on guard against what they have in store for us tomorrow if we spring their traps, along with those of their fellow-travellers in antifascism and the Resistance, whether Trotskyists or anarchists!
Workers, let’s remember the past and look clearly at what awaits us if we leave our class terrain for the terrain of antifascism, of nationalism, of democratic illusions; if we are not capable of uniting on an international scale to confront and destroy the bourgeois state!
CM (May 1975).
On 12 and 19 April, two overloaded boats carrying migrants fleeing from the most extreme misery sank in the Mediterranean, taking with them up to 1200 lives. These tragedies have been repeating themselves for decades: in the 1990s, the well-guarded fortress of Gibraltar was already a tomb for many migrants. Since 2000, 22,000 people have disappeared while trying to get to Europe by sea. And since the Lampedusa drama in 2013, in which 500 perished, the migrations and their fatal consequences have been growing at an unprecedented rate. With nearly 22,000 crossings and 3500 deaths, the year 2014 broke all records. Since January 2015, the sea has already claimed 1800 migrants’ lives.
In the last few years, we have been seeing a kind of industrialisation in human trafficking. The testimonies paint an edifying picture of refugee camps, of people crossing war zones, of beatings, rapes, slavery…The brutality and cynicism of the smugglers seem to have no limits. And the migrants go through all this in order to be welcomed to humiliating conditions in Europe, where they are defined as a “burden”, to use the expression of the head of operations at Triton, which is supposedly there to save the migrants at sea.
If people are prepared to go through such ordeals, it’s because what they are escaping from is even worse. At the root of the increasing waves of migrations are the unbearable conditions of life in more and more areas of the planet. These conditions are not new, but they have been getting worse and worse. Hunger and disease, and above all a society that is rotting on its feet is what all these masses of people are running away from: the accelerating decomposition of Africa and the Middle East, with their intractable conflicts, permanent insecurity, the reign of armed gangs, rackets, mass unemployment….
The great powers, driven by the logic of an increasingly irrational and murderous capitalism to defend their imperialist interests by using the most sordid methods, have a major responsibility for the frightful situation facing so many parts of the world. The chaos in Libya is a caricatured example: western bombs have replaced a tyrant with the reign of lawless militias. As well as illustrating the only perspective that capitalism can offer humanity, the dislocation of the country has provided the soil for the flourishing of the unscrupulous gangs of smugglers who are often connected to various imperialist agencies: mafia cliques, jihadists and even the self-proclaimed governments which are engaged in a bloody struggle against each other.
Like the migrants crossing the Mediterranean, being uprooted is inscribed in the history of the working class. From the very beginnings of capitalism, part of the rural population formed in the mediaeval period was torn off the land to provide the first source of man-power for the process of manufacture. Often the victims of brutal expropriations, these pariahs of the feudal system, too numerous for nascent capitalism to absorb, were already treated like criminals: “Legislation treated them as ‘voluntary’ criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed” (Marx, Capital, Vol 1, chapter 28) . With the development of capitalism, the growing need for labour power gave rise to numerous waves of migration. In the 19th century, when capitalism was prospering, millions of migrants took the path of exile to fill the factories. With the historical decline of the system, which was marked by the First World War, the displacement of populations didn’t stop and even increased. Imperialist wars, economic crises, climatic disasters – there are plenty of reasons for trying to escape from hell.
And with the permanent crisis of the system, immigrants are constantly faced with capital’s problem of absorbing extra labour power. Administrative, legal and police obstacles have gradually increased, aimed at preventing migrants from reaching the territories of the most developed states: limited stay, deportation, harassment, police tracking, air and navy patrols at the frontiers, detention camps, etc. Before the First World War, when the USA was looking to expand its work-force, it was the symbol of the land of asylum. Today the American border with Mexico is guarded by a gigantic wall. Europe has not escaped this dynamic. In the 1980s, the very democratic European states have begun to deploy an armada of warships in the Mediterranean and didn’t hesitate about collaborating with the “Guide of the Revolution”, Muammar Gaddafi, and his esteemed equivalents, His Majesty the King of Morocco and Algeria’s president for life, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, with the aim of pushing migrants back towards the desert. While the bourgeoisie was triumphantly dismantling the Iron Curtain, other “walls of shame” have been going up on numerous frontiers. The hypocrisy about freedom of circulation in the European space covered by the Schengen agreement can be seen very clearly in all this. As for those who do survive the crossing, it’s another round of police harassment and humiliation, awful detention centres, etc. Behind their crocodile tears, the cynicism of the democratic states is as boundless as that of the smugglers.
Overcrowded boats capsizing, hundreds drowning – this has been going on for years now. The growing number of deaths in the Mediterranean doesn’t date from April. So why the media frenzy right now?
It responds to a logic of ideological intoxication which is mobilising all factions of the bourgeoisie. Parallel to the transformation of states into fortresses, a nauseating anti-immigrant ideology is being spread, seeking to blame “foreigners” for the effects of the crisis and to present them as hordes of criminals undermining public order. These often hysterical campaigns try to divide the proletariat by making it identify with the cause of the Nation, i.e. those of the ruling class. They are based on the pernicious idea that the division of humanity into nations is normal, natural and eternal. Furthermore, the hypocritical attempt to talk about “good” and “bad” immigrants is entirely part of this logic: those who are judged “good” are those who can be useful to the national economy, the “bad” ones being those judged to be a burden on it.
As can be seen from the expressions of solidarity by workers in Italy towards the migrants who finally reached the coast of Sicily, many proletarians are in fact indignant about the fate the bourgeoisie reserves for the immigrants. But who better to channel this legitimate reaction towards a dead-end than the patent experts in this kind of work – the left of the bourgeoisie’s political apparatus. These so-called “friends of the people” take advantage of real indignation to trap the workers in the talons of the capitalist state. The Non-Government Organisations, acting once again as scouts for imperialism, haven’t got words strong enough to demand a military response from the state, all in the name of human rights. After the “humanitarian war” in Africa, we now have the “charitable control of the frontiers”! What loathsome hypocrisy! In France, the Trotskyist group Lutte Ouvrière illustrate this approach very well in its article ‘Capitalist Europe condemns migrants to death’[1]: “By reducing the number and scope of the patrols, the leaders of the EU have made the choice to allow those who attempt the crossing to die. This is the policy of non-assistance to people in danger. The 18 warships and two helicopters which were sent to the place the drama took plac, but after the drowning, increases the ignominy”. In a word, this bourgeois party, which claims to be marxist, also calls for more warships to “save” the migrants. Thus, the bourgeoisie is instrumentalising the hecatomb to strengthen its means of repression against the migrants, increasing and developing the means available to the Frontex agency which is in charge of coordinating military deployment at the frontiers of Europe and the anti-immigrant operations inside its borders: patrols, raids, arrests. It seems that the bourgeoisie has organised everything to “help” the migrants. Air strikes in Libya are also envisaged! Behind all this, the bourgeoisie is trying to stoke up the threatening atmosphere which enables it to carry out its repressive policies against the working class.
Truth Martine, 5.5.15
“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism”. (Lenin, The State and Revolution, 1917)[1]
January 15 1919, Rosa Luxemburg was assassinated, along with her comrade of combat Karl Liebknecht, by the Freikorps. These soldiers were under the orders of the minister Noske, a member of the SPD (German Social Democratic Party) who declared “If a bloodhound is necessary, then I will be it”! It was the Socialist party in power who orchestrated the bloody repression of the workers’ insurrection in Berlin and assassinated one the greatest figures of the international workers’ movement.
This odious murder was prepared for a long time through a series of slanders against Rosa Luxemburg. “Red Rosa”, “Rosa the incendiary”, “Bloody Rosa”, “Rosa the agent of Tsarism”... no lying attack against her was spared, culminating in the calls for a pogrom at the end of 1918/ beginning 1919, notably at the time of the “bloody week” in Berlin.
But just a few months after her murder, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists in the workers’ movement began to make her into an inoffensive icon so as to canonise her, empty her of revolutionary content, degrade her and take the edge off this trenchant revolutionary. Above all for them Rosa Luxemburg mustn’t remain the militant and exemplary revolutionary that she was; she had to be killed a second time, misrepresented into a sort of pacifist and feminist democrat. This is the real aim, in recent decades, of the work of “remembrance “which aims to “rehabilitate” (that’s to say recuperate) this great fighter for the revolution.
In the 1930’s in France for example, a whole current developed around Lucien Laurat, which increasingly ceded to the sirens of democracy and ended up arguing that from the very beginning of the “Bolshevik revolution”, the “worm” of Lenin was in the “fruit” of the revolutionary project. This argument logically became the apology for the Republican Army in the war in Spain of 1936-39 and for the dragooning of the working class into the second world butchery under the cover of the fight against fascism. It supported the POUM in Spain and the Trotskyists in the “heroism” of their national resistance. This nauseous democratic propaganda went into paroxysms after the Second World War through people such as Rene Lefeuvre, founder of the Editions Spartacus. The latter, in a collection of texts by Rosa Luxemburg[2], has a purely ideological preface and its 1946 title Marxism against dictatorship (a heading never used by Rosa Luxemburg!) presented this fighter for the revolution as radically hostile to Bolshevism, which is nothing other than a gross lie. In the introduction to the collection, Lefeuvre writes that: “all the great marxist theoreticians of renown: Karl Kautsky, Emile Vandervelde, Rodolphe Hilferding, Karl Renner, Georges Plekhanov – and ourselves in passing – denounced as much as Rosa Luxemburg the totalitarian doctrine of Lenin as absolutely contrary to the principle of marxism”.
Stalin mummified Lenin and perverted his thoughts into a terrifying dogma. “Bloody” Rosa Luxemburg became a sort of saint for democracy. The Stalinist counter-revolution rapidly generated two new putrid and complementary ideologies: attractive “Luxemburgism” on one side and repellent “Marxism-Leninism” on the other. Really just two faces of the same coin or rather two jaws of the same trap with the same result: reject the “bloodthirsty” Bolsheviks and admire the figure offered by a “pacifist” Rosa, like you admire a lion in a cage.
In Western Germany 1974 (the FRG), they even printed stamps bearing the image of Rosa Luxemburg!
After the collapse of the eastern bloc and the disappearance of the USSR, this vast ideological campaign was dug up again and amplified so as to feed the so-called “death of communism” zealously decreed by the bourgeoisie with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Official ideology here pursued the greatest lie in history, fraudulently assimilating communism with Stalinism. It is a particularly effective ideological weapon in the hands of the dominant class. Because if since the 1990’s the proletariat has had so many difficulties to see itself as a social force, to develop its consciousness and its organisation, it is really because it is cut off from its past, it’s lost its identity, it doesn’t know where it’s come from or where it’s going. If communism is Stalinism, this horror which has finally failed, then why fight for it? Why study the history of the workers’ movement when it will only lead to the Stalinist catastrophe? It is this logic and this poison that the bourgeoisie wants to put in our heads! And the presentation of Rosa as a pacifist and enemy of Lenin, the “dictator over the proletariat”, the “spiritual father of Stalin”, is one of the blackest chapters in this ignoble propaganda. Whether they are conscious of it or not, those who participate in this sham fight against the working class.
Today on blogs and forums, in bookshops and kiosks, throughout Europe and in the world, a new nauseous campaign has resurfaced in order to again distort the image of the militant Rosa Luxemburg. Thus, from television programmes, Rosa Luxemburg again appears under the sole traits of a “woman” and a “pacifist”. The very-well known and acclaimed paper, Le Monde, published an article in September 2013, written by a certain Jean-Marc Daniel, a professor of ESCP Europe, with the very evocative title: “Rosa Luxemburg, marxist-pacifist”. This association of the words “marxist” and “pacifist” is gob-smacking: for the ruling class the “real marxist” is one who abdicates from the class war, renounces the insurrection and the overthrow of capitalism.
Numerous books have now been published, including children’s literature, where Rosa Luxemburg is again presented as a relentless adversary of the Bolsheviks and of the “dictator” Lenin. Conferences and debate are also organised here and there, as was the case in Paris recently under the aegis of the “Luxemburgist” democratic historians of the group Critique Sociale. Even within the arts, the MAIF prize 2014 was awarded to the sculptor Nicolas Milhe for his project “Rosa Luxemburg”! This is a real ovation for Rosa ... on condition that she is opposed to her comrades in the fight, to the Bolsheviks, to the Russian revolution, in short opposed to revolution. The recuperation of Rosa Luxemburg in order to turn her into an “inoffensive icon” is a vast enterprise of ideological intoxication. It aims to inject the idea that the proletariat must fight to construct... not a global communist society but a “more democratic” society. After the odious propaganda of the Black Book of Communism, it is henceforth this idea of Luxemburg as the enemy of the Bolsheviks which is very seriously and officially taught in school programmes[3].
The stakes for the bourgeoisie today are to convince the most critical and recalcitrant elements that there is no other future than the defence of the democratic bourgeoisie. But behind this distortion there is also the campaign of the recuperation of Rosa Luxemburg by all sorts of democrats, with another unsaid objective, which is to discredit and demonise the real positions of revolutionary organisations.
Olga, November 7 2014
[1] This magisterial passage by Lenin is also valid for the fate reserved by the bourgeoisie for Jean Jaurès. See https://fr.internationalism.org/revolution-internationale/201409/9133/jean-jaures-et-mouvement-ouvrier [4], which will be published in English soon.
[2] “Problems of socialist organisation”(1904), “The masses and the leaders” – (1903), “Freedom of criticism and freedom of science” (1899).
[3] See on our French internet site: https://fr.internationalism.org/icconline/201409/9138/falsification-lhis... [5]
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/1945_purges_of_collaborators.jpg
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/migrants_at_sea.jpg
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/official_postage_stamp_luxemburg_and_liebknecht.jpg
[4] https://fr.internationalism.org/revolution-internationale/201409/9133/jean-jaures-et-mouvement-ouvrier
[5] https://fr.internationalism.org/icconline/201409/9138/falsification-lhistoire-programmes-scolaires
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/rosa-luxemburg