In 1983 the proletarian political milieu was confronted with the resurgence of class struggle after three years of retreat - a reflux brought about in the west by the sabotage of the rank-and-file unionists, under the impulse of the left and leftists, and in Poland by the brutal repression of 1981, which had been prepared by the sapping work of Solidarnosc. Since that time, the new-found militancy of the proletariat has continued to affirm itself all over the world: after the massive strikes of the workers in Belgium in the Autumn of ‘83, there have been significant class movements in Holland, West Germany, Britain, the USA, Sweden, France, Spain, Greece, Italy, Korea, Poland ... and this list is by no means exhaustive.
What was the reaction of the proletarian political milieu and the organizations who formed it; how did revolutionaries take up their responsibilities, posed once again in a very sharp way by the development of the class struggle, ie the necessity for them to intervene in the struggles of their class?
What would be the consequences of the acceleration of history on all levels - economic, military and social - on the life of the proletarian political milieu? The re-emergence of the class struggle brought about the potential for the development of the revolutionary milieu. Would this revitalization of the workers' struggle allow the proletarian political milieu to overcome the crisis it had been through in the previous period; would it be able to go beyond the difficulties and weaknesses which had marked it since the historical resurgence of the class struggle in 1968?
A political milieu blind to the class struggle
"The huge class confrontations which are brewing are also a test for the communist groups: either they will be able to take up their responsibilities and make a real contribution to the struggle, or they will stay in their present isolation and will be swept away by the tidal wave of history without being able to carry out the functions for which the class gave rise to them," (From the ICC ‘Address To Proletarian Political Groups' issued at its 5th Congress and published in IR 35, 4th quarter, 1983).
The ICC was to be the only organization to recognize fully in the movement of 1983 the signs of an international resurgence of the class struggle. For all the other groups of the proletarian milieu, there was nothing new under the sun. For the latter, the workers' struggles which had been growing before their eyes from1983 onwards had no significance: they remained in the grip of the union apparatus, thus they couldn't be the expression of a proletarian revival.
Outside the ICC, all the organizations of the proletarian political milieu which had survived the decantation and the crisis at the end of the1970s and beginning of the 1980s were as one man theorizing that we were still in the period of the counter-revolution.
The oldest organizations of the proletarian milieu, each in their own way, thus theorized that since the debacle of the 1930s, nothing much had changed. This was particularly the case with the groups descended from the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy founded in 1945 - ie the various groups of the Bordigist diaspora: on the one hand the ‘International Communist Parties' - Programme Communiste and Il Partito Comunista, and on the other hand, the ‘Internationalist Communist Party', Battaglia Communista, which was regrouped with the CWO from Britain in the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. As for the FOR, which thought that the revolution had been possible in Spain in the ‘30s, a period of profound defeat for the proletariat, it saw only the weaknesses of the current workers' struggles!
The parasitic micro-sects, incapable of expressing their own coherence, either developed a totally sterile kind of academic Bordigism, like Communisme ou Civilisation in France, or fell into a form of anarcho-councilism. These two tendencies were not absolutely contradictory, as can be seen by the evolution of a group like the GCI. But the common denominator remained a stubborn denial of the reality of the present class struggle. Even the vestiges of the post-68 ‘modernist' milieu were now in their own way participating in this general negation of the developing combativity of the proletariat, as can be seen by the evocative title of an ephemeral publication in France: La Banquise, ‘the Ice Floe'.
This view, quite general outside the ICC, that the course of history was still dominated by the counter-revolution, obviously expressed a dramatic underestimation of the class struggle since ‘68, and could only have negative consequences for revolutionaries at the essential level of intervention within the struggle. This situation was already evident at the end of the ‘60s, when the organizations which already existed, such as Programme Communiste and Battaglia Communista, were strangely silent about (since they couldn't see) the class struggle evolving in front of them and denied any significance to the workers' struggles of May ‘68 in France, which was actually the most massive strike the proletariat had ever launched. The problem was confirmed again at the end of the ‘70s. The ICC's intervention in the wave of struggles which broke out at that time bore the brunt of the criticisms of the whole proletarian milieu, and the same thing has happened in an even more acute way since 1983.
The question of intervention at the heart of the debates
Since the beginning of the renewal of class struggle which marked the 1980s, the intervention of the revolutionary political organizations in the workers' struggles, apart, obviously, from the ICC, has been virtually non-existent. The politically weakest groups have of course been most absent from the struggle. After a burst of activism at the beginning of the ‘80s, the GCI, when the class struggle really began moving, fell into cosy academicism while the FOR, to justify its absence from the terrain of the class struggle, started taking refuge in a theorization of its lack of material means! It's highly significant that, despite their capacity for big talk, these groups have produced no more than a handful of leaflets since 1983 - and that's not to speak about their content.
The IBRP certainly expresses a greater political solidity than the groups just mentioned, but its own intervention in the struggles hasn't exactly shone. This is all the more serious when you consider that, outside the ICC, this organization is the main pole of regroupment in the international proletarian political milieu. The IBRP's real will to intervene during the long miner's strike in Britain in 1984 has not unfortunately shown itself in the struggles that followed: despite having members in France, the IBRP made no intervention into the railway workers' strike in 1986, and if Battaglia Communista intervened in the 1987 schoolworkers' struggle in Italy, it was after long weeks of delay and at the insistent exhortations of the ICC's section there.
This weakness in the IBRP's intervention has its origins in the erroneous political conceptions which were already at the heart of the debates at the International Conference of Groups of the Communist left which took place in 1977, 1978 and 1980[1]. This was expressed essentially on two levels:
-- an incomprehension of the present historical period, which involves an inability to grasp the characteristics of the class struggle. Thus the CWO could write as follows to the Alptraum group in Mexico about the struggles in Europe: " ... we don't think that the frequency and the extension of these forms of struggle indicate - at least up to now - a tendency towards a progressive development. For example, after the struggle of the British miners, of the French railway workers, we have the strange situation in which the most agitated strata are those ... of the petty bourgeoisie," and they go on to cite, among others, the teachers!
-- serious confusions on the question of the party, which translate into an incomprehension of the present role of revolutionaries. Thus the IBRP could write, again to Alptraum which published this letter in Comunismo 4: "There is no significant development of struggles because there is no party; and the party can't exist unless the class finds itself in a process of developing struggles." Lucky are they who can understand this strange dialectic, but in these conditions, the decisive role of the intervention of revolutionaries is being glossed over while we wait for the Party, with a big P, to arise like a deus ex machina.
Throughout this period, the ICC - which unlike Battaglia Comunista, doesn't call itself a party - has tried to develop its intervention as far as its forces will allow, trying to carry out the historic responsibilities revolutionaries owe towards their class. There has not been a significant struggle in any country where the ICC has a section where revolutionary positions haven't been defended, where the intervention of the ICC hasn't tried to drive the workers' dynamic forward, to aid it to break out of the union trap, to push for extension, whether through leaflets, through speaking up in workers' assemblies, through the distribution of our press, etc. It's not a question of glorifying this fact or exaggerating it out of all proportion; readers can look at the ICC press to find the accounts of these interventions and the echo they have received. The point is simply to state what the intervention of revolutionaries has to be at a time when the proletariat is developing its struggle and thus when this intervention has greater possibilities.
In these conditions, it's not at all surprising that the debates and polemics between the different communist groups on the question of intervention itself have remained rather meager. Given the vacuity of the intervention of other groups, there couldn't be a real debate about the content of an intervention which doesn't exist. So we've had to go back to the basic principles about the role of revolutionaries, principles the ICC has defended with vigor. As for the other groups' criticisms of the ICC, they have in general been limited to saying that the ICC is overestimating the class struggle and is falling into activism!
Because of this, the question of recognizing the existence of the class struggle today, and of the role of revolutionaries and the question of intervention, have formed the line of demarcation within the communist milieu in the ‘80s; all its debates have been polarized around those questions.
The debates in the ICC and the formation of the EFICC
This tendency to yield to the propaganda of the bourgeoisie, which has spent the past years imposing a black-out on workers' strikes in order to deny their existence, has kept the other proletarian organizations blind to the class struggle, but it has also exerted its pressure on the ICC itself. From the struggle within the ICC against these tendencies to underestimate the class struggle, there emerged a debate which had at its root the questions of class consciousness and the role of revolutionaries. This debate then expanded to pose:
-- the question of the danger constituted in the present period by councilism, which crystallizes a tendency to deny the necessity for the political organization and thus for an organized intervention within the class;
-- the question of the weight of opportunism as the expression of the infiltration of the ruling ideology within the organization of the proletariat.
The debates were to be the source of a political strengthening, of some essential clarifications within the ICC. They were to reinforce its capacity to intervene within the struggles by providing a better understanding of the role of revolutionaries and a clearer reappropriation of the heritage of the revolutionary fractions of the past, an issue that crystallized around a more adequate view of the process of the degeneration and betrayal of the organizations of the class at the beginning of the century and in the 1930s.
Feeling themselves reduced to a small handful, more dilettantes than militants, the comrades in disagreement were to seize the first pretext that came along to withdraw at the very beginning of the 6th Congress of the ICC (late in 1985), to ‘free' themselves from the organization which they saw as a prison, and to form the External Fraction of the ICC, claiming to be the orthodox defenders of the ICC's platform. This irresponsible split expressed a profound incomprehension of the question of organization and thus a grave underestimation of its necessity. More than all its theoretical quibbles and the heap of calumnies the EFICC has dumped on the ICC to justify its existence as a sect, what really gave rise to this group was an underestimation of the class struggle and of the essential role of revolutionary intervention. Even if, since 1985, the EFICC sometimes formally recognizes the resurgence of class struggle since 1983, this grouplet has wandered into the same backwaters of academic passivity in which, as we've seen, most of the old organizations of the proletarian milieu are also wallowing. While proclaiming itself to be the orthodox upholder of the ICC platform, the EFICC has little by little developed a whole multitude of differences which represent so many departures from the coherence it purports to defend. The EFICC has opened a Pandora's box, and as we've seen with previous splits from the ICC, like the PIC and the GCI, it has entered into a dynamic in which, in order to justify its existence, it will be led towards more serious deviations that will put our whole platform into question.
The weight of social decomposition and the decantation in the revolutionary milieu
Was this new split the sign of a crisis in the ICC, indicating a political and organizational weakening of the organization that constitutes the main pole of regroupment within the proletarian milieu? On the contrary: what the EFICC represents is a resistance against the need for revolutionary forces to adapt to the needs of the class at a time when it is taking up its struggle in a determined manner and when the necessity for intervention is posed more sharply than before - a time not for ‘criticizing' the class struggle from a great height, but for being an active part of the struggle, for defending the revolutionary positions that can begin to gain a real echo within it. It's because ICC was able to carry out the theoretical and the political clarification, as well as the organizational refinement required to enable it to play its role as an organization of class combat, that the elements who were least convinced of this, those who preferred academic discussions to the heat of the class struggle, have left it. Paradoxically, although the departure of any militant is never desirable, and although we can only regret the irresponsible split which gave rise to the formation of the EFICC, which can only bring a little more confusion into a milieu which has quite enough already, in the period since the split, the ICC has strengthened itself politically and organizationally. This has been concretized in its greater capacity to ensure the presence of revolutionary ideas within a class struggle that is developing all the time.
However, although the appearance of the EFICC didn't express a crisis in the ICC - which would mean, since it's the main organization in the milieu, that there was a crisis in the milieu as a whole - it did express the difficulties that have persistently weighed on revolutionary groups since the historic resurgence of the proletariat in 1968.
As we have seen, these difficulties have their origin in the fundamental theoretical and political inadequacy of the majority of the groups of the milieu, who are unable to see the class movement going on right in front of them and thus don't get revitalized by contact with it. But this isn't the only explanation. Organizational immaturity, the product of decades of organic rupture with the revolutionary fractions that came out of the Communist International, has marked the milieu which arose after 1968 and has in particular taken the form of a preponderant sectarianism which gets in the way of the process of clarification and regroupment within the communist milieu. This immaturity has in turn been the channel for the infiltration of the dominant ideology in its most pernicious aspect - that of decomposition. One of the specific characteristics of the present historic period is that while the bourgeoisie's headlong flight into war is being held up by the combativity of the proletariat so that the door to a generalized war isn't open, the slow development of the crisis and of the class struggle hasn't made it possible for the proletarian perspective of the communist revolution to arise clearly in society. This ‘blocked' situation means that the system continues to rot on its feet, that there is a general decomposition of the whole of social life and of the dominant ideology. With the acceleration of the crisis at the beginning of the ‘80s, this decomposition has been accentuated more and more. It particularly affects the petty-bourgeois strata who have no future, but it also unfortunately manifests its perverse effects on the life of the proletarian milieu. It's the form that tends to be taken by the process of historical selection, of political decantation within the milieu in the present period.
The weight of the surrounding decomposition tends to express itself in various ways in the proletarian milieu. In particular we can point to:
-- the multiplication of micro-sects. In the last few years, the communist milieu has seen a number of small splits, all expressing the same weakness; none of them have brought anything to the dynamic towards regroupment by clearly situating themselves in relation to the existing poles of debate. On the contrary, they have locked themselves up in their specificities to bring new aspects of confusion to a proletarian milieu that is already too dispersed and scattered. Here we can mention, apart from the EFICC, which we've already talked about too much, a group like ‘A Contre Courant' which left the GCI in 1988. While ‘A Contre Courant' expressed a positive reaction against the degeneration of the GCI, it has been unable to go beyond the notion of returning to the original positions of the group, which already contained all the seeds of its later decay. The same goes for the recent split in the FOR which has taken refuge in false organizational quibbles without being able to publish any political argumentation. In addition, we've seen in France for example the reappearance or birth of a whole number of small parasitic sects like ‘Communisme Ou Civilisation', ‘Union Proletarienne', ‘Jalons', ‘Cahres Communistes', etc ... who represent almost as many points of view as the individuals who make them and whose flirts and divorces only feed confusion in the milieu and provide a sad caricature of what proletarian organizations should be. All these characteristics have the effect of repelling serious elements who are trying to move towards a revolutionary coherence.
-- a loss of the normal framework of debate within the revolutionary milieu. These last years have seen some serious polemical excesses in the proletarian milieu, targeted mainly at the ICC. Its perfectly understandable that the ICC should be at the centre of debates in that it constitutes the main pole within the revolutionary milieu. However, this can in no way justify the dangerous imbecilities which have been written about it recently. This applies to the bad faith and systematic denigration shown by the EFICC, whose only cohesion is to be anti-ICC; to the FOR, which has called the ICC "capitalist" be cause we're so "rich"! and worse still, the GCI, which published an article entitled ‘Once again, the ICC on the side of the cops against Revolutionaries.' These aberrations, rather than just indicating the stupidity of those who pen them, express a serious tendency to lose sight of the unity of the proletarian political milieu in the face of all the forces of the counter-revolution, an abandonment of the basic principles that have to be observed if the milieu is to protect itself;
-- the erosion of militant forces. Faced with the enormous strength of capitalist ideology, especially in its petty-bourgeois varieties, the tendency to lose sight of what revolutionary militancy means, to lose conviction and to withdraw into ‘family' comforts, is a phenomenon which has always weighed down on revolutionary organizations, But in the present period, the gnawing away at militant conviction by the dominant ideology has been further accentuated by the surrounding decomposition. Furthermore, a confrontation with the difficulties of intervening in the class struggle, often leads to hesitations among those whose convictions are the least firmly grounded and thus either to a pure and simple abandonment of militant life without any real divergences, or a flight into a sterile academicism, far removed from the class war. Such reactions express a fear of the practical implications of revolutionary combat: confrontation with the forces of the bourgeoisie, repression, etc ...
In these conditions its hardly surprising that the pressures of ideological decomposition affect first and foremost the groups that are the weakest politically and organizationally. In recent years, the degeneration of such groups has accelerated. The clearest example of this is the GCI: its morbid fascination with violence has increasingly led it towards anarchism and leftism, as can be seen by its support for the actions of the Shining Path in Peru, a Maoist organization if ever there was one; or more recently, by its irresponsible attitude towards the struggles in Burma, which have been dragooned behind the forces of democracy and in which the workers have been sent to get their heads beaten in by the army. The FOR, which continues to deny the existence of the crisis is a psychotic manner, is increasingly hard-pressed to hide its theoretical and practical emptiness. As for the EFICC, its systematic ‘critique' of the coherence of the ICC has pushed it into a growing incoherence, and in its, press, it seems to have as many points of view as it has members! The Bordigist diaspora hasn't recovered from the collapse of the PCI (Programme Communista) and vegitates, sadly, while at the same time providing succor to base unionism. All these groups, incapable of situating themselves in the class struggle today, because fundamentally they deny or profoundly underestimate it, are unable to be regenerated by contact with the struggle. They are already beginning to carry the nasty smell of the dustbin of history.
The organizations which are the expression of real historical currents within the communist milieu in that they crystallize a greater theoretical coherence and a greater organizational experience, are the best equipped to resist the pernicious influences of the dominant ideology. It's no accident that today, the ICC and the IBRP are the main poles of regroupment within the proletarian milieu. However, this certainly isn't a guarantee of immunization against the viruses of the dominant ideology. Even the most solid groups haven't escaped the consequences of the all-encompassing process of decomposition. The most perfect example of this is the Bordigist PCI which, at the end of the ‘70s, was the main organization of the milieu (at least at the numerical level) but which definitively fell apart at the beginning of the ‘80s. In the last few years, we've seen the departure of elements from the ICC who formed the EFICC, or more recently, the bitter resignation of the elements of the northern nucleus of Accion Proletaria, the ICC's section in Spain; or again, the participation of an element of the IBRP in France in a pseudo-conference in Paris with the EFICC, Communisme ou Civilisation, Union Proletarienne, Jalons, and some isolated individuals. This element, whose participation in the meeting gave a validity to the whole bluff, then left the IBRP when the latter disavowed his action. All these incidents show the urgent necessity for vigilance and for a struggle against the effects of ideological decomposition.
For its part, the ICC has always taken a clear position on such questions: diagnosing the crisis of the proletarian milieu in 1982, underlining the danger of the infiltration of the dominant ideology which at the historical level, finds its political expression in opportunism and centrism, outlining the specificities of the present period and in particular the weight of the decomposition of bourgeois ideology. It has in so doing armed itself politically and strengthened itself organizationally. The IBRP on the other hand prefers to adopt the policies of the ostrich: its splendidly denied the crisis of the milieu in the early ‘80s, declaring that it was just a crisis of the other groups. It's true that Battaglia Communista and afterwards the IBRP haven't had any splits, but is this an indication of the vitality of an organization? For long years, the PCI (Programme Communista) also didn't have any significant splits ... until it broke apart in 1983[2]. A lack of internal debate and political sclerosis generally don't express themselves in political splits but in a growing political disorientation, and a hemorrhage of militant energies, a process of disenchantment which brings no clarification either to those who leave or those who stay. The IBRP's withdrawal from intervention, its theorization of the persistence of the counter-revolution, is disquieting factors for the future of the organization.
Faced with this balance sheet of the difficulties the proletarian milieu has undergone, should we conclude that the communist milieu hasn't come out of its crisis at the beginning of the decade, a crisis whose main expression was the disappearance of Bordigism as the main pole of reference within the proletarian milieu?
With the resurgence of the class struggle, the development of the proletarian milieu
The situation of the proletarian milieu today is very different from the one which resulted in the crisis of 1982-83:
-- the failure of the Conferences of Groups of the Communist Left, even if it still has a weight seven years on, has to some extent been digested;
-- we are no longer in a period of retreat of the class struggle; on the contrary, we've had five years of resurgence;
-- the most important organization of the proletarian milieu is no longer a sclerotic and degenerated group like the Bordigist PCI.
In this sense, the proletarian milieu, despite the very serious weaknesses that continue to mark it, and which were just briefly outlined, is not in the crisis situation it went through in the early '80s. On the contrary, the development of the class struggle since '83, just as it lays the ground for a growing impact of revolutionary ideas, also tends to give rise to new elements within the proletarian milieu. Even if, like the class struggle which produces it, this emergence of a new revolutionary milieu is a slow process, it's nonethless significant of the present period.
The appearance of a proletarian political milieu on the periphery of the main centers of world capitalism - in Mexico, with the former Alptraum Communist Collective, now known by its publication Comunismo, and the Groupo Proletaria Internationalista, which publishes Revolution Mundial, in India with the groups Communist Internationalist and Lal Patak a and the circle Kamunist Kranti, in Argentina with the group Emancipacion Obrera - is extremely important for the whole proletarian milieu, seeing that for years there seemed to be no echo for revolutionary ideas in the under-developed countries. Of course, not all these groups express the same degree of clarity and their survival remains precarious given their lack of political experience, their distance from the political centre of the proletariat, ie Europe, and the extremely difficult material conditions in which they have to develop. However, their very existence is a proof of the general maturation of consciousness going on within the class worldwide.
The appearance of these revolutionary groups on the periphery of capitalism highlights in a very clear manner the responsibility of the already-existing revolutionary organizations, those which embody the historical experience of the proletariat, something which is cruelly lacking among the new groups which have arisen with little knowledge of the debates which have animated the communist milieu for two decades, and without any organizational experience. The dispersed situation of the old proletarian milieu, the heavy weight of sectarianism upon it, is a dramatic obstacle to the process of clarification which these new elements have to embark upon. Seen for a distance, it must be extremely difficult to situate oneself in the labyrinth of the numerous groups existing in Europe, to appreciate the real political importance of the different groups and of the existing debates.
The same difficulties which affect the old proletarian milieu centered in Europe have an even greater weight on the new groups arising in the peripheries, as can be seen with the sectarianism of groups like Alptraum in Mexico and Kamunist Kranti in India. But it is extremely important to understand that the political confusions these groups might have are of a different order to those displayed by the existing groups in Europe: in the first place they express the immaturity of youth exacerbated by the effects of isolation; in the second they are the expression of sclerosis or senile degeneration.
In these conditions, the influence of the old groups will be decisive for the evolution of the new ones, since the latter can only develop a coherence, strengthen themselves politically and break their isolation, by integrating themselves into the debates already going on in the international proletarian milieu, and by attaching themselves to the historic poles which already exist. The negative influence of a group like the GCI, which denies the existence of a proletarian political milieu and which peddles some very grave confusion, can only weigh very heavily on the evolution of a group like Emancipation Obrera, reinforcing its intrinsic weaknesses. Similarly the academicism of a little sect like Communisme ou Civilisation, with whom Alptraum is now developing some kind of activity, can only lead the latter into sterility.
On the whole, the IBRP has shown a much more correct attitude to the new groups, but it remains attached to the opportunist organizational conceptions which presided over the birth of the IBRP, and for example, with the hasty integration of Lal Pataka as the IBRP's expression in India. Furthermore, the serious underestimation of the class struggle shown by all these old groups tends to hold back the evolution of the new ones by depriving them of any real grasp of what gave birth to them: the workers' struggle.
The ICC, for its part, because its origins lay in an awareness of the passivity and political confusion of the groups which already existed prior to and after 1968 - notably Programme Communiste and Battaglia Communista - has taken to heart its responsibilities towards the new groups arising in the proletarian milieu. As with the intervention in the class struggle, so the intervention towards the groups born out of the class struggle is a priority for our organization. In the ICC press we have published, far from any sectarian spirit, texts by Emancipacion Obrera, Alptraum, The GPI and Communist Internationalist; we have mentioned all the groups in our press, after making their existence known to the whole revolutionary milieu, helping to no small extent to break their isolation. There's not one group with whom we haven't maintained an important correspondence, not one which hasn't been visited in order to hold more in-depth discussions and so contribute towards a better reciprocal knowledge and towards the necessary process of clarification. We have done this not with the idea of recruitment and of pushing for a premature integration into the ICC, but to allow them to ensure their survival and develop their political solidity - an indispensable stage of regroupment, which we of course consider to be necessary, is to take place on the clearest possible basis.
While the appearance of new groups in countries far from the traditional centers of the proletariat is a particularly important phenomenon, highly significant of the current development of the class struggle and its effects on the life of the proletarian milieu, this doesn't mean that there is no corresponding development in countries where the political milieu already exists. On the contrary. But this development doesn't take the same form: because the proletarian milieu and its organizations are already present, the emergence of new forces tends to take the form, not of the appearance of new groups, but of new elements who move towards the already existing movement. In contrast to the situation after ‘68, which was marked by the weight of the student milieu and which was concerned with general theoretical issues, the new elements today tend to come more directly out of the workers' struggle. Here again, the question of intervention is crucial in permitting these elements to join up with the proletarian milieu and to strengthen its militant capacities. The present development of struggle committees and discussion circles is the expression of the development of consciousness going on in the class. For today's proletarian groups to underestimate the question of intervention is tantamount to cutting themselves of from what gives them life. This is particularly obvious when it comes to the question of increasing militant resources, the infusion of new blood. The organizations which don't see this today condemn themselves first to stagnation, then to sclerosis and regression. And finally, to demoralization and crisis.
*******
With the renewal of the class struggle a new generation of revolutionaries is about to be born: not only the future but the present itself is bringing a new dynamic to the proletarian milieu. But this dynamic doesn't just mean that the relative isolation of revolutionaries from their class is about to be broken and that everything is going to be easier. It means an acceleration of the process of decantation in the proletarian milieu. Nothing is won in advance. The future of the proletarian organizations, their capacity to forge the world communist party, which is indispensable to the victory of the revolution, depends on their present capacity to take up the responsibilities for which the class has produced them. This is what is at stake in the present debates and activities of the communist milieu. The organizations which today are unable to live up to their responsibilities, to become an integral part of the class combat, are of no use to the proletariat and will be condemned by the historical process itself.
JJ
[1] See the second part of this article in IR 54.
[2] See the second part of this article in IR 54.
In No 55 of the International Review, we dealt with some of the most important, general features of the defeat of the revolutionary movement in Germany between November 1918 and January 1919, and the conditions in which this movement unfolded. In this article, we are looking further into the systematically counterrevolutionary policies of the SPD, which had passed into the camp of the bourgeoisie.
At the beginning of November 1918, the working class in Germany brought the First World War to an end through its mass struggle, and through the risings of the soldiers. To try and take the wind out of the workers' sails, and to avoid a further sharpening of class contradictions, the ruling class had been forced to end the imperialist conflict, under the pressure of the working class, and to make the Kaiser abdicate. But this was not sufficient to quell the workers: above all, the bourgeoisie had to prevent the flame of the proletarian revolution - which had been lit successfully a year before in the October revolution in Russia - from spreading to Germany.
All revolutionaries were aware that the workin g class in Germany was central to the internationalization of revolutionary struggles:
"For the German working class we are preparing ... a fraternal alliance, bread and military aid. We will all put our life at risk, in order to help the German workers to push forward the revolution, which has started in Germany," (Lenin, Letter to Sverdlov, 1.10.1918).
All revolutionaries agreed that the movement had to go further: "The revolution has started. We shouldn't rejoice about what has been achieved, we shouldn't feel triumphant about the smashed enemy, but we should exercise the strongest self-critique, fiercely gather our energy, in order to continue what we started. Because what we have achieved is little, and the enemy hasn't been defeated," (R. Luxemburg, The Beginning, 18.11.1918).
However, while it had been easier for the working class in Russia to overthrow the bourgeoisie, the working class in Germany came up against a stronger, more intelligent ruling class, which was better equipped, because of its economic and political strength, and which had also learnt from the events in Russia, as well as receiving support from the ruling classes of the other major powers.
But what proved decisive in Germany was that the bourgeoisie there possessed a trump card - the Social Democratic party (SDP) at its side: "In all previous revolutions the combatants faced each other in an open manner: class against class, program against program, sword against shield ... In today's revolution, the defensive troops of the old order line up not under their own banners and the coat of arms of the ruling class, but under the flag of a ‘social democratic party'. Bourgeois class rule wages today its last world historical struggle under a foreign flag, under the flag of the revolution itself. It is a socialist party; it is the most original creation of the workers' movement and of the class struggle, which has transformed itself into the most important instrument of the bourgeois counter-revolution. Core, tendency, politics, psychology, method - all this is through and through capitalist. Only the banners, the apparatus and phraseology are left over from socialism," (Rosa Luxemburg, A Pyrrhic Victory, 21.12.1918). As in the First World War, the SPD was to be the most loyal defender of capital in order to smash the workers' struggles.
The war's end, the SPD-USPD Government and Repression
On November 4 1918, the sailors of the German Baltic coast, mutinied in Kiel against the order to mobilize for another naval battle against Britain - a battle considered suicidal even by some generals. Faced with the attempted repression of the mutiny, a wave of solidarity with the sailors developed, and during the following days, spread like the wind to all the major villages and towns in Germany. Aware of the experience in Russia, the military commander, General Groener, insisted on an immediate end to the war. The armistice was agreed by the Allies on November 7 and was signed on November 11, 1918. With this cease-fire, the bourgeoisie eliminated one of the most important factors which had radicalized the councils of workers and soldiers.
The war had certainly taken away the workers' gains, but a majority of workers entered into the struggle with the idea that once the war was over, it would be possible to return to the old, peaceful, gradual way of doing things. In 1918, the majority of workers began with the idea that "peace" and the "democratic republic" were the principal achievements of the struggle.
Again drawing on the Russian experience, the German bourgeoisie along with the supreme military command had enough foresight to understand that it would need a Trojan horse in order to stop the proletarian movement. The military boss Groener was later to say of the November 10 agreement between the supreme military command and SPD leader and government chief, Friedrich Ebert: "We have allied ourselves in order to fight the revolution, to fight Bolshevism. The nub of the alliance we constituted on the evening of November 10 was the fight without mercy against the revolution, the reestablishment of a government of order, support for the armed forces and to organize a call for a national assembly as soon as possible ... In my opinion, there does not exist any party in Germany possessing at this time sufficient influence over the population, especially within the masses, which would suffice to restore governmental authority with the supreme military command. The right wing parties had completely disappeared, and naturally it was out of question to join up with the extreme radicals. The only alternative was for the supreme military command to make an alliance with the majoritarian Social Democracy."
It was against this background that the fervent war cries of the SPD and the anti-strike propaganda gave way to cries of "workers' unity" and "against a fratricidal struggle." Whereas, in a revolutionary situation, the whole dynamic tends towards polarization of the two opposing forces, the SPD tried to blur the contradictions between the classes.
On the one hand, it distorted its own role during the war and the present situation, in order to utilize the trust it still retained amongst the workers, which it had won as a result of its proletarian role the previous century. At the same time, it sought an alliance with the centrist USPD. The centrist nature of the latter party, with a right wing which could hardly be distinguished for the majority of the Social Democrats, a wavering centre, and a left wing, the Spatakists, favored this calculated effort of the SPD. The USPD's right-wing joined the SPD-headed Council of People's Commissars in November - in other words, the bourgeois government of the day.
A few days after the creation of the councils, the bourgeois government, presided over by the SPD - and which spoke up in the name of the Peoples' Commissars - started the first preparations for a systematic military repression: organization of Freikorps (mercenary troops), organizing republican soldiers' defense corps and loyal government officers, in order to stop the further collapse of the army and to have new bloodhounds at hand.
It was difficult for the workers to see through the role of the SPD. As an ex-workers' party, later to become a protagonist of the imperialist war and a defender of the capitalist democratic state, the SPD had developed, on the one hand, a ‘pro-worker' language, "in defense of the revolution", while on the other, it had conducted a witchunt against the ‘Bolshevik revolution' and its supporters, the Spartakists.
Karl Liebknecht, in the name of the Spartakists, on November 19 wrote in the Rote Fahne (Red Flag): "Those who call loudest for unity ... now find a resounding echo, above all among the soldiers. No wonder. The soldiers are very far from being all proletarian. And martial law, censorship, official propaganda bombardment have not failed to have an effect. The mass of the soldiers is revolutionary against militarism, against the war, and against the open representatives of imperialism. In relation to socialism, it is still undecided, wavering, immature. A large part of the proletarian soldiers, like the workers, consider that the revolution has been accomplished, that we have now only to establish freedom and demobilize. They want to be left in peace after so much suffering. But it's not each and every unity which makes us strong. The unity between a wolf and a lamb hands over the lamb to be devoured by the wolf. The unity between the proletariat and the ruling classes sacrifices the proletariat. The unity with traitors means defeat ... the denunciation of all the false friends of the working class, is in this case our first commandment ..."
In order to disarm the spearhead of the revolutionary movement, the Spartacists, a campaign was launched against them: apart from the systematic slandering - the treacherous character assassination which presented Spartacus as corrupt, plundering, full of terrorist elements - Spartacus was to be prevented from speaking up. On December 6, government troops occupied the Spartacus paper Rote Fahne; on December 9 and 13, the Spartacus headquarters in Berlin was occupied by soldiers. Liebknecht was slandered as a terrorist, responsible for anarchy and chaos. Already at the beginning of December, the SPD had called for the assassination of Luxemburg and Liebknecht.
Drawing the lessons of the struggles in Russia, the German bourgeoisie was determined to use all possible means against revolutionary organizations in Germany. Without hesitation, it used repression against them from the first day and never made a fuss about its intention to kill the most prominent leaders ....
Concessions to crush the movement
On November 15, the trade unions and the capitalists made a deal to limit the radicalization of the workers by making a few economic, concessions. Thus the 8 hour day without wage reductions was granted (by 1923, it had been replaced by a 10-12 hour day). Above all, however, the systematic creation of factory councils (Betriebsrate ), which followed the goal of canalizing the workers' self-initiative in the factory, and of submitting them to state control. These factory councils were set up to counter directly the workers' own councils. The unions played the central part in the building this dyke.
Finally, the SPD pointed out the ‘threat' of US intervention and moves to block the delivery of foodstuffs, should the workers' councils continue to ‘destabilize' the situation.
The strategy of the SPD: Disarm the workers' councils
Above all, however, the bourgeoisie focused its offensive against the workers' councils themselves. They tried to prevent the power of the councils leading to an undermining, a paralysis, of the state apparatus:
-- In some towns, the SPD took the initiative to transform the workers' and soldiers' councils into "peoples' parliaments", a means through which the workers were "dissolved" amongst the people and where they could no longer take a leading role vis-a-vis the whole laboring population (this happened, for example, at Koln under the leadership of K Adenauer, later chancellor);
-- The workers' councils had to be deprived of the concrete possibilities to actually put into practice the decisions they had taken. Thus on the November 23, the Executive Council of Berlin (the councils of Berlin had elected an Executive Council [Vollzugsrat]), didn't put up any resistance when the first elements of power were taken out of its hands, when the Executive Council renounced exercising power in favor of the bourgeois government. Already on November 13, under the pressure of the bourgeois government and of government-loyal soldiers, the Executive Council had withdrawn its proposal to set-up a Red Guard. Thus the Executive Council was confronted with the bourgeois government without having any arms at its command, at the same time as the bourgeois government was busily rallying masses of troops;
-- After the SPD had already managed to pull the USPD into the government (while holding onto the same number of government posts), and had thus created a frenzy of "unity" between the "various parts of social democracy", they continued the same intoxication vis-a-vis the workers' councils: in the Berlin Executive Council, as well as in the councils of other towns, the SPD insisted on the parity of the number of delegates between SPD and USPD. With this tactic they received more mandates than the actual balance of forces in the factories would have given them. The power of the workers' councils as essential organs of political leadership and organs of exercising authority, was thus even more distorted and emptied.
This offensive of the ruling class went hand in hand with the tactics of military provocations. Thus on December 6, troops loyal to the government occupied the Rote Fahne, arrested the Berlin Executive Council, and provoked a massacre amongst demonstrating workers (more than 14 shot.). But during that phase, the vigilance and combativity of the class were still unbroken. A day after the provocations, gigantic masses of workers (150,000) took to the streets. The bourgeoisie still met the workers' forceful resistance. But the movement was still very dispersed, and if the spark had been spread from one town to others, there still wasn't a very strong dynamic of the working class at the shop floor level of the factories themselves.
In such a situation, the lifeblood of the class at the grass roots level in the factories must start pulsating stronger. Factory committees must arise in which the most combative workers regroup, general assemblies take place, decisions taken and their implementation controlled; delegates must respond to general assemblies which have mandated them and if necessary they are revoked. In short the class mobilizes and gathers all its strength at the shop floor level across all the plants, the dividing lines are clearly delineated and the workers exercise a real control over the movement from the very grass roots level. In Germany, the level of coordination encompassing towns and entire regions hadn't yet been reached; on the contrary, isolation between the various towns was still the dominant aspect. A unification of the workers and their councils across the limits of a town is an essential step in this process in order to face up to the capitalists. When the workers' councils arise and the power of the bourgeoisie is confronted with the power of the workers, a period of dual power is opened up, and this requires the workers to centralize their force on a national and even bigger scale.
The precondition for doing all this is that the centralization is the result of a process which the workers are controlling. But against the background of the still-prevailing dispersal of the movement, the isolation of the different towns, the Berlin Workers' and Soldiers' council- pushed by the SPD - called for a national congress of workers' and soldiers' councils to be held on December 16-22. That congress was supposed to act as centralizing force with a central authority. In reality, however, the conditions for such a centralization were not yet ripe, because both the pressure and the capacity of the class to give impulses at the shop floor level, and to control the movement, hadn't yet been strong enough. In addition, dispersal was still the dominant tendency. Because of this premature, faked centralization - initiated by the SPD and which was more or less "imposed" on the workers instead of being a product of their struggle - the working class was confronted with a big obstacle.
It was no surprise that the composition of the councils did not correspond to the political situation in the factories, that it did not follow the principles of responsibility to the general assemblies and the revocability of the delegates. Instead, the distribution of delegates corresponded rather to the number of voters for the various parties, taking into account the national census of 1910. The SPD knew how to use of the prevailing idea that such councils would have to work along the principles of bourgeois parliaments. Thus, through a number of parliamentary tricks and maneuvers, the SPD managed to keep the congress under its control. The delegates immediately set up fractions after the opening of the congress (out of 490 delegates 298 were members of the SPD, 101 of the USPD amongst them 10 Sparacists and 100 "others").
With this congress, the working class found itself confronted with a self-proclaimed assembly, which spoke up in the name of the workers, but which from its very beginning was to betray the interests of the workers:
-- A delegation of Russian workers, who were to attend the congress following an invitation by the Berlin Executive council, was turned back at the German border on the orders of the SPD government. "The General Assembly taking place on the 16th of December does not deal with international deliberations, but solely with German affairs, in the deliberation of which foreigners of course cannot participate. The Russian delegation is nothing but representatives of the Bolshevik dictatorship" ... this was the justification of the SPD's daily paper, Vorwarts (No 340, December 11 1918). Thus the SPD fought tooth and nail against the perspective of the unification of the struggles across Germany and Russia, as well as the international extension of the revolution in general;
-- With the help of tactical maneuvers by the presidium, the congress rejected the participation of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht they were not even admitted as non-voting observers. The pretext given was that they weren't workers from Berlin factories.
In order to put pressure on the congress, the Spartacus League organized a mass demonstration on December 16th. This was attended by 250,000 workers, because many of the workers' and soldiers' delegations which wanted to present their motions to the congress, had been mostly rejected or warded off by the SPD.
However, the congress confirmed its death sentence when it decided that, as soon as possible, a national constituency should be called, and that such a constituency would hold all the authority in society, and that the congress would have to hand over power to it. The bait of bourgeois parliamentary democracy hung out by the bourgeoisie, lured the majority of workers into this trap. Thus the weapon of bourgeois parliament was the poison against the workers' initiative.
Finally the congress spread a ‘proletarian' smokescreen, talking of the first measures of socialization which should be taken, even though the working class hadn't taken power. The central question that of disarming the counter-revolution by overthrowing the bourgeois government was thus pushed into the background.
"To take social-political measures in individual plants is an illusion, as long as the bourgeoisie still holds political power" (IKD, Der Kommunist).
This congress was a total success for the bourgeoisie. For the Spartacists it meant: "The point of departure and the sole tangible acquisition of the revolution of November 9 was the formation of workers' and soldiers' councils. The first congress of these councils has decided to destroy this sole acquisition, to rob the proletariat of its positions of power, to demolish the work of November 9, to wind back the revolution ... Since the council congress has condemned the very organ the workers' and soldiers' councils, which gave him its mandate, to being a shadow of itself, it has thus violated its boundaries, betrayed the mandate, which the workers' and soldiers' councils handed out to it, has removed the ground under the feet of its own existence and authority ... The workers' and soldiers' councils will declare the counter-revolutionary work of its unfaithful delegates to be null and void," (Luxemburg, ‘Ebert's Slaves', 20.12.1918,). In some tows, e.g Leipzig, the local workers' and soldiers' councils protested against the decisions of the congress. But the early, preemptive centralization of the councils allowed them to fall very quickly into the hands of the bourgeoisie. The only way to fight against this was to increase the pressure from "below", ie at the grass roots level of the factories, the streets....
Encouraged and strengthened by the results of this congress the bourgeoisie now went on to provoke further military clashes. On December 24, the Peoples' Marine Division, a vanguard troop, was attacked by government soldiers. Several marines were shot. Once again a storm of outrage broke out among the workers. On December 25, huge numbers of workers protested and took to the streets.
Against the background of these openly counter-revolutionary actions of the SPD, the USPD withdrew from the bourgeois government on December 29. On December 30-January 1, the Spartacus-League and the IKD formed the Communist Party (KPD) in the heat of the struggles. At its founding congress a first balance sheet of the movement was drawn. We will take up the debates at the founding congress on another occasion. But the KPD, through the voice of Luxemburg, emphasized: "The passage of the predominantly soldier revolution of November 9th to a specific workers' revolution, the transformation of the superficial, purely political into the slow process of the economic, general settling of scores between labor and capital, demands from the revolutionary working class a quite different level at political maturity, schooling, tenacity than that which sufficed for the first initial phase," (‘The 1st Congress', 3.1.1919 Die Rote Fahne.)
The bourgeoisie provokes a premature insurrection
Having assembled a sufficient number of troops loyal to the government, above all in Berlin; having set up a new obstacle against the workers' councils following the "triumph" of the Berlin "congress", and before the phase of economic struggles could come into full swing, the bourgeoisie wanted to deal decisive military blows against the workers.
On January 4, the police superintendent of Berlin, who was a member of the left wing of the USPD, was to be removed by government troops. At the beginning of November the police headquarters had been occupied by revolutionary soldiers and workers, and up to January, it hadn't fallen into the hands of the bourgeois government. Once more, a storm of protest against the government broke out. In Berlin, hundreds of thousands of people took to the street on January 5. The Vorwarts (SPD newspaper) was occupied as well as other bourgeois press centers. On January 6 there were more mass demonstrations with hundreds of thousands participating.
Although the KPD leadership constantly propagated the necessity to overthrown the bourgeois government with the SPD at its head, they didn't think that the moment for doing so had arrived. In fact, they warned against a premature insurrection. However, under the overwhelming surge of the masses on the streets, which made which many revolutionaries feel that the working masses were ready for the insurrection, a "revolutionary committee" was founded on the eve of January 5, whose task was to lead the struggle for the overthrow of the government and to temporarily take over once the bourgeois government had been thrown out of office. Liebknecht. joined this "committee". However, the majority of the KPD considered the moment for insurrection hadn't yet come and emphasized the immaturity of the masses for such a step. It's true that the gigantic street demonstrations in Berlin had expressed an enormous rejection of the SPD government, but although discontent was rising in many towns, determination and combativity in other areas were lagging behind. Thus Berlin found itself fairly isolated. Even worse: having disarmed the national council congress in December and the executive council of Berlin the workers' councils in Berlin were no longer places of centralization, of decision-taking or for initiating workers' activities. This "revolutionary committee" did not emerge from the strength of any workers' council, nor did it have a mandate. It's not surprising that it didn't have an over-view about the mood amongst the workers and soldiers. Neither did it take over a real lead over the movement in Berlin or in other towns. In fact it turned out to be completely powerless and lacked orientation itself. An insurrection without the councils themselves.
The committee's appeals were without any effect, they were not even taken seriously by the workers. The workers had been caught in a trap because of these military provocations. The SPD did not hesitate about its counter-offensive. Its troops flooded the streets and started street fights with armed workers. During the following days, a terrible bloodbath was imposed upon the Berlin workers. On January 15, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered by SPD troops. With the bloodbath amongst the Berlin workers and the assassination of the most prominent leaders of the KPD, the head of the movement had been broken. The ferocious arm of repression came down on the entire working class. On January 17 the Rote Fahne was banned. The SPD intensified its demagogic campaign against the Spartacists and justified its order to assassinate Rosa and Karl: "Luxemburg and Liebknecht themselves have now become victims of their own bloody terror tactics ... Liebknecht and Luxemburg had not been social-democrats for a long time, because for social-democrats, the laws of democracy, which they broke, are sacred. Because of the breach of these laws, we had to fight them and we still have to ... therefore the smashing of the Spartacus rising means for the whole of our people, in particular the working class, an act of saving, something we were obliged to do for the well-being of our people and for history".
While during the July days in Russia in 1917 the Bolsheviks had managed to prevent a premature insurrection - against the resistance of the anarchists - in order to throw their whole weight behind a successful rising in October, the KPD did not succeed in doing this in January 1919. A part of the KPD - amongst them, one of their most prominent leaders, Liebknecht - overestimated the situation and let themselves get carried away by the wave of discontent and outrage. The majority of the KPD saw the weakness and immaturity of the movement but couldn't avoid the massacre.
As a government member declared on 3.2.1919: "A success for the Spartacus people had been impossible from the very beginning, because thanks to our preparation, we forced them to an early insurrection".
With the massacre against the proletariat in Berlin the heart of the proletariat had been hit, and after the Freikorps blood bath in Berlin, they could move to other centers of proletarian resistance in other parts of Germany. Because, in the meantime, in some towns which were isolated from each other, Republics had been proclaimed since the beginning of November (Nov 8 in Bavaria, Nov 10 in Braunschweig and Dresden , Jan 10 in Bremen), as if the rule of capital could be smashed through a series of isolated, dispersed insurrections. Thus the same counter-revolutionary troops marched on Bremen in February. After accomplishing another bloodbath, they proceeded to the Ruhr area in March and to central Germany, and in April 100,000 counter-revolutionary troops marched on to Bavaria to smash the "Bavarian Republic". But even with these massacres, the combativity of the class was not broken immediately. Many unemployed demonstrated on the streets all through the year 1919 and there were still a large number of strikes in various sectors, struggles against which the bourgeoisie never hesitated to use troops. During the Kapp putsch in 1920 and during the risings in central German; and in Hamburg, the workers still demonstrated their combativity until 1923. But with the defeat of the rising in January in Berlin, with the massacres in many parts of Germany in the winter of 1919, the ascendant phase had been broken. The movement had been robbed its heart and its leadership had been decapitated.
The bourgeoisie had succeeded in preventing the spread of the proletarian revolution in Germany, in stopping the central part of the working class in Europe joining the revolution.
After another series of massacres of the movements in Austria, Hungary and Italy, the workers in Russia remained isolated and were thus exposed to the attacks of the counter-revolution. The defeat of the workers in Germany opened the road to an international defeat of the entire working class and paved the way to a long period of counter-revolution.
The lesson of the German Revolution
It was the war that catapulted the working class into this international uprising, but at the same time the result of this was that:
-- the ending of the war removed the first cause of the mobilization in the eyes of the majority of the workers;
-- the war had profoundly divided the proletariat, in particular at its end, between those of the ‘defeated' countries, where the workers had launched themselves onto the offensive against the national bourgeoisie, and the ‘victorious' countries, where the proletariat had been injected with the nationalist poison of ‘victory'.
For all these reasons, it has to be clear to us today how much the conditions of war were truly unfavorable for the first challenge to capitalist rule. Only the simple-minded could think that the outbreak of a third world war today would provide a more fertile soil for a new revolutionary offensive.
Despite the specificities of the situation , the struggles in Germany have left us a whole heritage of lessons. The working class today is no longer divided by war, and the slow development of the crisis has prevented a spectacular outburst of struggles. In the innumerable confrontations taking place today, the class is acquiring more experience and is developing its consciousness in a more profound way, even if this process is generally tortuous and indirect.
However, this process of the development of consciousness about the nature of the crisis, the perspectives offered by capitalism, and the necessity to destroy it, is coming up against exactly the same forces which were already at work in 1914, 17, 18, 19: the left wing of capital, the unions, the parties of the left and their guard-dogs, the representatives of the extreme left of capital. It is these forces which, as part of a much more developed form of state capitalism and a more sophisticated repressive apparatus, are today preventing the working class from posing the question of power more rapidly.
The left parties and the leftists, like the social democrats who at the time took on the role of butchers of the working class, are once again posing as the friends and defenders of the workers; and the leftists and ‘oppositional' trade union forces will also have the responsibility of crushing the working class in any future revolutionary situation.
Those like the Trotskyists, who today talk about the need to get the left parties into power, the better to expose them, those who today claim that these organizations, although they have betrayed in the past, are still not integrated into the state, and that they can still be reconquered or pressured to change their orientation, are keeping alive the worst illusions about these gangsters. The ‘leftists' don't only play the role of sabotaging workers' struggles. The bourgeoisie will not always limit itself to keeping the left in opposition; at an appropriate moment, it will put these leftists in the government in order to smash the workers.
Whereas, in Germany, many of the weaknesses within the class could be explained by the fact that the period of decadence was only just beginning, so that many things were not yet clear, today, seventy years later, there can be no room for doubt about:
-- the nature of the trade unions
-- the parliamentary poison
-- bourgeois democracy and so-called national liberation struggles.
The clearest revolutionaries of the time were already showing the dangerous role of these forms of struggle, which belonged to the years of capitalism's historic prosperity. Any confusion or hope about the possibility of working in the unions, of using parliamentary elections, any hesitations about the power of the workers' councils and the world wide character of the proletarian revolution, will have fatal consequences.
Although the Spartacists, alongside the left radicals of Bremen, Hamburg and Saxony, carried out a heroic oppositional role during the war, it remains the case that the late foundation of the Communist Party was a decisive weakness of the class. We have tried to show the broad historical reasons for this. Nevertheless, history is not a fatalistic business. Revolutionaries have a conscious role to play. We must draw all the lessons from the events in Germany and from the revolutionary wave in general. Today it it's up to revolutionaries not to go into endless lamentations about the necessity for the party, but to constitute the real foundations for the construction of the party .. It is not a question of proclaiming ourselves the ‘leaders', as dozens of organizations do today, but of continuing the fight for the clarification of programmatic positions, of taking a vanguard role in the dally struggles of the class. No less than in the past, this will require a vigorous denunciation of the work of the left of capital, and a capacity to show both the broad and the concrete perspectives of the class struggle. The real precondition for being able to assume this task is to assimilate all the lessons of the revolutionary wave and in particular of the events in Germany and Russia. In another article in this Review, we will come back to the specific lessons about the party that the German revolution has left to us .
Dino
"The imperialist capitalist class, as the last offspring of the caste of exploiters, surpasses all its predecessors as far as brutality, open cynicism, and rascality are concerned.
"It will defend its ‘holy of holies' - its profits and privileges of exploitation tooth and nail. It will defend them with the cold-blooded viciousness which it manifested during the history of its colonial policy and during the last world war. It will move heaven and hell against the workers. It will mobilize the peasantry against the industrial workers. It will set the backward elements of the proletariat against the vanguard of socialism. It will get its officers to commit massacres. It will attempt to nullify socialist measures by a hundred and one methods of passive resistance ... It will sooner turn the country into a smoking heap of ruins than voluntarily relinquish its power to exploit the working class.
"This resistance must be put down with an iron hand, with the utmost energy. The power of the bourgeois counter-revolution must be met by the revolutionary power of the working class. The plots, schemes, and intrigues of the capitalist class must be countered by the ceaseless vigilance, clearness of vision, and readiness of the proletarian mass for action at any moment ...
"The struggle for socialism is the greatest civil war in history, and the proletarian revolution must prepare for this civil war the necessary weapons; it must learn to use them - to fight and conquer." (From ‘What Does Spartacus Want', Draft Program of the Communist Party of Germany, written by Rosa Luxemburg, 1918)
Between the end of September and the beginning of October 1988, Algeria went through a wave of social upheaval unprecedented since ‘Independence' in 1962. The major towns and industrial centers were shaken by a series workers' strikes and hunger riots by unemployed youth. With appalling barbarity, the ‘socialist' Algerian state and its sole party (the ‘'Front de Liberation Nationale'), massacred hundreds of young demonstrators. This state and party, hailed twenty years ago by Trotskyists and Stalinists as ‘socialist' met the demands for ‘bread and grain' with machine-guns and bullets. Assassinations, torture, mass arrests, the state of siege and the militarization of labor: this is the Algerian bourgeoisie's answer to the demands of the exploited.
The strikes and riots are caused by the rapid deterioration of the Algerian economy. Already a prey to the permanent crisis of the under-developed countries, the latter is now literally collapsing. The fall in gas and oil revenues, which are virtually the country's only resource, and the exhaustion of reserves forecast to have lasted until the year 2000, all explain the draconian austerity of the 1980's. Like Ceausescu's Romania, Chadli's Algeria has promised to repay its debt to the world's banks. The end of the state's intervention in sectors such as housing, health, and food prices has created a frightful situation for the laboring masses. Queues form at 6:00 in the morning for bread and semolina (the staple grain product); meat is not to be found; water is cut off for months at a time; it is impossible to find housing; already wretched wages are frozen; unemployment has become the norm for young people (65% of the 23 million population are under 25): all this is the result of 25 years of Algerian ‘socialism' born of the struggle for ‘national liberation'. The purely parasitic Algerian bourgeoisie defends its power against the exploited masses through a ferocious military dictatorship. FLN bureaucrats and army officers, who dominate the economic apparatus, live by speculation and the resale of imported foodstuffs at black market prices. This is the ruling class' weakness. And while it relies increasingly on the Islamic fundamentalist movement which it has encouraged in recent years, this movement is without any real influence on the working population, apart from fractions of the petty bourgeoisie and lumpen-proletariat.
The real meaning of the October upheavals, in reaction to terrible poverty, is the clear resurgence of the Algerian proletariat on the social scene. Much more than during the riots of 1980, 1985, or 1986, the working class has been in the forefront. At the end of September, strikes broke out throughout the industrial zone of Rouiba-Reghaia, 30 km from Algiers, with the 13,000 workers of the Societe Nationale des Vehicules Industriels (ex-Berliet trucks). From there, the strike spread to the whole Algiers region: Air Algeria, and above all the postal service (PTT). Despite the repression of the Rouiba workers by police armed with water-cannon, the movement then spread to the large cities of the East and West. In Kabylia, the attempts by police and military to set ‘Kabyles' against ‘Arabs' - to the point of sending out police loud-speaker vans to declaim "don't support the Arabs who did not support you in 1985" - met only hatred and contempt. Finally, and significantly, the state-controlled trades union, the UGTA (Union Generale des Travailleurs Algeriens) had to distance itself from the government, in order to regain some influence over of the movement.
It was in this context that there broke out, from 5th October onwards, a series of riots, lootings, destruction of shops and public buildings, carried out by thousands of young unemployed, sometimes joined by agents provocateurs from the secret police and the fundamentalists. These riots have been highlighted by the media both in Algeria and in the West in general, the better to hide the extent and the class direction of the strikes. Furthermore, the Algerian ruling class has made the most of them, to carry out a preventive massacre, which has since been put to use politically to emphasize the need for ‘democratic' ‘reforms', and to eliminate fractions of the state apparatus too closely linked to the army and the FLN, and inadequate in confronting the proletarian menace.
The riots of this young, hopeless, and unemployed population are not in continuity with the workers' strikes. They are clearly differentiated by their lack of any perspective, as well as the ease with which they are used and manipulated by the state apparatus. It is true that this youth does seem to have shown timid signs of emerging politicization, refusing to follow the slogans either of the opposition abroad (Ben Bella and Ait Ahmed, once leaders of the FLN, before being eliminated by Boumedienne), or of the Islamic fundamentalists, who are nothing other than a creation of the regime and the military. Here and there, young rioters tore down the Algerian flag, put town halls and FLN offices to the sack, and destroyed the Algerian headquarters of the Saharan Polisario, a nationalist movement supported by Algerian imperialism and symbolic of the hidden war with Morocco. But this kind of movement must be carefully distinguished from that of the striking workers. Youth as such is not a class. Separated from that of the proletariat, the action of youth, either unemployed or never having had a job (those known as the ‘guardians of the wall' because of their daily enforced idleness) cannot offer any way out.
Because they only attack the symbols of the state, because they loot and destroy blindly, these revolts remain impotent; they are merely brush fires, which can hardly contribute to the workers' class consciousness and struggle. They are not really any different from the periodic riots in the shanty-towns of Latin America. They express the accelerating decomposition of a system which provokes among the jobless, explosions of anger and despair without any historical perspective.
The apparent absence of any organization of the strike is doubtless what allowed these revolts to occupy the front of the stage. This explains the violence of the repression by the police and army (about 500 deaths, often amongst the very young). The armed forces remained uncontaminated; they did not even begin to fall apart. The 70,000 conscripts in an army of 120,000 did not budge.
All this shows that it would be wrong to compare the events of October 1988 with those of January 1905 in Russia. Nowhere did we see any signs of a pre-revolutionary period, either in the autonomous organization of the proletariat, of in any unsteadiness of the state.
This is why, once the water came back in the big cities, and the shops were ‘miraculously' restocked, the Chadli government was able, on the 12th October, to put an end to the state of siege. The 48-hour general strike in Kabylia, and the sporadic confrontations with the police, was rear guard actions. Bourgeois order reigns again, with a few ‘democratic' promises from Chadli (referendum on the constitution) and calls for calm from the imams (14th October), who put forward an ‘Islamic republic' with the military. In fact, this is a pause in a situation which remains highly explosive, and which will be expressed in more widespread social movements, where the proletariat will play a more visible and more determining part. This defeat is only the first round in the coming increasingly decisive confrontations between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Already, in early November, wildcat strikes have broken out again in Algiers.
Despite the apparent ‘return to calm', these social upheavals have a considerable historical importance. Consequently, they cannot be identified with the events in Iran in 1979, nor with today's events in Yugoslavia and Chile. In no case did the workers or young jobless follow the Islamic fundamentalists. Contrary to the claims of the press, the bourgeois intellectuals, and the French Communist Party, who all support Chadli come what may, the fundamentalists are the ideological arm of the military, with whom they work hand in glove. Unlike Iran, religion has almost no impact on the young unemployed, and still less on the workers.
The greatest danger for the proletariat today would be to trust in the promises of ‘democratization' and the renewal of ‘freedoms', especially since the referendum at the end of October (where Chadli won 90% of the votes). The proletariat can expect nothing from such promises, and has everything to fear from them. ‘Democratic' chatter does nothing but prepare still more infamous massacres by the bourgeois class, which has nothing to offer the exploited masses but poverty and bullets. This is a lesson for workers the world over: they promise you ‘democracy'; you will only suffer new massacres if you do not put an end to the barbarism of capital!
The October events in Algeria are important for 4 reasons:
-- they are a continuation of the strikes and hunger riots which have shaken next-door Morocco and Tunisia since the beginning of the 80's. They pose a real threat of extension throughout the Maghreb, where they have encountered a widespread echo. The Moroccan and Tunisian governments' immediate solidarity with Chadli -- despite their conflicting imperialist appetites -- is a measure of the fear that grips the bourgeoisie in these countries;
-- above all, they demonstrate the solidarity against the workers' strikes - of the great imperialist powers (France, USA) and their support for the bloodbath necessary to reestablish ‘order'. Already armed by France, Germany, and the US (who have taken over this role from the Russians), Algeria will now receive still more attentive care from the American bloc in the form of weaponry for civil war. Once again, we see confirmed the Holy Alliance of the whole capitalist world against the proletariat of one country, which confronts not just its ‘own' bourgeoisie, but all bourgeoisies.
-- because of the North African (and especially Algerian, numbering almost 1 million) proletariat's importance in France, these events have already had an enormous impact there. The question of proletarian unity against the bourgeoisie, in Western Europe and its immediate periphery is posed. Today, the conditions are encouraging for the formation of revolutionary minorities within the Algerian proletariat, at first among the immigrants in France and Europe, then in Algeria where the proletariat is most developed, and also in Morocco and Tunisia;
-- finally, this generalized strike movement is the Algerian proletariat's first large scale experience of confrontation with the state. The next movements will be less ‘flash in the pan'. They will be more clearly distinct from the revolts of the young jobless. Unlike these unconscious strata, easily permeated with society's general decomposition, the proletariat does not attack symbols, but a system. The proletariat does not destroy, to fall back into resignation and apathy; slowly, but surely, it is called on to develop its class consciousness and its tendency towards organization. It is in these conditions that the proletariat in Algeria, and indeed in all the countries of the Third World, will be able to give an orientation to the revolt of unemployed youth, to channel it into the destruction of capitalist anarchy and barbarism.
Chardin
15/11/88
The social movements in almost every branch of the state sector, which have shaken France for several months, are a striking illustration of the perspectives that the ICC has been putting forward for years: faced with increasingly brutal and widespread attacks on the part of a capital up to its neck in an insurmountable crisis (see the article on the economic crisis in this issue), the world working class is far from giving up the fight. An accumulation of profound discontent is now being transformed into an immense combativity which is forcing the bourgeoisie to deploy more and more subtle and large-scale maneuvers, to avoid losing control altogether. And so, in France, it has set in motion a highly elaborate plan making use not only of different forms of trade unionism (both "traditional" and "rank-and-file"), but also and above all of organs claiming to be still more "rank-and-file" (because they are supposedly based on the mass meetings of workers in struggle): the "coordinations" whose use in sabotaging struggles has only just begun.
Not for years has France seen so explosive a return from the traditional summer break as in autumn 88. It had been clear since the spring that large-scale social confrontations were brewing. The struggles which took place between March and May 1988 at Chausson (trucks) and the SNECMA (aircraft motors) proved that the period of relative working class passivity since the defeat of the December 86/January 87 rail strike had come to an end. The fact that these movements broke out during the presidential and parliamentary elections (no less than four elections in two months), was especially significant in a country where such periods are traditionally synonymous with social peace. And this time, when the Socialist Party (PS) returned to power, it could not hope for any "state of grace" as in 1981.
Firstly, the workers had already learnt between 1981 and 1986 that "left" austerity is no better than the "right" variety. Secondly, as soon as it was installed the new government made it clear that there could be no question of calling into question the economic policies applied by the right during the two previous years. And it made the most of the two summer months to make this policy still worse.
This is why the working class combativity, partially paralyzed during the spring by the electoral circus, could not help exploding into massive struggles in autumn, especially in the state sector where wages had fallen by almost 10% in a few years. The situation was all the more threatening for the bourgeoisie in that ever since the 1981-84 coalition government of the "Communist" and "Socialist" parties, the trade unions had been considerably discredited and in many branches were no longer in a position to control explosions of working class anger by themselves. And this is why they set up an apparatus aimed at splitting and dispersing the class' combats, where the trade unions would obviously have their place but where the leading role throughout the initial phase would be played by "new", "non-union", "really democratic" organisms: the "coordinations".
The term "coordination" has already been employed on many occasions during recent years in many European countries. In the mid-80's, we have seen in Spain the "Coordinadora de Estibadores" (Dockers' Coordination)[1], whose radical language and great openness (in particular in allowing revolutionaries to intervene in its mass meetings) were deceptive, but which in fact was nothing other than a permanent rank-and-file trade union structure. Similarly during the summer of 1987 a "Coordinamento di Macchinisti" (Drivers' Coordination) was formed on the Italian railways, only to reveal itself as being of the same variety. But the country most favored by the "coordinations" today is undoubtedly France, where all the important workers' struggles since winter 1986-87 have witnessed the appearance of organs bearing this name:
-- a "drivers' coordination" (known as the Paris-Nord) and an "inter-trades coordination" (known as Paris Sud-Est) during the rail strike of December ‘86[2];
-- a "teachers' coordination" during their strike in February ‘87;
-- the "inter-SNECMA coordination" during the strike in this company in the spring of 1988[3].
Some of these "coordinations" were merely unions, in other words permanent structures claiming to represent the workers in the defense of their economic interests. By contrast, others do not at first sight aim at becoming permanent structures. They come into being, or emerge into the light of day, when the working class mobilizes in one branch, only to disappear again. This was the case with the coordinations that appeared during the rail strike in France at the end of 1986 for example. And it is precisely this "ephemeral" character which gives the impression that they have been set up by the class specifically for and in the struggle that makes them all the more pernicious.
In reality, experience has shown us that this kind of organism, even when it has not been prepared months in advance by specific bourgeois political forces, has been "parachuted in" to a movement of struggle in order to sabotage it. Already in the French rail strike, we had seen how the "drivers' coordination", by refusing to allow anyone other than drivers into its mass meetings, made an important contribution to isolating and then defeating this movement. This "coordination" was formed on the basis of delegates elected by mass meetings in the depots. And yet, it immediately fell under the control of militants of the "Ligue Communiste" (a section of the Trotskyist IVth International), who then obviously took charge of sabotaging the struggle, as it is their role to do. In the case of the other "coordinations" which appeared later, however, both with the "railwaymen's inter-trades coordination" (which claimed to combat corporatist isolation) and still more with the "teachers' coordination" which appeared a few weeks later, it became clear that these organisms had been formed preventively, before any mass meetings could send delegates to them. And always, behind the formation of these "coordinations" was to be found a left or leftist force of the ruling class: a sure proof that the bourgeoisie had understood how much use it could make of these organisms.
But the clearest illustration of this policy of the bourgeoisie has been given by the formation and activity of the "Nurses' Coordination", to which the ruling class has entrusted the leading role in the first phase of its maneuver: sparking off the hospital strike in October 88. In fact, this "coordination" had already been created in March 1988, in the offices of the CFDT (the union more or less controlled by the PS) and by its militants. It is thus the Socialist Party, preparing for its return to power, which officiated at the baptism of this so-called organization of workers' struggle. The outbreak of the strike itself bears the mark of an action by the PS, and therefore by the government. The ruling class aimed (and we are not talking here of its reserves like the Trotskyists, but of its dominant forces which control the summit of the state) to launch a movement of struggle in a particularly backward sector politically, in order to defuse the discontent which had been accumulating for years within the working class. Clearly, the nurses, who were to be the cannon fodder in this bourgeois maneuver also had real reasons for discontent (appalling and worsening working conditions, and wretched wages). But all the events which took place over a period of a month allow us to highlight the reality of the bourgeoisie's plan designed to counter the rising discontent within the working class.
How the "Coordinations" behaved in the French hospital strike
The bourgeoisie knew what it was doing when it chose the nurses for its maneuver. The branch is a heavily corporatist one, where the level of qualifications required for entry has allowed the introduction of powerful prejudices and a certain contempt for other hospital workers (nursing aids, ancillary workers etc), considered as "subaltern". All these elements constituted a guarantee for the bourgeoisie that it would be able to control the movement, without there being any risk of it getting seriously out of hand, and especially that the nurses would be quite incapable of acting as a spearhead to extend the struggle.
This guarantee was strengthened by the nature and form of the demands put forward by the "Nurses' Coordination". Amongst these, the demand for "improved professional status" in fact concealed the desire to put forward the nurses' "specificity" and "special qualifications" in relation to other hospital workers. Moreover, this claim contained within it the disgusting demand to accept into nursing colleges only pupils who had passed the baccalaureate. Finally, with the same elitist approach, the demand for a wage increase of 2,000 francs per month (about 20-30%) was attached to the nurses' level of qualification (baccalaureate plus three years of university studies), which meant that other less qualified, and still worse paid, hospital workers would have no reason to put forward the same claims, especially since the "Coordination" behaved as if, and let it be said that, the other trades should not make wage demands as these would be deducted from the rises given to the nurses.
Another clue to the maneuver is the fact that the "Nurses' Coordination"'s initial nucleus had already, in June, planned to begin the movement on the 29th September, with a one-day strike and a big demonstration in the capital. This gave the "Coordination" time to establish itself more firmly before the real test. This reinforcement of the "Coordination"'s ability to control the workers was continued right after the demonstration by a meeting of several thousand people, where members of the leadership appeared for the first time in public. This mass meeting legitimized the "Coordination" after the event; it maneuvered as skillfully as possible to prevent the strike breaking out there and then, until it had things "well in hand". The meeting also allowed the "Coordination" to affirm its own specificity as a nurses' body, in particular by "encouraging" other workers who had taken part in the demonstration (proof enough of the immense discontent in the hospitals) and who were present in the meeting to form "their own coordinations". The apparatus was now in place for a systematic fragmentation of the struggle within the hospitals, and its isolation from other branches. The other "coordinations" created after 29th September in the wake of the "Nurses' Coordination" (no less than 9 of them in the health sector alone) were given the job of finishing off the division among the hospital workers, while it was left to the "health workers coordination" (created and controlled by the Trotskyist group "Lutte Ouvriere"), which claimed to be "open" to all trades, to control the workers who rejected the corporatism of the other coordinations, and to paralyze any attempt on their part to spread the movement outside the hospitals.
The fact that a "coordination" (which had been formed by trade unionists) launched the movement, rather than a trade union, is obviously no accident. Given the unions' loss of credibility in France, especially since the "united left" government of 1981-84, it was in fact the only way to ensure a large-scale mobilization. It was thus up to the "coordinations" to ensure the "massive mobilization' which all workers felt was necessary to push back the bourgeoisie and its government. For some time now, the unions have been quite unable to obtain this "massive mobilization" behind their "calls to struggle". Indeed, there are many branches where one or other union only has to call for "action", for a large number of workers to decide that this is purely self serving on the union's part, and that they want nothing to do with it. This distrust, and the feeble echo encountered by union campaigns have indeed been frequently used by bourgeois propaganda to drive home the idea that the working class is "passive" so as to develop among workers a feeling of demoralization and impotence. This meant that only an organ free from any trade union affiliation could obtain the necessary "unity" (the precondition for a massive response to its calls for action) within the trade chosen by the bourgeoisie as the basis for its maneuver. But this "unity" of which the "Nurses Coordination" claimed to be the guarantee against the usual "quarrels" among the different trades unions, was only the other side of the coin of the disgusting division which it promoted and strengthened among the hospital workers. Its proclaimed "anti-unionism" was accompanied by the iniquitous argument that the unions did not defend workers' interests precisely because they are organized by branch, and not by profession. One of the "Coordination"'s major arguments to justify its corporatist isolation was that unitary demands had the effect of "diluting" or "weakening" the nurses' "own" demands. This argument is not new. It has already been served up in December ‘86 during the rail strike by the "Drivers' Coordination". It is also to be found in the corporatist language of the "Coordinamento di Macchinisti" on the Italian railways in 1987.
In fact, under cover of "going beyond" or "questioning" the unions, this is nothing but a return to the basis of working class organization in the previous century, at a time when it had begun to organize trades unions; in the present period, it is no less bourgeois than today's unions themselves. Whereas today, the working class can only organize on a geographic basis, irrespective of any distinctions between companies, trades, or branches of industry (distinctions which the unions are of course constantly cultivating in their labor of dividing and sabotaging the struggle), any organism formed on the basis of a profession cannot be anything but bourgeois.
Here then is how the "coordinations" propose to trap the workers: either they "march" behind the unions (and in countries blessed with "trade union pluralism" they thus become the hostages of the different gangs which maintain their divisions), or they leave the unions, only to be divided up in another way by the "coordinations". In the final analysis, the "coordinations" merely complement the unions; they are the other jaw of the vice whose purpose is to immobilize the working class.
How "Coordinations" and unions share out the dirty work
This complementarity between unions and "coordinations" has been shown clearly in the two most important movements to hit France in the last two years: the rail and hospital strikes. In the former, the "coordinations'" role was essentially to keep control on the terrain, leaving it to the unions to negotiate with the government. In these conditions, they made themselves useful by pimping for the unions, declaring loudly that they did not contest the unions' responsibility in "representing" the workers in negotiating with the authorities (they went no further than to ask - unsuccessfully - for a stool at the bargaining table). In the latter case, where there was far more opposition to the unions, the "Nurses' Coordination" was finally granted a seat at this same table, in its own right. After the Health Minister's initial refusal to meet the "Coordination" (following the first demonstration on 29th September), it was the Prime Minister himself who granted this same favor on 14th October, after a demonstration of almost 100,000 people in Paris. It was the least the government could do to reward these people who had done such fine work for it. The division of labor was also maintained on this occasion: in the end, on the 14th October all the unions (except the more "radical" CGT controlled by the "Communist" Party) signed an agreement with the government, while the "Coordination" called for the struggle to continue. Anxious to be seen "really defending" the workers right to the end, it in fact never officially accepted the government's proposals. On the 23rd October, it buried the movement in its own way by calling for "the struggle to continue in other forms", and occasionally organizing demonstrations, where the declining numbers of participants could not but demobilize the workers still further. This demobilization was further encouraged by the fact that the government, while giving nothing to the other workers, and refusing any increase in the number of nurses (one of the most important demands), nonetheless gave the nurses a rise of about 10%, paid for out of funds which had already been allocated in the budget. This "half-victory", limited to the nurses (already planned for some time by the bourgeoisie: a previous health minister took part in the demonstrations called by the "Coordination" and even President Mitterand declared that the nurses' demands were "legitimate"), killed two birds with one stone: it increased the divisions amongst the different categories of hospital workers, and gave credence to the idea it is possible to win something by fighting on the corporatist terrain, especially when it is behind a "coordination".
But the bourgeois maneuver to disorientate the whole working class did not stop at the return to work in the hospitals. The last phase of the operation went well beyond the health sector, and was left entirely to the unions, which the "coordinations" had put back in the saddle. Whereas while the movement in the health sector was on the rise, the unions and the "leftist" groups had done everything in their power to prevent strikes starting in other sectors (especially in the Post Office, where the will to struggle was very strong), after the 14th October, they began to call for strikes and mobilizations all over the place. On the 18th October, the CGT called an "inter-trades day of action", while on the 20th the other unions, joined at the last minute by the CGT, called for a day of action in the state sector. Once this was over, the unions, with the CGT in the lead, began to call systematically for strikes in every branch of the state sector, one after the other: in the Post Office, the electricity industry, the railways, the urban transport systems in the provinces and then in the capital, the airlines, social security ...
The bourgeoisie aimed to exploit to the full the disorientation created within the working class by the ebb of the hospital movement, and to use the same maneuver in all the other sectors. The unions "radicalized" their language, and - with the CGT in the lead once again - tried to "outbid" the "coordinations" by calling for the "extension" of the strikes; where they still had the influence to do so they organized minority or "bitter end" strikes, calling for "commando actions" (as with the Post Office truck drivers who blockaded the sorting offices) which only had the effect of isolating the strikes still further. On some occasions, the unions had no hesitations in openly donning the "coordination" cap when this could be a "help", as in the Post Office where the CGT created its own "coordination".
The division of labor between unions and "coordinations" thus covers the whole social battle-ground: the latter are given the task of launching and controlling the massive "flagship" movement in the health service; the former, after negotiating "positively" with the government in the health service, are left to finish off the job in the rest of the state sector. And in the final analysis, the maneuver has succeeded, since today the workers' combativity is dispersed in a multitude of isolated struggles which can only wear it down, or paralyze it in the case of workers who refuse to be dragged into the adventurism of the CGT.
What are the lessons for the working class?
Two months after the beginning of the movement in the hospitals, strikes are still going on throughout France, in different branches, revealing the huge reserves of combativity which have accumulated in the ranks of the working class; already, revolutionaries can draw certain conclusions, which are valid for the class as a whole.
In the first place, it is important to emphasize the bourgeoisie's ability to take preventive action, and in particular to provoke premature social movements at a time when the proletariat as a whole is still not mature enough to achieve a real mobilization. This tactic has been used often in the past by the ruling class, including in situations where the stakes were far higher than in the present period. The most striking example is that of January 1919, when the Berlin workers answered a deliberate provocation by the social-democratic government by launching an uprising, despite the fact that workers in the provinces were not yet ready for insurrection. The massacre of workers which followed (as well as the murder of the German Communist Party's two main leaders: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) dealt a fatal blow to the revolution in Germany, where the working class was finally defeated piecemeal.
Today, and in the years to come, this tactic which aims to take the initiative in order to defeat the workers piecemeal will be used systematically by the bourgeoisie, whereas the generalization of capital's economic attacks demands an increasingly global and united response from the working class. The need to unify the struggle, felt more and more pressingly by the workers themselves, is bound to come up against a multitude of maneuvers aimed at dividing the working class and fragmenting its struggles, which will involve a division of labor among all the bourgeoisie's political forces, and especially the left, the trade unions, and the leftist organizations. What is confirmed by the events in France, is that one of the ruling class' most dangerous weapons will be the "coordinations", which will be increasingly used as the unions are discredited and the workers become readier to take control of the struggle themselves.
Against the bourgeoisie's maneuvers aimed at keeping the struggles under the control of the "coordinations", the working class must be aware that its real strength lies not in these so-called "centralizing" organisms, but first and foremost in its own general assemblies or mass meetings. The centralization of the class' combat is an important element in its strength, but over-hasty centralization, without an adequate foundation in the struggle's control by all the workers, can only end up handing over control to the forces of the ruling class (especially the leftist organizations) and to isolation, ie the two elements of defeat. Historical experience has shown that the higher the level in the pyramid of organs created by the class to centralize its combat, the greater the remove from the level where all the workers are directly involved, the easier it is for the left-wing forces of the bourgeoisie to take control and put their maneuvers into practice. This has been true even in revolutionary periods. It was true in Russia, where for most of 1917 the Executive Committee of the Soviets was controlled by the Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries, which for a time led the Bolsheviks to argue that the local soviets should not feel themselves tied to the policy conducted by this centralizing organ. Similarly in Germany in November 1918, the Congress of Workers' Councils could find nothing better to do than to hand over power to the social-democrats, who had gone over to the enemy camp, thus signing the death-warrant of the Councils themselves.
The bourgeoisie understands this perfectly. This is why it will systematically encourage the appearance of "centralizing" organisms, which it will easily be able to control as long as the working class remains insufficiently mature and experienced. And to make assurance doubly sure, it will whenever possible create such organs in advance, especially with the help of its leftists, giving them their "legitimacy" afterwards through sham mass meetings, so as to make sure that these meetings do not create their own centralizing organs: elected and revocable strike committees in the factories, central strike committees at the town or regional level, etc.
Whatever the councilist-workerists may say, those who today are swooning with ecstasy before the "coordinations", the recent struggles in both France and other European countries are proof that the working class has not yet attained sufficient maturity to create centralizing organisms at a national level, as the "coordinations" propose to do. There are no short cuts. For a long time to come, the class will have to defuse the traps and barriers set by the bourgeoisie. The workers will have to learn how to spread their struggles, and how to exercise real control over them through sovereign general assemblies in the workplace. The proletariat still has a long way to go; but there is no other.
FM. 22/11/88
[1]See Accion Proletaria no. 72
[2]See Revolution Internationale no. 153
[3]See Revolution Internationale nos. 168, 169.
In two previous articles, we demonstrated that all modes of production are regulated by an ascendant and a decadent cycle (International Review no. 55 [9]), and that today we are living in the heart of capitalism’s decadence (International Review no. 54 [10]). The present article aims to give a better description of the elements that have made it possible for capitalism to survive throughout its decadence, and in particular to provide a basis for understanding the rates of growth in the period following 1945 (the highest in capitalism’s history). Above all, we will demonstrate that this momentary upsurge is the product of a doped growth, which is nothing other than the desperate struggle of a system in its death-throes. The means that have been used to achieve it (massive debts, state intervention, growing military production, unproductive expenditure, etc) are wearing out, opening the way to an unprecedented crisis.
“The decisive question in the production process is the following: what is the relationship between those who work and their means of production?” (Rosa Luxemburg, Introduction to Political Economy). Under capitalism, the relationship linking workers to the means of production is that of wage labour. This is the fundamental social relation of production that both gives capitalism its dynamic, and contains its insurmountable contradictions[1] [11]. It is a dynamic relationship, in the sense that the system must continuously grow, accumulate, expand, and push wage exploitation to the limit, spurred on by the rate of profit’s tendency to decline, and by its equalisation as a result of the laws of value and of competition. It is a contradictory relationship in the sense that the very mechanism for producing surplus-value produces more value than it is able to distribute, surplus-value being the difference between the production value of the commodity produced, and the value of the commodity produced, and the value of the commodity labour-power, in other words, wages. By generalising wage-labour, capitalism limits its own outlets, constantly forcing the system to find buyers outside its own sphere of capital and labour.
“...The more capitalist production develops, the more it is forced to produce on a scale which has nothing to do with immediate demand, but depends on a constant extension of the world market... Ricardo does not see that the commodity must necessarily be transformed into money. The demand from workers cannot suffice for this, since profit comes precisely from the fact that workers’ demand is less than the value of what they produce, and is all the greater when this demand is relatively smaller. The demand of capitalists for each other’s goods is not enough either... To say that in the end the capitalists only have to exchange and consume commodities amongst themselves is to forget the nature of capitalist production, and that the point is to transform capital into value... Over-production springs precisely from the fact that the mass of the people can never consume more than the average quantity of staple goods, and that their consumption does not increase at the same rhythm as the productivity of labour... The simple relationship between capitalist and wage labourer implies:
1) That the majority of producers (the workers) are not consumers, or buyers, of a substantial part of what they produce;
2) That the majority of producers, of workers, can not consume an equivalent of their product as long as they produce more than this equivalent, in other words surplus-value. They must constantly be over-producers, producing beyond their own needs in order to be consumers or buyers... The special condition of over-production is the general law of production under capital: to produce according to the productive forces, i.e.l according to the possibility of exploiting the greatest possible mass of labour with a given mass of capital, without taking account of the existing limits of the market or of solvent demand...” (Marx, Capital Book IV, Vol II and Book III, Vol I).
Marx clearly showed, on the one hand, the inevitability of capitalism’s race to increase the mass of surplus-value in order to compensate the fall in the rate of profit (dynamic), and on the other the obstacle before it; the outbreak of crises due to the shrinking of the market where its production can be sold (contradiction) long before there appears any lack of surplus-value due to the fall in the rate of profit:
“So, as production increases, so the need for markets also increases. The more powerful and more costly means of production that [the capitalist] has created allow him to sell his commodities more cheaply, but at the same time they force him to sell more commodities, to conquer an infinitely greater market for his commodities... Crises become more and more frequent and more and more violent because, as the mass of products and so the need for larger markets grows, the world market shrinks more and more, and there remain fewer and fewer markets to exploit, since each previous crisis has subjected to world trade a market which had up to then not been conquered, or had been exploited only superficially,” (Marx, Wage Labour and Capital [12]).
This analysis was systematised and more fully developed by Rosa Luxemburg, who came to the conclusion that since the totality of the surplus-value produced by global social capital cannot, by its very nature, be realised within the purely capitalist sphere, capitalism’s growth is dependent on the continuous conquest of pre-capitalist markets; the exhaustion of the markets relative to the needs of accumulation would topple the system into its decadent phase:
‘Through this process, capitalism prepares its own collapse twice over: on the one hand, by spreading at the expense of non-capitalist modes of production, it brings forward the moment when the whole of humanity will be composed only of capitalists and proletarians, and where further expansion, and therefore accumulation, will become impossible. On the other hand, as it advances it exasperates class antagonism and international economic and political anarchy to such a point that it provokes the international proletariat’s rebellion against its domination long before the evolution of the economy has reached its final conclusion: capitalist production’s absolute and exclusive world domination... Present-day imperialism... is the last stage in [capitalism’s] historic process: the period of heightened and generalised world competition between capitalist states for the last remnants of the planet’s of the planet’s non-capitalist territories,” (The Accumulation of Capital [13]).
Apart from her analysis of the inseparable link between capitalist relations of production and imperialism, which demonstrated that the system cannot survive without expanding, and that it is therefore imperialist by nature, Rosa Luxemburg’s fundamental contribution lies in providing the analytical tools for understanding how, when and why the system entered its period of decadence. Rosa answered this question with the outbreak of the 1914-18 war, considering that the worldwide inter-imperialist conflict opened the period where capitalism becomes a hindrance for the development of the productive forces:
“The necessity of socialism is fully justified as soon as the domination of the bourgeois class no longer encourages historical progress, and becomes a hindrance and a danger for society’s further evolution. As far as the capitalist order is concerned, this is precisely what the present war has revealed” (Rosa Luxemburg, quoted in Rosa Luxemburg: journaliste, polemiste, revolutionnaire, by G. Badia).
Whatever the various “economic” explanations put forward, this analysis was shared by the whole revolutionary movement.
A clear grasp of this insoluble contradiction of capital provides a reference point for understanding the how the system has survived during its decadence. Capitalism’s economic history since 1914 is the history of the development of palliatives for the bottleneck created by the world market’s inadequacy. Only through such an understanding can we put capitalism’s occasional “good performance” (such as post-1945 growth rates) in its place. Our critics (see International Review, nos. 54 and 55) are dazzled by the figures for these growth rates, but this blinds them to their NATURE. They thus depart from the marxist method, which aims to bring out the real nature of things that lies hidden behind their existence. This real nature is what we intend to demonstrate here [2] [14].
During the ascendant phase, demand in general outstrips supply; the price of commodities is determined by the highest production costs, which are those of the least developed sectors and countries. This makes it possible for the latter to make profits, which allow a real accumulation, while the most developed countries are able to realise super-profits. In decadence, the reverse is true; on the whole supply is greater than demand and prices are determined by the lowest production costs. As a result, the sectors and countries with the highest production costs are forced to sell at a reduced profit or even at a loss, or to cheat with the law of value to survive (see below). This reduces their rate of accumulation to an extremely low level. Even the bourgeois economists have, in their own language (that of sale price and cost price) observed this inversion:
“We have been struck by today’s inversion of the relation between cost price and sale price... in the long term, the cost price still keeps its role... But whereas previously, the principal was that the sale price could always be fixed above the cost price, today it usually appears to be subjected to the market price. In these conditions, when it is no longer production but sale that is essential, when competition becomes increasingly bitter, companies take the sale price as a starting point, and progressively work back to the cost price... in order to sell, companies tend today to consider first and foremost the market, and therefore the sale price... This is so true that we now-a-days often come up against the paradox that it is less and less the cost price that determines the sale price, and more and more the reverse. The problem is: either give up producing, or produce below the market price” (J. Fourastier and B. Bazil, Pourquoi les prix baissent).
A spectacular indication of this phenomenon appears in the wildly disproportionate proportion of distribution and marketing in the product’s final cost. These functions are carried out by commercial capital, which takes a share in the overall division of surplus-value, so that its expenses are included in the cost of production. In the ascendant phase, as long as commercial capital ensured the increase of the mass of surplus-value and of the annual rate of profit by reducing the period of commodity circulation and speeding up the circulation of capital, it also contributed to the general decline in prices characteristic of the period (see graph 4). In the decadent phase, this role changes. As the productive forces come up against the limits of the market, the role of commercial capital is less to increase the mass of surplus-value than to ensure its realisation. This is expressed in capitalism’s concrete reality, on the one hand by a growth in the number of people employed in distribution and in general by a decline in the number of surplus-value producers relative to other workers, and on the other by the growth of commercial margins in the final surplus-value. It is estimated that in the major capitalist countries today, distribution costs account for between 50% and 70% of commodity prices. Investment in the parasitic sectors of commercial capital (marketing, sponsoring, lobbying, etc.) is gaining increasing weight relative to investment in the production of surplus-value. This simply comes down to a destruction of productive capital, which in turn reveals the system’s increasingly parasitic nature.
1. CREDIT
“The system of credit thus accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the constitution of the world market; the historic task of capitalist production is precisely to push these two factors to a certain degree of development, as the material basis for the new form of production. Credit accelerates both the violent explosions of this contradiction – crises – and as a result the development of those elements which dissolve the old mode of production” (Marx, Capital, Book III).
In the ascendant phase, credit was a powerful means of accelerating capitalism’s development by shortening the cycle of capital accumulation. Credit, which is an advance against the realisation of a commodity, could complete its cycle thanks to the possibility of penetrating new extra-capitalist markets. In decadence, this outcome is less and less possible; credit thus becomes a palliative for capital’s increasing inability to realise the totality of the surplus-value produced. The accumulation that credit makes temporarily possible only develops an insoluble abscess that inevitably comes to a head in generalised inter-imperialist war.
Credit has never constituted a solvent demand in itself, and still less in decadence as Communisme ou Civilisation (CoC) would have us say: “Credit has now found a place among the reasons which allow capital to accumulate; one might as well say that the capitalist class is able to realise surplus-value thanks to a solvent demand coming from the capitalist class. While this argument does not appear in the ICC’s pamphlet on the Decadence of Capitalism, it has now become a part of the panoply of all the initiates to the sect. They now admit what was previously fiercely denied: the possibility of realising the surplus-value destined for accumulation: (CoC no. 22) [3] [15]. Credit is an advance on the realisation of surplus-value, and so makes it possible to accelerate the closure of the complete cycle of capitalist reproduction. According to Marx, this cycle – as is too often forgotten – includes both production AND the realisation of the commodity produced. What changes between the ascendant and the decadent phases of capitalism, are the conditions within which credit operates. The worldwide saturation of the market makes the recovery of invested capital increasingly slow, and indeed decreasingly possible. This is why capital more and more lives on a mountain of debts, which are taking on astronomical proportions. Credit thus makes it possible to keep up the fiction of an enlarged accumulation, and to put off the final day of reckoning, when capital has to pay up. Since it is unable to do so, capital is pushed inexorably towards trade wars, and then to inter-imperialist war. War is the only “solution” for the crises of over-production in decadence (see International Review no. 54). The figures in Table 1 and Graph 1 illustrate this phenomenon.
Concretely, the figures in Table 1 show that the USA lives on 2.5 years of credits, Germany on 1 year. If these credits were ever to be repaid, the workers of these countries would have to work respectively 2.5 and 1 years for nothing. These figures also show that debt is growing faster than GNP, indicating that over time economic development is more and more taking place through credit.
These two examples are no exception, but illustrate the world indebtedness of capitalism. This is extremely hazardous to calculate, above all due to the lack of any reliable statistics, but we may estimate that debt is between 1.5 and 2 times world GNP. Between 1974 and 1984, world debt grew at a rate of about 11%, while the growth rate of world GNP hovered at about 3.5%!
Table 1. The Evolution of Capitalism’s Debt
|
State and Private Debts |
(as % GNP) |
Household Debts (as % disposable income) |
---|---|---|---|
|
West Germany |
USA |
USA |
1946 |
- |
- |
19.6% |
1950 |
22% |
- |
- |
1955 |
39% |
166% |
46.1% |
1960 |
47% |
172% |
- |
1965 |
67% |
181% |
- |
1969 |
- |
200% |
61.8% |
1970 |
75% |
- |
- |
1973 |
- |
197% |
71.8% |
1974 |
- |
199% |
93% |
1975 |
84% |
- |
- |
1979 |
100% |
- |
- |
1980 |
250% |
- |
- |
Sources: Economic Report of the President (01/1970)
Survey of Current Business (07/1975)
Monthly Review (vol. 22, no.4, 09/1970, p.6)
Statistical Abstract of the United States (1973).
Source: Bulletin de l’IRES 1982, no. 80 (the left hand scale is an index of the evolution of the two indicators which have been given a value of 100 in 1970 for purposes of comparison).
Graph no.1 illustrates the evolution of growth and debt in most countries. Debts are clearly growing faster than industrial output. Whereas previously, growth was increasingly dependent on credit (1958-74: production = 6.01%, credit = 13.26%), nowadays the mere continuation of stagnation depends on credit (1974-81: production = 0.15%, credit = 14.08%).
Since the beginning of the crisis, each economic recovery has been sustained by an ever-greater mass of credit. The recovery of 1975-79 was stimulated by credits accorded the ‘Third World’ and so-called ‘socialist’ countries, that of 1983 was entirely sustained by a growth of borrowing on the part of the American authorities (essentially devoted to military spending), and of the great North American trusts (devoted to company mergers, therefore unproductive). CoC does not understand this process at all, and completely under-estimates the expansion of credit as capitalism’s mode of survival in decadence.
We have already seen (International Review no. 54) that the decadence of capitalism is characterised not by the disappearance of extra-capitalist markets, but by their inadequacy relative to capitalism’s needs for expanded accumulation. This means that the extra-capitalist markets are no longer sufficient to realise the whole of the surplus-value produced by capitalism, and destined for reinvestment. Spurred on by an increasingly limited basis for accumulation, decadent capitalism tried to exploit as effectively as possible the outlet that the survival of these markets provides, in three ways.
Firstly, through an accelerated and planned integration of the surviving sectors of mercantile economy within the developed countries.
Graph no. 2 shows that whereas in some countries, the integration of the mercantile farm economy within capitalist social relations of production had already been completed by 1914, in others (France, Spain, Japan, etc) it continued during decadence, and accelerated after 1945.
Up until World War II, labour productivity increased more slowly in agriculture than in industry as a result of a slower development in the division of labour, due amongst other things to the still important weight of land rent, which diverted part of the capital needed for mechanisation. Following World War II, labour productivity grew faster in agriculture than in industry. This took the form of a policy of using all possible means to ruin subsistence family farms, still tied to small-scale mercantile production, so as to transform them into purely capitalist business. This is the process of the industrialisation of agriculture.
Spurred on by the search for new markets, the period of decadence is characterised by the improved exploitation of the surviving extra-capitalist markets.
On the one hand, improved techniques, improved communications, and falling transport costs facilitated the penetration – both in degree and extent – and destruction of the mercantile economy in the extra-capitalist sphere.
On the other hand, the development of policies of ‘decolonisation’ relieved the metropoles of a costly burden, and allowed them to improve returns on their capital and to increase sales to their old colonies (paid for by the super-exploitation of the indigenous populations). A large part of these sales were made up of armaments, the first and absolute need in building local state power.
The context in which capitalism developed in its ascendant phase made possible a unification of the conditions of production (technical and social conditions, the average productivity of labour, etc). Decadence, by contrast, has increased the inequalities in development between the developed and under-developed countries (see International Review nos. 23 and 54).
Whereas in ascendancy, the profits extracted from the colonies (sales, loans, investments) were greater than those resulting from unequal exchange [4] [16], in decadence the reverse takes place. The evolution of terms of exchange over a long period indicates this tendency. They have greatly deteriorated for the so-called ‘Third World’ countries since the second decade of this century.
Graph 3 below illustrates changes in the terms of trade between 1810 and 1970 for "Third World" countries, i.e. the ratio between the price of raw products exported and the price of industrial products imported. The scale expresses a price ratio (x 100), which means that when this index is greater than 100, it is favourable to "Third World" countries, and vice versa when it is less than 100. It was during the second decade of this century that the curve passed the pivotal index of 100 and began to fall, interrupted only by the 1939-45 war and the Korean war (strong demand for basic products in a context of scarcity).
We have seen already (International Review no. 54) that the development of state capitalism is closely linked to capitalism’s decadence [5] [17]. State capitalism is a worldwide policy forced on the system in every domain of social, political and economic life. It helps to attenuate capitalism’s insurmountable contradictions: at the social level by a better control of a working class which is now sufficiently developed to be a real danger for the bourgeoisie; at the political level, by dominating the increasing tension between bourgeois factions; at the economic level by soothing an accumulation of explosive contradictions. At this latter level, which is the one that concerns us here, the state intervenes by means of a series of mechanisms:
Cheating the law of value
We have seen that in decadence an increasingly important share of production escapes the strict determination of the law of value (International Review no. 54). The purpose of this process is to keep alive activities which would not otherwise have survived the law of value’s merciless verdict. Capitalism thus manages for a while, but only for a while, to avoid the consequences of the market’s Caudine Forks.
Permanent inflation is one means to meet this end. It is, moreover, a typical phenomenon of a mode of production’s decadence [6] [18].
Whereas in the ascendant period the overall tendency is for prices to remain stable or fall, in decadence this tendency is reversed. 1914 inaugurates the phase of permanent inflation.
After remaining stable for a century, prices in France exploded following the First World War, and even more after the Second; they have increased 1000-fold between 1914 and 1982.
Source: INSEE.
If a periodic fall and readjustment of prices to exchange values (price of production) is artificially prevented by swelling credit and inflation, then a whole series of companies whose labour productivity has fallen below the average in their branch can nonetheless escape the devalorisation of their capital, and bankruptcy. But in the long run, this can only increase the imbalance between productive capacity and solvent demand. The crisis is delayed, only to return still further amplified. Historically, in the developed countries, inflation first appeared with state spending tied to armaments and war. Later on, the development of credit and unproductive expenditure of all kinds were added to arms spending, and took its place as the major cause of inflation.
The bourgeoisie has adopted a series of anti-cyclical policies. Armed with the experience of the 1929 crisis, which was considerably aggravated by isolationism, the ruling class has got rid of its remaining pre-1914 free-trade delusions. The 1930’s, and still more the period after 1945 with the advent of Keynesianism, were marked by a string of concerted state capitalist policies. It would be impossible to list them all here, but they all have the same aim in view: to get control over fluctuations in the economy, and artificially support demand.
The level of state intervention in the economy has grown. This point has already been dealt with at length in previous issues of the International Review; here we will deal only with an aspect which has so far only been touched on: the state’s intervention in the social domain, and its implications for the economy.
During capitalism’s ascendant phase, increasing wages, the reduction in the working day, and improved working conditions were “concessions wrested from capital through bitter struggle... the English law on the 10 hour working day, is in fact the result of a long and stubborn civil war between the capitalist class and the working class” (Marx, Capital). In decadence, the bourgeoisie’s concessions to the working class following the revolutionary movements of 1917-23 represented, for the first time, measures taken to calm (8-hour day, universal suffrage, social insurance etc) and to control (labour contracts, trade union rights, workers’ commissions, etc.) a social movement whose aim was no longer to gain lasting reforms within the system, but to seize power. These last measures to be taken as a spin-off from the struggle highlight the fact that in capitalism’s decadence, the state, with the help of the trade unions, organises, controls and plans social measures in order to ward off the proletarian threat. This is marked by the swelling of state spending devoted to the social domain (indirect wages subtracted from the overall mass of wages).
(as a % of GNP)
|
|
Ger |
Fra |
GB |
US |
ASCENDANCE |
1910 |
3.0% |
- |
3.7% |
- |
|
1912 |
- |
1.3% |
- |
- |
DECADENCE |
1920 |
20.4% |
2.2% |
6.3% |
- |
|
1922 |
- |
- |
- |
3.1% |
|
1950 |
27.4% |
8.3% |
16.0% |
7.4% |
|
1970 |
- |
- |
- |
13.7% |
|
1978 |
32.0% |
- |
26.5% |
- |
|
1980 |
- |
10.3% |
- |
- |
Sources: Ch. André & R. Delorme, op. cit. in International review no. 54.
In France, the state took a whole series of social measures in a period of social calm: medical insurance in 1928-30, free education in 1930, family allowances in 1932; in Germany, medical insurance is extended to office and farm workers, help given to the unemployed in 1927. The present system of social security in the developed countries was conceived, discussed and planned during and just after World War II [7] [19]: in France in 1946, in Germany in 1954-57 (1951 joint management law), etc.
All these measures are aimed primarily at a better social and political control of the working class, and at increasing its dependence on the state and the trade unions (indirect wages). But on the economic level, they had a secondary effect: to attenuate the fluctuations of demand in Sector II (consumer goods), where over-production first appears.
The establishment of income relief, programmed wage increases [8] [20], and the development of so-called consumer credit are all part of the same mechanism.
In the period of capitalist decadence, wars and military production no longer have any function in capitalism’s overall development. They are neither areas for the accumulation of capital, nor moments in the political unification of the bourgeoisie (as with Germany after the 1871 Franco-Prussian war: see International Review nos. 51, 52, 53).
Wars are the highest expression of the crisis and decadence of capitalism. A Contre Courant (ACC) refuses to see this. For this ‘group’, wars have an economic function in the devalorisation of capital due to the destruction they cause, just as they express the increasing severity of crises in a constantly developing capitalism. Wars therefore do not indicate any qualitative difference between capitalism’s ascendant and decadent periods: “At this level, we would like to put into perspective even the notion of world war... All wars under capitalism thus have an essentially international content... What changes is not the invariant world content (whether the decadentists like it or not) but its extent and depth, which is constantly more truly worldwide and catastrophic” (A Contre Courant no. 1). ACC gives two examples to support its thesis: the period of the Napoleonic wars (1795-1815), and the still local nature (sic!) of the First World War relative to the Second. These two examples prove nothing at all. The Napoleonic wars were fought at the watershed between two modes of production; they are in fact the last wars of the Ancient Regime (decadence of feudalism), and cannot be taken as characteristic of wars under capitalism. Although Napoleon’s economic measures encouraged the development of capitalism, on the political level he engaged in a military campaign in the best tradition of the Ancient Regime. The bourgeoisie had no doubts about this when, after supporting him for a while, it abandoned him, finding his campaigns too expensive and his continental blockade a hindrance to its development. As for the second example, it requires either extraordinary nerve, or no less extraordinary ignorance to suggest it. The question is not the comparison of the First World War with the Second. but the comparison of both with the wars of the previous century – a comparison which ACC takes care not to make. Were they to do so, the conclusion is so obvious that no one could miss it.
After the insanity of the Ancient Regime, war was limited and adapted to capitalism’s needs for world conquest, as we have explained at some length in the International Review no. 54, only to return once again to complete irrationality in the capitalist system’s decadence. Given the deepening contradictions of capital, the Second World War was inevitably more widespread and destructive than the First, but their main characteristics are identical, and opposite to the wars of the previous century.
As for the explanation of war’s economic function through the devalorisation of capital (rise in the rate of profit – PV/CC+CV – thanks to the destruction of constant capital), it collapses under close examination. Firstly, because war also wipes out workers (CV), and secondly because the increase in capital’s organic composition also continues during war. The momentary growth in the rate of profit in the immediate post-war period is due on the one hand to the defeat and super-exploitation of the working class, and on the other to the increase in relative surplus-value thanks to the development of labour productivity.
At the end of the war, capitalism is still faced with the need to sell the whole of its production. What has changed, however, is first, the temporary decrease in the mass of surplus-value to be reinvested that has to be realised (due to the destruction caused by war), and second the decongestion of the market through the elimination of competitors (the USA grabbed most of their colonial markets from the old European metropoles).
As for arms production, it is primarily motivated by the need to survive in an environment of inter-imperialist competition, no matter what the cost. Only afterwards does it play an economic role. Although at the level of global capital, arms production constitutes a sterilisation of capital and adds nothing to the balance-sheet at the end of a production cycle, it does allow capital to spread out its contradictions in both time and space. In time, because arms production temporarily keeps alive the fiction of continued accumulation, and in space because by constantly stirring up localised wars and by selling a large part of the arms produced to the ‘Third World’, capital carries out a transfer of value from the latter to the more developed countries [9] [21].
The measures which we have described above, and which were already put into partial use after the 1929 crisis without being able to resolve it (New Deal, Popular Front, De Man plan, etc.) in order to delay the deadline of capitalism’s fundamental contradiction, have already been extensively used throughout the post-war period up to the end of the 1960’s. Today, they are exhausted, and the history of the last 20 years is the history of their growing ineffectiveness.
The pursuit of military growth remains a necessity (because it is pushed by growing imperialist needs), but it no longer provides even a temporary relief for the problems of the economy. The massive cost of arms production is now sapping productive capital directly. This is why today, its growth is slowing down (except in the USA, where arms spending grew by 2.3% p.a. in the period 1976-80 and 4.6% in 1980-86), and why the ‘Third World’s’ share in arms purchases is falling, even though more and more military spending is hidden, in particular under the heading of ‘research’. Nonetheless, world military spending continues to rise each year (by 3.2% during 1980-85), at a faster rate than world GNP (2.4%).
The massive use of credit has reached the point where it provokes serious financial tremors (e.g. October 1987). Capitalism no longer has any choice but to walk a knife-edge between the danger of a return to hyper-inflation (credit getting out of control) and recession (due to the increase in interest rates to hold back credit). With the generalisation of the capitalist mode of production, production is increasingly separated from the market; the realisation of a commodity’s value, and so of surplus-value, becomes more complicated. It is increasingly difficult for the producer to know whether his commodities will find a real outlet, a “final consumer”. By allowing production to expand without any relation to the market’s ability to absorb it, credit puts off the outbreak of crises, but aggravates the imbalance in the system, which means that when the crisis does break out, it does so more violently.
Capitalism is less and less able to sustain inflationist policies that artificially support economic activity. Such a policy presupposes high interest rates (since once inflation has been deducted there is not much interest left on what has been lent). But high interest rates imply a high rate of profit in the real economy (as a general rule, interest rates must be lower than the average rate of profit). This however is more and more impossible, as the crisis of over-production and lack of sales lower the profitability of invested capital, so that it no longer produces a rate of profit sufficient to pay bank charges. This dilemma was concretised in October 1987 by the stock-market panic.
The extra-capitalist markets are all over-exploited, under immense pressure, and are quite incapable of providing a way out.
Today, the development of unproductive sectors has reached such a point that it makes things worse rather than alleviating them. The time has therefore come for the reduction of overhead expenses.
Already, the palliatives used since 1948 were not based on a healthy foundation, but their exhaustion today creates an economic dead-end of unprecedented gravity. Today, the only possible policy is a head-on attack on the working class, an attack which is carried out with zeal by every government, whether right or left, East or West. However, this austerity, thanks to which the working class pays dearly for the crisis in the name of each national capital’s “competitiveness”, provides no ‘solution’ to the overall crisis; on the contrary, it merely reduces solvent demand still further.
We have considered the different elements that explain capitalism’s survival, not from any academic concern, but as militants. What concerns us is to understand better the conditions for the development of the class struggle, by placing it in the only valid and coherent framework – the decadence of capitalism – by coming to grips with the different measures introduced by state capitalism, and by recognising the urgency and the dangers of the present situation due to the exhaustion of all palliatives to capitalism’s crisis (see International Review nos. 23, 26, 27, 31).
Marx did not wait until he had finished Capital before joining the class struggle. Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin did not wait to agree on the economic analysis of imperialism before taking position on the necessity of founding a new International, of fighting the war by revolution, etc. Moreover, behind their disagreements (Lenin explained imperialism by the falling rate of profit and monopoly capitalism, Luxemburg by the saturation of the market), lay a profound agreement on all the crucial questions of the class struggle, and especially the recognition of the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production that put the socialist revolution on the agenda:
“From all that has been said above about imperialism, it follows that we must characterise it as capitalism in transition, or more correctly as moribund capitalism... parasitism and putrefaction characterise capitalism’s highest historical phase, ie imperialism... Imperialism is the prelude to the social revolution of the proletariat. Since 1917, this has been confirmed on a world scale” (Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism). If these two great marxists were so violently attacked for their economic analysis, it was not for the economic analyses as such, but for their political positions. In the same way, the present attack on the ICC over economic questions in reality hides a refusal of militant commitment, a councilist conception of the role of revolutionaries, a non-recognition of the present historic course towards class confrontations and a lack of conviction in the historical bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production.
C.McL
[1] [22] This is why Marx was always very clear on the fact that to go beyond capitalism to the creation of socialism presupposes the abolition of wage labour: “Instead of the conservative motto ‘A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work!’ [the workers] ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wages system!’ ... for the final emancipation of the working class, that is to say the ultimate abolition of the wages system” (Marx, Wages, Price and Profit).
[2] [23] We do not claim here to give a detailed explanation of capitalism’s economic mechanisms and history since 1914, but simply to put forward the major elements which have allowed it to survive, concentrating on the means it has used to put off the day of reckoning of its fundamental contradiction.
[3] [24] Here we should point out that, apart from a few ‘legitimate’, if academic, questions, this pamphlet of criticism is nothing but a series of deformations based on the principle that “he who wants to kill his dog first claims it has rabies”.
[4] [25] The law of value regulates exchange on the basis of equivalent amounts of labour. But given the national framework of capitalist social relations of production and the increase during decadence of national differences in the conditions of production (labour productivity and intensity, organic composition of capital, wages, rates of surplus-value, etc), the equalisation of profit rates which forms the price of production takes place essentially in the national framework. There thus exist different prices for the same commodity in different countries. This means that in international trade, the product of one day’s labour of a more developed nation will be exchanged for that of one that is less developed or where wages are lower... Countries that export finished goods can sell their commodities above their price of production, while remaining below the price of production of the importing country. They thus, realise a super-profit by transfer of values. For example: in 1974 a quintal (100 kilos) of US wheat cost 4 hours wages of a labourer in the US, but 16 hours in France due to the greater productivity of labour in the US. American agri-industry could thus sell its wheat in France above the price of production (4 hours), while still remaining more competitive that French wheat (16 hours) – which explains the EEC’s formidable protection of its agricultural market, and the incessant quarrels over this question.
[5] [26] For the EFICC, this is no longer true. The development of state capitalism is explained by the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital. Now if this were the case, we should be able to see statistically a continuous progression of the state’s share in the economy, since this transition took place over a long period, and moreover we should see it begin during the ascendant period. This is clearly not the case at all. The statistics that we have published show a clear break in 1914. During the ascendant phase, the state’s share in the economy is small and constant (oscillating around 12%), whereas during decadence, it grows to the point where today it averages about 50% of GNP. This confirms our thesis of the indissoluble link between decadence and the development of state capitalism’s, and categorically disproves that of the EFICC.
[6] [27] After this series of articles, only someone as blind as our critics could fail to see the clear break in capitalism’s mode of existence that is represented by the First World War. All the long-term statistical series that we have published in this article demonstrate this rupture: world industrial production, world trade, prices, state intervention, terms of exchange and armaments. Only the analysis of decadence and its explanation by the worldwide saturation of the market makes this rupture comprehensible.
[7] [28] At the request of the British government, the Liberal MP Sir William Beveridge drew up a report, published in 1942, which was to serve as the basis for building the social security system in Britain, but was also to inspire social security systems in all the developed countries. The principal is to ensure, in exchange for a contribution drawn directly from wages, a relief income in the event of “social risk” (sickness, accident, death, old age, unemployment, maternity, etc).
[8] [29] It was also during World War II that the Dutch bourgeoisie planned, with the trade unions, a progressive increase in wages as a function of, though remaining lower than, the increase in productivity.
[9] [30] CoC likes it when 2+2 makes 4; when they are told that subtracting 2 from 6 can also obtain 4, they find that this is contradictory. This is why CoC comes back to “the ICC and its contradictory considerations on armaments. While on the one hand armaments provided outlets for production to a point where for example the economic recovery after the crisis of 1929 was solely due to the arms economy, on the other we learn that arms production is not a solution to crises and that expenditure on armaments therefore represents an incredible waste for capital in developing the productive forces, that arms production should be put down on the negative side of the overall balance sheet” (CoC no. 22).
from the credit crisis to the monetary crisis and the recession, or:
Credit is not an eternal solution
One year after the stock market collapse of October 1987, when $2 trillion of speculative capital went up in smoke (equivalent to about $400 for each human being on the planet), world capitalism would appear to be in good health: indeed, according to today's forecasts, 1988 should be the best year since the beginning of the 1980's. But then, the years 1973 and 1978- 79 which preceded the great slumps of 1974-75 and 1980-82, were also excellent years in their time. The flight into credit is not an eternal solution. Today's ‘euphoria' heralds a new financial upheaval, with a new worldwide recession in perspective. Even as the American elections came to an end, the official language and propaganda were already changing, as ‘euphoria' gives way to appeals for caution.
"The end of the Reagan mandate is characterized by an expansion which has lasted now for six years, the longest peace-time expansion in American history ... In absolute terms, the US deficit may seem large. But since the country produces a quarter of the world's GNP, the US deficit is, as a percentage, lower than the OECD average ... The American ‘deficit crisis' is a public relations trick employed by the traditional Republican establishment to purge the party of certain popular politicians ... What is needed is a monetary system which prevents the central banks from endangering economic prosperity." (P.C. Roberts, a professor at the US Centre for Strategic Studies, and a theoretician of the so-called ‘supply-side economics' or ‘Reaganomics')[1]
According to some economists, in other words, US capital's gigantic deficits and massive indebtedness are not major problems. The anxiety aroused by their rapid development is supposedly without any real foundation, and is at most expresses the result of the ‘tricks' employed in the internecine struggles of American politicians. What in fact lies behind this ostrich-like idea is the question whether the flight into credit may not be, after all, an eternal remedy, a means of allowing the capitalist economy to develop without interruption, provided the monetary authorities adopt the right policies: "the longest peace-time expansion in American history" is supposed to confirm this possibility.
In reality, these famous six years of ‘expansion' of the American economy, which have temporarily prevented the complete collapse of the world economy[2] are not the fruit of any new economic discoveries. They are nothing other than a continuation of the old Keynesian policies of state deficits and the flight towards debt. And, contrary to the affirmations of our eminent professor, the size of this debt - the result of a veritable explosion of credit during recent years - far from being a matter of no importance, is already posing enormous problems for US. capital and the world economy, and opens up in the short term the perspective of a new world recession.
The devastating effects of excess credit
"In 1987, America imported almost twice as much as it exported. It spent $150 billion dollars more in other countries than it earned, and the Federal government spent $150 billion more in the home market than it received in taxes. The United States counts some 75 million household; last year, each of them therefore spent on average $2000 dollars more than they earned. And borrowed the balance abroad."[3]
Statistical science makes it possible, when a bourgeois possesses five cars and his unemployed neighbor has none, to say that on average they both have 2.5 cars. The average credit of each American household is only an average, but it gives an image of the extent to which American capitalism has had recourse to credit in recent years.
The consequences of this situation are already a particularly clear demonstration of the state of disrepair of the capitalist machine, both in the United States and in the rest of the world.
In the United States ...
Apart from the record indebtedness of US capital, the year 1988 has also seen three other historic records beaten:
-- the record of bank failures: in October 1988, the number of bankruptcies for the year had already smashed the 1987 record;
-- the record for amounts paid in compensation to depositors in US thrifts (savings funds);
- the record in the amount of interest paid on its own debt by the US Treasury: "Any moment now, the US government's bookkeepers will record a noteworthy passage in the federal accounts: the interests the Treasury. pays on the $2 trillion national debt is itself about to exceed the huge Federal budget deficit ... The US government pays roughly $150 billion a year in interests, or 14% of all the government's spending. Of that $150 billion, 10% to 15% goes to investors abroad." (New York Times, 11th October 1988).
However, the most serious immediate effect of this race into debt is the resulting rise in interest rates. The US Treasury has more and more difficulty in finding new lenders to finance its debt. To do so, it is forced to offer higher and higher interest rates. The government was forced to let these rates fall in October 1987 in order to slow down the stock market collapse, but since then it has once again been forced to raise them (the rate for three months Treasury Bonds has thus risen from 5.12% in October 1987, to 7.20 in August 1988).
The immediate results are already devastating on two levels. Firstly, at the level of the debt itself: given the size of the debt, it is estimated that a rise in interest rates of' one percentage point increases by $4 billion the amount US capital has to payout every year. Secondly, and above all, the rise in interest rates puts an increasing drag on the economy: in other words, heralds a recession in the more or less short term.
... and in the world
But US capital is not the only one to be in debt, far from it, even if it has become the planet's major debtor. When interest rates rise in the US, they also rise in the rest of the world. For the countries of the periphery, and especially for those of Africa and Latin America, long since unable to meet the obligations of their debts, this means an immediate increase in their interest repayments, and so in their already fantastic debt. Their chronic bankruptcy is already pushing inflation towards new records. In Brazil, for example, inflation is forecast at nearly 1000% for 1988. Investment has already undergone a generalized collapse.
The United States' creditors (in particular Japan and West Germany), who are in theory the first to benefit from American deficits since they provide an outlet for their exports, find themselves in possession of mountains of American ‘IOUs', held in dollars and of every description: Treasury Bonds, shares, promissory notes, etc. This makes a lot of money on paper, but what happens to this mass of paper should American capital be unable to pay, or should it - and we will come back to this later - devalue the dollar?
The idea of some economists, that the flight into credit, especially in the United States, is not a real threat to world capital, is an illusion already disproved by its devastating effects today, even without taking account of the perspective it opens up for the future.
Credit is not an eternal solution
Capitalism has always used credit to ensure its reproduction. It is a fundamental element of its functioning, in particular at the level of the circulation of capital. The generalization of credit accelerated the process of accumulation, and as such, it is a vital instrument for the smooth functioning of capital. But it only plays this role to the extent that capital functions in conditions of real expansion; in other words, if at the end of the delay that credit creates between the moment of sale and the moment of payment there exists a real payment, or repayment.
"The most that credit can do in this domain - which concerns circulation alone - is to safeguard the continuity of the productive process, on condition that there exists all the other conditions of this continuity, in other words that the capital against which it must be exchanged really exists." (Marx, Grundrisse).
Now the problem for capitalism today, both in the US and elsewhere, is that "the capital against which [credit] must be exchanged", "the other conditions of this continuity of the productive process" do not exist.
Contrary to what happens in conditions of real expansion, capital today is not using credit to accelerate a healthy productive process, but to put off the deadlines of a productive process bogged down in over-production and the lack of solvent outlets.
Since the end of the 60's, the end of the reconstruction process following World War II, capitalism has only survived by pushing all kinds of economic manipulations to unimaginable extremes, but without being able to resolve its fundamental problem. On the contrary, it has only succeeded in making it worse.
The flight into debt
In the United States. Following the "crash" of October 87, the USA had no choice but to increase its debt. Some economists estimate that other countries' central banks had to furnish the US some $120 billion.
In the less developed countries. Some economists had spoken of declaring a moratorium, and simply abolishing the debt of the poorest countries. As we predicted. In International Review 54, this idea has been reduced to promises and a few crumbs.
It is true that wiping out the repayment obligations of the indebted countries would eliminate the problem. But this would come down to making capitalism a mode of production which no longer produces for profit ... and which would no longer be capitalism. No, the ‘solution' has been to open new lines of credit, and to renegotiate interest repayments. The US has even accorded Mexico an emergency loan of $3.5 billion, the biggest loan accorded a debtor country since 1982.
In the Eastern Bloc. After a period of trying to reduce its debt, the USSR has returned to beg for credits from the Western powers, with the help of Perestroika. Banking consortia in Italy, West Germany, France and Britain should allow Moscow to obtain around $7 billion of loans. The same is true of China, which increasingly finds itself in the same situation as the countries of Latin America (galloping inflation, new credits requested to mitigate the inability to repay those contracted previously).
The perspectives
The capitalist economy is not heading for a credit crisis. It is already in it up to its neck. Now it must appear on the financial, monetary level. "The monetary system is essentially Catholic, the credit system essentially protestant... The Scotch hates gold. In paper form, the monetary existence of commodities is purely social in nature. It is faith that saves: faith in monetary value considered as the immanent spirit of commodities, faith in the mode of production and its predestined order, faith in the individual agents of production considered as mere personifications of capital, which grows by itself... The credit system cannot free itself from its foundations in the monetary system, any more than protestantism can free itself from its foundations in Catholicism." (Marx, Capital, Vol III).
In this sense, Roberts perceives something of the truth when he denies that the USA has a problem of excess debt, and only sees the problem of the monetary limits imposed by the central banks. But what he does not see, is that what follows on from this is not that the central banks should create more money, but that they have already created too much, and that the next expression of the capitalist crisis of over-production (of which the credit crisis is only a superficial expression) will come in the domain of money, in a loss of "faith" in money (and, firstly, in the currency of virtually all world trade, the dollar).
American capital cannot, and will not be able to pay back its debts, any more than any other capital. But it is the most powerful gangster. And it has the means to force its creditors to reduce - once again - its debt. Unlike the world's other states, the USA alone can pay its debts in its own currency (the others have to pay in hard currency, and in particular in dollars). This is why, as in 1973 and 1979, their only way out is to devalue the dollar.
But such a prospect today directly heralds in new monetary disaster, which in turn opens the way to a new recession, vastly deeper than those of 74-75 and 80-82.
The devaluation of the dollar will in the first place be "ruinous" for the United States' major creditor capitals, especially for Japan and West Germany ... who can do nothing about it, and who will certainly be quite incapable of playing the part of the "locomotive" to replace the flagging USA. But it will also constitute a trade barrier which will close off access to the American market - which has played the part of "locomotive" for the last six years - for the whole world economy.
As we wrote in International Review 54, only the American elections delayed this process. Whatever its speed, it is now under way.
The atmosphere over the last six years has been highly alarming. Far from being reabsorbed, or disappearing, the world economic crisis has continuously deepened: unemployment has continued to grow in most countries, misery has reached unheard of proportions in the poorest parts of the planet, the industrial deserts have spread within the very heart of capitalism's vital centers, the exploited classes reduced to pauperization in the most industrialized countries; at the financial level, we have seen the explosion of debt and the biggest stock market tremors for half a century, the whole wallowing in an unprecedented speculative frenzy. And yet, the capitalist machine has not completely collapsed. Despite the record numbers of bankruptcies, despite the increasingly frequent and serious cracks in the system, the profit machine continues to function, concentrating new and gigantic fortunes - the product of the carnage among different capitals - and boasts with cynical arrogance of the benefits of "liberalism". As economic journalists often remark, "the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer", but the machine "works" and the results for 1988, in the statistics at least, should be the best of the decade.
Not many people still really believe in the possibility of a new period of economic ‘prosperity', as in the ‘50s-‘60s. But the perspective of a new capitalist collapse like those of 1974-75 or 1980-82 seems to be receding thanks to governments' multiple manipulations of the economic machine. Neither real recovery, nor real collapse: an eternal "no future".
Nothing could be further from the truth. The capitalist system has never been this sick. Its body has never been so poisoned by massive doses of drugs and medicines to which it has had recourse to ensure a mediocre and appalling survival over the last six years. The next convulsion, which will once again combine recession and inflation, will be all the more violent, deep, and worldwide.
The destructive and self-destructive forces of capital will once again be unleashed with unprecedented violence, but this in its turn will provoke the necessary seisms that will compel the world proletariat to raise its struggles to higher levels, and to profit from the experience it has accumulated during these last years.
RV 15/11/88
[1] Le Monde, 25/10/88
[2] For an analysis of the reality of this "expansion" and its effects on the world economy, see "The perspective of recession has not receded, quite the reverse", in International Review 54, 3rd quarter 1988.
[3] Stephen Marris, Le Monde, 25/10/88
March 2019 marks the centenary of the foundation of the Third, Communist International, one of the high points of the international revolutionary wave which swept the globe at the end of the First World War. We will be producing a new article to celebrate and analyse this historic event, but in the meantime we are drawing readers' attention to what we wrote in 1989, 70 years after the formation of the CI; this is an article which retains its relevance today.
Amongst the many anniversaries that will be celebrated in 1989, there is one that the media and historians will not talk about other than briefly and then only with the conscious aim of distorting its significance. In March 1919 the founding Congress of the Communist International was held. As they did with the bicentenary of the foundation of the United States, the bourgeoisie's well-paid historians will celebrate the bicentenary of the French Revolution of 1789 by trumpeting the values of liberty, equality, fraternity, democracy and the nation as the absolute and definitive principles that had at last been discovered to lead humanity to ‘happiness'. Two centuries of exploitation, class struggle, misery and imperialist war, have revealed the capitalist reality behind these fine words. For the bourgeoisie, the purpose of these celebrations is to make people forget that "capitalism was born in blood and filth" (Marx), that it was born of the class struggle, and above all, that it is a transitory social form, which will disappear as all the previous modes of production have done before it.
The anniversary of the foundation of the Communist International is there to remind the bourgeoisie of 1989 that the class struggle is a reality of today's crisis-ridden capitalism, that the proletariat exists as both an exploited and a revolutionary class; it heralds the end of the bourgeoisie itself.
The international revolutionary wave in 1919
The CI's foundation awakes unpleasant memories for the whole capitalist class and its zealous servants. In particular, it reminds them of their fright at the end of World War I, faced with the mounting and apparently unavoidable tide of the international revolutionary wave: the victorious proletarian revolution in Russia in October 1917; mutinies in the trenches; the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm and the hurried signature of an armistice in the face of mutinies and the revolt of the working masses in Germany; then the insurrection of German workers; the creation along Russian lines of republics of workers' councils in Bavaria and Hungary; the beginning of strikes among the working masses in Britain and Italy; mutinies in the fleet and army in France, as well as among some British military units refusing to intervene against Soviet Russia ....
Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the British Government at the time, best expressed the international bourgeoisie's alarm at the power of the Russian workers' soviets when he declared in January 1919 that if he were to try to send a thousand British troops to help occupy Russia, the troops would mutiny, and that if a military occupation were undertaken against the Bolsheviks, England would become Bolshevik and there would be a soviet in London:
"The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent, but of anger and revolt amongst the workmen against pre-war conditions. The whole existing order in its political, social and economic aspects is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other" (quoted in Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol 3, p .13 5 ).
We know today that the CI's foundation was the high point of the revolutionary wave which extended from 1917 until at least 1923, throughout the world, from Europe to Asia (China), and to the ‘new' world from Canada (Winnipeg) and the USA (Seattle) to Latin America. This revolutionary wave was the international proletariat's answer to World War I, to 4 years of imperialist war amongst the capitalist states to divide the world up between them. The attitude towards the imperialist war of the different parties and individual militants of the social democracy, the 2nd International swallowed up by the war in 1914, was to determine what attitude they would adopt faced with the revolution and the Communist International.
"The Communist International was formed after the conclusion of the imperialist war of 1914-18 in which the imperialist bourgeoisie of the different countries sacrificed 20 million men.
"‘Remember the imperialist war!' These are the first words addressed by the Communist International to every working man and woman; wherever they live and whatever language they speak. Remember that because of the existence of capitalist society a handful of imperialists were able to force the workers of the different countries for four long years to cut each other's throats. Remember that the war of the bourgeoisie conjured up in Europe and throughout the world the most frightful famine and the most appalling misery. Remember that without the overthrow of capitalism the repetition of such robber wars is not only possible but inevitable" (Statutes of the Communist International, adopted at the 2nd Congress, in Degras, The Communist International, Documents)
Part I: The continuity from the 2nd International to the CI
The 2nd International and the question of the imperialist war
In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Karl Marx set out one of the essential principles of the proletariat's struggle against capitalism: "The workers have no country". This principle did not mean that workers should take no interest in the national question, but on the contrary that they should define their positions and attitudes on the subject, and on the question of national wars, as a function of their own historical struggle. The question of war and the attitude of the proletariat were always at the centre of the debates of the 1st International (1864-73), as it was in those of the 2nd (1889-1914). During most of the 19th century, the proletariat could not remain indifferent to the wars of national emancipation against feudal and monarchic reaction, and especially against Russian tsarism.
Within the 2nd International the marxists, with Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg in the forefront, were able to recognize the change in the period of capitalism's life that occurred at the dawn of the 20th century. The capitalist mode of production had reached its apogee, and reigned over the entire planet. Here began the period of "imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism", as Lenin put it. In this period the coming European war would be an imperialist and world war between capitalist nations over the distribution of colonies and spheres of influence. It was essentially the left wing of the2nd International which led the combat to arm the International and the proletariat in this new situation, against the opportunist wing, which was abandoning day by day the principles of the proletarian struggle. A vital moment in this struggle was the 1907 Congress of the International in Stuttgart, where Rosa Luxemburg, drawing the lessons of the experience of the 1905 mass strike in Russia, linked the question of imperialist war to those of the mass strike and the proletarian revolution:
"I have asked to speak in the name of the Russian and Polish delegations to remind you that on this point [the mass strike in Russia and the war, ed.) we must draw the lesson of the great Russian revolution [ie of 1905, ed.] ... The Russian revolution did not only arise as a result of the war; it also put an end to the war; without it, Tsarism would undoubtedly have continued the war" (Rosa Luxemburg, quoted in BD Wolfe, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin).
The left carried the adoption of the vitally important amendment to the Congress resolution, presented by Luxemburg and Lenin:
"Should a war break out nonetheless, the socialists have the duty to work to bring it to an end as rapidly as possible, and to use by every means the economic and political crisis provoked by the war to awaken the people and so to hasten the downfall of capitalist domination" (quoted in the Resolution on the Socialist currents and the Berne conference, at the First Congress of the CI).
In 1912, the 2nd International's Basel Congress reaffirmed this position against the growing menace of imperialist war in Europe:
"Let the bourgeois governments not forget that the Franco-Prussian war gave birth to the revolutionary insurrection of the Commune, and that the Russo-Japanese war set in motion the revolutionary forces in Russia. In the eyes of the proletarians, it is criminal to massacre themselves for the benefit of capitalist profit, dynastic rivalry, and the flourishing of diplomatic treaties" (ibid).
The betrayal and death of the 2nd International
The 4th August 1914 marked the outbreak of the First World War. Riddled with opportunism, swept away in the flood of chauvinism and war fever, the 2nd International broke up and died in shame: its principal parties (above all the French and German social-democratic parties and the British Labor party, in the hands of the opportunists), voted for war credits, called for the ‘defense of the fatherland', and a ‘holy alliance' with the bourgeoisie against ‘foreign invasion'; in France, they were even rewarded with ministerial positions for having given up the class struggle. They received a theoretical support from the ‘centre' (ie between the International's left and right wings), when Kautsky, who had been called the ‘pope of marxism', distinguished between war and the class struggle, declaring the latter possible only ‘in peacetime' .... and so of course impossible ‘for the duration'.
"For the class-conscious workers ( ... ) by the collapse of the [2nd] International they understand the glaring disloyalty of the majority of the official Social-Democratic parties to their convictions, to the most solemn declarations made in speeches at the Stuttgart and Basel International Congresses, in the resolutions of these congresses, etc" (Lenin, The Collapse of the Second International)
Only a few parties stood up to the storm: essentially the Italian, Serbian, Bulgarian and Russian parties. Elsewhere, isolated militants or groups, usually from the Left, such as Rosa Luxemburg and the Dutch ‘Tribunists' around Gorter and Pannekoek, remained faithful to proletarian internationalism and the class struggle and tried to regroup.
The death of the 2nd International was a heavy defeat for the proletariat, which it paid for in blood in the trenches. Many revolutionary workers were to die in the slaughter. For the ‘revolutionary social-democrats', it meant the loss of their international organization, which would have to be rebuilt:
"The 2nd International is dead, defeated by opportunism. Down with opportunism, and long live the 3rd International, rid not only of deserters ( ... ) but also of opportunism!" (Lenin, Situation and Tasks of the Socialist International)
The conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal: Steps towards the construction of the Communist International
In September 1915, the ‘International Socialist Conference of Zimmerwald' was held. It was to be followed in April 1916 by a second conference at Kienthal, also in Switzerland. Despite the difficult conditions of war and repression, delegates from 11 countries took part, including Germany, Italy, Russia and France.
Zimmerwald recognised the war as imperialist. The majority of the conference refused to denounce the opportunist right of the social-democratic parties which had gone over to the camp of the ‘holy alliance', or to envisage splitting with them. This centrist majority was pacifist, defending the slogan of ‘peace'.
United behind the representatives of the Bolshevik fraction, Lenin and Zinoviev, the ‘Zimmerwald Left', defended the necessity of a split, and the construction of the 3rd International. Against pacifism, they declared that "the struggle for peace without revolutionary action is a hollow and deceitful phrase" (Lenin), and opposed centrism with the slogan of "transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war. This slogan, precisely, is indicated in the resolutions of Stuttgart and Basel" (Lenin).
Although the Left gained in strength from one Conference to the next, it was unable to convince the other delegates, and remained in the minority. Nonetheless, its evaluation was positive:
"The second Zimmerwald Conference (Kienthal) is undoubtedly a step forward. ( ... ) What then should we do tomorrow? Tomorrow, we must continue the struggle for our solution, for the revolutionary social-democracy, for the 3rd International! Zimmerweld and Kienthal have shown that our road is the right one" (Zinoviev, 10/6/1916).
The meeting between the lefts of different countries, and their common combat, made possible the constitution of the "first nucleus of the 3rd International in formation", as Zinoviev recognized in March 1918.
The proletariat carries out the resolutions of the Stuttgart and Basel Congresses
The 1917 proletarian revolution in Russia opened a revolutionary wave throughout Europe. The proletarian threat decided the international bourgeoisie to bring the imperialist carnage to an end. Lenin's slogan became a reality: the Russian, then the international proletariat transformed the imperialist war into a civil war. Thus the proletariat honored the Left of the 2nd International, by applying the famous Stuttgart resolution.
The war had definitively thrust the opportunist right of the social-democratic parties into the camp of the bourgeoisie. The revolutionary wave put the pacifists of the centre up against the wall, and was to thrust many of them in their turn, especially the leaders such as Kautsky into the bourgeois camp. The International no longer existed. The new parties formed by splits from the social-democracy began to adopt the name of ‘Communist Party'.
The revolutionary wave encouraged and demanded the constitution of the world party of the proletariat: the 3rd International.
The formation of the CI: Its continuity in politics and principles with the 2nd International
The new International, which adopted the name of the Communist International, was thus formed in March 1919 on the basis of an organic split with the right wing of the parties of the defunct 2nd International. It did not, however, reject its principles or its contributions.
"Sweeping aside the half-heartedness, lies and corruption of the outlived official Socialist parties, we Communists, united in the 3rd International, consider ourselves the direct continuators of the heroic endeavors and martyrdom of a long line of revolutionary generations from Babeuf to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.
If the 1st International presaged the future course of development and indicated its paths; if the 2nd International gathered and organized millions of workers; then the 3rd International is the International of open mass action, the International of revolutionary realization, the International of the deed" (Manifesto of the CI, in The Five Years of the CI, ed. New Park)
The currents, the fractions, the traditions and the positions which formed the basis of the CI, were developed and defended by the Left within the 2nd International.
"Experience proves that only in a regroupment selected from the historical milieu - the 2nd International - in which the pre-war proletariat developed could the proletarian struggle against the imperialist war be pushed to its extreme conclusion, for only this group was able to formulate and advanced program for the proletarian revolution, and so to lay the foundations for a new proletarian movement" (Bilan, theoretical bulletin of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left), no. 34, August 1936, p.1128).
Over and above individuals such as Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, or even groups and fractions of the social-democratic parties like the Bolsheviks, the German, Dutch, and Italian lefts etc, there is a political and organic continuity between the left of the 2nd International and of Zimmerwald, and the 3rd International. The first Congress of the new International was called on the initiative of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (previously the Workers' Social Democratic Party of Russia (Bolsheviks), which was part of the 2nd International) and the German Communist Party (ex-Spartacus League). The Bolsheviks were the driving force behind the Zimmerwald Left. The latter, a true organic and political link between the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, drew up a balance-sheet of its past combats as the left wing of the 2nd International, and set out the needs of the day:
"The conferences of Zimmerweld and Kienthal were important at a time when it was necessary to unite all those proletarian elements determined in one way or another to protest against the imperialist butchery. ( ... ) The Zimmerwald group has had its day. All that was truly revolutionary in the Zimmerwald goes over to and joins the Communist International" (Declaration of the Participants at Zimmerwald, quoted in Broue, op. cit.).
We insist strongly on the continuity between the two Internationals. As we have seen on the organic level, the CI did not appear out of the blue. The same is true of its program and its political principles. Not to recognize the historical link between the two means succumbing to an anarchist inability to understand how history works, or to a mechanistic spontaneism which sees the CI as solely the product of the revolutionary movement of the working masses.
Without recognizing this continuity, it is impossible to understand why and how the CI breaks with the 2nd International. For although there is a continuity between the two, expressed amongst other things in the Stuttgart resolution, there is also a rupture. A rupture concretized in the CI's political program, in its political positions and in its organizational and militant practice as the ‘world communist party'. A rupture in facts, by the use of armed and bloody repression: against the proletariat and the Bolsheviks in Russia by the Kerensky government, with the participation of the Mensheviks and the SRs, both members of the 2nd International; against the proletariat and the KPD in Germany by the Social-Democratic government of Noske-Scheidemann.
Without recognizing this ‘break within a continuity', it is also impossible to understand the degeneration of the CI during the 1920s and the combat conducted within it, then outside it during the 30s following their exclusion, by the fractions of the ‘Italian', ‘German' and ‘Dutch' Communist Lefts, to name only the most important. Today's communist groups and the positions they defend are the product of these left fractions, of their defense of communist principles and their work in carrying out a critical reappraisal of the CI and the 1917-23 revolutionary wave. Without recognizing the heritage of the 2nd International, which is the political heritage of the proletariat, it is impossible to understand the foundations of the CI's positions, nor the validity of some of the most important of them today, nor the contributions of the fractions during the 1930s. In other words, it means being incapable of defending revolutionary positions today, consistently and with assurance and determination.
Part 2: The CI's break with the 2nd International
The CI's political program
At the end of January 1919, Trotsky drew up the ‘Letter of invitation' to the CI's founding Congress, which determined the political principles that the new organization aimed to adopt. In fact, this letter is the proposed ‘Platform of the Communist International', and sums it up well. It is based on the programs of the two main communist parties:
"In our opinion the new international should be based on the recognition of the following propositions, put forward here as a platform and worked out on the basis of the program of the Spartakusbund in Germany and of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in Russia" (Degras, opcit.)
In fact, the Spartakusbund no longer existed since the foundation of the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) on 29th December 1918. The KPD had just lost its two principal leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, assassinated by the social-democracy during the terrible repression of the Berlin proletariat in January. Thus at the very moment of its foundation, the CI suffered, along with the international proletariat, its first defeat. Two months before it was constituted, the CI lost two leaders whose prestige, strength, and theoretical abilities were comparable to those of Lenin and Trotsky. It was Rosa Luxemburg who had the most developed, in her writings at the end of the previous century, the point that was to become the keystone of the 3rd International's political program.
Capitalism's irreversible historical decline
For Rosa Luxemburg, it was clear that the war of 1914 had opened up the capitalist mode of production's period of decadence. After the imperialist slaughter, this position could no longer be contested:
"Matters have reached such a pitch that today mankind is faced with two alternatives: it may perish amid chaos; or it may find salvation in socialism" (Speech on the Program, Merlin Press).
This position was reaffirmed vigorously by the International:
"1. The present epoch is the epoch of the collapse and disintegration of the entire capitalist world system, which will drag the whole of European civilization down with it if capitalism with its insoluble contradictions is not destroyed" (Letter of Invitation, in Degras, opcit).
"A new epoch is born! The epoch of the dissolution of capitalism, of its inner disintegration. The epoch of the communist revolution of the proletariat" (Platform of the CI, ibid).
The political implications of the epoch of capitalist decadence
For all those who stand on the terrain of the Communist International, the decline of capitalism has consequences for the living conditions and struggle of the proletariat. Contrary to the ideas of the pacifist centre, those of Kautsky for example, the end of the war could not mean a return to the life and program of the prewar period. This was one point of rupture between the dead 2nd and the 3rd International:
"One thing is certain, the World War is a turning point for the world. ( ... ) The conditions of our struggle, and we ourselves, have been radically altered by the World War" (Luxemburg, The Crisis in the Social Democracy, 1915).
The opening of the period of capitalist society's decline marked by the imperialist war, meant new conditions of life and struggle for the international proletariat. It was heralded by the 1905 mass strike in Russia, and the emergence for the first time of a new form of unitary organization of the working masses, the soviets. Luxemburg (in Mass Strike, Party, and Unions, 1906) and Trotsky (in 1905) drew the essential lessons of these mass movements. With Luxemburg, the whole of the left led the debate within the 2nd International on the mass strike, and the political battle against the opportunism of the trade union and Social-Democratic party leaderships, against their vision of a peaceful and gradual evolution towards socialism. Breaking with social-democratic practice, the CI declared:
"The basic methods of struggle are mass actions of the proletariat right up to open armed conflict with the political power of capital" (Letter of Invitation in Degras, opcit).
The revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat
The action of the working masses leads to confrontation with the bourgeois state. The CI's most precious contribution is on the revolutionary proletariat's attitude to the state. Breaking with the social-democracy's ‘reformism', renewing the marxist method and the lessons of the historical experiences of the Paris Commune, Russia 1905, and above all the insurrection of October 1917 with the destruction of the capitalist state in Russia and the exercise of power by the workers' councils, the CI declared itself clearly and without any ambiguity for the destruction of the bourgeois state and the dictatorship of the proletariat, the dictatorship of the working masses organized in the workers' councils.
"2. The task of the proletariat is now to seize power immediately. The seizure of state power means the destruction of the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie and the organization of a new proletarian apparatus of power.
3. This new apparatus of power should embody the dictatorship of the working class, and in some places also of the rural semi-proletariat, the village poor ( ... ) Its concrete form is given in the regime of the Soviets or of similar organs.
4. The dictatorship of the proletariat must be the lever for the immediate expropriation of capital and for the abolition of private property in the means of production and their transformation into national property" (ibid).
This question was an essential one for the Congress, which was to adopt the ‘Theses on bourgeois democracy and proletarian dictatorship' presented by Lenin.
The theses on bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat
The Theses begin by denouncing the false opposition between democracy and dictatorship. "For in no civilized capitalist country is there ‘democracy in the abstract', there is only bourgeois democracy" (ibid). The Paris Commune had demonstrated the dictatorial character of bourgeois democracy. In capitalism, defending ‘pure' democracy in fact means defending bourgeois democracy, which is the form par excellence of the dictatorship of capital. What freedom of meeting or of the press is there for workers?
"‘Freedom of the press' is another leading watchword of ‘pure democracy'. But the workers know..., that this freedom is deceptive so long as the best printing works and the biggest paper supplies are in capitalist hands, and so long as capital retains its power over the press, a power which throughout the world is expressed more clearly, sharply, and cynically, the more developed the democracy and the republican regime, as for example in America. To win real equality and real democracy for the working masses, for the workers and peasants, the capitalists must first be deprived of the possibility of getting writers in their service, of buying up publishing houses and bribing newspapers. And for that it is necessary to throw off the yoke of capital, to overthrow the exploiters and to crush their resistance" (Theses, ibid).
After the experience of the war and the revolution, to demand and defend pure democracy, as do the Kautskyists, is a crime against the proletariat, the Theses continue. In the interests of the different imperialisms, of a minority of capitalists, millions of men were massacred in the trenches, and the ‘military dictatorship of the bourgeoisie' has been set up in every country, democratic or not. Bourgeois democracy assassinated Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg once they had been arrested and imprisoned by a social-democratic government.
"In such a state of affairs the dictatorship of the proletariat is not merely wholly justified as a means of overwhelming the exploiters and overcoming their resistance, but quite essential for the mass of workers as their only protection against the bourgeois dictatorship which led to the war and is getting ready for new wars. ( ... ) The fundamental difference between the proletarian dictatorship and the dictatorship of other classes ( ... ) consists in this, that ( ... ) the dictatorship of the proletariat is the forcible suppression of the resistance of the exploiters, that is of the minority of the population, the large landowners and capitalists. ( ... )
And in fact the forms taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat, which have already been worked out, that is, the Soviet power in Russia, the workers' councils in Germany, the shop stewards' committees, and other analogues of Soviet institutions in other countries, all these make a reality of democratic rights and privileges for the working classes, that is for the overwhelming majority of the population; they mean that it becomes really possible to use these rights and privileges in a way and on a scale that was never even approximately possible in the best democratic bourgeois republic" (ibid).
Only the dictatorship of the proletariat on a world scale can destroy capitalism, abolish classes, and ensure the passage to communism.
"The abolition of state power is the goal of all socialists, including and above all Marx. Unless this goal is reached, true democracy, that is, equality and freedom, is not attainable. But only Soviet and proletarian democracy leads in fact to this goal, for it begins at once to prepare for the complete withering away of any kind of state by drawing the mass organizations of the working people into constant and unrestricted participation in state administration" (ibid).
The question of the state was a crucial one, at a moment when the revolutionary wave was unfurling in Europe and the bourgeoisie in all countries was waging civil war against the proletariat in Russia, when the antagonism between capital and labor, between bourgeoisie and proletariat, had reached its most extreme and most dramatic point. The need to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia and the extension of the revolution, ie the power of the Soviets, internationally to Europe was posed concretely for revolutionaries. For or against the state of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia and the revolutionary wave. ‘For' meant joining the Communist International, and breaking organically and politically with the social-democracy. ‘Against' meant defending the bourgeois state, and choosing definitively the camp of the counter-revolution. For the centrist currents that hesitated between the two, it meant break-up and disappearance. Revolutionary periods do not leave any room for the timid policies of the ‘middle ground'.
Part 3: Today and tomorrow: Continuing the work of the CI
The change in period revealed definitively by the 1914-18 war determines the break between the political positions of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals. We have seen this on the question of the state. Capitalism's decline and its consequences for the proletariat's conditions of life and struggle posed a whole series of new problems: was it still possible to take part in elections and make use of parliament? With the appearance of the workers' councils, were the trade unions that had taken part in the ‘holy alliance' with the capitalists still working class organizations? What attitude should be adopted towards national liberation struggles in the epoch of imperialist wars?
The CI was unable to answer these new questions? It was formed more than a year after October 1917, two months after the proletariat's first defeat in Berlin. The years that followed were marked by the defeat and ebb of the international revolutionary wave, and so by the growing isolation of the proletariat in Russia. This isolation was the determining reason behind the degeneration of the state of the proletarian dictatorship. These events left the CI incapable of resisting the development of opportunism. In its turn, it died.
To draw up a balance sheet of the CI, obviously we must recognize it as the International Communist Party that it was. For those who see it only as a bourgeois organization, because of its eventual degeneration, it is impossible to draw up a balance sheet, or to extract any lessons from its experience. Trotskyism lays claim uncritically to the first 4 Congresses. It never saw that where the 1st Congress broke with the 2nd International, the following congresses marked a retreat: in opposition to the split with the social-democracy accomplished by the 1st Congress, the 3rd proposed to make an alliance with it in the ‘United Front'. After having recognized its definitive passage into the bourgeois camp, the CI rehabilitated social-democracy at the 3rd Congress. This policy of alliance with the social-democratic parties was to lead Trotskyism in the 1930s to adopt the policy of ‘entrism', ie entering these same parties in direct defiance of the very principles of the 1st Congress. This policy of alliance, or of capitulation as Lenin would have said, was to precipitate the Trotskyist current into the counter-revolution, with its support for the bourgeois republican government in the Spanish civil war and then its participation in the imperialist Second World War, in betrayal of Zimmerwald and the International.
Already in the 1920s, a new left was created within the CI to try to struggle against this degeneration: in particular, the Italian, Dutch, and German Lefts. These left fractions, which were excluded during the 1920s, continued their political combat to ensure the continuity between the dying CI and the ‘party of tomorrow', by subjecting the CI and the revolutionary wave to a critical reappraisal. It is not for nothing that the review of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left during the 1930s was called Bilan (‘the balance sheet').
In continuity with the International's principles, these groups criticized the weaknesses in its break with the 2nd International. Their unsung efforts, in the deepest night of the counter-revolution during the 1930s and the second imperialist war, have made possible the resurgence and existence of communist groups today which, while they have no organic continuity with the CI, ensure its political continuity. The positions worked out and defended by these groups answer the problems raised within the CI by the new period of capitalist decadence.
It is therefore on the basis of the critical reappraisal carried out by the ‘Fractions of the Communist Left' that the CI lives today, and will live in the World Communist Party of tomorrow.
Today, in the face of growing exploitation and poverty, the proletariat must adopt the same position as the Zimmerwald Left: No to the holy alliance with the bourgeoisie in the economic war! No to sacrifices to save the national economy! Long live the class struggle! Transform the economic war into a civil war!
In the face of economic catastrophe, in the face of social decomposition, in the face of the perspective of a Third imperialist World War, the historic alternative is the same today as it was in 1919: the destruction of capitalism and the installation of the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat, or the destruction of humanity. Socialism or barbarism.
The future belongs to communism.
RL
Preliminary Introduction:
Of the various proletarian groups which the GPI has made contact and initiated an exchange of publications with, the IBRP (particularly the PCInt) has been one of those making a large and direct critique of our positions as expressed in Revolucion Mundial. We salute this attitude of the IBRP. There are various questions that we have taken up with these comrades, but all of them are centered around one main preoccupation; in the IBRP's judgment, the GPI has "adopted very quickly, and without hardly a critique, the positions of the ICC, which they characterize as being within the proletarian political camp." According to the IBRP, this is to be explained by the "direct and exclusive" contact with the ICC which marked the origins of the GPI, and "since we are convinced that the ICC (without denying it the merit of being an organization of sincere militants, loyal to the proletarian class) does not represent a valid pole of regroupment for the constitution of the international revolutionary party, we think that the comrades of the GPI must take further steps towards a real process of clarification, decantation and selection useful to the constitution of a revolutionary pole in Mexico ... a series of political discussions, the outcome of which will demonstrate that we were right."[1]
That the GPI has been fashioned under the influence of the ICC, taking up its positions from the beginning (or if you want to pose it from another perspective; that we are the result of the militant labor of the ICC), is something we've always pointed out. We have already said that presently, in front of the weakness of the international revolutionary milieu, before the creation of a unique pole of reference and regroupment of the revolutionary forces, new militants are emerging under the determined influence of this or that group, inheriting as many of their merits as deficiencies, are being immediately faced with the necessity of taking "a side" faced with the existing divergences in the milieu.
But it is not correct to say that the GPI has adopted the ICC's positions without being critical. From the beginning we have recognized the existence of a camp of proletarian political groups, in fact we want to say we do not consider the ICC as the possessor of "all that is true", and we have already had occasions to develop our divergences with them. Although, truth be told, from the understanding we have of the positions of the other regroupments, we have developed the conviction that the ICC is, at least, the one that has maintained the greatest political coherence.
We insist once more that the GPI considers that its consolidation will only be able to occur through the deepening of the political positions we have taken up, especially by confronting them with those maintained by the different groups of the international communist milieu. By being willing to discuss and to collaborate with other groups, as far as maintaining proletarian principles will permit, we situate ourselves as a small part of the process towards the confirmation of the world communist party.
In this spirit, we publish the position we have taken concerning the conception of the IBRP on class consciousness and the role of the party.
We understand that the conditions for the regroupmerrt of revolutionaries in a new international party are still far away and that much remains to be done; probably only some very important confrontations in the class struggle will permit a clear and effective polarization of revolutionary forces. We don't pretend to know the concrete form of this process of polarization. However it is certain that the necessity of a world communist party on a world scale will be posed each time with more urgency by the proletariat, and its present revolutionary minorities must make every effort to clear the way that leads to its constitution, laying the foundations so that the different existing groups will be able to regroup with the maximum political clarity possible. Beginning by clarifying the points of accord and divergences that exist on the role of the communist party in the working class.
Clearly, the GPI has no other choice than to "meddle" in the fundamental debates that have occupied revolutionaries for many years (and which recently have found expression in two important moments; firstly the conferences called by the PCInt and secondly the responses to the ‘International Proposal' of 1986 by Emancipacion Obrera. And if we have entered into debate with the comrades of the PCInt, it is because all of the points raised in the discussions by them refer to the question of class consciousness and the party. So, it is not for us to pretend to give right now a solution to the question. But if we can at least make clear what for us are the weaknesses of the IBRP (and of those who share its positions), we will consider the object of our article to have been fulfilled.
We criticize basically the PCInt's article ‘Class Consciousness in the Marxist Perspective', the Platform of the IBRP and their correspondence with us.
I. Posing the problem
In the article ‘Class Consciousness in the Marxist Perspective', the IBRP develop their conception of this question, endeavoring at the same time to demonstrate that in the polemic that took place between Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg concerning the formation of class consciousness and the role of the party, that the former was right and the latter (together with her present-day ‘inheritors'), were wrong.
There is in effect in the revolutionary milieu a tendency to present divergences on the party (and on all questions) as a reproduction or continuation of all the old debates that have always animated revolutionaries. This is the result not of an academic excess, but of a real effort of the proletarian political regroupments to take hold of the historical traditions of revolutionary positions.
But without doubt, it is obvious that the present debates cannot be exactly the same as those which took place almost a century ago: ‘much water has passed under the bridge' since then the proletariat has not only lived through the revolutionary wave, the largest ever known, but also the longest period of counter-revolution. For the present revolutionary minorities, there is an immense accumulation of experience that provides the basis for the clarification of problems that will be posed to the proletariat in its struggle, but at the same time they have greater difficulty obtaining this clarification due to their precarious existence.
And this, the present debate between revolutionaries concerning the relationship between class consciousness and the party, that apparently reproduces the same divergences between the tendencies represented by Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg, hides a much more profound divergence, more serious than the differences of these leaders of the proletariat.
In effect, whereas at the beginning of the century the preoccupation of those revolutionaries was to set out the process through which the proletarian masses arrive at class consciousness, that is to say, the understanding of the irreconcilable antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, as well as the necessity and possibility of the communist revolution, now this preoccupation, although still present, is intersected by another more general and elemental, if you want, more ‘primitive' whether in general the proletarian masses can or cannot arrive - in some way - at class consciousness.
Whereas one part of the present revolutionary milieu, including the IBRP, consider that "the communist party is the only or principal depository of class consciousness," until the destruction of the bourgeois state and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and only after then will the masses become class conscious.
The other part, in which the GPI includes itself, considers that the fundamental prerequisite for the destruction of the bourgeois state and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat is the arrival of the proletariat, the determined mass of the class (at least the majority of the proletariat of the biggest cities) to class consciousness.
With the result that there exists a veritable abyss between the conceptions that are held on the role of the party (more specifically on the present role that the organized revolutionary minorities must fulfill). In the end, the debate does not consist of the more or less decisive role that the party will play in the process of the confirmation of the proletariat as a class for itself; the major problem is not to define whether the party ‘orients' or ‘leads', but a more basic question: what is meant by a class for itself?
Thus for example, perhaps we would be able to agree that the function of the party is ‘to lead' the proletariat. But this agreement would only be more apparent than real: since at present others (like the IBRP) consider ‘idealistic' the notion that the proletarian masses develop revolutionary consciousness as a condition for the taking of power, it's evident that because of this they have to see their relationship as essentially identical to that which, for example, exists between officers and soldiers in modern armies, or between the boss and the workers in the factory: that is to say, a relationship in which only the leader knows the real aims to follow, whereas for the led, these aims appear behind ideological clouds and, therefore, they have to be pushed along an imposed direction (in a patriarchal and authoritarian way), a relationship of the dominating to the dominated.
For us, on the contrary, the direction given by the communist party is nothing other than the comprehension, the profound conviction that develops in the whole of the working class, of the correctness of the party's programmatic positions and of its slogans, which are the expression of the class' own movement. A conviction at which the masses will arrive through learning the historical lessons that they extract from their struggle, in which the party participates taking a vanguard role. Between the party and the proletariat there is a relationship of a new type, the sole property of the working class.
So then, for some, the constitution of the proletariat into a class means that the party, unique bearer of the proletarian/revolutionary consciousness, comes to the head of the masses, who - despite all their experience of struggle are permanently dominated by bourgeois ideology. For others, on the contrary, the constitution of the proletariat as a class means that the masses, through their experience, and the intervention of the party, advance towards revolutionary proletarian consciousness. The IBRP hold the first position, we the second; perhaps the GPI will be submerged in idealism?
II. The IBRP intend to deepen Lenin
One of the first questions that arises from the article cited by the IBRP, is the new formulation that they make of the thesis that Lenin expressed in his work, What is to be done? But the changes the comrades introduce into the terminology employed by Lenin, do not signify so much a ‘precision' of his thought, but a travesty of it, behind which is found the displacement of the debate on the question concerning how the masses arrive at class consciousness, to whether in general it is possible for them to arrive at this. Therefore, though we do not share the thinking of Lenin according to which consciousness is introduced from outside the working class, before ‘criticizing' Lenin we must ‘defend' him, trying to restore his thinking, showing clearly what his preoccupations were and their role in the combat against the economists. (In order that there is no misunderstanding, we want to make it clear that when we refer to ‘Lenin', or to any other revolutionary, we do not look to see if they were ‘mistaken' or ‘infalable' as individuals, but we take them as representatives of a particular political current, and it is because in this or that work that this current which we want to take as our ‘example' is expressed more clearly).
OK. Lenin called trade union consciousness "the conviction that it is necessary to regroup in trade unions, to struggle against the bosses, to demand of the government the promulgation of this or that law necessary for the workers ..."[2] and social democratic consciousness (we today would call it communist consciousness) "the consciousness of the irreconcilable antagonisms between its interests (of the workers) and all contemporary political and social regimes"[3]. According to Lenin, the working class, despite its spontaneous struggles of resistance, is only capable of reaching a trade unionist consciousness, whereas communist consciousness has to be introduced from outside by the party.
The IBRP modify the formulation of Lenin, posing that "the immediate experience of the working class allows it to develop consciousness of its class identity and of the necessity of collective struggle ( ... )," that "the conditions of existence of the proletariat, its struggles and reflections on that struggle, raise its understanding to a level where it can see itself as a separate class, and define itself as by the need for struggle against the bourgeoisie. But class identity is not consciousness"[4]. And a little further on they say: "for class identity to be transformed into class consciousness, the organization of the proletariat into a class, hence into a political party is necessary." From this, we can see more clearly what the IBRP comrades mean when they talk of "transformation". Firstly it is necessary to note that what the comrades call "consciousness of class identity", Lenin called "trade union consciousness."
Moreover, Lenin made clear that the spontaneous element is the embryonic form of consciousness, "since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the course of their movement, the only choice is either socialist or bourgeois ideology... the spontaneous development of the working class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology... Therefore our task consists in combating spontaneity, it consists in separating the workers movement from this spontaneous tendency to trade unionism sheltering under the wing of the bourgeoisie and pulling towards the wing of revolutionary social democracy" (the then proletarian party)[5].
Now, it would be possible to ask on what side does the IBRP place this "consciousness of class identity" that the workers will develop? And they would answer: "For the most part, the experiences gained by the working class in its conflict with the bourgeoisie are structured by the world outlook of the bourgeoisie and give rise only to a sense of class identity which remains a type of bourgeois consciousness"[6].
So then, in a roundabout way, (changing ‘consciousness' for ‘sense'), the IBRP say that consciousness of working class identity is a form of bourgeois consciousness. We regret that this, straight away, is no more than the introduction of an enormous confusion of terms in marxism. But we have hardly begun; now the IBRP has to explain how class identity, that is to say this form of bourgeois consciousness, "is transformed into communist consciousness.":
"a section of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat, and in particular, a portion of the bourgeois ideologists who have raised themselves to comprehending theoretically the historical movement as a whole (Communist Manifesto). Here, in a nutshell, is the materialist conception of class consciousness. The spontaneous struggle of the working class can raised the consciousness of that class to the level of class identity, the realization that it is not part of the ‘people', but is a class-in-itself. This is a necessary prelude to its qualitative leap to class consciousness (or, the emergence of the class for itself), but the latter can only come about if ‘philosophy' or a theoretical understanding of the historical movement as a whole is provided and grips the working class: ie if the class can become aware that it must be furnished with a party possessing a scientific world view. This world view is of necessity formulated outside of (though its material is partly furnished by) the class struggle and outside the existence of the whole proletariat, though individual proletarians participate in its creation" [P16, RP21][7]
There are expressed in this paragraph of the IBRP such a quantity of confusions that it is very difficult for us to know where to begin. We are trying to disentangle their reasoning. The IBRP offer us here three ‘levels' of consciousness.
The first level: consciousness of class identity which already is not considered as an identity of a class in opposition to the bosses, but only "that it is not part of the people." With this, the IBRP reduce this "embryonic consciousness," the product of the struggle about which Lenin talks, to the level of vulgar "knowledge", on the same level of understanding as a child which can make a verbal distinction between workers, peasants, etc. But the IBRP also denotes this identity as an indispensable premise in order that the leap towards class consciousness can occur. Without a doubt, the IBRP would say to us that this "class identity" is nothing other than a form of bourgeois consciousness - with the result that bourgeois consciousness is an indispensable premise for ... proletarian consciousness. In other words, in order for the proletariat to become a "class for itself", it must be a class "in itself", or, in order for the proletariat to become class conscious, it must go through an indispensable process which it does not have.
The second level: class consciousness. By means of a qualitative leap, the proletariat confirms itself as a class for itself. What does this leap consist of? In the conviction of the masses of the need of a party bearing - in itself - communist consciousness. But this conviction, does it imply that the proletarian masses break, in the end, with bourgeois ideology? According to the reasoning of the IBRP, no. The masses are not able to arrive at communist consciousness before the taking of power, and as there is no "middle way", then in reality there is no such qualitative leap.
The proletariat, according to the IBRP, confirms itself as a class for itself, but the proletariat remains dominated by bourgeois ideology. It would be fruitful to ask, what is the basis for the masses to become "convinced" of the necessity for the communist party, since nothing exists, apart from bourgeois ideology? How do the masses recognize the "correct" party, given that they are permanently dominated by bourgeois ideology and, therefore, they cannot understand the party's revolutionary positions? Such a "conviction" becomes a mere causality, something that depends, not on the correctness of the party's positions, but on its skillful maneuvers in relation to the other parties (bourgeois and petty bourgeois) who also try and "convince" the masses. The IBRP reduce the confirmation of the proletariat as a class for itself, to this.
The third level: communist consciousness, the theoretical understanding of the movement, the global, scientific understanding held by the party. Where does it come from? According to Marx: "The theoretical conclusions of the communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They merely express, in general terms, actual relations springing from an existing class struggle, from an historical movement going on under our eyes," (Communist Manifesto). But now the IBRP, "deepening" Lenin, have discovered that the theoretical thesis of communists are found in analyses elaborated outside of the class struggle (though this is part of its. material) by this or that bourgeois ideologist or this or that isolated proletarian that has risen to the level of ideologist. Very good, but the class struggle is the real form of the class existence, its prowess, its form of movement: the class does not exist but in its struggle. To affirm therefore, as the IBRP does, that communist consciousness is developed outside of the class struggle is the equivalent of saying that it is elaborated outside of classes, independently outside of these, and particularly outside of the proletariat. And, the effect of this reasoning is that the IBRP tend to differentiate between what will be the class consciousness of the proletariat (the consciousness of the necessity for the party) and what will be communist consciousness, making of the latter some sort of... "philosophy", inaccessible to the profane.
Certainly, we can find in the article of the IBRP paragraphs which contradict this, as when they say "to provide such a world view is the task of the communist party. It does this through a profound study of social reality, its conflicting processes and its historical trajectory coupled with political intervention in the class struggle. It thus aims to fuse all the sparks of communist consciousness generated in the class struggle into a coherent world view and to regroup all those who accept this world view into a force capable of intervention, capable of structuring the experience of the working class within the communist framework" [pI6, RP21][8]. Formulating the question like this, there nothing to suggest or support the conception of ideologists outside of the class struggle forging communist consciousness. But it is not us, but the IBRP that has to choose between the two contradictory positions.
What then does the deepening of Lenin by the IBRP consist of?
According to Lenin, the proletarian masses cannot by themselves - despite all their spontaneous struggle rise up to communist consciousness. Therefore, the party must infuse this consciousness, bring it to them, while he maintained that "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 consciousness attained by the party "must be infused into the working masses with an increasing fervor". If there are workers involved in the elaboration of socialist theory, "they only participate to the degree that they have attained, with greater or lesser perfection, a grasp of the science of their century, to advance this science. And in order that the workers attain this more frequently, it is necessary to concern oneself as much as possible with the development of the consciousness of the workers in general" [The IBRP who cite this first idea of Lenin have forgotten to cite the second].
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" (that is to say, communist). That the "the political consciousness of the class cannot be brought to the workers from outside of the sphere of the relationship between the workers and bosses. The only sphere in which it is possible to find the knowledge of the relations between all classes." That the communist militant will participate in the "integral development of the political consciousness of the proletariat." That "social democracy is always in the front line ... bringing abundant material for the development of political consciousness and the political activity of the proletariat." In the end the party must always concern itself with "general and multiple agitations and in general uniting all the labors that bring together as one the spontaneous destructive force of the multitude and the conscious destructive force of revolutionaries."
Whereas on the contrary, the IBRP consider that "to admit that the whole class or the majority of the working class, taking account of the domination of capital, can attain communist consciousness before the taking of power and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, is purely and simply idealism".
Sooner or later the comrades will have to extend their critique beyond Rosa Luxemburg and her "heirs." Extend it to Engels who, when he attacks the "social democratic cretinism", states:
"The time of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of unconscious masses is past. Where it is a question of the complete social order, the masses themselves must also be in it, must have grasped what is at stake, what they are going for body and soul," (Introduction to the Class Struggle in France, 1895). Formulations of this type imply - according to the IBRP - "an over-estimation of how extensively true consciousness, not a product of the direct class experience, could eventually permeate the proletariat, via the party" [p 17, RP21][9].
But then the IBRP will have to extend its critique, we would say, to Lenin, and to see him as "over-estimating" the level of communist consciousness that the proletariat can develop, "over-estimating" the importance of the party's work in raising this consciousness as its fundamental and basic task, and for believing that the communist consciousness of the masses will be the only guarantee of the triumph of the revolution.
The whole of Lenin's combat in What is To Be Done? was directed against the economists, against those who objectively kept the workers at the level of trade unionism, in a spontaneity that pushed towards maintaining the workers under the domination of bourgeois ideology. And here is the IBRP, supposedly combating the "spontaneists", but instead of analysing how the masses develop consciousness, on the contrary establishing in theory the maintenance of the masses under the domination of bourgeois ideology. The comrades haven't deepened Lenin when they say that until the taking of power, the proletariat has no alternative but to convince themselves of the necessity for the party - which itself - bares communist consciousness. On the contrary, this is more like the thesis of the "economists": "that the workers are trapped in the trade unionist struggle and that leaves to the marxist intellectuals the political struggle."
For Lenin, the confirmation of the proletariat as a class for itself was signified by the raising of the masses to communist consciousness, uniting thus the whole spontaneous movement with scientific socialism. For the IBRP, on the contrary, the confirmation of the proletariat as a class for itself is signified by the maintenance of the masses under the domination of bourgeois ideology, the fusion of all bourgeois ideology with communist consciousness. This is what they reduce their "dialectic" to.
In the next Revolucion Mondial, we will continue this work dealing with the fundamentals of marxism concerning class consciousness and the role of the party.
October 1988
Ldo
[1] Letter of IBRP to the GPI, 19.3.88.
[2] What is To Be Done. Ed Anteo, p. 69.
[3] Opcit, p. 68
[4] ‘Class Consciousness In the Marxist Perspective', Communist Review No 2.
[5] What is To Be Done p81
[6] ‘Class Consciousness...' p10
[7] idem
[8] idem
[9] ‘Class Consciousness..." p15.
Capitalism is in a dead-end; each day that passes presents us with a picture of a society heading for destruction. Since the holocaust of World War II, wars and massacres have continued non-stop on the capitalist periphery; the barbarity of this decadent system, whose prolonged death-agony can only provoke one endless round of destruction, is being laid bare day by day. The recent series of ‘natural' catastrophes and accidents, the increase in gangsterism, terrorism, drug-taking and drug smuggling are so many signs of the generalized gangrene that is eating away at the capitalist body politic all over the world.
Although capitalism's entry into its decadent period was the precondition for its overthrow by the proletarian revolution, the perpetuation of this decadence is not without danger for the working class. The spread of capitalism's putrefaction to every layer of society threatens to contaminate the only class that bears within it a future for humanity. This is why, as capitalism rots where it stands, it is up to revolutionaries not to console the working class with its misery and suffering by hiding the horror of this world in decomposition, but on the contrary to emphasize its full extent and to warn workers against this daily threat of contamination.
The announcement of catastrophes provoked by ‘natural' phenomena or by accidents, killing or mutilating a multitude of human beings, has become part of everyday life. In recent months, hardly a week has passed without the media displaying apocalyptic images of catastrophes that strike one day the under-developed countries, the next the great industrial metropoles of the Western world. Such events are becoming banal; they affect the entire planet. Not only do they increase the general insecurity of existence for the working class, as for the population in general; they are more and more felt as a menace threatening to engulf the entire human race in much the same way as a nuclear war.
As it plunges into decadence, capitalism can only create more destruction
Torrential rain in Bangladesh, hitting more than 30 million people in September 1988; the recent years' drought in the Sahel which has caused famines such as humanity has never seen before; hurricanes in the Carribean or over the island of Reunion, flattening the houses of the local population; earthquake in Armenia, destroying whole towns in a matter of minutes and burying tens of thousands of human beings in the ruins.... All these gigantic catastrophes which have ravaged under-developed countries in recent months are not restricted to the 3rd World or the Eastern bloc. They are tending to spread to the most industrialized regions of the world, as we can see from the appalling succession of air and rail accidents which have claimed hundreds of victims at the heart of the great urban concentrations of Western Europe.
Contrary to what the bourgeoisie would like to make us believe, none of this destruction, this loss of human life, is due to some kind of ‘law of series', or to the ‘uncontrollable forces of nature'. The only aim of these ‘explanations', which the ruling class finds so convenient, is to relieve its system of any responsibility, to hide all its rottenness and barbarity. For the real cause behind all these tragedies, this incalculable human suffering is capitalism itself, and this appalling succession of ‘natural', ‘accidental' tragedies is nothing other than the most spectacular expression of a moribund society, a society that is falling apart at the seams.
These tragedies reveal in the full light of day the total bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, which since World War I has entered into its period of decadence. Following a period of prosperity where capital was able to develop the productive forces and social wealth to an immense degree by creating and unifying the world market, by extending its mode of production throughout the planet, this decadence means that since the beginning of the century capitalism has reached its own historic limits. Capitalism's decline today is expressed by the fact that it can no longer produce anything today but destruction and barbarity, famines and massacres, on a planetary scale.
This decadence explains in particular why the countries of the ‘Third World' have been unable to develop: they arrived too late on a world market that was already constituted, shared out and saturated (see our pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism). This is what condemns these countries, despite all the hypocritical talk about their ‘development', to being the first victims of dying capitalism's utter barbarity.
The longer its death-agony lasts, the more horribly do capitalism's principal characteristics appear, as the system's insoluble internal contradictions burst into the open.
Obviously, we cannot accuse capitalism of causing earthquakes or hurricanes. It is responsible, however, for the fact that such natural phenomena are transformed into immense social disasters.
Capitalism possesses the technical ability to send men to the moon, to produce monstrous weapons capable of destroying the planet a dozen times over; at the same time it is incapable of protecting the population from natural disasters by building dams against the effects of hurricanes, or by building earthquake-resistant housing.
Worse still, not only can capitalism do nothing to forestall these catastrophes, it is equally incapable of alleviating their devastating effects. What the ruling class calls ‘international aid' to the affected populations is a disgusting lie. Every state and government of the ruling class is directly responsible for the suffering of hundreds of millions of human beings who die like flies every day, victims of cholera, dysentery and hunger.
While millions of children are threatened with death from starvation, in capitalism's great industrial centers millions of tons of milk are destroyed every year to prevent a collapse in the market price. In countries ravaged by monsoons or hurricanes, the population is reduced to fighting over a meager ration of grain, while the governments of the EEC plan to leave fallow 20% of farming land, in order to combat.... over-production!
Decadent capitalism's appalling barbarity is not only expressed in its impotence to relieve the suffering of the victims of natural disasters. The permanent and insoluble crisis of the systern is itself an immense catastrophe for the whole of humanity, as we can see from the increasing pauperization of millions of human beings reduced to a state of desperate wretchedness. Capitalism's inability to integrate the immense masses of unemployed into the productive process is not a problem limited to the ‘Third World'. In the very heart of the most industrialized nations, millions of proletarians are being reduced to a state of abject poverty. In the richest state of the world, this transformation of immense masses of workers into down-and-outs is particularly clear: in the United States, millions of workers, mostly full-time wage earners (representing 15% of the population living below the poverty line), are being made homeless and forced to sleep in the streets, in pornographic cinemas (the only ones to remain open all night) or in cars, because they cannot afford a place to live.
The more capitalism is stifled by its generalized crisis of over-production, the less is it able to overcome the famines in countries like Ethiopia or the Sudan which today are turning into veritable genocides. The more it masters technology, the less it uses it for the good of the population.
In the face of this appalling reality, what use are all these ‘humanitarian' campaigns for ‘aid to the victims and/or the starving', all the appeals for ‘solidarity' launched by 57 varieties of media stars? How ‘effective' are all these charitable organizations, which in the advanced countries run soup kitchens or overnight hostels for the homeless? What is the meaning of all these wretched subsidies that some states distribute to those who are destitute? At best, all such ‘aid' put together is only a drop in an ocean of poverty and famine. In the Third World, they only put off the tragic deadline for a few weeks; they just manage to prevent the advanced countries from looking too much like the Third World. In fact, all this ‘aid', these ‘solidarity campaigns' are nothing but sinister masquerades, a sordid and cynical racket, whose real ‘effectiveness' is measured in their ability to buy consciences and hide the barbarism and absurdity of the world in which we live.
The better feelings of bourgeois humanism have their limits. Despite the crocodile tears of clergymen and other ‘charitable souls', despite the ‘willingness' of governments to help, these limits are dictated by the fact that the bourgeoisie cannot escape the laws of its own system. This is even more evident today when, after three quarters of a century of decadence, these laws are getting completely out of control, as can be seen in the series of catastrophic accidents in the industrialized countries.
In recent months, the proliferation of railway accidents, especially in the urban networks of advanced countries like France or Britain, has demonstrated that insecurity does not only threaten the populations of under-developed countries, but hangs over the entire world, in every aspect of daily life.
And, contrary to the lies peddled by the bourgeoisie, railways accidents like those at the Gare de Lyon in Paris (June 88), or Clapham Junction in south London (December 88) are not caused by human error, any more than mere bad economic management lies at the root of the present dilapidated state of the productive apparatus, or of the decaying public transportation which daily kill or mutilate hundreds of human beings in the most industrialized countries.
This series of accidents is nothing other than the disastrous result of every bourgeois state's policy of ‘rationalizing' production; in their insatiable quest for profit and competitivity in the face of a worsening world economic crisis, no saving that can be made by eroding the security of workers and of the population in general is too small to be worthwhile, whatever the cost in human lives. This ‘rationalization', which in the name of productivity is engaged in a more and more widespread destruction of productive forces, is in fact completely irrational. Labor power is being destroyed, not only through unemployment but in the deaths and injuries provoked by the catastrophes and accidents at work caused by this same ‘rationalization'. Technical resources are being destroyed as factories are closed, but also by the material damage caused by all these ‘accidents'.
Similarly, all the disasters that the ecologists blame on ‘technical progress' the growing pollution of air and water, ‘accidents' in chemical plants such as Seveso in Italy or Bhopal in India which caused more than 2,500 deaths, nuclear catastrophes as at Three Mile Island or Chernobyl, the oil slicks that regularly destroy coastal plant and animal life thus endangering the ocean's food chain for decades to come (as we have seen lately in the Antarctic), the destruction by CFC's of the ozone layer that protects every living thing from ultra-violet radiation, the rapid disappearance of the Amazon rain-forest, the planet's main source of oxygen - are nothing other than signs of decadent capitalism's irrational, suicidal logic, of its total inability to master the productive forces that it has set in motion, and which now threaten to upset for centuries to come, if not definitively, the planetary equilibrium necessary to the survival of the human species.
And this suicidal logic, the infernal machine of decadent capitalism, takes on still more terrifying proportions with the massive production of ever more sophisticated engines of death. All today's most advanced technology is today oriented towards arms production, in the perspective of massacres infinitely more murderous than those unleashed today (in ‘peace' time) in the countries of capitalism's periphery. There is no limit to the horror of this bloody monster that is decadent capitalism.
But all this destruction is only the tip of the iceberg, the visible signs of a more general phenomenon affecting every aspect of capitalist society. It is the reality of a world that is falling apart.
The ideological decomposition of capitalist society
This decomposition is not limited solely to the fact that despite all the development of its technology, capitalism is still subject to the laws of nature, or to its inability to master the means that it has set in motion for its own development. It affects not only the system's economic foundations, but every aspect of social life through the ideological decomposition of the ruling class' values which, as they collapse, drag with them every value that makes life in society possible, and in particular through an increasing atomization of the individual.
This decomposition of bourgeois values is not a new phenomenon. It was already marked during the 1960s by the emergence of marginal ideologies, which at the time could still offer an illusory hope of creating islands of a different society, based on other social relationships, within capitalism.
This decomposition of ruling class values was expressed in the appearance of the ‘community' type ideologies - the fruit of the revolt of petty bourgeois strata already hit by the crisis, and especially by the decomposition of society - and of the hippy movement of the 60s and early 70s, as well as by a whole series of currents advocating a ‘return to the earth', the ‘natural life', etc. Basing their existence on a supposedly ‘radical', contestationist critique of wage labor, commodities, money, private property, the family, ‘consumer society', etc, all these communities set themselves up as ‘alternative' or ‘revolutionary' solutions to the collapse of bourgeois values and the atomization of the individual. All justified themselves on the grounds that a better world could be built simply by ‘changing mentalities' and proliferating community experiments. However, all these minority ideologies (built on sand, since they were born of social strata which, unlike the proletariat, have no historical future), did not just peddle what their subsequent collapse has since proved to be mere illusion. In reality, their project was nothing other than a grotesque parody of primitive communism. This nostalgia for the past was merely an expression of a perfectly reactionary ideology, whose essentially religious basis is moreover revealed by the fact that all these ‘purifying' themes were taken up almost to the letter by mystic sects such as the ‘Moonies', Hare Krishna, ‘Children of God' and the like, which have arisen since from the ruins of these communities.
Today, the communities of the 60s and 70s have given way either to religious sects (for the most part exploited if not directly manipulated by the capitalist state and the great powers' secret police), or to still more ephemeral phenomena such as the huge gatherings at rock concerts organized by bourgeois institutions like ‘SOS Racisme' in France, ‘Band Aid' or Amnesty International; in the name of great humanitarian causes (the struggle against apartheid or world hunger), such gatherings have nothing better to offer the new generations than an ersatz of community and human solidarity.
But for several years now, capitalist society's ideological decomposition has been expressed above all by the development in the very heart of the great capitalist industrial metropoles, of nihilist ideologies of the ‘punk' variety, which express the void into which all society is increasingly thrust.
Today, such is the misery and barbarism engendered by the complete dead-end of the capitalist economy that the whole of society is more and more being stamped in the image of a world without any future, on the brink of an abyss. It is the realization of this dead-end since the beginning of the 80s that has wiped out all the ‘alternative solutions' of the communities of the previous two decades. The hippy communities' utopia of ‘peace and love' has been succeeded by the ‘no future' of the punk and skinhead gangs that terrorize the inner cities. The love, pacifism, and beatific non-violence of the previous years' marginal communities has been followed by the violence, the hatred, and the urge to destroy that animates a marginalized youth, left to itself in a world without hope, a world which has nothing to offer but unemployment and misery.
The whole of social life is being stifled today by the nauseating odors of this decomposition of dominant values. Society is ruled by violence, ‘every man for himself'; the gangrene affects the whole of society, but especially the most deprived classes with its daily round of despair and destruction: the unemployed who commit suicide to flee their wretchedness, children murdered and raped, old people tortured and assassinated for a few pennies.... The advanced state of decomposition of capitalist society that infects the great industrial concentrations is expressed in the development of insecurity, the law of the jungle.
As for the media, they both reflect and propagate this decomposition. Violence is everywhere on television and in the cinema; blood and horror splatter the screens daily, even in films aimed at children. Systematically, obsessively, all the means of communication take part in a gigantic campaign of brutalization, especially of the workers. No means are neglected: the screens are filled with confrontations between sporting ‘heroes' swollen with anabolic steroids, with calls to participate in all kinds of lotteries and games of chance which day after day sell the illusory hope of a better life to those who suffocate in their own misery. In fact, the whole of cultural production today expresses society's rottenness. Not only cinema and television, but also literature, music, painting, and architecture are increasingly unable to express anything but anguish, desperation, the void.
One of today's most flagrant signs of all this decomposition is the increasingly massive use of drugs. This has taken on a different meaning from the 60s; drugs are no longer used to flee into illusion, but to take frantic refuge in madness and suicide. Young drug users are no longer ‘getting high' collectively by passing round a ‘joint' of marijuana; they are ‘getting smashed' on alcohol, crack and heroin.
The whole of society, not just the users, is now infected by this cancer. The bourgeois state itself is being eaten away from the inside. This is true not only of Third World countries like Bolivia, Columbia, or Peru where drug exports are all that keeps the economy afloat, but also of the USA which is one of the world's major producers of cannabis, whose value makes it the third national crop after corn and soya.
Here again, capitalism comes up against an insurmountable contradiction. On the one hand, the system cannot tolerate the massive use of drugs (the US annual consumption amounts to about $250 million, the equivalent of the entire defense budget) which encourages the spread of crime, mental illness and epidemics like AIDS, and is a calamity from the purely economic standpoint; on the other, drugs trafficking is now one of the pillars of the state not only in under-developed countries like Paraguay or Surinam, but in the heart of the world's most powerful ‘democracy', the USA.
The American secret service is largely financed by cannabis exports, to the point where George Bush, who today champions the struggle against drug abuse, was directly involved in it as head of the CIA. The corruption tied to the drug trade that feeds today's capitalist state is not confined to the drug producing countries. Every state is directly contaminated, as can be seen in the recent scandal over the laundering of ‘narco-dollars' which involved the husband of an ex-minister of Justice in a country as ‘clean' as Switzerland.
Nor is the traffic in drugs the only domain in which corruption is rotting away the bourgeoisie's political apparatus. All over the world, hardly a month passes without a new scandal sullying the highest dignitaries of the state (and as always, these scandals only reveal a tiny part of the real picture). For example, as we write, virtually every member of the Japanese government up to and including the Prime Minister is caught up in a gigantic web of corruption. The rottenness has reached such a point that the bourgeoisie has the greatest difficulty in finding ‘presentable' politicians to replace those that resign, and when they finally think they have discovered that rare bird, the ‘incorruptible politician', it is only to discover a few days later that he was one of the first to get his head in the trough. Needless to say, Japan is not the only advanced country where such events take place. In France, it is the Socialist Party, which in elections regularly denounces the ‘moneyed powers' which is now in the forefront of an ‘insider trading' scandal (use of secret information obtained from government contacts to get rich in a matter of hours), and an intimate friend of a President renowned for his denunciation of the ‘corrupting power of money' who has been stuffing his pockets. Indeed the means used to get rich quick (stock market speculation) is itself significant of the rottenness of capitalist society, where the bourgeoisie drains a major part of its capital, not into productive investment but into ‘games of chance' designed to give a rapid and massive return. Increasingly, the Stock Exchange looks like the gaming rooms at Las Vegas.
Although up to now, capitalism has been able to push the most extreme effects of its own decadence out to the periphery (the under-developed countries), today they are coming back like a boomerang to strike its very heart. And the decomposition which today is infecting the great industrial centers spares no social class and no age, not even children. Crime and delinquency among children are already well known in ‘Third World' countries, where for decades economic disaster has plunged the population into atrocious misery and generalized chaos. Today, the prostitution of children in the streets of Manila, the gangsterism of the kids in Bogota is no longer an exotic and far-off scourge. They have come to the heart of the world's greatest power, to the most developed of the United States - California - right on the doorstep of Silicon Valley where the world's most advanced technology is concentrated. No image could sum up better the insoluble contradictions of decadent capitalism. On the one hand, a gigantic accumulation of wealth, on the other an appalling misery dragging gangs of children down into suicide and crime: young girls hardly out of puberty taking refuge in prostitution, or in search of a reason to live; children no more than ten years old taking refuge in the use and traffic of drugs, caught up in the infernal spiral of gangsterism and organized murder (in Los Angeles, no less than 100,000 children organized into gangs handle the retail drug market, and in 1987 were responsible for 387 murders).
Nor is it only in the USA that a rotting capitalism sows desperation and death in the young generations. In the great industrial concentrations of Western Europe, quite apart from the incredible increase during the last ten years of delinquency and drug abuse among adolescents, the suicide rates are taking on disastrous proportions. France, along with Belgium and West Germany, is the country with the highest suicide rate in Western Europe for the 15-24 age group. With an official average of 1000 suicides per year, representing more than 13% of the death rate in this age group (as against a rate of 2.5% in the rest of the population), the figures have tripled between 1960 and 1985.
A society that slaughters and corrupts its children like this is running headlong to its own destruction.
Only the proletariat can extricate society from this dead-end
This society's general decomposition is not a new phenomenon. The same has happened to every decadent society in the past. But compared to previous modes of production, the rottenness of capitalism is taking the form of a barbarity unprecedented in human history. Moreover, unlike past societies, where several modes of production could exist simultaneously in different parts of the world, capitalism has become a universal system which subjects the whole world to its own laws. As a result, the different disasters that affect a particular part of the planet in the context of society's general decomposition, inevitably spread to the other parts, as we can see for example in the extension to every continent of diseases like AIDS. For the first time in history, it is thus the whole of human society which threatens to be swallowed up by this phenomenon of decomposition. Whereas in the past, the social and productive relationships of a new society could emerge within the old as it collapsed (as capitalism developed within declining feudalism), the same is no longer true today. Today, the only possible alternative is the construction of another society on the ruins of the capitalist system; this new, communist, society will bring about the full satisfaction of human needs thanks to a blossoming of the productive forces that the laws of capitalism make impossible. And the first stage of this regeneration of society can only be the overthrow of the power of the bourgeoisie by the only class which today is capable of offering humanity a future: the world proletariat.
"Since in the fully-formed proletariat the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through urgent, no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need - the practical expression of necessity - driven directly to revolt against this inhumanity, it follows that the proletariat can and must emancipate itself. But it cannot emancipate itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation" (Karl Marx, The Holy Family, in Collected Works Vol 4, p. 37).
What Marx wrote last century, when capitalism was still a flourishing system is still more true today. Faced with this decomposition that is menacing the very survival of the human race, only the proletariat, because of the place it occupies within capitalist productive relations, is capable of bringing humanity out of its prehistory, of building a true human community.
Up to now, the class combats which have developed in the four corners of the planet have been able to prevent decadent capitalism from providing its own answer to the dead end of its economy: the ultimate form of its barbarity, a new world war. However, the working class is not yet capable of affirming its own perspective through its own revolutionary struggles, nor even of setting before the rest of society the future that it holds within itself.
It is precisely this temporary stalemate, where for the moment neither the bourgeois nor the proletarian alternative can emerge openly, that lies at the origin of capitalism's putrefaction, and which explains the extreme degree of decadent capitalism's barbarity. And this rottenness will get still worse with the inexorable aggravation of the economic crisis.
The more capitalism plunges into its own decadence, the more drawn out its death agony, the less the working class of the central countries of capitalism will be spared the devastating effects of its putrefaction.
In particular, it is the new generations of proletarians who are menaced by contamination from the gangrene eating away at society's other strata. Despair leading to suicide, atomization, drugs, delinquency and other aspects of marginalization (such as the lumpenisation of unemployed youth who have never been integrated into the productive process) are so many scourges which threaten to exercise a pressure towards the dissolution and decomposition of the proletariat and consequently weaken or even call into question its capacity to carry out its historic task of overthrowing capitalism.
All this decomposition which is more and more infesting the young generations could thus deal a mortal blow to the only force able to give humanity a future. Just as the outbreak of imperialist war in the heart of the ‘civilized' world, as Rosa Luxemburg wrote in the Junius Pamphlet, decimated in a few weeks "the elite troops of the international proletariat, the fruit of decades of sacrifices, and the efforts of several generations", so decadent capitalism can mow down, in the years to come, this "fine flower" of the proletariat which is our great strength and hope.
Given the gravity of the present situation of capitalist decay, and the high stakes involved, revolutionaries must alert the proletariat today against the danger of annihilation that threatens it. In their intervention, they must call on the workers to transform this rottenness that they are subjected to daily into a greater determination in developing their combat and forging the unity of their class. Just as they must understand that their struggles against misery and exploitation bear within them the abolition of warmongering barbarism, so they must become conscious that only the development, the unification, and the international generalization of these struggles will be able to rescue humanity from the hell of capitalism, from this collective suicide where the old world's decomposition is dragging the whole of society.
The only gleam of hope in this rotting world is the present struggle of the world proletariat for class solidarity, especially in the great industrial concentrations of Western Europe. This alone can prefigure any kind of embryonic human community. Only from the international generalization of these combats can a new world emerge, with new social values. And these values will only spread to the whole of humanity when the proletariat builds a world rid of crises, wars, exploitation, and the results of all this decomposition. The despair that increasingly submerges all the non-exploiting strata of society will only be overcome when the working class heads consciously towards this objective.
And it is for the world's most concentrated and experienced proletariat, the workers in Western Europe, to take up the responsibility of standing in the vanguard of the world proletariat in its march towards this perspective.
Its combats alone can provide the spark that will light the flame of the proletarian revolution.
Avril 22.2.1989
Nearly 1,000 dead, according to sources in the hospitals (300 according to the government). 3,000 demonstrators gravely wounded, 10,000 arrested, a state of siege, suppression of all ‘freedoms', open season for 10,000 armed men to massacre without discrimination: the ‘left' government of Carlos Alvares Perez, that partisan ‘humanistic socialism which accepts the norms of the capitalist system', has, with unprecedented bloodshed and brutality, repressed the recent wave of hunger riots in Venezuela.. And it was Perez himself who provoked the riots through a series of measures which, overnight, have doubled the price of public transport and tripled that of certain basic goods. Such are the ‘norms of the capitalist system' in crisis. Such is the reality masked by the ‘humanistic' speeches of the ‘left' fractions of capital, which in this domain have nothing to envy in those of the right.
The events of the first week of March 1989 in Venezuela, just like those in Algeria last October, are an illustration of the only future capitalism offers to the exploited classes: poverty and blood. They constitute a new warning to the workers who still have illusions in the so-called ‘Socialist' or ‘Communist' parties which claim to represent them while ‘accepting the norms of the capitalist system.'
At the time of writing, we don't have at our disposal all the necessary information about these events. But here and now it is essential to denounce this new massacre perpetrated by the bourgeoisie in defense of its class interests, and the lies it uses in order to cover up its crimes.
Hunger riots
The press, particularly of the ‘Socialist' left, of the European friends of President C.A. Perez, has tried to deny that these are revolts against hunger. Venezuela, one of the world's great oil producers, is supposed to be a ‘rich country'. The government's recent measures have simply aimed to make the population understand that the period of ‘oil manna' is over and that - for the ‘good of your family' - it's a question of adapting to the new conditions of the world economy. In sum, the ‘poor' in Venezuela have picked up bad habits from the rich. It's a question of making them accept reality. The cynicism of the bourgeoisie knows no limits.
Even at the times of the biggest rises in oil prices, in the middle and at the end of the 1970s, the wealth of the ‘petro-dollars' obviously remained essentially in the hands of the local ruling class. In fact, the latter couldn't move quick enough to place this money - as well as the largest slice of what it had received in international loans - into overseas investments, thus assuring itself of more reliable revenues, paid in US dollars. On the other hand, as soon as income from black gold began to decline, in particular after 1986, inflation (officially) went up to 40% in 1988 and is expected to rise to 100% in 1989. Meanwhile wages (for those who still get any - the official unemployment rate being 25% in 1988), have stayed far behind. The deterioration of workers' living conditions and those of the millions of marginal elements in the shanty towns has been quite staggering in the last few years. Never has there been such a crying contrast between the opulence of the rich and the growing deprivation of the poor.
This is why the recent government measures, which included a tripling of the price of powdered milk - basic nourishment for babies could only be felt as the most brutal provocation. The riots which exploded in Caracas and its outskirts (4 million inhabitants), but also in the other main towns of the country, were not a reaction against a so-called ‘loss of standing' as the free-thinking dandies of the left have claimed. They were hunger riots: spontaneous reactions against a level of poverty that is becoming unbearable. "We'd rather get killed than go on dying of hunger," as the demonstrators shouted to the troops.
The working class can impose a balance of forces on the bourgeoisie through strikes and through its political class combat. But the ‘workless' masses, the marginalized population of the underdeveloped countries, by themselves can only respond to the attacks of capital through desperate acts of looting and riots that lead nowhere. The fact that their first act was to loot the food shops (many of which were operating a policy of deliberate shortages to push up prices) and the supermarkets shows clearly that the issue here was hunger.
The riots of early March in Venezuela were above all this: the response of the marginalized masses to the increasingly barbaric attacks of world capitalism in crisis. They are part of the social tremors which more and more are shaking the very foundations of decomposing capitalist society.
The true face of bourgeois democracy
But the barbarism of decadent capitalism does not stop at the economic level. The repression meted out by the bourgeoisie in Venezuela is eloquent proof of this. The scale of the massacre was matched by its savagery: wounded people finished off on the pavement, children murdered in front of their parents, a torture chamber installed in a disused family hotel.
Even though for decades it governed through military regimes, the Venezuelan bourgeoisie has never before unleashed such carnage. In one week reality has shattered the much-vaunted myth of ‘democracy, a bulwark against military dictatorship'. This has been clearly shown by the way the Accion Democratica government (AD being a member party of the Socialist International) and the army gorillas worked hand in hand to protect their property, their money, their laws, their system.
These who are now wailing about ‘the dangers these events pose for the fragile Venezuelan democracy' are the same people who have prepared the repression by putting it around that voting in the recent elections, whether for C.A. Perez or anyone else, would ‘offer protection from the military.'
It's the world bourgeoisie which has carried out this bloodshed in Venezuela
But President C.A. Perez isn't the only representative of the local bourgeoisie. His reaction in defense of the interests of his class is the same as any other bourgeois government facing a similar threat. A whole array of heads of state came to show him what was expected of him, a few weeks before the massacre, at the ceremony marking his inauguration. Fidel Castro even told him: "We need a leader in Latin America, and you're the man." A few months before that, at a conference of the Socialist International, he had met with Swedish and British Socialists, with Willy Brandt of Germany, Mitterand of France, Craxi of Italy, Kreysky of Austria, Gonzales of Spain, Soares of Portugal, Papandreou of Greece, etc. All these ‘humanist' and ‘socialist democrats' warmly recognized him as one of their own - the man who will always be remembered as the butcher of Caracas.
The ‘Democrats' the world over are trying to portray the Venezuelan government as a ‘victim of the IMF'. The latter is presented as a sort of ‘pitiless monster', coming from who knows where to force the bourgeoisie of the most indebted countries to pile on the exploitation, the misery, the oppression ... in short, to be the bourgeoisie. But in demanding the repayment of debts, in repressing those who attack the established order, the IMF and C.A. Perez are simply applying the ‘norms of the capitalist system', the norms of the bourgeoisie everywhere. It's their ‘order' which has been re-established in Venezuela, the same order that reigns in all countries, and to defend it they have never thought twice about using the most barbaric methods.
An ‘order' that is rotting on its feet, an order that only the world proletariat can destroy.
For the working class in Venezuela as in other countries - and in particular the most industrialized ones - these events are a further reminder of its historic responsibilities.
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles". There are periods when this general truth, which is one of the foundations of marxism, does not apply in an immediate sense. World wars cannot be explained by the confrontation between the ruling class and the proletariat: on the contrary, it is only possible for them to break out when this confrontation has been weakened. But if there is one epoch when these words of the Communist Manifesto apply to immediate reality, it is today's. This is true at the level of the present course of history: as the ICC has already demonstrated, only the working class' struggle and mobilization since capitalism entered its open crisis at the end of the 60's have prevented this system from giving its own answer to its economic collapse: generalized imperialist war. It is true more specifically for the decade which is drawing to a close, where the development and bitterness of class combats since 1983, have forced the ruling class to develop on a grand scale all kinds of ideological campaigns - pacifist campaigns in particular - aimed at hiding from the workers what is really at stake in the present situation. And finally, it is still more true today when the intensification of these campaigns and the use of a multitude of maneuvers within the struggle itself, are among the surest signs of its potential for development.
**************
Not since the Second World War has the working class in every country been subjected to such a brutal series of attacks. In peripheral countries like Mexico, Algeria or Venezuela, workers living conditions have fallen by as much as half in recent years. In the central countries, the situation is not fundamentally different. Behind the adulterated figures "explaining" that "things are getting better", the "unemployment is declining" and such like gross lies, the bourgeoisie cannot hide from the workers the constant decline in their living conditions, the falling real wages, the dismantling of "social welfare", the proliferation of insecure, miserably paid jobs, the irresistible increase in absolute pauperization.
For more than 20 years, the world working class has fought back in large-scale struggles against the inexorable decline in its living conditions. Those that broke out at the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 70s (May 68 in France, the Italian "hot autumn" of 1969, the uprising of Polish workers in December 1970, etc), just as the open crisis of capitalism began to affect working class living conditions, proved unmistakably that the proletariat has emerged from the death-shroud of the counter-revolution in which it had been wrapped since the end of the 1920s. The perspective opened by the capitalist mode of production's intensifying contradictions was not a new imperialist slaughter, as in the 1930s, but widespread class confrontation. Then, the wave of workers' struggles of the late 70s/early 80s (Longwy-Denain in France, steel and many other branches in Britain, Poland etc), confirmed that the previous wave had not been a mere flash in the pan, but had opened a whole historical period where the confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat could only become more bitter. The brief duration of the reflux in the struggle following the working class' defeat during these combats (marked by the December 81 coup in Poland) bore further witness to this reality. By autumn 1983 the massive struggles in the Belgian state sector opened up a new series of combats whose extent and simultaneity in most of the advanced countries, especially in Europe, were an important expression of the deepening class antagonisms in the most decisive countries for the class struggle's development on a world scale. This series of combats, especially the widespread conflicts in the Belgian state sector during 1986, showed clearly that the increasingly frontal and massive capitalist attacks already posed the necessity for the unification of the proletarian struggle, in other words not only their geographical extension beyond trades and different branches of industry, but also the workers' ability consciously to organize this extension themselves.
At the same time, the various struggles during this period, especially those that have occurred recently in France (on the railways in December 86, in the hospitals during the autumn of 88) and in Italy (in the schools during the spring of 87, on the railways during the summer and autumn of the same year), have highlighted the trade unions' declining ability to put themselves forward as the ‘organizers' of the workers struggles. Even if this has only been obvious in countries where the unions have discredited themselves most in the past, it corresponds to a general and irreversible historical tendency. All the more so in that it is accompanied by workers' increasing distrust of leftwing political parties and of bourgeois democracy in general; this is clear especially in the rising figures for abstentions in the electoral comedy.
Within this historical context, of a proletarian militancy which has shown no signs of diminishing in 20 years, and of a weakening of the essential structures for controlling the working class, the continuation of ever-deeper capitalist attacks is creating the conditions for still greater upsurges of the class struggle, of still more massive and determined confrontations than those we have seen in the past. This is what is really at stake in the world situation. This is what the bourgeoisie does everything in its power to hide from the workers.
The bourgeoisie reinforces its ideological campaigns
From television, radio, and the newspapers, we "learn" that the most significant elements of today's international situation are:
-- the ‘warming' relations between the great powers; principally between the USA and USSR, but also between the latter and China;
-- the ‘real desire' of all governments to build a ‘peaceful' world, to settle the conflicts in various parts of the world by negotiation and to limit the arms race (especially the most ‘barbaric' nuclear and chemical weapons);
-- the fact that the main danger threatening humanity today is the destruction of the environment, especially of the Amazon rain forests, by the ‘greenhouse effect' which will turn immense areas of the planet into desert or by technological disasters of the Chernobyl variety, etc; and that consequently we should mobilize behind the ecologists, and the governments which have now been converted to their ideas;
-- the growing popular aspirations to ‘freedom' and ‘democracy', as interpreted by Gorbachev and his ‘extremists' such as Yeltsin, along with Walesa and his Nobel prize, a George Bush transformed into a scourge of his one-time friends, the Noriega style goons and drug-dealers, a Mitterand displaying his bicentennial ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man' to the four corners of the earth, and the Chinese students, to give an exotic ‘popular' flavor to all this fuss;
-- the preparation for Europe in 1992, the mobilization for this ‘unparalleled historic event' which the opening of the member countries' frontiers will represent, and for which the European elections of 18th June are an important stepping stone;
-- the threat of "islamic fundamentalism', of its grand master Khomeini, which his Rushdicide declarations and his battalions of terrorists.
In the midst of all this din, the working class and the crisis seem strangely silent. As for the first, it is supposed to be in retreat (haven't growth rates returned to the levels of the 1960s?), we should be excited about the ups and downs of the dollar, we are ‘informed' that the powers that be are concerned about third world debt and are ‘doing something'. As far as the second is concerned, if the media talk about it at all (and in general news of the struggle is subjected to the most systematic black-out), it is usually to write its obituary, or to publish alarmist bulletins as to its health: it is dead, or nearly, at all events it is ‘in crisis because trade unionism is in crisis'.
This kind of omnipresent propaganda is not new for capitalism or even for class societies in general. From the beginning, the bourgeoisie has used lies to make the exploited classes accept their fate, or to turn them away from the class struggle. But what distinguishes the times in which we live, is the extreme degree of state totalitarianism set up to control how people think. It does not broadcast just one, official truth, but fifty competing ‘truths', so that everyone can ‘make his choice', as in a super-market, and which are in reality nothing but fifty variations of the same lie. The questions are lies, even before we get to the answers: for or against disarmament? For or against getting rid of short-range missiles? For or against a Palestinian state? For or against ‘liberalism'? Is Gorbachev sincere? Is Reagan senile? These are the ‘essential' questions for the TV ‘debates' or the opinion polls, unless it is ‘for or against fox-hunting' or ‘for or against the massacre of elephants'.
If the aim of all these lies and media campaigns is to set up a smokescreen to hide the real problems confronting the working class, their intensification today simply expresses the bourgeoisie's awareness of the growing danger of explosions of working class militancy, and of the process of developing consciousness throughout the class. For example, as we have already pointed out in these pages (eg, in International Review no 53, ‘War, Militarism, and Imperialist Blocs), one of the reasons behind the replacement of the militarist campaigns of the early decade (Reagan's crusade against the ‘evil empire') by today's pacifist campaign from 1983- 84 onwards, is that the theme of imminent war, while it can increase the demoralization of the working class in a moment of defeat, runs the opposite risk of opening the workers' eyes to what is really at stake in the present period, once they renew the open combat. There has not been any real attenuation in the conflicts between the great imperialist powers, quite the reverse: we need only site the constant growth in military spending, despite its being an ever greater economic burden for all countries. What has changed is that the working class is better placed today to understand that the only force capable of preventing a world war is its own struggle. In these conditions, it was important for the bourgeoisie to ‘show' that it is thanks to the ‘wisdom' of governments that we can hope for a more peaceful world, less menaced by the danger of war.
Similarly, the main aim of the present campaigns on the danger to the environment, and the apparent readiness of governments to ‘fight' against these dangers, is to confuse the consciousness of the proletariat. These dangers are indeed a real threat to humanity. They are a sign of capitalist society's general decomposition (see the article on ‘The Decomposition of Capitalism' in International Review no 57). But obviously, none of the campaigns intend to put forward this kind of analysis. They aim to ‘show', and in this the bourgeoisie has succeeded in several countries, that world war is not the main threat hanging over humanity. The impact of the pacifist campaigns is reinforced by this ‘substitute fear' for the anxieties inevitably provoked in the population by the agony of the capitalist world. Amongst other things, the ecological threat appears much more ‘democratic' than the danger of war, where the working class knows very well that it would be the main victim: the polluted air of Los Angeles does not distinguish between the lungs of the workers and the bourgeois, Chernobyl's cloud of radiation affects workers, peasants and bourgeois of the region without distinction (though in reality, even here the workers are far more exposed than the bourgeois). As a result, ‘ecology is everyone's business': here again, the point is to hide from the working class the existence of its own specific interests. It also aims at preventing the workers from understanding that there is no solution to this kind of problem (like those of growing insecurity, or drugs) within capitalist society, whose irreversible crisis cannot but produce still more barbarity. This is the main aim of governments which announce that they are going to deal ‘seriously' with the threat to the environment. Moreover, the extra cost of these ‘ecological' measures (increased taxes, and higher prices for such consumer goods as the ‘clean car') can be used to justify the workings' falling living standards. It is obviously easier to make people accept sacrifices to ‘improve the quality of life' than for arms spending (and then divert the former to the latter).
This attempt to make workers accept further sacrifices in the name of a ‘great cause' reappears in the campaigns about ‘building Europe'. Already at the end of the 70s, when the steelworkers rebelled against mass redundancies, every state used Europe as an excuse: "these job cuts are not the government's fault; it's been decided in Brussels". Today, they're singing the same chorus: the workers must improve their productivity, and be ‘reasonable' in their demands, so that the national economy can be competitive in the ‘Great European market of 1992'. In particular, ‘harmonizing taxation and social security' will be an opportunity to level out the latter - downwards - in other words deal a new blow to the living conditions of the working class.
Lastly, the campaigns on democracy aim to make the workers of the great Western industrial centers ‘understand' their ‘good fortune' in enjoying such precious commodities as ‘Freedom' and ‘Democracy', even if their living conditions are more and more difficult. The same message is aimed at workers still deprived of ‘Democracy': their legitimate discontent at the constant and catastrophic decline in their living standards must be turned into support for a policy - ‘democratization' - which will overcome the causes of these calamities (see the article on ‘Glasnost' in this issue).
Special mention should be made here of the extensive media coverage of events in China:
"The only force really capable of defying the government is not the working class but the students" (we've heard this song before, in France in May 68, and then again in December 86). This is the message that must be put over; no opportunity can be missed to try to convince the working class that it ‘doesn't count', or at least to hinder its becoming aware that it is the only class with a future, that its present struggles are the preparation for the only perspective able to save humanity, the precondition for the overthrow of this system that grows daily more barbaric.
But the ruling class does not trust merely to its huge media campaigns to achieve this goal. At the same time, it attacks the proletariat's combativity, self-confidence, and developing consciousness on the terrain where they appear most directly: the struggle against the bourgeoisie's increasingly brutal attacks.
The bourgeoisie's maneuvers against the workers' struggles
If the unification of its struggle is currently a vital necessity for the working class, then clearly this is where the bourgeoisie must make its biggest effort. And this is indeed what is happening.
Recent months have seen unfolding a bourgeois offensive aimed at getting ahead of workers' militancy, provoking struggles preventively in order to nip in the bud the drive towards a massive movement of solidarity throughout the class. This tactic was already used last summer in Great Britain, dominated by the world's most skilful and experienced bourgeoisie, with the August postal strike. By provoking a movement in a sector as central as the Post Office, but at the worst time of year for spreading the struggle, the bourgeoisie took every precaution to keep the movement isolated from other branches of industry. The maneuver's success gave the go-ahead to the bourgeoisie in other West European countries to use this strategy to the hilt, as we saw in September in France with the artificial provocation, planned months in advance, of the nurses' strike. Here again, the bourgeoisie aimed to bring one sector out prematurely, on ground that it had prepared in advance, and before the class as a whole was ready for a head-on confrontation (see the article on ‘France: the coordinations in the lead, to sabotage the struggle' in International Review no 56). In December, the Spanish bourgeoisie, encouraged by the successes in Britain and France, also adopted the strategy, when all the trade unions called for the famous ‘general strike' on 14th December, when not just one industrial branch, but millions of workers from all branches were sent out to battle prematurely, in a fake demonstration of ‘strength'. This is how, in all those countries where major confrontations have taken place in the last two years, the bourgeoisie managed to ‘damp the powder' in advance, and so stifle any new upsurge of massive struggle.
In order to carry out this policy of sabotaging the workers' struggles, the bourgeoisie must strengthen its forces of control on the spot. Faced with the workers' increasing distrust of the trade unions, and their tendency to take charge of the struggle themselves, the bourgeoisie has everywhere tried, not only to put the official unions back in control, but also to set up ‘non-union' structures, to take up the needs of the class, the better to empty them of their content and turn them against the workers.
So in France, we have seen an extreme ‘radicalization' of the CGT (CP controlled trade union), as well as reshuffles within the other unions to give them a more ‘left' image. In Spain, the workers have confronted a similar radicalization which allowed all the trade unions together to orchestrate the maneuver of 14th December. In particular, we have seen the UGT (union strongly tied to the ruling PSOE) suddenly take its distance from the PSOE, taking up the ‘fight' alongside the Workers' Commissions (CCOO, the CP controlled union) and the CP against the government's austerity policy.
In recent months, this same radicalization of the official unions has also held back the development of the struggles in Holland where, as in Spain, the unions have not only tried to polish up their image by talking tough against the government, above all they have been trying to take over the workers' need for unity, in order to mislead it and strip it of any real meaning. In Spain, the 14th December maneuver publicized the unity between the UGT-CCOO-CNT unions, while organizing the demonstrations to prevent any chance of different groups of workers getting together. In Holland, the unions have aimed to mislead this essential need of the class through a fake ‘active solidarity'; to do so, they have set up as early as last autumn, a ‘coordination committee' supposedly designed to ‘organize solidarity' with between struggles in different branches of industry.
In Britain, finally, the bourgeoisie has not been left behind in this ‘radicalization' of its trade unions. In the recent transport strikes around London, the biggest in this sector since 1926, it was the ‘official' unions themselves that took the responsibility of calling an illegal strike.
However, this policy of ‘radicalizing' the official unions is clearly becoming less and less capable, by itself, of halting the development of the struggle. More and more often, the official, or even the rank-and-file unions are being supported by another structure of control, claiming to be ‘outside the unions' and mostly run by leftists: the self-proclaimed coordinations. Since the movement in the French hospitals, which starred the ‘nurses' coordination', this has become a model for the whole of the European bourgeoisie. Lately, there have appeared new ‘branches' of this coordination, in particular in West Germany where the same kind of coordination was set up in the Cologne hospitals in November, before any kind of mobilization developed in the sector. It was also amongst the nurses that Dutch leftists set up a coordination and called a national meeting at Utrecht in February, thus attempting to create a premature centralization, before the workers had really mobilized.
It is no accident that the maneuver used during the nurses' strike in France is now being used as a model, a reference point, by the bourgeoisie in other European countries. Thanks to the nurses' pseudo-victory (the government had already allocated the funds for the hardly-‘won' pay-rise long before), this coordination became the spearhead of the present bourgeois offensive aimed at presenting sectionalist struggles as the only ones capable of leading the workers to victory, at playing off different sectors of workers against each other, in order to undermine any attempt at a united counter-attack on the basis of demands common to all workers. This in a number of countries lately, we have seen unions and leftists step up the techniques already used during the rail strikes of 1986 in France and 1987 in Italy (especially through the ‘coordinations') to inject the sectionalist poison systematically into every struggle, by putting forward specific demands, to prevent workers from other branches identifying with the struggle, or even to set workers against each other.
In Spain, for example, the grand maneuvers of 14th December were not merely aimed at ‘damping the powder' of workers' discontent. Since then, the unions have begun a huge campaign on the theme: "We must draw the lessons of the 14th December in each industrial branch, since each has its own contract, and its own specific demands". Similarly, wherever the unions are especially distrusted, it is the leftists and rank-and-file unionists who have been putting forward specific demands for drivers on the railways, or for mechanics in the airlines, for the Teruel miners or the Valencia nurses, etc.
In West Germany, the bourgeoisie has launched a huge media campaign to ‘restore the status of the nursing profession', and so use this particular sector to inject the poison of sectionalism into the working class. On the same basis, the leftists of the Cologne coordination have put forward a demand for 500 DM, but only for nurses, just as in France.
In Holland since the beginning of the year, working class combativity has threatened to break into open struggle against the new austerity measures announced by the government; the unions and leftists have exploited their radical image to maintain the isolation of struggles that have developed in a number of branches since early 89: at Philips, in Rotterdam docks, amongst teachers, council workers in Amsterdam, the Hoogovens steelworkers, lorry drivers, building workers, etc. The unions' strategy for dispersing the struggle (rotating strikes, one branch after the other, regional meetings, 2 hour walk-outs, ‘action days' called just in one branch, etc) is based essentially on the use of specific demands, so that workers from other branches cannot identify with a particular struggle (the 36 hour week for the steelworkers, overtime payments for the lorry drivers, defense of teaching quality for the teachers, etc).
These are the maneuvers that the bourgeoisie is using today in Western Europe, in other words against the spearhead of the world proletariat. For the moment, this strategy has succeeded in disorientating the working class, and hindering its march towards a united combat. But the fact that the ruling class is forced to rely more and more on its ‘leftists', like the intensification of its media campaigns, is a sign of the deep process whereby the conditions are ripening for new, more determined and conscious, massive upsurges of the proletarian struggle. In this sense, the huge and extremely combative struggles in recent months, by workers in various countries of the capitalist periphery (South Korea, Mexico, Peru, and above all Brazil, where for several weeks more than 2 million workers went well beyond the limits set by the trade unions), are only the forerunners of a new series of major confrontations in the central countries of capitalism. More than ever, it is the working class that holds the key to the present historical situation.
FM : 28-5-89
The history of the international communist left since the beginning of the century, such as we've begun to relate in our pamphlets on the ‘Communist Left of Italy' isn't simply for historians. It's only from a militant standpoint, the standpoint of those who are committed to the workers' struggle for emancipation, that the history of the workers' movement can be approached. And for the working class, this history isn't just a question of knowing things, but first and foremost a weapon in its present and future struggles, because of the lessons from the past that it contains. It's from this militant point of view that we are publishing as a contribution to the history of the revolutionary movement a pamphlet on the German-Dutch communist left which will appear in French later this year. The introduction to this pamphlet, published below, goes into the question of how to approach the history of this current.
******************
Franz Mehring, the renowned author of a biography of Marx and of a history of German social democracy, comrade in arms to Rosa Luxemburg, emphasized in 1896 - in the Neue Zeit - how important it was for the workers' movement to be able to reappropriate its own past:
"The proletariat has the advantage over all the other parties of being able to constantly draw new strength from the history of its own past, the better to wage its present-day struggles and to attain the new world of the future."
The existence of a real ‘workers' memory is the expression of a constant effort by the workers' movement, in its revolutionary aspect, to reappropriate its own past. This reappropriation is inseparably linked to the self-development of class consciousness, which is manifested most fully in the mass struggles of the proletariat. And Mehring noted in the same article that "to understand is to go beyond" (aufheben), in the sense of conserving and assimilating those elements of the past which contain the seeds of the future of a historic class, the only historic class today, the bearer of the "new world of the future". Thus, for example, it is impossible to understand the emergence of the Russian revolution of October 1917 without relating it to the experiences of the Paris Commune and of 1905.
Since we consider that the history of the workers' movement can't be reduced to a series of bucolic images, painting a bye-gone epoch in rosy hues, and still less to academic studies in which "the past of the movement is so miniturised into the pedantic study of minutiae, so deprived of any general perspective and so isolated from its context that it can only be of the most limited interest" (G Haupt, L'Historien et le mouvement social), we have chosen to approach our work on the history of the Dutch-German revolutionary workers' movement as a form of praxis. We define this in the same way as G Haupt: considered as the expression of a "militant materialism" (Plekhanov), this praxis is defined as "a laboratory of experiences, failures and successes, a field for theoretical and strategic elaboration, demanding a spirit of rigor and critical examination in order to grasp historical reality, and thus discover its hidden elements, to invent and innorate on the basis of a historic moment seen as experience." (Haupt, ibid).
For the revolutionary workers' movement, the history of its own past is not ‘neutral'. It implies a constant questioning and thus a critical examination of its past experience.
The revolutionary transformations in the praxis of the proletariat are always underpinned by profound transformations in class consciousness. Only the critical examination of the past, free of dogmas and taboos can restore to the revolutionary workers' movement this historical dimension which is characteristic of a class which has a final goal: its own liberation and the liberation of humanity. Rosa Luxemburg defined the method used by the workers' movement to investigate its own past in the following way:
"No firmly fixed plan, no orthodox ritual that holds good for all times, shows him the path that he must travel. Historical experience is his only teacher, his Via Dolorosa to freedom is covered not only with unspeakable suffering, but with countless mistakes. The goal of his journey, his final liberation, depends entirely on the proletariat, on whether it understands to learn from its own mistakes." (Rosa Luxemburg, The Crisis of Social Democracy, cited by Haupt, op cit).
Whereas the history of the workers' movement, as praxis, involves a theoretical and practical discontinuity, brought about by contact with new historical experience, it also presents itself as a tradition that plays a mobilizing role in workers' consciousness and that feeds the collective memory. While this tradition has often played a conservative role in the history of the proletariat, it also expresses all that is stable in the theoretical and organizational acquisitions of the workers' movement. Thus, discontinuity and continuity are the two inseparable dimensions of the political and social history of this movement.
The left communist currents which emerged from the IIIrd International, like the ‘Bordigist' Italian Left on the one hand, and the Dutch Left of Gorter and Pannekoek on the other, have not escaped the temptation of situating themselves unilaterally within either the continuity or the discontinuity of the workers' movement. The Bordigist current has resolutely chosen to affirm the ‘invariance' of marxism and of the workers' movement since 1848, the ‘invariance' of communist theory since Lenin. The ‘councilist' current that goes back to the 1930s in Holland has, on the other hand, opted for denying all continuity in the workers' and revolutionary movement. Its theory of a New Workers' Movement has meant throwing the ‘old' workers' movement into the dustbin, its whole experience having been judged negative for the future. Between these two extreme attitudes we can situate the KAPD of Berlin, and above all Bilan, the review of the Italian Fraction in exile in France and Belgium during the 30s. The two currents, German and Italian, while both were theoretical innovators who marked the discontinuity between the new revolutionary movement of the 20s and 30s and the one which preceded it inside social democracy and during the war of 1914-18, also affirmed their continuity with the original marxist movement. All these hesitations show the difficulty in grasping the continuity and the discontinuity of the left communist currents - ie, in conserving and going beyond their heritage.
*************************
The difficulties of writing a history of the left communist and council communist movement aren't limited to this problem of assimilating and going beyond their acquisitions. They are above all the product of a tragic history which for nearly sixty years has seen the disappearance of the revolutionary traditions of the workers' movement, traditions that culminated in the revolutions in Russia and Germany, A sort of collective amnesia seemed to descend on the working class under the blows of successive and repeated defeats that culminated in the second world war, that destroyed for a whole generation the experience of having lived through a revolutionary struggle and that wiped out the fruits of decades of socialist education. But it is above all Stalinism, the most profound counterrevolution the workers' movement has ever known, which, following the defeat of the Russian revolution, has done the most to rubout this collective memory , which is an indissoluble part of class consciousness. The history of the workers' movement, and above all of the revolutionary left current in the IIIrd International, became a gigantic enterprise of ideological falsification in the service of Russian state capitalism, then of the states built on the same model after 1945. This history became the cynical glorification of the party in power and its police state apparatus. Under the cover of ‘internationalism', official history, ‘revised' continuously to take in the latest ‘turn' or settling of scores, became a form of nationalist, statist sermonizing, a justification for imperialist war and terror, for the lowest, most morbid instincts, cultivated on the rotten soil of counterrevolution and war.
On this point it's worth again citing the historian Georges Haupt, who died in 1980, and was known for the seriousness of his works on the IInd and IIIrd Internationals:
"With the aid of unprecedented falsifications, treating the most elementary historical realities with contempt, Stalinism has methodically rubbed out, mutilated, remodeled the field of the past in order to replace it with its own representations, its own myths, its own self-glorification. The history of the international workers' movement gets frozen into a series of dead images, images that have been tampered with and emptied of any substance, trumped-up copies in which the real past can hardly be recognized. The function which Stalinism assigns to what it considers and declares to be history, the validity of which is imposed without any regard to credibility, expresses a profound fear of historical reality, which it tries systematically to mask, truncate, and deform in order to turn it into something as conformist and as docile as possible. With the aid of an imaginary and fetishised past that has been deprived of any elements that might bring reality to mind, the power structure aims not only to obstruct any view of reality but to infest the faculty of perception itself. Thus the permanent necessity to anaesthetize and pervert the collective memory, the control of which becomes total the minute the past is treated as a state secret and access to documents is forbidden".
At last the period of May 1968 came along. This was the upsurge of a social movement on such a scale that it swept through the world from France to Britain, from Belgium to Sweden, from Italy to Argentina, from Poland to Germany. There is no doubt that the period of workers' struggles from 68-74 facilitated historical research into the revolutionary movement. A number of books appeared on the history of the revolutionary movements of the 20th century in Germany, Italy, France and Britain. The red thread of historical continuity between the distant past of the 20s and the period of May 68 seemed obvious to those who were not taken in by the spectacular appearance of the student revolt. However, rare were those who saw a workers' movement arising from its ashes, the reawakening of a collective historical memory that had been anaesthetized and asleep for nearly 40 years. Nevertheless, in all their confused enthusiasm, revolutionary historical references emerged spontaneously, and with joyful profusion, from the mouths of the workers who were out on the streets and who frequented the anti-union Action Committees. And these references weren't the result of leftist students, historians or sociologists whispering in their ears. The collective memory of the working class was evoking - often in a confused way, and in the confusion of the events - the whole history of the workers' movement, and all its main stages: 1848, the Paris Commune, 1905, 1917, but also 1936, which, with the constitution of the Popular Front, was the antithesis of the other dates. The decisive experience of the German revolution (1918-23) was not referred to a great deal, but still the idea of workers' councils, preferred to that of the soviets which with their mass of soldiers and peasants were less purely proletarian, appeared more and more in the discussions in the streets and in the action committees born out of the generalized strike wave.
The resurgence of the proletariat onto the scene of history, a class which certain sociologists had declared ‘integrated' or ‘ernbourgeoisiefied', broadly created favorable conditions for research into the history of the revolutionary movements of the 20s and 30s. Even though they were still all too rare, studies were made of the lefts in the IInd and IIIrd Internationals. The names of Gorter and Pannekoek, the initials KAPD and GIC, alongside the names of Bordiga and Damen, became more familiar to the elements who called themselves ‘ultra-left' or ‘internationalist communists'. The dead weight of Stalinism was being lifted. But other, more insidious forms of truncating and distorting the history of the workers' movement appeared as Stalinism declined. According to the climate of the day, a social democratic, Trotskyist, or purely academic historiography came forward, their effects being just as pernicious as those of Stalinism. Social democratic historiography, like the Stalinist version, tried to anaesthetize and rub out the whole revolutionary significance of the left communist movement by turning it into a dead thing from the past. Very often the communist left's criticisms of social democracy were carefully erased so as to make its history as inoffensive as possible. Leftist historiography, in particular that of the Trotskyists, did its bit by lying through omission, carefully avoiding saying too much about the revolutionary currents to the left of Trotskyism. When they couldn't avoid mentioning them, most simply dealt with them in passing by sticking the label ‘ultra-left' or ‘sectarian' on them, and by referring to Lenin's critique of ‘left wing childishness'. A method, what's more, that had already been practiced for a long time by Stalinist historiography. History became the history of their own self-justification, an instrument of legitimization. Let's again cite what was written by Georges Haupt, who was far from being a revolutionary, about the historiography of this ‘new left':
"Less than a decade ago, the anti-reformist and anti-Stalinist ‘new left', a severe critic of university history which it rejects as bourgeois, took up a ‘traditional' attitude to history and got into the same rut as the Stalinists and social democrats by forcing the past into the same mould. Thus the ideologues of the extra-parliamentary opposition (which it hasn't been for a long time, author's note) in the sixties in Germany themselves tried to find their legitimacy in the past. They treated history like a big cake from which everyone could take a slice according to appetite and taste. Erected into a source of legitimacy and used as an instrument of legitimization, working class history became a sort of depot of accessories and disguises in which each fraction, each grouplet could find its justifying reference, useable for the needs of the moment" (Haupt, op cit. p 32).
Revolutionary currents like Bordigism or councilism, because they were unable to escape the danger of sectarianism, also made the history of the revolutionary movement an instrument for legitimizing their conceptions. At the cost of deforming real history, they cut things to shape, eliminating all the components of the revolutionary movement which went in a different direction to them. The history of the communist left was no longer that of the unity and heterogeneity of its constituent parts, a complex history that had to be seen in its globality, in its international dimension, in order to show its unity. It became a history of rival, antagonistic currents. The Bordigists superbly ignored the history of the Dutch and German communists. When they did speak about them, it was always with a lofty disdain, and like the Trotskyists they referred to Lenin's ‘definitive' critique of left wing childishness. They carefully covered up the fact that in 1920 Bordiga, just like Gorter and Pannekoek, was condemned by Lenin for being ‘infantile' because of the same rejection of parliamentarism and of the British CP's entry into the Labor Party.
Councilist historiography has had a similar attitude. Glorifying the history of the KAPD and the ‘Unionen' - which most often they reduce to their ‘anti-authoritarian', anarchistic currents, like Ruhle's - and above all of the GIC, they ignore no less superbly the existence of Bordiga's current and of the Italian Fraction around Bilan in the 30s. This current is thrown into the same sack as ‘Leninism'. With no less a zeal than the Bordigists, they also erase the enormous differences between the Dutch Left of 1907 to 1927, which affirmed the need for a political organization, and the councilism of the 1930s. Pannekoek's itinerary before 1921 and after 1927 becomes a straight line for the councilists. The left communist Pannekoek of pre-1921 is ‘revised' in the light of his later councilist evolution.
Apart from the sectarianism of these Bordigist and councilist historiographies, which aim to be ‘revolutionary' when only the truth is truly revolutionary, one has to point out the narrowly national vision held by these currents. By reducing the history of a revolutionary current to one national component, chosen in relation to their ‘territory' of origin, these currents have shown a restricted national narrow-mindedness and a strong inward-looking spirit. The result is that the international dimension of the communist left has been rubbed out. The sectarianism of these currents is inseparable from their localism, reflecting an unconscious submission to national characteristics, which today is quite obsolete for a real international revolutionary movement.
Twenty years after 1968, the greatest danger faced by attempts to write a history of the revolutionary movement is less deformation or ‘disinformation' than the enormous ideological pressure which has been exerted in recent years. This pressure has translated itself into a notable diminution of academic studies and research in the history of the workers' movement. To get some idea of this, it's enough to cite the conclusions of Le Mouvement Social (no. 142. January-March 1988), a French journal known for its researches into the history of the workers' movement. One historian notes a tangible drop, in this journal, of articles devoted to the workers' movement and the parties and organizations that claim adherence to it. He notes a "tendencial drop in ‘pure' political history: 60% of the articles at the beginning, 10-15% today", and above all a "tendency towards a decline in the study of the workers' movement": 80% of the articles 20 years ago, 20% today. Since 1981, no doubt because of the erosion of "lyrical illusions" about the left in power, we've seen a definite drop in studies of communism in general. This ‘dislocation' has been even more brutal since 1985-6. A disquieting sign of this ideological pressure, which comes from the bourgeoisie in response to a growing uncertainty about the security of its economic foundations. The author notes that "a working class preponderance (in this journal) has been slowly eaten away by the rise of the bourgeoisie." And he concludes by showing that there has been an increase in studies devoted to the bourgeoisie and non-proletarian strata. The history of the workers' movement is more and more giving way to the history of the bourgeoisie and to plain economic history.
Thus, after a whole period in which studies of the workers' and revolutionary movement were being written, albeit in an academic context in which semi-truths and semi-lies were the limits of their achievement, and in which the revolutionary dimension of the movement's history was obscured, we are now seeing a period of reaction. Even when its ‘neutral', even when it's adapted to the tastes of the day and sanitized , the history of the workers' movement, above all when it's revolutionary, appears ‘dangerous' for the dominant ideology. The political and ideological history of the revolutionary movement is explosive. Because it is a praxis, it is heavy with revolutionary lessons for the future. It calls into question all the ideologies of the official left. As a critical lesson about the past, it is heavy with a critique of the present. It is a "weapon of criticism" which as Marx affirmed can be turned into "criticism by weapons". Once again we can cite G Haupt:
" ... history is an explosive terrain to the extent that the reality of the facts or the experiences of a past which has often been glossed over are liable to call into question any pretence to being the sole representative of the working class. Because the history of the workers' world touches the ideological foundations upon which all the parties who want to be in the vanguard base their hegemonic claims." (p 38, ibid)
******************************
This history of the German-Dutch communist left goes against the stream of present-day historiography. It does not aim to be a purely social history of this current. It aims to be a political history, restoring life and relevance to all the political and theoretical debates which developed within it. It aims to place this left in its international context, because otherwise its existence becomes incomprehensible. It aims above all to be a critical history, to show, without a priori assumptions or anathemas, its strengths and its weaknesses. It is neither an apology for nor a rejection of the German-Dutch communist current. It aims to show the roots of the councilist current, the better to underline its intrinsic weaknesses and explain the reasons for its disappearance. It also aims to show that the ideology of councilism expresses a movement away from the conceptions of revolutionary marxism, which were expressed in the 1930s by the Italian Left and the KAPD. And as such this ideology, close to anarchism, can be particularly pernicious for the future revolutionary movement, because of its rejection of the revolutionary organization and of the Russian revolution, and finally because of its rejection of the whole experience acquired by the past workers' and revolutionary movement. It is an ideology which disarms the revolutionary class and its organizations.
Although written in a university context this history is thus a weapon of struggle. To take up Mehring's expression, it is a history-praxis, a history "to wage the present-day struggle and to attain the new world of the future."
This history is thus not an ‘impartial' one. It is a committed work. Because historical truth, when it is the history of the revolutionary movement, demands a revolutionary commitment. The truth of the facts, their interpretation from a proletarian standpoint, can only lead to revolutionary conclusions.
In this work, we have taken as our own Trotsky's reflections about the objectivity of the work of revolutionary history, from the preface to his History of the Russian Revolution:
"The reader, of course, is not obliged to share the political views of the author, which the latter on his side has no reason to conceal. But the reader does have the right to demand that a historical work should not be the defense of a political position, but an internally well-founded portrayal of the actual process of the revolution. A historical work only then completely fulfils its mission when events unfold upon its pages in their full natural necessity ...
The serious and critical reader will not want a treacherous impartiality, which offers him a cup of conciliation with a well-settled poison of reactionary hate at the bottom, but a scientific conscientiousness, which for its sympathies and antipathies open and undisguised seeks support in an honest study of the facts, a determination of their real connections, an exposure of the causal laws of their movement. That is the only possible historic objectivism, and moreover it is amply sufficient, for it is verified and attested not by the good intentions of the historian, for which only he himself can vouch, but by the natural laws revealed by him of the historic process itself."
The reader can judge, through the abundance of the material used, that we have aimed at this scientific good faith, without hiding our sympathies and antipathies.
Manuel Fernandez Grandizo, known as G. Munls, died on 4 February 1989. The proletariat has lost a militant who devoted his whole life to the class struggle.
Born at the beginning of the century, Munis began his life as a revolutionary very young, becoming a militant of Trotskyism at a time when this current was still in the proletarian camp and was waging a bitter struggle against the Stalinist degeneration of the parties of the Communist International. He was a member of the Spanish Left Opposition (OGE) which was formed in February 1930 in Liege, in Belgium, around F. Garcia Lavid, known as ‘H Lacroix'. He was active in the Madrid section where he supported the Lacroix tendency against the leadership around Andres Nin. The discussion in the Left Opposition revolved around the question of whether or not it was necessary to create a ‘second communist party' or to continue oppositional work within the existing CPs in order to regenerate them. This latter position, which in the 30s was that of Trotsky, was in a minority at the third conference of the OGE, which then changed its name to Izquierda Comunista Espanola (Spanish Communits Left). Despite his disagreement, Munis continued to militate within it.
This orientation towards creating a new party was concretized in the foundation of the POUM in September 1934. This was a centrist party, without any real principles. Regrouping the ICE and J Maurin''s ‘Workers and Peasants' Bloc'. Along with a small group of comrades, Munis opposed the dissolution of the revolutionary current into the POUM and founded the Bolshevik-Leninist Group of Spain.
The circumstances of his life had taken Munis to Mexico, but as soon as he received news of the 1936 uprising in Barcelona, he returned to Spain, reformed the Bolshevik-Leninist Group which had disappeared, and later on participated with courage and determination, alongside the ‘Friends of Durruti', in the May 1937 insurrection of the workers of Barcelona against the Popular Front government. Arrested in 1938, he managed to escape the Stalinist prisons in 1939.
The outbreak of the second imperialist world war led Munis to break with Trotskyism, on the question of the defense of one imperialist camp against another, and to adopt a clear internationalist position of revolutionary defeatism against the imperialist war. He denounced Russia as a capitalist country and this led to the Spanish section breaking with the IVth International at its first post-war Congress, in 1948 (cf ‘Explicacion y Llamamiento a los militantes, grupos y secciones de la IV Internacional,' September 1949).
After this break, his political evolution continued to move in the direction of greater revolutionary clarity, in particular on the union and parliamentary question, and notably after discussions with militants of the Gauche Communiste de France. However, the ‘Second Communist Manifesto' which he published in 1965 (after he'd spent a number of years in Franco's jails) showed a continuing difficulty in breaking completely from the Trotskyist approach, even though this document is evidently situated on a proletarian class terrain.
In 1967, along with comrades from the Venezuelan group Internacialismo, he participated in efforts to restore contacts with the revolutionary milieu in Italy. Thus, at the end of the ‘60s, with the resurgence of the working class onto the scene of history, he took his place alongside the weak revolutionary forces existing at that time, including those who were to form Revolution Internationale in France. But at the beginning of the ‘70s, he unfortunately remained outside the discussions and attempts at regroupment which resulted in particular in the constitution of the ICC in 1975. Even so, the Cerment Ouvriere Revolutionaire (FOR), the group he formed in Spain and France around the positions of the ‘Second Manifesto', at first agreed to participate in the series of conferences of groups of the communist left which began in Milan in 1977. But this attitude altered during the course of the second conference; the FOR walked out of the conference, and this was the expression of a tendency towards sectarian isolation which up to now has prevailed in this organization.
It's thus clear that we have very important differences with the FOR, which has led us to polemicise with them a number of times in our press (see in particular the article in International Review 52). However, despite the serious errors he may have made, Munis remained to the end a militant who was deeply loyal to the combat of the working class. He was one of those very rare militants who stood up to the pressures of the most terrible counterrevolution the proletariat has ever known, when many deserted or even betrayed the militant fight; and he was once again there alongside the class with the historical resurgence of its struggles at the end of the ‘60s.
We pay our homage to this militant of the revolutionary struggle, to his loyalty and unbreakable commitment to the proletarian cause. To the comrades of the FOR, we send our fraternal greetings.
IR 58, 3rd Quarter 1989
Understanding the decadence of Capitalism, VII
THE CONVULSIONS OF IDEOLOGY
The ‘ideological crisis’, the ‘crisis of values’ which journalists and sociologists have been talking about for decades is, contrary to what they say, not a ‘painful adaptation to capitalist technological progress’. It is rather the expression of the halt in any real historical progress by capitalism. It’s the decomposition of the dominant ideology which accompanies the decadence of the economic system.
All the convulsions which capitalist ideological forms have gone through over the past three quarters of a century in fact constitute not a permanent rejuvenation of capitalism but an expression of its senility, demonstrating the necessity and possibility of the communist revolution.
In the previous articles in this series [1] [53], which sought to respond to those ‘Marxists’ who reject the theory of the decadence of capitalism, we concentrated mainly on the economic aspects of the question: “It’s in political economy that we must seek the anatomy of civil society,” as Marx said [2] [54]. We reiterated the marxist vision according to which it is economic factors which determine that, at a certain moment in their development, the various historical systems of society (slavery, feudalism, capitalism...) enter into a phase of decadence. As Marx put it:
“At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is just a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins and epoch of social revolution.” [3] [55].
We have shown that capitalism has undergone such a process since the first world war and the international wave of proletarian revolutions which put an end to it. We’ve shown how this system has been transformed into a permanent obstacle to the development of the productive forces, to the production of humanity’s means of existence: the most destructive wars in history, a permanent arms economy, the greatest famines ever known, epidemics, wider and wider areas condemned to chronic underdevelopment
We’ve insisted that capitalism is locked up in its own contradictions and can only postpone its day of reckoning through a desperate flight into credit and unproductive expenditure.
At the level of social life we have analysed some of the fundamental transformations brought about by these economic changes: the qualitative difference between the wars of the 20th century and those of ascendant capitalism; the bloated growth of the state machine in decadent capitalism, in contrast to the ‘economic liberalism’ of the 19th century; the differences in the forms of life and struggle for the proletariat between the 19th and 20th centuries.
However this picture remains incomplete. At the level of, the ‘superstructures’, of the ‘ideological forms’ which are based on these crisis—ridden relations of production, we have also seen convulsions and transformations which equally express this decadence. From the same passage by Marx:
“With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of a natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.” [4] [56].
In our texts on decadence (in particular in the pamphlet devoted to it) we’ve gone into certain characteristics of these ideological transformations. We return to them here in order to respond to certain aberrations which our critics have formulated on this question.
Those who reject the theory of decadence, who can’t see any change in capitalism since the 16th century on the concrete level of production, are no less myopic when it comes to seeing the evolution of capitalism at the level of its ideological forms. What’s more, for some of them, in particular the punk anarcho-Bordigists of the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste [5] [57], anyone who claims to recognize any transformations at this level is simply displaying the “moralising” vision of the “priests”. This is what they write about this:
‘~..It only remains to the decadentists to add on ideological justification, the moralising argument ... of a superstructural decadence reflecting (like the vulgar materialists they are) the decadence of the relations of production. ‘Ideology decomposes, the old moral values collapse, artistic creativity stagnates or takes rebellious forms, philosophical obscurantism and pessimism develop.’ The 64,000 dollar question is: who is the author of this passage: Raymond Aron? Le Pen? Monseigneur Lefebvre [6] [58] ... Oh no - it’s from the ICC pamphlet The Decadence of Capitalism. The same moralising discourse thus corresponds to the same evolusionist vision, whether from the mouths of the priests of the right, left or ultra-left.
“As if the dominant ideology was decomposing, as if the essential moral values of the bourgeoisie were collapsing! In reality what we see is a movement of decomposition/recomposition on a growing scale: each time the old forms of the dominant ideology become disqualified, they give rise to new ideological recompositions whose bourgeois content and essence invariably remains identical.” [7] [59].
The good thing about the GCI is its capacity to condense into a few lines a particularly high number of absurdities, which, in a polemic, allows one to economise on paper. But let’s begin at the beginning.
According to the GCI it is ‘vulgar materialism’ to establish a link between the decadence of the relations of production and the decline of the ideological superstructures. The GCI has read Marx’s critique of the conception which sees ideas as a purely passive reflection of material reality. Instead, Marx puts forward a dialectical view which sees the permanent inter—relationship between these two entities. But you’d have to be an ‘invariantist’ to deduce from this that the ideological forms aren’t subject to the evolution of material conditions.
Marx is very clear on this:
“The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, ie. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance.” [8] [60]
How could the “dominant material relationships” go through the convulsions of a period of decadence without the same thing happening to their “expression in ideas”? How could a society living through an epoch of real economic development, where the social relations of production appear as a source of the amelioration of the general conditions of existence, be accompanied by ideological forms identical to those of a society in which the same relations are leading society towards misery, massive self-destruction, permanent and generalised anguish?
By denying the link between the ideological forms of an epoch and the economic reality underlying it, the GCI claims to be combating ‘vulgar materialism’, but it only does this by falling into the idealism which believes in the primordial existence of ideas and their independence from the material world of social production.
What offends the GCI is that one can talk about the decomposition of the dominant ideology. To see this as a manifestation of the historic decadence of capitalism is to develop a “moralising argument”. Against this, they offer us a great truth: bourgeois ideology in the 20th century is, just like it was in the 19th century, “invariably” bourgeois. Conclusion? Therefore it doesn’t decompose (!).
In the ‘dialectical’ view of ‘invariance’ we are taught that as long as capitalism exists it remains “invariably” capitalist and that as long as the proletariat exists it also remains “invariably” proletarian.
But having deduced from these tautologies the non-putrefaction of the dominant ideology, the GCI attempts to deepen the question: “what we see is a movement of decomposition/recomposition on a growing scale: each time the old forms of the dominant ideology become disqualified they give rise to new ideological recompositions...“
This isn’t quite so ‘invariant’. The GCI obviously doesn’t give any explanation about the origin, the causes, the beginning of this “movement on a growing scale.” The only thing it’s sure about is that — unlike in the ‘decadentist’ conception - this has nothing to do with the economy.
But let’s get back to this discovery of a ‘movement’ by the GCI: decomposition/recomposition. According to their explanation, the dominant ideology permanently goes through “new ideological recompositions.” Yes “new”. This is eternal youth! What are these “ideological recompositions”? The GCI comes up with an answer straight away.
“This is what we’re seeing with the re-emergence in force and on a world scale of religious ideologies.”
But as everyone knows, religion is the last desperate cry of ideological mystification. Other novelties: “anti-fascism ... democratic myths anti-terrorism.” What’s new about these old refrains used by the ruling class for at least half a century, if not for much longer? If the GCI doesn’t have any other examples to give it’s because fundamentally there are no “new ideological recompositions” in decadent capitalism. Capitalist ideology can no more rejuvenate itself that the economic system which engenders it. On the contrary, what we see in decadent capitalism is the wearing out, at different speeds in different parts of the planet, of the ‘eternal’ values of the bourgeoisie.
The ideology of the ruling class boils down to the latter’s “ideas of its dominance.” In other words it is the permanent justification of the social system run by that class. The power of its ideology resides first and foremost not in the abstract world of ideas confronting other ideas, but in the acceptance of this ideology by men themselves and in particular by the exploited class.
This acceptance is based on an overall balance of forces. It is exerted as a constant pressure on each member of society, from birth to the funeral ceremony. The ruling class has people specifically charged with this work: in the past the religious institutions took the main brunt of it, in decadent capitalism it falls to the ‘scientists of propaganda’ (we’ll come back to this). Marx talked about: “the active and conceptive ideologues whose principal means of earning their daily bread consists in keeping up the illusions about itself fuelled by this class.” [9] [61].
But this isn’t enough to hold up an ideological domination in the long term. It’s also necessary for the ideas of the ruling class to have a minimum degree of correspondence with existing reality. The most important of these ideas is always the same: the existing social rules are the best possible for ensuring the material and spiritual well-being of society’s members. Any other form of social organisation can only lead to anarchy, misery and desolation.
It’s on this basis that the exploiting class justify the permanent sacrifices that they demand from and impose on the exploited class. But what happens to this ideology when the mode of production no longer manages to pro-vide the minimum of well-being and society slides into misery, anarchy and desolation? When the most difficult sacrifices no longer bring any compensation to the exploited?
The ruling ideas are then daily contradicted by reality itself. Their power to convince is weakened. In a process which is always complex, more or less rapid, made up of advances and retreats which express the vicissitudes of the economic crisis and of the balance of forces between the classes, the ‘moral values’ of the ruling class cave in under the thousand and one blows of a reality which gives them the lie.
It’s not new ideas which destroy old ones, it’s reality which deprives them of their mystifying power. Marx again: “Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development, but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking.” [10] [62].
It’s the experience of two world wars and dozens of local wars, the reality of nearly 100 million deaths, for nothing, in these quarters of a century, which has, especially in the proletariat of the European countries, dealt the most devastating blows against patriotic ideology. It’s the development of the most frightful misery, in the countries of capitalism’s periphery, and increasingly in the main industrial centres, which is destroying illusions in the benefits of capitalist economic laws. It’s the experience of hundreds of struggles ‘betrayed’, systematically sabotaged by the unions, which is ruining the latter’s ideological power and explains why, in the most advanced countries, the workers are showing an increasingly massive disaffection from the unions. It’s the reality of the identical practices of all the ‘democratic’ political parties, from right to left, which has continually eroded the myth of bourgeois democracy and has led in the old ‘democratic’ countries to record rates of abstention from elections. It’s the growing inability of capitalism to offer any perspective other than unemployment and war which is leading to the collapse of all the old moral values which sang to the glories of the fraternity between capital and labour.
The “new ideological recompositions” the GCI talks about simply describe the bourgeoisie’s efforts to restore some life to its old moral values by coating them with a more or less sophisticated layer of varnish. This can at the most hold back the movement of ideological decomposition — in particular in the less developed countries where the working class has less historical experience [11] [63] - but in no way can it reverse it or even halt it.
The ideas of the bourgeoisie, and the hold they have, are no more imperious to decomposition that those of the feudal lords or slave-owners in their days, however displeasing this may be to the guardians of ‘invariantist’ orthodoxy.
Finally, to conclude on the GCI’s intransigent defence of the indestructible quality of the ideas of the bourgeoisie, a few words about their reference to the men of the right. With its powerful capacity for analysis, the GCI points out that certain bourgeois of the ‘right’ in France have talked about the crumbling of the moral values of their class. The GCI uses this to make yet another amalgam with the ‘decadentists.’ Why not amalgamate the latter with the pygmies, because, just like the ‘decadentists’, they observe that the sun rises every morning? It’s quite normal for right—wing factions to moan about the decomposition of the ideological system of their class; this is just the other side of the coin to the politicians of the left, whose essential task is to keep this moribund ideology alive by disguising it with an anti-capitalist’, ‘pro-worker’ verbiage. It’s no accident that the ‘popularity’ of Le Pen and his Front National is the result of a political and media operation carefully organised by Mitterand’s Socialist Party.
We are no longer at the end of the 19th century, when economic crises were becoming more and more attenuated, when the arts and sciences were developing in an exceptional manner, and when the workers saw their living conditions regularly improving under the pressure of their mass economic and political organisations. We are in the epoch of Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Biafra, of massive and growing unemployment for 30 years out of 75.
The dominant ideology doesn’t have the same hold that it had at the beginning of this century, when it could make millions of workers believe that socialism could be the product of a peaceful, almost natural evolution of capitalism. In the decadence of capitalism, it is increasingly necessary for the dominant ideology to be imposed by the violence of media manipulations, precisely because it can less and less be imposed any other way.
The GCI makes a banal but true observation:
“The bourgeoisie, even with its limited vision (limited from the point of view of its class being) has drawn enormous lessons from the past and has consequently refined and reinforced its ideological weapons.”
This is an undeniable fact. But the GCI understands neither its origin nor its significance.
The GCI mixes up the strengthening of bourgeois ideology and the strengthening of the instruments of its dissemination. It doesn’t see that the development of the latter is the product of the weakness of this ideology, of the ruling class’s difficulty in ‘spontaneously’ upholding its power. If the bourgeoisie has had to multiply a hundredfold its expenditure on propaganda, this isn’t out of any sudden pedagogic desire, but because in order to maintain its power, the ruling class has had to impose unprecedented sacrifices on the exploited class and has had to face up to the first international revolutionary wave.
The beginning of the dizzying development of the ideological instruments of the bourgeoisie dates precisely to the opening of the period of capitalist decadence. The first world war was the first ‘total’ war, the first that involved a mobilisation of the totality of society’s productive forces in the interests of the war. It was not enough to ideologically dragoon the troops at the front, it was also necessary - and in an even stricter manner — to dragoon the entire producer class. In order to carry out this work, the ‘workers’ unions’ were definitively transformed into instruments of the capitalist state. This work was all the more vital because never before had such a war been so absurd and destructive, and because the proletariat had launched its first attempt at international revolution.
During the inter—war period, the bourgeoisie, confronted with the most violent economic crisis in its history, and with the necessity to prepare for a new war, had to systematise and develop still further the ideology and the strengthening of the instruments of political propaganda, in particularly the ‘art’ of manipulating the masses: Goebbels and Stalin have left the world bourgeoisie practical treatises which today serve as basic references for any media publicist and manipulator. “A lie repeated one thousand times becomes the truth,” as the man in charge of Hitler’s propaganda put it.
After the second world war, the bourgeoisie was equipped with a new and formidable instrument: television. The dominant ideology in every household, distilled daily for everyone by the most powerful government and commercial services. Presented as a luxury, the state in fact made it the most powerful instrument of its ideological domination.
The bourgeoisie has indeed “refined and reinforced its ideological weapons,” but contrary to the affirmations of the GCI, first, this has not prevented the dominant ideology from wearing out and decomposing, and secondly, this is the direct product of the decadence of capitalism.
This development of ideological totalitarianism can also be seen in the decadence of past societies, such as ancient slavery and feudalism. In the decadent Roman Empire, there was the divinisation of the Emperor and then the imposition of Christianity as the state religion; in feudalism, the divine right of kings and the systematic use of the Inquisition. But no more than under capitalism did they represent a strengthening of the dominant ideology, a greater adhesion by the population to the ideas of the ruling class. On the contrary.
Here once again we must recall the important differences between the decadence of capitalism and the decadence of societies which preceded it in Europe. First of all, the decadence of capitalism is a phenomenon of world-wide dimensions, which affects all countries simultaneously, even if conditions differ. The decadence of past societies was always a local phenomenon.
Secondly, the decline of slavery, and also of feudalism, took place at the same time as the rise of a new mode of production within the old society and co-existing with it. Thus the effects of Roman decadence were attenuated by the simultaneous development of feudal economic forms; those of feudal decadence by the development of commerce and capitalist relations of production in the big towns.
By contrast, communism is not the work of an exploiting class which can, as in the past, share power with the old ruling class. As an exploited class, the proletariat can only emancipate itself by destroying from top to bottom the power of the old exploiting class. There is no possibility that the premises of new communist relations could come along to lighten or limit the effects of capitalist decadence. This is why capitalist decadence is much more violent, destructive and barbaric than that of past societies.
Compared to the means developed by the bourgeoisie to ensure its ideological repression, those used by the most delirious emperors of decadent Rome, or the cruellest of feudal inquisitors, look like children’s games. But these means are in proportion to the degree of internal putrefaction attained by the ideology of decadent capitalism.
But it’s not just the idea of a decomposition of the dominant ideology or the collapse of moral values which shocks the GCI. For the apostles of invariance, talking about the manifestations of decadence at the level of philosophical and artistic forms is also a species of ‘moralism’.
Here again one can only ask why the GCI still lays claim to marxism. As we’ve seen, not only did Marx speak about this, but he saw it as a particularly crucial area: “ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”
For marxism, ‘men’ are determined by the relationship between classes. Thus the way consciousness develops about the conflict between the existing relations of production and the necessity for the development of the productive forces is different according to which class we’re talking about.
For the ruling class, an awareness of this conflict is expressed on the political and juridical level through the armouring of its state, through the hardening of totalitarian generalisation of the control of the state, of the law, over the whole of social life. This is state capitalism, the feudalism of the absolute monarchs the divinisation of the Emperor. But, simultaneously, social life sinks deeper and deeper into illegality, generalised corruption and banditry. Since the trafficking during the first world war which made and unmade colossal fortunes, world capitalism has developed trafficking of all kinds: in drugs, prostitution and weapons, making them into a permanent source of finance (for example for the secret services of the great powers) and, in the case of certain countries, the main source of revenue.
Unlimited corruption, cynicism, the most sordid and unscrupulous Machiavellianism have become qualities essential for survival within a ruling class which tears itself apart all the more violently as the sources of its riches fade away.
As for the artists, philosophers and certain religious thinkers, who are in general part of the middle classes, their masters’ loss of any future - which they probably feel more acutely than their employers themselves — means that they have a tendency to assimilate their own end to the end of the world. They respond with black pessimism to the blockage of material development by the contradictions in the dominant laws of society.
This is how this feeling was voiced by Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1957, in the aftermath of the second world war, in the decade of wars in Korea, and Indochina, of Suez and Algeria:
“For me, the only given is the absurd. The problem is to know how to get out of this and whether suicide has to be deduced from the absurd.”
A sort of ‘nihilism’ has developed, denying that reason has any possibility of understanding and mastering the course of events. There is a development of mysticism, understood as a negation of reason. And this again was a phenomenon which marked the decadence of previous societies. Thus in the feudal decadence of the 14th century:
“The swamp—like nature of the times saw the hatching of mysticism in all its forms. It appeared at the intellectual level with the treaties on the art of dying and, above all, the imitation of Jesus Christ. It appeared on the emotional level with the great manifestations of popular piety exacerbated by the preachings of uncontrolled elements of the wandering clergy: the ‘flagellants’ roamed the countryside, beating and tearing their breasts with blows from the lash in village squares, with the aim of disorienting human senses and calling Christians to repent. These manifestations gave rise to an imagery in often doubtful taste, like the fountains of blood symbolising the Redeemer. Very quickly, the movement turned to hysteria and the ecclesiastical hierarchy had to intervene against the trouble-makers to prevent their preaching further swelling the number of vagabonds…
“Macabre art developed ... a sacred text was particularly favoured by the most lucid minds: the Apocalypse,” [12] [64].
Whereas in past societies the dominant pessimism was counter-balanced after a certain time by the optimism engendered by the emergence of the new society, in decadent capitalism, there seems to be no bottom to the abyss.
Capitalist decadence destroys the old values, but the senile bourgeoisie has nothing to offer except the void, nihilism. ‘Don’t think!’ This is the only response which capitalism in decomposition can offer to the questions posed by the most desperate. ‘No future’ is its only perspective.
A society which is breaking all historical records in suicide, in particular among the young, a society in which the state is forced, in a capital city like Washington, to install a state of siege during the night against young people, against children, in order to contain an explosion of banditry, is a society blocked, a society in decomposition. It’s no longer advancing. It’s regressing. This is ‘barbarism.’ And it’s this barbarism which is expressed in the despair, or the revolt, which for decades has marked the artistic, philosophical and religious forms.
In the hell which a society in decadence makes for human beings, only the action of the revolutionary class carries any hope. In the case of capitalism, this is more true than ever before.
Any society subject to material scarcity, that is to say all hitherto societies, is organised in such a way that its first priority is to ensure the material subsistence of the community. The division of society into classes was not a curse that fell from the sky, but the fruit of the development of the division of labour in order to meet this prime necessity. All relations between human beings, from the way to distribute the wealth created, to relationships of love, are mediated through the mode of economic organisation.
When the economic machine breaks down, it’s this link, this mediation, this cement of relations between human beings that crumbles and decomposes. When productive activity ceases to create for the future then virtually all human activities seem to lose any historical meaning.
In capitalism the importance of the economy in social life attains unprecedented levels. Wage labour, the relationship between proletariat and capital, is out of all exploitative relations in history, the one most stripped of any non-commercial relationship, the most pitiless of all. Even in the worst economic conditions, the slave masters or the feudal lords fed their slaves and their serfs ... as they fed their cattle. Under capitalism, the master only feeds his slave as long as he’s needed for business. No profit, no labour, no social relationship. Atomisation, solitude, powerlessness. The effects on social life when the economic machine breaks down are much more profound under capitalist decadence than in the decadence of previous societies. The disintegration of society provoked by economic crisis engenders a return to primitive, barbaric social forms: war, delinquency as a means of survival, omnipresent violence, brutal repression [13] [65].
In this swamp, the only thing which has any future is the fight against capital, which offers no perspective except generalised self-destruction. The only thing which unifies and creates real human relations is the fight against capital, which alienates and atomises them. And the principal protagonist in this fight is the proletariat.
This is why proletarian class consciousness, which is affirmed when the proletariat acts as a class, which is developed by revolutionary political minorities, is the only one which can look the world in the face, the only one which can really understand the reasons why society is blocked.
The proletariat has demonstrated this by taking its defensive struggle to its final consequences, in the international revolutionary wave opened up by the seizure of power by the Russian proletariat in 1917. Then it clearly reaffirmed the project which is that of the workers of the whole world: communism.
The organised activity of revolutionary minorities, by pointing systematically to the causes of social decomposition, by drawing out the general dynamic which leads to the communist revolution, constitutes a decisive factor in the development of this consciousness.
It is essentially in and through the proletariat that “men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out.”
For the revolutionary class, nothing can be gained by lamenting the miseries of capitalist decadence. On the contrary, it must see the decomposition of the ideological forms of capitalist domination as a factor which can help free workers from the ideological grip of capital. It represents a danger when the proletariat sinks into resignation and passivity. The lumpenisation of young unemployed proletarians, self—destruction through drugs or submission to the ‘everyone for himself’ ideology of the bourgeoisie, threaten a real weakening of the working class (see ‘The Decomposition of Capitalist Society’ in IR 57). But the revolutionary class can’t take its struggle to its ultimate conclusion without losing its last illusions in the existing system. The decomposition of the dominant ideology is part of the process leading to this.
Furthermore, this decomposition has its effects on the other parts of society. The ideological domination of the bourgeoisie over the whole non-exploiting population outside the proletariat is also weakened by it. This weakening doesn’t of itself contain any future: the revolt of these strata, without the action of the proletariat, can only lead to a multiplication of massacres. But when the working class takes the initiative in the struggle, this enables it to count on the neutrality or even the support of these strata.
There can’t be a proletarian revolution if the armed bodies of the ruling class haven’t themselves decomposed. If the proletariat has to confront an army which continues to obey unconditionally the ruling class, its combat is doomed in advance. Trotsky had already made this a law after the revolutionary struggles in Russia in 1905. This is all the more true today, after decades of the development of its weapons by the decadent bourgeoisie. The moment when the first soldiers refuse to fire on the proletarians in struggle always constitutes a decisive point in the revolutionary process. Now, only the decomposition of the ideological values of the established order, combined with the revolutionary action of the proletariat, can lead to the disintegration of the armed bodies of capital. This is another reason why the proletariat must not ‘only see misery in misery.’
The GCI, for whom the revolution has always been on the agenda, doesn’t understand the changes that have taken place in the dominant ideological forms; in its ‘invariant’ universe, there’s no room for any such movement. It therefore renders itself incapable of understanding the real movement that leads towards the revolution.
The decomposition of the ideological forms of capitalism is a crying proof that the world communist revolution is now on the agenda of history. It is part of the process in which the consciousness of the necessity for revolution is maturing, and in which the conditions that made it possible are being created.
RV
[1] [66] International Review 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56.
[2] [67] Preface to the Critique of Political Economy.
[3] [68] ibid.
[4] [69] ibid.
[5] [70] See the previous articles in this series.
[6] [71] Famous personalities of the right in France.
[7] [72] Le Communiste no. 23.
[8] [73] The German Ideology.
[9] [74] ibid.
[10] [75] ibid.
[11] [76] The concrete examples of “new ideological recompositions’ given by the GCI refer mainly to the less developed countries: “rebirth of Islam, the return of a number of countries previously under ‘fascist-type dictatorships’ to the ‘free play of democratic rights and freedoms’ — Greece, Spain, Portugal, Argentina,
Brazil, Peru, Bolivia...” In this way ‘invariance’ ignores the growing decomposition of these same values in the countries with the longest traditions and greatest concentrations of the proletariat, as well as the rapidity with which they’re being used up in their ‘new’ areas of application. But when you think history is ‘invariant’, it’s hard to see it accelerating.
[12] [77] J Farier, De Marco Polo a Christophe Colombus.
[13] [78] The massive development, in all countries, of armed bodies specialising in the repression of crowds and social movements, is a specific characteristic of decadent capitalism.
The text we are publishing here is a part of the report on the International Situation presented and debated at the Conference of the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF), held in July 1945 in Paris. Today, when the world bourgeoisie is enthusiastically commemorating the high deeds of the victory of 'democracy' over Hitlerite fascism - which is supposed to be the sole reason for the second world war - it is necessary to remind the working class not only of the true imperialist nature of this bloody butchery which left 50 million dead and piles of smoking ruins all across Europe and Asia, but also of the real significance of the capitalist 'peace' which followed it.
Such was the aim that this small minority of revolutionaries gave itself at this Conference, by showing, against all the lackeys of the bourgeoisie, from the Socialist Parties and the Communist Parties to the Trotskyist groups, that under capitalism in its imperialist phase, 'peace' is just an interval between wars, whatever labels these wars might adorn themselves with.
From 1945 to this day, the innumerable localized armed conflicts, which have already left at least as many dead as the 1939-45 World War, the world economic crisis which has lasted for 20 years and the crazy acceleration of the arms race, have amply confirmed these analyses. The perspective put forward by these comrades is more valid than ever: proletarian class struggle leading to communist revolution as the only alternative to a third world war that would threaten the very survival of humanity.
Report on the international Situation
Gauche Communiste de France (Left Communists of France): July 1945
extracts
I. War and Peace
War and peace are two moments of the same society; capitalist society. They do not appear as mutually exclusive historical opposites. On the contrary, war and peace under capitalism are complementary, indispensable to each other, successive phases of the same economic system.
In the epoch of ascendant capitalism, wars (whether national, colonial or of imperial conquest) represented an upward movement that ripened, strengthened and enlarged the capitalist economic system. Capitalist production used war as a continuation by other means of its political economy. Each war was justified and paid its way by the opening up of a new field for greater expansion, assuring further capitalist development.
In the epoch of decadent capital, war, like peace, expresses this decadence and greatly accelerates it.
It would be wrong to see war as negative by definition, as a destructive shackle on the development of society, as opposed to peace, which would then appear as the normal and positive course of development of production and society. This would be to introduce a moral concept into an objective, economically determined process.
War was the indispensable means by which capital opened up the possibilities for its further development, at a time when such possibilities existed and could only be opened up through violence. In the same way, the capitalist world, having historically exhausted all possibility of development, finds in modern imperialist war the expression of its collapse. War today can only engulf the productive forces in an abyss, and accumulate ruin upon ruin, in an ever-accelerating rhythm, without opening up any possibility for the external development of production.
Under capitalism, there exists no fundamental opposition between war and peace, but there is a difference between the ascendant and decadent phases of capitalist society (and in the relation of war to peace), in the respective phases. While in the first phase, war had the function of assuring an expansion of the market, and so of the production of the means of consumption, in the second phase, production is essentially geared to the means of destruction, ie to war. The decadence of capitalist society is expressed most strikingly in the fact that, while in the ascendant period, wars had the function of stimulating economic development, in the decadent period economic activity is essentially restricted to the pursuit of war.
This does not mean that war has become the aim of capitalist production, since this remains the production of surplus value, but that war becomes the permanent way of life in decadent capitalism. If war and peace have never expressed an opposition which can be identified with the opposition between classes, still less in the present epoch can the proletariat make 'peace' a platform for its revolutionary struggle against decadent capitalism.
To the extent that the alternative of war or peace is not simply designed to deceive the proletariat, to lull its vigilance and to make it quit its class terrain, this alternative expresses only the apparent, contingent, momentary basis for the regroupment of the imperialist constellations with a view to new wars. In a world where zones of influence, markets for the disposal of products, sources of raw materials, and countries where labor-power can be super-exploited are definitively divided amongst the great imperialist powers, the vital need of the young, less favored imperialisms clash violently with the interests of the older, more favored imperialisms, and are expressed in bellicose and aggressive policies aimed at winning by force a new division of the world. The imperialist 'peace' bloc in no way represents a policy based on a more humane, moral concept, but simply the intention of the more well-heeled imperialisms to defend by force the privileges acquired in previous acts of banditry. 'Peace' for them in no way means a peacefully developing economy - impossible under capitalism but methodical preparation for the inevitable armed competition and, at the right moment, the merciless crushing of competing imperialisms.
The working masses' profound aversion to war is all the more exploited in that it offers a magnificent terrain for the mobilization for war against the enemy imperialism - which is portrayed as the instigator of war.
Between the two wars, Anglo-Russo-American imperialisms used the demagogy of 'peace' as camouflage for a war they knew to be inevitable, and as a way of ideologically preparing the masses for this war.
The mobilization for peace is an expression of conscious charlatanism on the part of all the lackeys of capital and, at best, a mirage, the empty and impotent wail of the petit-bourgeoisie. It disarms the proletariat by presenting it with that most dangerous of illusions - a peaceful capitalism.
The struggle against war can only be effective and purposeful when it is indissolubly tied to the revolutionary struggle for the destruction of capitalism. Against the deceitful alternative of war or peace, the proletariat sets the only alternative posed by history: Imperialist war or proletarian revolution.
II. Imperialist war
On the eve of the war, the International Bureau of the Communist Left made the mistake of seeing it above all as the direct expression of the class struggle, a war of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat. It denied, completely or partly, the existence of inter-imperialist antagonisms exacerbating and determining the world holocaust. Starting from the incontestable truth that there are no new markets to conquer, and hence that war is ineffectual as a means of resolving the crisis of overproduction, the IB arrived at the incorrect and simplistic conclusion that imperialist war was no longer the product of capitalism divided into warring states, competing for global hegemony. Capitalism was presented as a solid and unified whole, which has recourse to imperialist war with the sole aim of massacring the proletariat and blocking the rise of the revolution.
The fundamental error in the analysis of the nature of imperialist war was compounded by a second mistake in the appraisal of the balance of class forces at the moment when war broke out.
‘The era of wars and revolutions' does not mean that the development of war corresponds to the development of revolution. These two courses, though their source lies in the same historical situation of capitalism's permanent crisis, are nevertheless essentially different, and the relationship between them is not directly reciprocal. While the unfolding of war becomes a factor directly precipitating revolutionary convulsions, it is never the case that revolution is a factor in the outbreak of imperialist war.
Imperialist war does not develop in response to rising revolution, quite the reverse. It is the reflux following the defeat of revolutionary struggle - the momentary ousting of the menace of revolution - which allows capitalism to move towards the outbreak of a war engendered by the contradictions and internal tensions of the capitalist system.
The incorrect analysis of the nature of imperialist war must lead, fatally, to presenting the moment of the outbreak of war as the moment of revolutionary upsurge, and inverting the two moments, giving a false understanding of the existing balance of forces.
The absence of new outlets and new markets where the surplus value embodied in products made during the productive process can be realized, opens up the permanent crisis of capitalism. The shrinking of the exterior market has as a consequence the restriction of the interior market. The economic crisis continues and grows.
In the imperialist epoch, the final elimination of isolated producers and groups of small or middle producers by the victory and monopoly of the large concentrations of capital, the trusts and cartels, corresponds on an international level to the elimination of small states or their complete subordination to the few great imperialist powers that dominate the world. But just as the elimination of small capitalist producers· doesn't do away with competition, which grows from small struggles scattered on the surface to gigantic struggles on the same scale as the concentration of capital, so the elimination of small states and their enslavement by four or five monster imperialist powers doesn't mean any lessening of inter-imperialist antagonisms.
On the, contrary, these antagonisms are concentrated, and what they lose in number and extent, they gain in intensity and their shocks and explosions shake capitalist society to its foundations.
The more the market contracts, the more bitter become the struggle for sources of raw materials, and for the mastery of world market. The economic struggle between different capitalist groups concentrates more and more taking on its most finished form in struggles between states. The aggravated economic struggle between states can only be finally resolved by military force. War becomes the sole means, not of resolving the international crisis, but through which each state tries to overcome its problems at the expense of its rivals.
The momentary solutions found by individual imperialisms in economic or military victories have the effect not simply of worsening the situation of opposing imperialisms, but of still further aggravating the world crisis, and of destroying huge quantities of the values built up over decades and centuries of social labor.
Capitalism in the imperialist epoch is like a building where the construction materials for the upper stories are taken from the lower ones and the foundations. The more frenetic the upward building, the weaker becomes the base supporting the whole edifice. The greater the appearance of power at the top, the more shaky the building is in reality. Capitalism, compelled as it is to dig beneath its own foundations, works furiously to undermine the world economy, hurling human society towards catastrophe and the abyss.
"A social formation does not die until all the productive forces it opened up are developed," said Marx, but this doesn't mean that it will disappear of itself once its mission is over. For this to happen, a new social formation corresponding to the state of the productive forces, and able to open the way to their development, must take over the direction of society. In doing so, it throws itself against the old social formation, which it can only hope to replace through struggle and revolutionary violence. If it survives, the old formation retains control over society, guiding it not towards new fields of development of the productive forces, but, according to its new and henceforth reactionary nature, towards their destruction.
Society pays for each day of capitalism's continued survival with a new destruction. Each act of decadent capitalism is a moment in this destruction.
In a historical sense, war in the imperialist epoch is the highest and most complete expression of decadent capitalism, its permanent crisis, and its economic way of life: destruction.
There is no mystery about the nature of imperialist war. Historically it is the concretization of the decadence and the destructiveness of capitalist society, which reveals itself in the accumulation of contradictions and in the exacerbation of inter-imperialist antagonisms, which serve as the concrete basis and immediate cause for the unleashing of war.
******
The object of war production is not the solution of an economic problem. Its origins are the result of the state's need, on the one hand, to defend itself against the dispossessed classes and maintain their exploitation by force, and on the other to maintain its economic position and better it at the expense of other imperialist states, again by force. The permanent crisis makes the solution of inter-imperialist differences by are struggle inevitable. War and the threat of war are latent or overt aspects of the situation of permanent war in society. Modern war is essentially a war of materials. With a view to war, a monstrous mobilization of a country's entire economic and technical resources is necessary. War production becomes at the same time the axis of industrial production and society's main economic arena.
But does the mass of products represent an increase in social wealth? To this we must reply categorically, no. All the values crated by war' production are doomed to disappear from the productive process to be destroyed without reappearing in the next cycle. After each cycle of production, society chalks up, not a growth in its social heritage, but a decline, an impoverishment of the totality.
Who pays for war production? In other words, who realizes war production?
In the first place, war production is realized at the expense of the working masses, who are drained by the state (through various financial devices taxes, inflation and supplementary loans and other measures) of value, with which it constitutes a new buying power. But the whole of this mass can only realize part of war production. Most of it remains unrealized and awaiting its realization through war - that is through banditry carried out on the defeated imperialism. In this way, a kind of forced realization takes place.
The victorious imperialism presents the bill of its war production under name of 'reparations', carves its pound of flesh from the defeated imperialism, and imposes its law on it. But the value contained in the war production of the defeated states, as other small capitalist states, is complete and irrecoverably lost. If one drew up a balance sheet for the operation of the entire world economy, taken as a whole, it would be catastrophic, although certain individual imperialisms might be wealthier. The exchange of goods through which surplus value can be realized only functions partially with the disappearance of the extra-capitalist market, and tends to be replaced by forcible 'exchange', brigandage on the weakest countries by the strongest, by means of imperialist war. This presents us with a new aspect of imperialist war.
III. Transforming imperialist war into civil war
As we said above, it is the cessation of class struggle, or more precisely the destruction of the proletariat's class power and consciousness, the derailing of its struggles (which the bourgeoisie manages through the introduction of its agents into the class, gutting workers' struggles of their revolutionary content and putting them on the road of reformism and nationalism), which is the ultimate and decisive condition for the outbreak of imperialist war.
This must be understood not from the narrow, limited viewpoint of one nation alone, but internationally.
Thus the partial resurgence, the renewed growth of struggles and strike movements in Russia (1913) in no way conflicts with our assertion. If we look a little closer, we can see that the power of the international proletariat on the eve of 1914 - its electoral victories, the great social democratic parties, the mass union organizations, pride and glory of the 2nd International - were only a facade hiding a ruinous ideological condition under its veneer. The workers' movement, undermined and rotten with opportunism, could only topple like a house of cards at the first blast of war.
Reality cannot be understood through the chronological photography of events, but must be seized in its underlying, internal movement, in the profound modifications which occur before they appear on the surface and are registered as dates. It would be committing a serious mistake to remain faithful to the chronological order of history, and see the 1914-18 war as the cause of the collapse of the 2nd International, when in reality the outbreak of the war was the direct result of the previous opportunist degeneration of the international workers' movement. The fanfares of internationalism sounded all the louder on the outside, while within the nationalist tendencies triumphed. The war only brought into the open the 'embourgeoisement' of the parties of the 2nd International, the substitution of their original revolutionary program by the ideology of the class enemy, their attachment to the interest of the national bourgeoisie.
The internal process of the destruction of the class consciousness revealed its completion in the outbreak of war in 1914 which it itself had conditioned.
World War 2 broke out under the same conditions. We can distinguish three necessary and successive stages between the two imperialist wars.
The first was completed with the exhaustion of the great revolutionary wave after 1917, and sealed by a string of defeats, with the defeat of the left and its expulsion from the Comintern, with the triumph of centrism, and with the USSR's commitment to its evolution towards capitalism through the theory and practice of 'socialism in one country.'
The second stage was that of international capitalism's general offensive aimed at liquidating the social convulsions in Germany, the centre where the historical alternative between socialism and capitalism was decisively played out, through the physical crushing of the proletariat, and the installation of the Hitler regime as Europe's gendarme. Corresponding to this stage came the definitive death of the Comintern and the collapse of Trotsky's Left Opposition, which, incapable of regrouping revolutionary energies, engaged in coalitions and fusions with opportunist groups and currents of the socialist left, and in the practices of bluff and adventurism which led it to proclaim the formation of the 4th International.
The third stage was that of the total derailment of the workers' movement in the democratic countries. Under the mask of the defense of 'liberties' and 'workers' conquests' threatened by fascism, the real aim was to yoke the proletariat to the defense of democracy - that is, its national bourgeoisie, its national capital. Anti-fascism was the platform, the modern capitalist ideology which the parties that had betrayed the proletariat used as wrapping for their putrid merchandise of national defense.
In this third stage occurred the definitive passage of the so-called Communist parties into the service of their respective capitals, the destruction of the class consciousness through the poison of anti-fascism, the adhesion of the masses to the future inter-imperialist war through their mobilization into the 'popular front', the derailment of the strikes of 1936, the 'anti-fascist' Spanish war. The final victory of state capitalism in Russia was revealed in its ferocious repression of the slightest impulse to revolutionary action, its adhesion to the League of Nations, its integration into an imperialist bloc and its installation of a war economy in preparation for imperialist war. This period also saw the liquidation of numerous revolutionary groups and left communists thrown up by the crisis of the CI, who, through their adherence to 'anti-fascist' ideology, and the defense of the 'workers state' in Russia, were caught up in the cogs of capitalism and lost forever as expressions of life of the proletariat. Never before has history seen such a divorce between the class and the groups that express its interests and its mission. The vanguard found itself in a state of complete isolation, reduced quantitatively to negligible little islands.
The immense revolutionary wave which burst out at the end of the first imperialist war threw international capitalism into such terror that it had to dislocate the proletariat's very foundations before unleashing another war.
******
Imperialist war doesn't solve any of the contradictions of the system that engenders it. It's a phenomenon that takes place thanks to the momentary eclipse of a proletariat struggling for socialism, but which provokes the most profound instability in society and drags humanity towards the abyss.
On the other hand, though conditioned by the eclipse of the class struggle, war can also be a powerful factor in the awakening of the class consciousness and revolutionary combativity of the masses. Thus does the dialectical and contradictory course of history reveal itself.
The piling up of ruins, the enormous destruction, the millions of corpses, the poverty and famine - all this, growing and developing day by day, confronts the proletariat and the laboring masses with an acute, direct dilemma: revolt or die.
The patriotic lies, the chauvinist fog, are dissipated and only make the proletariat more aware of the atrocious futility of the imperialist butchery. War becomes a powerful motor accelerating the revival of the class struggle and is rapidly transformed into civil, class war.
During the third year of this war, there appeared the first symptoms of a process of disengagement from the war by the proletariat. Still a deeply subterranean process, difficult to discern and even more difficult to measure. Against the Russophiles and Anglophiles, against the platonic friends of the revolution, above all the Trotskyists who hide their chauvinism under the argument that there is a greater possibility for the outbreak of revolutionary proletarian movements in the democracies, and who see the victory of the democratic imperialisms as a precondition for the revolution, we for our part located the centre of the revolutionary ferment in the European countries, more precisely in Italy and Germany, where the proletariat had suffered more from physical destruction than the destruction of its consciousness, and had only adhered to the war under the pressure of violence.
The war had sapped the strength of the German gendarme. The extremely fragile economies of these imperialisms, which had not been able to avoid social convulsions in the past, were bound to be shaken by the first difficulties, the first military reverses. Our 'revolutionaries of tomorrow', who are chauvinists today, triumphantly pointed to the mass strikes in America and Britain (while condemning and deploring them because they weakened the power of the democracies) as proof that the democracies offered more advantages to the struggle of the proletariat. Apart from the fact that the proletariat can't determine which type of regime suits it best at a given moment under capitalism, and that to make the proletariat choose between democracy and fascism is to make it abandon its own terrain of struggle against capitalism, the example of the strikes in Britain or America didn't indicate a greater maturation of the masses in these countries, but rather showed that capitalism was more solid in these countries and could more easily put up with partial struggles by the proletariat.
Far from denying the importance of these strikes, and while fully supporting them as expressions of the fight for immediate class objectives, we didn't conceal their limited and contingent significance.
Our attention was above all concentrated on the places where the vital forces of capitalism were going through a process of decomposition and of profound revolutionary ferment where the slightest external manifestation could take on an extremely explosive character. Looking out for such symptoms, attentively following this evolution, preparing ourselves to participate in these explosions - this had to be and was our task in this period.
A part of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left accused us of impatience, refusing to see the draconian measures taken by the German government in the winter of 1942-43, both at home and on the fronts, as anything but the continuation of fascist policies, and denying that they reflected an internal molecular process. And it's because they denied it that they were surprised and overtaken by the events of July 1943, when the Italian proletariat broke out against the imperialist war and opened the road to civil war.
Enriched by the experience of the first war, incomparably better prepared for the eventuality of a revolutionary threat, international capitalism reacted in solidarity, and with extreme skill and prudence towards a proletariat decapitated of its vanguard. From 1943 on, the war was turned into a civil war. In affirming this we are not saying that inter-imperialist antagonisms disappeared, or that they ceased to have an effect on the continuation of the war. These antagonisms remained and could only amplify, but to a lesser degree, acquiring a secondary character in comparison to the grave threat that a revolutionary explosion represented for the capitalist world.
The revolutionary danger became the central concern of capitalism in both blocs; it was this which was uppermost in determining the course of military operations, their strategy and the way they were carried out. Thus, through a tacit agreement between the two rival imperialist blocs, and with the aim of circumventing and stifling the first flickers of revolution, Italy, the weakest and most vulnerable link, was cut in two halves.
Each imperialist bloc, through its own particular means, through violence and demagogy, ensured that order was maintained in either half.
This division of Italy, in which the vital industrial centers of the north were confided to Germany and delivered over to the ferocious repression of fascism, was to be maintained in spite of all military considerations until after the collapse of the government in Germany.
The allied landing, the circuitous advance of the Russian armies allowing the systematic destruction of industrial centers and proletarian concentrations, obeyed the same central objective: they were preventative destructions to counter-act the threat of an eventual revolutionary explosion. Germany itself was to be the theatre for a level of destruction, a massacre unprecedented in history.
Faced with the total collapse of the Germany army, with massive desertions and uprisings by soldiers, sailors and workers, repressive measures of the most savage ferocity were the reply both internally and externally: the last reserves of manpower were hurled into battle with the conscious aim of exterminating them.
Unlike during the First World War, when once it had embarked on a course towards revolution, the proletariat kept the initiative and obliged world capitalism to stop the war, during the last war, as soon as the first signal of revolution appeared - in Italy in July 1943 - it was capitalism which seized the initiative and waged an implacable civil war against the proletariat, preventing by violence any concentration of proletarian forces, not stopping the war even after the collapse and disappearance of the Hitler government and even after Germany had begged for an armistice, in order to stamp out any revolutionary threat from the German working class by means of a monstrous carnage, a pitiless preventative massacre.
When one considers that the terrible bombardments which the allies directed against Germany destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes and massacred millions of human beings, but left intact 80% of the factories, as the allied press has informed us, one can see the true class meaning of these 'democratic' bombardments.
To the skeptics, who saw no civil war either on the side of the proletariat, or of capitalism, because it didn't take place according to known, classical schemas, we suggest that among other things they meditate seriously on these figures.
The original and characteristic trait of this war, which distinguishes it from that of 1914-18, is its sudden transformation into a war against the proletariat while pursuing its imperialist aims. This methodical massacre of the proletariat didn't stop until the danger of socialist revolution had momentarily and partially its true been expunged.
How was this possible? How can we explain this momentary and undeniable victory of capitalism over the proletariat ... How did the situation appear in Germany? The zeal with which the allies carried out a war of extermination, the plan for the massive deportation of the German proletariat, put forward in particular by the Russian government, the methodical and systematic destruction of the towns, posed the threat that the extermination and dispersal of the German proletariat would be such that, before it could make the least class gesture, it would be out of the fight for years.
This danger really existed, but capitalism was only partially able to carry out its plan. The revolt of the workers and soldiers, who in some towns came out on top over the fascists, forced the allies to precipitate and to finish this war of extermination earlier than planned. Through these class revolts, the German proletariat succeeded at two levels: in undoing capitalism's plan, forcing it to bring the war quickly to an end, and in unfurling its first revolutionary class actions. International capitalism was able to gain a momentary control of the German proletariat and prevent it from leading the world revolution, but it didn't succeed in eliminating it definitively ...
L'Etincelle (The Spark) No 1,
January 1945
Organ of the French Fraction of the Communist Left
Manifesto
The war continues. The 'liberation' might have made workers hope for an end to the massacre and the reconstruction of the economy, at least in France.
Capitalism has responded to these hopes with unemployment, famine, mobilization. The situation which the proletariat suffered under German occupation has got worse, only now there's no German occupation.
The resistance and the Communist Party promised democracy and profound social reforms! The government has maintained the censorship and strengthened its police force. It has engaged in a caricature of socialization by nationalizing a few factories, with full compensation for the capitalists! The exploitation of the proletariat remains and no reform can make it go away.
However, the resistance and the Communist Party are in full agreement with the government: they don't give a damn about democracy or the proletariat. They have but one goal: war. And for this they need the 'sacred unity' of all classes. War for revenge, for the renewal of France, war against Hitlerism, the bourgeoisie claims.
But the bourgeoisie is afraid! It is afraid of proletarian movements in Germany and France. It's afraid of what will happen after the war! It needs to muzzle the French proletariat: it is increasing its police forces, which tomorrow will be used against the workers.
It needs to use the French workers to crush the German revolution; so it is mobilizing its army.
The international bourgeoisie comes to its aid. It is helping it to reconstruct its war economy in order to shore up its own class rule.
The USSR is the first to help out; it has signed a pact of struggle against the French and German workers.
All the parties, the Socialists, the 'Communists' are helping out as well: "Down with the fifth column, with the collaborators! Down with Hitlerism! Down with the brown maquis!"
But all this noise is just an attempt to hide the real origin of the present misery: capitalism, of which fascism is just the offspring. To hide the betrayal of the lessons of the Russian Revolution, which took place in the middle of the war and against the war. To justify collaboration with the bourgeoisie in the government. To throw the proletariat once again into the imperialist war. To make workers believe that proletarian movements in Germany are just the fanatical resistance of Hitlerlsm!
Comrade workers! More than ever the tenacious struggle of the revolutionaries during the first imperialist war, of Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and Liebknecht must be our struggle! More than ever the first enemy to knock down is our own bourgeoisie! More than ever, in the face of the imperialist war, the necessity for civil war is making itself felt!
The working class no longer has a class party: the 'Communist' Party has betrayed, is betraying now, will betray again tomorrow. The USSR has become an imperialism. It is relying on the most reactionary forces to prevent the proletarian revolution. It will be the worst gendarme against the workers' movements of tomorrow; right now it has begun the mass deportation of German workers in order to break their class strength.
Only the left fraction, which has broken away from the "rotting corpses" of the 2nd and 3rd Internationals, represents the revolutionary proletariat today. Only the communist left refused to participate in the derailment of the working class by anti-fascism and, right from the start, warned it against this new trap. It alone denounced the USSR as a pillar of the counter-revolution after the defeat of the world proletariat in 1933!
At the outbreak of the war, it alone stood against any 'Sacred Unity' and proclaimed that the class struggle was the only struggle for the proletariat, in all countries, including the USSR. And it alone understands how to prepare the ground for the future class party, rejecting all compromises and united fronts, and, in a situation ripened by history, following the hard road trodden by Lenin and the Bolshevik fraction before the First World War.
Workers! The war isn't just fascism! It's also democracy and 'socialism in one country', it's also the USSR. It's the whole capitalist regime, which, in its death throes, is dragging the whole of society down with it! Capitalism can't give you peace; even when the war ends, it can't give you anything anymore.
Against the capitalist war, the class solution is civil war! Only through civil war leading to the seizure of power by the proletariat today can there arise a new society, an economy of consumption and no longer of destruction!
Against partisanism and the war effort! For international proletarian solidarity.
For the transformation of imperialist war into civil war.
The Communist Left (French Fraction)
China, Poland, Middle east, struggles in Russia and America
Capitalist convulsions and workers' struggles
In a few months, the world has witnessed a whole series of remarkable events: events which reveal what is really at stake in the present historical period. China in the spring, the Russian workers' strikes in the summer, the situation in the Middle East with Iran's new "peaceful" political orientation as well as bloody and menacing events such as the systematic destruction of Beirut and the French fleets' warlike gesturing off the Lebanese coast. And finally, on the front page of all the papers, the formation in Poland of the first government under a Stalinist regime to be controlled neither by a "communist" party nor even by one of its puppets ("peasant" party or the like) reveals how unprecedented the situation is in these countries.
For bourgeois commentators, each of these events generally has a specific explanation which has nothing to do with any of the others. And when they do try to establish some common link between them, some general framework in which they can be placed, then these are put to work for today's hysterical campaigns for "democracy". And so we are told that:
- "China's present convulsions are tied to the problem of the succession to the ageing autocrat Deng Xiaopirig ";
- "the workers' strikes in Russia are explained by the country's specific economic difficulties";
- "the new direction of Iranian politics is due to the death of the mad paranoiac Khomeini";
- "the bloody battles in Lebanon, and the French military expedition, are caused by the excessive appetite of Hafez el-Assad, the 'Bismarck' of the Middle East";
-"only by starting with the country's specificities can we understand the situation in Poland" ....
But all these events are supposed to have one point in common: they are described as part of the universal struggle between "Democracy" and "totalitarianism", between those who defend and those who suppress the "Rights of Man".
Against the bourgeois vision of the world which sees no further than the end of its nose, against the lies repeated endlessly in the hope that the workers will take them for the truth, revolutionaries must show what is truly at stake in the latest events, and place them in their true framework.
At the heart of today's international situation lies the irreversible collapse of society's material base, the insurmountable crisis of the capitalist economy. The bourgeoisie has welcomed the last two years as a 'recovery', or even 'an end to the crisis': it has gone into raptures over growth rates 'unheard of since the 60s'; it can do nothing about reality, which remains as stubborn as ever: the recent ‘good performance' of the world economy (in reality, of the advanced countries' economies) has been paid for by a new headlong flight into generalized debt, which heralds convulsions still more brutal and dramatic than their predecessors. Already, the threatened return of galloping inflation to most countries, and especially to that model of 'economic rectitude', Thatcher's Britain, is beginning to cause concern.... All the bourgeoisie's euphoric declarations will have no more effect than the rain dances of prehistoric man: capitalism has reached a dead-end. In such a situation of open crisis, the only perspective that it has been able to offer humanity since its entry into decadence at the beginning of the century has been the flight towards war, which can only end in worldwide imperialist conflict.
Lebanon and Iran: War yesterday, today, and tomorrow
This is confirmed by the latest events in Lebanon. Once known as 'the Switzerland of the Middle East', this country has had no respite for fifteen years. Its capital has been blessed by the attentions of so many 'liberators' and 'protectors' (Syrians, Israelis, Americans, French, British, Italians) that it is on the point of being wiped off the map. A veritable modern Carthage, Beirut is being systematically demolished: week after week, hundreds of thousands of shells are transforming it into a mound of ruins, where its surviving inhabitants live like rats. This is no longer caused by the confrontation of the two great imperialist powers: the USSR which once supported the Syrians, has been forced to restrain its ambition by the West's massive show of force in 1982. But although in the last instance, the antagonism between the two great imperialist blocs determines the overall aspect of today's military confrontations, they are not alone in the use of armed force. As the capitalist crisis plunges deeper into disaster, the small powers' particular demands are becoming more pressing, especially when they realize that they have been duped as is the case with Syria today.
In 1983, the Syrians agreed with the US bloc to break its alliance with the USSR in return for control over a part of Lebanon. It even policed its zone of occupation against the PLO and the pro-Iranian groups. But in 1988, the US bloc decided that Russia had too many problems of its own to attempt a return to the Middle East: it no longer had any need to respect its previous agreement. Its remote control of the Christian General Aoun's offensive aimed to push Syria back behind its own borders, or at least to reduce its claims, and to leave the control of Lebanon in the hands of more reliable allies - Israel and the Christian militia - while at the same time putting the muslim militia in their place. The result is a massacre, whose main victims are the civilians on both sides.
Once again, there has been a careful division of labor within the Western bloc: the USA pretends to be impartial, in order to pick up the pieces once the situation is ripe, while France has been directly involved through the dispatch of an aircraft carrier with six other warships which nobody, with the best will in the world, can believe are there for 'humanitarian reasons' as Mitterrand would have it. In Lebanon too, the crusades for the 'rights of man' and 'freedom' are nothing but fig-leaves to hide the most sordid imperialist calculations.
In Lebanon today is concentrated the barbarism of dying capitalism. It is proof that all the talk of peace over the last year is just that: talk. Even if the intensity of some conflicts has diminished, there is no real perspective of peace in our time: quite the reverse.
And this is how we should understand the latest evolution of the situation in Iran. The Iranian government's new orientation, its readiness to cooperate with the American 'Great Satan', are not fundamentally due to Khomeini's death. They are essentially the result of years of pressure by the same 'Great Satan', along with all its closest allies, aimed at bringing Iran to heel after its attempt to escape the control of the US bloc. Barely two years ago the US showed Iran that 'things had gone on long enough' by sending the biggest armada since World War II to the Persian Gulf, and by increasing its support for the 8-year Iraqi war effort. The result was not long in coming: last year, Iran agreed to sign an armistice with Iraq and to open peace negotiations. This was a first success for the Western bloc's offensive, but it did not go far enough. It also required that Iran pass into the control of political forces capable of understanding their own 'best interest', and muzzling the fanatical and utterly archaic religious cliques which had led into this situation. Last winter's 'Rushdiecide' declarations were the last attempts by the cliques gathered around Khomeini to take control of a situation that was slipping from their hands: the Imam's death put an end to their ambitions. In fact, his remaining authority made Khomeini the last barrier to a changing situation, in the same way that in Spain during the 1970's Franco became the last obstacle in the way of a 'democratization' ardently desired by the national bourgeoisie and the American bloc as a whole. The speed with which the situation is evolving in Iran, where the new president Rafsanjani has formed a government of 'technocrats' excluding all the old 'politicians' (except himself), shows that the situation has been 'ripe' for a long time, and that the serious forces of the national bourgeoisie are in a hurry to put an end to a regime which has succeeded in reducing the economy to ruins. This bourgeoisie is liable to lose its illusions fast: in the midst of the world economy's present disaster, there is no room for the 'reemergence' of an under-developed country, still less one that has been bled white by eight years of war. For the great powers of the Western bloc, by contrast, the overall result is a good deal more positive: the bloc has taken a new step forward in its strategy of encircling Russia, added to its success in forcing the USSR to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan. However, the 'pax Americana', which is being reestablished in this part of the world at the cost of the most dreadful massacres, in no way heralds a definitive 'pacification'. As it tightens its grip on the, Russian bloc, the West is only raising the insurmountable tensions between the two imperialist blocs to a still higher level.
The various Middle-Eastern conflicts only serve to highlight one of the present period's overall characteristics: bourgeois society's advanced state of decomposition after 20 years of worsening economic crisis. Lebanon, even more than Iran, bears witness to this state of affairs, with its rule by armed gangsters, its never-declared and never-ending war, its daily terrorist bomb attacks, and its 'hostage-takers'. The wars between the bourgeoisie's rival factions have never been a tea-party, but in the past at least they had rules for 'organising' their massacres. Today these rules are swept aside every day: further proof of this society's decomposition.
But this situation of barbarism and social decomposition is not limited to today's wars, and methods of warfare. This is how we should also understand this spring's events in China, and this summer's in Poland.
China and Poland: Convulsions of the Stalinist regimes
These two, apparently diametrically opposed, series of events, reveal in fact identical situations of profound crisis and decomposition affecting the so-called 'communist' regimes.
In China, the terror which has swept over the country speaks for itself. The massacres in June, the mass arrests, the series of executions, the daily intimidation and denunciations bear witness, not to the regime's strength, but to its extreme fragility and the convulsions that threaten to topple it. We were given a vivid illustration of this during Gorbachev's visit to Beijing in May when, incredibly, the student demonstrations upset the program for the visit by Perestoika's inventor. The power struggle within the party apparatus between the 'conservative' clique and the 'reformers' who used the students as cannon fodder was not simply about the succession to the aging Deng Xiaoping. It revealed essentially the degree of political crisis that is shaking this apparatus.
This kind of convulsion is not new to China. The so-called 'Cultural Revolution' for example, covered a whole period of confusion and bloody confrontations. Nonetheless, during the ten years that followed the overthrow of the 'gang of four', the situation gave the impression of having been somewhat stabilized under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. In particular, the opening towards the West and the 'liberalization' of the Chinese economy allowed a small degree of modernization to take place in some sectors, creating the illusion that 'peaceful' development had at last arrived in China. Last spring's upheavals have put an end to these illusions. Behind the facade of 'stability' the conflicts had sharpened within the party between the 'conservatives' who considered that 'liberalization' had already gone too far, and the 'reformers' who felt the movement should be continued on' the economic level, and even extended. The party's last two general secretaries, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Zhiang, supported the latter line. The former was chased from his position in 1986 after being dropped by Deng who had at first been his patron. The latter, who was the prime mover of the student demonstrations in spring because he counted on them to impose the domination of his line and his clique, suffered the same fate after the terrible repression in June. This put an end to the myth of 'Chinese democratization' under the aegis of the new 'helmsman' Deng. On this occasion, some 'specialists' recalled the fact that Deng had made his career as an organizer of repression, and in using the greatest brutality against his enemies. To be more precise, this is typical of the careers of all China's leaders. Brute force, terror, repression, massacres: these are virtually the only methods of government for a regime which would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions without them.
And when occasionally a one-time butcher, a converted torturer, sounds the bugle of 'democracy', whetting the appetite of the petty bourgeois intellectuals in China, and the worthy media souls world-wide, his fanfares are quickly reduced to silence. Either (like Derig Xiaoping ) he is intelligent enough to change his tune in time, or he goes down the chute.
The events of spring and their sinister epilogue are a clear demonstration of the acute crisis that reigns in China. But this kind of situation is not unique to China, nor does it spring solely from its considerable economic backwardness. What is happening today in Poland shows that all the Stalinist-type regimes are undergoing the same crisis.
The formation of a government led by Solidarnosc, in other words by a political formation other than a Stalinist party or one of its puppets, is not only unprecedented historically in a country of the Soviet glacis. It is equally significant of the degree of crisis within Poland itself. The Solidarnosc government is not the result of a decision planned and executed deliberately by the national bourgeoisie, but of the latter's weakness, which this decision can only increase.
In fact, these events express the bourgeoisie's loss of control over the political situation. The different stages and results of this loss of control were desired by none of the participants at the 'round table' of early 1989. In particular, neither the bourgeoisie as a whole, nor any of its individual fractions, have been able to master the 'semi-democratic' electoral game worked out during these negotiations.
As soon as the June elections were over it became clear that their result - a crushing defeat for the Stalinists and the 'triumph' for Solidarnosc - were as much an embarrassment for the latter as for the former. The situation that has emerged today is a clear sign of the crisis' gravity, and clearly presages future convulsions.
In Poland today, we have a government led by a member of Solidarnosc, but whose key posts (key especially for a regime which relies essentially on force to control society) of the Interior and Defense Ministries remain in the hands of the POUP (in fact of their two previous ministers), in other words, of a party which only a few months ago had still not legalized Solidarnosc, and had imprisoned its leaders. And although all these fine folk are in complete and unbreakable agreement against the working class (we can trust them on this point, at least), the 'cohabitation' between the representatives of two political formations whose economic and political programs are diametrically opposed is liable to be anything but harmonious.
Concretely, the economic measures decided by a ruling group which swears only by 'liberalism' and the 'market economy' are likely to be bitterly resisted by a party whose whole program and reason for existing go against such a perspective. And this resistance will not only appear inside the government. It will come mainly from the entire party apparatus, the hundreds and thousands of 'Nomenklature' bureaucrats whose power, privileges, and income depend on their 'management' (if such a term can be said to have any meaning in the present state of chaos) of the economy.
We have already seen, in Poland as in most of the other Eastern bloc countries, the difficulty of applying the kind of measure planned by the 'experts' of Solidarnosc, even when they have been decided and are applied by the party leadership. Today, while it is obvious that, for the workers, management by these 'experts' will mean an even greater decline in their living conditions, it is much less clear how it can lead the economy to anything other than still greater disorganization.
But this is not an end to the new government's problems. It will be constantly confronted by a 'parallel' government formed around Jaruzelski, and essentially made up of members of the POUP. In reality, this is the government that will be obeyed by the whole existing economic and administrative apparatus, which is also one and the same as the POUP. The Mazowiecki government, hailed as a 'victory for democracy' by all the Western media campaigns, has hardly been formed and its prospects already appear as a simple development of the reigning economic and political chaos.
Solidarnosc's creation in 1980 as an independent trade union, designed to channel, derail, and defeat the immense workers' combativity of the previous summer, brought about at the same time a situation of political crisis which was only resolved with the coup d'etat and repression of December 1981. The fact that the union was outlawed once it had finished its job of sabotage showed that the Stalinist type regimes cannot tolerate with impunity the presence of a 'foreign body' not directly under their own control. Today's formation of a government led by this same trade union (the historically unprecedented formation of a government by a trade union itself says much as to the aberration of the present situation in Poland) can only reproduce on a still grander scale the same kind of contradictions and convulsions. In this sense, the 'solution' of ferocious repression adopted in December 1981 cannot be excluded. Kiszczak, Minister of the Interior during the state of siege, is still at his post ...
The convulsions shaking Poland today, though they may take on an extreme form in this country, are by no means specific to it. All the countries under Stalinist regimes are in the same dead end. Their economies have been particularly brutally hit by the world capitalist crisis, not only because of their backwardness, but because they are totally incapable of adapting to an exacerbation of inter-capitalist competition. The attempts to improve their competitivity by introducing some of the 'classical' norms of capitalist management have only succeeded in provoking a still greater shambles, as can be seen from the utter failure of 'Perestroika' in the USSR.
This shambles is also developing on the political level, with the attempts at 'democratization' designed to let off steam and channel the huge and growing discontent which has been growing for decades within the whole population. This can be seen in the Polish situation, but also in what is happening in Russia: the nationalist explosions provoked by a loosening of central power are a growing threat to the USSR. The cohesion of the whole Eastern bloc is similarly affected: the hysterical declarations by the 'fraternal' parties of East Germany and Czechoslovakia against the 'revisionists' and 'assassins of marxism' in power in Poland and Hungary are not just playacting; they reveal the degree of division that is developing between the different Warsaw Pact countries.
What is in store for the Stalinist regimes is thus not a 'peaceful democratization', still less an economic 'recovery'. With the deepening of the worldwide capitalist crisis, these countries have entered a period of convulsions to an extent unheard of in a past which is nonetheless rich in violent upheavals. The events of this summer give us an image of a world plunging into barbarism: military confrontations, massacres, repression, economic and political convulsions. And yet at the same time, the only force which can offer society another future has raised its head: the proletariat has made its presence most massively felt, precisely in Russia.
USSR: the working class enters the struggle
The proletarian struggles which, for several weeks in July and August, mobilized more than 500,000 workers in the mines of the Kuzbas, the Donbas, and the Siberian North are of great historical importance. They are by far the most massive proletarian movement in the USSR since the revolutionary period of 1917.
But above all, because they have been fought by the proletariat which was subjected most brutally and deeply to four decades of the terrible counter-revolution unleashed all over the world after 1920, they are a brilliant confirmation of the course of history today: the perspective opened by capitalism's acute crisis is not one of world war, but of class confrontations.
These struggles were not as widespread as those in Poland in 1980, nor even as many in the central capitalist countries since 1968. However, they open a new perspective for the Russian proletariat, which for more than half a century has been forced to tolerate in silence the most appalling living conditions. They prove that the workers can express themselves on their class terrain, even in the heart of 'real socialism', against both repression and the poison of nationalist and democratic campaigns.
They are also, as in Poland in 1980, the proof of what the proletariat can do in the absence of the classic organs for the control of the class struggle: the trade unions. The movement's rapid spread from one mining centre to another through the dispatch of mass delegations, the collective control of the struggle through mass meetings, the organization of mass meetings and demonstrations in the streets overcoming the separations between different factories, the election of strike committees responsible to the mass meetings, are the elementary forms of struggle that the working class adopts when the terrain is not, or hardly, occupied by the professional saboteurs.
Faced with the movement's size and dynamic, and to avoid it spreading to other sectors, the authorities had no other choice, temporarily, than to give in to the workers' demands. However, it is obvious that most of these demands will never be really satisfied: the catastrophic economic situation in the USSR makes it impossible. The only demands that are not likely to be put into question are precisely those that reveal the movement's limits: 'autonomy' for factories, allowing them to fix the price of coal and to sell on the domestic and world markets anything not bought up by the state.
Just as in 1980, the constitution of a 'free' trade union proved to be a trap which rapidly closed on the workers, so this 'victory' will very soon be transformed into a means to increase the exploitation of the miners, and to divide them from other sectors of the working class, who will have to pay more to heat themselves. The large-scale struggles of the Russian miners are thus, like the struggles in Poland, an illustration of the political weakness of the proletariat in the Eastern bloc
In this part of the world, despite the great courage and combativity they have shown against an unprecedented series of attacks, the workers are still very vulnerable to nationalist, trade unionist, democratic, or even religious (in the case of Poland) mystifications. As a result, the political convulsions which regularly and increasingly rock these countries are mostly turned against the workers' struggles, as we have seen in Poland where the banning of Solidarnosc between 1981 and 1989 allowed it to polish up its image, damaged by its role as a 'social fireman'. In the same way, the 'political' demands made by the Russian miners (resignation of local party apparatchiks, new constitution, etc), were used to boost Gorbachev's present policy.
This is why the struggles in Russia this summer are a call to the whole world proletariat, and especially in the heart of capitalism where its most powerful and experienced battalions are concentrated. These struggles bear witness to the depth, strength, and importance of today's class combat. At the same time, they highlight the responsibility of the proletariat in the heartlands. Only the confrontation and denunciation in struggle of the most sophisticated traps laid by the world's strongest and most experienced bourgeoisie will allow the proletariat in the Eastern bloc to confront these same traps victoriously. The struggles mobilizing more than 100,000 workers in the hospitals, and the telecommunications and electrical industries, which have taken place in the United States, the world's greatest power, this summer at the same time as the struggles in the world's second power, are the proof that the proletariat in the central countries is continuing in this direction. In the same way, the great combativity which has appeared over several months in Britain against the union sabotage set up by the world's politically strongest bourgeoisie, especially in the docking and transport industries, are another step down this road.
FM 7/9/89
The International Communist Current has just held its 8th Congress. With the delegations from the ICC's ten sections, delegates from the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista (GPI) of Mexico, and from Communist Internationalist (CI) of India also took part in the Congress. Their active and enthusiastic participation brought a new breath of energy and confidence to our discussions, from the periphery of capitalism where the proletarian struggle is most difficult, where the conditions for militant communist activity are least favorable; their presence gave the tone to the whole Congress. The GPI delegation was mandated to seek its militants' entry into our organization; their candidature was discussed and accepted at the Congress opening session. We will come back to this later.
This Congress was held at a moment of rapid historical acceleration. Capitalism is leading humanity to disaster. Every day, living conditions for the vast majority of human beings worsen dramatically; hunger riots proliferate; for billions, life expectancy is declining; all kinds of catastrophes claim thousands of victims, and wars, millions.
The situation of the working class throughout the world, including in the rich developed countries of the northern hemisphere, is also getting constantly worse; unemployment is rising, wages falling, job and living conditions worsening. The working class has not remained passive and as it resists, step by step, the attacks against it, it is developing its struggle, its experience, and its consciousness. The dynamic of developing workers' struggles has been confirmed most recently in the massive strikes this summer in Great Britain and the USSR. In both East and West, the international proletariat is fighting back against capital.
It is clear what is at stake: capitalism is leading us towards a still more brutal collapse into economic disaster, and to a 3rd World War. Only the proletariat's resistance is preventing today, and can prevent tomorrow, the unleashing of another world-wide holocaust: only the development of its struggle can open humanity's way to the revolutionary perspective of communism.
We will not enter here into the Congress' debates on the international situation. We refer our readers to the resolution adopted by the Congress, and to its presentation in this issue of the International Review. Suffice it to say that the Congress confirmed the validity of our previous orientations, and their acceleration, in the three aspects of the international situation: the economic crisis, inter-imperialist tensions, and the class struggle. It reaffirmed the validity and the immediacy of the historic course towards class confrontations: recent years have not put this perspective in question; despite its weaknesses and difficulties, the proletariat has not suffered any major defeats which could overturn this course, and capitalism's road to world war remains blocked. More particularly, the Congress confirmed, against the lies and propaganda of the bourgeoisie but also against the doubts, hesitations, lack of confidence and skepticism currently reigning amongst the groups of the proletarian political milieu, the continuing reality of the wave of workers' struggles which has been developing on an international level since 1983.
The GPI and CI were both formed around, and on the basis of, our general analyses of the present period; and specifically of the recognition of a historic course towards class confrontations. The interventions by the Indian delegate, and by the ICC's new militants in Mexico, were thus fully integrated into the demonstration by the whole Congress of its confidence in the proletarian combat, and in its struggles today. The Congress' ability to do this was vital, and the resolution it adopted answered this need clearly. It also, as the reader will see, went further in clarifying the different characteristics of the present period, and decided to open a debate on the question of social decomposition.
Defense and reinforcement of the revolutionary organization
This general understanding of what is at stake historically today is the framework wherein revolutionary organizations, which are both a product of the world proletariat's combat and active participants in it, must mobilize, and prepare to take part in their class' historic struggle. Their role is vital: on the basis of the clearest possible understanding of the present situation and its perspectives, it is down to them, today, to take on the vanguard political struggle within the workers' struggles.
This is why the perspectives for our organization's activity drawn up by the Congress are one with our analysis of the present historical period. After evaluating positively the militant work accomplished since the 7th Congress, the resolution adopted on our activities reaffirmed our existing orientation:
"The activities of the ICC in the coming two years must be in continuity with the tasks undertaken since the revival of class combats in 1983, tasks outlined at our two previous Congresses in 1985 and 1987 which give priority to intervention in the workers' struggles, to active participation in orienting the struggle, and showing the need for a greater and more long-term militant commitment faced with the perspectives:
- of new integrations coming out of the present wave of class struggle, in the first place the constitution of a new territorial section, which in the short term is one of the most important issues facing the ICC;
- of a more important role for the organization in the process leading to the unification of workers' struggles (...)
The organization's most recent experience has allowed us to highlight several lessons which must be fully integrated into the perspectives for our activities:
- the need to fight for the holding of open mass meetings, which aim right from the start to widen the struggle, to spread it geographically ( ... )
- the need for unitary demands, against demagogic attempts to outbid everyone else, and against sectional particularities;
- the necessity of not being naive faced with the action of the bourgeoisie on the ground, so as to be able to foil the maneuvers aimed at recuperating the struggle by the unions and the coordinations that are developing today;
- the need to be in the forefront of intervention in the constitution and the action of the struggle committees (...)."
In the present period, intervention in the workers' struggles determines every aspect of a revolutionary organization's activity. To carry out their tasks of intervention, revolutionaries need solid centralized political organizations. The question of the political organization and its defense has always been a central one. Communist organizations are subject to the pressure both of bourgeois, and of petty-bourgeois ideology, which appears in individualism, localism, immediatism, etc. This pressure is still stronger on today's communist groups, due to the effects of the social decomposition that affects the whole of capitalist society. As the resolution on activities emphasizes:
"Bourgeois society's decomposition, in the absence of any perspective of an immediate way out, exerts its pressure on the proletariat and its political organisations (... )".
This increased pressure on communist groups makes the question of the defense of the revolutionary organization still more crucial. This was the second element of the Congress' discussion on our activities. The resolution reaffirms that, against this danger, "the ICC's greatest strength lies in its international, unified, and centralized nature". In this sense, the Congress required of all the organization, all its sections and all its militants, to strengthen the ICC's organizational fabric, its collective work, its international centralization, to develop a more rigorous functioning and a greater militant commitment. The object is to counter today's particular effects of decomposition on revolutionary political groups, such as localism, individualism, or even destructive activities and maneuvers.
Revolucion Mundial's constitution as a section of the ICC
Confidence in the proletarian struggle; confidence in the role and intervention of revolutionaries; confidence in the ICC; as we have said, this is what was at stake in the Congress. The presence of the delegate from CI, the candidature of the comrades from Mexico, as well as their interventions during the debates, were all illustrations of their own confidence on these three levels which placed these comrades in the same dynamic as the rest of the Congress. Apart from the various texts and resolutions it adopted, the Congress' clearest demonstration of confidence was its adoption of the resolution integrating the comrades of the GPI into the ICC, and the formation of a new section in Mexico. Here are the most important extracts:
"1. A product of the development of the class struggle, the Grupo Proletario Internacionalista is a communist group which was constituted with the ICC's active participation - on the basis of the ICC's political positions and of its general orientations, in particular that of intervention in the class struggle ( ... )
2. The GPI's first Congress saw the ratification by all its militants of ( ... ) the political class positions developed by the group. In close collaboration with the ICC, it opened up a process of political reapropriation and clarification, and drew out the main lines for establishing a coherent political presence by the group in Mexico.
3. One year later, the GPI's second Congress -- like the ICC -- drew up a positive balance-sheet of this process of political clarification. In fact, the group had:
- acquainted itself with, confronted, and taken position on the different currents and groups of the political milieu, defended the programmatic, theoretical, and political positions of the ICC,
- developed the same orientations as the ICC, of intervention in workers' struggles and in the proletarian political movement,
- assumed a political presence at both a local and an international level,
- maintained a lively, intense and fruitful internal political life.
4. The GPI's second Congress has successfully confronted and overcome the group's councilist weaknesses, which were expressed in the process of political clarification:
- on the theoretical level by the unanimous adoption of a correct position on class consciousness and the party,
- on the political level by the unanimous demand for the opening of the process of it militants' integration, to which the ICC reacted favorably.
5. Seven months later, the ICC's VIIIth Congress evaluates this process of integration positively. The comrades of the GPI have unanimously, after in-depth discussion, pronounced their agreement with the ICC's Platform and Statutes. Apart from this, the GPI has, since the opening of this process, assumed the tasks of a true section of the ICC, by a regular and frequent correspondence, by taking positions in the ICC's debates, by intervening in the class struggle, and ensuring the regular publication of Revolucion Mundial ( ... ).
6. The VIIIth Congress of the ICC ( ...)j, conscious of the difficulties for the organization of integrating a group of militants in a relatively isolated country, considers that the process of the GPI comrades' integration with the ICC is drawing to a close. Consequently, the Congress pronounces itself for the integration of the GPI militants into the organization, and their constitution as the ICC's section in Mexico".
Following this decision by the Congress, the Mexican delegation declared, as it had been mandated to do, the dissolution of the GPI. Needless to say, from this moment on, the delegates intervened in the Congress as delegates of Revolucion Mundial, the new section in Mexico, and as full members of the ICC. The high degree of political clarity expressed in its preparation for the Congress, and its delegation's energetic and important participation in the debates shows that the formation of the new section represents a considerable reinforcement of the ICC both politically and in terms of its presence on the American continent.
A reinforcement of the proletarian political milieu
This dynamic of political clarification, militant commitment, and regroupment, with the ICC in particular, is not unique to the comrades of RM. At the Congress' closure, the delegate from CI, a group with which we have been in close contact for years, posed his candidature to our organization; we have accepted this candidature. This integration and the publication of Communist Internationalist as the ICC's organ in India opens the perspective of our organization's political presence, and its 12th section, in a country (and in the Asian continent) where revolutionary forces are all but non-existent and where, despite a great combativity as we have seen in India particularly, the proletariat is dispersed and lacking in historical and political experience.
Nor, it should be said, is this process of movement towards and integration in the ICC something peculiar to the countries of the periphery. We have witnessed, and taken part in a renewal of contacts and a dynamic towards militant commitment in Europe, where the ICC and the major communist groups and currents are already present.
But let us be clear about one thing: however enthusiastic we may be over this increased militant strength, there can be no question, for us, of triumphalism. We are all too aware of what is at stake historically, of the proletariat's difficulties and the weakness of revolutionary forces.
These new integrations are a success for the ICC, which since its foundation has claimed and worked to be a real international pole of political reference and regroupment. They confirm the validity of our political positions in the periphery and the developed countries of every continent; they confirm the orientation of our intervention towards the proletarian political movement. But, and we are extremely aware of this, they also give us new and greater responsibilities: on the one hand, we must make these integrations a complete success; on the other, our militant responsibility towards the world proletariat is increased.
The emergence of elements and political groups in countries of the periphery (India, Latin America), the appearance of a new generation of militants, are the product of a historical period and of today's workers' struggles. Moreover as we have seen, it is essentially on the basis of a more or less clear recognition of the historic course towards class confrontations, and of the reality of the present wave of struggles, that these groups have been formed.
The question of the course of history is the central one "separating" the groups of the proletarian political movement. Over and above their existing programmatic differences, this is what determines today the various groups' and currents' dynamics: either towards intervention in the struggle and in the revolutionary movement, towards discussion and political confrontation, and eventually regroupment; or towards skepticism at the struggle, refusal and fear of intervention, retreat into sectarianism, dispersal, discouragement, and sclerosis.
The recognition of the development of the workers' struggle, and revolutionaries' readiness to intervene in them, lies at the basis of revolutionary groups' ability to confront their responsibilities: within the struggle itself, of course, but also towards those elements and groups that appear throughout the world, and towards the need to develop centralized and militant organizations capable of acting as poles of reference and regroupment.
In our opinion, the strengthening of the ICC represents a strengthening of the entire proletarian political movement. These are the first real and significant regroupments for a decade, in fact since the formation of the ICC's section in Sweden. They mark a break with the proliferation of splits, dispersion, and loss of militant forces. For all proletarian political groups, for all emerging revolutionary elements, this should be an element of confidence in the present situation, and a call to militant sense of responsibilities.
History is accelerating on every level
Already, we can make a positive evaluation of the 8th Congress. It reaffirmed our confidence in today's workers' struggles, and our conviction that they will develop during the coming period; it reaffirmed our orientation towards intervention in these struggles. The Congress strengthened further the ICC's international and centralized nature with a view to its defense. It integrated new comrades, and formed a new section and new publications: Revolucion Mundial, and Communist Internationalist. This was a truly "world" Congress, with the participation of comrades from Europe, America, and Asia.
History is accelerating.
The Congress was able to take its place within this historic framework. The 8th Congress of the ICC was a product of this historical acceleration; we have no doubt that it will also be a moment and a factor within it.
The international Situation
Presentation of the resolution
We're publishing here the Resolution on the International Situation adopted by the 8th Congress of the ICC. This Resolution is based on a very detailed report which is too long to publish in this Review. However, given the synthetical character of the Resolution we judged that it would be useful to precede it with some extracts, not from the report itself, but from the presentation made on it at the Congress, extracts which we have accompanied with a number of statistics taken from the report.
Usually, the report for a congress looks at the evolution of the situation since the preceding congress. In particular, it examines the extent to which the perspectives drawn up two years before have been verified. But the present report doesn't limit itself to examining the past two years. It attempts to make a balance-sheet of the whole 1980s, the years we've called the 'years of truth.'
Why such a choice?
Because at the beginning of the decade, we announced that it was going to be a turning point in the evolution of the international situation. A turning point between:
* a period in which the bourgeoisie was still trying to hide from the working class - and from itself - the gravity of the convulsions of its system;
* and a period in which these convulsions would reach such a level that the ruling class could no longer hide the fact that capitalism had reached a dead-end: a period in which this fact would become plain to the whole of society.
This distinction between the two periods would obviously have its repercussions on all aspects of the world situation. In particular it would underline exactly what was at stake in the struggles of the working class.
For the present congress, which is the last congress of the '80s, it is thus important to verify the validity of 'this general orientation we adopted ten years ago. In particular it is important to show that this orientation has in no way been refuted, above all in the face of doubts and fluctuations which exist in the proletarian political milieu and which lead to an under-estimation of what's at stake in the present period, especially the importance of the struggles of the working class.
On the economic crisis
It is vital that this congress arrives at a real clarity on this subject. In particular, even before drawing out the catastrophic perspective for the evolution of capitalism in the years ahead, it is necessary to emphasize the gravity of the crisis right now.
Why is it necessary to make such a balance-sheet?
1) For one obvious reason: our capacity to draw out the future perspectives for capitalism depends closely on the validity of the framework we use for analyzing the past situation.
2) Because, and this too is obvious, a correct evaluation of the present gravity of the crisis will to a large extent determine our capacity to pronounce on the real potential of the current struggles of the class, particularly in response to the under-estimations which exist in the political milieu.
3) Because there have been tendencies within the organization to under-estimate the real seriousness of the collapse of the capitalist economy, based on a one-sided interpretation of the figures usually provided by the bourgeoisie, such as 'Gross National Product' or the volume of the world market.
Such an error can be very dangerous. It could lead us to get trapped in a view similar to that of Vercesi1 at the end of the '30s, when he claimed that capitalism had henceforward overcome its crisis. This view was based on the growth of the crude figures of production without any concern for what was being produced (in reality, mainly weapons) or without asking who was going to pay for it.
It's precisely for this reason that the report, as well as the resolution, base their appreciation of the considerable aggravation of the capitalist crisis throughout the '80s not so much on these figures (which on their own seem to indicate that there's been 'growth', particularly in these last few years), but on a whole series of other elements which, taken together, are much more significant. We refer to the following elements:
- the dizzying growth in the debt of the under-developed countries, but also of the main world power as well as the public administrations of all countries;
- the continuous rise in arms spending, but also in all the unproductive sectors such as, for example, the banking sector - and this to the detriment of the productive sectors (production of consumer goods and the means of production);
- the acceleration of the process of creating industrial deserts, which has meant the disappearance of whole chunks of the productive apparatus and thrown millions of workers into unemployment;
- the enormous aggravation of unemployment throughout the '80s and, more generally, the considerable development of absolute pauperization within the working class of the most advanced countries.
On this latter point, it's worth making a comment that will help denounce the present campaigns of the bourgeoisie about the impending improvement of the situation in the USA. The figures given in the report show that there's been a real impoverishment of the working class in this country. But we also draw the attention of the congress to the report by the US section at its last conference (see International Review 64). This report clearly shows that the bourgeoisie's figures indicating a so-called drop in unemployment to the level it was in the '70s are in fact an attempt to mask a tragic aggravation of the situation: the real level of unemployment is three times higher than the official level;
- finally, one of the most basic expressions of the worsening convulsions of the capitalist economy is provided by the increasing number of calamities hitting the under-developed countries: the malnutrition and famine which claim more and more victims, the catastrophes that have turned these countries into a true hell for hundreds of millions of human beings.
In what way should we consider these different phenomena as highly significant manifestations of the collapse of the capitalist economy?
As far as generalized debt is concerned, we have here a clear expression of the underlying cause of the capitalist crisis: the general saturation of markets, lacking real solvent outlets for the realization of surplus-value, production has to a large extent been poured into fictitious markets.
We can take three examples:
1. During the 1970s, there was a considerable increase in imports by the under-developed countries. The commodities purchased came mainly from the advanced countries, which made it possible for production there to revive for a while. But how where these purchases to be paid for? Through the loans taken out by the under-developed countries from their suppliers (see table 1). If the buying countries were really reimbursing their debts, we could consider that these commodities had really been sold, that the value they contained had effectively been realized. But we all know that these debts will never be reimbursed2. This means that, globally speaking, these products haven't been sold against a real payment, but against promises of payment, promises that can never be kept. We say globally speaking, because the individual capitalists who effected these sales may have been paid. But this doesn't alter the real problem. What accrued to the capitalists has been advanced by the banks or states which for their part will never be reimbursed. This is the true significance of all the present negotiations (designated by the term 'Brady plan') which aim to make major reductions in the debts, of a certain number of under-developed countries, beginning with Mexico (in order to avoid a situation where these countries openly declare their bankruptcy and cease all repayments). This 'moratorium' on a part of the debts means that, from now on, it is officially envisaged that the banks or the lending countries will not recover the whole of what they've loaned.
Table 1. Total debt of under-developed countries (in billions of dollars)
|
1970 |
1975 |
1980 |
1985 |
1988 |
Current debt |
70 |
170 |
580 |
950 |
1320 |
Mean annual increase for the period |
|
20 |
82 |
74 |
123 |
(Source: Banque mondiale, 1988)
2) Another example is the explosion of the USA's foreign debt. In 1985, for the first time since 1914, America became a debtor vis-as-vis the rest of the world. This was a considerable event, at least as important as the USA's first trade deficit since the first world war (1968) and as the first devaluation of the dollar since 1934 (1971). The fact that the planet's' main economic power, which for years had been the world's financier, should now find itself in the situation of some under-developed country or a second-rate power, like France for example, says a lot about the degradation of the whole world economy and represents a new stage in its collapse.
By the end of 1987, the net foreign (the total of debts minus the total of credits) of the USA had already risen to 368 billion dollars (or 8.1% of GNP). The world champion of foreign debt was no longer Brazil; Uncle Sam had already gone three times better. And the situation isn't about to improve, because the main cause of this debt, the deficit in the balance of trade remains at a considerable level. What's more even if this deficit were to be miraculousl y reabsorbed, the USA's foreign debt would continue to grow to the extent that, like any Latin American country, the states must continue to borrow in order to pay back the interest on its debts. On top of this, the balance between American investment abroad, and foreign investment in America, which was still 20.4 billion dollars in the black in 1987 - a fact which limited the financial consequences of the trade deficit - went into the red in 1988 and has continued to slide since then (see table 2).
On the basis of these projections, the external debt of the USA is thus is destined to grow very considerably in future: it's due to reach 1000 billion dollars in 1992 and 1400 billion in 1997. And so, just like the debts of the third world countries, the American debt has no chance- of being reimbursed.
Table 2. US Foreign debt (annual figures in $ billions)
|
71-75 |
76-80 |
81-85 |
1986 |
1988 |
1990 |
Current account |
|
-5 |
-56 |
-139 |
-132 |
-108 |
Balance of trade Balance of investment |
|
-26 |
-74 |
-144 |
-121 |
-89 |
Revenue |
|
|
|
23 |
-3 |
-20 |
(Source: OCDE, decembre 1988; après 1987, les valeurs sont estimees)
3) The third example is that of the budget deficits, the astronomical accumulation of debts by all states (see tables 3 and 4). At the last Congress, we already pointed out that it was to a large extent these deficits, and particularly the federal deficit of the USA, which had permitted a timid revival of production in 1983.
And it's the same problem again today. These debts will also never be reimbursed, except at the price of even more astronomical debts (table 3 shows that simply the interest is already more than 10% of state expenditure in most of the advanced countries: this is already becoming a major item in national budgets). And the production bought through these debts, which is to large extent armaments, will also never really be paid for.
Table 3. Evolution of net national debt
|
1980 |
1985 |
1987 |
United States |
19.7 |
27.8 |
30.3 |
Japan |
17.3 |
26.8 |
25.9 |
West Germany |
14.3 |
21.9 |
23.0 |
France |
14.3 |
23.8 |
26.6 |
Great Britain |
47.5 |
46.6 |
43.4 |
Italy |
53.6 |
80.9 |
89.1 |
Average 7 major countries |
22.0 |
31.4 |
33.4 |
Belgium |
68.9 |
110.5 |
116.7 |
(Source: OCDE, decembre 1988)
Table 4. Interest payments of the Central Administration (percentage of expenditures)
|
1980 |
1985 |
1987 |
United States |
8.7 |
13.2 |
13.3 |
Japan |
10.3 |
17.2 |
17.7 (*) |
Italy |
14.8 |
17.3 |
18.7 (*) |
(*) 1986.
(Source: OCDE, decembre 88)
In the final analysis, during these years, a good part of world production hasn't been sold but simply given. This production may correspond to goods that are really made, but it's not a production of values, ie of the only thing that interests capitalism. It hasn't allowed a real accumulation of capital. Global capital is reproduced on an increasingly narrow basis. Taken as a whole, capitalism hasn't grown richer. On the contrary, it has grown poorer.
And capitalism has grown all the more poor for the fact that we've seen a spectacular growth in armaments3 and unproductive expenditure in general (see table 5).
Table 5. Growth in military spending according to official figures (in billions of 1986 dollars)
|
1980 |
1987 |
% growth |
United States |
194.5 |
275.2 |
41.5 |
Japan |
15.2 |
20.5 |
35.2 |
Italy |
11.2 |
13.9 |
25.5 |
United Kingdom |
23.5 |
27.0 |
15.0 |
France |
26.1 |
29.0 |
11.2 |
Spain |
6.5 |
7.2 |
10.3 |
West Germany |
21.6 |
22.5 |
4.2 |
East Germany |
3.5 |
5.4 |
52.2 |
South Korea |
3.7 |
5.3 |
44.1 |
Taiwan |
3.3 |
4.7 |
40.4 |
(Source: SIPRI, Yearbook 1988)
Arms can't be counted in the 'plus' column in the general balance-sheet of world production on the contrary, they have to go in the minus column. Contrary to what Rosa Luxemburg wrote in The Accumulation of Capital in 1912, and to what Vercesi said at the end of the '30s, militarism is not at all a field of accumulation for capital. Armaments may enrich the individual capitalists who sell them, but not capitalism as a whole since they can't be incorporated into a new cycle of production. At best, when they're not used, they constitute a sterilization of capital. And when they are used, they result in a destruction of capital.
Thus, to get a real idea of the evolution of the world economy, to get some idea of the real values produced, you'd have to subtract from the official production figures (GNP for example) the figures for the debts in the period under consideration, as well as the figures corresponding to arms expenditure and all the unproductive expenses. In the case of the USA, for example, in the period 1980-87, merely the growth in the state's debt is higher than the growth of GNP; 2.7% of the GNP for the growth of debt, 2.4% for the average yearly growth of GNP itself. Thus, for the decade just ending, if you merely take into account the budget deficits, you can already see that there's been a regression in the main world economy. A regression that in reality is much more significant, because of:
1) other debts (foreign debt, debts of particular: enterprises, of local administrations, etc);
2) enormous unproductive expenditure.
In the last analysis, even if we don't have exact figures enabling us to calculate on a world scale the real decline of capitalist production, we can conclude just from the preceding example how real this global impoverishment of society is.
It's only in this framework - and not by seeing the stagnation or fall in GNP as the manifestation par excellence of the capitalist crisis - that we can grasp the real significance of the 'exceptional rates of growth' that the bourgeoisie has been rejoicing about these last two years. In reality, if we subtract from these formidable 'rates of growth' everything appertaining to the sterilization of capital and to debt, we would have a plainly negative growth rate. Faced with an increasingly saturated world market, a rise in production figures can only correspond to a new rise in debts - one even more considerable than the previous increases.
It's by seeing the real impoverishment of the whole of capitalist society, the real destruction of capital throughout the 80s, that we can understand the other phenomena analyzed in the report.
Thus, the creation of industrial deserts is a flagrant illustration of this destruction of capital. Table 6 gives us a concrete, statistical picture of this reality, which involves the blowing up or demolishing of newly-built factories, the transformation of certain industrial zones into eerie landscapes of desolation and ruin, and above all, massive redundancies for the workers. For example, this table shows us that in the USA, between 1980 and 1986, jobs fell by 1.35 million in industry while growing by 3.71 million in the hotel and restaurant sectors and 3.99 million in the financial-insurance-business sectors. The socalled 'reduction in unemployment' which the American bourgeoisie talks about so much has in no way meant an improvement in the real productive capacity of the American economy: in what way is the 'reconversion' of a skilled metal worker into a hot-dog seller something positive for the capitalist economy, not to mention for the worker himself?
Similarly the rise in real unemployment, the absolute impoverishment of the working class and the sinking of the under-developed countries into a state of total deprivation (for an impressive tableau of this, see the article in IR 57, 'Economic Balance Sheet of the 1980s: the barbaric agony of Capitalism') are manifestations of this global impoverishment of capitalism, of the historic impasse of this system4, an impoverishment which the ruling class makes the exploited and the poverty-stricken masses pay for.
Table 6. Development of employment by sector of the economy (in millions and percentage variation)
|
1974 |
1980 |
1987 |
1987/80 |
GERMANY |
|
|
|
|
Mines, etc |
0.26 |
0.23 |
0.21 |
-8.1% |
Industries |
9.62 |
8.99 |
8.25 |
-8.2% |
Construction |
2.18 |
2.09 |
1.73 |
-17.2% |
Commerce, hotels, etc |
4.3 |
4.28 |
4.15 |
-3.1% |
Finance, assurances, etc |
0.69 |
0.74 |
0.83 |
+11.5% |
GREAT BRITAIN |
|
|
|
|
Mines, etc |
0.36 |
0.36 |
0.21 |
-42.1% |
Industries |
8.03 |
7.08 |
5.40 |
-23.8% |
Construction |
1.69 |
1.62 |
1.53 |
-5.5% |
Commerce, hotels, etc |
4.47 |
4.82 |
5.06 |
+5.0% |
Finance, assurances, etc |
1.62 |
1.84 |
2.61 |
+41.9% |
UNITED STATES (*) |
|
|
|
|
Mines, etc |
0.72 |
1.07 |
0.81 |
-24.9% |
Industries |
20.42 |
20.84 |
19.49 |
-6.5% |
Construction |
5.15 |
5.82 |
6.55 |
+12.4% |
Commerce, hotels, etc |
20.62 |
24.40 |
28.11 |
+15.2% |
Finance, assurances, etc |
8.56 |
11.60 |
15.60 |
+34.4% |
(Source: OECD, national accounts, 1988)
(*) 1986, not 1987
This is why the so-called 'growth' the bourgeoisie has boasted about since 1983 has been accompanied by unprecedented attacks on the working class. These attacks obviously aren't the expression of some deliberate 'wickedness' on the bourgeoisie's part, but rather of the authentic collapse of the capitalist economy over the course of these years. A collapse which the bourgeoisie has managed to prevent from appearing too openly, in the form of an overt recession, by playing tricks with the law of value, by strengthening state capitalist policies at the level of the blocs, and by diving headlong into debt.
A remark on this question of 'recession.' In the interests of clarity, the resolution uses the term 'open recession' to mean the stagnation or fall in the capitalist indicators themselves, which reveals openly the reality that the bourgeoisie tries to hide, and to hide from itself: the collapse of value production.
This collapse, as the report shows, continues even during moments the bourgeoisie counts as phases of 'recovery.' It's this last phenomenon which the resolution describes as 'recession.'
To conclude this part on the economic crisis, we must underline once again that the considerable aggravation of the crisis of capitalism, and of attacks against the working class, throughout the '80s, is an unambiguous confirmation of the perspective we drew up ten years ago. Similarly, we have to underline that this situation can only get considerably worse, on a world scale, in the period ahead, because capitalism today is in a total impasse.
On the imperialist conflicts
On this question, which hasn't raised any major debates, the presentation will be very brief and will limit itself to reaffirming a few basic ideas:
1) It's only by basing oneself firmly on the framework of marxism that one can understand the real evolution of imperialist conflicts: beyond all the ideological campaigns, the aggravation of the capitalist crisis can only lead to an intensification of the real antagonisms between the imperialist blocs.
2) A manifestation of this intensification, the offensive of the US bloc, and the success it has achieved, enable us to explain the recent evolution of Russian diplomacy and the USSR's withdrawal from various positions it could no longer hold onto.
3) This diplomatic evolution therefore in no way means that we're beginning to see an attenuation in the antagonisms between the great powers - on the contrary; nor that the conflicts which have ravaged the numerous points on the globe are now going to disappear. In a whole number of places, wars and massacres continue and can intensify from one day to the next, bringing in their wake an increasing toll of corpses and calamities.
4) In the present pacifist campaigns, one of the decisive elements is the necessity for the whole bourgeoisie to hide from the working class what's really at stake in the present period, at a time when its struggles are developing and deepening.
The evolution of the class struggle
The essential aim of the presentation here is 'to make explicit the overall balance sheet of the class struggle in the '80s.
In order to provide the broad outlines of this balance sheet, to see how far the movement has come, we have to see briefly where the proletariat was at the beginning of the decade.
The beginning of the 1980s was marked by a contrast between:
* on the one hand, the weakening of the proletarian struggle in the big working class concentrations of the advanced countries of the western bloc, in particular of western Europe, following the main battles of the second wave of struggles (1978-79);
* on the other hand, the mighty confrontations in Poland in the summer of 1980, which were the culminating point in this wave. This weakening of the struggle of the decisive battalions of the world proletariat was due to a large extent to the strategy of the left in opposition which the bourgeoisie adopted right from the start of the second wave. This new card of the bourgeoisie surprised the working class and in some ways broke its élan. This is why the combat in Poland took place in a general context that was unfavorable, in a situation of international isolation. This situation obviously made it easier to derail the struggle onto the terrain of trade unionism, of democratic and nationalistic mystifications, and, consequently, facilitated the brutal repression of December '81.
In turn, the cruel defeat suffered by the proletariat in Poland could only aggravate, for the time being, the demoralization, demobilization and disarray of the proletariat in other countries. In particular, it made it possible to polish up the image of trade unionism both east and west. This is why we talked about a reflux, a defeat for the working class, not only at the level of its will to fight, but also at the ideological level.
However, this reflux didn't last long. From the autumn of '83, a third wave of struggles began to develop, a particularly powerful wave which showed that the combativity of the proletariat was intact, and which was characterized by massive and simultaneous struggles.
Faced with this wave of workers' struggles, the bourgeoisie in many places adopted a strategy of dispersing its attacks, with the aim of fragmenting the struggles; this strategy was accompanied by a policy of immobilization by the unions wherever they had lost most credibility. But from the spring of '86, the generalized struggles in the public sector in Belgium, as well as the railway workers' strike in France that December, showed the limits of this strategy, owing to the considerable aggravation of the economic situation which compelled the bourgeoisie to carry out increasingly frontal attacks. From this point, and for a whole historic period to come, the essential question posed by these experiences of the class, and by the very nature of the capitalist offensive, was that of the unification of struggles. That is to say a form of mobilization not limited to a simple extension, but one in which the working class takes direct charge of extension through its general assemblies, with the aim of forming a united front against the bourgeoisie.
Faced with these necessities and potentialities of the struggle, it's obvious the bourgeoisie doesn't remain inactive. It deploys in a still-more systematic manner than before the classic weapons of the left in opposition:
- the radicalization of the traditional unions
- the use of base unionism
- the policy which entails these organs going one step ahead of the struggle in order to defuse it.
But also, especially where trade unionism is most discredited, it is using new weapons like the coordinations, which complete or precede the work of the unions. Finally, in numerous countries the poison of corporatism with the aim of trapping the workers in a false choice between 'extension through the unions' and 'self-organized' isolation in one trade.
For the moment, this collection of maneuvers has succeeded in disorienting the working class and impeding the movement towards the unification of struggles. This doesn't mean that the dynamic of the movement has been put into question, since even the radicalization of bourgeois maneuvers is, just like all the present media campaigns, pacifism and the rest, a sign of the growing potential for wider and much more conscious combats.
In this sense, the overall balance sheet we have to draw up for the '80s is not one indicating a stagnation of class struggle, but one indicating a decisive advance. This advance can be gauged in the contrast between the beginning of the 80s, which saw a momentary strengthening of trade unionism, and the end of the period, in which, as the comrades of World Revolution put it, "the bourgeoisie is maneuvering to set up 'anti-union' structures in the struggles of the working class."
The report also makes explicit the historical framework in which the proletarian struggle is unfolding today, a framework which explains the slow pace of its development, and the difficulties faced by the proletariat, difficulties which the bourgeoisie systematically exploits in its various maneuvers. A number of elements advanced here have already been evoked in the past (slow rhythm of the crisis itself, though this is tending to accelerate today), the weight of the break in organic continuity with the past workers' movement and the inexperience of the new generations of workers). But the report makes a particular point on the question of the decomposition of capitalist society, something which has given rise to numerous debates in the organization.
It was indispensable to raise this question for several reasons:
a) First, it's only recently that this question has been clearly brought out and made explicit by the ICC (though we had already identified it in relation to terrorist attacks in Paris in the autumn of '86).
b) It's important to examine to what extent a phenomenon that affects the revolutionary organizations (and which is particularly underlined in the activities report) also weighs on the class whose avant-garde these organizations are.
The presentation won't go back over what's said in the report. We will limit ourselves to putting forward the following points:
1) For a long time the ICC has been saying that the objective conditions in which workers' struggles are developing today (capitalism's plunge into an economic crisis that hits all countries simultaneously) are much more favorable to the success of the revolution that the conditions that lay at the origin of the first revolutionary wave (le, the first imperialist war).
2) Similarly, we've shown that the subjective conditions are also more favorable to the extent that today there are no bi g workers' parties, like the Socialist parties, whose betrayal within the decisive period itself could, as in the past, throw the proletariat into disarray.
3) At the same time, we've also pointed to the specific difficulties and obstacles encountered by the present historical resurgence of class struggle: the weight of the organic break, the distrust of politics, the weight of councilism (see in particular the resolution on the international situation adopted by the 6th Congress of the ICC).
It was important, therefore, to say - in accord with what we've written about the difficulties encountered by the organization that the phenomenon of decomposition is a real weight in the present period and will continue to be so for some time to come; that it constitutes a very serious danger that the class will have to face up to if it is to protect itself from it and find the means to turn it back against capitalism.
While it is necessary to be aware of the gravity of this phenomenon, that obviously doesn't mean that all aspects of decomposition are an obstacle to the development of consciousness in the proletariat. The objective elements which clearly expose the total barbarism that society is sinking into can only increase the workers' disgust for the system and thus contribute to the development of class consciousness. Similarly, at the level of ideological decomposition, elements like the corruption of the bourgeois class, of the collapse of the traditional pillars of its ideological domination also contribute to an understanding of the bankruptcy of capitalism. But on the other hand, all the elements of ideological decay which weigh on the revolutionary organization also weigh, and still more heavily, on the class as a whole, making all sorts of difficulties for the development of the class struggle and of class consciousness.
But this observation should in no way be a source of demoralization or skepticism.
1) Throughout the '80s, despite this negative weight of decomposition, which has been systematically exploited by the bourgeoisie, the proletariat has still been able to push forward its struggles in response to the aggravation of the crisis which, as we've so often said, has once again shown itself to be 'the best ally of the working class.'
2) The weight of decomposition is a challenge that has to be taken up by the working class. By struggling against its influences, particularly by strengthening its class unity and solidarity through collective action, the proletariat itself will be forging the weapons for the overthrow of capitalism.
3) In this combat against the weight of decomposition, revolutionaries have a crucial role to play. Just as the recognition that this weight affects our own ranks isn't something that should demoralize us but, on the contrary, should strengthen our vigilance and determination, the recognition that the working class itself is encountering these difficulties should also lead to greater determination and conviction In our intervention in the class.
To conclude this presentation, we'd say that the discussion on the international situation should not only lead to greater clarity in our ranks but also:
- to a greater confidence in the validity of the analyses upon which the ICC was formed and has developed, and in particular our confidence in the development of the class struggle towards increasingly profound and generalized confrontations, towards a revolutionary period;
- to a greater determination to carry out the responsibilities which the proletariat has conferred on us.
Resolution on the international situation
1) The acceleration of history throughout the 80s has highlighted the insurmountable contradictions of capitalism. The 80s have been years of truth.
Truth about the deepening of the economic crisis.
Truth about the aggravation of imperialist tensions.
Truth about the development of the class struggle.
As reality appears more and more clearly, the ruling class has nothing but lies to offer: "growth", "peace" and "social calm".
The economic crisis
2) During this decade, the living standards of the working class have been subjected to the strongest attack since the war:
- massive development of unemployment and temporary work
- attacks on wages, reduction of buying power
- amputation of the social wage.
While the proletariat of the industrialized countries has suffered from growing impoverishment, the majority of the world population has found itself at the mercy of famine and rationing.
3) The bourgeoisie, against all the evidence that the exploited of the world feel in their bones, is singing hymns to the new-found "growth" in its economy. This "growth" is a myth.
This so-called "growth" in production has been financed by a frenetic resort to credit and through the gigantic trade and budget deficits of the USA, in a purely artificial manner. These credits will never be repaid.
This indebtedness has essentially been used to finance arms production - ie , it is capital earmarked for destruction. While whole branches of industry have been dismantled, those sectors which show the strongest rates of growth are those concerned with arms and unproductive activities in general - services like advertising and banking, or pure waste sectors, such as the drug market.
The ruling class has only been able to maintain the illusion of economic activity through the destruction of capital. The false "growth" of the capitalists is really a recession.
4) In order to arrive at this "result", governments have had to resort to state capitalist measures to an unprecedented degree: record debt, war economy, falsification of economic figures, financial manipulations.
Contrary to the illusion that privatization represents a dismantling of state capitalism, the role of the state has been reinforced. Under the imposition of the USA, there has been a development in international "cooperation" between the Western powers, ie a strengthening of the imperialist bloc.
5) Within the eastern bloc, "perestroika" corresponds to a recognition of economic bankruptcy. State capitalist methods Russian style - the state's total grip over the economy and the omnipresence of the war economy - have resulted in nothing but a growing bureaucratic anarchy in production, a gigantic waste of wealth. The USSR and its bloc are bogged down in economic underdevelopment. Gorbachev's new economic policies will not change this.
In the east as in the west, the capitalist crisis is accelerating while attacks on the working class are intensifying.
6) No state capitalist measure can lead to a real revival in the economy, or even all such methods put together. They are a huge fiddle vis-a-vis the laws of the economy. They aren't a remedy but a factor aggravating the disease. Their massive utilization is the most obvious symptom of the disease.
As a consequence, the world market has become more and more fragile: growing fluctuation of currencies, frenzied speculation, crises on the stock exchange without the capitalist economy coming out of the recession it dived into at the beginning of the 80s.
The weight of debt has grown terribly. At the end of the 80s, the USA, the first world power, has become the most indebted country in the world. Inflation has never disappeared: it has continued to knock at the doors of the industrialized countries, and, under the inflationary pressures of debt, it is now going through an irreversible acceleration at the heart of developed capitalism.
7) At the end of the 80s, state capitalist policies are revealing their impotence. Despite all the measures taken, official growth rates are irresistibly declining and announce the open recession that's coming, while the index of prices slowly rises. Inflation, which has been artificially hidden, is about to return in force to the heart of the industrial world.
During this decade, the ruling class has followed a policy of putting things off till tomorrow. This policy, even when used more and more massively, is reaching its limits. In the immediate it will be less and less effective, while the practice of stealing from the future will eventually have to be paid for. The years ahead will be years of a further plunge into economic crisis, when inflation will increasingly go hand in hand with recession. Despite the international tightening of control by the state, the fragility of the world market will keep growing: there will be more and more bankruptcies in industry, commerce and in the banks themselves.
The attacks against the living conditions of the proletariat and humanity in general can only be dramatically accentuated.
Inter-imperialist tensions
8) The 1980s opened with the fall of the Shah's regime in Iran, resulting in the dismantling of the west's military front line to the south of Russia, and the invasion of Afghanistan by the troops of the Red Army.
This situation, spurred on by the economic crisis, pushed the American bloc into launching a wide-scale imperialist offensive aimed at consolidating its own bloc, disciplining small recalcitrant imperialisms (Iran, Libya, Syria), expelling Russian influence from the peripheries of capitalism and imposing a quasi-blockade on the USSR, smothering it in the narrow limits of its own bloc. In the final analysis the aim of this offensive is to strip the USSR of its status as a world power.
9) In the face of this pressure, incapable of keeping up with the arms race and of modernizing its obsolete weapons to the necessary level, incapable of winning the proletariat's adherence to its war effort, as can be seen from the events in Poland and the growing unpopularity of the Afghan adventure, the USSR has had to retreat.
The Russian bourgeoisie has been able to take advantage of this retreat by launching, under Gorbachev's guidance, a major diplomatic and ideological offensive on the theme of peace and disarmament.
The USA, which has to deal with the growing discontent of the proletariat inside its own bloc couldn't then appear as the only war-like power and has in turn taken up the refrain of peace.
10) Having begun with the bellicose diatribes of the bourgeoisie, the 80s are ending with enormous ideological campaigns about peace.
Peace under capitalism in crisis is a lie. The bourgeoisie's speeches about peace serve only to camouflage imperialist antagonisms and the intensifying war preparations, to hide from the working class the true historic stakes, war or revolution, to prevent the workers becoming conscious of the link between austerity and the war preparation and lulling the class into a false sense of security.
The disarmament treaties have no value. The weapons put on the scrapheap only constitute a tiny part of the arsenal of death that belongs to each bloc and are mainly the obsolete ones. And, since trickery and secrecy are the rule in this domain, nothing can really be verified.
The western offensive continues as the USSR is trying to profit from the situation by reducing the technological gap and modernizing its weapons while creating a mystifying aura of political innocence.
The war goes on in Afghanistan, the western fleet is still massed in the Gulf, weapons still talk in the Lebanon etc ... The budgets of the armies continue to swell, if necessary fuelled in a discrete manner. Even more destructive weapons are in the pipeline for the 20 years ahead of us. Nothing has fundamentally changed despite all the soporific sermons, and the spiral of war is going to accelerate.
In the west, the USA's proposals to reduce its troops in Europe simply expresses the bloc leader's insistence that the European powers make a greater contribution to the overall war effort. This process is already under way with the formation of 'joint armies', the plan for a European air fighter, the renovation of the Lance missiles, the Euclid project, etc. Behind the famous 'Europe of 1992' is a Europe armed to the teeth in order to confront the other bloc.
The present retreat of the Russian bloc contains the seeds of tomorrow's military face-offs. The perspective is the development of imperialist tensions, the intensification of the militarization of society and a Lebanon-style decomposition, particularly in the countries most affected by inter-imperialist conflicts and the less industrialized countries, like Afghanistan today. In the- long term this process will also take place in Europe if the international development of the class struggle is not enough to become an obstacle to it.
11) As long as the bourgeoisie doesn't have a free hand to impose its 'solution' - generalized imperialist war and as long as the class struggle isn't sufficiently developed to allow its revolutionary perspective to come forward, capitalism is caught up in a dynamic of decomposition, a process of rotting on its feet which is experienced at all levels:
- degradation of international relations between states as manifested in the development of terrorism
- repeated technological and so-called natural catastrophes
- destruction of the ecosphere
- famines, epidemics, expressions of the generalization of absolute pauperization
- explosion of "nationalities", or ethnic conflicts
- social life marked by the development of criminality, delinquency, suicide, madness, individual atomization
- ideological decomposition marked among other things by the development of mysticism, nihilism, the ideology of 'everyone for himself', etc ...
The class struggle
12) The mass strike in Poland lit up the 1980s and showed what was at stake in the class struggle for the period. The deployment of the bourgeois strategy of the left in opposition in Western Europe, union sabotage and military repression against the workers in Poland, resulted in a short but difficult retreat by the working class at the beginning of the decade.
The western bourgeoisie took advantage of this situation in order to launch a redoubled economic attack (brutal development of unemployment), while accentuating its repression and waging media campaigns about war, aimed at furthering the retreat by demoralizing and terrorizing the workers, and getting them used to the idea of war.
However the 80s have above all been years of development of the class struggle. From 1983 on, under the whip of a succession of austerity measures, the international proletariat rediscovered the road of struggle. In the face of massive attacks, the combativity of the proletariat was demonstrated in massive strike movements on all continents and above all in Western Europe; at the heart of capitalism where the most experienced battalions of the world working class is concentrated.
Thus the workers struggle sprang from one continent to another: South Africa; Korea; Brazil; Mexico, etc and in Europe: Belgium 83; British miners 84; Denmark 85; Belgium 86; French railway workers 86; Spain 87; West Germany 87; teachers in Italy 87; hospital workers in France 88, etc.
According to the bourgeoisie, the truth of the class struggle doesn't exist. With all its strength it tries to hide it. The statistical fall in strike days lost in comparison to the 70s which has been used to fuel the ideological campaigns aimed at demoralizing the working class, does not take any account of the qualitative development of the struggle. Since 1983, short and massive strikes have been more and more numerous, and despite the news blackout imposed on them, the real development of workers' militancy has bit by bit made itself felt.
13) The wave of class struggle which has developed since 1983 poses the perspective of the unification of struggle. This process is characterized by:
- massive and often spontaneous struggles linked to a general discontent affecting all sectors
- a tendency towards a growing simultaneity of struggles
- a tendency towards extension as the only way of imposing a rapport de force on a ruling class that is united behind its state
- to realize this extension, increasing moves by workers to take charge of the struggle themselves against union sabotage
- the appearance of struggle committees
This wave of struggle not only expresses the growing discontent of the working class, its intact combativity, its will to struggle, but also the development and deepening of its consciousness. This process of maturation is taking shape on all aspects of the situation confronting the proletariat: war, social decomposition, the impasse of capitalism, etc, but it is taking shape more particularly on two points which are essential since they determine the proletariat's relationship to the state:
- distrust towards the unions is developing all the time; internationally through repeated confrontation with these forces of control and a tendency for workers to leave the union
- the rejection of the political parties of the bourgeoisie is intensifying as can be seen for example, by continuous struggles during electoral campaigns and a growing abstention from elections.
14) Far from the way the state media try to minimize the question, social convulsions are a central and permanent preoccupation of the ruling class in the west as in the east. First, because they interfere with all the other questions on an immediate level, secondly because the workers' struggle bears the seeds of a radical challenge to the existing state of affairs.
Just as the preoccupation of the ruling class is expressed in the central countries by an unprecedented development of the strategy of the left in opposition, it is also manifested in:
- the will of the western bloc's US leaders to replace the overt 'dictatorships' in the countries under their control by 'democracies' better equipped to deal with social instability by including a 'left' that is capable of sabotaging workers' struggles from within (the lessons of Iran have been drawn)
- the policies of the Gorbachev team which is doing the same thing in its bloc in the name of 'Glasnost' (here the lessons of Poland).
15) Faced with the discontent in the working class, the bourgeoisie has nothing to offer except more austerity and repression. Faced with the truth of the workers struggle, the bourgeoisie has nothing but lies and its capacity to maneuver.
The crisis makes the bourgeoisie intelligent. Given the loss of credibility in its political/union apparatus for controlling the working class, it has had to use this apparatus in a more subtle manner:
- first, by maneuvering its 'left' in close connivance with all the different parts of the state machine: a repulsive 'right' is thus used to reinforce the credibility of the left; the media, the forces of repression all play their role etc. The policy of the left in opposition has been strengthened in all countries, in spite of electoral vicissitudes
- then, by adapting its organs of social control in order to block and sabotage workers' struggles from the inside:
* radicalization of the classical trade unions
* increasing use of leftist groups
* development of base, rank and file unionism
* development of structures outside the unions, which claim to represent the struggle: coordinations.
16) This capacity of the bourgeoisie to maneuver has up till now held back the tendencies towards extension and unification contained in the present wave of struggle. Faced with the dynamic towards massive struggles and extension of the movements, the ruling class encourages everything that divides· and isolates the workers: corporatism, regionalism, nationalism. Faced with this dynamic, the bourgeoisie is ready to launch preventative actions in order to push the working class into struggle in unfavorable conditions. In every struggle the workers are obliged to confront a whole coalition of bourgeois forces.
However, despite the difficulties it is encountering, the dynamic of the working class struggle has not been broken. On the contrary it is still developing. The potential combativity of the working class is not only intact, it is growing stronger. Under the painful spur of the austerity measures which can only get worse, the working class is being compelled to fight and confront the forces of the bourgeoisie. The perspective is the development of the class struggle. The weapons of the bourgeoisie, because they are going to be used more and more frequently, are destined to be unmasked.
17) The apprenticeship the proletariat is acquiring about the bourgeoisie's capacity for maneuvering is a necessary factor in the development of its consciousness, of its strengthening faced with the enemy in front of it.
The dynamic of the situation is pushing it to impose its force through a real extension of its struggles which is geographical extension against the divisions organized by the bourgeoisie which aim for a sectionalist, corporatist or regionalist imprisonment, against the proposals for a phony extension made by the unionists and leftists.
In order to achieve the necessary widening of its combat, the working class can only count on itself, and above all on its general, mass assemblies. These assemblies should be open to all workers, must assume sole authority for the conduct of the struggle, the priority of which must be geographical extension. Flowing from this, the sovereign general assemblies must reject everything which tends to stifle them (calls to refuse entry to other workers, for example) and deprive them of their control over the struggle (eg organs of premature centralization that the bourgeoisie today has no hesitation about encouraging and manipulating or worse, those it imposes from the outside: coordinations, union strike committees). The future unification of struggles depends on this dynamic.
The lack of political experience in the present generation of the proletariat due to almost half a century of counter-revolution is a heavy weight. It is further reinforced by:
- the distrust and rejection of anything to do with politics, the result of decades of disgust with the political maneuvering of the bourgeoisie, in particular with those parties claiming to be part of the working class
- the weight of the surrounding ideological decomposition upon which, more and more, the bourgeoisie will base its maneuvers to reinforce atomization, ‘each man for himself', to undermine the growing confidence of the working class in its own strength and in the future its combat implies
The capacity of the working class, tomorrow, to confront the capitalist state, to overthrow it and open the door to the future, depends on its capacity, today, to reinforce its collective action, its unity and its class solidarity, to overcome its political weaknesses, draw the lessons of its struggles, to develop its political experience.
In this process towards unification, in the political combat for extension against the union maneuvers, revolutionaries have a vanguard, decisive and indispensable role to play. They are an integral part of its struggle. The capacity of the class to translate its combativity into a maturation of consciousness depends on their intervention. The future outcome of the struggle depends on their intervention.
18) The proletariat is at the heart of the international situation. If the 80s are years of truth this truth is above all that of the working class. The truth of a capitalist system which is leading humanity to ruin through the barbaric decomposition already underway, at the end of which lies the apocalyptic war which the bourgeoisie is preparing more and more madly.
The 80s have shown what's at stake and what the proletariat's responsibilities are: socialism or barbarism, war or revolution! The future of humanity depends on its capacity to take up these responsibilities in the years ahead, to put forward its revolutionary perspective in and through the struggle.
1 Vercesi was the main animator of the left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy. His political and theoretical contribution to the Fraction, and to the whole workers' movement, was considerable. But at the end of the 30's he developed an aberrant theory about the war economy being a solution to the crisis, which disarmed and disoriented the Fraction when it was faced with the Second World War.
2 What's more the bourgeois ‘experts' themselves say this clearly:
"Practically no one thinks today that the debt can be reimbursed, but the western countries insist on elaborating a mechanism which would hide this fact and avoid such harsh terms as ‘cessation of payments' and ‘bankruptcy'" (W Pfaff, International Herald Tribune, 30 January 1989. What this author forgets to talk about are the real causes for this caution and prudery. The fact is that for the bourgeoisie of the great western powers to openly proclaim the complete bankruptcy of their debtors would be to recognize the bankruptcy of their financial system and, underneath that, of the whole capitalist economy. The ruling class today is a bit like one of those cartoon characters who continue running after they've gone over the edge of a precipice and who only fall when they realize where they are.
3 The relatively smaller increase in West Germany's military expenditure (if you compare it to that of its commercial rivals) is certainly connected to this country's ‘good' economic performance over the past few years.
4 The famines and the absolute impoverishment of the working class we've seen in recent years aren't new phenomenon in the history of capitalism. But apart from the sheer breadth they take on today (and which is comparable only to the situations created at the time of world wars), it's important to distinguish what pertained to the introduction of the capitalist mode of production into society (which indeed arose in "blood and filth", as Marx said, based as it was on the creation of an army of paupers and beggars, on the workhouses, on children's night-work, on the extraction of absolute surplus-value ...) to what pertains to the death agony of this mode of production. Just as unemployment today doesn't represent an ‘industrial reserve army' but expresses the incapacity of the capitalist system to continue one of its historic task - the generalization of wage labor - so the return of famine and of absolute impoverishment (after a period in which it was replaced by relative impoverishment) signals the total, historical bankruptcy of this system.
We are publishing here the first part of an article which aims at a clearer definition of the relationship between Party and Fraction as it has developed step by step through the history of the revolutionary movement. This first part will deal with the work of the Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party during the 1930s, concentrating especially on the decisive years from 1935 to 1937, dominated by the Spanish Civil War: it aims, in particular, to answer the comrades from Battaglia Comunista's criticisms of "the Fraction", ie the group formed at the end of the 1920's as a "fraction" of the Italian Communist Party, struggling against the latter's Stalinist degeneration.
We have already answered these criticisms on various specific points elsewhere1. Here, we intend to examine at a more general level the historical relationship between "fraction" and party. This question may seem secondary, now that fifty years have passed since communists considered themselves as fractions of the old parties which have since passed over to the counter-revolution. But as we will see in this article, the Fraction is not merely a matter of statistics (being a part of the Party); essentially, it expresses the continuity between the old party's program, and the elaboration of the new party's program, enriched with the proletariat's new historical experience. This is the fundamental meaning of this way of working, of this red thread running through past history, which we want to bring out for the new generations, for those groups of comrades throughout the world looking for a class coherence. Against all those imbeciles who amuse themselves by 'making a clean sweep' of all the workers' movement that preceded them, the ICC reaffirms that only on the basis of this continuity in political work will it be possible for the World Communist Party to emerge, as the indispensable weapon of the battles that await us.
Let us first set out systematically, and without deforming them, the positions of Battaglia against which we are writing. In the article "Fraction and Party in the experience of the Italian Left", we find developed the idea that the Fraction, founded in 1928 at Pantin, in the Paris suburbs, by exiled militants, rejected the Trotskyist notion of the immediate formation of new parties, because the old parties of the Communist International had not yet passed officially from opportunism to the counter-revolution. "This comes down to saying that (...) if the communist parties, despite being infested with opportunism, had not yet passed bag and baggage into service with the class enemy, then the construction of new parties could not yet be put on the agenda". This is absolutely true, even if as we shall see, this was only one of the conditions necessary for the Fraction's transformation into the Party. It is also worth remembering that the comrades who founded the Fraction in 1928 had already, in 1927, had to rid themselves of an activist minority who then considered the CP's as counter-revolutionary ("Leave the Moscow International!" as they said), and who, under the illusion that the 1929 crisis was an immediate prelude to revolution, adopted the position of the German Left which in 1924 had already given birth to a short-lived "new" "Communist Workers' International".
Continuing its historical reconstitution, Battaglia recalls that the Fraction " ... has above all a role of analysis, education, and preparation of militants; it develops the greatest possible clarity on the phase when it will act to form the Party, at the moment when the confrontation between the classes will sweep away opportunism" (Report for the 1935 Congress). "Up to then" continues Battaglia, "the terms of the question seemed clear enough. The Fraction-Party problem was resolved 'programmatically' since the former depended on the process of degeneration going on in the latter, ( ... ) and not on an abstract theoretical elaboration which would have raised this particular type of revolutionary organization to an unchanging political form, valid in all historical periods of stagnating class struggle ( ... ). The idea that the transformation of Fraction into Party can only be envisaged in 'objectively favorable' situations, ie during a recovery of the class struggle, rests on the idea that only in this situation, or in its accompanying storms, would the definitive betrayal of the Communist Parties be verified in fact".
The CPs' betrayal was openly declared in 1935, when Stalin and the PCF [French CP] (imitated by all the others) supported the rearmament measures decided by the bourgeoisie government in France "to defend democracy". Faced with this official passage to the class enemy, the Fraction published the manifesto "Leave the Communist Parties, they have become instruments of the counter-revolution", and called a Congress to answer these events as an organization. According to Battaglia's article:
"If we are to follow the schema developed during the preceding years, the Fraction should have fulfilled its task as a function of this event, and gone on to build the new party. But although the perspective remained, when it came to putting it into practice there appeared within the Fraction several tendencies which tried to put off the problem rather than to resolve its practical aspects.
In Jacobs' report, around which the debate should have developed, centrism's betrayal and the Fraction's new slogan of leaving the Communist Parties [did not imply] "its transformation into a party, nor did it represent the proletarian solution to centrism's betrayal; this solution can only be given by tomorrow's events, for which the Fraction is preparing today." ( ... )
For the reporter, the answer to the problem of the crisis in the workers' movement could not be the attempt to close up the scattered ranks of revolutionaries in order to give the proletariat, once again, its vital political organ, the party ( ... ), but was rather to launch the slogan of leaving the CP's, without any other indications of what should be done, because "there exists no immediate solution to the problem posed by this betrayal". ( ... )
While it was true that the damage done by centrism had finished by immobilizing a politically disarmed class in the hands of capitalism ( ... ), it was no less true that the only possibility of organizing any kind of opposition to imperialism's attempt to solve its own contradictions through war necessarily meant the reconstruction of new parties ( ... ), so that the alternative of war and revolution should not be merely an empty slogan.
Within the Fraction's Congress, Jacob's theses created a strong opposition which ( ... ) disagreed with the reporter's 'wait-and-see' analysis. For Gatto ( ... ), it was urgent to clarify the relationship between Fraction and Party, on the basis not of petty mechanical formulae, but of the precise tasks demanded by the new situation: "we agree that we cannot found' the party immediately, but there may also be situations which force the necessity of its formation on us. The reporter is drematieing; and this can lead to a kind of fatalism".
This was not a vain concern: "the Fraction was to go on waiting until its dissolution in 1945".
Battaglia then claims that the Fraction remained paralyzed by this disagreement, noting that "the 'partyist:' current, although stuck in the most absurd immobility, nonetheless remained coherent with the positions expressed at the Congress, whereas the 'wait-and-see' current, and especially its most prestigious element, Vercesi, had no shortage of hesitations and changes of direction".
On this point, Battaglia's political conclusions are inevitable: "to say that the party can only emerge during a revolutionary situation when the question of power is on the agenda, and that during periods of counter-revolution, the party 'must' disappear or give way to fractions" means "depriving the class of a minimum political reference point in the hardest and most delicate periods", with "the sole result of being overtaken by events".
We have tried here to set out Battaglia's position as faithfully as possible, in order to it accessible to comrades who do not read Italian. To sum up, according to Battaglia:
a) from its foundation until the 1935 Congress, the Fraction saw its transformation into a Party as dependent on the recovery of the class struggle, while
b) the same minority that in 1935 defended the formation of the Party remained politically coherent but in practice completely immobilized during the years that followed (ie during the factory occupations in France and the Spanish Civil War):
c) the fractions (considered as "not very well-defined organisms", or "substitutes") were unable to offer the proletariat a minimum political reference point during the periods of counter-revolution.
These are three deformations of the history of the workers' movement. Let us see why.
Battaglia maintains that the link between the fraction's transformation into the party, and the class struggle, is a novelty introduced in 1935, which cannot be traced back to the Fraction's birth in 1928. But if we are going back in time, why stop in 1928? Much better return to 1922, to the legendary Rome Theses (approved by the 2nd Congress of the Italian CP), which by definition constitutes the Italian Left's basic text:
"The return to the organization of a true class Party, under the influence of new situations and encouragements to action that events exert on the working masses, takes place in the form of a separation of a part of the Party which, through its debates on the program, the critique of experiences unfavorable to the struggle, and the formation within the Party of a school and organization with its own hierarchy (the fraction), reestablishes a continuity in the life of a unitary organization founded on the basis of consciousness and discipline. From this emerges the new Party".
As we can see, the Left's most fundamental texts are extremely clear on the fact that the fraction's transformation into the party is possible only "under the influence of new situations and encouragements to action that events exert on the working masses".
Let us return to the Fraction, and its basic text on the question: Towards the 2-3/4 International, published in 1933 and considered by Battaglia as "much more dialectical" than the 1935 position:
"Our fraction will be able to make the transformation into a party to the extent that it correctly expresses the evolution of the proletariat, which will once again be precipitated onto the historical stage, and will demolish the present balance of class forces. While always maintaining, on the basis of the trade union organizations, the only position that makes the mass struggle possible, our fraction must fulfill the role that is proper to it: the formation of militants both in Italy and in exile. The moment for its transformation into the Party will be the moment of capitalism's imminent collapse".
On this point, we should consider directly the section cited in Battaglia's text on the 1935 Congress, where the comrades consider that "the terms of the question seemed clear enough". This text states word for word that the transformation from Fraction to Party is possible "in the moments when the confrontation between classes sweeps away opportunism", in other words in a moment of rising class struggle. The terms of the question certainly seem clear enough here. A few lines further on we read: "The class therefore recognizes itself in the Party from the moment when historical conditions upset the balance of class forces; the affirmation of the party is then the affirmation of the class' capacity for action".
You can't get clearer than that! As Bordiga often said, you just have to know how to read. The trouble with looking at history through the distorting spectacles of a preconceived idea, is that you are obliged to read the opposite of what is written.
But the most extraordinary is that, for the sake of their argument, the comrades of Battaglia are forced to ignore what they themselves have already written concerning the Fraction's 1935 Congress:
"Here we should recall that the Italian Left abandoned the name 'Left Fraction of the Italian CP', to become the Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left at a Congress held in 1935. This was forced on them by the fact that, contrary to what they had foreseen, the opportunist CPs open betrayal of the proletariat did not wait for the outbreak of World War II. ( ... ) The change in name marked both the adoption of the Fraction's position relative to this 'turn' by the official CPs, and the fact that objective conditions still did not allow the formation of new parties".
This passage is taken from the Political Preface of May 1946, in which the PCInternazionalista (Battaglia) presented its Programmatic Platform, recently adopted at the Turin Conference, to militants abroad. This same basic text, which sets out to explain the historic affiliation between the Italian CP of Livorno 1922, the Fraction in exile, and the PCInt of 1943, is clear on one of the key points of separation with the Trotskyists, which concerned: "... the necessary objective conditions for the communist movement to form new parties with a real influence on the masses, conditions which Trotsky either ignored, or thought existed in the current situation, due to an incorrect analysis of the existing perspectives. Following the experience of the Bolshevik Fraction, it [ie the Italian Left] established that the course towards the formation of the party was essentially one where the class struggle takes place in revolutionary conditions and therefore the proletarians are led to regroup around a marxist program restored against the opportunists, and defended up until then only by a minority".
As we can see, the PCInt of 1943 had not changed a comma of the Fraction's position on this question; moreover, it officially considered the Fraction's political positions as its own. On the contrary, it is Battaglia which has abandoned these positions, and which has succeeded in the same discussion in lining up at least four different positions. In fact, Battaglia considers the correlation between the renewal of the class struggle and the reconstruction of the Party as:
But let us leave Battaglia's self-serving zigzags to one side, and return to the 1935 Congress.
As we can see from the above, it was not the Congress' majority that introduced new positions, but on the contrary the minority which called into question those that the Fraction had always held, moreover by adopting the positions of the Fraction's adversaries. One report replied to the accusations of fatalism hurled at the Fraction by all those, and first and foremost the Trotskyists, who rejected the Fraction's work in favor of the illusion of "mobilizing the masses"; Gatto accused the report of "fatalism". Piero declared that "our orientation must change, we must make our press more accessible to the workers" by competing with the pseudo ‘workers of the opposition' who specialized in "attracting the masses" thanks to a systematic adulation of their illusions. Tullio drew the apparently logical conclusions: "when we say that without a class party there is no leadership, then we mean that this is equally vital in moments of depression"; he forgot that Bilan had already replied to Trotsky:
"From the idea that the revolution is impossible without a Communist Party, the simplest conclusion is drawn that we must build the new Party at once. It is as if we were to deduce from the premise that the workers can no longer defend their elementary demands without an insurrection, the conclusion that we must unleash the insurrection immediately" (Bilan, no.1).
Battaglia's attempt to present the debate as a confrontation between those who wanted a Party already well-tempered when the revolutionary onslaught began, and those who wanted to improvise it at the last moment, does not stand up to examination. To the absurd alternative, "is it necessary to wait for revolutionary events to happen before moving to establish the new party, or, inversely, would it not be better for events to occur with the party already present?", the majority at the Congress had already replied once and for all: "If our problem was only a problem of will, then we would all be in agreement, and nobody would bother to discuss it".
The problem at the Congress was not a question of will, but of willfulness, as the years that followed were to demonstrate.
When Battaglia presents the 1935 debate as one between those who wanted the party irrespective of objective conditions, and those who "took refuge" in waiting for such conditions, they forget what the 1946 Preface had already clearly stated: that the 'Party-builders' did not merely under-estimate or ignore objective conditions, they were inevitably pushed to "claim that such conditions existed, on the basis of a false analysis of the perspectives". This seems to escape Battaglia completely: but this is what was at the heart of the discussion in 1935. The activist minority did not merely state its "disagreement with the Party's formation solely in a period of proletarian recovery", it was inevitably forced to develop a false analysis of the perspectives which would allow it to declare that, if a true proletarian recovery had not yet occurred it was nonetheless just around the corner, that it was necessary to take the leadership of the first steps, and so on and so forth. The minority did not develop this reversal of the Fraction's analysis of the course towards imperialist war openly at the Congress; they had probably not yet realized where their mania for founding parties was bound to lead them. This ambiguity explains why alongside the out and out activists who for the most part came from the defunct Reveil Communiste, there were comrades like Tullio and Gatto Mamone, who split with the minority as soon as it became clear what was really under discussion. But although the minority had not yet revealed the full extent of their disagreements (and unanimously approved the Jacobs report), this was already entirely clear to the majority's most lucid members:
"It is easy to see this tendency when we examine the position held by some comrades over the recent class conflicts, where they claim that the fraction could assume the leadership of these movements despite the present state of decomposition in the proletariat, completely in abstraction from the real balance of class forces" (Pieri).
"So, as the discussion has proved, we are supposed to think that we could have intervened to lead today's movements of despair (Brest-Toulon) and give them a new direction ( ... ). To think that the fraction can lead movements of proletarian desperation is to compromise its intervention in the events of tomorrow" (Jacobs).
The months following the Congress were to see a growing polarization between the two tendencies. In his article "A little clarity, if you please" (Bilan, no 28, January 1936), Bianco attacked the open rejection by some members of the minority, of Jacobs' report, which they had only just accepted. The attack was particularly directed against "comrade Tito, who is full of fine phrases like 'changing the line', and not just being present but 'taking the lead, the direction of the movement for communist rebirth ': abandoning, in order to form an international organism, all 'obstructionist a prioris' and 'our scruples over principle' ".
The final shape of the different groupings was already apparent (although Vercesi, in the same issue of Bilan, tried to minimize the extent of the differences). Already, in the Fraction's Italian review Prometeo, Gatto had distanced himself from the minority, restating that "the Fraction will express itself as a Party in the heat of events", and not before the proletariat unleashes "its battle for emancipation".
But if we are to understand the extent of the errors that the minority was on the point of making, then we must take a step back, and consider the balance of forces between the classes during these decisive years, and the way in which the different left forces analyzed them. The Italian Left described the period as counter-revolutionary on the basis of brutal reality: 1932, the political liquidation of the reactions against Stalinism, with the exclusion from the Left Opposition of the Italian Left and other forces that could not accept Trotsky's zig-zags; 1933, the crushing of the German proletariat; 1934, crushing of the Spanish proletariat in the Asturias; 1935, crushing of the Austrian proletariat, and the French workers' enrolment under the tricolor flag of the bourgeoisie. Trotsky closed his eyes to this mad race towards worldwide butchery to keep up the moral of his troops or him, the German CP, rotten to the core, was still, even in 1933, "the key to the world revolution"; and when the German CP collapsed in the face of Nazism, that meant that the way was clear for the foundation of a new party and even a new International, and if the militants controlled by Stalinism did not join it then it was social-democracy's left wing that "was evolving towards communism", and so on ...
Trotsky's opportunist maneuvers provoked splits on the Left, of those who refused to follow this line: the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes in Belgium, Union Communiste in France, the Revolutionary Workers' League in the USA, etc. Until 1936, these groups seemed to stand half-way between the Italian Left's rigor and Trotsky's acrobatics. The test of 1936 was to prove that their solidarity with Trotskyism was much greater than their differences. In reality, 1936 was the last desperate class upsurge of the European proletariat. The period between May and July 1936 witnessed the French factory occupations, the wave of struggles in Belgium, the Barcelona proletariat's response to Franco's coup, after which the workers remained in complete control of Catalonia for a week. But this was the last convulsion. Within a few weeks, not only had capital succeeded in bringing these actions under control, it had managed to denature them completely by transforming them into moments of the Sacred Union in defense of democracy. Trotsky ignored this recuperation; he proclaimed that "the revolution has begun in France" and encouraged the Spanish proletariat to enroll as cannon fodder in the anti-fascist militia, to defend the republic.
All the left dissidents, from the LCI to the UC, from RWL to a large fraction of the council communists, let themselves be taken in, in the name of the "armed struggle against fascism". Even the minority of the Italian Fraction adhered, in reality, to Trotsky's analyses, declaring that the situation remained "objectively revolutionary", and that in the zones controlled by the militia, collectivization was being carried out "under the noses of the governments in Madrid and Barcelona" (Bilan no 36, Documents of the minority). The bourgeois state has survived and is strengthening its control over the workers? This is nothing but a "facade", an "empty envelope, a simulacrum, a prisoner of the situation", because the Spanish proletariat when it supports the bourgeois Republic does not support the state but the proletarian destruction of the state. Consistent with this analysis, many of the minority's members left for Spain to enroll in the government's anti-fascist militias. For Battaglia, these perilous 360 degree about-turns mean "remaining coherent with their positions in the most absurd immobility". This is a strange idea of coherence and immobility!
In reality, the minority had completely abandoned the Fraction's analytical framework, to adopt Trotsky's dialectical acrobatics; these, the Fraction had already denounced when it wrote of the democratic Republic's massacre of the Asturian miners in 1934:
"The repent terrible massacre in Spain should put an end to all those balancing acts which maintain that the Republic is certainly a 'workers' conquest' to defend, but only under 'certain conditions', and above all 'to the extent that' it is not what it is, or on condition that it 'becomes' what it can never become, or if, far from having its actual meaning and objectives, it should be on the point of becoming the organ of working class domination" (Bilan no 12, October 1934).
Faced with the war in Spain, only the Italian Fraction's majority (and a minority amongst the councilists) stuck to Lenin's defeatist position. But only the Fraction drew all the lessons from this historical turning point, denying the continued existence of backward regions where it would be possible to struggle temporarily for the bourgeoisie or for national liberation, and denouncing as bourgeois and an instrument of imperialist war all the forms of anti-fascist militia. This political position was vital to remain internationalist in the looming imperialist massacre, and so to be able to contribute to the rebirth of the future World Communist Party. The Fraction's positions from 1935 (Sino-Japanese war, Italo-Abyssinian war) to 1937 (Spanish Civil War) are thus the historical watershed which marked the Italian Left's transformation into the Internationalist Communist Left, and which was point of selection for all the revolutionary forces from that moment on.
By 'selection', we mean in reality, not in somebody's theoretical schemas. The collapse of the Ligue des Communistes in Belgium was answered by the appearance of a minority, which formed the Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left. In France, the collapse of Union Communiste was answered by the emergence of a few militants who joined the Italian Left, and who then founded, in the midst of imperialist war, the French Fraction of the Communist Left. In the New World, the collapse of the Revolutionary Workers' League and of the Mexican Liga Comunista was followed by a split of a group of Mexican and immigrant workers, who founded the Grupo dos Trabajadores Marxistas on the positions of the International Communist Left. Even today, only those who place themselves in direct continuity with these positions of principle, without quibbling or searching for some "third way", have any chance today of contributing to the rebirth of the class party.
It is well known that the ICC recognizes the totality of this programmatic demarcation. But what is Battaglia's position?
"The events of the Spanish Revolution highlighted both the strong and the weak points of our tendency: the majority in Bilan appeared tied to a theoretically impeccable formula, which nonetheless had the defect of remaining a simplistic abstraction; the minority on the other hand, dominated by the urge to take part in events whatever the cost, was not always sufficiently prudent to avoid the traps of bourgeois Jacobinism, even on the barricades.
Since the objective possibility existed, our comrades in Bilan should have posed the problem, just as our party was to do later with the partisan movement, by calling the fighting workers not to fall into the trap of imperialist war strategy".
This position, which we have taken from a 1958 special issue of Prometeo devoted to the Fraction, was not incidental but restated on several occasions2. Here Battaglia declares itself for a third path, separate both from the abstractions of the majority and the participation of the minority. But is it really a third path, or just a reformulation of the minority's position?
What is the minority accused of? Inertia, a willingness to be right in theory without taking the trouble to intervene in order to defend a correct orientation amongst the Spanish workers. This accusation repeats, word for word, those put forward at the time by the minority, the Trotskyists, the anarchists, the POUMists, etc: "to tell the Spanish workers that they are in danger, and not to intervene ourselves to combat this danger, is a sign of insensitivity and dillettantism" (Bilan no 35, Texts of the minority). Not only are these accusations identical; more to the point, they are shameless lies. The majority immediately took up the combat alongside the Spanish workers, on the class front, and not in the trenches. Unlike the minority, which abandoned the struggle in Spain at the end of 1936, the majority continued its political activity there until May 1937, when its last representative, Tullio, returned to France to announce to the Fraction and to the workers of the world, that the anti-fascist Republic had just massacred the workers on strike in Barcelona.
The majority's presence in Spain was certainly less visible than that of the minority, who published their communiques on the presses of the Partido Obrero del Unificacion Marxista (POUM) in government, and who became brigadier- generals on the Aragon front, like their spokesman Condiari. The majority's representatives by contrast (Mitchell, Tullio, Caridali ) acted in strict secrecy, in constant danger of arrest by the Stalinist squads, or of denunciation by the POUMists and anarchists, who regarded them more or less as fascist spies. Under these terrible conditions, these comrades continued the struggle to rescue at least a few militants from the spiral of imperialist war, confronting not only danger, but also the hostility and contempt of the militants with whom they debated. Even the most lucid elements, such as the anarchist Berneri (later assassinated by the Stalinists), were ideologically shaken to the point where they became the active promoters of the extension of the war economy - and the resulting militarization of the working class - to every factory, and remained totally incapable of understanding where the class frontier really lay, to the point of writing: "the Trotskyists, Bordigists, and Stalinists, are only divided on a few tactical points" (Guerre de Classe, October 1938). Even when every door slammed shut in their faces, the comrades of the majority continued to knock at them: emerging from the POUM headquarters after yet another fruitless discussion, they found the Stalinist killers waiting for them, and only escaped with their lives by pure luck.
Let us note in passing that the same minority which in 1935 insisted that the party should be ready before the decisive class confrontations, in Spain declared that the revolution had arrived, and would win, in the complete absence of so much as an ounce of class party. The majority, on the contrary, set the party at the heart of its analysis, and declared that there could be no question of revolution, since no party had been formed, nor was there even the slightest tendency in this direction, despite the minority's intense propaganda to prove the opposite. It was not the members of the majority who under-estimated the importance of the party ... and of the Fraction. When we consider the collapse of the minority, who in the end deluded themselves into taking the POUM - a member of the government in the bourgeois republic - for the party, then we can see how correct were the majority's warnings to the 1935 Congress of the danger of "adulterating the very principles of the Fraction".
For Battaglia, the minority was guilty of being "not always (!) sufficiently prudent to avoid the traps of bourgeois Jacobinism, even on the barricades". What does such a vague expression mean? The difference between the majority and the minority was that the former intervened to convince at least a tiny vanguard to desert the imperialist war, while the latter intervened to take part in it by volunteering for the government militia. Battaglia certainly holds a remarkable trump card if they know a way of participating in imperialist war which is sufficiently "prudent" not to play the game of the bourgeoisie... What does it mean to say that the majority should have behaved like the PCInt "towards the partisan movement"? Perhaps the majority should have called for a "united front" with the Stalinists, Socialists, anarchists and POUMists, as the PClnt did in 1944 when it proposed a united front to the Agitation Committees set up by the Italian CP and Socialist Party with the anarcho-syndicalists? Battaglia presumably thinks that "since the objective conditions existed", such "concrete" proposals would have allowed the Fraction to pull out of its hat the Party which was so sorely lacking. Let us hope that Battaglia has no other cards up its sleeve, no other miraculous expedients capable of transforming an objectively counter-revolutionary situation into the exact opposite; this is certainly possible, "but only under certain conditions", and above all "to the extent that it is not what it is", or on condition that "becomes what it cannot become" (Bilan no 12).
The real problem is that Battaglia departs from the Fraction, whose tradition it nonetheless claims, on at least two essential points: the preconditions for the formation of a new party, and the attitude to take in a globally counter-revolutionary period towards the confrontation with superficially proletarian groupings such as the anti-fascist militias. In a forthcoming article on the period between 1937 and 1952, we will see how this incomprehension appeared in the PCInt's formation in 1943, and in its attitude towards the partisans.
In considering this tragic period in the history of the workers' movement, we also intend to demonstrate the falsehood of Battaglia's affirmation that the Fraction was incapable of "giving the class the slightest political orientation in the toughest and most delicate periods"3.
Beyle
1 On the Spanish Civil War, see the articles in the International Review nos 50 and 54. On the Italian Fraction and its political oppositions, see the various articles and documents published in the International Review, and our pamphlet La Gauche Communiste d'Italie, published in French and Italian (shortly to appear also in Spanish and English) as well as the supplement on the relationships between the left Fraction of the Italian CP and the International Left Opposition, 1929-33.
2 In an article "The ICC and the course of history" published in Battaglia Comunista no 3, 1987, Battaglia comes on a bit strong: "In the 1930s, the Fraction (...) considered the perspective of war was inevitable", which supposedly led them "make political mistakes" such as "eliminating any possibility of revolutionary intervention in Spain, even before the proletariat's defeat".
3 These attacks on the Fraction, of which Battaglia claims to be the heir, are all the more significant in that they are appearing just as several Bordigist groups are beginning to rediscover the Fraction, after the silence maintained by Bordiga (see the articles published in Il Comunista of Milan, and the reprinting by Il Partito Comunista of Florence of the Fraction's manifesto on the war in Spain). Are Battaglia and the Bordigists changing places?
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1968-may-france
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/proletarian-political-milieu
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1919-german-revolution
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/algeria
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/massacres
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/france
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/18/proletarian-struggle
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/19/union-question
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/055_decadence_05.html
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/054_decadence_part04.html
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftn1
[12] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch09.htm
[13] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/index.htm
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftn2
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftn3
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftn4
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftn5
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftn6
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftn7
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftn8
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftn9
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftnref1
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftnref2
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftnref3
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftnref4
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftnref5
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftnref6
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftnref7
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftnref8
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/056_decadence_06.html#_ftnref9
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/304/understanding-capitalisms-decadence
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/debt
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/credit
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/first_congress.jpg
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/founding-communist-international-1919
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/contribution-discussion
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/29/class-consciousness
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/polemic
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/270/decadence-capitalism
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/32/decomposition
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/venezuela
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/bourgeois-democracy
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/bourgeois-maneuvers
[50] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/german-and-dutch-left
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1848/mexico
[52] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/munis
[53] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn1
[54] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn2
[55] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn3
[56] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn4
[57] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn5
[58] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn6
[59] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn7
[60] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn8
[61] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn9
[62] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn10
[63] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn11
[64] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn12
[65] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftn13
[66] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref1
[67] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref2
[68] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref3
[69] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref4
[70] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref5
[71] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref6
[72] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref7
[73] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref8
[74] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref9
[75] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref10
[76] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref11
[77] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref12
[78] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/058_part_08.html#_ftnref13
[79] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-ii
[80] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1996/state-capitalism-after-world-war-ii
[81] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/french-communist-left
[82] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/poland
[83] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/china
[84] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/middle-east
[85] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/russia
[86] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/america
[87] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[88] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[89] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/life-icc
[90] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/2044/rome-theses
[91] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/2045/foundation-italian-fraction
[92] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/2042/party-and-fraction-marxist-tradition
[93] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/battaglia-comunista
[94] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[95] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[96] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2043/ottorino-perrone-vercesi