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
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