At its Fifth Congress, the ICC made an appeal to the proletarian political milieu (International Review no. 35) to face up to its responsibilities in the context of today's serious world situation. The destructive contradictions of the capitalist system, exacerbated by the world crisis, reveal all the more starkly the alternative facing the working class: war or revolution. "But instead of serving as a reference point, a beacon in the emerging social storms, the political vanguard of the proletariat frequently finds itself buffeted and shaken by events ... incapable of overcoming its dispersion and divisions which are an inheritance of the counter-revolution."
The ICC Address does not pretend to offer any miracle solutions to this problem. We essentially wanted to insist on our conviction that intervention in struggles and above all, the preparation for future decisive encounters "cannot be carried out by the mere efforts of each group taken individually. It is a question of establishing a conscious cooperation between all organizations, not in order to carry out hasty and artificial regroupments but to develop a will, an approach, which centers attention on a systematic work of fraternal debate and confrontation between proletarian political forces."
We clearly stated in the Address: "The time has not yet come for calling for new conferences of communist groups". The lessons of the breakdown of the previous cycle of International Conferences (1977-80) must first be drawn and the debate seriously taken up again on questions still left unclarified. This is particularly true of the question which provoked the dislocation of the Conferences: the role, the function, of the future party of the proletariat.
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In this article we intend to answer the different letters and proposals we received from the groups which responded to our Address. The very fact that various organizations felt the need to answer and explain their positions is, in itself, a positive sign. At least it can be said that the political organizations of the proletariat are not deaf and dumb.
But although revolutionaries are by nature optimistic, we could not help getting the distinct impression that the answers to the Address were often less the result of a profound conviction than a knee-jerk reflex: how to save face by answering while in fact washing one's hands of the real problems of the milieu by not going to the heart of the issues. Reading between the lines, one sees that groups continue to think: if other organizations are in difficulty, all the better! It gets rid of the competition! Each group builds ‘its' party and defends ‘its' territory. Is the confrontation of political positions a necessity? ‘Sure', each group writes. But in fact this answer is no more than a half-hearted ‘why not?'. The basic needs of the class are not understood and thus, this activity is not seen as a vital necessity.
The desire to think, much less act, collectively only appears when some particular event rouses the milieu from its sectarian torpor, but it is far from being a constant concern, a systematic process. ‘Intervention in the class' and ‘intervention in the political milieu of the class' are still being played off against each other. The latter is still seen as an afterthought if not an outright sterile exercise. But if political groups were really convinced:
-- that class consciousness cannot come from outside the working class itself and that it is not injected into the class as the Leninist position in What is to be Done? Claimed;
-- that the political milieu of the proletariat exists for a purpose: so that the goals and means of the class can be expressed and clarified;
all groups would understand in practice and not just in words that the debates in the milieu are the reflection of the needs of the class. They would see that discussions are not superfluous and that the themes of debate are not just fortuitous choices. They would see that the vital process of clarification within the international working class as a whole must be expressed by a movement towards clarification in its political milieu. It is futile to just keep a scorecard of groups disappearing or splitting as though the milieu were a boxing ring. Without a thorough clarification in the milieu, any errors will simply be perpetuated and this would inevitably be detrimental to the possibility of a victorious revolution.
Today, most groups recognize that a major decantation is taking place in the political milieu; they can hardly do otherwise. But they are still basically passive in this situation. There is no understanding of the urgency involved in the need for active, conscious clarification without which this dislocation will merely be a dead loss. They do not recognize that sectarianism and fear of debate doomed the International Conferences and hindered the political milieu from consciously assuming its tasks. Only a confrontation of positions can help us all to evolve towards political coherence and assure an intervention appropriate to the needs of our historical situation.
We have so far received letters from the Communist Bulletin Group (Britain), the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (Belgium), the Communist Workers Organisation (Britain) and the ICP/Battaglia Comunista (Italy). The Fomento Obrero Revolucionario promises an answer in December 1983. Elements of the Groupe Volonte Communiste (ex-Pour Une Intervention Communiste) (France) are working on a balance sheet of their political trajectory. To begin with the basics ...
Communist Bulletin Group
How can one tell the difference between hot air and sincere conviction? By seeing whether words get translated into actions. Talk is cheap. The CBG writes:
"We want to express our solidarity with the approach and concerns expressed in the Address ... open, fraternal and continuing debate is a material necessity for the revolutionary milieu ... We have to fight for the recognition of the existence of a proletarian political milieu ..."
Fine! There is only one problem -- but a big one. The founders of this group are the same ex-members of the ICC section in Aberdeen (and ex-CWO section in Aberdeen) who covered up, participated in and justified the taking of material and money from the ICC when they played around in the troubled waters of the Chenier affair (see IR no 28). These ‘comrades' knew about Chenier's maneuvers for months beforehand and said nothing to their own comrades. They later justified stealing from us by saying this "was normal in the case of splits". Our indignation was to them the proof of our "petty bourgeois ownership attitude". The CBG as a whole still politically justifies these acts and positions. They still refuse to give back what they took. In the first issues of the Bulletin they covered all this up with baseless personal attacks against the ICC of the vilest and most stupid sort. Today, (probably because this attitude did not bring the results they counted on) they have changed their tune and hypocritically discovered "the need for healthy polemic". Whether the tone is hysterical or sickly sweet the result is the same: nowhere in the CBG press is there any disavowal of the actions or position of stealing as the origin for a group.
How can they talk about ‘solidarity' and the ‘recognition of a political milieu of the proletariat' when the very basis for this doesn't exist for them? The CBG actually put pen to paper to write: "The existence of the milieu engenders a community of obligations and responsibilities". But who is to say that these words do not actually mean: watch out the day after we disagree with you, because stealing, or whatever else comes into our head, will then automatically become ‘anti-petty bourgeois' activity. Or perhaps their view can be formulated as follows: when one splits, one can take whatever is at hand but when, at last, one is one's own master, with one's ‘own' little group, the ex-highwayman joins the circle of property owners. Or maybe because they have some new members, the old ones hope to hide behind their new name. New name, new game?
The CBG's letter cannot be taken seriously. If there are any sincere comrades in this group, the least they can do is to make an effort to understand this problem and act accordingly. It is impossible to talk about the existence of a milieu in words and do the opposite in deeds.
When El Oumami split from the ICP/Programma stealing material in France, we showed our solidarity on this elemental level. We will have the same attitude in the future: defending the proletarian political milieu against destructive attacks whatever the group concerned. At least it can be said that El Oumami's actions went along with their leftist platform. But what about the CBG?
What are its positions? The same (more or less) as the ICC! Another group whose existence is politically parasitical. What does it represent in the proletariat? A provincial version of the ICC platform minus the coherence and plus the stealing. But there is probably an evolution in the air. Most little circles which split before first clarifying their positions follow the path of least resistance at first and adopt the same platform as the group they left. But quite soon, to justify their separate existence once the drama has died down, all kinds of secondary differences are discovered and before you know it, principles are changed. This was the case for the PIC, and to a certain extent, the GCI (which both left the ICC), and the CBG is already following the same route by rejecting any coherence on the organization question.
However, this has never prevented us from polemicising with these other groups, nor from considering them as a part of the proletarian milieu in general or even inviting them to International Conferences. But this is not true for the CBG. A political group which does not respect the ‘community of obligations and responsibilities' to a point where they participate in acts aiming to injure, or destroy other organizations of the proletariat, puts itself outside the political milieu and deserves the ostracism it gets. Until the fundamental question of the defense of the political organizations of the proletariat is understood, we are obliged to consider the CBG's letter as null and void. They got the wrong Address.
Groupe Communiste Internationaliste (Belgium)
The GCI has written us:
"We agree with the principle of the need for regroupment and the world centralization of communist forces on the basis of a program. But for us this means not the primacy of consciousness over existence (discussion and exchange of ideas as a precondition) but the need for a real practical-theoretical convergence as a basis, a cement for the development of debate and polemic. That is why we are formulating real proposals for work and not the endless talk in a vacuum which characterizes, for the moment, your public meetings.
1. We think it vital that the few workers' groups that do exist develop elementary measures and practices of security and solidarity together so as to oppose a compact front against the increasingly virulent attacks of state or para-state repression. What do you think?
2. Concerning the recent important wave of struggles and the fact that unions have once again acted as strike-breakers, we feel that it is fundamental and necessary to develop a campaign of propaganda, agitation and actions centered around the question: unions equal strike-breakers; autonomous organization outside and against them; solidarity with the victims of repression, etc. We think that it is on this terrain and only on this terrain that groups can show their will to struggle." (GCI letter to ICC, 29.9.83)
We are not against joint actions if the situation requires them. We share the GCI's concern for the defense of proletarian organizations; this has always been our practice (the position taken by the ICC section in Belgium against Amada/Maoist calumnies on the GCI; the position on Chenier; against the attacks of El Oumami in France). Other occasions can arise. But for us the effectiveness of this ‘type of action' does not flow from a preparation against repression ‘in itself' (defense groups? military training?) nor from unprincipled fronts for the defense of victims in general, but from solid, principled agreement on the existence of the proletarian milieu and the need to defend it. This cannot be accomplished ‘only on the terrain of actions' but must necessarily involve what the GCI sees as ‘endless talk' -- discussions, debate, public statements at our meetings, in the press, etc. The same thing is true for the denunciation of the unions: this cannot be reduced to painting up slogans or launching ‘propaganda campaigns'. We know these kinds of campaigns only too well; the PIC was very fond of them for years. They only hide confusion and an inability to carry out real revolutionary work. The denunciation of unions is a long-term work requiring a whole framework so that intervention is not just a one-off agitation but part of a constant activity in the press, leaflets, strikes, demonstrations, etc, on an international level. Putting forward ‘projects for joint actions' as a basis is turning revolutionary activity on its head and leading it to disaster.
The GCI seems to be falling into the trap of seeing agitation as the ‘only terrain' for confrontation. This approach creates a separation between ‘theory' and ‘action' which can only make theory into sterile academicism and action into a no less sterile activism. In the end, this logic leads to depriving the class struggle of its consciousness, it's crucial element.
The GCI accuses us of idealism and Hegelianism, of giving ‘primacy to consciousness rather than existence'. In the answer to the GCI letter written by the section in Belgium (see Internationalisme, Dec. 1983), the ICC wrote:
"Just as a man breathes in order to live and not just to exercise his lungs, the ICC exists and discusses not for tea room chats but to develop a clear intervention in the class struggle. The alternative is not theory or practice; the question is what intervention, on what basis, with what positions?
It was in the name of the primacy of existence over consciousness that the Communist International imposed the policy of the united front. It was in the name of the same argument that the PCI (Programma) forbade any discussion and political intervention in the immigrants' struggle; that the GCI made a mountain out of a molehill with their phantom workers' committees (France) which evaporated as fast as they arose, and it was with the same reasoning that the GCI expelled the ICC from an unemployed committee in Brussels because according to the GCI the choice was between pasting up posters or discussing decadence.
We have seen the result of this sort of approach in the degeneration of the CI, the break-up of the PCI (Programma), the disappearance of all the GCI committees, a split in the GCI ... This logic which seeks at all costs to make agitation the only terrain of confrontation leads only to apoliticism and activism."
We do not reject joint actions; we can even add that the strike movement in Belgium in September 1983 would have required such actions. But they cannot be improvised. They call for a certain common analysis and political agreement which must be worked out through what the GCI calls ‘endless talk'!
We have gone into the implications of the GCI's approach because this kind of reasoning is not limited to them. Far from it. How many times have we heard groups say: "each group has its positions; no one is going to change -- so why bother talking". And to the extent that political groups do not try to defend their positions through rational arguments within a principled framework but try to ignore each other and avoid debate, discussion in the political milieu indeed stagnates. Some, like the GCI then conclude that rapprochement can only come from ‘one-off actions' (the GVC/ex-PIC text promised for the future will be interesting on this point) while others are glad to polemicise as long as it leads to nothing, as long as no common statement results. This was the case with the ‘dumb' International Conferences (see IR no.17). Either way the result is a dead-end.
ICP/BATTAGLIA COMUNISTA (Italy)
With its roots in the Italian Left and with its platform, this revolutionary group represents a serious current in the political milieu. It's will to polemicise, to confront political positions in the press and in public meetings is an indisputable reality. Battaglia participated in a public meeting of the ICC in Naples on the theme ‘Crisis in the Revolutionary Milieu: What is to be Done?' and later answered our address with a letter sent to all the groups which participated in the International Conferences.
Battaglia begins its response by criticizing the ICC: "We reject the ICC conception of the revolutionary camp itself. The ICC is unclear because it does not distinguish between the revolutionary camp and the camp of proletarian political forces."
If ‘revolutionary organizations' mean those groups with a coherent political platform, an organizational structure and a systematic and regular intervention in class struggle, and if ‘proletarian political camp' includes revolutionary groups but also groups without a platform or coherence or historical roots and which, on an unstable basis, claim to want to be part of the proletariat, then we can agree with this definition. Despite some occasional errors in vocabulary, we have always defended the need for this distinction. This is why in 1977 we insisted so much that Battaglia agree to define the International Conferences with clear political criteria.
Unfortunately, Battaglia uses this distinction for its own purposes:
"Who is in crisis? Certainly the ICC is. Certainly the PCI (Programma) is. Certainly not the (numerically small) forces which knew how to evaluate the situation and the problems of the Polish experience, which did not fall victim to mechanistic or idealistic positions and which benefit from solid doctrinal positions[1]. There is no crisis in the revolutionary milieu; it is a purging of the proletarian camp."
So which are the organizations of the true revolutionary camp? The CWO? If we judge from its over-estimation of the class struggle in Poland (when they called the workers to insurrection ‘now'), the CWO is not of the chosen either. But Battaglia keeps a discrete silence on this issue. The only group left is ... Battaglia! This sort of reasoning only makes us think that the sad result of Programma's megalomania has taught Battaglia nothing.
But wait. The rehabilitation of the CWO is coming. The object of the exercise is to justify the elimination of the ICC from the International Conferences. Polemics in the press are for the "vast and agitated" milieu but the Conferences are "for work towards the formation of the party". According to Battaglia and the CWO, as the three Conferences wore on they realized that the ICC did not have the same position as they did on the party. Appalled by this sudden revelation, BC "assumed the responsibility that is expected of a serious, leadership force" (BC letter) by introducing on this question an additional selective criterion unacceptable to the ICC. This is a pretty story. The ICC never ever had a Leninist position on the party, from way before the Conference in 1977. If that is what prevented the Conferences from continuing in 1980, it should have stopped them right from the beginning. So far as ‘taking up its responsibilities', we can quote an extract from our letter to BC in June 1980:
"Are we to think that your decision wasn't taken until during the conference itself? If that was the case, we can only be flabbergasted by your irresponsible underestimation of the importance of such a decision, by your improvised and precipitous behavior, which completely turned its back on the demands of the patient and systematic work which is so indispensable to revolutionaries.
But at the Conference, you said that this was in no way an improvised decision, but that you had previously talked about the necessity for a ‘selection'. Do we have to remind you, comrades, that during the meeting of the technical committee of November 1979 we clearly asked you about your intentions towards the future of the Conferences and about your apparent desire to exclude the ICC, and that you responded equally clearly that you were in favor of continuing them with their participants, including the ICC?
If, in fact, you felt that it was time to introduce a new, much more selective criterion for the calling of the future conferences, the only serious, responsible attitude, the only one compatible with the clarity and fraternal discussion that must animate revolutionary groups, would have been to have explicitly asked for this question to have been put on the agenda of the Conference and for texts to have been written on this question. But at no point in the preparation for the third Conference did you explicitly raise such a question. It was only after negotiations in the corridor with the CWO than you dropped your little bomb at the end of the Conference." (Proceedings of the Third Conference of Groups of the Communist Left)
And having rid themselves of the ICC, BC and the CWO held a fourth Conference, the culminating point in the decantation of the ‘proletarian camp' towards the ‘revolutionary camp' and the formation of the party -- with the SUCM, Supporters of the Unity of Communist Militants, a group which was just about to form ‘the Party' in Iran along with Komala, which is engaged in armed struggle for the liberation of Kurdistan in alliance with the Kurdish Democratic Party.
What is this group with whom BC "assumed its responsibilities"? According to the letters which BC sent to the SUCM in July and September 1983, the UCM "underestimates revolutionary defeatism", and its position of "defending the gains of the (Islamic) revolution does not exclude participating in the Iran/Iraq war". The UCM defends "just" wars and BC spends three pages of its letter giving lessons to its supporters on how to understand the falling rate of profit. To be sure, BC protests against the UCM's ‘social chauvinism' -- but ever so politely and it whispers to the SUCM that it really shouldn't go so far as to defend the state.
To the ICC, BC writes about our "congenital incapacity", our "theoretical inconsistency", saying that "only incompetent and incurable militants" could have our ideas. To the SUCM, it writes in the following style "allow us to say, dear comrades, that the organization of which you are the supporters can be said to have, dare we say it, a clear Stalinist leaning". What sweetness for our brothers ‘in evolution' from the third world! But for the ICC, any old insult will do. The only time BC loses its cool is when it learns that the UCM held a meeting of the ‘Internationalist Committee for Iran' to celebrate the constitution of a committee for the construction of the Communist Party of Iran, a meeting that took place in Italy with the Nuclei Leninisti Internazionalista, the Lega Leninista and others, but without BC!
In reality, the problem with BC and the CWO (which follows BC faithfully) is not that they have established a distinction between the proletarian camp and the revolutionary camp, but that they don't see the difference between the proletarian camp and the bourgeois camp. The SUCM, at least, seems more clear; it writes to BC: "either you are with the ICC, or you're with us". Now BC seems to want to distance itself somewhat from the SUCM and it has sent to different organizations the recent correspondence it's had with this group. But in the letter replying to the ICC's Address, it obstinately defends what it has done on this issue. One step forward, two steps back.
How is it that a political organization like BC, with all its experience, could have allowed itself to be drawn into a flirtation with the SUCM, a support group for bourgeois, Stalinist-type organizations?
It's true that political organizations are not infallible. But this isn't an error of enthusiasm about an unknown group. For over a year we've been warning BC and the CWO about the bourgeois content of the SUCM's political positions. Today, the fusion between the UCM and Komala, the military communiqués that we get from the SUCM on the armed struggle in Iran (how many tanks destroyed, how many people killed for the liberation of Kurdistan), as well as the Stalinist language of their documents and leaflets, can leave no doubt about what these groups are, at least for militants who aren't ‘incompetent and incurable'. The only doubt about the SUCM is knowing exactly who's behind them. BC has never posed the question about the origins of the enormous funds at the disposal of this group of Iranian dissidents, which in a year and a half has been able to cover all the main countries of Europe with its propaganda. Why does it have such an interest in penetrating the small groups of the present proletarian milieu, who can't offer anything material to the objectives of Komala? The SUCM is a very skilful group which knows how to talk the language of everyone in the milieu, which knows how to flatter the flatterers.
It's not as BC still claims, a ‘group in evolution'. How can a group coming from Stalinism, in alliance with the bourgeoisie, ‘evolve' towards the proletariat? A political organization can't cross this class frontier. If they keep slopping about in this muck, it's BC and the CWO who will evolve towards the bourgeoisie. "To know how to draw a clear line of demarcation vis-a-vis groups infested with social patriotism is the least we can demand of organizations as serious and as important as BC and the CWO." Rivoluzione Internazionale, no.33)
BC has allowed itself to be led by the nose because the SUCM, UCM and Komala talk about the party, and BC and the CWO have their vision clouded by the word ‘party'. They have turned away from the ICC under the pretext that we're ‘against the party'. It seems quite secondary whether we're talking about the bourgeois party of Kurdish nationalism.
BC has made this mistake because it has a penchant (one might say a ‘congenital' one) towards opportunist operations. According to their response to the Address, BC and the CWO are "the only ones to carry out this work towards the proletariat of the third world". If BC had really done its work towards the proletariat of the third world, it would have been quite intransigent in its denunciation of nationalism, as was the ICC in its interventions on the ‘guerilleros' in Latin America and elsewhere. This whole condescending attitude towards the militants of the third world (who are, it seems, so backward that you have to judge their positions with the indulgence of a Battaglia) is nothing less than an insult to the anti-nationalist communists of the third world, and a pure and simple alibi for Battaglia. Battaglia is no more clear on the program to be followed in Europe itself. This isn't a question of geography and it doesn't begin in 1983. In IR no.32, we published the documents of the ICP of Italy in 1945 when Battaglia and Programma were both in the ICP. Their ambiguities about the partisans, those ‘forces in evolution' during the ‘liberation' of Italy speak for themselves. Battaglia replied to us that one has to know how to get one's hands dirty. Well then, the flirtation with the SUCM is not surprising.
But the main reason behind Battaglia's wavering and contradictory policies towards the proletarian political milieu, towards the definition of this milieu and of Battaglia's own responsibility within it, is the inadequacy of their platform, full of ‘tactical' loopholes on unionism, electoralism and national liberation.
Battaglia boasts about having ‘solid doctrinal positions'. But where are they? Certainly not in the new edition of their platform. The ICC must haunt BC's dreams because they keep attributing their own weaknesses to us. According to BC, the ICC suffers from a surfeit of ‘open questions'. What exactly this refers to, we do not know. What we do know is that BC has, not ‘open questions', but gaping holes, so much so that it prevents them from seeing class lines. On all the main issues, including the question of the party, BC merely repeats the errors of the Communist International, but makes them worse with vague and contradictory formulations.
Examine the positions of the ICP/Battaglia; there is never an honest, clear rejection of the errors of the CI on the union question, electoralism or national liberation. There is not even a clear rejection of the errors of their own party, the ICP, since 1943. Just a little attenuation here and there, a fudge of formulations when the situation requires it. If Battaglia occasionally asserts the opposite of the IIIrd International's positions, it is only paying lip-service, enveloping; it in so many ‘diplomatic' and ‘tactical' ambiguities that everything is fundamentally back to square one. BC continues to twist around, equivocating; all the way.
Marx wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.
At the beginning of the twenties, the centrist majority of the Communist International, led by the Bolsheviks chose to eliminate the Left to join with the Right (the Independents in Germany, etc). This was a fatal move, a tragedy for the communist movement.
In 1945, the newly created ICP of Italy, chose to eliminate the Gauche Communiste de France (see the article on the Second Congress of the ICP (1948) in this issue of the Review), in order to join with the survivors of a voluntary participation in the imperialist war in Spain in 1936, with the remnants of those who participated in the Anti-Fascist Committee of Brussels and with those who flirted with the Resistance and national liberation. This again was a tragedy for the communist milieu but it already had something of a farce played out by megalomaniacs.
In our period, the International Conferences were sabotaged to eliminate the most intransigent communist current in order to run after alliances with the UCM and other defenders of national liberation in Iran and Kurdistan. The remnants of sixty years of Stalinism were taken for ‘embryos of the future communist party' in the Third World.
This time it was a complete farce! All the more so because at least Lenin's concern was the mass unity of the proletariat, and not, as in BC's more prosaic case, the defense of a little group.
The ‘juniors' of today are no different from their ‘seniors' of 1945. The same approach, the same positions. Perhaps a bit watered down but with a good dose of hypocrisy added on. Although history repeats itself as farce, opportunism always remains the same.
Communist Workers Organization (Britain)
In its open letter of September 1983, the CWO writes:
"We agree that the working class and its minorities are in an extremely difficult and dangerous situation at the moment, though when you speak of ‘the crisis in the revolutionary milieu' it is not the one we have in mind ... More significant of the real crisis is our continued isolation as communists from the working class." (‘Reply to the "Address" of the International Communist Current')
But isolation as such isn't what provoked the crisis. For the CWO, the loss of revolutionary energies today can be put at the same level as in the past. Are we then still in the middle of the counter-revolution?
The CWO considers that the Address is "an expression of the crisis in the ICC". Does it therefore reject discussion? In the end, no: "though it is not possible to carry on relations between our tendencies at the level of the international conferences, this does not exclude debate." Thus, the CWO proposes a public meeting between the ICC and the CWO "on the topic of the present situation of the class struggle and the responsibility of revolutionaries". We have accepted this perfectly valid proposal.
But in its letter, the CWO makes a number of reproaches against the ICC and we want to deal with some of them here (to deal with all of them would be too much even for a Hercules).
* According to the CWO's letter, the ICC is not ‘serious' because "the CWO offered the ICC the opportunity to solidarise with our international intervention on the Iran/Iraq war, the ICC refused on the most ridiculous grounds." (For our response to this proposal, see World Revolution no.59.)
In the framework of the International Conferences, the CWO refused to take up a common position against imperialist war and the inter-imperialist tensions because, as it says in the same letter, these were "vague and meaningless joint positions on self-evident banalities".
But did the CWO want the ICC to rubber-stamp its dangerous ambiguities about the UCM? The CWO doesn't bring out a leaflet for every local war in the world, only for the Iran-Iraq war. And although the leaflet did take a position on those ‘self-evident banalities' it must be seen as part of the rapprochement between the UCM and the CWO.
* Also, in their response to the Address, the CWO reproaches us for not inviting them to ICC Congresses whereas they invite us to theirs.
For some years, we invited BC and the CWO to our different Congresses and they came along, together with delegations from other political groups. But after the breakdown in the International Conferences, after being pushed out by the maneuvers of BC and the CWO, we consider that it would be nonsense to invite these groups to our internal meetings. The CWO does not want the ICC to participate in conferences between groups, but it wants to come to our Congresses? It kicks us out of the conferences, but invites us to its Congresses? Is that a logical approach? Does the CWO understand the significance of its own actions?
In the article ‘On the so-called Bordigism of the CWO' (Revolutionary Perspectives, no.20, second series), the CWO doesn't want to talk about that exactly. It prefers to defend its elder brother Battaglia against a sinister plot: the ICC has called BC ‘Bordigist'. If the word bothers you, comrades, let's drop it. It does not change the basic issue. The truth is that, in this article and in the letter, the CWO is furious with the ICC because we have published documents about the ICP's opportunism towards the partisans. In fact, these articles were aimed mainly at Programma, but the hat burns on the heads of Battaglia and the CWO. And with good reason. Between 1945 and 1952, BC was at the helm of the ‘united' ICP. But what is the CWO's reply: it wails ‘mummy' and stamps its foot. ‘Lies!' it says. But it explains nothing and justifies everything.
* According to the CWO, "before 1975, the ICC never mentioned the PC Int (Battaglia)" as though we'd ‘hidden' the existence of BC from the CWO, for fear that these two titans might meet up. We did talk about Battaglia, but the CWO had its ears closed at the time. In the early seventies, the group was emerging out of the libertarian milieu and considered the Russian Revolution to be a bourgeois revolution, the Bolshevik party a bourgeois party. But when it finally recognized the October revolution and the Communist International, it was only paying lip-service. For the CWO, the counter-revolution was definitive by 1921 (it didn't say whether this was in January or December) and this fateful date was a sufficient basis to denounce the ICC as a ‘counter-revolutionary group'. At the time, we were Leninists because we talked about Bilan, but today we are called councilists because the CWO has discovered Battaglia. The CWO has gone through so many zig-zags in its life that you never know how long the latest zig will last. The CWO is reduced to polemics of the kind that appear in RP no.20 because it was born in ignorance of the history of the workers' movement, and because it has never sought for a real coherence in its attitude towards proletarian political groups.
* We can't reply to everything here, but we do want to deal with one final important point. In RP no.20 the CWO accuses us of condemning its rapprochement with BC. This is wrong. We are always for the regroupment of organizations as soon as they find themselves on the same basic political positions. We would never have condemned a BC/CWO regroupment within the International Conferences. We followed the same path ourselves with the formation of our section in Sweden in the same period. We are against the perpetuation of little sects. If groups agree, they should unite. This helps to clarify things for the proletariat.
We would go further. We have known the CWO for a long time, and comparing its present rapprochement with BC to the strange alliances its anti-ICC reactions have produced in the past (with the PIC, the Revolutionary Workers' Group of Chicago, etc) we say: much better!
The question we must ask the CWO is this: why do you maintain a separate existence? Either one thing or the other: either you agree with the platform of BC, and that means that its ambiguities on the electoral, union and national questions are shared by you; or you don't agree -- in which case, where are the discussion texts between your groups?
The CWO wants to wait and see whether the ICC is ‘really serious', whether its Address is ‘sincere'. Our Address expresses the position we have always had on the necessity for a dialogue in the political milieu of the proletariat. For more than fifteen years, we haven't shifted one iota on this point. We aren't chameleons like the CWO which changes color every two or three years. If the CWO has a short memory, we're happy to refresh it for them.
Perspectives
The groups write to us: your suggestions are vague. What do you want exactly with this Address?
We want to call for a change of heart in the political milieu of our class: the end of pretensions and of arrogance in a state of magnificent isolation; the end of evasions, of dangerous activism, of poetic licence on questions of principle.
First, to the basics. It's time to stop making the question of the party an alibi. It's time to discuss it seriously without anathemas, without going around in circles about empty formulae. It's time to respond clearly on some elementary questions before the debate can really go deeper:
-- does class consciousness come from outside the class as Lenin wrote in What is to be Done?
-- either in the past or tomorrow, is the class party the sole crucible or depository of class consciousness?
-- is it the party that takes power?
-- can the party impose itself on the class through the use of force, as in Kronstadt in 1921?
-- what criticisms, modifications, and elaborations on the question of the party can we draw from the Russian Revolution, the experience of the first revolutionary wave, and the degeneration in Russia, and in the Communist International?
These are the fundamental question which have to be answered by pushing forward the criticism of the errors and insufficiencies of the past, and by benefitting from the contribution of the entire international communist left, without any ‘Italian', ‘German' or other exclusiveness.
Even Programma, after thirty years of being closed and self-sufficient, is today being compelled by events to open a debate inside itself on the party, its function and mode of organization. But why only an internal debate? Can you catch some shameful disease by taking part in the political discussion going on in the proletarian milieu? Is the confrontation of political positions a luxury, an annexed to ‘normal' activities, something you do if there's time, or is it a necessity, the only way to verify the premises of our political contribution to the decisive struggles of our class?
It's undeniable that the absence of the International Conferences is a real problem today, that it makes it even more difficult to respond to the acceleration of history, to ensure that militant energies aren't lost in the convulsions of the political milieu, to present a principled framework for the newly-emerging elements of the class, to assist clarification in all countries, especially those which haven't had the time to develop marxist traditions. And it is also undeniable that the International Conferences were dislocated because of the sectarianism in the milieu: the PIC which rejected a ‘dialogue of the deaf'; the FOR which didn't want to discuss the economic crisis and which loudly withdrew from the Second Conference; the actions of Battaglia and the CWO which we have criticized; Programma which saw in the conferences only the ‘fuckers' and the ‘fucked'.
To create a new spirit is the only way to make it possible to hold new conferences in the future, the only way to ensure a conscious decantation in the milieu, to work towards new and absolutely necessary efforts of regroupment.
For who dares to look at the political milieu of the proletariat and say that it will never be anything else but what it is today?
JA
[1] In Battaglia, crisis is never expressed clearly and openly through opposition and confrontation of political divergences for the simple reason that there is not much of a political life of discussion within the organization. There is no real confrontation; one votes with one's feet by discretely, in silence, leaving the organization, one by one. This is not so immediately visible to the eye but just as important.
As to its ‘solid doctrinal positions', we refer the reader to the article in this IR on the Second Congress of the PCI/Italy in 1948. A reading of this report can help give the reader a more exact idea of Battaglia's ‘solid positions'.
The course of history: The 80s are not the 30s
In which direction is history moving; where is our society going to? Are we heading for a new world war? Or, on the contrary, are we heading for class confrontations that will pose the question of proletarian revolution?
This is a basic, fundamental question for anyone claiming to play an active and conscious part in the class struggle.
This is why the congresses of a proletarian political organization always devote a large part of their effort to the analysis of the international situation, with the aim of grasping as firmly as possible the general dynamic of the balance of class forces.
The Partito Communista Internazionalista (Battaglia Communista) held its Fifth Congress in November 1982 and has just published the fruits of its labors in Prometeo no.7 of June 1983. The question is touched on ... even if this is partly to insist that this kind of question cannot be answered.
In a recent text (distributed at the ICC's July 1983 public forum in Naples, Italy) BC states that they consider this Congress' Theses as a contribution to the debate in the revolutionary milieu, and "is still waiting for them to be discussed in their political substance." Rather than deal superficially with all the questions touched on at BC's Congress ("crisis and imperialism", "tactics for intervention and the revolutionary party", "the transitional phase from capitalism to communism") we have limited ourselves in this article to the question of the present historic course, and what the Theses of BC's Congress have to say about it.
Is it possible to move towards world war and world revolution at the same time?
According to Battaglia, we cannot answer the question of the present perspective for class struggle more precisely than to say: it may be war, it may be revolution, it may be both. For Battaglia, there is nothing that allows us to assert that one outcome is more probable than the others. Here is an example of how this idea is formulated:
"The generalized collapse of the economy immediately gives rise to the alternative: war or revolution. But by marking a catastrophic turning point in the capitalist crisis and an abrupt upheaval in the system's superstructure, the war itself opens up the possibilities of the latter's collapse and of a revolutionary destruction, and the possibility for the communist party to assert itself . The factors determining the social break-up within which the party will find the conditions for its rapid growth and self-affirmation -- whether this be in the period preceding the conflict, during or immediately after it -- cannot be quantified. We cannot therefore determine ‘a priori' when such a break-up will take place (eg Poland)." (‘Tactics for the Intervention of the Revolutionary Party', Prometeo, June 1983)
BC starts from a basic idea which is both correct and important: there is no ‘third way out'. The alternative is war or revolution, and there is no possibility of capitalism starting on a renewed peace-time economic development. Apart from anything else, this is important in the face of the flood of ‘pacifist' illusions that the bourgeoisie is pouring over the proletariat in the industrialized countries. But it is inadequate, to say the least, in determining a perspective.
Battaglia says "the factors determining the social break-up ... cannot be quantified. We cannot therefore determine ‘a priori' when such a break-up will take place."
However, the question is not to determine the date and time of an eventual proletarian revolution but, more simply and more seriously, one of knowing whether the world bourgeoisie has the means to lead the proletariat of the industrialized countries into a third world war or whether on the contrary, pushed by the crisis and not enrolled under the capitalist banner, the proletariat is preparing for the confrontations that will pose the question of the world communist revolution.
When it says that the revolutionary situation may arise before, during or after a coming war, Battaglia admits its inability to take position on the present historical perspective.
BC justifies this inability by saying that the economic crisis can lead simultaneously to one or the other historical outcome.
There are supposedly two parallel tendencies, each with as much chance of being realized as the other.
It is true that from an objective standpoint, the economic crisis simultaneously exacerbates the antagonisms between social classes, and between rival capitalist powers. But whether one or the other of those antagonisms comes to a head depends in the last instance on one and the same factor: proletarian practice and consciousness.
It is the same, exploited, class which either affirms itself as protagonist of the revolution or serves as cannon-fodder and producer of the material means for imperialist war.
The state of mind, the consciousness of a class ready to overthrow the capitalist social order and build a new society is radically different from that of workers atomized, broken, ‘identified with' their ruling class to the point where they accept slaughtering each other on the battlefield in the name of ‘their' respective fatherlands. Marching under the red flag towards the unification of humanity is not the same thing as marching in ranks of four under the national banner to massacre the proletarians of the opposing imperialist camp. The working class cannot be in these two mutually exclusive states of mind simultaneously.
This is an obvious fact that Battaglia would accept without hesitation. However, it seems to be unaware that the processes leading to one or other of these situations are also mutually exclusive.
The process that leads to a revolutionary outcome is characterized by the proletariat's increasing disengagement from the grip of the dominant ideology and the development of its consciousness and combativity; in contrast, the process that leads towards war is expressed in the workers' growing adherence to capitalist values (and to their political and trade union representatives) and in a combativity which either tends to disappear, or appears within a political perspective totally controlled by the bourgeoisie.
These are two thoroughly different, antagonistic, mutually exclusive processes.
Anyone who analyses history in the light of the proletariat's role of central protagonist knows that the march towards war cannot be the same as the march towards revolutionary confrontations.
To affirm that these two processes can unfold simultaneously, without it being possible to determine which has the upper hand, is quite simply to reason by reducing the working class' consciousness and combativity to a mere abstraction.
How do we recognize the course towards war?
Today, Battaglia claims to be the only authentic heir to the inter-war Fraction of the Italian Left. But for this current, which remained on a class terrain throughout the dark days of triumphant counter-revolution, one of its greatest merits was its lucid recognition of the revolution's retreat after the 1920s and the opening of the course towards war in the 1930s. If it was able to recognize the Spanish Civil War and the 1936 strikes in France not as "the beginning of the revolution in Europe", as Trotsky thought, but as moments of the march towards world war that had already started, this was thanks to its ability to reason in terms of a historical course and to situate particular events within the overall dynamic of the balance of class forces on a world historical level. We only have to consider the periods leading up to the two world wars to see that they did not come as bolts from the blue, but were the result of a preparatory process during which the bourgeoisie systematically destroyed proletarian consciousness to the point where it could enlist the workers under the national banner.
In 1945, applying the method of the Italian Left, the Communist Left in France produced a remarkable summary of this process of war preparation:
"Through the intermediary of its agents within the proletariat, the bourgeoisie managed to put an end to the class struggle (or, more exactly, to destroy the proletariat's class power and its consciousness) and to derail its struggles by emptying these struggles of their revolutionary content, by setting them on the rails of reformism and nationalism -- which is the ultimate and decisive condition for the outbreak of imperialist war.
This must be understood not from the narrow and limited standpoint of one national sector taken in isolation, but internationally.
Thus, the partial resurgence of struggles and the 1913 strike wave in Russia in no way detracts from our affirmation. If we look more closely, we can see that the international proletariat's power on the eve of 1914, the electoral victories, the great social-democratic parties and the mass union organizations (the pride and glory of the Second International), were only an appearance, a facade hiding a profound ideological decay. The workers' movement, undermined and rotten with rampant opportunism, was to collapse, like a house of cards before the first blast of war.
Reality does not appear in the chronological photography of events. To understand it, we must grasp the underlying internal movement, the profound changes which have already occurred before they appear at the surface and are recorded as dates.
It would be a serious mistake to respect history's chronological order to the letter and present the 1914 war as the cause of the Second International's collapse when, in reality, the outbreak of war was conditioned by the previous opportunist degeneration of the international workers' movement. The greater the internal triumph and domination of the nationalist tendency, the louder sounded the public fanfares of the internationalist phrase. The 1914 war simply brought into the light of day the passage of the Second International's parties into the bourgeois camp, the substitution of the class enemy's ideology for their initial revolutionary program, their attachment to the interests of the national bourgeoisie.
The open completion of this internal process of destruction of class consciousness appeared in the outbreak of the 1914 war which it conditioned.
The outbreak of the Second World War was subject to the same conditions.
We can distinguish three necessary and successive stages between the two imperialist wars.
The first came to an end with the exhaustion of the great post-1917 revolutionary wave and consisted of a series of defeats for the revolution in several countries: in the defeat of the left, excluded from the Communist International by the triumph of centrism, and the beginning of Russia's evolution towards capitalism, through the theory and practice of' "socialism in one country".
The second stage is the general offensive of international capitalism, which succeeded in liquidating the social convulsions in the decisive centre where the historical alternative of capitalism or socialism was played out -- Germany -- through the physical crushing of the proletariat and the installation of the Hitler regime playing the role of Europe's policeman. This stage corresponds to the definitive death of the CI and the bankruptcy of Trotsky's left opposition which, unable to regroup revolutionary energies, engaged itself in coalitions and mergers with the opportunist currents and groups of the socialist left, and took the road of bluff and adventurism by proclaiming the Fourth International.
The third stage saw the total derailment of the workers' movement in the ‘democratic' countries. Under cover of defending workers' ‘liberties' and ‘conquests' from the threat of fascism, the bourgeoisie's real aim was to win the proletariat's adherence to the defense of democracy -- ie of national bourgeoisie and the capitalist fatherland. Anti-fascism was the platform, the modern capitalist ideology, that the proletariat's traitor parties used to wrap up the rotten produce of defense of the nation.
During this third stage occurred the definitive passage of the so-called communist parties into the service of their respective capitalisms, the destruction of class consciousness through the poisoning of the masses with anti-fascist ideology, the masses' adherence to the future imperialist war through their mobilization in the ‘Popular Fronts', the perverted and derailed strikes of 1936. The definitive victory of state capitalism in Russia was expressed, amongst other things, by the ferocious repression and physical massacre of all attempts at revolutionary reaction, by Russia's entry into the League of Nations, its integration into an imperialist bloc and the installation of the war economy with a view to the oncoming imperialist war. This period also witnessed the liquidation of many revolutionary and Left Communist groups with their origins in the crisis of the CI, which (through their adherence to anti-fascist ideology and the defense of the ‘Russian workers' state') were caught in the cogs of capitalism and definitively lost as expressions of the life of the class. Never has history recorded such a divorce between the class and the groups that express its interests and its mission. The vanguard is in a state of absolute isolation and reduced in numbers to a few negligible little groups.
The immense revolutionary wave that sprang from the end of the first imperialist war has put such fear into international capitalism that this long period of disintegration of the proletariat's foundations was necessary to create the conditions for unleashing a new worldwide imperialist war." (Report to the July 1945 Conference of the Communist Left in France)
As we can see, the historic course towards war has its specific manifestations which are sufficiently prolonged and recognizable -- even if they cannot be "quantified" as Battaglia would like -- for us to risk taking up a position.
It might perhaps be said that it is not always easy to recognize such a process -- but it would mean shunning the responsibilities of revolutionaries, and resigning ourselves to impotence and uselessness, to pretend that it is impossible, in a general way, to determine the historic course.
How do we recognize the course towards decisive class confrontations?
The process leading towards the creation of revolutionary situations is very different from that leading towards war. The march towards war does not break with the logic of the dominant system.
For the proletarians, going to war means complete submission to capital at every level ... to the point of sacrificing life itself. There is no fundamental change in the relationship between exploiting and exploited classes. The ‘normal' relationship is simply pushed to one of its most extreme forms.
"In reality, what could be called the ‘normal' course of capitalist society is towards war. The resistance of the working class, which can put this course into question, appears as a sort of ‘anomaly', as something running ‘against the stream', of the organic processes of the capitalist world. This is why, when we look at the eight decades of this century, we can find hardly more than two during which the balance of forces was sufficiently in the proletariat's favor for it to have been able to bar the way to imperialist war (1905-12, 1917-23,1968-80)." (International Review, no.21, second quarter 1980, ‘Revolution or War'.)
In this sense, the course towards rising class struggle is far more fragile, unstable and uneven than the course towards war. Because of this, it can be interrupted and reversed by a decisive defeat in a confrontation with the bourgeoisie, while the course towards war can only be broken by the war itself.
"Whereas the proletariat has only one road to victory -- armed, generalized confrontation with the bourgeoisie -- the latter has at its disposal numerous and varying means with which to defeat its enemy. It can derail its combativity into dead-ends (this is the present tactic of the left); it can crush it sector by sector (as it did in Germany between 1918 and 1923); or it can crush it physically during a frontal confrontation (even so, this remains the kind of confrontation most favorable to the proletariat)." (ibid)
The course towards war and the course towards decisive class confrontations
To take account of this ‘reversibility' of the course towards revolution we prefer to talk of a ‘course towards class confrontations' in trying to understand the present situation.
"The existence of a course towards class confrontations means that the bourgeoisie does not have a free hand to unleash a new world butchery: first, it must confront and beat the working class. But this does not prejudge the outcome of this confrontation, in one way or the other. This is why it is preferable to talk about a ‘course towards class confrontations' rather than a ‘course towards revolution'." (International Review no.35, ‘Resolution on the International Situation', Fifth Congress of the ICC.)
This is why we make less use of the term ‘course towards revolution' ... not because we have overturned our analysis of the question of the present course, as Battaglia claims, trying to raise an unreal polemic which avoids the real questions (as in their public reply to the ‘Address to Proletarian Political Groups' of the ICC's Fifth Congress).
This term, ‘course towards revolution' is justified essentially by the need to insist that there is no third way out of the dilemma: war or revolution. But if it were left at that, such a formulation could imply an outcome which we cannot affirm with certainty, at least not at the present stage of development of the historic course: we know that we are heading towards large-scale confrontations between bourgeoisie and proletariat which will once again pose the question of the revolution, and not towards war. But we cannot predict in advance the outcome of this confrontation.
Revolution during the war?
History gives us far more examples of situations where the balance of forces is totally in favor of the ruling class, than of periods where the proletariat has shaken or really limited bourgeois power. As a result, we have fewer historical references to define the characteristics of what a course towards revolutionary confrontations might be than is the case with a course towards war. All the more so since the experience of the proletariat's previous great revolutionary movements has generally occurred during or immediately after a war (the 1871 Paris Commune, 1905 and 1917 in Russia, 1918-19 in Germany). And the conditions created by war are such that, though they may provoke the development of a wave of revolutionary struggles as in 1914-18, they prevent these struggles from becoming truly international.
War can provoke revolutionary movements -- and may even do so extremely quickly: the first significant strikes in Russia and Germany took place in 1915 and 1916; the revolution broke out ‘only' 2-3 years later. But these 2-3 years were a period of world war, of history speeded up so that, on the level of the balance of class forces, these years were worth decades of exploitation and ‘peaceful' crisis.
However, "... the imperialist war (1914-18) also brought with it a whole series of obstacles to the generalization of revolutionary struggles on a world scale:
-- the division between ‘victorious' and ‘beaten' countries; in the former, the proletariat was more easily prey to the chauvinist poison poured out in huge doses by the bourgeoisie; in the second, while national demoralization created the best conditions for the development of internationalism, it by no means closed the door to revanchist feelings (cf ‘national Bolshevism' in Germany).
-- the division between belligerent and ‘neutral' countries: in the latter countries the proletariat didn't suffer a massive deterioration of its living standards.
-- faced with a revolutionary movement born out of the imperialist war, the bourgeoisie could resort to bringing a halt to hostilities (cf Germany in November 1918).
-- once the imperialist war was over, capitalism had the possibility of reconstructing itself and thus, to some extent, of improving its economic situation. This broke the élan of the proletarian movement by depriving it of its basic nourishment: the economic struggle, and the obvious bankruptcy of the system.
By contrast, the gradual development of a general crisis of the capitalist economy -‑ although it doesn't allow for the development of such a rapid awareness about the real stakes of the struggle and the necessity for internationalism - does eliminate the above obstacles in the following way:
-- it puts the proletariat of all countries on the same level: the world crisis doesn't spare any national economy.
-- it offers the bourgeoisie no way out except a new imperialist war, which it can't unleash until the proletariat has been defeated." (International Review no.26, third quarter 1981, ‘Resolution on the Class Struggle', Fourth Congress of the ICC.)
History does not, therefore, provide us with all the possible characteristics of a period of rising class struggle like today, marked not by war but by society's slow decline into economic crisis.
We can nonetheless identify this course:
-- firstly, because it does not have the essential characteristics of a course towards war;
-- secondly, because it is marked both by the proletariat's progressive disengagement from the grip of the dominant ideology, and by the development of the workers' own class consciousness and combativity.
The present course of history
Battaglia's Fifth Congress does not really take a position on the perspectives for the class struggle. It remains vague ... just as the ICP's Second Congress in 1948 did on the same question (see the article in this issue). But the Congress' Theses do say, as regards the present situation:
"If the proletariat today, faced with the gravity of the crisis and undergoing the blows of repeated bourgeois attacks, has not yet shown itself able to respond, this simply means that the long work of the world counter-revolution is still active in the workers' consciousness." (Synthesis of the General Political Report)
Battaglia has never understood the importance of the historic break with the counter-revolution constituted by the strike wave opened up by May 1968 in France. In reality, BC considers that today, just as in the 1930s, "the long work of the world counter-revolution is still active in the workers' consciousness."
To a large extent, BC still doesn't see the qualitative difference between the 1930s and the 1980s. They do not see that qualitatively different historical conditions are created for the proletarian struggle by the economic crisis' systematic destruction of the ideological mystifications which weigh the proletariat down and which have enlisted it in war in the past.
According to Battaglia's Fifth Congress Theses:
"The fact of having, for decades, yielded first to opportunism, then to the counter-revolution of the centrist parties; the fact of having undergone the weight of the collapse of political myths like Russia or China; the frustration of emotional/political campaigns created artificially around the Vietnam War: these have engendered, in the shock of the vast and destructive economic crisis, a proletariat, that is tired and disappointed, though not definitively beaten." (idem)
It is only normal that BC should observe, at the least, that since the Second World War the proletariat has not been massively crushed and is not "definitively beaten". But, once this is said, BC continues to see no more in the proletariat and its struggles than "the long work of the counter-revolution", tiredness and disappointment.
Let us examine the real situation.
As we have seen above, the existence of working class combativity (strikes, etc) is not enough to determine a course towards revolutionary confrontations. The struggles on the eve of the First World War, steeped in the spirit of reformism, in illusions about democracy and an endless capitalist prosperity; those of the late ‘30s diverted and annihilated in the dead-end of ‘anti-fascism' and so in the defense of ‘democratic' capitalism: these demonstrate that without the development of proletarian consciousness, class combativity is not enough to block the course towards war.
Since the end of the ‘60s, throughout the four corners of the earth, the workers' combativity has undergone, with ups and downs, a renewal that breaks unequivocally with the previous period. From May ‘68 in France to Poland 1980, the working class has shown that it is far from being "tired and disappointed", that its combative potential remains intact and that it has been able to put this potential into action.
What point has class consciousness reached?
Here we can distinguish two processes which, though tightly linked, are nonetheless not identical. Proletarian consciousness develops, on the one hand by its disengagement from the grip of the dominant ideology and, on the other, ‘positively' through the affirmation of the class autonomy, unity and solidarity.
As regards the first aspect, the devastating effects of the economic crisis, which no government -- right or left, East or West -- has been able to check, have dealt some heavy blows to the bourgeois mystifications of the possibility of a prosperous, peaceful capitalism, of the Welfare State, of the working class nature of the Eastern bloc and other so-called ‘socialist' regimes, of bourgeois democracy and the vote as a means of ‘changing things', of chauvinism and nationalism in the most industrialized countries, of the working class nature of the ‘left' parties and their trade union organizations. (For a more extensive treatment of this question, we refer the reader to our previous texts, in particular the Report on the Historic Course adopted at the ICC's Third Congress in IR no.18, third quarter 1979.)
As to the second aspect -- the ‘positive' development of class consciousness -- this can only be evaluated in relation to the proletariat's open struggles considered not in a static or local manner but in their worldwide dynamic. And indeed, the struggles of the last 15 years, from May ‘68 in France to September ‘83 in Belgium. (the strikes in the public sector), while they have not reached a revolutionary degree of consciousness -- which it would be childish to expect at their present stage of development -- are nonetheless marked by a clear evolution towards autonomy from the bourgeoisie's control apparatus (unions, left parties) and towards forms of extension and self-organization of the struggle. The mere fact that the bourgeoisie is more and more systematically obliged to have recourse to ‘rank and file unionism', especially in the ‘democratic' countries, to contain and divert the workers' combativity because the workers are deserting the unions in ever greater numbers, and because the union leaderships are less and less able to make themselves obeyed, is in itself enough to demonstrate the direction of the dynamic of workers' consciousness. Unlike the 1930s, when the workers' struggles were accompanied by increased unionization and the grip of bourgeois forces on the movement, the struggles in our epoch are tending to affirm their autonomy and their ability to go beyond the barriers that these forces erect against them.
Certainly, the proletariat still has a long way to go before it affirms its fully-formed revolutionary consciousness. But if we have to wait for this before taking a position on the present movement's direction -- as Battaglia seems to -- then we might as well give up any hope of a serious analysis of the present course of history.
Battaglia's Fifth Congress seems to have devoted a lot of effort to the analysis of the present economic crisis. This is an important aspect of our understanding of today's historical evolution -- as long as this analysis is correct, which is not always the case. But the best of economic analyses is no use to a revolutionary organization, unless it is accompanied by a correct appreciation of the historic dynamic of the class struggle. And in this sense, Battaglia's Congress is 40 years behind the times.
To judge from the work of its Fifth Congress, all the signs are that, as far as the analysis of the class struggle goes, Battaglia has still not arrived at the years of truth -- the 1980s.
RV
"' ... never, since the 1930s, has it been so clear that the capitalist economy is in a total impasse; never since the last world war has the bourgeoisie set in motion such huge military arsenals, so much effort towards the production of the means of destruction; never since the 1920s has the proletariat fought battles on the scale of those which shook Poland and the whole ruling class in 1980-81. However, all this is just the beginning. In particular, although the bourgeoisie is apparently consoling itself by talking about the ‘economic recovery', they have a hard time masking the fact that the worst of the crisis is still ahead of us. Similarly, the worldwide retreat in the workers' struggle following the tremendous fight in Poland is only a pause before enormous class confrontations that will involve the decisive detachments of the world proletariat, those of the industrial metropoles and of Western Europe in particular." (‘Resolution on the International Situation', International Review, no.35)
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After the 1970s, dominated by the illusion of an economic recovery, the 1980s are indeed Years of Truth. While the development, after the invasion of Afghanistan by Russian troops, of the mass strike by the workers in Poland demonstrated, at the beginning of the 1980s, the concretization of the historical alternative of war or revolution, the years that followed the partial defeat of the world proletariat have been marked by a step forward in imperialist tensions, without the working class showing itself in a significant manner.
Confused by the activity of the left in opposition, and by intensive ideological campaigns around the danger of war, and partly demoralized by the defeat in Poland, the working class struggle has marked time, which has still further facilitated the rapid acceleration in the bourgeoisie's war preparations.
However, capitalism's ever more rapid plunge into the crisis, combined with the fact that the world proletariat remains undefeated, means that this pause in the struggle can only be temporary. Today, the renewal of working class combativity in the central countries is there to show that the reflux is coming to an end.
History is accelerating under the pressure of the deepening crisis. Understanding this acceleration, at the level of inter-imperialist tensions as well as of the class struggle, is an essential task for revolutionary organizations today if they intend to be able to carry out their function in the class tomorrow.
Exacerbation of imperialist tensions
Ever since the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the proletariat has been subjected to intensive propaganda on the danger of war. Just in these last few months: a Boeing 747 with hundreds of passengers aboard shot down by the Russians over Sakhalin; hundreds of French and American soldiers killed in murderous bomb attacks in Beirut; American marines landing in the miniscule Caribbean island of Grenada; French and Israeli aircraft bombarding the Lebanon -- and all this against a back-drop of long-standing conflicts that not only show no signs of ending, but on the contrary are getting worse: the Iran/Iraq war which has already left hundreds of thousands dead and wounded, the wars in Chad, Angola, Mozambique, the Western Sahara, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cambodia, etc. There is a long list of wars to illustrate the exacerbation of military tension. And every one a pretext for the intensification of the Western bloc's obsessive bludgeoning designed to paralyze the proletariat with fear or a feeling of its own impotence, and to denounce the Russian bloc's aggression, even when the latter's influence is insignificant.
"Today ... the bourgeoisie has discovered in a muffled but painful way that there is no solution to the crisis. Recognizing the impasse, there is nothing left but a leap in the dark. And for the bourgeoisie a leap in the dark is war." (‘The 80s: Years of Truth', International Review, no.20)
It is in this context that we are witnessing a qualitative change in the evolution of imperialist conflicts. Contrary to the propaganda spewed out daily by all the media of the Western bloc, this evolution's major characteristic is an offensive of the American against the Russian bloc. The Western bloc's aim in this offensive is to completely surround the USSR, and strip it of all its positions outside its immediate influence. The West aims to expel Russia definitively from the Middle East by reintegrating Syria into its bloc. This will include bringing Iran to heel, and resituating it in the US bloc as a major component in the bloc's military apparatus. The ambition is to follow up with the recuperation of Indo-China. In the end, the West aims to strangle Russia completely, and strip it of its super-power status.
One of this offensive's main characteristics is the US bloc's ever more massive use of its military might, in particular through the dispatch of expeditionary forces, either American or drawn from the bloc's other major powers (France, Britain, Italy), onto the terrain of confrontations. This corresponds to the fact that the economic card -- played so frequently in the past to lay hold of the enemy's positions - is no longer adequate:
-- because of the US bloc's present ambitions,
-- and above all because of the aggravation of the world crisis itself, which has created a situation of internal instability in the secondary countries that the US bloc once relied on.
The events in Iran are in this respect revealing. The collapse of the Shah's regime, and the paralysis of the US military apparatus that this provoked throughout the region, allowed the USSR to score points in Afghanistan. This persuaded the American bourgeoisie to set up the rapid deployment force (and allowed it the more easily to force this down the throat of a population traumatized by the affair of the US embassy hostages in Tehran 1979), and reorientate its imperialist strategy.
In the same way today, the difficult economic and social situation of Israel, the Western bloc's most stable military bastion in the Middle East, demands the bloc's direct and growing military presence in the Lebanon.
The US bloc's increasing difficulty in maintaining its advance against the Russian bloc through its economic might, as the crisis strikes ever harder, pushes it to subordinate its economy more and more completely to its military requirements. For a long time, the USSR, given its congenital economic weakness, has been obliged to maintain its domination over its bloc by sacrificing economic competivity to the demands of its military strength through the hypertrophy of its war economy. The primacy of the military over the economic is a general tendency of decadent capitalism, which is accelerating today, and which is laid bare by the years of truth.
This tendency is not a sign of capital's strength, but, on the contrary, of its growing weakness. The flight forward into the war economy, and toward war itself, is the product of the collapse of the super-saturated world market. The particularity of armaments production lies in that it is destined to produce neither labor-power, nor means of production, but means of destruction; it is itself a sterilization and a destruction of capital.
Since the end of the seventies armaments programs have been developing throughout the world. The US state's arms procurements are one of the determining factors in the present economic "recovery". But, in the end, this gigantic destruction of capital only accentuates the effects of the crisis and accelerates the bankruptcy of world capital (see the article in this issue).
The proletariat: a brake on the generalization of conflicts
The bankruptcy of world capital pushes the bourgeoisie towards war, as two imperialist holocausts this century have already shown dramatically. The economic crisis is deeper today than ever before. How is it that, in these conditions, none of the innumerable imperialist conflicts has yet been generalized into a Third World War?
The working class remains a decisive obstacle to world war. It is not the accumulation of fantastically destructive weaponry that holds back the bourgeoisie's tendencies. But, since 1968, the bourgeoisie has been unable to secure the submission of the capitalist world's major social force -- the proletariat.
A generalized imperialist war would be a total war. The bourgeoisie needs a proletariat docile enough to man the factories at full capacity, to accept the complete militarization of labor and of social life in general, to submit without complaining to draconian rationing, and to play the part of victim if not submissive object to the bourgeois state, in the name of the fatherland and the national flag, arm-in-arm with its exploiters.
The development of workers' struggles against the effects of the crisis since 1968 in the heart of world capitalism -- ie at the centre of the rivalry between the two imperialist blocs that have divided up the world, in Europe -- shows that this condition is not fulfilled. It is this worldwide recovery in proletarian struggle at the end of the sixties that obliged the US bourgeoisie to withdraw its 400,000 troops from Vietnam, in the face of the gathering risks of a social explosion.
The capitalist class must penetrate and break this proletarian resistance to have its hands free to fight it out on the battlefield of imperialist confrontations. The sole aim of the intensive ideological campaigns on the danger of war, since Russian troops invaded Afghanistan, is to paralyze the proletariat, and make it accept the effort of increasing military interventions, and, in the end, war. These campaigns are primarily directed at the working class in the industrialized countries, and especially in Europe, which in the past has always played a decisive role in the march towards war. The two world wars were made possible by the proletariat's enrolment under the national banner, and behind the bourgeoisie's mystifications. We are not in the same situation today. Nowhere are there to be found major fractions of the proletariat beaten into submission and controlled by the bourgeoisie. Everywhere the struggles of resistance to austerity demonstrate that the working class' fighting potential is intact and far from being broken.
Two years ago, in the face of the outburst provoked by the sending of several thousand "counter-insurgency advisers" to E1 Salvador, Reagan announced his intention to overcome the "Vietnam syndrome" -- ie the American populations resistance to the dispatching of American soldiers into open conflicts. Today, with thousands of US troops in Lebanon or Grenada, we can see that the western bourgeoisie, thanks to intensive propaganda, has taken a step forward at this level, However, we are a long way from the counter-revolutionary period when the US could comfortably send 16,000 men to Lebanon to impose "order". The bourgeoisie still has a long way to go to break the working class' resistance and open the way to a Third World War.
Thus, since 1968, the dominant bourgeois preoccupation has been the proletariat, since they know that this is the main danger confronting them. We find a striking example of this situation in the current organization of the bourgeoisie's political apparatus: increasingly, to confront the class struggle, it is tending to put its left fractions into opposition, whereas world war demands a "national unity" which for the moment they are not able to institute. It is the class struggle that is on the agenda.
But even if the working class holds back the tendencies towards war, this does not mean that inter-imperialist tensions cease to exist. On the contrary, they can only get worse under the pressure of the crisis. The proletarian struggle is unable to prevent the multiplication of localized imperialist conflicts; what it prevents is their generalization into a third holocaust.
Inter-imperialist tensions never disappear under capitalism, and the pacifist illusion -- ie the illusion of a peaceful capitalism -- is one of the worst poisons for the proletariat. Even during the 1980 mass strike in Poland, when the two blocs were thick as thieves in isolating and defeating the Polish proletariat, inter-imperialist tensions did not disappear -- even if they were pushed into the background: conflicts continued on the periphery, and the major powers' armaments programs leapt forward.
The present level of class struggle, while it prevents the outbreak of a Third World War, is not enough to push the bourgeoisie back on a military level. The workers in Poland have posed the question of the international generalization of the mass strike in the heart of Europe -- a question which, isolated as they were, they were unable to answer. This is the only perspective that can push the bourgeoisie back worldwide, and lay the groundwork for the communist revolution, which will put an end to war by putting an end to capital. This perspective is in the hands of the West European proletariat, which, through its historical experience and its concentration, is best able to defend it. Humanity's future depends on its ability to struggle and confront the attacks of the bourgeoisie.
Resurgence of class struggle
While the proletariat is constantly hammered by all the media with the ubiquitous, obsessive theme of war, where, in capital's infernal logic, the mounds of corpses justify still further massacres, all channels of information maintain a complete black-out on the subject of the class struggle.
However, after a real lull following the defeat in Poland, the strikes that have been taking place in Europe for several months show a renewal of class struggle; they confirm that the proletariat, far from being beaten, has kept its combative potential intact, and is prepared to use it.
The September strike in the Belgian state sector is significant in this respect; this is the most important movement of workers' struggle since the battles of 1980 in Poland, given the combination of the following elements:
-- the number of workers involved (some 900,000 out of a population of only 9 million);
-- the fact that the movement involved one of the world's most industrialized countries, one of its oldest national capitals, situated in the heart of the enormous proletarian concentrations of Western Europe;
-- the dynamic that appeared at the movement's outset: a spontaneous upsurge of struggles which took the unions by surprise and got beyond them; a tendency to extend the struggle; overcoming regional and linguistic divisions;
-- the enormous discontent that these struggles revealed, and which continues to grow;
-- the fact that the movement took place in an international context of workers' combativity (car-workers in Britain, postal workers in France, public service workers in Holland etc) .
The state-imposed black-out on all information on the strike during its first ten days, in the countries bordering on Belgium (France, Germany, Britain) points up the ruling class' fear of an extension of these explosions of discontent in Western Europe.
These struggles seem insignificant alongside the magnificent flare-up of the mass strike in Poland 1980. However, they are developing in a very different context, which gives them their value or meaning.
The weakness of "official" union control and the rigidity of the Polish state made possible the dynamic of the mass strike (extension and self-organization) on a national scale. However, in their isolation, the workers in Poland came up against the illusion of a western-style "democratic" unionism peddled by Solidarnosc.
"The proletariat of Western Europe, by contrast, because it is not in the same isolated position, because it has accumulated decades of experience in confronting unions and the left, because today more than ever it is pushed to struggle by the crisis, because it is not mobilized for war, finds itself in more favorable conditions than it has ever known for clarifying the real nature of the unions, the left and democracy." (‘The Balance of Forces Between the Working Class and the Bourgeoisie', International Review, no.35)
The strike in Belgium showed the weaknesses that continue to weigh on the working class, and which were revealed especially by the absence of any clear calling into question of the unions or of any self-organization of the struggles. However, these weaknesses should not diminish or mask the importance of the movement. In fact, while the active installation of the "left in opposition" in most countries from 1979 on succeeded in exhausting the workers' thrust in 1978-80, the 1983 strikes in Belgium constitute the first large scale threat to bourgeois strategy. They are an unquestionable indication that the working class is recovering from its defeat in Poland 1981, and that the retreat that marked the years 1981-82 is coming to an end.
Now that the economic crisis is hitting the capitalist metropoles full blast, the bourgeoisie can no longer put off its austerity programs, nor spread them out in time. The exploiting class is increasingly forced to attack every fraction of the proletariat at once, in old Europe, at the heart of the industrialized world. The working class is thus pushed to call on its reserves of combativity at an increasingly massive level. The conditions for extension and generalization are gathering, as the proletariat confronts the generalized attacks of the bourgeoisie. The conditions for self-organization are gathering, as the proletariat is forced to confront the left and the unions in struggling against the state, and as the deepening crisis exposes the democratic and trade-union mystifications that the bourgeoisie has maintained for 50 years with the myth of the Welfare State.
The struggles in Belgium, France, Holland etc, herald the large scale struggles of the future. The renewal of the class struggle in autumn 1983 is only at its beginnings.
"In the advanced countries of the west, and notably in Western Europe, the proletariat will only be able to fully deploy the mass strike after a whole series of struggles, of violent explosions, of advances and retreats, during the course of which it will progressively unmask all the lies of the left in opposition, of unionism and rank and filism." (‘Resolution on the International Situation', International Review, no.35)
To the extent that the historic course is the result of the balance of force between classes, it might seem paradoxical in the present period, to witness a simultaneous acceleration in inter-imperialist tensions and a renewal of class struggle. The balance of class forces between proletariat and bourgeoisie is not immediate and mechanical but historic. The exacerbation of contradictions provoked by the crisis demands a qualitatively superior response from the class struggle to push back the bourgeoisie and prepare for the final assault against the barbaric reign of capital.
Today's renewal of class struggle announces the mass strikes of the future, first on a national scale, and then generalized internationally, which will allow the proletariat to set forward its perspective of revolution. On this road, the proletariat of Europe must consciously assume its opposition to the problem of war, since in today's imperialist contexts it confronts the problem more and more directly.
More than ever, the world proletariat will be forced to take up the slogan of the revolutionary proletariat at the turn of the century: War or Revolution!
JJ
The text from Internationalisme no.36 (July 1948) published here is a critique of the political and organizational weaknesses of the Internationalist Communist Party in its beginnings. We have already on a number of occasions republished texts from Internationalisme criticizing the ICP (see especially IRs nos. 32, 33 and 34). The following text, by looking at all the positions of the ICP at its second congress, gives a precise idea of what the orientations of the group were. The weaknesses criticized at the time still exist today -- fuzziness on the national and union questions, on the role, function, and mode of operation of the revolutionary organization, the lack of a clear perspective on the period etc -- and have in fact grown more acute, resulting in the near total dislocation of the ICP's main continuator, the International Communist Party (Programma Comunista) last year (see IR no. 32). But these weaknesses are not restricted to Programma -- they raise questions which need to be addressed by all revolutionary groups. This is why we are republishing this text to coincide with the discussions raised by the ‘Address to proletarian political groups' (IR no.35) which the ICC put out in response to the present state of crisis and dispersion in the revolutionary milieu (see the article dealing with the replies to the Address in this issue). The preface, taken from the previous re-edition of the text, alludes to a number of texts: here we are only publishing one. The others can be found in the Bulletin d'Etudes et de Discussion of Revolution Internationale, no. 7, June 1974.
Preface
From the Bulletin d'Etude et de Discussion, no.7, June 1974 -- published by Revolution Internationale.
The following texts[1] are extracts and articles which first appeared in Internationalisme, organ of the Gauche Communiste de France.
Although nearly thirty years old, and unknown to the great majority of militants, these texts still retain considerable interest for today.
The revolutionary struggle of the proletariat for its emancipation is a historical movement. When struggles emerge, they cannot be seen as a new beginning, as certain groups have claimed[2], but only as the continuation and surpassing of previous struggles. The history of the revolutionary struggle is not a sum of dead moments, but a living movement which carries on and continues, bearing its ‘past' within it. There can be no surpassing that doesn't contain the gains of previous experience. In publishing texts that are thirty years old, we hope to contribute to a better knowledge of a particularly obscure, ignored period -- the one which followed the Second World War -- and of the often passionate debates and controversies which animated the weak revolutionary groups of that time. If the perspective of today's period is different from what it was then, the problems raised in the discussions, the way to understand and resolve them, remain central to the concerns of revolutionary groups and militants today. Problems such as: the historic period we're living in, imperialist wars, the nature and function of the unions, so-called national liberation movements, parliamentarism, the problems of the proletarian revolution, the tasks of revolutionaries, the relationship between party and class, and particularly the question of the historic moment for the constitution of the party.
The Italian Left: Myth and Reality
The International Communist Party (Programme Comunista) claims to be the uninterrupted, organic continuation of the Italian Left, both organizationally and politically. That is a myth. Only the ignorance of a majority of the ICP's own members, and the prudent silence of others, can give a semblance of reality to this myth. After being excluded from the Communist Party, the Italian Left constituted itself into a Fraction in exile (Pantin 1929). Up until 1943-45, the Fraction in exile was the only organization of the Italian Left. In Italy itself there was no organized group and the old militants were dispersed and reduced to total inactivity by repression. When the Internationalist Communist Party was formed in 1943-45 in Italy, this was done independently and separately from the Fraction, both on the organizational and the political levels. The ICP (Programma) has never claimed any organic continuity with the Fraction and has always been ambiguous about considering the Fraction as an expression and continuation of the Italian Left. It therefore follows that the much-vaunted organic continuity was interrupted by a gap of twenty years (and what a twenty years!). Either that or it has never existed and is no more than a myth kept up for reasons of convenience and mystification.
The activity of the Italian Fraction up until its dissolution in 1945 represents a very important contribution to the development of communist theory, and the political positions it took up in the face of contemporary events were firmly rooted on a revolutionary class terrain. Around the Italian Fraction, other groups were formed in France and Belgium, thus constituting the International Communist Left.
One has to become acquainted with the positions of the ICL, to read their texts, particularly those in the review Bilan (even when these texts took the form of ‘gropings' as they used to say themselves), to see and measure the regression that the present positions of the ICP (Programma) represent in comparison to the ICL.
Crisis and end of the International Communist Left
The ICL did not represent the whole current of the communist left that came out of the IIIrd International, but only one of its branches. Other branches were the German, Dutch, and British Lefts. But it was more homogeneous, more organized, and to a certain degree more coherent. This enabled it to put up a longer resistance against the terrible pressures exerted on revolutionaries by successive defeats of the proletariat, the degeneration of the Communist International, the triumph of the Stalinist counterrevolution in Russia, the opening up of a course of generalized reaction and finally the imperialist war. Under the crushing weight of these events, the ICL struggled to draw the appropriate lessons from them, to serve as programmatic material for and in the revival of the proletarian struggle. However great the efforts and the merits of the ICL, such a work could not be without its shortcomings and vacillations.
In a general period of retreat, each new event tends to result in another numerical reduction of the revolutionary organization and to provoke serious political disturbances. No revolutionary group can have a foolproof shelter against the pernicious influence of events. The ICL didn't escape from this rule. The war in Spain was the first shock, provoking discussions and splits. The approach and outbreak of the Second World War profoundly affected the ICL, giving rise to divergences which grew and grew, resulting in a deep crisis. The texts we are publishing here give a fairly exact idea of the divergences which resulted, on the one hand, in the dissolution of the Fractions and their absorption by the new Party created in Italy, and, on the other hand, in the emergence of the Gauche Communiste de France and its separation from the ICL.
The dissolution of the fractions
The first two texts deal essentially with the question of the dissolution of the Italian Fraction. This was a central issue at the time, not only because the dissolution brought a sudden end to the necessary process of clarifying the problems under discussion, but also because it meant the abandonment of positions defended so stubbornly by the Fraction throughout its existence - touching on the very concept of the party and implying a false analysis of the period and its perspectives.
The existence of the party is closely linked to and conditioned by the period and state of the proletarian class struggle. In a period of developing struggles the class secretes the political organization, the party[3]; but if the class goes through decisive defeats a long period of retreat opens up, inevitably resulting in the disappearance or degeneration of the party. In such periods, when the counter-revolution has the upper hand over the class and its organizations, to try to reconstitute the party displays a voluntarist conception and can only lead to adventurism and opportunism, During the thirties, the Communist Left waged the most violent battles against Trotsky's voluntarist conception of artificially building the party.
The proclamation of the ICP in Italy was done without the embarrassment of any analysis of the period or its perspectives. As with the Trotskyists, this was an act of pure voluntarism. But even more crucial was the fact that the constitution of the new Party, the ICP of Italy, had neither an organizational nor a political link with the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left.
The Fraction was a living revolutionary organism which appeared once the old Party had become enmeshed in the counter-revolution and destroyed as a class organization. It did not have the idea that it would ‘dissolve itself' and have its members enter individually into a Party constituted separately and independently of it. This was by definition impossible and politically inconceivable. The dissolution of the Italian Fraction and the entry of its members into the ICP of Italy formed outside and independently of the Fraction, was the worst kind of liquidationism, a political suicide. It is understandable that the GCF categorically refused to associate itself with such a policy and criticized it violently.
The organic continuity of the Fraction does not exist today. It has been broken and interrupted by fifty years of reaction. But the question of its dissolution is still of considerable interest to the revolutionaries who are emerging today. These groups are the product and expression of the new period of rising class struggle. They are thus the nuclei of the future party. The future party will not arise ‘spontaneously' out of nowhere, but will be the result of the development and accentuation of the class struggle and of the work of existing revolutionary groups. We can't talk about the dissolution of these groups preceding a hypothetical party that has come from who knows where. Such a view removes any meaning and value from the activity of these groups. On the contrary, we should see in the existence and activity of these groups the materials that will be used to build the future party. Their dissolution and the constitution of the party are not acts separated in time but simultaneous. It would be more correct to talk about them being transformed into the party than about their ‘dissolution', because they are constituent elements of the future party. Far from being pretentiousness and self-.flattery, this view highlights the seriousness of the responsibility that these groups bear, a responsibility they must assume fully and consciously. Any other view is just blather and dilettantism.
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The ICP (Programma) pretends that its program and positions have an invariant continuity, that its political practice is irreproachable, a true example of revolutionary purity. Reading the texts we are publishing here will erase that legend. Many readers will learn with surprise and astonishment about the real history, the sum of confusions on which Programma is founded. From the proclamation of the Party to the analysis of the post-war period, from the theoretical meanderings about the war economy to the participation in the Anti-Fascist Committee in Brussels, from the participation in elections to its positions on the union question, all these were expressions of political eclecticism and opportunism. They show the gulf between Programma and the Fraction, the enormous regression of the former in comparison to the latter. The trenchant criticisms of all this made by Internationalisme are still of interest, and it is clear that they have been shown to be fully justified, remaining equally valid today with regard to the invariable errors of Programma Comunista.
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Internationalisme n 36, July 1948
The 2nd Congress of the ICP in Italy (1948)
On the basis of various reports, written and oral, we can get a fairly precise idea about what happened at the Congress of the ICP of Italy.
First of all, we have the one published in the last .issue of Internationalisme, which gives a fairly complete picture of the debates at the Congress.
In Battaglia Comunista, organ of the ICP in Italy, and in L'Internationaliste, organ of the Belgian Fraction, there are articles dealing with the work of the Congress.
Finally, there was the public meeting organized by the French Fraction.
The general impression can be summed up by what comrade Bernard wrote at the beginning of his article: "This wasn't really a Congress because the problems dealt with were done in such a skimpy manner."
To convince oneself of this, it suffices to read the press of the ICP of Italy, and of its sections in Belgium and France. The delegate from France said in his oral report: "The Congress did not deal with any of the fundamental problems, did not make any thorough analysis of the present evolution of capitalism and the perspectives that derive from it. Of the whole agenda, the only things discussed were the possibilities for the Party's activities in the present situation." For its part, the Belgian Fraction, in its last bulletin, devotes one roneo page to the Congress and restricts itself to a "rough resume of the two tendencies which emerged at the Congress." It concludes by saying that the Congress decided to "take up a deeper discussion on the analysis of capitalism in its present phase."
How far we have come from the fanfares which accompanied the formation of the Party in 1945, the enthusiastic and grandiloquent salute to the "reconstruction of the first class party in the world by the Italian proletariat," and the whole bluff that carried on for two years about the successes and mass activities of this Party.
Today, the result of three years of activism has led the comrades to be a bit more modest and to engage in some rather bitter reflections, despite certain young neophytes like the French delegate who was unable to finish his report without using a phrase which reminds one of the tradition in Russia: "And we say thank you to the ICP of Italy."
Recruitment: the number one aim of the Party
During its first period the Party got drunk on recruitment. For the sake of recruitment, it sacrificed the clarity of political positions, avoiding pushing problems too far in order not to ‘hinder' the recruitment campaign and ‘trouble' the members already acquired. Ferociously, categorically, it refused to hold a discussion, either in front of the workers, or the members of the Party, or the founding Conference at the end of 1945, about the lamentable experience of the participation of one of its sections and of comrades who later became leaders of the Party in the Committee of the Anti-fascist Coalition in Brussels. An experience which lasted from the liberation to the end of the war and which these comrades continue to defend as being correct and revolutionary. Again, so not to make things awkward for recruitment, and also perhaps because this conception was also held in the Party (which would be even more serious), flattery was used towards the workers who participated in those military organisms, the various armed formations of the Resistance.
On this point, the Party Platform adopted at the 1945 Conference says:
"Concerning the partisan, patriotic struggle against the Germans and the fascists, the party denounces the maneuver of the national and international bourgeoisie, which, with its propaganda for the rebirth of an official state militarism (propaganda which it knows is devoid of any meaning - ? - ) is aiming to dissolve and liquidate the voluntary organizations of this struggle, which in many countries have already been attacked with armed repression."
And while warning against the illusions these organizations spread among the workers, the Platform characterizes them as follows:
"These movements which don't have a sufficient political orientation (apart from being ‘partisan' and ‘patriotic', what more does the ICP want?) express nevertheless the tendency for local proletarian groups to organise and arm themselves to conquer and maintain control in local situations, and thus to take power."
Thus, so not to risk losing popularity and the possibilities for recruitment, the Party refrained from attacking these groups for what they really were, and for the role they played, instead preferring to flatter the workers involved in "these tendencies which constitute a historic fact of the first order."
As on this last question, the Party has not shown any concern to push ahead with its analysis of the evolution of modern capitalism. We of course do see, and even very clearly, the affirmation that capitalism is evolving towards a new form -- state capitalism -- but the Party still doesn't have a very precise idea about what state capitalism is, what it means on a historic level and what profound changes it has brought to the structures of the capitalist system.
In section 14 which deals with the problem of state capitalism, the Platform talks about the "reaccumulation of wealth between the hands of entrepreneurs and of state bureaucrats whose interests are linked to the former." Having seen in state capitalism only the class unity of the state and of private entrepreneurs in the face of the proletariat, but not seeing what opposes and distinguishes the two, the Platform denounces "the inept slogan of the socialization of the monopolies which serves only to travesty this strengthening."
In nationalizations, which are the economic structure of state capitalism, the Platform sees nothing but a maneuver of the "powerful industrial and banking monopolies which are trying to get the collectivity to foot the bill for the reconstruction of their enterprises."
With such an analysis of modern capitalism and its tendencies, which doesn't go any further than what was already being put forward in 1920, it's not surprising that on the political level the Party takes up essentially the positions of the Third International twenty-five years ago, without any real changes: revolutionary parliamentarism and trade union policies.
What have been the results? After nearly three years, the Party admits that it has lost half its membership. Entire groups of militants have left, some to form the Trotskyist group the POI, others the Autonomous Ferderation of Turin, the majority falling into indifference and disgust towards any kind of militant activity. In brief, the reproduction of what happened to Trotskyist parties in other countries. The Party has not strengthened its positions among the workers. The flight from theoretical research, the imprecise, equivocal character of its positions has not helped it to keep militants. In its number one objective -- to recruit at any price, to grow numerically -- the Party now has to register that there has been a fiasco, a smarting failure which was not difficult to foresee and predict.
A party without cadres
But there's something more serious in the defection of half its numbers, and that is the extremely low ideological level of the militants remaining in the Party. Bernard talks about the "scenic function" of the majority of delegates at the Congress, their non-participation in the debates.
Frederic said that the workers' delegates considered the general theoretical analyses went over their heads and could not be carried out by them, that this work was incumbent on the intellectuals. Vercesi expresses this reality as follows: "In order to run after chimeras, the work of educating militants, which is in a deplorable state, has been neglected." Especially when we remember that Vercesi himself bears a considerable responsibility for this deplorable state, since he contributed to it for three years with his refusal to hold discussions in public, for fear of ‘troubling' militants.
This is a typical failure of artificial formations which pompously declare themselves to be parties: they don't understand that the subjective foundation of the new party can't be based on voluntarism but on a real assimilation by the militants of past experience, and on the solution of problems which the old party came up against without providing the answers. Because it wanted to act on the basis of repeating old formulae and positions, even those of the Rome Theses, without taking account of the profound changes that have occurred in the last twenty-five years, the ICP embarked on a course of action in a vacuum, using up energies and wasting precious time and forces which could and should have been applied to the formation of cadres for the Party and the struggle to come.
The absence of cadres and negligence towards their formation -- this is the clearest thing in the balance sheet revealed by the Congress of the ICP.
Is there realty a Party in Italy?
Reduced numerically by the loss of half its members, an absence of cadres, "a complete lack of any analysis of the evolution of modern capitalism," (Vercesi), so much for the subjective conditions. As for the objective conditions, we have a period of concentration of capitalism which "has been conditioned by the international defeat which the proletariat has suffered and by its destruction as a class" (Document of the EC after the Congress. See ‘Our Line of March' in Battaglia Communista 3-10 July). What remains then of the necessary conditions justifying the construction of the Party? Nothing, absolutely nothing, except voluntarism and bluff, so familiar to the Trotskyists.
At the Congress, Damen in his report tried to justify the proclamation of the Party. We leave to one side the argument that the Italian workers are "politically more healthy" than those of other countries. Such arguments show only the persistence of nationalist sentiments even among very advanced militants. The opening up of a revolutionary course can only take place on an international scale, just as the break with capitalist ideology can't be the isolated manifestation of the ‘golden' proletariat of a single country. Patriotism about the revolutionary proletariat of Italy has no more value than the patriotism of socialism in one country. Setting this argument aside, Damen justifies the proclamation of the Party by the fact that a Fraction could not have served as a pole of attraction for the workers, which is true for a period where the conditions for the polarization of the proletariat around a revolutionary program are present, but this simply isn't the case in Italy or anywhere else. Finally, Damen argues that the Fraction only had a raison d'être when it was a question of "ideological opposition and resistance to opportunism in the party up to the time of open struggle, which could only be waged by a political organism which has the characteristics and the tasks of the Party." We heard the same theme developed at the meeting of the French Fraction of the Communist Left. What a backward step in comparison to the Congress of the Italian Fraction in 1935! This is an argument typical of Trotskyism which, during the pre-war years, defended against us the idea that with the death of the old party the conditions are given for the proclamation of the new party. Whereas the reverse is true: the death of the old party or its passage into the enemy camp means precisely that the conditions for the existence of a revolutionary party are absent, since the latter is conditioned by the development of a revolutionary orientation within the proletariat.
When the comrades Vercesi and Daniels, at the Congress, denied that the ICP could really play the role of a party, they were only reiterating the thesis which we have developed since 1945 about the absence of the conditions for the formation of the party, and at the same time they recognized implicitly that the ICP is not carrying out the tasks of a fraction either; ie programmatic elaboration and the formation of cadres. Here we have nothing other than the translation into Italian of the artifices and behavior of the Trotskyists in other countries.
For Damen the Party is a fact, a "wedge driven into the crisis of capitalism." That may console him but we would remind him that the Trotskyists see their parties in the same way in other countries.
For Vercesi, there is neither a "wedge", nor a "breach, however minimal, in capitalism," nor a party, since it is only an enlarged fraction. Unfortunately, we would say that in Italy there is neither a party, nor an enlarged fraction; neither an influence on the masses, nor the formation of cadres. The activity of the ICP tends to compromise one in the immediate and the other for the future.
The confirmation of perspectives
An orientation towards the formation of the party could have had some meaning in the period 1943 to 1945, which saw the events of July 1943 in Italy, the fall of Mussolini, the growing discontent in Germany, and which permitted revolutionary militants to hope for the development of a course towards a break with the imperialist war and its transformation into a vast social crisis. The fundamental error of the ICP and above all its sections in France and Belgium was to persist in this perspective after the end of hostilities, when Russian and American imperialism had succeeded in occupying Germany, in dispersing and putting into prison camps millions of German workers -- in a word, in controlling this crucial focus of revolt, this centre of the European revolution.
But far from understanding that the cessation of war without a movement of revolt meant a consummate defeat for the proletariat, a new period of retreat opening up a course towards a new imperialist war, the International Communist Left came up with its theories about the opening up of a course towards class struggle. It saw the end of the war as the condition for the resurgence of revolutionary struggles, or as it wrote, correcting Lenin, "the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war begins after the end of the war."
The whole orientation of the ICL was based on this perspective, and all events examined from this angle. Thus, the bloody events in Algeria, Greece and the Middle East were seen as the premises for the revolutionary crisis; economic strikes were hailed as movements towards the radicalization of the masses; union actions and movements were supported and the Party gave itself the task of winning the leadership in them; finally the immediate task was seen to be the construction of the class party in all countries. And while they gloated over all this, we were charged with being "pessimists", "doctors and theoreticians in their studies" and treated with disdain.
Today this whole perspective has collapsed. And Vercesi is absolutely right. He is merely repeating our own criticisms of the ICP when he declares: "The interpretation that the war would open up a revolutionary cycle has been shown to be completely wrong."
Since revolutionary activity only has any value if it is based on predictions drawn from an exact evaluation of the historic situation, the recognition by the Congress that its previous perspectives were unfounded means the implicit condemnation and the collapse of all the past activities and policies of the Party that were based on this perspective.
However, we also have to warn against the orientation expressed by the Vercesi tendency, which bases its analysis on "the capacities of the capitalist economy to enjoy a renaissance through the system of planning, the disappearance of cyclical crises and of competition within states." This conception is not new: it is connected to the old theory of the economic strengthening of capitalism, the so-called theory of the war economy, which we have analyzed and opposed on a number of occasions, both before and during the war.
Today a growing number of ICP militants have felt and understood the sterility of an activism that has no analysis of the situation. Although this has come three years late, we consider this fact as the only positive result to have come out of this Congress. We entirely agree with Daniels when he declares:
"The weapons that the movement possesses are twenty-five years old and are completely blunt. In the meantime capitalism has transformed its whole structure and all its methods of struggle. The class party must do the same if it wishes one day to be the guide of the working class, to prepare the reawakening of the class."
Internal life of the Party: discipline or the consciousness of militants
On several occasions we have criticized the tendencies towards bureaucratization in the ICP of Italy. Alluding to this criticism, the French delegate says in his account: "Those who participated in the Congress and in its often passionate debates can recognize the democracy that reigns in the party, the gratuitousness of the accusation of bureaucratization." But using the same argument one could cite as an example the sittings of the Trotskyist parties and even the Socialist parties. There also there is ‘free' and passionate discussion. What is important is not the greater or lesser democracy in congresses but to know what the activity of militants is based on, the cudgel of ‘freely consented discipline' or a real conviction about the positions, the greatest possible consciousness, on the part of the militants? The comrade cited the case where the ICP expelled militants for political divergences, and added: "Like any self-respecting party." Indeed there have been a striking number of expulsions from the ICP, but it must be said that not once have these expulsions taken place after discussions in the Party as a whole, the only method that could have allowed these crises to be a moment in the clarification of militants. They have always been the result of pronouncements by the leadership.
The Congress, for example, revealed the existence of profound divergences in the Party, but you would look in vain in the Party press, even in the weeks preceding the Congress, for the least discussion and controversy. This would obviously have risked troubling the members and undermining the prestige of discipline. The Party seems to prefer to leave it to Congress to reveal, as Vercesi said, that "there are parliamentarist delegates, others in favor of a sort of compromise with centrism (ie Stalinism). The majority doesn't have clear ideas and follow different paths depending on which zone they come from."
Even more categorical and biting is Daniels, talking about the Congress itself. He says:
"There is a tendency at the Congress to pass in silence over the errors of the past, to avoid discussing problems which could lead to wide debates, debates which could really enable the Party to gain a new life and to lay bare everything which, under the excuse of defending traditional positions, hides opportunism and prevents a clear ideological elaboration and a consequent assimilation of this on the part of the militants."
This would be the way to a healthy internal life in the organization -- by basing the strength and effectiveness of the activity of each one of its members on the continuous, widest possible confrontation of ideas, stimulated and maintained by the whole life of the Party.
When, by contrast, Maffi, a great leader of the Party, declares that he has "abstained from dealing with such problems" because "I know that this discussion would have poisoned the Party," we say that such a concern undeniably and in the clearest possible way demonstrates that there is a tendency towards ossification and bureaucratization in the internal life of the organization.
And because it's the latter conception which prevails in the ICP, we saw the absurd ending to the Congress which Bernard talks about, when, "Vercesi ... in a way apologized for being a trouble-maker and for having created disquiet among the militants." Because, in the final analysis, neither one tendency nor the other admit the existence of tendencies and fractions in the Party; for both, the Party remains a monolithic, homogeneous, and monopolistic organization[4].
The question of the participation in elections
One of the questions which provoked the stormiest debates was that of participation in elections. To be sure, no one advocated a policy of active parliamentarism. This derives less from a certainty about the uselessness of parliamentary action than from the fact that the present strength of the Party makes it impossible for it to get anyone elected. Thus, they were able to save time on a debate which could, in any case, only be a theoretical one, and like any theoretical debate could only "uselessly trouble the Party."
For the same reason the Party at the last election could pay very cheaply for being extremely revolutionary, to the point of inviting the electors not to vote, even for the Party. But we are already aware of the case of someone elected to a municipal council who came up with good reasons to retain his mandate. After all, the definitive justification of all parliamentarism can be found in the following theoretical arguments which Damen put forward to justify the ICP's participation in the electoral campaign:
"If the bourgeoisie is compelled (?) to adopt a means of struggle which can be usefully exploited by the class party in order to turn it against the bourgeoisie, the revolutionary vanguard cannot renounce using and infiltrating the electoral competition."
No Trotskyist could fail to support this argument. This is the purest and the worst from Lenin's Left Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder. The truth is that the proletariat cannot in its struggle for emancipation use the "means of political struggle" that belong to the bourgeoisie and which are aimed at the subjugation of the proletariat. It was different in the period before1914 when the proletariat could not pose yet the revolutionary transformation of society as a concrete and immediate objective. From this flowed the necessity to struggle on the terrain of capitalism itself to wrest from it as many reforms as possible.
Revolutionary parliamentarism as a real activity has never existed for the simple reason that the revolutionary action of the proletariat presupposes the mobilization of the class outside the capitalist framework, not the taking up of positions inside capitalist society, what Damen calls "using" and "infiltrating" from within.
The policy of revolutionary parliamentarism played a major part in the corruption of the Third International. The parliamentary fractions served as fortresses of opportunism in the parties of the Third International as they had done previously in the Parties of the Second. But the participationist believes that he has found an impressive argument when he declares:
"The abstentionist problem has now been surpassed because it only had a raison d'être in a period when it was necessary to define precisely a principle against the parliamentary current of the old socialist party. Today, when there is no longer any possible doubt, about the clearly anti‑parliamentary character of the ICP the latter ...can adopt, this method of struggle."
Here is a highly astute form of reasoning: in the old parliamentary party we had to be anti-parliamentarian, but now, because our party is anti‑parliamentarian, then we can engage in parliamentarism. We don't doubt that such an argument will empress the party patriots who would not for a single instant dare to question its revolutionary infallibility, guaranteed a priori and forever. On the other hand, those who knew the Communist International, either because they militated inside it or simply because they have studied its history, will probably be less inclined to give such ample credit to any party, even the Party of Damen and Maffi. Can we seriously believe that the Bolshevik Party and the CI in its early years were less sincerely revolutionary than the ICP of Italy? In fact they offered a better guarantee, if only because at the time they expressed the most advanced programmatic positions of the proletariat, whereas the ICP, even according to its own admission, is notably behind them. Nevertheless, all the precautions taken by the CI (read the theses of the Second Congress on revolutionary parliamentarism) did not prevent this policy from becoming a lever for opportunism. The degeneration of the Party is not only the result of the general situation and of the balance of class forces; it also depends on the policies practiced by the Party itself. During the last twenty-five years the proletariat has paid too high a price for the militants of the vanguard to forget this basic truth.
The slippery nature of the parliamentary slope can be measured by the results obtained from it, results which are constantly referred to in order to prove the strength and influence of the Party. The reporter to the Congress did not hesitate to show that in this or that region, the Party's list to the last elections obtained four times as many votes. As though one could talk about the strength and influence of the Party when sales of the press are falling, when the organization has lost half its members, and when the ideological level of its members, even according to the ones responsible for it, is "lamentable". Hearing Damen talk about the victories of the Party, one can't help thinking that there are victories which are the worst kind of defeats.
It might be useful, to sooth the fever of the participationists, to cite the example of the Trotskyist party in France which in 1946 also had a certain success, winning nearly 70,000 votes. This didn't stop this party seeing the majority of its electors melting away like snow in the sun at the following elections, and a year later from seeing its own ranks collapse. A large part of its militants pushed the logic of going to the masses to its conclusion, ending up joining the Rassemblement Democratique Rdvolutionaire which had more numbers and whose words could have a greater echo.
Because this is exactly how comrade Damen reasons: "by participating in the elections," he says against the anti-participationists, "the party was able to penetrate the broad masses, bring new words, try to give shape to the vague aspirations to leave the old worn-out paths." Carried away by the noble sentiment of sowing good words, it doesn't seem to enter his head that, in order to reap, you have to sow in the right soil, otherwise it's a waste of seed and energy. Revolutionaries don't draw their inspiration from the missionaries of the Salvation Army who go to preach the divine word in the brothels. Socialist consciousness isn't acquired in a vacuum no matter what conditions; it's not the fruit of voluntarist actions but presupposes a tendency for the workers to detach themselves from bourgeois ideology, and electoral campaigns (which are privileged moments in the brutalization of the workers) certainly don't provide the conditions for this.
It has long been shown that the psychological roots of opportunism are, however paradoxical this may seem, its impatience to act, its inability to accept times of retreat and of waiting. It must immediately "penetrate the masses, bring new words." It doesn't take the time to look where it's putting its feet. It is impatient to implant the flag of socialism, forgetting in its rush that this flag only has any value when it is implanted on the class terrain of the proletariat, not when it's thrown onto the first capitalist dung-heap that comes along.
Despite Leninist orthodoxy, the cudgel of discipline and the electoral successes that have been registered, the resistance of militants against participation has been growing continuously, proving that the ICP of Italy is made up of many healthy elements. But despite lively criticisms, the Congress did not resolve the question. The compromise agreed not to participate in the November elections but it leaves the question of principle open. The cult of unity and "don't let's trouble the militants, the rank-and-file," prevailed over clear and intransigent positions. This is just a step back to prepare a bigger jump. Revolutionary militants can't be content for long with such half-measures. With or without the assent of the leadership, they must liquidate these ‘old blunt weapons', or liquidate themselves as revolutionaries.
The position taken on the union question is definitely the salient feature of this Congress.
What was the ICP's previous position? A completely orthodox copy of the theses of the Communist International:
"Work within the trade union economic organizations of the workers, in order to develop and strengthen them, is one of the prime political tasks of the Party.
"The Party aspires towards the reconstruction of a unitary trade union confederation, independent of any state commission and utilizing the methods of the class struggle and of direct action against the bosses, both for local, categorical demands and for general class demands ... communists do not call for or provoke a split in the unions simply because their leading organs have been conquered or held by other parties." (Political Platform of the ICP, 1946).
This was the basis for the Party's work in the unions which, when it was possible and especially in the provinces and small unions, went as far as participating in union commissions and leaderships. It unreservedly supported economic demand struggles, considering these struggles as "one of the prime political tasks of the party".
This conception has for a long time been a principle for the ICL. One of the reasons for the ICL's hostility towards us has been our anti-union position. We can therefore only express our satisfaction in seeing the ICP now abandoning the main part of its old position on the unions and on economic demands.
We can only agree with the following definition: "The Party categorically affirms that the present unions are a fundamental organ of the capitalist state, the aim of which is to imprison the proletariat tin the productive mechanisms of the national collectivity."
Or again:
"The working class,, in the course of its revolutionary attack, must destroy the unions as one of the most sensitive mechanisms of capitalism's class rule."
We agree all the more wholeheartedly because here we find, not only the ideas that we have defended for a long time, but even the reproduction of our own terms and expressions. (See in particular our theses on the present problems of the workers' movement, Internationalisme 31, February 1948).
We would however point out that on the union question, as on so many other questions, the ICP has once more left open a little window which enables it to reintroduce the same ideas which it has kicked out the door.
For example when the ICP declares its "indifference to whether or not workers belong to the union," it takes up a passive position which poorly hides its continuing attachment to the unions. To say that "it would be fishing in the abstract to put forward the slogan ‘leave the trade unions', a slogan which is conceivable only when the historic situation poses the objective conditions for sabotaging the unions," is to look for sophisticated pretexts to avoid shocking the backward sentiments of the masses. If you are convinced that the unions are and can only be an organ of the capitalist state, whose function is to imprison the workers in the service of the capitalist order, you can't remain "indifferent" to whether workers are or are not organically part of the unions, any more than we are indifferent to whether the workers are part of the maquis, of committees for national liberation, of parties or any other political formation of capitalism.
It has never entered the head of a serious militant that the workers' abandonment of the political formations of capitalism depends on whether or not he calls for it; he knows quite well that this is the result of objective conditions. But this does not prevent him -- in fact, it obliges him - to make propaganda calling for the workers to desert these organizations of the bourgeoisie. The desertion of the organizations of capitalism is not only a manifestation of, but also a precondition for, the development of consciousness in the class. This applies both to union organizations and to political organizations. In any case, indifference towards political positions merely camouflages a real and shameful acquiescence.
But there's more, The ICP denounces the unions but it advocates that workers come together in the union fraction. What then is this union fraction?
"It is," says the above-cited EC document, "the network of Party factory groups which, acting on the unitary basis of its program ... constitute the union fraction."
At first sight one might be led to believe that this is simply a reference to the cells of the Party, but if one examines it more closely, it becomes clear that something quite different is meant here. First of all, it is difficult to see why the sum of the factory cells should form themselves into a separate organism. This divides the unity of the Party in two: on the one hand, the workers grouped separately in the factory cells, and on the other hand the non-workers grouped who knows exactly where, but equally separate. Secondly, within the CI the Italian Left always opposed the introduction of this factory cell structure, seeing in it a tendency towards ouvrierism and a bureaucratic method of stifling the ideological life of the party (see for example ‘The Nature of the Party' published by Bordiga in 1924). It would be really surprising to see the ICP break from this traditional position, which is more valid today than ever. Thirdly, what could be the specific tasks of worker members of the Party distinct from the tasks of the Party as a whole? And finally, we don't understand why this organization, which is centralized and unified at the national level, should constitute and bear the name of ... the union fraction.
In fact, the union fraction isn't the factory cells of the Party but a separate organization, distinct from the Party, but created and led by it. Certainly the Party doesn't have too many illusions about the scope this organization could have in the immediate future:
"In the present situation, what will happen most often is the reduction of the union fraction to Party members and a ,few sympathizers acting inside the factory or the union."
But this isn't why the Party has created this organization: it is destined to have a much more important function:
"The regroupment of the workers -- unionized or non-unionized, members or non-members of other parties -- around our factory groups does not depend on a voluntaristic effort, by the Party but on the evolution of the general situation and the dynamic of social struggles".
In these texts it emerges clearly that the union fraction has a dual function: in the immediate period, "acting inside the factory or the union," and also to serve, right now, as the nucleus around which, tomorrow, will be regrouped the workers of all tendencies and parties -- a sort of embryonic soviet.
It should be pointed out that the ICP, which is so afraid of "fishing in the abstract" by calling for the destruction of the unions in the absence of the necessary conditions, has no fear of fishing with the bluff of creating the embryos of the future soviets.
On the one hand the Party has given up acting in the unions, and has also given up the illusion that you can have an influence in the masses today; on the other hand, it returns to the idea of union activity and mass work, not directly but through the intermediary of a special organization created for this purpose: the union fraction. Thus no one can reproach the Party: everyone has been taken into account and everyone can be happy. The step forward taken on this question is immediately followed by two steps back[5]. Yesterday's error has been supplemented by today's confusion. By adding the new confusion to the previous error, you end up with a confusion within an error and you haven't advanced one iota.
Conclusions
We have looked at the work of the ICP. If we cannot talk about its contribution to clarifying the basic problems of the period, since even in the opinion of its own partisans it has not done this, we can say that the clearest part of its work has been the total overturning of the positions and orientations adopted at its founding Conference.
It would be hard to find, in the annals of political groups, another example of a founding Platform being so slated and refuted, in such a short space of time.
Our period can rightly be characterized by these sudden changes, by the rapidity of its course. But the surprising obsolescence of the ICP's Platform can't be attributed to this because it was already senile at birth. This reality, observed by Congress delegates themselves, is not the result of chance. It has its roots, among other things, in the fact that the Party has had the pretension of being the sole bearer of revolutionary consciousness, shrugging its shoulders at the mere idea that it could learn something through a confrontation of ideas with other revolutionary groups in various countries.
Two- and- a-half years have sufficed to ensure that not one page of the December 1945 Platform remains intact. This is a severe lesson, but one that could be salutary if the comrades of the ICL understand and accept the lesson. Only on this condition will the experience not have been in vain.
To finish, and insofar as it is possible and permissible for us to judge and pass an opinion from a distance, we think that the conclusion drawn by comrade Bernard is premature. He says: "For sincerely revolutionary militants there is no way forward except to split and create a new political regroupment whose fundamental task is the search for and formulation of the ideological bases for the future formation of the real class party." We don't underestimate the immense difficulties which these comrades will come up against in the atmosphere that presently reigns in the ICP. But it is undeniable that the ICP of Italy remains to this day the main revolutionary proletarian organization in Italy, and probably the most advanced. Just as after the 1945 Conference, we consider that within it there are a large number of healthy revolutionary militants, and because of this the organization cannot be seen as being already lost to the proletariat.
In 1945 we wrote that behind the patriotism and the appearance of unity there existed real divergences which could not fail to manifest themselves and crystallize into opportunist and revolutionary tendencies. Today, we still consider that the most urgent task of a sincere revolutionary is to help this crystallization to take place, to enable genuine revolutionary energies to find their most advanced level of maturation and expression.
M.
[1] For the lack of space, we cannot publish all the articles in full. We know this is unsatisfactory, and contains the risk of deformation, and we are the first to deplore it. We try to avoid it as much as possible. The best solution would be the publication of a collection of the main articles from this review. A hope to be followed up ...
[2] Cf the theorizations by dissident Bordigists and Situationists like Le Mouvement Communiste, Negation, and especially in Invariance no. 2, new series.
[3] It is perhaps necessary to point to another error that is committed today - that of linking the existence of the party to the revolutionary, insurrectionary period. This idea, which conceives of the party existing uniquely in the period of the revolution, is the source of many confusion:
a. It mixes up the party with the councils. The latter, because they are the specific organization of the class for carrying out the revolution and the seizure of power - which is not the function of the party - can only appear and exist in the revolution;
b. such an idea leads one to say that a party of the working class has never existed in history, which is a pure absurdity;
c. it ignores the reasons for the party emerging in the class, the functions of the party, one of the most crucial of which is to be an active factor in the process whereby the class becomes conscious of itself;
d. "the organization of the proletarians into a class and thus into a party" (Marx) means that the existence of the party has a constant character, which can only be put into question in a period of profound defeat and reaction;
e. a period of rising class struggle opens the process towards the reconstruction of the party. Not to understand this means putting one's feet on the brakes precisely when the road is beginning to go uphill.
[4] See the series of articles which we published under the title "Present Problems of the Workers' Movement', in Internationalisme 17, 18, 19, 23, 24, 25 and particularly the last number. (Note by the International Review: the article from Internationalisme 25, on the concept of the ‘brilliant leader', was republished in IR nos 33 and 34.)
[5] For anyone accusing us intentionally distorting the thinking of the ICP we cite the explanation given by the Belgian Fraction on this point: "if there are workers who don't want to join the Party, they should be organized in the Party's union fractions, which tomorrow could also perhaps be the basis for the creation of new unions", (Bulletin of May 1948, on the Congress of the ICP of Italy).
The big industrial countries have been strengthening their armed presence in the theatres of military operations with a new-found vigor, after a period in which, following the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam in 1975, this presence had been reduced. In 1982, the ‘war game’ writ large played out in the Falklands clearly marked a turning point in the military policy of the western bloc and was a prelude to the ‘interposition’ in the Lebanon of the American, French, British and Italian expeditionary force that same year, an ‘interposition’ which became a direct intervention in 1983.
This policy has been accompanied by an intensification of military expenditure, expressing capitalism’s headlong flight towards the only solution it can offer to the definitive crisis of its system of exploitation: generalized war. However, the massive weight of the war economy doesn’t mean that we are in the same situation as the 1930s. Today, the policy of arms spending can in no way provide a palliative to the crisis, as was the case then. On the contrary, this policy can only accelerate capitalism’s plunge into the abyss of the crisis. It is unable to reabsorb the massive unemployment in the heart of the industrial centers, and does not allow for a real economic recovery. Thus, the conditions ripen for a response from the working class, which is beginning to raise its head again in the central countries of capitalism.
The acceleration of military spending
The big capitalist countries are more and more directly carrying on the dirty work of military confrontation between imperialist rivals -- work that was previously left to smaller client states. In the 1970s, the great powers tended to hold back the acceleration of military spending, delegating the role of gendarme against the Russian bloc to their Third World allies. However, this relative slowing down never amounted to an actual reduction. Military spending never stopped growing, particularly in the Third World and the eastern bloc.
After relying mainly on their economic preponderance on the world market to counteract the Russian bloc, the main western countries are being compelled by the deepening crisis to accelerate their armaments policies.
Industrial production in these countries is at best using 75 per cent of its capacity, and investments are dwindling. Even those bourgeois analysts who believe most strongly in the US economic ‘recovery’ -- now fewer and fewer in number -- are perplexed about the fact that this ‘recovery’ is being accompanied by a fall in investment. The pressure from the falling rate of profit is intensifying, all the more because productivity in the industrialized countries has not stopped growing.
In the USA, including high technology sectors like electronics, bankruptcies are proliferating. In automobiles and aeronautics, giant companies like Chryslers, Boeing, Macdonnell Douglas etc owe their survival to military orders: tanks for Chrysler, Awacs for Boeing, fighter planes for Douglas.
France, the second biggest arms producer in the western bloc, is experiencing an unprecedented blockage in agriculture and the food industry, mines, steel, and electronics. In aeronautical construction there is a greater and greater fusion between the civil and military sectors, with the arms sector dominating. Civil aviation Is stagnating; the military sector is the only one that is to some extent holding up against the recession.
Along with the USA, France and Britain, Japan is playing a growing role in arms production, notably on the electronics side, which is so indispensable in today’s military strategy.
Similarly, West Germany, which like Japan is supposed to have a ‘low profile’ in military matters, is spending as much as France in this sphere.
What’s more, the official figures only show a part of what is actually devoted to armaments. In 1981 for example, 25 per cent of world research was officially devoted to military needs. In fact, 90 per cent of research programs are under the control of the army. All the ‘technical advances’ in civil society are spin-offs from the arms industry. In computers, for example, the international standards for scientific or management programming are decided by the Pentagon.
The open crisis reveals that the entire capitalist economy is oriented towards war, and that this war economy is no longer capable of ensuring the accumulation of capital, to say nothing about satisfying human needs. On the contrary, a growing proportion of investments are directed towards producing the means of destruction. According to the World Bank, 10 per cent of world spending on armaments represents what it would cost to resolve the problem of hunger in the world. Military expenditure has now reached the astronomical sum of more than a million dollars … each minute.
Military spending accelerates the crisis of capitalism
“… armaments have the unique characteristic of possessing a use value which does not allow them to enter, in any form, into the process of production. A washing machine can contribute to the reproduction of labor power, just like loaf of bread or a shirt. Through the content of their use value, these goods can serve as capital in the form of variable capital. A computer, a ton of iron or a steam engine, insofar as they are means or objects of labor can function as capital in the form of constant capital. But arms can only destroy or rust.” (from the ICC pamphlet, The Decadence of Capitalism)
Even for the exporting countries, arms today less than ever constitute a palliative to the crisis. The costs of armaments cut into the competitiveness of each national capital, a fact vouched for by the USA’s insistence that Japan and Germany rearm themselves so as to share the burden of these costs.
Also, competition in the arms market is getting more acute. The buyer countries are themselves becoming competitors at many levels: “It has become practically impossible to obtain import contracts that don’t to some degree stipulate introducing the buyers to the techniques of arms production” (L’Expansion, 1.12.83).
Finally, arms can only be bought thanks to loans from the great powers -- loans that are less and less likely ever to be repaid. Armaments don’t help to delay the effects of the crisis: they only serve to maintain and advance strategic positions in the rivalries between east and west.
Just as the USSR gets its allies to pay for its arms, the USA gets its arms paid for through the particular place of the dollar as an international reserve currency. Using high interest rates to drain towards the USA capital given over to speculation on the dollar, the bloc leader gets other countries to finance its budget deficit. Because the dollar is becoming more expensive, the US buys at almost half price in these countries. In 1982, the American budget deficit corresponded exactly to the national defense budget (Survey of Current Business, 7/83). The American ‘recovery’ is entirely based on the printing of money, and the inflationary pressures that this inevitably engenders are leading towards a new surge of hyper-inflation that will threaten the international monetary system. And it was precisely against this danger that the bourgeoisie had to reshape its policies at the end of the seventies.
But it’s the extension of mass unemployment that most clearly shows the true bankruptcy of, the system. Whereas before World War II arms production permitted a spectacular reabsorption of unemployment -- from 5,331,000 to 172,850 in the US between 1933 and 1938, from 3,700,000 to 200,000 in Germany -- this isn’t the case today. With the gigantic growth in productivity based on the microchip etc, the present level of rearmament in the big industrial countries has had a negligible effect on unemployment. This hasn’t stopped growing and will continue to do so.
Arms production does not provide a real outlet for capitalism, and today less than ever. It is becoming a greater and greater burden for each national economy.
The bourgeoisie is making a lot of noise about a so-called economic ‘recovery’ which is supposed to represent the victory of Reagan’s austerity policies. The OECD begins its report, in Economic Perspectives, December 1983, with an almost triumphant declaration: “The recovery of economic activity now involves almost all the countries of the OECD.” And it highlights a series of positive points: increasing GNP and industrial production, falling inflation, reduction in budget deficits, increasing profits. Two pages later, the OECD writes: “If this appreciation were to prove false, it would be necessary to revise this forecast as to the vigor and duration of the recovery.” ... This kind of remark shows how much confidence the bourgeoisie itself has in the recovery it announces so loudly!
Undeniably, certain economic indicators which were negative in 1982 turned positive in 1983, which means simply that 1983 was less appalling than 1982 -- at least for the bourgeoisie. From this to a real economic recovery there is not a step but a gulf to be leapt. Before analyzing its causes and perspectives, let us briefly examine the reality of this ‘recovery’.
The growth in GNP and industrial production
This growth is to all intents and purposes limited to the US and its extent is wretched enough, In the US, the GNP has risen by 3.5%, whereas in Europe it has hardly risen by 1%. Industrial production rose by 6% in the US, which does not even compensate for the fall of 1982 (-8.1%): the balance over two years is still a fall of -2.6%! As for the European countries, the growth in their industrial production is magnificent, varying as it does from ... -4.3% in Italy to 1% in Britain!
Degree of use of the productive forces
Under-utilization of the productive forces is one of the clearest signs of over-production. Despite a 10% increase over 1982, the rate of utilization of productive capacity has not risen above 80% in the US. As for unemployment, contrary to the miracles that were forecast, it has only fallen at an annual rate of 0.2% in the US and continues its rapid advance in all the European countries.
Investment
Company investments have continued to decline, despite the ‘recovery’. Since these investments are the basis for any long-term recovery, this is a sign that the bourgeoisie itself does not believe in the recovery.
World trade
This remained stagnant in 1983, after a 2% drop in 1982.
Taken as a whole, these figures (drawn from the bourgeoisie’s official statistical body -- the OECD) prove incontestably that, while capitalism may well be pausing briefly in its deepening crisis, there can be no question of a real economic recovery. The only positive development that the bourgeoisie can boast of is a real drop in inflation, and we shall see later just what this drop in inflation really means. The existence of a momentary lull in a general course towards collapse merely expresses the uneven profile that has always characterized the development of the capitalist economy. The important thing is to see whether this development is rising or falling: today, it is pointed firmly downwards, with no perspective of reversing direction.
After the profound recession of 1975, the western bourgeoisie resorted to a massive dose of its classic drug: credit, printing paper money without any economic counterpart. The United States played a primary role here: the multiplication of dollars and its balance of payments deficit did indeed act as a locomotive on the whole world economy. This policy’s failure, in the form of unbridled worldwide inflation, pushed the bourgeoisie to reverse the tendency and develop its monetarist conceptions. History does not repeat itself, and the bourgeoisie today no longer has the means to reproduce the same scenario, since the specter of a collapse in the international monetary system remains ever-present, even without inflation, if only because of colossal state indebtedness, which simply gets worse as the dollar rises. And so, despite the famous ‘recovery’, the US experienced a record number of bank failures in 1983.
The ‘trick’ invented by the American bourgeoisie to stimulate the economy without stimulating inflation consists essentially in transferring capital from one hand to the other. On the one hand, the US, thanks to exceptional interest rates, attracts capital from all over the world, and repatriates the mass of dollars scattered abroad. On the other, the worldwide reduction in wages and rapidly growing productivity allows the bourgeoisie to increase significantly the capital accruing to it in the form of surplus value. This double movement of impoverishment of the proletariat and of other countries relative to the US, gives the latter the necessary resources to finance its budgetary, commercial and current operations deficits. These have grown considerably during the previous year, showing that Reagan’s monetarist language is merely, in the final analysis, a bluff. The federal budget deficit has tripled in two years, from $70 billion in 1981 to $179 billion in 1983; the balance of payments deficit has doubled in one year, from $36 billion in 1982 to $63 billion in 1983; the current operations deficit has quadrupled in one year, from $11 billion to $42 billion.
These astronomical figures, which are nonetheless accompanied by falling inflation and a rising dollar -- apparently in contradiction to all economic logic -- are a good expression of the enormous flow of capital into the US taking place today. At the same time, it reveals the full limits of the present ‘recovery’. In contrast to the end of the ‘70s, the US is no longer up to acting as ‘locomotive’ for the world economy. Although it is once again importing vast quantities of goods, the uplifting effect of pursuing this policy is partially wiped out by the transfer of capital in the same direction, and the increasing cost of raw materials priced in dollars (eg, oil). The improvement of the economic situation in the US, which has nothing spectacular about it as we have seen, is accompanied by a stagnation of the European economies, which is not destined to change qualitatively.
In the longer term, the present mechanism of the US ‘recovery’ heralds a catastrophic future for the world economy. The present over-valuing of the dollar, as a result of the high American interest rates, allows the US to import cheaply, but it undermines the competitiveness of the exporting sector, which further increases the balance of payments deficit. Under the pressure of the law of value, the dollar is bound to devalue, and the whole beautiful machinery at work today will burst like a balloon. At this point, the American budget and balance of payments deficits, which have been left to swell in the most spectacular manner, will no longer be compensated and the inflation presently hidden by high interest rates and the movement of capital will come into the open.
Capitalism will then find itself in a situation ten times worse, and will be hurled ever deeper into the abyss.
ML
In the first article in this series in International Review 34, we examined the attitude of communists to the national question on the eve of capitalism’s decadent epoch, and in particular the debate between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg on whether the working class should support ‘the right of nations to self determination’. We concluded that even when some national liberation struggles could still be considered progressive vis a vis the interests of the working class, such a slogan had to be rejected.
With the declaration of war in 1914, a whole new range of questions was posed for the workers’ movement, and in this article we want to look at the first attempts of communists to discuss them, and their implications for the question of support for all nationalist struggles.
One of the specific functions of revolutionaries is always to do their best to analyse the reality which confronts their class. The debate amongst the fractions of the ‘Zimmerwald Left’ during the first imperialist world war on the question of national liberation struggles was a vital part of this concern to delineate the conditions confronting the class struggle; new, unprecedented conditions of global capitalist warfare, unfettered imperialism and massive state control.
Sixty years later the debate is not the same and revolutionaries have no need to repeat its inadequacies or errors. The experience of the class itself has provided answers, as well as new problems. But if today’s political minorities do not adopt for themselves the same spirit of ruthless critique and practical investigation, clinging instead to slogans more appropriate to the ascendant period of capitalism, then they fail in their basic duties and reject the whole methodology of Lenin, Luxemburg and left fractions. It is this methodology which has led the ICC, to reject the position of Lenin on the national question and develop the contribution made by Rosa Luxemburg.
Those revolutionaries who remained faithful to the spirit of the Communist Manifesto and its rallying call – “The workers have no fatherland. Workers of the world unite!” – regrouped in the Zimmerwald movement of those opposed to the war, but were soon forced to organise themselves as a left-wing within this movement in order to defend a clear class position against the reformist and pacifist tendencies of the majority. The Zimmerwald Left was founded in 1915 on the basis of a recognition:
While not rejecting the old minimum programme of social democracy and the struggle for reforms within capitalism, this struggle now had to be waged “in order to sharpen in general any social and political crisis of capitalism as well as the crisis caused by the war and to turn this struggle into an onslaught against the fundamental stronghold of capitalism... Under the slogan of socialism this struggle will make the labouring masses impervious to the slogan of the enslavement of one people by another...” (Draft Resolution of the Zimmerwald Left, 1915).
Despite a continuing attachment to the minimum programme, which was appropriate to the ascendant period of capitalism, the positions of the Zimmerwald Left reflected the break in historical period, and in the workers’ movement itself. It could no longer be a straightforward question of the proletariat supporting bourgeois nationalist movements in order to advance the struggle for democracy within the context of a still expanding capitalist mode of production. The proletariat’s attitude to national liberation was now inseparable from the need to struggle against imperialist war and, more generally against imperialist capitalism itself, with the direct aim of creating the conditions for the revolutionary seizure of power by the working class.
Within the Zimmerwald Left, the Bolshevik Party had already clearly expressed the general, historical attitude of revolutionaries to national liberation struggles:
“At the bottom of real nationalist wars ‘such as took place especially in the period between 1789 and 1871 lay a slow and long process of nationalist mass movements of struggle against absolutism and feudalism, of overthrow of national oppression and of the creation of states upon a national foundation as prerequisites for capitalist development.
"The national ideology created by this epoch left deep traces upon the masses of petty bourgeoisie and upon a section of the proletariat. The bourgeois sophists and the betrayers of socialism, who trail behind these sophists, are making use of this at present, in an entirely different, and imperialist epoch, to divide the workers and to divert them from their class problems and the revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie.
"The words of the Communist manifesto that “workers have no fatherland” are now truer than ever. Only the international struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie can open to the oppressed masses the road to a better further”. (Resolution on the character of war, adopted at the Berne conference of the Bolshevik Party, 1915).
It is within this framework that the debate between the different fractions of the Zimmerwald Left on the national question took place. This debate, principally between the Western European communists on the one hand and Lenin on the other, initially focussed on whether it was still possible for the proletariat to give its support to ‘the right of nations to self-determination’, much along the lines of the pre-war polemics between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, but inevitably widened out to address two more fundamental questions raised by the entry of capitalism into its imperialist, decadent phase:
Whereas Lenin answered emphatically yes to both questions, others like the German, Dutch and Polish Lefts, along with the Kommunist group around Bukharin and Piatakov inside the Bolshevik Party, tentatively began to answer no, rejecting the slogan of self-determination and attempting to elaborate the tasks of the proletariat faced with new conditions of capitalist decadence. It was these fractions, who tended to cohere around the theory of imperialism defended by Rosa Luxemburg, who were most successful in coming to grips with the national question in decadence, against the rearguard actions of Lenin who was loath to give up elements of the obsolete minimum programme which might still play a vital role in the proletarian revolution in Russia and the backward countries of Eastern Europe and Asia.
When Bukharin opposed the right of nations to self-determination as a proletarian tactic at the Berne Conference of the Bolshevik Party in 1915, Lenin was the first to point out that one could not reject one point in the proletariat’s struggle for democracy without calling into question this struggle itself: if self-determination was impossible to achieve in the imperialist epoch, why not all other democratic demands? Lenin posed the problem as how to link the advent of imperialism with the struggle for reforms and democracy, and from this standpoint he denounced Bukharin’s position as “imperialist economism”; that is, a rejection of the need for a political struggle, and therefore a capitulation to imperialism [1] [13].
But Bukharin was not rejecting the need for a political struggle at all, only the equation of this with the struggle for the minimum programme. Bukharin and the Kommunist group posed the problem as the need for the proletariat to make a decisive break with the methods of the past, and to adopt new tactics and slogans corresponding to the need to destroy capitalism through proletarian revolution. Whereas communists were formerly in favour of the struggle for democracy, now they opposed it. As Bukharin more fully expressed it in a later amplification of this position:
“...it is perfectly clear, a priori, that the specific slogans and aims of the movement are wholly dependent on the character of the epoch in which the fighting proletariat has to operate. The past era was one of gathering strength and preparing for revolution. The present era is one of the revolution itself, and this fundamental distinction also gives rise to profound differences in the concrete slogans and aims of the movement. The proletariat needed democracy in the past because it was as yet unable to think about dictatorship in real terms...Democracy was valuable in so far as it helped the proletariat to climb a step higher in its consciousness, but the proletariat was forced to present its class demands in a ‘democratic’ form...But there is no need to make a virtue out of a necessity...the time has come for a direct assault on the capitalist fortress and the suppression of the exploiters...” (The Theory of The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, 1919)
Since the period of progressive bourgeois democracy was now over, and imperialism was inherent to capitalism’s continued existence; it was utopian and reactionary to advance anti-imperialist demands which left capitalist relations intact. The only answer to imperialism was the proletarian revolution:
“Social democracy must not advance ‘minimum’ demands in the realm of present-day foreign policy... any advancement of ‘partial’ tasks, of the ‘liberation of nations’ within the realm of capitalist civilisation, means the diverting of proletarian forces from the actual solution to the problem, and their fusion with the forces of the corresponding national bourgeois groups... The slogan of ‘self-determination of nations’ is first of all utopian (it cannot be realised within the limits of capitalism) and harmful as a slogan which disseminates illusions. In this respect it does not differ at all from the slogans of the courts of arbitration, of disarmament, etc, which presupposes the possibility of so-called ‘peaceful capitalism’ ”. (Theses on the Right of Self-Determination, 1915).
But Bukharin went further in his rejection of the minimum programme in the imperialist epoch, by showing the need for tactics and slogans which expressed the need for the proletariat to destroy the capitalism state. Whereas in ascendant capitalism the state had ensured the general conditions for exploitation by individual capitalist, the imperialist epoch gave rise to a militaristic state machine which directly exploited the proletariat, with a change from individual ownership of capital to collective ownership through unified capitalist structures (in trust, syndicates, etc.) and the fusion of these structures with the state. This tendency towards state capitalism spread from the economy to all areas of social life:
“All these organisations have a tendency to fuse with one another and to become transformed into one organisation of the rulers. This is the newest step of development, and one which has become especially apparent during the war... So there comes into being a single, all-embracing organisation, the modern imperialist pirate state, an omnipotent organisation of bourgeois dominance.... and if only the most advanced states have attained this stage, then each day, and especially each day of war, tends to make this fact general”. (The Imperialist Pirate State, 1915)
The only force which could confront these united forces of the entire bourgeoisie was the mass action of the proletariat. The need of the revolutionary movement in these new conditions was first of all to manifest its fundamental opposition to the state, which implied a rejection of support for any capitalist country. [2] [14]
It was against this broad attack on the minimum programme, and the rejection of self-determination by most of the Western European lefts, that Lenin wrote his Theses on Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination in 1916. From the beginning he was forced onto the defensive by the need to avoid objectively supporting reactionary bourgeois democracy and the democratic state. So he had to agree with Bukharin that:
Lenin's position was also based on a recognition that the nature of the new period demanded a break with the old reformist methods of struggle:
"...these demands must be formulated and put through in a revolutionary and not a reformist manner, going beyond the bounds of bourgeois legality, breaking them down... and drawing the masses into decisive action, extending and intensifying the struggle for every fundamental democratic demand up to a direct proletarian onslaught on the bourgeoisie, i.e. up to the socialist revolution that expropriates the bourgeoisie". (Ibid).
Capitalism and imperialism could only be overthrown through economic revolution. Nevertheless:
"It would be a radical mistake to think that the struggle for democracy was capable of diverting the proletariat from the socialist revolution or of hiding, overshadowing it, etc. On the contrary, in the same way as there can be no victorious socialism that does not practice full democracy, so the proletariat cannot prepare for its victory over the bourgeoisie without an all-round, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy". (Ibid).
This is Lenin's whole argument in a nutshell, but in view of the arguments ranged against it at the time, two key questions remained unanswered:
Lenin was undoubtedly aware of these problems, but could not resolve them. Imperialism, he agreed, turned democracy into an illusion - 'aspirations' among the masses; that is, there existed an antagonism between imperialism's denial of democracy and the masses 'striving' for democracy. What this boiled down to in Lenin's position was the continuing need for a struggle by the working class, not to destroy the capitalist state - not yet, at least - but to work within it and to use its institutions to win further democratic reforms: "The marxist solution to the problem of democracy is for the proletariat to utilise all democratic institutions in its class struggle against the bourgeoisie in order to prepare for its overthrow and assure its own victory". (Lenin, Reply to P. Kievsky (Y. Piatakov), 1916).
Before the February revolution, Lenin was united with Kautsky in believing that the marxist attitude towards the state was that the proletariat should capture state power and use it to create socialism. Be criticised Bukharin's position as un-marxist and semi-anarchist, re-affirming that socialists were in favour of using the existing state institutions.
But in the process of formulating his own answer to Bukharin in 1916 he changed his position, returning to Marx's original writings on the need to smash the bourgeois state apparatus, and stressing that the real significance of the appearance of workers' soviets in 1905 was as the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the alternative to bourgeois state power; his repudiation of Bukharin became instead the pamphlet better known as State and Revolution, which clearly calls for the demolition of the bourgeois state.
However, despite this vital clarification of his attitude to the state, and despite his attitude to the state, and despite his determined practical struggle for the achievement of the call for "All power to the soviets" in October 1917, Lenin never relinquished his theoretical vision of a democratic revolution'. So for example while in his April Theses he concluded that, to the extent that state power had now passed to the bourgeoisie, "the bourgeois-democratic revolution in Russia is completed", he still included in his programme the need for the proletariat to carry out bourgeois-democratic tasks, including self-determination, in the struggle for soviet power. In Bukharin's phrase, his position on the national question remained "pre-state", remaining largely influenced by the conditions confronted by the proletariat in the under-developed capitalist countries, and based on obsolete conceptions more appropriate to the period of ascendant capitalism than imperialist decadence.
Since the period of national wars embraced a definite historical period - broadly between 1789 and 1871 - the question posed was firstly whether this period was definitively ended with the outbreak of war in 1914, and secondly, given the undoubtedly imperialist and reactionary nature of this war, whether this signified a general and irreversible characteristic of wars in the new period. Again, whereas the European lefts began tentatively to answer yes to both questions, Lenin was reluctant to concede either, despite a large degree of actual agreement.
This whole issue was obviously a vital one for the Zimmerwald Left who in the midst of the imperialist war denounced the bourgeoisie's lies of defending the fatherland and dying for one's country; if some wars could still be pronounced progressive and revolutionary, then the internationalists should instead call on the working class to defend its fatherland in that particular case. As Bukharin pointed out, in the war this had become a class line:
"The most important question of tactics of our time is the question of the so-called defence of the country. For that is exactly where the line of separation is drawn between the entire bourgeois and the entire proletarian world. This word itself contains a deception for it concerns not really the country as such, i.e. its population, but the state organisation..." (The Imperialist Pirate State).
Therefore:
"The task o social democracy at the present time is a propaganda of indifference with respect to the 'fatherland', to the 'nation', etc, which presupposes the posing of the question not at all in a "pro-state" manner... (protests against a state 'disintegration') but on the contrary, posing it in a sharply expressed revolutionary manner with regard to state power and to the entire capitalist system". (Thesis 7, Theses on the Right of Self-Determination, 1915)
Bukharin demonstrated that if the slogan of self-determination was concretely applied (i.e. through granting independence and the right to secede) in the conditions of imperialist war, it became nothing other than a variant of the slogan 'defence of the fatherland', since it would be necessary to materially defend the borders of the newly independent state in the imperialist arena; otherwise what meaning could the demand have in reality? In this way, the internationalist forces of the proletariat would be splintered and their class struggle taken onto a nationalist terrain:
"Hence it follows that in no case and under no circumstances will we support the government of a Great Power which suppresses the uprising and revolt of the oppressed nation; neither will we mobilise the proletarian forces under the slogan 'the right of nations to self-determination'. Our task in this case is to mobilise the forces of the proletariat of both nations (in common with others) under the slogan of a civil, class war for socialism and for a propaganda against a mobilisation of forces under the slogan 'the right of nations...'." (Thesis 8, Ibid).
The German Left, basing itself on the theory of Rosa Luxemburg, who in the Junius Pamphlet had stated that "Today the nation is but a cloak that covers imperialist desires, a battle cry for imperialistic rivalries, the last ideological measure with which the masses can be persuaded to play the role of cannon fodder in imperialist wars", also came out clearly against the idea of progressive national wars in the imperialist epoch:
"In the era of the unleashing of this imperialism, national wars are no longer possible. National interests serve only as the pretext for putting the labouring masses of the people under the domination of their mortal enemy, imperialism." (Theses 5, Theses of the Internationale group on the Tasks of International Social Democracy, 1916)
In his vigorous riposte, Lenin drew back from making such a general conclusion about the nature of the new period:
Lenin could not accept that the entry of capitalism into its imperialist phase dictated the reactionary nature of every war, emphasising the need for a concrete assessment of each separate war, and he refused to accept that the obvious imperialist nature of the advanced countries of Europe and America signified a change in the entire capitalist system from which even the backward countries of Asia and Africa could not escape. In the advanced capitalist countries the era of national wars was long over, but in Eastern Europe and the semi-colonial and colonial countries bourgeois revolutions were still underway; here, national liberation struggles against the major imperialist powers were not yet a dead letter, and therefore defence of the fatherland was still progressive in these cases. Furthermore, even in Europe national wars could not be considered impossible (though he implied they were unlikely), on part of small annexed or oppressed nations against the major powers. He posed the hypothetical example of Belgium annexed by Germany in the course of the war to illustrate the need for socialists to support even the 'right' of the 'oppressed' Belgian bourgeoisie to self-determination.
Lenin's reluctance to concede the German Left's more coherent argument on the impossibility of national wars stemmed mainly from his very practical concern not to reject any possible movement or event which could help to precipitate a crisis in the capitalist system which could be exploited by the proletariat.
"The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene... We would be very poor revolutionaries if, in the proletariat's great struggle for socialism, we did not know how to utilise every popular movement against every single disaster imperialism brings in order to intensify and extend the crisis". (The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up, 1916)
He was not interested in the fate of nationalist movements in themselves, but only in their ability to weaken the grip of the major imperialist powers in the middle of the world war, and he therefore placed the Irish rebellion of 1916 on the same level as colonial rebellions in Africa and mutinies among colonial troops in India, Singapore, etc. as signs of the deepening crisis of imperialism.
Let us take the concrete example of the Irish nationalist rebellion of 1916 to illustrate some of the dangers in this approach. For Lenin, the rebellion was evidence in support of his position that encouragement for the nationalist aspirations of oppressed nations could only be an active and positive factor in the struggle against imperialism, against others like Radek and Trotsky who argued that it was a hopeless putsch without serious backing which showed, on the contrary, that the era of national liberation struggles was dead. Lenin didn't argue that there was a mass proletarian movement behind the rebellion, which manifested itself as "street fighting by a section of the urban petty bourgeoisie and a section of the workers": the real issue was the class nature of such nationalist revolts vis a vis the proletariat, or to put it another way: did such movements help to strengthen "the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat" (Lenin) - or the imperialist bourgeoisie?
Lenin dangerously ascribed to such nationalist actions an anti-capitalist potential: despite their reactionary fantasies, he said, "objectively they will attack capital", (Ibid), and the proletariat had only to unite and direct them to advance the process of social revolution. But without going into the whole history of the 'Irish Question', we can briefly say that it provides facts which repudiate this idea.
The Easter Rebellion of 1916 put the seal of nationalism on the class struggle of the Irish proletariat, already weakened by the partial defeat of its pre-war struggles, but actively mobilising workers behind the armed struggle of southern Irish Catholic nationalism. Despite the lack of sympathy among the mass of workers for this desperate military putsch, the subsequent mass terror campaigns of the British state only served to complete their disorientation and drive them into the arms of the reactionary nationalists, resulting in massacre and the systematic sabotage of any last sign of autonomous class struggle against capital by both British 'Black and Tans' and republican IRA. This defeat of a relatively weakened and isolated sector of the world proletariat by the combined forces of the Irish and British bourgeoisies could only represent the strengthening of world imperialism, whose primary interest is always the defeat of its mortal class enemy. The Irish rebellion only proved that all factions of the bourgeoisie, even in the so-called oppressed nations, side with imperialism when faced with the threat of the destruction of the exploiting system they all rely on for their privileges.
With the benefit of hindsight, revolutionaries today can only conclude that history has proved Lenin wrong, and the lefts, despite their confusions, were essentially right. The lesson of the Irish rebellion is that support for nationalism leads directly to the sub-ordination of the class struggle to the wars of imperialism in the decadent epoch of capitalism.
Lenin's exhortation to support all nationalist revolts has inevitably been exploited by the bourgeoisie as an excuse to drown workers and peasants in countless bloodbaths under the banners of nationalism and 'anti-imperialism'. However, a river of blood still separates the worst of Lenin's errors from the 'best' position defended by those Stalinist, Trotskyist and Maoist butchers of the proletariat who proclaim themselves his true heirs. It is also necessary to rescue the original critical content of Lenin's writings from those like the Bordigists of the ICP (Communist Program) and others who, while remaining within the revolutionary camp, prefer also to remain attached to all the errors of the past even when they lead dangerously close to defending the most reactionary capitalist factions in the name of 'national liberation' (see IR 32 for a fuller treatment of the ICP's errors and recent decomposition).
Lenin was always aware of the dangers of revolutionaries supporting nationalism and constantly emphasised the need for the proletariat to maintain its unity and independence from all forces of the bourgeoisie; - even though this only tended to make his position even more unworkable and contradictory in practice. So even where he called on revolutionaries to support every revolt against imperialism, he added "provided it is not the revolt of a reactionary class". What the lefts like Rosa Luxemburg were arguing more coherently was that the nationalist element in all revolts against the bloody repression of the major imperialist powers was always injected by the most reactionary class - the bourgeoisie - to stifle the threat of real class revolt; revolutionaries had to draw a clear dividing line between nationalism and the class struggle, since only the latter in the imperialist epoch represented the progressive way forward for humanity.
All along the line, Lenin qualified his position in order to avoid the ever present danger of subordinating the class struggle to the national struggle, whether through capitulating to the democratic state machine or to the bourgeoisie in 'oppressed' nations. The marxist attitude to the national question had always recognised the primacy of the class struggle:
"Unlike the petty bourgeois democrats, Marx regarded all democratic demands without exception, not as absolutes, but as the historical expression of the struggle of the masses of the people led by the bourgeoisie against feudalism. There is not a single one of these demands that could not serve and did not serve in certain circumstances as an instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie to deceive the workers. In this respect to select one of these demands, namely, the self-determination of nations, and to contrast it with the rest is radically wrong theoretically. In practice, the proletariat can preserve its own independence only if it sub-ordinates its struggle for all democratic demands not even excluding the demand for a republic, to its revolutionary struggle for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie". (Thesis 5, 1916).
Following on from this, Lenin had to codify his position on self-determination concretely to express this need to defend the international unity of the working class and to reconcile this paramount concern of revolutionaries with his theoretical division of the proletariat into two camps - in the 'oppressed' and the 'oppressor' nations. This, for him, was "the most difficult and most important task". So while the proletariat of the 'oppressor' nation must demand freedom of separation for the colonies and small nations oppressed by its 'own' imperialism.
"...the socialists of the oppressed nations must, in particular, defend and implement the full and unconditional unity, including organisational unity, of the workers of the oppressed nation and those of the oppressor nation. Without this it is impossible to defend the independent policy of the proletariat and their class solidarity with the proletariat of other countries in the face of all manner of intrigues, treachery and trickery on the part of the bourgeoisie". (Thesis 4, our emphasis).
How many times do we hear this quoted by today's 'Leninist' enthusiasts for national liberation struggles? Lenin was quite explicit: in the absence of the class unity of the proletariat, including its concrete organisational expression, the working class was unable to defend its autonomy from the enemy class. The class struggle will be subordinated to the national struggle, which in reality is only the struggle of imperialism for a slice of the world market, and the workers will become the cannon fodder for their own bourgeoisie in this struggle. In effect, the watchwords of the Communist Manifesto, "Workers have no fatherland, workers of the world unite!" would be turned on their head: "Workers of all so-called oppressed countries defend your fatherland!"
It is this reciprocal element in Lenin's position on support for self-determination that today's leftists ignore or conceal, but it is central to a defence of proletariat internationalism since it still, in however distorted and practical a way, holds a vision of the global interests of the working class.
Elsewhere in his writings, Lenin firmly rejected an abstract or uncritical approach to the support of nationalist movements: “no democratic demand can fail to give rise to abuses, unless the specific is subordinated to the general; we are not obliged to support either ‘any’ struggle for independence or ‘any’ republican or anti-clerical movement”. (The Discussion Summed Up). The general interests of the class struggle could be contradicted by support for this or that nationalist movement : “It is possible that the republican movement in one country may be merely an instrument of the clerical or financial-monarchist intrigues of other countries; if so, we must not support this particular, concrete movement..." (Ibid).
And from the example of Marx’s refusal to support Czech nationalism in the nineteenth century, Lenin drew the conclusion that if the proletarian revolution should break out in a few larger European countries, revolutionaries should be in favour of a ‘revolutionary war’ against those other capitalist nations which acted as the bulwarks of reaction: i.e. in favour of crushing them and all their outposts no matter what national liberation struggles might arise within their borders.
Whereas for Lenin there was a possibility of nationalist movements acting as weapons of the imperialist powers against the class struggle, for Luxemburg and Bukharin this was a generalised and inevitable phenomenon of the imperialist phase of capitalism. Without having the advantage of their coherent theoretical starting point, Lenin was still forced by the weight of argument to at least lean towards their positions – significantly, he was now forced to admit that the slogan of Polish independence was utopian and reactionary in contemporary conditions, going so far as to say that “...even a revolution in Poland alone would change nothing and would only divert the attention of the masses in Poland from the main thing – the connection between their struggle and that of the Russian and German proletariat”. (The Discussion Summed Up). But he still refused to draw any general conclusion from this ‘specific’ example.
Besides their basic method, one thing all the participants in the debate in the Zimmerwald Left were agreed on, one thing which is so often ignored or paid lip service to in discussions about the possibility of supporting national movements : only the working class struggle offers any future for the oppressed masses of humanity. Nowhere, even in Lenin’s most confused statements on this subject, is there a suggestion that decadent capitalism could be destroyed in any other way except through violent proletarian revolution. The concern which animated Lenin, Bukharin, Luxemburg and the others was whether, and to what extent, national struggles could contribute to bringing about the final crisis of capitalism and thus act in favour of the revolutionary struggle by helping to weaken the whole rotting edifice of imperialism.
Despite the overwhelming agreement on the basic framework of the debate, a sizeable part of the workers’ movement still felt that a complete break with past theory and practice on this question was not yet justified; to Lenin it seemed that workers had nothing to lose by supporting nationalist movements because they were all moving in the same direction towards the destruction of capitalism. Today we have more than enough evidence, in the countless, massacres of workers by nationalist factions, to make our own vital contribution to this debate by concluding that the class struggle and nationalism in all its forms are at no point whatsoever convergent: the latter is always a weapon in the enemy’s hands against the former.
Those revolutionaries who bravely, in a hesitant manner, suggested that the time had indeed come to make a clean break with the past, were in the vanguard of the proletariat’s attempt to understand the world it lived and fought in. Their contribution and in particular the theory of Rosa Luxemburg on the whole question of imperialism and the mortal crisis of capitalism is still an essential cornerstone of the work of revolutionaries in the decadent epoch.
As for Lenin’s position on the national question, it has, as we all know, been pillaged by the bourgeoisie in order to justify all manner of reactionary wars of ‘national liberation’. Nor is it an accident that the left of capital, in search of marxist credentials for its participation in imperialist wars, chose to regurgitate Lenin’s writings, which contain enough dangerous weaknesses to allow a back door to remain open to what has now become one of the cornerstones of the bourgeoisie’s ideology.
True, Lenin cannot be held responsible for the way in which the bourgeoisie, in the wake of the defeat of the proletarian revolution he fought so hard for, has distorted his words. Against the anarchists and libertarians, for whom Lenin was always a bourgeois politician using marxism only to justify his own struggle for power, we can point to the way in which the bourgeois counter-revolution has been forced to pervert the whole framework of the debate in which Lenin participated, and to conceal or suppress certain vital principles he defended in order to rob his contribution of its revolutionary marxist content.
But having said this, unlike the Bordigists, we have no need to remain blind to the errors of the past. From many of the above points, we can see that dangerous weaknesses and ambiguities were present in Lenin’s writings at the beginning which have to be decisively rejected in order to defend clear class positions today.
In a forthcoming article we will examine the tragic practical consequences of the Bolsheviks’ incomprehensions about the national question after October 1917, through the policies of the soviet state.
S. Ray
Part 1: The debate on the national question at the dawn of decadence [16]
Part 3: The debate during the revolutionary wave and the lessons for today [17]
[1] [18] Some of Lenin’s other arguments against the lefts’ position were, it has to be said, pretty feeble. Thus, Bukharin and Piatakov had been “depressed” by the war(!), while the origin of the Dutch and Polish Lefts’ opposition to self-determination was to be found in the histories of their respective small nations; which didn’t quite explain why it was the dominant position taken up by the western European fractions of the Zimmerwald Left at this time, including the German Left.
[2] [19] Bukharin’s position on the smashing of bourgeois state power and his emphasis on the mass action of the workers was in part assimilated from the work of Pannekoek and the German Left, with whom the exiled Kommunist group collaborated during the war. In his pre-war polemic with Kautsky, Pannekoek had emphasised that “the proletarian battle is not just a battle against the bourgeoisie for state power; it is also battle against state power”. (Mass Action and Revolution, 1911). The proletariat’s response to the bloody repression of the bourgeois state was the mass strike.
[3] [20] It should be pointed out that the secession of Norway from Sweden in 1905 was the only concrete example Lenin could ever point to in support of his ‘self-determination’ policy, which is why it keeps popping up in all his writings on the subject. Without delving too deeply, we can say that it contained enough specificity to make it a fragile enough basis for a general position: it occurred on the eve of capitalism’s decadence, in a region outside the major European capitalist heartlands, in a country with a relatively small proletariat. In addition, the Norwegian bourgeoisie had always enjoyed a large degree of political autonomy and, ultimately its formal independence was achieved because the Swedish bourgeoisie were quite prepared to accept it, which is why they allowed a referendum on it in the first place...
Following the defeat and the repression suffered by the working class in Poland in December 81, a discussion began in the ICC with the aim of drawing the maximum number of lessons from this experience. The main questions were:
-- why and how had the world bourgeoisie managed to isolate the workers in Poland from their class brothers in other countries?
-- why, in Poland itself, had the workers - who in August 80 had shown such combativity, such a capacity for self-organization, who had shown such intelligence in using the weapon of the mass strike against the bourgeoisie - then fallen so easily into the traps laid by Solidarnosc, which delivered them bound and gagged to the forces of repression?
-- for the world proletariat, what was the true extent of the defeat suffered in Poland? Was it a partial defeat with a relatively limited impact, or a decisive defeat which meant that the bourgeoisie now had a free hand to impose its own response to the inexorable of the economic crisis: generalized imperialist war?
The ICC's International Review no 29 put forward answers to these questions in the article ‘After the repression in Poland: perspectives for the world-wide class struggle.' However, the ICC's thinking didn't restrict itself to the elements contained in this text. It led it to make a more precise critique of the thesis, sketched out by Lenin and developed by his epigones, that the communist revolution would begin, not in the main bastions of the bourgeois world, but in the less developed countries: the ‘capitalist chain' would have to be broken at its ‘weakest link'. This approach led to the publication in IR 31 of a text whose title was a good summary of the thesis defended in it: "The proletariat of western Europe at the centre of the generalization of the class struggle: critique of the theory of the ‘weakest link'".
It also led in January ‘83 to the adoption by the central organ of the ICC of a ‘Resolution on the critique of the theory of the weak link,' and, in July 83 to the adoption by the 5th Congress of the ICC of a ‘Resolution on the International Situation' which affirms that:
"The other major lesson of these battles (in Poland 1980-81) and their defeat is that this world-wide generalization of struggles can only begin from the countries that constitute the economic heart of capitalism. That is, the advanced countries of the west and, among these, those in which the working class has the oldest and most complete experience: Western Europe...If the decisive act of the revolution will be played out when the working class has dealt with the two military giants of east and west, its first act will necessarily be played out in the historic heart of capitalism and of the proletariat: western Europe." (IR 35)
The whole ICC agreed on the necessity to criticize the thesis of the ‘weakest link', which the degenerating Communist International turned into a dogma and which served to justify the worst bourgeois aberrations, notably that of ‘socialism in one country'.
However, a minority of comrades rejected the idea that "the proletariat of western Europe would be at the centre of the world wide generalization of the class struggle," that "the epicenter of the coming revolutionary earthquake would be in this region of the world."
"To the extent that the debates going on in the organization generally concern the whole proletariat they should be expressed publicly" (‘Report on the Structure and Functioning of the Revolutionary Organization', IR 33). We are therefore publishing here a discussion text written by a comrade of the minority and which to some degree synthesizes the disagreements which arose during the course of the debates on this particular question.
Since this text refers to the resolution of January ‘83, we felt that it would be useful to precede it with this resolution even though it was not written for external publication but in order to take a position on the internal debate. This is why the language may be somewhat difficult to follow for the reader who is not familiar with our analyses, and we recommend a prior reading of the texts from IR 29 and 31 already mentioned.
Finally, apart from the resolution and the discussion text, we publish the ICC's response to the arguments contained in the latter.
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Resolution of the ICC
1. The ICC reaffirms the unity of the conditions for the proletarian revolution on a world scale. The unification of the capitalist world in the period of decadence implies that it is the entire world - whatever the degree of development of the countries that compose it - which is ripe for the communist revolution, the conditions for which have existed since 1914 on a world scale. It rejects the Bordigist theory of bourgeois revolutions in certain geographical areas of the Third World, which are presented as a necessary stage towards the proletarian revolution. The latter is not only necessary but possible for each sector of the world proletariat, for whom it is the only perspective faced with the general crisis of the system.
2. Just as the unity of the conditions for the revolution is not the sum of particular national conditions, so the world proletariat is not the sum of its parts. The marxist conception of the revolution is not a vulgar materialist one. The revolution is a dynamic process, not a static one; its forward movement implies going beyond particular geo-historic conditions. This is why the ICC rejects both the ‘theory of the weakest link of capitalism' and the theory of the ‘west European revolution'.
The first, elaborated by the Communist International in its phase of decline, implicitly affirmed that the proletariat of the backward countries could play a more revolutionary role than that of the developed countries (because of the absence of a ‘workers' aristocracy', the non-existence of the poison of ‘democracy', the weakness of the national bourgeoisie). The second, developed in Gorter's Reply to Lenin, put forward the idea that only the proletariat of Western Europe and North America were capable of realizing the world revolution, which was in fact restricted to Western Europe, which had the most favorable objective conditions (strong concentrations of workers, traditions of struggle).
The symmetrical error of these two conceptions had its origins both in the conditions of the time (the 1917 revolution was born out of a war in the periphery of industrial Europe, in a capitalist world still divided into a constellation of imperialisms and of private capitals) and in a confusion between the field of extension and the dynamic of the revolution. In seeking to determine the most favorable objective conditions for the outbreak of the revolution, the revolutionaries of the time had a tendency to confuse the point of departure with the point of arrival of the whole dynamic process of the extension of the revolution.
Although both theories were not bourgeois conceptions and expressed the life of the revolutionary movement of the time as it searched for a coherent view, they have led to the worst kinds of aberrations: the theory of the weak link has ended up in third worldism; the theory of the west European revolution in neo-Menshevism.
3. The mass strike of August ‘80, limited to Poland, does not challenge the classic schema of the international generalization of the class struggle as the qualitative leap needed for the opening-up of a revolutionary period.
Poland posed very sharply the question of the objective conditions most favorable to the development of the international dynamic of the mass strike:
-- in contrast to 1917-18, the bourgeoisie is much better prepared and more united internationally to stifle any threat of generalization beyond the borders of one country;
-- a revolutionary process cannot begin in one country in the absence of a dynamic towards breaking out of the national framework; within national confines, the mass strike can only be smothered.
4. Determining the point of departure for this dynamic, and thus the best conditions for the beginning of the revolutionary earthquake does not mean denying the unity of the world proletariat. It is the very process by which this potential unity becomes a real one.
However, unity does not mean the identity of parts which remain subjected to different material conditions. There is no natural equality between the various organs, the heart and the brain of a living body; they carry out vital, complementary functions.
5. The ICC rejects the naively egalitarian conception which holds that any country can be the point of departure for the revolutionary dynamic. This conception is based on the anarchist belief that, given the example of the revolutionary general strike, all countries could simultaneously initiate a revolutionary process.
In reality, the uneven development of capitalism, by creating an ever-widening gulf between the big industrial countries concentrating the majority of the modern industrial proletariat, and the Third World countries, has the consequence that the most favorable conditions for the birth of the revolutionary framework are strictly determined by the historic and social framework.
6. The point of departure for the world revolution is necessarily to be found in Western Europe, where the force of numbers is supplemented by a revolutionary tradition that goes from 1848 to the first revolutionary wave, where the working class has most directly confronted the counter-revolution and which constitutes the final battlefield for a generalized imperialist war.
Because Western Europe is:
-- the first economic power and the biggest concentration of workers, where the existence of a number of nations next to each other poses the immediate question of going beyond national boundaries;
-- at the heart of the contradictions of capitalism in crisis, contradictions that are pushing it towards world war;
-- the Gordian knot of the most powerful bourgeois mystifications (democracy, parliament, trade unions) , mystifications that the proletariat will have to settle scores with in order to make a liberating leap for the whole world working class.
It is at the very heart of the course towards revolution. The fact that the period of counterrevolution came to an end with May ‘68, the maturation of proletarian consciousness in Europe in the 1970s, the existence of a developed proletarian political milieu: all these factors confirm this point.
7. Neither the countries of the Third World, nor of the eastern bloc, nor North America, nor Japan can be the point of departure for the process that leads to revolution:
-- the countries of the Third World because of the numerical weakness of the proletariat and the weight of nationalist illusions;
-- Japan and especially the US because they have not so directly been through the counter-revolution and world war, and because of the absence of a deep revolutionary tradition;
-- the eastern bloc countries because of their relative economic backwardness and the specific form that the world crisis takes there (scarcity) obstructing the development of a direct and global consciousness of the cause of the crisis (ie overproduction), and because of the Stalinist counter-revolution which has, in the minds of workers, transformed the idea of socialism into its opposite and has allowed democratic, trade unionist and nationalist illusions to have a new impact.
8. However, while the point of departure for the world revolution is necessarily to be found in western Europe, the triumph of the world revolution in the last instance depends on its rapid and victorious extension to the USA and the USSR, the heads of the two imperialist blocs, where the last great act of the revolution will be played out.
During the first revolutionary wave, the countries which had the most advanced and concentrated proletariat were at the same time the most powerful and decisive military countries, ie the countries of Western Europe. Although the most advanced and concentrated battalions of the proletariat are in Western Europe, the centers of world capital's military power have shifted to the USA and the USSR, which has consequences for the development of a revolutionary proletarian movement.
Today, a new anti-working class Holy Alliance between Russian and American capital, going over and above their imperialist rivalries, would lead to a direct military intervention against revolutionary Europe, ie to a world-wide civil war; and the outcome of this would depend on the capacity of the proletariat in the two bloc leaders, especially the USA, to paralyze and overthrow the bourgeois state.
9. The ICC warns against a certain number of dangerous confusions:
-- the idea that ‘anything is possible at any moment, in any place', as soon as sharp class confrontations arise at the peripheries of capitalism; this idea is based on an identification between combativity and the maturation of class consciousness;
-- the unconscious assimilation between the international mass strike and the revolution; whereas international generalization is a qualitative step which announces the revolution; it is the beginning of a revolutionary period but cannot be mixed up with the revolution itself. The latter will necessarily take the form of a situation of dual power which will pose the alternative: dictatorship of the workers' councils or bloody counter-revolution, opening the course towards war;
-- the conception of a linear development of the internationalization of the mass strike, whereas the latter will necessarily follow a winding course, with advances and retreats, as in the example of Poland.
It is up to revolutionaries to keep a cool head and not to give in to immediatist exaltation, which leads to adventurism, or to become depressed and demoralized with each retreat.
Although history has been accelerating since August 1980 and is providing revolutionaries with an exalted perspective, they must understand that their work remains a long-term one.
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Critique of some positions of the ICC on the theory of the "weak link"
The last two years have put the capacities of revolutionary minorities to the test. The sudden deepening of the crisis in the entire world, the brutality of the austerity measures the bourgeoisie has taken, the clarity of the massive war preparations, all this seemed to demand a thundering answer from the world proletariat. And yet the working class has suffered an important defeat in Poland while elsewhere on the globe the struggle has stagnated. Revolutionary organizations have remained tiny and without much of an echo. This situation has exposed the many weaknesses which existed in the revolutionary milieu. The confusion is considerable and understandable. Revolutionaries can no longer limit themselves to the reaffirmation of lessons from the past. They have to assess and explain the defeat in Poland and the present difficulties. They have to clarify the perspectives for the workers' struggle, explain how we can get from here to there. In this context, the ICC has formulated its ‘critique of the theory of the weak link'. (‘The Proletariat of Western Europe at the Centre of the Generalization of the Class Struggle', IR 31, ‘Resolution on the Critique of the Theory of the Weak Link', in this issue). Those texts justly reject Lenin's position about a breakdown of the capitalist system starting in the weakest countries and spreading from there to the rest of the system. This theory has been an instrument for those who look for capitalism's gravedigger outside the proletariat. The problem with the ‘Leninists' who defend this position today is not that they have illusions about the strength of the workers in the weak countries, they just have illusions about those weak countries themselves. For them, the proletariat is no more than cannon-fodder for the ‘anti-imperialist movement'.
But the ICC texts go beyond the rejection of this disastrous theory. They explain the defeat in Poland precisely as a result of the fact that Poland is a weaker country and state that "only in Western Europe ... can there be a full development of the political consciousness which is indispensible for (the proletariat's) struggle for revolution". (IR 31, p.7). There it will not be feasible for the bourgeoisie to isolate a mass strike because it will be "no longer possible to set up an economic cordon sanitaire and a political cordon sanitaire will have no more effect." (idem, p 6-7)
This vision certainly gives a way to digest the defeat in Poland and to see more clearly a way ahead. But at the same time:
-- It obscures some of the lessons of Poland and other struggles that occurred and will occur outside Western Europe. It sees their relevance necessarily as limited, since they take place outside the area where the main capitalist mystifications - in the ICC's view - can be overcome;
-- It creates the false impression that the ability of the bourgeoisie to isolate a mass strike depends on the place where it occurs, so that a mass strike in Western Europe would not encounter the same problems as in Poland or would overcome them more easily;
-- It gives the false hope that revolutionary consciousness can come to fruition in Western Europe alone and then break down the capitalist mystifications in other industrialized areas through the power of example ("When the proletariat of these countries detaches itself from the most sophisticated traps laid by the bourgeoisie...the chimes will ring for the world-wide generalization of proletarian struggle, for the revolutionary confrontation" idem, p.8).
Class forces and class consciousness
The proletarian struggle begins out of necessity, not out of consciousness. Mystifications can only be overcome because of and in the struggle. It is the potential of the struggle to grow which enables the working class to break through capitalist mystifications, rather than the other way around. Struggles develop despite the weight of many illusions which all have in common the belief that an improvement in living conditions, a victory, can only be gained within this framework of capitalism. This framework has many names and is colored by local specificities, but it is always the framework of the nation-state.
This illusion still handicaps the workers' struggle in all countries. But it has a very different effect in countries where the proletariat is only a tiny minority dwarfed by other classes as opposed to those countries where the proletariat has the potential power to paralyze the entire economy and smash the bourgeois-state, provided that it only had to confront its ‘own' bourgeoisie.
In the first case, this illusion tends to lure the workers away from their class terrain and into a front with a faction of the bourgeoisie (the Church, the left, the guerillas, ‘progressive' military, etc) because their own potential power within the nation-framework is so small. That's why the workers in those countries need the demonstration of power of the class in the industrialized countries to find the path of autonomous struggle, to follow it in a way that goes beyond mere desperation.
It is only in the second case that this illusion of change within the nation, foundation of all capitalist mystifications, cannot prevent the development of working class struggle on its own terrain. Here, the workers are strong enough to count on themselves, even if they still see themselves only as a social category exerting pressure within the nation and not yet as the world class that has humanity's fate in its hands. Thus it is the key development of the workers' struggle in these countries which is the key to the growing awareness of the entire working class of its own power. And it is this growing awareness of the entire working class which makes it possible for the proletariat to break through the network of capitalist mystifications. Therefore, the major concentrations of the proletariat in the industrial heartlands of both blocs play the decisive role in the development of revolutionary class consciousness. Only there can the struggle grow despite the weight of bourgeois ideology and become the lever by which proletarian consciousness is freed from the weight of the ideology of the dominant class.
But the existence of struggle is in itself not enough. As Marx said, just as a man doesn't throw away the tool that keeps him alive before it has become totally useless and he has found something else to replace it with, in the same way, the proletariat will not destroy the existing social system before the necessity and the possibility of this historical task becomes embedded in its consciousness. And this process is not possible within the limits of Western Europe alone.
Becoming conscious of the necessity of generalization
In order to understand the necessity of revolution, the working class must be able to perceive the destruction of the objective basis of capitalist mystifications. All these mystifications are based on the belief that a prosperous economy within the framework of the nation is possible. In order to destroy this hope for all workers, its falseness must be clearly demonstrated for the whole world, not in the weakest economies, but in the strongest capitalist nations. As long as in these stronger economies a strong illusion in substantial recovery is kept alive, the belief that the capitalist nation can be a framework for survival will be kept alive among the workers in all countries, weak or strong. That implies that the revolution is not for next year. Talking about a revolutionary assault in the short-term, as some people did during the mass strike in Poland, can only lead to demoralization. But it means also that for the first time in history, this essential condition for worldwide revolution will really be fulfilled. All previous revolutionary attempts of the proletariat have broken their backs on this problem. The mobilization of the workers for the First World War and later the defeat of the first revolutionary wave, were to a large extent made possible by the limits of the capitalist crisis, by the promise of recovery in the stronger countries. The mobilization of workers for the Second World War, their defeat in countries like Spain, was made possible not only by the weight of the defeat of the first revolutionary wave but also by the ability of capitalism to offer new hope for recovery through the launching of state-capitalism on an unprecedented scale (in Germany, for example, industrial production rose 90% between 1933-38, while unemployment declined from 3.7 million to 200,000).
Today capitalism is for the first time approaching the point where it will no longer have any objective economic means to keep alive any hope for recovery, to create a temporary improvement in the situation of ‘its' workers, even in a limited part of the globe. State capitalism has already been developed, not to its theoretical maximum, but to its maximum efficiency. The extension of state capitalism on an international scale, and the redistribution of surplus value it allows through government aid the IMF, world bank, etc, still could be developed some more, but not by much because the foundations of the system - competition - puts an iron limit on this development. This extension has already been fully used during the post-war period to create the markets required by the high development of productive forces in the strongest countries, forging an unprecedented interdependency of all units of the capitalist machine.
As a result, none of them still has the means to shield itself from the crisis. Even attempting to do so would only aggravate its situation. For the first time, a steep decline without a creditable hope for recovery becomes unavoidable for all countries. That doesn't mean that the situation of each country becomes the same, that workers everywhere will be thrown into famine. It means some will be thrown into famine and others into barbaric exploitation, militarization, terror, competition between them and finally into war and global destruction, unless they can prevent it. The specific situations of all workers will not become the same; a myriad of differences will continue to exist. What will be the same everywhere is the all out attack of the bourgeoisie, the interests of the workers, the perspectives they have.
Becoming conscious of the possibility
But to become the conscious goal of their struggle, the workers must not only see the revolution as necessary, but also as possible - within the limits of their forces. The level of political consciousness is necessarily limited by the forces they have at their disposal. A struggle beginning on a platform of limited, economic demands can only expand its goal; can only become political, to the degree that the class forces at the workers' disposal grow accordingly - through extension and self-organization. But what is possible depends also upon the opposition the workers have to overcome. And here again we see important differences between the situation in 1917 and today. In 1917, the bourgeoisie was divided and disorganized by the war, disorientated by its lack of experience. Under these circumstances, there were indeed ‘weak links' in its defense which the proletariat could exploit. According to the logic of the ICC resolution, the workers in Russia should have dreamed about bourgeois democracy, since they had not directly confronted the more sophisticated mystifications of the bourgeoisie in the West. But despite the pleadings of the Mensheviks, they didn't waste their time with that. The degree of self-organization achieved; the extension of the struggle throughout Russia; the workers' unrest in neighboring countries; and the weakness of the bourgeoisie they had to confront: these made possible a goal far beyond that, it made possible the goal of a revolutionary victory in Russia with a reasonable hope that other countries would rapidly follow.
Today, however, any fraction of the proletariat in struggle is facing a united world bourgeoisie. There are no more weak links in capitalism's defense. What was possible then isn't any longer and since class consciousness is bound to what is objectively possible, revolutionary consciousness will require more time to mature, to allow class forces to grow much larger than was required in 1917. If class forces are not developed on an international scale beyond a limited area like western Europe, and if capitalist mystifications succeed in keeping the struggles isolated from each other and prevent the proletariat from becoming conscious of its common interests and perspectives, then no mass strike, regardless of where it happened, could lead to "the full development of the political consciousness indispensable for revolution", because it would be impossible for the workers to see the forces required for the task of defeating a united world bourgeoisie. Under such circumstances a mass strike would be bound to stagnate, which means to go rapidly downhill. Because the possibility of a further proletarian goal could not be perceived and thus be absorbed by the proletariat's consciousness, the degree of self-organization could not be maintained and would have to wither away, and a false perspective based on bourgeois mystifications would inevitably take hold. The ICC didn't realize this when it wrote, more than three months after the dismantling of the autonomous class organization in Poland, "The movement, far from dying down, has become stronger" (IR 24, p 4) and when later, in the framework of its ‘weak link critique', it attributed the success of capitalist mystifications in Poland to the "specificities" of the eastern bloc and Poland in particular.
The weight of specificities
As the ICC wrote, "the idea that there are national or bloc ‘specificities' ... will be pulverized more and more by the leveling down of the economic conditions in all countries and of the living conditions of all workers." (IR 29, p 4) That does not mean that revolutionaries have to deny that there are all kinds of differences between workers of different countries, sectors and regions, which capital uses to divide them. But the power to divide does not stem from the ‘specificities' themselves but from capitalism's global ability to maintain illusions in its system. Without the progressive demystification of these illusions by the crisis and the class struggle, workers will remain isolated in their ‘specific' situations in the strong countries as well as the weaker ones. The powerful position of the church in Poland might be specific for that country, but there is nothing specific about the mystifications this institution uses against the workers' struggle - nationalism, pacifism, legalism, etc. In other words, those mystifications are not powerful because the church is powerful but it is the other way around: the church fulfils that left in opposition role because the lack of depth of the crisis (not in Poland but on an international scale) and the immaturity of the development of the workers' struggle (again on the international level) permits capital to use these mystifications with success. This means that revolutionaries have to stress again and again the worldwide unity of the proletariat's struggle and unmask the mystifications behind the specificities. That means struggling against the fear that extension of the struggle and generalization are not possible because of the specific differences, and its corollary - the illusion that a victory, a full development of revolutionary consciousness is possible within one country or one part of a continent alone.
Now let's take a closer look at the main specificities which the ICC sees as responsible for the western European workers' lack of company on the road to revolutionary consciousness.
The ‘scarcity' in the eastern bloc
"The specific form that the world crisis takes there (scarcity), obstructing the development of a direct and global consciousness of the causes of the crisis (overproduction) ..." (‘Resolution of the critique of the theory of the weak link')
For the workers in the East as well as those in the West, overproduction and scarcity can only be understood when they leave the ‘specific' point of view and see the capitalist system as a whole. Without this global view, the manifestations of overproduction in the West appear as unfair distribution, lack of protection against foreign competition, etc. Overproduction cannot be located in the West alone. Indeed, the weaker countries are feeling it first, because their lower organic compositions push them earlier against the limits of the world market. Even Luxemburg, on whose economics the ICC bases itself, was clear on the fact that overproduction is not a problem facing certain capitalist countries while others merely feel the consequences, but a result of a growing disproportion built into the productive process and thus present in every country. Even in the weakest countries, workers can see how overproduction on the world market makes the prices of the commodities they produce plunge and creates hunger and unemployment, while at the same time pushing ‘its' bourgeoisie to divert more and more surplus value into means of destruction. Even in a typical underdeveloped country like Ghana, industry is running at less than 15% of its capacity (New York Times, 4 February, 1983). In the same way, scarcity can only be grasped from a global point of view.
If one looks at the problem from the standpoint of a specific country, scarcity exists in every country (in different degrees but everywhere increasing):
-- scarcity of consumption goods for workers and unemployed, for whom austerity and inflation push the goods they need more and more out of reach while they remain in abundance for the ruling class;
-- scarcity of capital for the ruling class which desperately tries to squeeze more surplus value out of the workers to protect its competitive position on the shrinking world market.
This global point of view, needed to see the roots of the system and the potential of socialist revolution, the proletariat in the western countries doesn't get as a birthright. It can only be the result of the tendency of the class struggle to become global itself and international in scope.
Lack of revolutionary tradition, culture, age
The view that there never was a strong workers' movement outside western Europe is biased, colored by the influence of bourgeois historians who had reasons to minimize the revolutionary movement. But more importantly, we must realize that these lessons from the past are dormant in the memory of the proletariat and can only be reappropriated through the struggle, with the help of the communist minority which itself is generated by the struggle. The long counter-revolution separated the western European workers from the traditions of the past as effectively as elsewhere. It makes no sense to say, as the ICC resolution does, that the workers in the US and Japan have not been directly enough through the counter-revolution, while those in the eastern bloc have been confronted by it too much with the result that in their minds ‘the idea' of socialism has been transformed into its opposite. Everywhere on the globe, the vast majority of workers identify the word ‘communism' with Stalinism or its ‘Eurocommunist' or ‘Trotskyist' variants. Not through bourgeois education and culture but through the development of the struggle, the minds of the workers are opening to the lessons of the experiences of their class brothers in other parts of the world and the lessons of the past. All the arguments about tradition, culture and age fly in the face of the historical fact that the countries where the proletariat was most successful in homogenizing its revolutionary consciousness were Russia and Hungary - where the working class was relatively young, without long-standing traditions and with a rather low level of bourgeois education. That doesn't mean that experience is not important, that all lessons are forgotten when there is no open struggle going on. Experience was very important for the workers in Russia but it was directly linked to the struggle. Not their geographical position, not their direct confrontation with democracy, etc, but only their autonomous struggle enabled them to assimilate the experiences of workers elsewhere and their own, to incorporate them in the next phase of their struggle.
The lack of direct confrontation with capitalism's most powerful mystifications
When the workers in Western Europe break through the mystifications of democracy and trade unions it will not be the result of their daily exposure to these traps. Only in and through the struggle this can happen, because the generalization of the crisis and the simultaneous struggle of the workers elsewhere create the conditions to reject the isolation that these mystifications try to impose. It's the same for the workers in the East. Outside the struggle, ‘free' unions and a democratic state can be seen as exotic and desirable products to be imported from the West. But inside the struggle they become "the institutionalization of the movement", to use the words of Andrzej Koladziej, the MKS delegate from Gdynia who refused to be a candidate in the Solidarnosc elections. Outside the struggle another perspective could have been created for the Polish workers, it could have made Koladziej's position the majority one, or it could have made the numerous confrontations between the union and the workers, after the death of the MKS, more successful for the latter. The fact that it didn't happen was not a result of a lack of direct exposures to these mystifications. If this were the case, the proletariat's struggle would become hopeless. Capitalism can always find new packages for its old lies unless the material basis of all mystifications is destroyed by the international crisis and class struggle. If the unions in western Europe, through their daily practice, lose all credibility, there are still the rank-and-filists to advance the mystification of a new unitary union; there is still the possibility for institutionalizing ‘workers' councils' and self-management within the state; the possibility for radical-left governments to prepare for repression, etc. Revolutionary class consciousness can only develop by assimilating the experience of the class in the whole world. This is true for the workers in the East as well as in the West. Despite their lack of direct experience with ‘free' unions over an extended period, "concerning the need to denounce the unions, the Polish workers have travelled further in a few weeks than the proletariat in other countries has done over a period of several generations." (IR 24, p 3) But the consciousness they obtained is not a permanent acquisition that remains there outside the struggle. It will have to be reappropriated in the coming struggle, as much outside as in Poland.
We call the defeat in Poland "limited". That is correct, not because Poland is only a secondary country, but because the gains that were made for the whole proletariat, the lessons of Poland, weigh in the long run much heavier than the defeat. Of course, it was not an orderly ‘retreat'. But then the proletariat is not an army, with a general staff and stronger and weaker battalions, engaged in tactical warfare. Its struggle is not a military one but a struggle for its own consciousness and organization. Never was there an ‘army' with such a continuous flow of advances and retreats, all according to the spread of class consciousness. In this battle, there are no orderly retreats. Every halt, every step backwards is a result of bourgeois control. The experience of the MKS will have to be repeated and improved in several countries before the shift in the balance of forces between the classes on an international scale (the process of internationalization) paralyses the hand of the ruling class. But the coming struggles will be able to build upon the lessons of Poland. It is crucial that these lessons - not only those of the ascendant phase of the struggle but as much those of its declining phase - are not obscured by attributing its strength (as the bourgeoisie does) or its weakness (as the ICC does) to Polish ‘specificities'. The proletariat, in its next battles, must remember the power of self-organization that was demonstrated in Poland. It must remember how the bourgeoisie of the entire world closes ranks when faced with the proletarian danger. It must remember how the bourgeoisie, when it cannot prevent self-organization, tries to control the central organs, making them instruments to prevent the spontaneous actions of the proletariat and to spread nationalism and legalism and other poison, and finally transforming them into bourgeois institutions. It must remember the confrontations between Solidarnosc and the workers, showing how every trade union, even one freshly founded, immediately becomes the mortal enemy of the struggle. It must remember how the isolation of the most radical struggle in decades has shown the necessity to break through all divisions, frontiers of sectors and countries.
To smash the main capitalist mystifications, they will have to be attacked from both sides. From within, by a struggle that, because of its self-organization and radicalization, is actively looking for the solidarity of workers of other countries; and, dialectically linked, from outside by the explosive unrest in the rest of the class which, through the assimilation of the experiences of struggles all over the world, is becoming conscious of its commonality of interests and thus capable to offer this solidarity.
To make the revolution, the proletariat has no other weapons than its revolutionary and thus international consciousness. Consequently, this consciousness must develop in the struggles before the revolution. Generalization will not start with the revolutionary assault in Western Europe and spread through a ‘domino-effect', toppling country after country because the ‘strongest link' of the capitalist chain is broken or, as the ICC would put it, because its "heart and head" are smashed.
Generalization is a process, part of the ripening of the proletariat's consciousness, developing internationally in the struggles that precede the revolutionary assault and making this assault possible precisely because it occurs. Capitalism's only (future) weak link is the worldwide unity of the proletariat.
Sander
5 April 1983
----------------------------------------
Answer to the critique
One of the main features of comrade Sander's text is that, side by side with excellent passages in which he develops very clearly the analyses of the ICC, there are a number of assertions which are equally clear but which are unfortunately in contradiction with the views underpinning the preceding passages.
Thus, comrade Sander recognizes that it is necessary both firmly to reject the theory of the ‘weakest link' and to establish a very clear distinction between the proletariat of the developed countries and that of the Third World as regards their respective capacity to constitute the decisive battalions of the future revolutionary confrontation. He considers that in the backward countries "the workers...need the demonstration of power of the class in the industrialized countries to find the path of autonomous struggle, to follow it in a non-disparate way".
We fully agree with these assertions. However, disagreements arise when he
-- considers that the workers of countries other than those of the Third World (ie North America, Japan, Western Europe and Eastern Europe) have an equal capacity to unmask bourgeois mystifications and constitute a vanguard of the world proletariat in its revolutionary struggles;
-- considers it false to say that "the bourgeoisie's capacity to isolate a mass strike depends on the place where it occurs";
-- rejects the idea that the world-wide generalization of struggles will follow a "domino effect" (to use his own terms), that there will be a process which gets underway in a given part of the planet and then spreads to the rest of the world;
-- fights the idea that there is a sort of "head and heart" of the world proletariat where the class is most concentrated, most developed and richest in experience.
In the final analysis, the main fault of Sander's text, and one which lies at the basis of all his other mistakes, is that it uses a method which wants to be marxist but which at certain moments moves right away from a real marxist vision.
Moving away from Marxism
The basic reasoning of comrade Sander is as follows:
1. "The proletarian struggle begins out of necessity, not out of consciousness"
2. "it is the development of the workers' struggles in these countries which is the key to the growing awareness of the entire working class of its own power"
3. "...it is this growing awareness which makes it possible for the proletariat to break through the network of capitalist mystifications"
4. "Mystifications can only be overcome because of and in the struggle. It is the potential of the struggle to grow which enables the working class to break through capitalist mystifications, rather than the other way round."
5. Capitalism is in a complete economic impasse. Everywhere in the world it is revealing its bankruptcy and launching a total attack on the workers' interests.
6. Everywhere in the world, therefore, there is a development of the "necessity" which is at the basis of the workers' struggle.
Conclusion: Everywhere that the proletariat is not a "tiny minority dwarfed by other classes" (countries of the Third World) the conditions for the development of revolutionary consciousness are arising in an equal manner.
The reasoning has the apparent rigor of a syllogism. Unfortunately, it's false. Certainly it's based on some general truths recognized by marxism but, in this particular case, they are put forward outside their real field of application. They become half-truths and end up in untruths.
If we can agree with stage 5 of the reasoning and (with some reservations) stage 6, taken by themselves, we have to criticize and challenge the other stages, which puts the whole of his reasoning into question.
1. "The proletarian struggle begins out of necessity, not out of consciousness"
Yes, if we're saying that "being precedes consciousness" (Marx), that in the last instance it is material interests which make classes move. But Marxism is not a vulgar materialism. It is dialectical. This is why Marx could write that "theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses."
It's because the ICC is faithful to this dialectical view that it was able to understand that today we are in a course towards class confrontations and not towards war. Already in 1968 we were saying (Revolution Internationale, old series, no 2)
"Capitalism has at its disposal less and less mystifications capable of mobilizing the masses and leading them into a massacre. The Russian myth is collapsing; the false dilemma of bourgeois democracy against totalitarianism is getting worn out. In these conditions, the crisis can from the beginning be seen for what it is. Its first symptoms are going to provoke increasingly violent reactions from the masses in all countries."
Thus, if the ICC affirms that, in the present period, the aggravation of the crisis is going to provoke a development of the class struggle and not a growing demoralization opening the way to the imperialist holocaust as in the 1930s, it is because we are taking into account the subjective factors acting on the situation: the fact that the proletariat has not recently emerged from a profound defeat (as in the ‘20s), and the wearing out of mystifications used in the past. It was because it had this approach which we lay claim to, that the Italian Communist Left was able to analyze correctly the nature of the war in Spain and did not fall into the absurdities of a Trotsky who - because the objective conditions were ripe -founded a new International one year before ... the war.
Comrade Sander knows all this and he affirms it in another part of his text. The problem is that he forgets it in his argumentation.
2. " ... it is the development of the workers' struggle ... which is the key to the growing awareness of the entire working class of its own power": we refer again to what's just been said.
3. "... it is this growing awareness which makes it possible for the proletariat to break through the network of capitalist mystifications."
Here again, Sander puts forward a correct idea but in a partial, unilateral way. The consciousness of the proletariat is above all a consciousness ‘of itself'. It includes the awareness of its own power. But it can't be reduced to this. If the feeling of being strong "makes it possible for the proletariat to break through the network of capitalist mystifications" it would be absolutely impossible to understand what happened in 1914, when a proletariat felt itself to be stronger than ever before was suddenly thrown into the imperialist massacre. Before 1914 the working class seemed to be going from success to success. In reality, it was capitulating step by step to bourgeois ideology. Moreover, this is a method abundantly employed by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat throughout the 20th century: presenting its worst defeats (‘socialism in one country', the popular fronts, the ‘Liberation' of 1945) as victories, as expressions of its power. Sander's phrase needs to be completed by another: "it is in its capacity to break through the network of capitalist mystifications that the proletariat demonstrates its power, increases its power and its awareness of its power." Forgetting this point allows Sander to continue serenely with his arguments - but unfortunately they lead off the track towards a dead-end.
4. "Mystifications can only be overcome because of and in the struggle. It is the potential of the struggle to grow which enables the working class to break through capitalist mystifications, rather than the other way round."
For the first time, Sander makes a small concession to tie dialectical method ("rather than the other way round"). However, it doesn't take him away from his unilateral and partial method, and this leads him to put forward an idea that is in contradiction with the whole experience of the workers' movement. For example, during the course of the First World War it wasn't the struggle in itself which was the only, or the main, factor in demystifying the workers in Russia or Germany. In 1914, mobilized behind bourgeois flags by the Socialist parties, the workers of the main European countries went off with ‘flowers on their rifles' to massacre each other in the name of the ‘defense of civilization' and of the ‘struggle against militarism' or ‘Tsarism'. As Rosa Luxemburg put it:
"War is a gigantic, methodical, organized form of' murder. In order to get normal men to systematically murder each other, you first have to find a suitable way of intoxicating them." (Junius Pamphlet)
As long as this intoxication lasted, the workers adhered to the stupid slogans of social democracy (especially in Germany) which explained that ‘the class struggle is only valid in times of peace'. It wasn't struggle which sobered the proletariat: it was several years of the barbarity of imperialist war that made it understand that it wasn't in the trenches fighting for ‘civilization'. It was only by becoming aware that it was getting massacred and massacring its class brothers for interests which were not its own that it began to develop the struggles that led to revolution in Russia in 1917 and in Germany in 1918.
Sander's method, based on the juxtaposition of partial truths, leads him to put forward another complete untruth: "the consciousness they (the Polish workers) obtained is not a permanent acquisition that remains there outside the struggle."
First of all we have to say that this statement contradicts what Sander himself says:
" ... the coming struggles will be able to build upon the lessons of Poland ... (The proletariat) must remember the confrontations between Solidarnosc and the workers, showing how every trade union, even one freshly founded, immediately becomes the mortal enemy of the struggle."
Does Sander then deny that the direct protagonists of the combats in Poland have a ‘memory' of their experience which the workers of other countries can conserve, despite all the deformations of the bourgeois media? Would that be because in Poland (and thus in the rest of the eastern bloc) the specific conditions in which the proletariat is struggling are less favorable to the development of consciousness than in other countries (those of western Europe, perhaps)? But this is precisely the thesis that Sander is fighting against.
We thus discover another element in comrade Sander's method: the rejection of coherence.
But let's return to this idea that ‘consciousness is not a permanent acquisition.' We shall spare Sander and the reader a discourse on the way the proletariat comes to consciousness: this is a question which has already been dealt with in this Review and will be again. Here we shall restrict ourselves to posing the following questions:
-- why, in Poland itself, did the struggles of 1980 go further than those of 1970 and ‘76?
-- does this not prove that an acquisition of the struggle does persist?
-- this higher level of the struggle in 1980, was it solely due to the aggravation of the economic crisis?
-- should we not also see it as the product of a whole process of maturation in the consciousness of the proletariat which carried on after the struggles of 1970 and ‘76?
-- more generally, what is the significance of the basic marxist idea that the proletariat draws the lessons from its past experiences, that it draws benefit from the accumulation of its experiences?
-- finally, what is the function of revolutionary organizations themselves, if not precisely to systematize these lessons, to use them to develop revolutionary theory so that it can fertilize the future struggles of the class? Doesn't the struggle itself secrete these organizations for this very reason?
Comrade Sander knows the right answers to all these questions. He knows has marxism as well as the positions of the ICC but, all of a sudden, he ‘forgets' them. Are we to conclude that he tends to attribute to the development of the consciousness of the proletariat the same frequent bouts of amnesia which appear in his own approach?
Wanting to be ‘materialist', Sander's view finally falls into positivism, it tends to reject marxism and fall into the grossest sophistries of councilism, the ones which deny that the organization of revolutionaries has any function in the class struggle.
"Horizontal" councilism
The distinguishing feature of the councilist conception (we're talking about the degenerated councilist conceptions, notably as developed by Otto Ruhle, and not Pannekoek's conception which doesn't fall into the same aberrations) is that it denies that there is any heterogeneity in the way the class comes to consciousness. It refuses to admit that certain elements of the class can, before the others "understand the conditions, the line of march and the general goals of the movement" (Communist Manifesto). This is why, for councilism, the only organization that can exist for the proletariat is its unitary organization, the workers' councils, within which all the workers advance at the same pace along the path of consciousness. Obviously we shall not insult Sander by attributing such a conception to him. In any case his text proves that it isn't his view - if it was he wouldn't be in the ICC in the first place.
However, the same unilateral, non-dialectical approach which led Sander to open the door involuntarily to classical councilism leads him this time to enter with both feet, and voluntarily, into another variety of councilism. If we can use the term ‘vertical' to describe Otto Ruhle's councilism which denies that, on the road to revolution, certain elements of the class can raise themselves to a higher level of consciousness than others, we can say than Sander's councilism is ‘horizontal' since it puts an equals sign between the levels of consciousness of the proletariats of different countries or regions of the world (except for the Third World). Alongside the whole ICC, Sander admits that, even at the moment of revolution, there will still be a great heterogeneity in the consciousness of the proletariat - this will be expressed in particular by the fact that, when the class takes power, communists will still be in a minority. But why then shouldn't this heterogeneity exist between various sectors of the proletariat who have different histories and experiences - who are subject to the same crisis, of course, but in different forms and to a different degree.
Sander tends to throw aside the elements cited by the ICC to explain the central role of the west European proletariat in the future generalization of struggles, in tomorrow's revolution. Actually, he doesn't take the trouble to examine each of these elements one by one because he poses the unity and homogeneity of the proletariat a priori. Significant of this is the way he refutes the idea that the workers of the West can understand more easily than those of the East that the crisis of capitalism is a crisis of overproduction:
"For the workers in the East as well as those in the West, overproduction and scarcity can only be understood when they leave the ‘specific' point of view and see the capitalist system as a whole ... This global point of view needed to see the roots of the system and the potential of socialist revolution, the proletariat in the western countries doesn't get as a birthright. It can only be the result of the tendency of the class struggle, to become global itself and international in scope."
Comrade Sander's "global point of view" is without doubt the analysis made by revolutionaries of the nature of capitalism and its contradictions. Revolutionaries can acquire this "global point of view" whether they find themselves in advanced countries like Britain, where Marx and Engels lived, or whether they come from backward countries, as did Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin. This derives from the fact that the political positions and analyses of revolutionary organizations are not the expression of the immediate conditions their militants find themselves in, nor of the particular circumstances of the class struggle in this or that country, but are the secretion, the manifestation of the emergence of consciousness in the proletariat as a historic being, as a world class with a revolutionary future.
Since they have at their disposal a theoretical framework which makes them much more capable than the rest of their class of going rapidly beyond appearances and seeing the essence of phenomena, they are far better placed to see in each and every manifestation of capitalism's life the operation of the underlying laws which govern the system.
On the other hand, what is true for the revolutionary minority of the class is not generally true for the broad masses. In this society "the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class." The great majority of workers are subjected to the influence of bourgeois ideology. And though this influence will gradually weaken, it will last up until the revolution. However, the bourgeoisie finds it more and more difficult to maintain this influence as the reality of the system increasingly contradicts the images which the bourgeoisie drapes over it. This is why the open crisis of capitalism is the condition for the revolution. Not only because it compels the proletariat to develop its struggles, but also because it makes plain to see what a total impasse has the system reached. The same goes for the idea that communism is possible, that capitalism can be replaced by a society based on abundance, allowing the full satisfaction of human needs, a society "in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." Such an idea can be grasped more easily by those workers to whom the cause of the crisis - generalized overproduction - is revealed more clearly. In the East as in the West, the workers are being thrown into a growing poverty and are being forced to engage in more and more powerful struggles. But becoming conscious that this poverty is the absurd result of an overproduction of commodities will be much easier in countries where there are millions of unemployed alongside shops filled to bursting point than in countries where there are queues in front of empty shops - a situation which can be presented as the result of insufficient production or of bad management by irresponsible bureaucrats.
Just as he refuses to recognize the weight of economic specificities on the process whereby the class becomes conscious, comrade Sander is very shocked by what we say about the importance of a whole series of social and historical factors in this process:
"All the argument is about tradition, culture and age fly in the face of the historical fact that the countries where the proletariat most succeeded in homogenizing its revolutionary consciousness were Russia and Hungary, where the working class was relatively young, without long-standing traditions and with a rather low level of bourgeois education."
However, in his apparent rage against coherence, he has already given us the answer to this: "But what is possible (in terms of struggle and the development of political consciousness) depends also upon the opposition the workers have to overcome. And here again we see important differences between the situation in 1917 and today. In 1917 the bourgeoisie was divided and disorganized by the war, disorientated by its lack of experience. Under these circumstances, there were indeed ‘weak links' in its defense which the proletariat could exploit."
This is precisely one of the great differences between the present situation and the one which existed in 1917. Today, educated by its experience, the bourgeoisie is able, despite its imperialist rivalries, to constitute a united front against the class struggle. It has shown this on numerous occasions, especially at the time of the great struggles in Poland 1980-81 when East and West had a remarkable division of labor against the proletariat, a fact that we have often-written about in our press.
Faced with the struggles in Poland, the specific task of the West was to cultivate, via its propaganda in Polish-language radio and its trade unionist envoys, illusions about free trade unions and democracy. This propaganda could have an effect as long as the workers in the West, especially Western Europe, hadn't through their own struggles denounced trade unionism as an agent of the class enemy and democracy as the dictatorship of capital. On the other hand, the very fact that, in the eastern countries, and as an expression of the terrible counter-revolution which descended on this region (cf IR 34, ‘Eastern Europe: the weapons of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat'), the system cannot tolerate the long-term existence of ‘free trade unions', regularly allows the latter to take on the martyr's halo and polish up their image in front of the workers. While the struggles of the workers in Poland dealt a decisive blow against surviving illusions in the West about ‘socialism' in the Russian bloc, they left trade unionist and democratic illusions virtually intact, both in the East and the West.
In the reciprocal aid that the bourgeoisies of both blocs gave each other in the face of the working class, it was the strongest bourgeoisie that was able to give the most. This is why the capacity of the world proletariat to generalize its struggles and embark upon a revolutionary struggle is fundamentally determined by the blows it can direct against the strongest sectors of the bourgeoisie.
This is also why, in the period to come, the elements which, for marxism, are at the basis of the proletariat's power, will have such a determining effect on its capacity to develop its consciousness:
-- its number, its concentration, the associated character of the proletariat's labor;
-- the culture which the bourgeoisie is obliged to dispense to it in order to raise the productivity of its labor[1];
-- its daily confrontation with the most elaborate forms of bourgeois traps;
- its historical experience.
All these things exist to a greater or lesser extent wherever the proletariat labors, but they are most fully developed in the region where capitalism historically emerged: western Europe.
The unity of the proletariat
For comrade Sander, the key phrase is "the unity of the proletariat": "Capitalism's only (future) weak link is the worldwide unity of the proletariat." We fully agree. The problem is that he's not entirely convinced of this. Because we point to something that's obvious - the differences that exist between the different sectors of the working class - and because we deduce from this some of the characteristics of the process towards the worldwide generalization of workers' struggles, he imagines that we are ignoring the unity of the world proletariat. As the resolution of January ‘83 says:
" ... unity does not mean the identity of parts, which remain subjected to different material conditions. There is no natural equality between the various organs and the heart and the brain of a living body; they carry out vital, complementary functions ..."
"Determining the point of departure for this dynamic (the internationalization of the mass strike), and thus the best foundations for the beginning of the revolutionary earthquake does not mean denying the unity of the world proletariat. It is the very process by which this potential unity becomes a real one."
This view is based on a dialectical and dynamic method which, to use Marx's terms, poses the abstract (the potential unity of the world proletariat) and then raises itself to the concrete (the real process whereby this unity develops). Sander starts with the first stage but, in line with his unilateral and partial approach, he forgets the second. Thus he remains locked in his abstractions and these prevent him from seeing the horizon, from grasping how the real process towards the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat will develop.
FM
[1] For comrade Sander there's black and there's white and never the twain shall meet. For him, it seems there's no such thing as grey. He admits readily that there is a considerable difference between the strength of the proletariat in the advanced countries and that of the proletariat of the Third World, a difference connected to objective material factors. However, the fact that intermediate situations can exist escapes him completely. Thus, when one takes into consideration a certain number of the elements that mark the degree of economic development of a country and the strength of the proletariat (see the table) , one is struck by the fact that the USSR and the countries of the eastern bloc display a considerable backwardness in comparison to the USA, Japan and western Europe.
If one takes factors such as:
-- Gross National Product per inhabitant, which allows one to see the average productivity of labor and its degree of association;
-- the proportion of the population living in the towns, which is one of the components of the level of concentration of the working class;
-- the proportion of the active population occupied in the agricultural sector, which illustrates the weight of rural backwardness and is in inverse proportion to the level of agricultural labor's dependence on the industrial sector;
-- the proportion of the population which has kept up its studies to college level, which is an indication of the technical sophistication of the population;
-- infant mortality, which is a very clear expression of economic and social backwardness; the USSR and the countries of eastern Europe are much nearer a country like Greece, which is a long way behind the situation of the most advanced countries.
|
USA |
JAPAN |
WESTERN EUROPE (a) |
USSR |
EASTERN EUROPE (b) |
GREECE |
MEXICO |
|
Population (millions) |
230.8 |
118.5 |
309.9 |
267.6 |
110 |
9.8 |
71.9 |
|
Number of inhabitants per sq. km. |
24.8 |
319 |
149 |
11.6 |
110 |
74 |
36.4 |
|
Urban population (%) |
73 |
82.8 |
78.4 |
63.4 |
61 |
62 |
67 |
|
Agricultural sector (% of the active population |
1965 |
5.6 |
33 |
13.2 |
39.8 |
41.4 |
|
55 |
1981 |
2.2 |
10.3 |
6.4 (c) |
20.2 |
26.3 (d) |
|
33.4 |
|
GNP per inhabitant (in dollar) |
12675 |
9511 |
8745 |
4550 |
4222 |
3918 |
2364 |
|
Students in tertiary education (% of population) |
53.8 |
29.3 |
24.2 |
21.3 |
17.2 |
19 |
11.8 |
|
Infant mortality (%) |
13.8 |
9.1 |
12 |
28 |
22.3 |
20.3 |
60 |
|
(a) Principal countries: West Germany, France, UK, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Denmark, Spain (b) except USSR: Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania. (c) West Germany, France, UK, Italy (d) Poland |
Extracts from a text by H. Canne-Mejer
The certitude of the coming of communism
Marx never actually gave a description of communist society. He simply demonstrated that production organized on the basis of private property would become an unbearable burden to the vast majority of the population, so that they would put the means of production in common and eliminate exploitation due to social classes. To Marx, describing the future society would be falling into utopianism. According to him, a new society would emerge from the bowels of the old because of the actions of the real forces governing social labor. Marx noted that private ownership of the means of production developed a process of collective work by gathering together thousands and thousands of workers. These workers would then become the gravediggers of the private ownership of the means of production because while misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation increased, the revolt of the working class, unified and organized by the process of work itself, would also increase.1
“The centralization of the means of production and its social character has reached a point where they are incompatible with the capitalist envelope. This envelope will burst. The last hour of private property has sounded”.2 According to Marx the capitalist mode of production produces its own negation “with the inevitability of a law of nature”.3
This formulation of Marx with its allusion to the “inevitability of the laws of nature” caused a lot of misunderstanding.
It led many marxists to a mechanistic interference of social development. They believed in an automatic collapse of the capitalist system, either because of crises, or because of the decline in the profit rate or because of a lack of markets to realize surplus value. In a time of collapse, the working class would simply take over the means of production for themselves. It would be enough for the working class to observe what Marx called “the inevitable and increasingly visible decomposition....”4 of the system. The changes that the intellectual capacities of the working class would have to undergo during a continuous struggle to make it capable of politically and economically dominating social life seem superfluous in this approach.
But this conception of a definitive collapse is in contradiction with Marx’s method of thought. For him, this ‘inevitability’ is not a necessity outside of mankind, an imminent necessity which happens despite men in the sense that certain bourgeois thinkers, for example, often speak about the immanent development of the idea as the motor force of the world. For Marx, inevitability is imposed by men themselves as a result of their experience of social life. Marx was convinced that workers must constantly and violently resist the oppressive tendencies of capitalism and that this struggle carries on until they have defeated capitalism. Thus the ‘inevitability’ Marx talked about flowed from the natural necessity to struggle against capitalism.
Marxism as social psychology
Marx not only developed a theory which identified the material motor forces of the capitalist system, he also gave a theory of social psychology which predicted changes in the ideas, the will, the feelings and the actions of workers. The concentrated pressures of capitalist domination would be counteracted by organized struggle where solidarity and the spirit of sacrifice would be forged and the working class would form a solid unity of purpose, thought and action. The development of the individuality of a worker would be possible only as a part of an active and larger whole, as a part of his organization of struggle. The idea of right and wrong in social life would be redefined in accord with the necessities of this struggle. These new ideas, which could be called ‘ethical values’, would in turn serve as a motor force for new struggles. Each struggle would become an ethical value and these new ethical values would lead to new struggles. The new ethic would be both mother and daughter of the struggle.
The birth of the new society
Marx founded his certitude in the coming of a society without exploitation or classes in the certitude of a fierce struggle against capitalism. Through this struggle the new society would emerge from the bowels of the old. This struggle would be carried out by means of unions improving working conditions and the socialist parties developing class consciousness. On the practical level, to begin this process, there had to be a struggle for the improvement of the bourgeois parliamentary system (universal suffrage) and a struggle for social reforms.
Marx did not expect great practical successes from the parliamentary and union struggle. For him, the movement of wages was a prime function of the accumulation of capital. In a period of prosperity, the economy developed a growing need for labor, and the unions could obtain higher wages. But if wages rose to a point where production would cease to be profitable, accumulation would decrease with its concomitants of unemployment, ‘overpopulation’ and decline in wages. Subsequently, the profit base would grow again5. “Thus the increase in the price of labor not only remains restricted within limits which do not touch the foundations of capital, but these limits also provide the certitude of an extension on a greater scale.”6. For Marx, the meaning of class struggle was to be found above all in the development of the intellectual characteristics which would lead to the fall of capitalism.
Marx thought that unions by themselves could never defeat capitalism as long as the capitalist class held the state. The cardinal point in the political struggle must be looked for in the conquest of state power, either via parliament (Marx considered this possible for Britain and Holland) or revolutionary methods. But after the Paris Commune he was convinced that the state had to be destroyed not conquered. In any case, the task of the revolutionary government would not be to ‘establish’ communism, for example by statification of the means of production (although the nationalization of some sectors was not excluded). Marx did not prescribe what revolutionaries should do in the case of revolution. He thought that developments should be decided by the revolutionary forces at work in society. “When a genuine revolution breaks out”, he said, “we will see the conditions appear at that time (no doubt not idyllic ones) that will allow the most urgent immediate measures to be realized”.7
Many marxists of this period held the opinion that the task of a revolutionary government was basically not to hinder in any way the struggle of the workers against the capitalists. Its duty was in fact to extend this struggle. Unions would thus have a free rein to arrange social life as they wished. Capitalists would be expropriated not via nationalizations but because profits would not be paid. Thus capital would lose all value and at the same time the management of social life would fall into the hands of the association of free and equal producers. On the one hand the birth of the new society within the old is linked to the flowering of political consciousness which leads to political power in one form or another. On the other hand, it is linked to the process of development of the forces fighting against the capitalists and, at the same time, preparing and building the new instruments of social organization.
As an illustration of the above, we can quote a historical fact cited by the well-known marxist, A.Pannekoek. In 1911 there was a strike in Germany and the strikers tried to prevent strikebreakers from coming in. The bourgeois press called this action ‘terrorism’. The courts intervened and tried to charge some strikers with kidnapping. According to the accusation, the strikers forced the strikebreakers to follow them before the strike committee where they were cross-questioned as though they were before their judges. After a warning, they were released. But when they went before ‘official justice’, the strikebreakers declared that there was no question of kidnapping.
They followed the strikers of their own free will. The judge was astonished and said, “So you admit that this organization which is hostile to you is such a competent authority that you dare not disobey the strikers’ order to follow them?”
For Pannekoek in 1911 this anecdote was an example of the way workers’ organizations would function later as independent bodies opposed to the old organs of the state. It would be enough to break the power of the state and then autonomous workers’ organizations would flourish.
A miscalculation
What Marx expected from the development of capitalism has, generally, come about in reality. But his predictions about class struggle have up to now proved false. The concentration of capital and the centralization of economic (and political) life has been accomplished. The class of wage earners became preponderant. Thousands of workers were grouped in factories, millions of them were organized into unions. Economic crises kept coming faster and faster until in 1939 they showed their greatest destructive power. The First and then the Second World War, the consequences of capitalist competition were responsible for the death of millions of workers and brought European production to its knees. Although these predictions of the old marxists came true, we cannot say as much for the prediction about the pauperization of the laboring classes, at least if we look at the question from the angle of consumption and social security. The quantity and diversity of articles of consumption have increased over the years. Social security dealing with unemployment, disablement, sickness, old age, etc, has become a meaningful support for existence. The reduction in hours of work, the introduction of vacations, the radio, the cinema and TV as well as the possibility of travel have provided leisure activities that the old marxists could not have dreamed of.
But this increase in the standard of living and this greater security are not the only reasons why workers’ perspective for a society without classes and exploitation has disappeared. The reason lies in the way this improvement was obtained. If this improvement had been gained over the years by mass struggles of workers faced with fierce resistance from the capitalists, the process of developing the new mental characteristics mentioned above would have come about. The certitude of communism, its inevitability, was to be found in the need for a permanent, fierce struggle to realize the force of labor at the level of the value of labor, with as a psychological consequence, the will to realize communism. The workers’ conceptions of solidarity and a solid class discipline, the expression of new social values, of a new moral consciousness, all of this was linked to an active struggle of the workers themselves, as had been the case in Marx’s time.
Herein lies Marx’s mistake. He underestimated the consequences of the prodigious increase in productivity which opened the way to a rise in the standard of living. Especially after the First World War, the character of class struggle changed. Collaboration between capital and labor through parliaments and unions became possible on the basis of the increased productivity of labor and provided an answer; to the situation without the masses being forced to intervene. The violent struggle of the masses themselves has not been absolutely necessary and it follows that the predictions of a social-psychological nature were not realized.
Mental and manual labor
Before ending this section, we would like to say that the increase in the standard of living is not contrary to the law of the value of labor power formulated by Marx. At first sight this increase, epitomized in radios, cinema, television, possibilities for travel, etc, seems to contradict the law. But this is only appearance. This law says that the value of labor is determined by the cost of reproducing labor power including reproducing the next generation. In the old days, these costs were limited to the cost of miserable housing, clothing and food. The tavern and the Church took care of distraction anal relaxation there was. Today, reproduction demands much more and this is because of the change in the nature of work.
Machines are responsible for this. As long as work was done with uncomplicated machines or none at all, work had mostly a physical, manual aspect. Muscles were what counted; intellectual effort or nervous energy played a secondary role. Thus, the costs of reproducing labor power were limited to restoring physical capacities and to the physical education of children. With the widespread development of mechanized work, of more and more complicated machines, intellectual effort, a constant attention span, led to a change in the nature; of work (among drivers, railway men, in clothes factories, an assembly lines, in offices, etc). Instead of physical labor exhausting only the body, both mind and body were now exhausted. This led to a shortening of the working day and the growth of entertainment like cinema, radios, vacations, etc. In other words: mental and physical exhaustion led to an increase in the value of labor which was expressed in an increase in the cost of reproducing of labor. The rise in the standard of living far from being in contradiction to the law of the value of labor power is its confirmation.
But it certain that, today, the working class has not managed to realize the new value of its labor power despite the so-called power of the unions and parliamentary socialist parties. In relation to the pace of economic life, there has been a regression which is not expressed in consumer goods but in general stress and nervous disorders. That is not what Marx expected.
1 Capital 1, ch 24.
2 See note 1
3 Idem.
4 Marx, Letter to Domela Nienwenhuis 22.2.1880. p.317, Ed Institut Marx-Engels-Lenine.
5 Capital 1 ch 23 no. 1
6 Capital 1 ch 23 no. 2
7 See note (4)
As a complement to the article ‘The Conception of Organization in the German and Dutch Lefts' in this issue, we are publishing below part of a text by Canne-Mejer, a theoretician and one of the most active militants of this political current, especially in the GIC of the thirties. This text, written at the end of the 50s, is called ‘Socialism Lost'. It illustrates inhere some of the errors contained in the theoretical and political conceptions of ‘council communism' ended up by putting marxism into question and doubting the overall significance of proletarian struggle past and present. With a belief that capitalism can live forever. A capitulation to the bourgeois ideology of the post-war reconstruction period -- the ‘consumer society' that became all the rage in the 60s.
This text is prefaced by introductory remarks from our Current.
A socialist lost
When this text was written, the few survivors of the Communist Left were mostly isolated and dispersed. The long period of counter-revolution had exhausted their energies. The Second World War had not led to an upsurge of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat as in 1917. What remained of the Italian and the German-Dutch Lefts which had resisted for more than 20 years as small minorities, was now dislocated and very reduced in size or suffering from extreme political confusion. In this situation, political errors that had not been overcome in the past, began to lead to growing aberrations about the very foundations of revolutionary theory, about the understanding of what marxism basically is.
In the Italian Left, the Internationalist Communist Party was formed in confusion in Italy in the middle of the Second World War with the upsurge of workers' struggles in 1943.[1] It rejected the legacy of the International Left Communist group which was the most coherent in the thirties: Bilan. The criticisms and repeated appeals of the Gauche Communiste de France (Internationalisme) to take up the profound political issues involved, fell on deaf ears. A little later, in the International Communist Party (a split from the Internationalist Communist Party), Bordiga increasingly theorized a monolithic marxism through a dogmatic and one-sided fidelity to Lenin and the Russian revolution.
As for the German-Dutch Left, their dislocation and incapacity to draw the lessons of the Russian revolution in the ‘30s accelerated their degeneration. In hammering home a rejection of the Russian revolution Canne-Mejer in the ‘50s ended up by completely putting marxism and class struggle into question. The process leading to such incomprehensions about marxism was not identical in these two currents and did not come from the same source. The origin of the failure of the groups of the Italian Left is to be found in their inability to assure a continuity with the theoretical and political elaboration carried out by the GCI before the war. On the one hand, the pressure of the war and the post-war period led to the dissolution of the GCF in 1953 and all the political work organized on the basis of this continuity. On the other hand, the other tendencies of the Italian Left went from political concessions to tactical compromises, maintaining their organizations but regressing on political positions and becoming fossilized. The consequences can be seen today in the decomposition of the PCI (Programme Communiste) and the political errors of the PCI (Battaglia Comunista).
The origin of the failure of the German-Dutch Left, however, is to be found in an earlier period. In the ‘20s, they represented the most advanced attempts to understand the fundamental contributions of the new period which started with the First World War and the revolutionary wave: the impossibility of revolutionary parliamentarism; the counterrevolutionary nature of unions; the rejection of national liberations struggles; the rejection .of the ‘mass party' and any attempt to join with Social-Democracy and its ‘left' currents as well as the tactic of the ‘united front'. But in the ‘30s, because it not only rejected the Bolshevik Party but more and more even the very class nature of the October revolution, the heir of this Left, the ‘council communist' current, was not able to integrate the new political positions into a theoretical and organizational coherence. This current kept itself on a class terrain, but without really advancing beyond a repetition of undeveloped positions.
In fact, only Bilan at this time was capable of taking up the lessons of the revolution and providing the basis for today's understanding of these questions, even though they did not carry this elaboration out to its logical conclusions. Bilan can seem unclear in its theoretical formulation of certain positions and particularly the relationship between party and class. But by rooting themselves in history, they were able to understand much more clearly the dynamic of both the revolution and the reflux and the tasks of revolutionaries. Bilan offered a more global framework, a more coherent one, in continuity with the workers' movement. At the basis of ‘councilism', however, there was a rejection of the global historical framework. The non-recognition of the Bolshevik Party as a party of the proletariat prevented this current from developing a methodical and systematic criticism of the positions expressed in the Russian revolution. On the theoretical level, this current began by first underestimating the active and indispensable function of the revolutionary political organization in the proletarian revolution and finished by negating this role at altogether. In fact, this conception shows incomprehension of the process of coming to consciousness of the class itself despite their constant but purely formal insistence on this question.
‘Council communism' continued to follow this conception. On this basis, in the period of reconstruction when it seemed, that capitalism had got a new breath of life and that the proletariat no longer had the means to carry on its struggle for class aims, Canne-Mejer, who all his life had been a devoted militant of the cause of the proletariat, ended up by spouting all kinds of nonsense about "leisure time" and "the improvements possible in the standard of living on the basis of class collaboration"!
In future articles we will return more fully to this council communist conception, which is still around today.
Today, there is no longer any danger of taking the reconstruction period for any real renaissance of capitalism. But the danger of abandoning class struggle because of the difficulties of today's period does indeed exist. The underestimation of the tasks of revolutionaries in class struggle -- as an active, organized, integral part of the struggle capable of providing clear orientations -- the irresponsibility and sectarianism reigning among groups in the ‘anti- Leninist' line, are as harmful as the ridiculous megalomania of groups attached to ‘Leninism'. It can sometimes even be more harmful. The bankruptcy of the conception of ‘monolithic marxism' and the party injecting class consciousness into the class is obvious in the resounding failure of all the ‘tactics' of the groups who defend this conception. The ‘councilist' conception, however, is more diffuse, and today, when the bourgeoisie is trying to take advantage of the hesitations of the workers to disorientate and immobilize them, councilism is an ideology whose logic goes in exactly the same direction. Just as Canne-Mejer ended up by singing the same tune as the bourgeoisie in a past period. The text we are publishing has little interest in its own right but it shows the logical conclusion of a profoundly erroneous method and conception of class struggle. In rejecting marxism, it rejects all perspective for the struggle of the working class.
The point is not to take marxism as a bloc like the Bordigists do, word for word, ‘by the book', but to understand that marxism is historical materialism. If the historical and political dimension of marxism is just "an old-hat rigor valid for the 19th century", and only the analysis of phenomena is preserved then the terrain of class struggle and the communist revolution is left behind, and you end up jumping into the arms of the bourgeoisie.
In this text, Canne-Mejer sees the working class as a mere economic category in society. He deals with the tasks of the proletariat only in relation to the taking over of the means of production and consumption. Class struggle is considered as a simple "rebellion" unconnected to any objective, historical necessity of the impasse inherent in the internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Neither capitalism's entry into decadence nor the overall conditions and future of the class are dealt with, only "work itself". Canne-Mejer still has some memories left: he refers to the criticism marxists have always made, to the effect that there is no "automatic link" between class struggle and the mechanisms of capitalism. But the factors determining class struggle still have to be developed: the consciousness and action of the class. In Canne-Mejer, this simply becomes a question of "social psychology" or "ethics", and is just as mechanical, whether in parallel to or alternating with "rebellion". Nothing could be more alien to marxism. Canne-Mejer nowhere raises the real issues: what are the political tasks of the working class?; what is the nature and role of communists within the working class?; etc. The marxist conception of class struggle is reduced to the struggle for reforms through the unions and parliaments of the 19th century without any reference to the study of historical conditions. Marxists have always placed their struggle in this context, indicating its limits in relation to the general goal of class struggle: communism through the destruction of the capitalist state. This whole aspect is reduced to a vague notion of "fierce struggle" outside of any historical context, of the material conditions of the revolution, And since, according to the ‘councilist' vision the Russian revolution is not a workers' revolution, for CanneMejer this "fierce struggle" never took place in the 20th century. Even the workers' councils are forgotten. Because there has been no "fierce struggle", Marx was mistaken. The massacre of generations of workers in the counter-revolution and wars is ignored. Although "attention is drawn to two primordial phenomena of economic life during this century", the war economy is also ignored.
One ends up by joining the bourgeoisie in the study of the ‘increase in capital investment' and the ‘enormous increase in the productivity of labor'. The working class is assimilated to the unions and its present living conditions become ‘leisure'. This is what is supposed to prove Marx's miscalculations according to Canne-Mejer. Such is the sad end of councilism.
[1] See especially the articles on the early years of the PCI (Internationaliste et Internationale) in International Review no. 32 and 36.
For discussion groups and individuals emerging into revolutionary politics today, it's necessary that their work towards clarification involves the reappropriation of the positions of the communist left, including those of the German and Dutch lefts. The latter, in particular, were often the first to defend a whole series of essential class positions: the rejection of trade unionism and parliamentarianism, rejection of the substitutionist conception of the party, denunciation of frontism, the definition of all the so-called socialist states as state capitalist.
However, it's not enough merely to reappropriate class positions on the theoretical level. Without a clear concept of revolutionary organization, all these groups and individuals are condemned to the void... It's not enough to proclaim yourself a revolutionary in words and in a purely individual manner; you have to defend class positions collectively, in an organized framework. The recognition of the necessity for and organization that has an indispensible function in the class and that operates as a collective body is the precondition for all militant work. Any hesitation or incomprehension about the necessity for organization will be severely punished and result in a disintegration of political forces. This is particularly true for the ‘councilist' groups today.
Drawing the lessons of the history of the German and Dutch lefts means demonstrating the vital necessity of an organization for whom theory is not pure speculation but a weapon that the proletarian masses will take up in the revolution of the future.
The main contribution of the German left -- and mainly the KAPD - wasn't that they recognized the necessity of the party in the revolution. For the KAPD, which was formed as a party in 1920, this went without saying. Its fundamental contribution was that it understood that the function of the party was no longer the same in the period of decadence. It was no longer a mass party, organizing and assembling the class -- but a party/nucleus regrouping the most active and conscious proletarian fighters. As a select part of the class, the party had to intervene in the class struggle and in the organs that the class gave rise to: strike committees and workers' councils. The party was a party fighting for the revolution and no longer for gradual reforms in organs that the proletariat no longer had anything to do with (unions, parliament), except to work for their destruction. Finally, because the party was a part of the class and not its representative or its chief, it could not substitute for the class in its struggle or in the exercise of power. The dictatorship of the class was the dictatorship of the councils, not the party. In contrast to the Bordigist vision, it wasn't the party that created the class but the class the party.[1] This did not mean -- as in the populist or Menshevik view -- that the party was in the service of the class. It was not a servant that passively adapted to each hesitation or deviation of the class. On the contrary, it had to "develop the class consciousness of the proletariat even at the price of appearing to be in contradiction with the broad masses." (Theses on the Role of the Party in the Revolution, KAPD, 1920.)
The KAPD in Germany and Gorter's KAPN in Holland had nothing to do with the views of Ruhle from whom today's ‘councilists' claim descent. Ruhle and his tendency in Dresden were expelled from the KAPD at the end of 1920. The KAPD had nothing in common with the semi-anarchist tendencies who proclaimed that any party was counter-revolutionary by nature, that the revolution was not a question of the party but of education. The conceptions of the pedagogue Ruhle were not at all those of the KAPD. For the latter, the party wasn't made up of the individual wills of each member: it was "a programmatically elaborated totality, founded on a unified will, organized and disciplined from top to bottom. It has to be the head and arm of the revolution." (Theses on the Role of the Party). The party, in fact, played a decisive role in the proletarian revolution. Because in its program and its action it crystallized and concentrated the conscious will of the class, it was an indispensible weapon of the class. Because the revolution was first of all a political act, because it implied a merciless combat against the bourgeois tendencies and parties that worked against the proletariat in its mass organs, the party was a political instrument of struggle and clarification. This conception had nothing to do with all the substitutionist views of the party. The party was secreted by the class and consequently was an active factor in the general development of consciousness in the class.
Nevertheless, with the defeat of the revolution in Germany and the degeneration of the revolution in Russia, some of the KAPD's weaknesses came to the surface.
Voluntarism and dual organization
Constituted at the very point when the German revolution was entering a reflux after the defeat of 1919, the KAPD ended up by defending the idea that you could make up for the decline in the proletariat's revolutionary spirit through putschist tactics. During the March Action in central Germany in 1921, it pushed the workers of the Leuna factories (near Halle) to make an insurrection against their will. Here it showed a profound incomprehension of the role of the party and one which led to its disintegration. The KAPD still retained the idea of the party as a ‘military HQ' of the class, whereas the party is above all a political vanguard for the whole proletariat.
Similarly, faced with the collapse of the workers' councils, and imprisoned in its voluntarism, the KAPD came to defend the idea of a permanent dual organization of the proletariat, thus adding to the confusion between unitary class organs that arise in the struggle and for the struggle (assemblies, strike committees, workers' councils) and the organization of the revolutionary minority which intervenes in these unitary organizations to fertilize their thought and action. Thus, by pushing for the maintenance of the ‘Unions' -- factory organizations born in the German revolution and closely attached to the party -- alongside the party itself, it found itself incapable of determining its own tasks: it either became a propaganda league[2], a simple political appendage of the factory organizations with their strong economist tendencies, or a Leninist-type party with its transmission belts to the class on the economic terrain. In other words, in both cases, not knowing what was what and who did what[3].
There can be no doubt that the KAPD's erroneous conceptions largely contributed to its disappearance in the late ‘20s. This should be a lesson to those revolutionaries of today who, disorientated by activism and immediatism, try to make up for their numerical weakness by creating artificial ‘workers groups' linked to the ‘party'. This is the conception of Battaglia Comunista and the Communist Workers' Organization for example. There is however a considerable historic difference: whereas the KAPD found itself confronted with organs (the Unions) which were artificial attempts to keep alive workers' councils that had only just disappeared, the present conception of the revolutionary organizations that have an opportunist leaning rests on pure bluff.
The Genesis of the Party
Behind the KAPD's errors on the organizational level, there was a difficulty in recognizing the reflux of the revolutionary wave after the failure of the March Action, and thus in drawing the correct conclusions about its activity in such a situation.
The revolutionary party, as an organization with a direct influence on the thought and action of the working class, can only be constituted in a course of rising class struggle. In particular, the defeat and reflux of the revolution do not make it possible to keep alive a revolutionary organization that can fully assume the tasks of a party. If such a retreat in the workers' struggle is prolonged, if the way is opened for the bourgeoisie to take the situation in hand, either the party will degenerate under the pressure of the counter- revolution, and from within it will emerge fractions who carry on the theoretical and political work of the party (as in the case of the Italian Fraction), or the party will see a reduction in its influence and membership and become a more limited organization whose essential task is to prepare the theoretical framework for the next revolutionary wave. The KAPD did not understand that the revolutionary tide had ceased to rise. Hence its difficulty in drawing up a balance-sheet of the preceding period and adapting itself to the new period.
These difficulties led to the false and incoherent responses from the German-Dutch left:
-- voluntaristically proclaiming the birth of a new International, as with Gorter's Communist Workers' International in 1922.
-- not constituting itself into a fraction but proclaiming itself to be the party after various splits: the term ‘party' became a mere label for each new split, reduced to a few hundred members, if not less.[4]
All these incomprehensions were to have dramatic results. In the German left, as the Berlin KAPD grew weaker, three currents co-existed:
-- those who rallied to Ruhle's theory that any political organization was bad in itself. Sinking into individualism, they disappeared from the political scene;
-- others - in particular those in the Berlin KAPD who were fighting against the anarchistic tendencies in the Unions - had a tendency to deny the workers' councils and see only the party. They developed a ‘Bordigist' vision before the word existed;[5]
-- finally, those who considered that organizing into a party was impossible. The Communist Workers Union (KAU), born out of the fusion between a split from the KAPD and the Unions (AAU and AAU-E), didn't really see itself as an organization, but as a loose union of diverse, decentralized tendencies. The organizational centralism of the KAPD was abandoned.
It was the latter current, supported by the Dutch GIC (Group of International Communists) which emerged in 1927, which was to triumph in the Dutch left.
The Dutch Left: The GIC, Pannekoek and the Spartacusbond
The trauma of the degeneration of the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik party left deep scars. The Dutch left, which took up the theoretical heritage of the German left, did not inherit its positive contributions on the question of the party and the organization of revolutionaries.
It rejected the substitutionist vision of the party as the HQ of the class, but it was only able to see the general organization of the class: the workers' councils. The revolutionary organization was now seen merely as a ‘propaganda league' for the workers' councils.
The concept of the party was either rejected or emptied of any content. Thus, Pannekoek considered either that "a party can only be an organization that aims to lead and dominate the proletariat" (Party and Working Class, 1936) or that "parties -- or discussion groups, propaganda leagues, the name doesn't matter -- have a very different character from the type of political party organizations that we've seen in the past" (The Workers Councils, 1946).
Starting from a correct idea -- that organization and the party had a different function in decadence -- a false conclusion had been reached. Not only was it no longer seen what distinguished the party organization in the period of ascendant capitalism from that of a party in a revolutionary period, in a period of fully maturing class consciousness: there was also an abandonment of the marxist vision of the political organization as an active factor in the class struggle.
1. The indissoluble functions of organization -- theory and praxis -- were separated. The GIC saw itself not as a political body with a program, but as a seam of individual consciousnesses, a sum of separated activities. Thus the GIC called for the formation of federated ‘working groups' out of fear of seeing the birth of an organization united by its program and imposing organizational rules:
"It's preferable that the revolutionary workers work towards the development of consciousness in thousands of small groups rather than activity being subordinated into a large organization which tries to dominate and lead" (Canne-Mejer, The Future of a New Workers' International, 1935). Even more serious was the definition of the organization as an ‘opinion group': this left the door open to theoretical eclecticism. According to Pannekoek, theoretical work was aimed at personal self-education, at "the intensive activity of each brain". From each brain there came a personal thought or judgment "and in each of these diverse thoughts we find a portion of a more or less wider truth." (Pannekoek, The Workers' Councils). The marxist view of the collective work of the organization, the real point of departure for "an intensive activity of each brain", gave way to an idealist vision. The point of departure was now the individual consciousness, as in Cartesian philosophy. Pannekoek went so far as to say that the goal was not clarification in the class but "one's own knowledge of the method for seeing what is true and good" (ibid).
If the organization was just a working group in which the opinion of each member was formed, it could only be a ‘discussion group' or a ‘study group', "giving itself the task of analyzing social events" (Canne-Mejer, op cit). There had certainly been a need for ‘discussion groups' carrying out political and theoretical clarification. But this corresponded to a primary stage in the development of the revolutionary movement last century. This phase, dominated by sects and separate groups, was a transitory one: the sectarianism and federalism of these groups generated by the class were an infantile disorder. These disorders disappeared with the emergence of centralized proletarian organisations. As Mattick noted in 1935, the views of the GIC and Pannekoek were a regression:
"A federalist organization can no longer maintain itself because in the phase of monopolistic capital in which the proletariat now finds itself, it simply doesn't correspond to anything ... It would be a step backwards in relation to the old movement rather than a step forward" (Rte-Korrespondenz no.10-11, Sept, 1935).
2. In reality, the functioning of the GIC was that of a federation of "independent units" incapable of playing an active political role. It would be worth citing an article by Canne-Mejer in 1938 (Radencommunisme no 3):
"The Group of International Communists had no statutes, no obligatory dues and its ‘internal' meetings were open to all the comrades of other groups. It followed that you could never know the exact number of members in the group. There was never any voting -- this wasn't necessary because it was never a question of carrying out the politics of a party. One discussed a problem and when there was an important difference of opinion, the different points of view were published, and that was all. A majority decision had no significance. It was up to the working class to decide".
In a way, the GIC castrated itself out of fear of raping the class. Out of fear of violating the consciousness of each member through rules of organization, or of violating the class by ‘imposing' its positions on it, the GIC negated itself as a militant part of the class. In effect, without regular financial means, there is no possibility of bringing out a review and leaflets during a war. Without statutes, there, are no rules enabling the organization to function in all circumstances. Without centralization through elected executive organs, there is no way of maintaining an organization's life and activity in all periods, particularly in periods of illegality, when the need to face up to repression demands the strictest centralization. And, in a period of rising class struggle like today's there is no possibility of intervening in the class in a centralized, world-wide manner.
These deviations of the councilist current, yesterday with, the GIC, today with the informal groups who claim adherence to council communism, are based on the idea that organization is not an active factor in the class. By ‘letting the class decide', you fall into the idea that the revolutionary organization is ‘at the service of the class' -- a mere roneo and not a political group which sometimes, even in the revolution, has to swim against the stream of the ideas and actions of the class. The organization is not a reflection of ‘what the workers think'[6]: it is a collective body bearing the historical vision of the world proletariat, which is not what the class thinks at this or that moment but what it is compelled to do: carry out the goals of communism.
It was thus not at all surprising that the GIC disappeared in 1940. The theoretical work of the GIG was carried on by the Spartacusbond which was born out of a split in Sneevliet's party in 1942 (cf the article in IR 9, ‘Breaking with the Spartacusbond').Despite a healthier view of the function of the revolutionary organization -- the Bond recognized the indispensible role of the party in the revolution as an active factor in the development of consciousness -- and of its mode of operation -- the Bond had statutes and central organs -- the Spartacusbond ended up being dominated by the GIC's old ideas about organization.
Today, the Spartacusbond is moribund, and Daad en Gedachte -- which left the Bond in 1965 -- is a meteorological bulletin of workers' strikes. The Dutch left is dying as a revolutionary current. It's not through the Dutch left itself that its real theoretical heritage will be passed on to the new elements arising in the class. Understanding and going beyond this heritage is the task of revolutionary organizations and not of individuals or discussion groups.
‘Councilist' ideas of organization have not however disappeared, as we can see in various countries. Making a critical balance-sheet of the concept of organization in the German and Dutch lefts provides us with proof not of the bankruptcy of revolutionary organizations, but on the contrary of their indispensable role in drawing the lessons of the past and preparing for future combats.
Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement, but without revolutionary organizations, there can be revolutionary theory. Failing to understand this can only lead individuals and informal organizations into the void. It opens the door to a loss of conviction in the very possibility of a revolution (see the text by Canne-Mejer in this IR).
CH
[1] "... it is not even possible to talk about the class as long as there is no minority within it tending to organize itself into a political party" (Bordiga, Party and Class)
[2] An idea defended by Franz Pfemfert, Ruhle's friend, director of the review Die Aktion and a member of the KAPD.
[3] Micahelis, an ex-teacher of the KAPD and a member of the KAU in 1931, said "In practice, the Union became a second party ... the KAP later on regrouped the same elements as the Union."
[4] In 1925, in Germany there were three KADs: one for the Berlin tendency and two for the Essen tendency. This error, which was a tragedy for the proletarian camp at the time, repeated itself in the form of farce in 1943 in Italy with the proclamation - in the midst of the counter-revolution - of the Internationalist Communist Party led by Damen and Maffi. Now there are four ‘parties' in Italy claiming descent from the Italian left. This megalomania of small groups calling themselves the party only serves to make the very notion of the party look ridiculous and is a barrier to the difficult process of the regroupment of revolutionaries, which is the main subjective condition for the emergence of a rest world party in the future.
[5] The same Michaelis said in 1931: "Things even reached the point where, for many comrades, the councils were only considered possible if they accepted the KAP's line".
[6] In the same issue of Radencommunisme it says "when there was a wildcat strike, the strikers often brought out leaflets via the group; the latter produced them even if they weren't in absolute agreement with their content". (Our emphasis)
The capitalist economy of the 1980s is plunging deeper and deeper into a complete dead-end. History is accelerating. Decadent capitalism's most fundamental and deep-rooted characteristics are being laid bare. In this sense, the 1980s are indeed the ‘years of truth', where the stakes of social life appear ever more openly: world war, and the destruction of humanity, or international communist revolution.
The two terms of this alternative have existed within social life ever since the onset of decadence - "the era of wars and proletarian revolutions", as the Communist International called it. But they are not posed symmetrically, and do not, at each moment, have the same weight on the unfolding future. Since 1968, the proletariat, the only class that bears a historical solution to capitalist decadence, has re-entered the historic scene and in so doing has opened a course towards class confrontations. This does not mean that inter-imperialist confrontations have come to an end. On the contrary, they have never ceased, and the 1980s are witnessing the exacerbation of these antagonisms: the growing subordination of the whole of economic life to military imperatives, the continued and worsening barbarism of capitalism, with its destruction and its mounds of corpses, of which the endless fighting in Lebanon and the renewed war between Iran and Iraq are only the most recent examples. But it does mean that the proletariat, through its combativity, through the fact that it has not adhered to the dominant ideology, nor surrendered to the capitalist class, prevents these conflicts from generalizing into a third world holocaust[1].
To say that the proletarian struggle is all-important in the present situation may seem like empty optimism when we look at the sorry picture, presented by the bourgeois media. But in understanding the major tendencies that characterize a situation and its dynamic, we cannot content ourselves with the superficial and mystified appearances presented by the dominant class. The proletariat is an exploited class, and its struggle cannot follow a straight line and develop its strength gradually. The class struggle is the expression of a balance of forces between antagonistic classes, and it follows an uneven course, with advances and retreats, during which the dominant class attempts to wipe out all trace of the previous advance.
This tendency is still greater in the decadent period where the bourgeoisie's state-capitalist form of politico-economic domination constantly tends to absorb every aspect of social life. The class struggle is nonetheless still the motor of history, and it is impossible to understand why the accelerated decomposition of society continues, without culminating in a generalized butchery, if it is not understood that the proletariat remains the determining barrier to capitalism's warlike tendencies.
The struggle is beginning again in every country
Since 1968, we have witnessed two advances of the international proletariat: from 1968 to 1974, when the bourgeoisie was taken unawares by the re-emergence of a social force that it had thought definitively buried, and from 1978 to 1980, when the movement culminated in Poland, with a mass strike developing all the characteristics of the class struggle in the decadent period[2]. Since mid-1983, the tendency towards a recovery in proletarian struggle, whose perspectives we had already announced after two years of confusion and paralysis following the partial defeat of the world proletariat in Poland[3], has come to the surface: in Belgium, Holland, Germany, Great Britain, France, the United States, in Sweden, Spain, Italy, etc, strikes have broken out against the draconian austerity measures imposed by the bourgeoisie and affect all the countries at the heart of the industrial world where humanity's historic destiny will be decided[4]. Strikes and riots have exploded in secondary countries such as Tunisia, Morocco and Rumania. The resistance to the infernal logic of the capitalist crisis is once again emerging internationally.
The ‘Theses on the Resurgence of Class Struggle' that we publish below point out the general lines of the proletarian advance during the last two waves of struggle, and trace the characteristics of the one that is just beginning.
While none of the struggles in the above-mentioned countries, taken individually, is in itself profoundly significant as a great step forward for the international proletariat, the context of deepening crisis, social decomposition, exhaustion of mystifications, the growing gulf between State and civil society, the acceleration of history, is favorable ground for the development of the consciousness of the revolutionary proletariat. The key to the perspectives opening up before the proletariat, and which already exist potentially in this renewed combativity, lie in the international and historic nature of these reactions, and in an understanding of the process by which class consciousness develops through an accumulation of experience, and of the evolution of the class struggle and its dynamic.
Signs of the future
None of the struggles since the massive September ‘83 strike in the Belgian state sector has really forced the bourgeoisie to withdraw the measures it wanted to impose on the working class. Not one has had even a momentary success, whether it be the state sector strikes in Holland or the Greyhound strike in the US against wage reductions, the Sagunto steel-workers' struggle in Spain, or the Talbot-Poissy car-workers' struggle in France against redundancies, or even the postal workers' struggle in France against increased working hours. However, the fact that the proletariat has not let these measures pass without resistance, as we have seen in the US, for example, where for 4 years the workers in many sectors have passively accepted wage cuts, is in itself a positive sign of its combativity, its refusal to submit to the interests of the national economy. And the first victory of the struggle is the struggle itself.
It is true that none of these struggles has managed to develop any of the characteristics that the historical situation of capitalist decadence is going to impose on the working class -- extension and self-organization of is its combats, a radical confrontation with the union apparatus, and with all the bourgeoisie's democratic and trade-union mystifications, the politicization of the movement. However, we should examine the various movements more closely, in the light of these characteristics:
-- as regards the need to extend the struggle (ie an awareness that the proletariat cannot fight as an isolated minority, that it can only create a favorable balance of forces by mass participation in the combat) we have witnessed in Belgium, a spontaneous attempt by the Charleroi railway workers to spread the movement immediately going beyond the community/linguistic divisions between Flanders and Wallonia, that the bourgeoisie bias used extensively in the past to divide the proletariat. The trade unions were forced to ‘spread' the strike to the whole state sector, in the hope of drowning it in less combative fractions of the class, and of creating a division between the state sector and private industry. And yet the strike was only brought to an end after 3 weeks involving up to 900,000 workers in a country with only 9m inhabitants. Hardly was it over than another state sector strike the first since 1903 -- broke out in the Welfare state ‘paradise' of Holland, and continued for 6 weeks. This one began under the pressure of the railway workers' and bus drivers' combativity, and ‘order' was restored with considerable difficulty, despite the close collaboration between Dutch and Belgian trade unions, between all the left, right and union fractions of the bourgeoisie, and despite the organization of a ‘pacifist' campaign in the midst of the movement.
In the US, workers from other industries supported the Greyhound strikes by taking part on the picket-line; the unions were forced to organize their ever-ready ‘financial help' in the form of ‘Christmas presents' for the Greyhound strikers, in answer to the feeling of popular solidarity, and to prevent the expression of the only real class solidarity possible - the extension of the struggle.
-- as regards the need to organize the struggle ourselves, mass assemblies took place during most of these movements. But the question of self-organization poses and contains the problem of confronting the unions, which is a step that the proletariat has yet to take, and that implies a degree of awareness and self-confidence that is only at its beginning today. However, the union question was posed frequently in all these first movements of the recovery. Most of the strikes either broke out spontaneously without waiting for orders from the unions, or were taken in hand from the start -- as in Holland and Italy -- only because the unions knew that they were going to break out anyway. In Belgium, the movement started outside the unions, and was only ‘under control' 3 days later; in Holland, we saw many cases of mass assemblies refusing to follow union recommendations. In Britain, 1200 shipyard workers came out on strike against the maneuvers of the union.
Even in Sweden the one-day miners' strike at Kiruna was followed by the whole workforce, against the union's recommendation that only a fraction take part. Everywhere, in Italy, France, Spain, Holland, Belgium, the union leadership is being obeyed less and less, or not at all, and the dirty work left in the hands of the rank-and-file unionism. The exhaustion of the union mystification is beginning to make itself felt, and is laying the basis for the class' ability, in the future, to take its destiny in its own hands and organize itself.
-- as regards the movement's politicization, ie the creation of proletarian strength against the state, as we saw it developed in Poland in August 1980, this question is bound up with the proletariat's ability to spread and organize its own struggle. We have not yet reached this point. But the question of the state is already posed in the strikes of state employees, who are less and less mystified by the state's supposed ‘social' nature, and in the resistance to the austerity measures that the crisis is forcing all states to take against the workers. It is clearly posed, for example, in the confrontations between workers and the ‘Socialist' police at Sagunto in Spain. The demystification of the trade unions' reactionary nature as cogs of the state machine is another stepping-stone in this development of political consciousness.
These few elements bring us to the conclusion that today, at the beginning of this recovery in the class struggle, the proletariat is already coming up against the same barriers that broke the wave of 1978-80: faced with the need to extend the struggles, the unions propose a fake extension by trade or industry; faced with the need for self-organization, the shop-stewards propose ‘rank-and-file' strike committees; faced with the need for active solidarity, the unions propose a useless ‘material' support; faced with the problem of politicization, the unions propose the fraudulent verbal radicalization of ‘fighting' unionism, fervently urged on by the leftists. Thus, all the ingredients of the previous wave are already there in the present one.
The left taking its place in opposition in the face of the 1978-80 wave of struggles, the sudden ‘radicalization' of unions and left-wing parties after years of ‘responsible' language in the hope of coming to power, the renewed importance of rank-and-file unionism, and of the leftists within it, are all so many bourgeois anti-bodies against the proletariat, which momentarily diverted it. Today, these anti-bodies are already present right from the start of the struggle, but at the same time, they are losing their effectiveness.
In this sense, this third renewal of the class movement will be more difficult at the beginning, as the western proletariat is confronting the oldest and most experienced bourgeoisie in the world -- unlike Poland 1980. This difficulty will slow down the movement, but the lessons it contains are all the more profound.
When a wave of class struggle begins at an international level, we cannot expect a qualitative step forward right from the beginning. Before advancing, the proletariat must often relive in practice the difficulties confronted previously; its consciousness will be able to develop further thanks to the dynamic of the struggle itself, combined with an accumulation of experience under the impulse of the accelerating crisis.
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At the outset of the workers' movement, Marx and Engels defined the conditions for the communist revolution: international economic crisis, and the internationalization of the struggle. Today, the conditions are gathering for the generalization of the workers' combats, which contains the perspective of revolution. There are ups and downs still to come. The chips are down in the great game of history, but the results are not settled in advance. Revolutionary organizations must be able to recognize the dynamic of the historical perspective if they are to fulfill the decisive function for which the class has created them.
CN
[1] See ‘Inter-imperialist Conflicts and Class Struggle: the Acceleration of History' in IR 36.
[2] See all the articles on the class struggle in Poland, its lessons and its applications, IR nos 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29.
[3] See ‘Where is the Class Struggle Going?: Towards the End of Post-Poland Retreat' in IR 33.
[4] See ‘The Proletariat of Western Europe at the Heart of the Generalization of the Class Struggle' in IR 31.
1. The 5th Congress of the ICC, in its resolution on the international situation, affirmed that "the crisis which is now hitting the metropoles of capitalism with full force will compel the proletariat of these metropoles to express the reserves of combativity which have not as yet been unleashed in a decisive way" and that "the crisis is showing itself to be the best ally of the world proletariat". What was only put forward at the time of the Congress, without sensing how imminent it was, has now become a reality. Since the middle of 1983 the working class has come out of the retreat marked by the defeat in Poland and has embarked upon a new wave of battles against capitalism. In less than six months, countries like Belgium, Holland, France, the USA, Spain and to a lesser extent Germany, Britain and Italy have seen important or significant class movements.
2. The present resurgence of struggle expresses the fact that, in the present period of an inexorable and catastrophic aggravation of the crisis of capitalism, in a context of a historic course towards class confrontations, moments of retreat by the proletariat are and will more and more be short-lived. What is being shown by this resurgence is that today partial defeats and the momentary disorientation that they permit or provoke cannot decisively hold back the capacity of the proletariat to respond in a growing manner to the increasingly violent attacks mounted by capital. It shows once again that since 1968 it is the working class which holds the historic initiative, which on a global level has gone onto the offensive against a bourgeoisie which, despite a step by step defense of its interests and a massive deployment of its anti-working class arsenal, does not have a free hand to put forward its own response to the crisis: generalized imperialist war.
3. The present wave of struggles has already announced that it is going to be broader and more important than the two waves which preceded it since the historic resurgence of struggle at the end of the ‘60s: that of 1968-74 and 1978-80.
The main characteristics of the first wave were:
-- that it announced in a loud and spectacular manner (notably with May ‘68 in France, ‘rampant May' in Italy, the confrontations in Poland) the end of the period of counter-revolution, the beginning of a new period dominated by the confrontation between the two major classes in society;
-- that it surprised the bourgeois class, which had lost the habit of seeing the proletariat as a major actor in the life of society,
-- that it developed on the basis of an economic situation which, relatively speaking, had not deteriorated very much, leaving space for many illusions in the proletariat, notably that of the existence of a ‘left alternative'.
The second wave had the following distinctive elements:
-- it was based on a much more advanced degradation of the capitalist economy and on much more severe attacks on the living conditions of the class;
-- it took place at the transition between two moments in the development of the historic situation: the ‘years of illusion' and the ‘years of truth';
-- it saw the bourgeoisie of the advanced countries reorientate its strategy in the face of the proletariat, replacing the card of the left in power with that of the left in opposition;
-- with the struggles of Poland 1980, it saw the emergence for the first time in more than half a century of that decisive weapon of the class in the period of decadence: the mass strike;
-- it culminated in a country on the periphery belonging to the most backward bloc, which demonstrated the capacity of the bourgeoisie of the metropoles of capital once again to put up considerable lines of defense against the workers' struggle.
The present wave of struggles has its source in the wearing out of the factors which led to the post-Poland retreat:
-- the vestiges of illusions from the 1970s which have been swept away by the very deep recession of 1980-82;
-- momentary disarray provoked by the move of the left into opposition and by the defeat in Poland.
It is emerging:
-- after a long period of austerity and mounting unemployment, of an intensification of economic attacks against the working class in the central countries;
-- following several years of using the card of the left in opposition and all the mystifications associated with it.
For these reasons, it is going to carry on with increasingly powerful and determined battles by the proletariat of the metropoles of capital, the culminating point of which will be at a higher level than either of the first two waves.
4. The characteristics of the present wave, as have already been manifested and which will become more and more discernable are as follows:
-- a tendency towards very broad movements involving large numbers of workers, hitting entire sectors or several sectors simultaneously in one country, thus posing the basis for the geographical extension of the struggle;
-- a tendency towards the outbreak of spontaneous movements, showing, especially at the beginning, a certain bypassing of the unions;
-- the growing simultaneity of struggles at an international level, laying the basis for the world generalization of struggles in the future;
-- a progressive development, within the whole proletariat, of its confidence in itself, of its awareness of its strength, its capacity to oppose itself as a class to the attacks of the capitalists;
-- the slow rhythm of the development of struggles in the central countries and notably of their capacity for self-organization, a phenomenon which results from the deployment by the bourgeoisie of these countries of a whole arsenal of traps and mystifications, and which has been shown again in the most recent confrontations.
5. In contrast to 1968 and in continuity with what happened in 1978, the present revival is in no way faced with an unprepared bourgeoisie. It is going to come up against the complete gamut of responses that the bourgeoisie has already made to the combativity and consciousness of the proletariat, responses which it will be continually perfecting:
-- the international solidarity of the bourgeoisie, which has been manifested particularly in the use of the black-out or distortion of the meaning of struggles by the media;
-- organization of campaigns of diversion of various kinds (pacifism, scandals, etc) ;
-- division of labor between different sectors of the bourgeoisie: right and left, left and leftists, union leaders and base unionism;
-- the posing of bourgeois demands during struggles (defense of the national economy or of this or that sector of the economy, or of unions ‘threatened' by the bourgeoisie) ;
-- false calls for extension and generalization through the unions, aimed at preventing a real extension;
-- selective and ‘intelligent' use of repression with the aim both of demoralizing workers and creating points of fixation that derail combativity from its initial objectives.
6. The need to take into consideration and to denounce the considerable means and obstacles set in motion by the bourgeoisie should not, however, lead to a lack of confidence in the capacity of the proletariat to confront and overcome them. These obstacles are the reason for the slow and progressive development of struggles in the metropoles (which does not exclude the possibility of sudden accelerations at certain moments, notably in cases where the bourgeoisie has not been able to put its left forces in opposition, as in Spain and especially in France). Because of this, the central countries will continue to differ from the countries of the periphery (Eastern Europe and, above all, the Third World) which may go through explosions of anger and despair, violent and massive ‘hunger' revolts which don't have their own perspective and which will be subject to ferocious repression. However, the permanent and increasingly intensive and simultaneous use by the bourgeoisie of the advanced countries of all these means for sabotaging struggles will necessarily lead to them being used up:
-- black-outs and falsifications will lead to a absolute lack of confidence in the bourgeois media;
-- campaigns of diversion will more and more show their real face in the light of the reality of social struggles;
-- the most radical contortions of the left and the leftists, the unions and base unionists, by leading struggles to impasses and defeat will result in a growing distrust towards these forces of capital, as is already being shown in the present period, notably through a clear tendency towards de-unionization (in terms of membership and of the involvement of workers in the life of the unions);
-- the use of repression, even if it will be ‘moderated' in the advanced countries in the coming period, will in the end lead to a growing consciousness of the need for a direct and massive confrontation with the state.
In the final analysis, capitalism's total economic impasse, the growing misery into which the system plunges the working class, will progressively wear out all the mystifications which up to now have allowed the bourgeoisie to maintain its control over society, notably the mystification of the ‘welfare state'. While it would be false to expect in the coming period to see sudden ‘qualitative leaps' or the immediate, emergence of the mass strike in the central countries, it is on the other hand necessary to underline the tendency towards confrontations which have already begun to take on a more and more massive, powerful and simultaneous character.
In this sense, as has already been said, "the crisis is showing itself to be the best ally of the proletariat."
The Communistenbond Spartacus (‘Spartacus' Communist League) began in 1942 as a split from the Marx-Lenin-Luxemburg Front, itself a split from the RSAP. Before its dissolution by the Dutch government in 1940, the RSAP, whose dominant figure was Henk Sneevliet, oscillated between the POUM and Trotskyism, with anti-fascist positions, the defense of unions, ‘national liberation' and the Russian state. The MLL front which succeeded it, in clandestinity, began the internationalist work of denouncing all the fronts of the capitalist war. In 1941 its leadership, unanimously, except for one Trostskyist vote, decided not to support the USSR and denounced the German-Soviet pact as a part of the imperialist war front. The arrest of the MLL Front leadership, including Sneevliet, and their execution by the German army decapitated the MLL in 1942. Several months later the vestiges of the Front split in two: the small Trotskyist minority which chose the capitalist camp and the militant internationalists who, starting from great confusions would eventually form the Communistenbond. This latter organization would gradually evolve towards council communism. After representing the internationalist revolutionary current in Holland from 1945 through the fifties, it completely degenerated into councilist ideology. It disappeared as a group at the end of the seventies, leaving only epigones like Daad en Gedachte.
We are presenting the history of Communistenbond Spartacus here because this history is not well-known and even the Bond in degeneration considered its own history as just ‘old hat'. For revolutionary internationalists, the history of a communist group is never ‘old hat'. It's our history, the history of a political current which the working class gave life to. Making a balance sheet of this group and the councilist current today, drawing the positive and negative lessons from this experience is the way to forge the weapons of tomorrow. Because the councilist current is organizationally in decomposition in Holland, because it is no longer a living body capable to drawing essential lessons for the revolutionary struggle, the ICC must take up the task of drawing the lessons of the history of the Communistenbond Spartacus, in order to show elements of the class who are attracted to councilism that the logic of councilism leads to the void.
Two fundamental lessons to draw:
1. the rejection of October 1917 as a ‘bourgeois' revolution inevitably leads to a rejection of the whole history of the workers' movement since 1848. It necessarily goes along with a refusal to recognize the change in the historical period in 1914: the decadence of capitalism. It also logically leads to defending ‘national liberation struggles' as ‘progressive bourgeois revolutions'. This logic was chosen by the Swedish group Arbetarmakt who plunged head first into the leftist magma.
2. an incomprehension of the role and centralized functioning of the revolutionary organization inevitably leads to the void or to anarchist conceptions. Anti-centralism and individualism in the conception of the organization opens the door to workerism and immediatism which can happily coexist with academicism and opportunism. The results? The history of the Communistenbond shows us what they are - an abdication to anarchist and petty bourgeois tendencies. The end result is dislocation or capitulation to bourgeois ideology (unionism, national liberation struggles).
We hope that this history of Communistenbond Spartacus will help those who follow the council communist tradition to understand the need for organized activity based on the marxist conception of the decadence of capitalism. The political organization of revolutionaries on an international and centralized basis is an indispensable weapon that the class creates for the triumph of the world communist revolution.
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The evolution of the MLL Front towards the internationalist positions of non-defense of Russia and against the imperialist war without any distinction for labels - either ‘democracy', ‘fascism' or ‘communism' - is an atypical evolution. Coming from the RSAP, which had been oriented towards left socialism, it went towards council communist positions. This orientation was largely due to the strong personality of Sneevliet who despite his old age was still capable of evolving politically and had nothing more to lose on a personal level[1]. Such a profound political transformation cannot be compared to even that of the Munis group or the RKD which were also atypical[2].
But this evolution didn't go to its ultimate consequences. The death of Sneevliet and his comrades - particularly Ab Menlst - totally decapitated the leadership of the Front. The MLL owed its cohesion to the political weight of Sneevliet, who was more a militant guided by intuition and revolutionary convictions than a theoretician.
The death of Sneevliet and almost all the members of the Centrale reduced the organization to nothing for several months. From March to the summer of 1942, all the militants were in hiding and avoided any contact with each other because they thought the gestapo was using an informer from within the organization itself. But the police archives and the records of the Sneevliet trial show no evidence of a gestapo agent within the organization[3].
Of the leadership, only Stan Poppe survived. Under his influence the Revolutionair-socialistische Arbeidersbeweging (the Socialist Revolutionary Workers' Movement) was founded during the summer. The use of the term ‘Workers' Movement' meant that the organization that was the formal continuation of the MLL front saw itself as neither a front, nor a party.
In the wake of the formation of the Stan Poppe group the last partisans of Dolleman formed their own group with a Trotskyist orientation on 22 August 1942 at the Hague. Thus the ‘Comite van Revolutionaire Marxisten' was formed on the basis of the defense of Russia[4]. This group was much smaller than Poppe's . It published a newspaper De Rode October (Red October) printing 2000 copies per month. Among the leaders of the CRM there was Max Perthus who had been freed from prison. The old Trotskyist faction of the MLL Front was thus reconstituted. The younger, more activist elements of the Front mainly joined the CRM. Logically the CRM was in the orbit of the IVth International; it became the IVth International's section in the Netherlands in June 1944[5].
This last split was the result of a confrontation between two irreconcilable positions: one defending the internationalist positions taken by Sneevliet and his comrades in July 1941; the other participating in the war by supporting Russia and thus the Allied military bloc.
Other personal and organizational reasons played a role in the split. In the summer of 1942 Poppe formed a new leadership eliminating all the supporters of the defense of Russia. Poppe was the last person to see Sneevliet before his arrest and this appeared suspicious to some[6].
In fact, the organization formed around Stan Poppe was perfectly prepared for clandestinity and was able to continue its political life until the end of the war without arrests. Leen Molenaar was one of the best counterfeiters of false papers and ration cards for the clandestine militants[7].
At the end of the summer, this group of fifty militants began editing more or less regularly a mimeographed bulletin called Spartacus. This was the organ of the Communistenbond Spartacus. Several pamphlets were edited which showed a higher theoretical level than the MLL Front. Towards the end of 1944, Spartacus became a monthly theoretical organ. From October 1944 until May 1945 they distributed a weekly page on immediate events: Spartacus Actuele Berichten (Current Events).
Politically, the Bond members, being older were less vulnerable and more theoretically formed than the younger Trotskyist elements. Many of them had been militants in the NAS and kept a certain revolutionary syndicalist mentality. Thus, Anton (Toon) van den Berg, a militant first of the OSP then the RSAP, had been a leader of the NAS in Rotterdam until 1940. The Rotterdam group of Communisten was formed around him and this group was characterized by an activist spirit until the end of the war. Other militants had a political past marked not so much by unionism but by left socialism and even the MLL Front. Such was the case of Stan Poppe.
Stan Poppe had played an important role in the OSP. He was in the leadership of this party as Secretary. At the fusion with the RSP, he became a member of the political bureau of the RSAP. Elected Secretary-Treasurer of this party, he was delegated - with Menlst - in December to the Conference of the Centre for the IVth International. A member of the political bureau in 1938, he was one of the leaders of the MLL Front in 1940. In the Front and later in the Communisten Spartacusbond, he was known under the name of Fjeerd Woudstra. Very oriented towards economic study, his political orientation was still a mixture of Leninism and councilism.
Most militants came from the old RSAP without going through the Trotskyist movement which was very weak in Holland anyway. Many of them continued to work in the Bond after the war, most of them until the end of their lives: Bertus Nansink, Jaap van Otterloo, Jaap Meulenkamp, Cees van der Kull, Wlebe van der Wal, Jan Vastenhouw, were these kind of militants.
But for two more years, the evolution of Spartacus contained political ambiguities which proved that the spirit of the RSAP had not totally disappeared. The old left socialist reflexes still showed through in contacts with a Social Democratic group which had left the SDAP at the beginning of the war and whose dominant personality was W. Romljn. At the end of 1943, under the pseudonym Soclus, Romljn wrote a pamphlet where he ‘tactically' supported the military struggle of the Allies. Spartacus strongly attacked this position[8] and gave up the idea of negotiations for fusion with Romljn. But the very fact that there were proposals for fusion with this group showed that the Bond had no class analysis of Social Democracy. In this, ‘Spartacus' was very far from council communism which had always denounced socialist groups of the right and left as counter-revolutionary and bourgeois. This persistence in looking for contacts with left socialists could still be seen in November 1944, when for a time common work was done with the De Vonk work which finally failed because of the political divergences.
As for the Trotskyist current, although the organizational break was completed, the same was not true ideologically with these left tendencies. Poppe had two meetings in 1944 with the group ‘Against the Stream' (Tegen de Stroom, led by Vereeken). Although this group rejected the defense of Russia in June 1941, it remained linked to the French Communist Internationalist Committee of Henri Molinier. It joined the IVth International after the war[9]. More significantly was the fact that even within the Spartacus Bond, the last hesitations on the defense of Russia were not totally eliminated. A small part of the organization - which was against the defense of the Russian camp in World War II - took a stand in favor of this defense in case of a third world war between the western Allies and the USSR[10].
For two years - until the theoretical contribution of the ex-GIC became preponderant - the Bond tried to clarify its political positions. Its activity consisted in large part in carrying out theoretical work, in the form of pamphlets. This work rested in large part on the shoulders of Bertus Nansink and above all of Stan Poppe.
Stan Poppe's pamphlet on Perspectives of Imperialism after the War in Europe and the Task of Socialist-Revolutionaries was written in December 1943 and appeared in January 1944[11]. This text was very influenced by Lenin's book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and claimed a continuity with the ‘scientific socialism of Marx, Engels and Lenin' but not Rosa Luxemburg. It tried to define the evolution of capitalism and develop revolutionary perspectives for the proletariat.
The cause of the world war was attributed to ‘the general crisis of capitalism' since 1914. In a Leninist way, Poppe defined the new period as a crisis of ‘imperialist monopoly':
"This last and highest phase was defined by Lenin as imperialism. Imperialism is the political expression of a society producing in a capitalist-monopoly mode."
This reference to Lenin is particularly interesting when we think of how the ‘councilists' of Spartacus would define themselves as anti-Leninists in the future.
However, a certain amount of theoretical reflection can be discerned below the surface of these somewhat scholastic references to Lenin. Poppe saw the crisis as a crisis of overproduction. This led to state capitalism, the end-product of the monopoly stage, which gave rise to the arms economy. The latter invades all of production and "the (capitalist) system can only be propped up by war or production for war". In this text Poppe does not refer to Russia as state capitalist. On the contrary, he asserts that the USSR "is outside the hold of monopoly capitalist production and of the domination of the market"; Russia is "the only state organized adversary of imperialism". Such a statement is all the more surprising because in the MLL Front Poppe was one of those who considered Russia as state capitalist. The denunciation of state capitalist measures in all countries, "whether they be democratic or autocratic, republican or monarchical", except in Russia, is thus a notable contradiction in this text.
The analysis of the conflict in Europe was more lucid: "the war is ending. The military defeat of Germany and its allies is no longer speculation but a fact of life ..." Paradoxically Poppe thought that the second world war would be extended into a third world war in Asia, pitting Japan against the Anglo-American camp for the control of the colonies.
Somewhat like Bordiga after 1945[12], Poppe thought the war was leading to the political fascisation of the western democracies:
"On the level of foreign policy, the imperialist war is the other side of the monopolistic exploitation of labor power. In domestic policy, bourgeois democracy, corresponding to the same social order, is like fascism."
In the case of a revolutionary crisis, the democracies will see "their own future" in fascism. If there is no such revolutionary crisis, a form of neo-fascist economy will be imposed: "In words, there will be no more fascism but in fact we will live in the second golden age of fascism. At the heart of the neo-fascist social policy will be a constant decline in the workers' standard of living, the necessary consequence of deflationary policies."
With the example of the thirties in his mind, Poppe thought that the open crisis of capitalism would continue after the war: "there will be no reconstruction or else a very short and limited one". The alternative for the proletariat was "either socialism or a fall into barbarism", either proletarian revolution or war. But the text does not go into any prognosis. It emphasizes that the war "for the conquest of Indonesia and the Far East" implies "an inevitable war against the Soviet Union itself", either in the course of ‘third' war in the Orient or a ‘fourth' world war.
Nevertheless, "the general crisis of capitalism ripens the revolutionary crisis of the system". This does not mean to imply that "the revolution arises automatically". It "depends on the conscious intervention of the revolutionary class during the (revolutionary) process".
Theoretically, Poppe defines the revolution as the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of this "dictatorship and of the state itself". This dictatorship will be a dictatorship of the factory councils which will form "the central councils of power". It is interesting to note that peasant soviets are excluded. In the ‘struggle for power' which is the "struggle for and with the councils", the proletariat of the factories is at the heart of the revolution. It is symptomatic of a Gramscilike factoryist vision that Poppe takes factory occupations like those in Italy in 1920 as his example[13].
But a separation is made between the revolution of the councils in the industrialized countries and the call for support for ‘national liberation struggles':
"There can be no socialist policy in Europe and America without proclaiming the complete independence of the former colonial peoples."
On the colonial question, Poppe takes Lenin's position on ‘the rights of peoples to self-determination'. It seems that Poppe's position on this did not reflect the opinion of all the militants: in 1940 Jan Vastenhouw, then a member of the MLL Front, firmly attacked Lenin's conception in an internal bulletin.
Poppe goes very far in his analysis. Not only does he consider that "the task (of revolutionary socialists) is of course to call on workers of all countries to get rid of the Japanese in the occupied territories of China and Indonesia" but he also proclaims that this ‘liberation' should be done under the banner of the USSR. Of course Poppe is not talking about a Stalinist USSR but a liberated one - as a result of the workers' councils taking power in Europe - ruled by the workers and peasants who will have overthrown Stalinism. In this vision, a mixture of fantasy and belief, there could be a revolutionary war of ‘national liberation':
"If socialists are correct in their analysis, it means that the Soviet Union will also become the most important factor in the struggle against Japanese imperialism. A Soviet Union that can count on an alliance with the people's councils in power instead of doubtful treaties with capitalist governments; a Soviet Union that enjoys the support of a system of united councils in Europe and the solidarity of the proletariat guided by revolutionary socialism will also be able to expel Japanese imperialism from Mandchu-Kuo and other parts of China and Indonesia - without the help of the British and American armies."
This idea of a war of ‘revolutionary liberation' is akin to the theory of the revolutionary war launched by the Comintern in 1920. One cannot help but notice that Poppe's ‘liberation' from the barrel of a gun was even more ‘national' (if not downright nationalistic) than revolutionary in its offer to "restore the territorial integrity of the Republic of China". He appears to be talking about a bourgeois national revolution, like the wars of the French Revolution, which established rather than destroyed the national framework. Poppe's theory of workers' councils is a national theory of a federated union of councils. The concept of a ‘national liberation struggle' is the corollary of a concept of workers' councils emerging from a national revolution.
The positions of Poppe and the Communistenbond were still at this time very far from the positions of council communism. They were still a mixture of Leninism, Trotskyism and even Gramsci. Until the summer of 1944 the Bond was unable to come to a political position on the nature of the USSR.
It was finally through discussions with former members of the GIC that Spartacus definitively moved towards council communism. Some members of the Bond made contact with Canne-Meijer, BA Sijes, Jan Appel, Theo Massen and Bruun van Albada and asked them to work in the Bond. They agreed to contribute theoretically through discussion and texts[14] but they did not in any way wish to dissolve their own group nor immediately join the Bond. They were still very suspicious towards the new organization since it was marked by a Leninist tradition. They wanted to wait and see how far the Bond would evolve towards council communism. Little by little they participated in editorial activities and interventions, with a hybrid status as ‘guests'[15]. They avoided taking positions on organizational matters of the Bond and did not participate in meetings when these questions were on the agenda. But a little before May 1945 they became full members of the organization once political and theoretical agreement had been reached on all sides.
The fruit of this political maturation of the Bond was the pamphlet published in August 1944: De Strijd om de macht (The Struggle for Power). This pamphlet took a stand against any union and parliamentary activity and called for the formation of new anti-union proletarian organs emerging from the spontaneous struggle: factory councils, the basis of the formation of workers' councils. The pamphlet pointed out those changes in the capitalist mode of production had led to structural modifications within the working class and thus required new forms of workers' organizations corresponding to the emergence of a ‘new workers' movement'[16].
In this pamphlet, and unlike the old GIC, the Bond called for the formation of a revolutionary party an International. However, unlike Trotskyism, the Bond emphasized that such a party could only emerge after the war when the organs of struggle of the proletariat would be formed.
When in May 1945, the Communistenbond Spartacus legally published the first issue of its monthly Spartacus it could no longer be considered a continuation of the MLL Front. With the militant contribution of the members of the GIC, the Bond became a council communist organization. As Canne-Meijer was to write in 1946:
"The present Spartacusbond cannot be seen as a direct continuation from the RSAP. Its composition is different and on many questions its positions are not the same ... Many of those who were part of the RSAP did not join Spartacus; some were attracted by Trotskyists. But they were not numerous because in any case Trotskyists are not very numerous."[17]
Spartacus was the most important revolutionary organization in Holland and bore a heavy political responsibility on an international level in terms of the regroupment of revolutionaries in war-torn Europe, isolated by the Occupation and once again looking for international contacts. This possibility of becoming a pole of regroupment depended on the solidity of the organization, its political and theoretical homogeneity, of a clear will to escape from the linguistic barriers of a small country like Holland.
Numerically, the Bond was relatively strong for a revolutionary organization, especially in a small country. In 1945 it had about 100 members. It had a monthly theoretical review as well as a weekly paper printing 6,000 copies[18]. It was present in most large cities, and in particular in the workers' centers of Amsterdam and Rotterdam where the council communist tradition was real.
But the organization was far from being homogeneous. It regrouped former members of the MLL Front and the GIC, but also syndicalists from the pre-war NAS. Anarchists were also in the Bond from the old ‘Libertarian Socialist Movement'. Many young people also joined Spartacus but without political experience or theoretical formation. It was thus a union of different origins but not really the fusion which could represent the basis for the creation of a homogeneous organization. Centrifugal tendencies were very strong as we will see later on. Libertarian elements carried with them anti-organizational conceptions. The ex-Syndicalists around de Toon van den Berg in Rotterdam were very activist and workerist. Their conception was more syndicalist than political. On the other hand, the young people had a propensity to follow along after one or the other tendency, mostly the first, because of their political immaturity.
Organizationally, the Bond had nothing to do with the old GIC which had seen itself as a federation of working groups. The Bond was a centralized organization and remained so until 1947. Its organization was composed of nuclei (kerne) or local sections of six members, and then city-wide or territorial sections. An executive committee of five members represented the organization to the outside world and was responsible to the Congress of the Bond which was the sovereign body. As with any revolutionary organization worthy of its name, it had elected working bodies: a political commission regrouping the editorial staff and responsible for political questions; an organization commission for current questions; a control commission responsible for verifying that decisions taken were indeed applied; a financial control commission. In 1945 there were between 21 to 27 people in the central organs.
The basis for joining was clearly defined by the statutes adopted in October 1945[19]. The Bond put a very high value on the organization and accepted new members only with the greatest prudence and demanded of them "the discipline of a democratic centralist party"[20]. In fact, the Bond followed the tradition of the KAPD. But Communistenbond took over certain aspects of this tradition which were the least favorable for its work. The Bond was centralized by its organs but decentralized on a local level. It considered that each "nuclei was autonomous in its own region"[21]. Aiming at a ‘decentralization of work', it was inevitable that this decentralization clashed with the centralism of the organization.
At the same time, the Bond maintained certain conceptions of organization which had flourished during the period of mass political organizations. The organization was still seen as an organization of ‘cadres': hence the formation, decided at the conference of 21/22 July 1945, of a ‘school of marxist cadres'. It was not totally unitary: at its periphery there were the ‘Associations of Friends of Spartacus' (VSV). The VSV was the Bond's autonomous youth organization. Composed of young people between 20 and 25, this parallel organization was in fact an organization of young sympathizers. Although it had no duties vis-a-vis the Bond, it had to participate in propaganda and make financial contributions. Such a hazy line between militants and sympathizers helped to strengthen the centrifugal tendencies that existed within the organization.
Another example of the weight of the past was the creation in August 1945 of a ‘Workers' Aid' (Arbeidershulp). The idea was to set up, in the enterprises, an organ, or rather an assistance fund, to give financial aid to workers on strike. Underlying it was the notion that the Communistenbond had to direct the workers' struggle by substituting itself for their spontaneous efforts at self-organization. Nevertheless, this ‘Workers' Aid' only had a brief existence. The discussion on the party which took place throughout the Bond led to a more precise view of the nature and function of the political organization of revolutionaries.
Spartacus thought that the workers' struggles which broke out at the end of the war would open up a revolutionary period, if not immediately then at least in the future. In April 1945 the Bond's conference proclaimed the necessity for a party and the provisional character of its existence as a national organization:
"The Bond is a provisional organization of marxists, oriented towards the formation of a real international communist party, which will have to arise from the struggle of the working class."[22]
It's noteworthy that this declaration posed the question of the birth of a party in the revolutionary period. Such a conception was the opposite to that of the Trotskyists in the 1930s, and then the Bordigists after 1945, who saw the question of when the party is formed as a secondary issue and considered that the party was a product of mere will. It was enough to ‘proclaim' it for it to exist. No less noteworthy was the ‘Inaugural Address' - voted at the July Conference - to internationalist revolutionary groups. It excluded the Trotskyist CRM of Holland, with whom the conference broke all contact, because of their position of ‘defense of the USSR'[23]. It was an appeal for the regroupment of the different groups of the communist left, those who rejected the idea of the party taking power:
"It is in and through the movement itself that a new communist international can be born, with the participation of the communists of all countries, free of bureaucratic domination but also of any pretensions towards taking power for it itself."[24]
It must be said however that this appeal for the regroupment of internationalist revolutionaries only gave rise to some limited measures. The conference decided to set up a secretariat for information in Brussels, the task of which would be to make contact with various groups and edit an information bulletin. At the same time there was a very brief revival of contact with the Vereeken group. It was clear that the positions of his group ‘Against the Stream' (Tegen de Stroom)[25] were incompatible with those of the Bond. But the very fact of reviving contact showed an absence of political criteria for demarcating internationalist communist groups from confused or anarchist groups. This same absence of criteria could be seen again in 1947, at an international conference held in Brussels.
The Bond's preparation for the emergence of a party implied a greater homogeneity in the organization on the theoretical conception of the party. This is why the ‘Theses on the Task and Nature of the Party' were written for the Congress of 24-26 December 1945[26]. They were adopted by the Congress and published as a pamphlet in January 1946[27]. It is very significant that they were written by a former member of the GIC: Bruun van Albada. This fact itself showed the unanimity which then existed in the Bond on the question, and above all expressed an explicit rejection of the conceptions which had reigned in the GIC during the thirties.
The holding of public meetings on the theme of the party during the course of 1946 showed the importance that the organization accorded to the Theses.
The Theses are centered around the change in the function of the party between the period of capitalism's ascendance - described as the period of ‘liberal capitalism' - and the period of decadence that followed the first world war, the period of the domination of state capitalism. Although the concepts of the ascendance and decadence of capitalism are not used, the text strongly underlines the change in historic period, which implied a need to go beyond the old conceptions of the party:
"The present critique of the old parties is not just a critique of their political practice or of what their leaders get up to, but is a critique of the entire old conception of the party. It is a direct consequence of changes in the structure and objectives of the mass movement. The task of the (revolutionary) party is in its activity within the mass movement of the proletariat."
The Theses in a historical manner showed that the conception of a workers' party acting on the model of the bourgeois parties of the French revolution and not distinct from other social strata became obsolete with the Paris Commune. The party does not aim for the conquest of the state but for its destruction:
"In this period of the development of mass action, the political party of the working class had to play a much broader role. Because the workers had not yet become the overwhelming majority of the population, the political party still appeared as the organization necessary for mobilizing the majority of the population behind the action of the workers, in the same way that the bourgeois party acted in the bourgeois revolution. Because the proletarian party had to be at the head of the state, the proletariat had to conquer the state."
Showing the evolution of capitalism after 1900 "the period of growing prosperity for capitalism", the Theses traced the development of reformism in social democracy. They had a tendency to reject the parties of the IInd International after 1900, given their evolution towards parliamentary and union opportunism. And they ignored the reaction of the revolutionary left within these parties (Lenin, Luxemburg, Pannekoek). Demonstrating very clearly that classical social democracy only had a "semblance of real democracy" and that there was a "complete split between the mass of members and the party leadership", the Theses came to a negative conclusion and failed to show the positive contribution these organizations had made to the workers' movement of the time:
"The political party ceased being a formation of working class power. It became the diplomatic representative of the workers inside capitalist society. It participated as a loyal opposition in parliament, in the organization of capitalist society."
The First World War opened up a new period, the period of the proletarian revolution. The Theses considered that it was the absolute pauperisation of the proletariat and not the change in period which was at the origin of the revolution. From this standpoint it was hard to see how the revolutionary period of 1917-23 differed from that of 1848, a period of ‘absolute pauperization' characteristic of the situation of a nascent proletariat:
"The outbreak of the world war meant that the phase of relative pauperization was followed by that of absolute pauperization. This new evolution forced the workers into a revolutionary opposition against capital. Thus, at the same time, the workers entered into conflict with social democracy."
The Theses did not fail to underline the positive gains of the post-war revolutionary wave: the spontaneous emergence of "enterprise organizations and workers' councils as organs of workers' democracy within the enterprise and as organs of local political democracy". But the Theses minimized the revolutionary significance of 1917 in Russia: all they seem to retain of 1917 is what happened afterwards - the counterrevolution and state capitalism. They even saw the Stalinist counter-revolution originating in the revolution itself. The process of degeneration was denied and the Russian workers made responsible for the failure of the Russian revolution. Thus the development of ‘state socialism' (ie state capitalism) was seen as the "result of the revolutionary struggle of the peasants and workers".
However, the Theses were quite lucid about the pernicious effect of the confusion between socialism and state capitalism in the workers' minds at that time. This confusion got in the way of a full maturation of revolutionary consciousness: "... through the Russian revolution, the state socialist conception was given a revolutionary aura and this played no small part in preventing the development of a real revolutionary consciousness in the working class."[28]
The implicit rejection of the Russian Revolution and the contribution of the Bolshevik party in 1917 led the author of the Theses to establish an identity between the revolutionary Bolshevism of the beginning, and Stalinism. For him there was no difference between Bolshevism and social democracy, "except in method". The aim of both was an "economy planned by the state".
More marginal was the definition of the role of the party and of revolutionaries in their intervention. Taking up the KAPD's conceptions in the 1920s, the Bond insisted that the role of the party was neither to guide, nor educate nor substitute itself for the working class:
"The role of the party is now restricted to that of an organization of clarification and propaganda. It no longer aspires to rule over the class."
The genesis of the party is tightly linked to the changes in capitalism - where the period "of liberal capitalism is definitively closed" - and to the transformation of the workers' class consciousness. The revolutionary struggle which gives rise to the party is above all a struggle against the state, produced by mass action. It is also a conscious struggle for organization: "The state has clearly become the mortal enemy of the working class ... In every case, the workers' struggle involves an irreconcilable opposition to the state, not only the government but the whole (state) apparatus, including the old parties and unions ... There is an indestructible connection between the three elements of the workers' struggle for emancipation: the upsurge of mass action, of organization and of consciousness."
The Theses established a dialectical interaction between the development of the revolutionary organization and the revolutionary struggle: "Thus organization develops materially and spiritually in the struggle; and with organization, the struggle itself develops."
The most significant aspect of the Theses is that they demonstrate the positive role of the revolutionary party in mass movements and define the type of revolutionary militant who corresponds to the new period. The party's field of action is clearly defined:
A. Necessity for the Party: The development of consciousness
The Theses show that the party is necessary, because it is a dialectical product of the development of class consciousness and consequently an active factor in this process of development. Here we are far indeed from the councilist vision that was to develop later on, in which unorganized revolutionaries simply dissolve themselves into the class[29]. Also rejected was the Bordigist view which makes the party a sort of general staff to which the workers are blindly subordinated. The necessity for the party derived not from a relationship of force between this organization and the class, but from an organic relationship between party and class, born out of the development of class consciousness.
"In the process through which consciousness develops in the struggle, where the struggle itself becomes conscious, the party has an important and necessary role to play. In the first place tit supports this development of consciousness. The lessons that are drawn both from victories and defeats - lessons of which the workers, taken separately, are more or less aware - are formulated by the party and disseminated among the masses through its propaganda. The ‘idea', when it seizes hold of the masses, thus becomes a material force.
The party is neither a general staff detached from the masses, nor the ‘thinking brain' of the workers. It is the focus for expressing the growing consciousness of the workers."
While the party and the class have an organic, complementary relationship within the same unity of consciousness, they are not identical. The party is the highest expression of the proletariat's class consciousness - a political and historical consciousness, not a reflection of the immediate struggle (the immediate consciousness in the class). The party is thus a part of the class.
"A part of the class, the most conscious and formed element in the struggle, the party is the first to be able to understand the dangers that threaten (the workers' struggle), the first to discern the potentiality of the new organs of power. It must struggle within them so that its opinions are used to the full by the workers. It must propagate its positions through words, and then necessary through an intervention in deed, so that its example can advance the class in its struggle."
This conception of the propagandist function of the party "through words and deeds" is identical to that of the KAPD in the 1920s. Here the Bond had almost a voluntarist conception of the party's action, where the example of the party's action is a form of struggle and even a way of inciting struggle. This definition of the party is close to that of Bordiga, for whom the party was a program and a will to action. But for the Dutch Left, the program was less a totality of theoretical and political principles than the formulation of class consciousness, or even the sum of workers' consciousnesses:
"What every workers feels, ie that the situation is intolerable and that it is absolutely necessary to destroy capitalism, must be synthesized by the party in clear formulae."
B. The tasks of the Party: Theory and Praxis
For the Communistenbond, it was clear that there could be no separation between theoretical and practical intervention. Theory was not defined as a sum of individual opinions but as a science. As the Bond had already written in January 1945: "dialectical materialism is not simply the only exact method but also the only universal method of research"[30]. Paradoxically, it was the scientist Pannekoek who in his Workers' Councils rejected the idea of materialist scientific theory, considering that an organization expressed various opinions without scientific results and without method. In contrast to the Bond in the 1945-46 period, Pannekoek defended an eclectic method, ie he rejected any method of theoretical investigation, in line with the notion that a sum of units gives you a totality. As he put it: "in each of these diverse thoughts you can find a greater or lesser portion of truth"[31]. In contrast to this, the Theses affirmed that:
"Questions must be examined in their coherence; the results must be presented in their scientific clarity and determinism."
From this method derived the tasks of the party in the proletariat:
-- the task of ‘enlightenment' and not of organization, the latter being the task of the workers in struggle. The function of organizing the class disappeared in favor of the task of clarifying the struggle. This clarification was defined negatively as an ideological and practical struggle against "all the pernicious attempts of the bourgeoisie and its accomplices to contaminate the workers' organization with its own influence";
-- the task of "practical intervention in the class struggle". Realizing this task stems from the party's understanding that it cannot "carry out the workers' functions on their behalf":
"(The party) can only intervene as a part of the class and not in contradiction with it. Its position in its intervention is solely to contribute to the deepening and extension of the power of the democracy of the councils ...".
This function of the party didn't imply passivity. In contrast to the ‘councilists' of the fifties and sixties, the Spartacusbond had no fear of affirming itself as a ‘motor' of the class struggle, taking initiatives that compensated for the hesitations of the workers:
"... when the workers hesitate to take certain measures, members of the party can, as revolutionary industrial workers, take the initiative and they even have a duty to do so when it is possible and necessary to accomplish these measures. When the workers want to abrogate the decision to take action to a union representative, conscious communists must take the initiative for an intervention by the workers themselves. When, in a more developed phase of the struggle, the enterprise organizations and the workers' councils hesitate about a problem of organizing the economy, conscious communists must not only show them the necessity for such organization; they must also study these questions themselves and convene enterprise assemblies to discuss them. Thus, their activity unfolds within the struggle and as a motor to the struggle when it stagnates or threatens to be diverted into a dead-end."
We can see here a somewhat ouvrierist interpretation of intervention in the workers' councils. The idea that party members intervene as ‘industrial workers' seems to exclude the possibility that ‘conscious communists' of an intellectual origin can defend their point of view in front of the workers as party members. By this token Marx, Lenin, and Engels would be excluded. We know that in 1918 Rosa Luxemburg was deprived of the ‘right' to intervene in the Berlin Central Council on the pretext that she was an ‘intellectual'. Those who defended the motion excluding her were SPD members who were quite aware of Luxemburg's political weight. Here, the Theses seem to hold that the ‘intellectual' members of the party are foreign to the proletariat, even though the party is defined as "a part of the class".
At the same time, it is characteristic that the intervention of the party in the councils is straightaway centered round the economic problems of the period of transition: the management of production and the "organization of the economy through the democracy of the workers' councils, the base of which is calculation of labor time." In insisting that "the necessity of organizing a planned communist economy must be clearly demonstrated", the Spartacusbond showed a tendency to underestimate the political problems which would first be posed in the proletarian revolution, ie the seizure of power by the councils, the precondition for the period of transition to communism.
C. The functioning of the Party
The Theses were silent on the question of the centralization of the party. Neither the question of fractions and tendencies, nor that of internal democracy, were posed. The Bond showed a tendency to idealize the homogeneity of the party. Just like the Bordigist Internationalist Communist Party after the war[32], it did not conceive that divergences might appear within the organization. But while the Bordigist party found ‘guarantees' against divergences in an ideal and immutable ‘program', the Spartacusbond thought it had found them in the existence of ideal militants. According to the Bond a militant was someone who was always capable of being autonomous in his understanding and his judgment:
"(The party members) must be autonomous workers, with their own capacity for understanding and judging ..."
This definition of the militant appears as a ‘categorical imperative', an individual ethic within the party. It must be stressed that the Bond thought that an entirely proletarian composition and the high quality of each militant would shield the party from the risk of bureaucratic degeneration. However, it has to be said that parties composed overwhelmingly of workers, like the CPs in the twenties and thirties, were not shielded from Stalinist bureaucratization and that the organization of the party by factory cells stifled the militants' political capacity for "understanding and judgment"[33], even that of the best militants. Furthermore, in a revolutionary party, there is no formal equality in everyone's capacities: real equality exists on the political level because the party is above all a political body whose cohesion is reflected in each one of its members. It is this body which enables its militants to tend individually towards political and theoretical homogeneity.
More profound is the Bond's rejection of a zombie-like Jesuit discipline - as in the famous watchword of the Society of Jesus ‘perinde ac cadaver' -which breaks the profound convictions of each militant:
"Adhering to the main general conceptions of the party, which are also their own conceptions, (the militants) must defend and apply them in all circumstances. They do not follow a zombie-like discipline, submitting to decisions without any will of their own. They only obey out of a deep conviction, based on a fundamental conception. In case of a conflict within the organization, it's conviction that settles things."
Thus the conception was of a freely consented organizational discipline, based on the defense of the party's main positions. It was this notion of discipline that was to be rejected a few years later by the Bond on the pretext that it infringed the free activity of each member as a "free man who thinks for himself".
There is a very important idea contained in the Theses. The party is not just a program, but is composed of men animated by a revolutionary passion. This passion, which the Bond called ‘conviction', was to protect the party from any tendency towards degeneration:
"This self-activity of the members, this general education and conscious participation in the workers' struggle makes it impossible for any bureaucracy to arise in the party. On the organizational level, there can be no effective measures against this (danger) if this self activity and education are missing. In that case the party can no longer be seen as a communist party. In a real communist party, whose fundamental idea is the self-activity of the class, this idea is incarnated in the flesh and bones of each one of its members. A party with a communist program can end up degenerating, perhaps; a party composed of communists, never."
Traumatized by the Russian experience, the Bond thought that militant will and theoretical formation constituted sufficient guarantees against the threat of degeneration. It thus tended to build up the image of a pure militant not subjected individually to the pressure of bourgeois ideology. Holding that the party is a sum of individuals following a ‘higher calling', the Theses express a certain voluntarism, even a naive idealism. The separation between the program, which is the fruit of constant theoretical research, and militant will, led to the rejection of the idea of a party as a programmatic and organic body. If the party is just a sum of individual wills, it can no longer be an organ irrigating the totality of its militant cells. A couple of years later, the Bond was to push this separation to an extreme.
D. The link with the class
Born out of the mass action of the proletariat, the party can in the end only find ‘guarantees' through its links with the proletariat.
"When this link doesn't exist, when the party is an organ which situates itself outside the class, there is no choice but to put oneself outside the class in a defeatist manner, or to force its leadership on the class. Thus, the party can only be truly revolutionary if it is anchored in the masses to such an extent that its activity is not, in general, distinct from that of the proletariat, and if the will, the aspirations and the conscious understanding of the working class are crystallized in the party."
In this definition the link with the class seems contradictory. The party catalyses the consciousness of the class in struggle and simultaneously fuses with the proletariat. The Bond only sees any contradiction between party and class when there is a process of degeneration, when the ‘link' is lost. The reason for this is that the revolutionaries of that period were haunted by the fear of a repetition of the horrors of the counter-revolution in Russia. But it needs to be said that the correspondence between the historic goals of the proletariat and those of the party doesn't mean a fusion. The history of the workers' movement, in particular, the Russian and German revolutions, is the history of the tormented relationship between party and class. In a revolutionary period, the party can be in disagreement with the actions of the class; thus in July 1917 the Bolsheviks were in disagreement with the working masses of Petrograd who wanted prematurely to take power. And like Luxemburg's Spartacusbund, the party can also be in agreement with the ‘will of the masses' when they are anxious to take power, as in Berlin 1919, which ended in the decapitation of the party. In fact, the ‘fusion' between party and masses is rarely achieved. Even in a revolutionary period and much more so in a counter-revolutionary phase, the party often has to go ‘against the stream' rather than with it. While being a ‘part of the class' - as the Theses put it - it is distinct from the totality of the class as long as its principles and its activity are not fully accepted by the mass of workers, or even encounter their hostility.
E. Party and state in the revolution
The Theses of December 1945 did not raise the problem of the relationship between party and state after the seizure of power. The question[34] was raised within the Bond and in March 1946 there appeared a pamphlet which devoted a chapter to this problem: ‘Van slavenmaatschannij tot arbeidersmacht' ('From slave society to workers' power'). It affirmed that the party can neither take power nor ‘govern' the workers. Indeed, "whatever party forms the government, it must govern against men, for capital and a bureaucracy"[35]. This is why the party, which acts within the workers' councils, is distinct from the state:
"It is a very different party from those of bourgeois society. It does not itself participate in any form of power ... the proletarian seizure of power is neither the conquest of the state government by a ‘workers' party' nor the participation of such a party in a state government ... the state as such is by essence completely alien to the power of the workers; thus the forms of organization of workers' power have none of the characteristics of the exertion of power by the state."
But in 1946, in contrast to what happened later, it was Pannekoek who was influenced by the Communistenbond! In his Five Theses on the Class Struggle[36] he affirmed - in contrast with his previous position -"that the work of (revolutionary) parties was an indispensable part of the self-emancipation of the working class", It's true that he reduced the function of these parties to a purely theoretical and propagandist one:
"It's the parties who have the second function (the first being the ‘conquest of political power'- ed), that is to disseminate knowledge and ideas, to study, discuss and formulate social ideas and enlighten the minds of the masses through propaganda."
The divergences which appeared in the Bond on the conception of the party - during the preparation for the Christmas 1945 Congress - were more in the nature of nuances than a rejection of the Theses. In any case, they were a rejection of Pannekoek's educationist theory. In another set of draft Theses - accepted by two members out of five of the political commission - it was stressed that "the new party is not the educator of the class". This draft aimed mainly at making more precise certain points that were somewhat vague in ‘Taak en Wezen van de nieuwe Partij'. In the first place - to clearly mark the break with Sneevliet's RSAP - ‘tactical' participation in parliament was firmly rejected: "The party does not of course participate in any parliamentary activity." In the second place, the author of the draft saw in the Theses a return to the activist conceptions of the KAPD, or rather of ‘leadership' tendencies in the mass struggle:
"The party does not lead any action and, as a party, does not conduct any action of the class. It's task is precisely to combat any subordination of the class, and its movements, to the leadership of a political group."[37]
In this spirit, the new party "does not recognize any ‘leaders'; it simply executes the decisions of its members ... As long as a decision subsists, it is valid for all members."
Chardin
(to be continued)
[1] Of Sneevliet's two sons, one committed suicide and the other died in Spain with the POUM militia fighting under the banner of anti-fascism, a victim of the positions of the RSAP.
[2] The Munis group, exiled in Mexico during the war, took internationalist positions on the nondefense of Russia. The RKD also came from Trotskyism and was composed of French and Austrian militants. It worked with the French Fraction of the Communist Left at the end of the war. Little by little it went towards anarchism and disappeared in 1948-49.
[3] The studies of Max Pesthus and Wim Bot on the MLL Front based on studies of German archives in Holland give no basis for this hypothesis.
[4] Winkel in his book De Ondergrondse pers 1940-45 (Hague 1954) asserts that the ex-head of the KAPN and friend of Gorter, Bavend Luteraan was the editor of the CRM. It seems that during the war Luteraan created his own group on the basis of Trotskyist positions. After the war, he became a member of the Dutch Social Democracy (Labor Party).
[5] The ‘Bolshevik-Leninist Group' was constituted on the basis of the positions of the IVth International in 1938 and disappeared during the war, after the arrest of the leadership. The CRM proclaimed itself a party in December 1945, even though very small, under the name Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). It published the weekly De Tribune which had nothing to do with the Tribunism of the SPD in the days of Gorter.
[6] After the war, suspicion fell on Stan Poppe. Sneevliet had been arrested after his visit to Poppe. In the Sneevliet trial records it was said that Sneevliet was arrested "with Poppe's help". An enquiry commission was formed in 1950 made up of the RCP, Communistenbond and a small independent union, the OVB. The commission unanimously arrived at the conclusion that Poppe's attitude was above reproach and that no blame could fall on him.
[7] 300,000 people out of a population of 6 million inhabitants lived in clandestinity with false papers and false ration cards in Holland.
[8] See Spartacus, Bulletin van de revolutionairsocialistische Arbeidersbeweging in Nederland, Jan 1944.
[9] See Vereeken, Le Guipeau dans le mouvement Trotskyiste, Paris 1975, 1st chapter.
[10] See Spartacus no.4, Oct.1942 and in the same review, the issue of Feb.1944 in the article ‘De Sowiet-Unie en Wij' (the Soviet Union and US).
[11] ‘De perspectiven van het imperialisme na de vorlag in Europa en de taak van de revolutionaire socialisten' Dec 43. It is remarkable that this pamphlet whose theses are very far from council communism is given as the political basis of the Bond in 1945 without any criticism of the theses. See Spartacus Maanschrift voor de revolutionair-socialistische Arbeidersbeweging, May 1945, Beschonwingen over de situatie: de balans.
[12] See Prometeo, no.3, Oct.1946, ‘Le Prospettiva del dopoguerra in relazione alle piattaforma del Partito' (Post-war Perspectives in relation to the Party Platform). The author of this article, Bordiga, asserts that "western democracies are gradually moving towards totalitarian and fascist forms". In using these terms, Bordiga, like the Dutch Left, meant to emphasize the state capitalist tendencies in the countries of Western Europe.
[13] The Bond published a study of factory occupations in Italy ‘Een bedrijfsbezetting' (‘Factory Occupations') in its theoretical review Maanblad Spartacus in 1945 (nos. 9 & 12). This study asserts that in 1920 "The factories formed a unity which was not attached to a party as a union". "the movement ended with a compromise between the bosses and the unions". The text showed that factory occupations are not enough and that there must be workers' councils whose "first task is not managing industry but organizing struggle. A period of war will exist - civil war". This criticism of the factory occupations in Italy is very different from the factoryist view of ‘production management' by the councils defended later in the Bond by Pannekoek.
[14] For the history of the fusion between the ex-GIC and the Communistenbond, a letter from Canne Meijer of 30 June, 1946, to the paper Le Proletaire (RKD-CR) provides some useful details. In 1944 Canne Meijer wrote a discussion text on workers' democracy entitled ‘Arbeiders-democratie in de bedrijven', in Spartacus, no.1, Jan. 1945. Bruun van Albada published a study of the marxist method as a scientific, dialectical method of investigation: ‘Het marxisme als methode van onderzoek'.
[15] "... they were only ‘guests' (Canne Meijer notes in the same letter) doing all the work ... along with the comrades of the Bond but they took care not to interfere organizationally."
[16] In 1943 and 1944, however, members of the Bond participated in the creation of a little clandestine union Eenheidsvakbewweging. For the history of this union, see De Eenheidsvakcentrale (EVC) 1943-48. Groningen, 1976, by Coomans, T. de Jonge and E. Nijhof.
[17] In the letter of 30 June 1946, already mentioned, Canne Meijer thought that the Bond was part of the development of a "new workers' movement which was not an ‘opposition' to the old one, nor its ‘left', nor its ‘ultra-left' but a movement with another basis."
[18] Letter of Canne-Meijer in 27 June 1946, in the paper Le Proletaire. In 1946 the circulation of Spartacus fell to 4000 copies.
[19] The Statutes are in the internal bulletin of the Bond Uit eigen kring (In our circle), no.5, Oct.1945.
[20] A decision of the Conference of 21-22 July 1945, where twenty-one militants of the ‘Kerne' of Leiden, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, HilversumBussum were present. See Uit eigen Kring, no.2, August 1945.
[21] "The nucleus is autonomous in its own circle. It decides the admission and exclusion of its members. The central Executive Commission must first be consulted for admissions and exclusions". By this point of the Statutes, the autonomy of the nuclei remained limited in theory, all the more so because organizational discipline was affirmed: "The nucleus (main nucleus) are supposed to observe the decisions made by the Conference of the Bond and disseminate the principles of the Bond, as they are established by the Conferences of the Bond."
[22] Uit eigen kring, no.l, April 1945.
[23] Uit eigen kring, no.2, August 1945:
"The conference agrees to reject any collaboration with the CRM. The decision is made not to hold any discussion with the CRM."
[24] Uit eigen kring no.4, August 1945, draft inaugural address "to the manual and intellectual workers of all countries".
[25] The proposal to establish an information secretariat in Brussels came from ‘Against the Stream' and the Communisten Centre. The conference agreed. (Cf Uit eigen kring no.2, August 1945, point 8 of the resolution)
[26] The Theses, which was one of three draft Theses, appeared in Uit eigen kring, no.8, Dec. 1945, then as a pamphlet in January 1946. The two other drafts were put under discussion without being rejected.
[27] The Theses weren't questioned until 1951. Draft amendments were submitted to the organization by the Amsterdam group. (Cf Uit Eigen kring, 20 October 1951.
[28] In 1943, Pannekoek himself, despite his analysis of the Russian Revolution as ‘bourgeois' showed that October 1917 had a positive effect on class consciousness:
"Then, like a shining star in a sombre sky, the Russian Revolution illuminated the whole earth. Everywhere hope came to the masses. They became less receptive to their masters' orders, because they heard the appeals coming out of Russia; appeals to end the war, appeals for fraternity between the workers of all countries, appeals for the world revolution against capitalism." (The Workers' Councils)
[29] Cf Bordiga in Party and Class, 1921 (republished in Le Fils du Temps, no.8, Oct.1971): "A party lives when there lives a doctrine and a method of action. A party is a school of political thought and, consequently, an organization of struggle. First of all, there is a factor of consciousness; then a factor of will, or more exactly, a tendency towards a final goal."
[30] Cf Spartacus, Maandschrift voor de Revolutionaire-socialistische Arbeidersbeweging, no.l, ‘Het marxisme als methode van onderzoek', an article written by Van Albada, who was an astronomer.
[31] cf The Workers' Councils.
[32] Bordiga's Internationalist Communist Party saw itself as a ‘monolithic' party in which no ‘liberty of theory' could exist. Internal debates were made impossible by the ‘organic centralism' of a leadership which saw marxism as a matter of ‘conserving the doctrine'. In the Bond, internal debates existed, but its statutes did not define the framework in which they had to take place.
[33] Cf Bordiga, L'Unita, no.172, 26 July 1925:
"... leaders of a working class origin have shown themselves to be at least as capable as the intellectuals of opportunism and, in general, more susceptible to being absorbed by bourgeois influences ... We say that the worker, in the factory cell, will tend to discuss only particular questions of interest to the workers in his enterprise."
[34] A second set of draft theses on the party raised this question. It explicitly rejected the idea of the party taking and exercising power. Cf ‘Stellingen, taak en wezen van de Partij', thesis 9, in Uit eigen kring, no.7, Dec.1945.
[35] The pamphlet was one of the programmatic foundations of the Bond. It examined the question of power through the evolution of class societies from antiquity to capitalist society.
[36] Pannekoek's ‘Five Theses' were republished by Informations et Correspondence Ouvriere (ICO) in the pamphlet: The Generalized Strike in France, May-June 1968, supplement to ICO, no.72.
[37] Uit eigen kring, no.7, Dec.1945, ‘Stellingen over begrip en wezen van de partij' (‘Theses on the concept and essence of the party'). These Theses formed the third draft submitted to discussion by the Bond's Congress.
In the previous issue of the International Review (No.37) we dealt with the international resurgence of class struggle. Following the defeat of the proletariat in Poland and the reflux in class struggle which ensued in 1981 and 1982, we have recently witnessed a massive resurgence of the struggles throughout the world and principally in Western Europe.
This resurgence confirms that the working class is refusing to put up with more belt-tightening, that it doesn't accept sacrificing itself in order to ‘save the national economy'; that the bourgeoisie has neither succeeded in obtaining social peace, nor any support for its immediate economic projects: the slashing of wages, massive lay-offs, generalized misery. This social indiscipline of the proletariat signifies that the bourgeoisie does not possess the political means to unleash a third world war, despite the intensification of inter-imperialist rivalries and conflicts. Incapable of making the accumulation of misery acceptable, which doesn't mean that it won't succeed in imposing a large part of it, the bourgeoisie is all the more incapable of imposing the greatest sacrifices up to the ultimate one which would open the road to the capitalist conclusion to the crisis: generalized war.
We continue therefore to affirm that the historic course of the period opened up at the end of the ‘60s is towards class confrontations and not towards war.
In the 1980s, the ‘years of truth', the bourgeoisie can no longer delay its economic attacks against the working class. This attack is not improvised, but has been prepared over several years now by the ruling class, at the international level:
-- at the political level, through the implementation of the ‘left in opposition', in other words outside all governmental responsibility;
-- at the economic level, through the planning by organs such as the IMF or the OECD, or by inter-state agreements, of the economic attack against the working class.
We have frequently elaborated this question in the pages of the International Review (notably in No.31, "Machiavellianism, and the Consciousness and Unity of the Bourgeoisie") and in our territorial press. We will not return to the question here. It is certainly an internationally coordinated, planned and organized attack against which the working class has been defending itself since the end of 1983[1].
The Silence of the Press
The silence, the various lies developed by the bourgeois media, cannot prevent revolutionary groups from recognizing this resurgence. Since last September, all the countries of Europe have been affected by strikes, by massive and determined reactions of the proletariat. Without neglecting the hunger revolts in Tunisia, Morocco, and recently in Santo Domingo, it is necessary to insist that the movements which have once more swept the USA, Japan (22,000 dockers on strike) and above all Britain, Germany, Belgium, Holland, France, Spain, Italy, etc, are taking place in the historic centre of capitalism, and on this account acquire a particular importance.
Despite the blackout of press coverage, we are aware (and one of the tasks of revolutionaries is to spread the news) that:
-- in Spain, "the workers under attack have begun to defend themselves against the plans of the government. Not a single day passed without a new strike breaking out..." (Der Spiegel, 20.2.84). Involved in the strike were workers from SEAT, General Motors, textile workers, Iberia (aviation) the railways, the public service sector, the steel industry (Sagunto) and the shipyards;
-- on March 24th, 700,000 workers demonstrated in Rome against plans to eliminate the ‘scala mobile' (inflation-linked pay compensation scheme);
-- on March 12 and 13, 135,000 miners launched a strike in Britain which has continued ever since;
-- in France, after Talbot and the post office, it's now the steel sector, the shipyards, the mines and the automobile industry which are featuring in the workers' reactions;
-- in May, in the paradise of social peace - in West Germany - the strike launched by the unions around the 35-hour week is the response of the bourgeoisie to the combativity of the workers which has begun to express itself in a series of spontaneous wildcat strikes.
From the movement of the general strike in the public sector in Belgium in September 1983, to the present strike of the metal workers in Germany, it's the entire international proletariat which is returning to the road of the class struggle, to the refusal of the logic of sacrifices which capitalism offers us.
The weapons of the bourgeoisie
1. The Campaigns of Diversion
The silence and lies of the press are not the only weapons used by the bourgeoisie. The organization of campaigns of diversion allows for confusion, a demobilization of the workers -- essentially those who have not yet entered the struggle. This was the whole thrust of the pacifist demonstration organized by the left and the leftists in the middle of the public service sector strikes in Belgium and Holland last autumn. The utilization of the "aerialoil-detection" fraud campaign invented during the Talbot strike in France, the fuss made over the financing of political parties in Germany -- what a sudden outburst of honesty! -- at the moment when the metal workers'' strike began, are intended to enable the workers' struggles to be passed over in silence. All these campaigns (and there have been many others, too) create a smokescreen to hide the reaction of the workers, thereby reinforcing their isolation.
2. False Appeals for Extension
Faced with sectors of the class which are already on strike, these smokescreens are not sufficient. Today, the one thing the bourgeoisie is afraid of is the extension, the real coordination of the strikes. It can no longer prevent proletarian reactions; it is no longer capable of doing so. And so it tries to smother them in despair and isolation. Since the proletariat is not an amorphous mass incapable of reflection, the bourgeoisie has to develop themes which permit this isolation and this division. This task falls primarily to the loyal servants of capital, the trade unions: enclosing the workers in dead-ends, in the defense of the national economy, in the "produce French, consume French" slogan of the CGT (the trade union of the French CP), in opposing the workers of one region to those of another such as in Belgium, of one sector against another as in Holland where the unions during the public sector strike proposed a ... reduction of wages in the private sector!
It becomes more and more obvious that workers, who are isolated, dispersed by region, by industrial sector, are destined for defeat. The concern for the necessity of extension is affirmed more strongly each time. In order to oppose this will, to empty it of its proletarian content, the bourgeoisie does not hesitate to take the lead. It proposes false extensions, false generalizations, and false solidarity.
We have already seen how the unions have ‘generalized' the struggle of the railway and postal workers in Belgium towards the less combative and more easily controlled public sector The bourgeoisie uses base unionism in order to workers. In doing so, they wipe out a real extension in order to assure complete control over the strike. It was in the attempt to achieve the same goal that the CGT organized, called for and supervised, under the ‘protection' of its stewards and wardens, the ‘March on Paris' of the steel workers on the 13th of April. It was in pursuit of this same goal also that the ‘March on Rome' of the 24th March was organized. The same goes for the union of the Spanish CP, the ‘workers commissions' who, along with the leftists have appealed for a ‘March on Madrid' on the 6th March aimed at enforcing the same isolation and dispersion as the Belgian FGT.
3. Base Unionism
The accumulation of all these maneuvers damages the image of the unions among the workers even more. And despite the radicalization of their image, they have not succeeded in reversing the drop in union membership, in preventing their leaders from being more and more jeered and shouted down as soon as they appear and, above all, in keeping complete control over the workers' reactions. This is the point where critical, ‘radical' unionism sets in, tending to bring back into the union prison those workers who are turning their backs on it, and trying to avoid the unmasking of the unions as a whole. It is base unionism, rank-and-file unionism, the ‘Collectif' of 1979/84 which at Longwy has corralled the workers into ‘commando actions' serving only to isolate them all the more in ‘their' region, ‘their' town, ‘their' factory. It is the ‘coordination groups of the trade unionist forces', the committees of solidarity and struggle which, with Camacho -- the leader of the Spanish ‘workers' commissions' -- have promoted a hypothetical ‘general strike' on some as yet unspecified date which ... only the unions should decide on.
The best example of the dirty work accomplished by base unionism is in Italy. It would have taken the official unions a great deal of time to mobilize so many people -- but 700,000 workers responded with the ‘March on Rome' called by the ‘national assembly of factory councils'. It must be said that these ‘factory councils' are councils in name only. It's not the first time that the bourgeoisie has usurped words and names of the proletariat in order to disfigure their real meaning, their class content. These councils are nothing but a trade union structure, the base of which has existed since 1969. They are quite the reverse of organs produced by the struggle, controlled and directed by the workers united in their general assemblies. Created at the end of the movement of 1969 to keep the struggles enclosed in the factories and workshops, they return to the scene today, having constituted a nation-wide base unionist organization credible in the eyes of the workers, ready for use from the beginning of the movement. It serves therefore to streamline the official unions. The motto of the ‘factory councils' of the Italian leftists is "we are not against the unions: we are the unions."
The bourgeoisie uses base unionism in order to empty the struggle of its content and take control through an application of the tactics of ‘a free hand for the base', of ‘recognizing all the actions'. One of the arguments of base unionism is to make workers believe that through their struggle, their determination, their combativity, they can exert pressure on the unions in order to push them to give their recognition or to take the struggle in hand. In this way they constantly draw the workers back into the union prison, in taking up the arguments of the radicalization of their language.
These alterations in the language of the unions reveal their true meaning in those strikes, such as at Citroen or Talbot in France where the employers announced a greater number of lay-offs than was really necessary, in order to permit the unions to show off their radical image in refusing any retreat, and allowing them finally to get people to believe in their victory, in their effectiveness in making the bourgeoisie ‘back down' by ‘reducing' the number of lay-offs ... to the levels originally planned! And so, at Talbot, having announced 3,000 lay-offs, ‘only' 2,000 were finally sacked, ‘thanks' to the energetic reactions of the unions.
Even if this tactic is not new, its coordinated application by employers and unions is becoming increasingly common today.
4. The Utilization of Repression
The state cannot allow itself a blind and frontal repression against the workers' struggles which are presently developing. This would only have the opposite of the desired effect: one acceleration of the coming to consciousness of the workers that it is the entire bourgeoisie, the state, which has to be confronted. However, the state needs to display its presence and its force. And therefore it makes use of selective repression. It tends to create points of fixation in order to divert the combativity of the workers.
This is the reason behind the court actions against the miners union in Britain over the organization of strike pickets. Moreover, this enhances the credibility of the union by giving it a martyr's halo. The British bourgeoisie hasn't hesitated to arrest over 500 miners to date. This was also the aim at Talbot in France in allowing the hired militia of the bosses to intervene against the workers on strike under the noses of the police. The same thing at Longwy with the "punch up" and "commando" operations. This is also what has happened at Sagunto in Spain with the violent repression against a workers' demonstration. This is a favorable terrain for base unionism, for the leftists, who are therefore able to benefit from state violence through their need for victims in order to give their actions credibility. The utilization of selective violence and the violence of leftism are perfectly complementary and comprise a unity.
5. Keeping the Left in Opposition
In order to be fully effective, all the obstacles which the bourgeoisie places in the path of the proletariat require the existence of an apparent opposition to governments charged with attacking the working class. In order to gain the confidence of the workers and in order to play on their illusions and weaknesses, the maintenance of a workerist language by the important left parties allows for a credible and effective deployment of the obstacles previously mentioned. The return of the SPD into opposition in Germany last year made possible the organization of powerful pacifist demonstrations. Today it permits the DGB trade unions to organize preemptively a strike movement around the 35-hour issue, with the goal of exhausting and demoralizing the workers' combativity which was beginning to express itself spontaneously. Equally, the calling of pacifist demonstrations in Italy corresponds to a more pronounced opposition of the CP in relation to the government and to a radicalization of its language; just like the GCIL which, in developing a base unionism of the ‘factory council' breed, tries to occupy the social terrain. Although participating in government, the French CP is trying to follow the example of the Italian and Spanish CPs, and of the German and Belgian SPs, in appearing to be opposed to the attack mounted against the working class. This is the reason be behind the ever-growing criticism which its trade union - the CGT - is making against Mitterand.
For the bourgeoisie, the time has not yet come for changing the deployment of its political apparatus in face of the proletariat. On the contrary, it needs to reinforce the policy of the ‘left in opposition' in confronting the working class.
The characteristics of present struggles
The present resurgence of struggles signifies that the proletariat - on the one hand, under attack economically and on the other hand maturing and reflecting on its defeat in Poland, progressively losing both its illusions in a way out of the capitalist crisis and its confidence in the left parties and the unions - is returning to the path of its class combat through the defense of its living conditions, through the struggle against capital.
The necessity to maintain the left in opposition, the need for a political force of the bourgeoisie to be present in the struggles in order to control, sabotage and divide them, has been the tactic employed since 1979-80. The present resurgence of the class struggle reveals the progressive wearing out of this tactic. In the majority of the west European countries, the existence of the big left parties in "opposition" is no longer sufficient to prevent the upsurge of struggles.
At the same time as the card of the left in opposition progressively wears out, the present workers' struggles express equally the end of the illusions concerning the economic renewal of capitalism. The illusions maintained by the left and the unions concerning the protectionist, nationalist, or ‘anti-capitalist' solutions of the ‘make the rich pay' variety, tend to collapse more and more. This is what is expressed in the refusal of the steel workers, whether in Spain or in France, to be fooled by the plans for ‘industrial reorganization' or for ‘retraining'. The same thing is expressed all the more by the return of the workers of the USA and West Germany to the path of struggle after two years in which they accepted wage cuts in order to ‘save' their companies.
The maturation of consciousness in the working class proceeds today via the recognition of the bourgeois character of the left as a whole, the inevitability of the deepening of the crisis of capitalism and that only determined, massive and generalized workers' struggle can open an alternative perspective to the continued degradation of its living conditions. This progressive maturation is expressed in the very characteristics of the struggles unfolding today before our eyes:
-- a tendency towards the upsurge of spontaneous movements expressing a certain overflowing of the unions;
-- a tendency towards large-scale movements;
-- a growing simultaneity of struggles at the international level;
-- the slow rhythm of the development of these struggles.
1. A Tendency Towards the Upsurge of Spontaneous struggles
Whether we take the public sector strike in Belgium which began without the unions in September ‘83; the rejection of the agreement drawn up by the unions and the employers by 65,000 shipyard workers in October ‘83 in Britain; the struggle of 15,000 miners without union approval the same month in the same country; the criticisms made by and the disgust of the Talbot workers with the unions in December ‘83; the violent, spontaneous demonstrations of the steel and shipyard workers in France in March ‘84; whether in Spain at General Motors or in Germany where wildcat strikes broke out in Duisburg (Thyssen) and Bremen (Klockner) or even the hunger revolts in Tunisia, Morocco, the Dominican Republic, in Brazil, etc - all these workers' reactions express a general tendency towards a spontaneous overflowing of the unions.
The unions no longer succeed in preventing workers' reactions even if, for the most part, they still, succeed in keeping control. The coming to consciousness concerning the anti-working class role of the unions grows. The lies about their working class character, about the possibility and necessity to utilize them, about their indispensability, are unmasked more and more.
2. The Tendency Towards Large Scale Movements
Millions of workers throughout the world, and particularly in the major centers of capitalism, have and are continuing to participate in the present struggles. As we have already noted, large-scale movements have hit and are continuing to hit the whole of western Europe, the USA, South America, both North and southern Africa, India etc. Moreover, every sector has been affected by the workers' reactions: the public services, the car industry, steel, shipbuilding, mining etc.
Inevitably, the workers learn of the existence of these movements. Inevitably, in order to break out of their isolation, the question of the extension and the coordination of struggles are posed. At the beginning the answer was given by the railwaymen at Liege and Charleroi (Belgium) who went to the postal workers and succeeded in drawing them into the strike of last September. The miners in Britain have come out on strike against massive lay-offs. 10,000 flying pickets appealed for extension, and on the 12th and 13th March 135,000 miners ceased work. That also is a beginning of a response to the question of extension.
Extension, however, is not solely directed to towards workers who still have a job. Those who are out of work are just as concerned by the struggles of their class. We have seen how unemployed workers have joined demonstrations of workers in Longwy and Sagunto. In the Dominican Republic the unemployed, 40 per cent of the population, have participated in the workers' revolt against price rises of basic foodstuffs. The same goes for Tunisia and Morocco last winter.
3. The Simultaneity of Struggles
At no time either during the first wave of workers' struggles (‘68-‘74) or during the second wave of ‘78-‘80 was there such a degree of simultaneity. And each of us knows the price which the proletariat in Poland paid for this: the incapacity to break with the entanglements of bourgeois propaganda on the specificities of ‘the east' in the mass strike of August ‘80; the incapacity of the workers' struggles to break the international isolation of the proletariat. Today, this simultaneity is merely a juxtaposition of workers' struggles, and not the international generalization of the class struggle. However, the idea of generalization is already making progress. In the general assemblies, the workers of Charleroi, up against the unions, reacted to the bitter clashes between the workers and the French police at Longwy by shouting "to Longwy! to Longwy!" Make no mistake, the strikes in Europe, particularly (though for different reasons) in Germany and in France, have captured the attention and aroused the interest of the workers.
4. Self-Organization
Up to now the proletariat has not extended, coordinated, not to mention generalized its combat. As long as the workers do not come to challenge the union control of their struggles, as long as they don't succeed in taking them into their own hands, as long as they don't confront the unions concerning the goals and the control over the movement, they cannot organize the extension. In other words, the importance of self-organization in response to immediate needs is primordial in every struggle today.
It is up to the general assemblies to decide on and to organize the extension and the coordination. It is up to them to send mass delegations or delegates to call for strikes in the other factories, to nominate, and if necessary at any moment to revoke the delegates. In fact, up to now the bourgeoisie has succeeded in emptying all the existing assemblies of their content.
Without self-organization, without general assemblies, there can be no real extension, never mind the international generalization of class struggle, But without this extension, the rare examples of self-organization, of general assemblies in Belgium, France, and Spain lose their function and their political content and allow the bourgeoisie and its unions to occupy the terrain. The workers are in the process of understanding that the organization of the extension can only be achieved at the price of combating trade unionism.
5. The Slow Rhythm of the Development of the Struggles
The present difficulties in the self-organization of the working class are only the most obvious result of the slow progress of the present development of the struggles. The economic attack is, however, very strong. Some people see in these difficulties and in the slowness of the resurgence, in the absence of a ‘qualitative leap' towards the mass strike overnight, an extreme weakening of the proletariat. They are confounding the conditions of struggle facing the proletariat in the major industrial and historical countries of capitalism with the conditions prevailing in the countries of the ‘third-world' or of the Russian bloc such as Poland. Before being able to unleash the mass strike and an international generalization, the proletariat must face up to and surmount the obstacles placed in its path by the bourgeoisie - the left in opposition and the unions - and at the same time organize the control and the extension of its struggles. This process necessitates a coming to consciousness and a collective reflection on the part of the class, drawing the lessons of the past and of the present struggles. The slow rhythm of the resurgence of struggles, far from constituting an insurmountable weakness, is the product of the slow but profound maturation of consciousness in the working class. We affirm therefore that we are only at the beginning of this wave of struggle.
The reason for this slowness is due to the necessity to take up again the lessons which were posed during the previous wave, but which have not been resolved: the lack of extension in the dockers strike in Rotterdam in 1979; the absence of general assemblies at Longwy-Denain the same year; the base unionist sabotage of the steel strike in Britain; the necessity for an international generalization after the mass strike in Poland; the role of the ‘left in opposition' in the reflux and at the end of this wave of struggles.
But, as opposed to ‘78-‘80, it is the totality of these questions which the workers find themselves confronted with in each struggle today. It's not one question which is raised in each struggle, but all of them at one go. Therein lies the slowness of the present rhythm of the struggles. Therein lies the difficulty but also the profundity of the maturation of consciousness in the working class.
6. The Present Particular Role of the Proletariat in France
In the coming to consciousness of the international proletariat, its sector in France has a particular responsibility, be it temporary and limited. As a result of the accidental arrival of the left in power following the election of May and June 1981, this country presently constitutes a cleavage in the international deployment of forces of the bourgeoisie. The participation in government of the left parties, the SP and the CP, is a serious weakness for the international bourgeoisie.
If the mass strike of August 1980 in Poland has contributed considerably to the destruction of the mystification of the ‘socialist' character of the Eastern bloc, the present development of struggles in France cannot but contribute to unmasking the mystification and the lies hawked by the left in the other countries and weakening these same parties in the workers midst.
The sacking of thousands of workers by this government, the support it has received from the unions, the strikes themselves such as in the public sector (post office, railways) or in the car industry (Talbot, Citroen), the violent confrontations between the police and the ‘left' and the steel and shipyard workers (Longwy, Marseilles, Dunkerque) can only accelerate the recognition within the entire working class of the bourgeois character of the left parties of capital. On this coming to consciousness by the proletariat depends to a great extent the development of the class struggle up to the proletarian revolution.
The role of communists
There is another part of the proletariat which plays a particular role, which cannot be measured with the same scale as the previous one. This part carries a historical, permanent and universal responsibility. It consists of the communist minorities, the revolutionaries.
"Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary movement", wrote Lenin in What Is To Be Done? Without a communist program, without a clear position in the class struggle, no proletarian revolution is possible. Without political organization, without a programme, no clear position and therefore no revolution. The struggle of the working class can only develop in affirming and maintaining its autonomy from the bourgeoisie. The workers' autonomy depends on the political clarity of the movement of struggle itself. As an integral part of the working class, its political minorities have an indispensable and irreplaceable role in this necessary political clarification. The political groups of the proletariat have the responsibility of participating and intervening in the process of coming to consciousness of the working class. They accelerate and push to the limit this collective reflection of their class. This is why it is important:
-- that they recognize the present resurgence of the workers' struggles after the defeat in Poland;
-- that they denounce the ‘left in opposition' as a major obstacle thrown up by the bourgeoisie to the workers' struggles;
-- that they understand that Western Europe is the key, the epicenter of the renewal of the struggles today and of their development;
-- that they recognize that the historic course is, since the end of the sixties, towards class confrontations and not towards imperialist war.
Only this general understanding can allow for a clear intervention:
-- the denunciation of unionism in all its forms. We have seen the disastrous effects of the Solidarnosc union in Poland after the mass strike of August ‘80. It wasn't only a very great portion of the workers who were blinded and at sea concerning the profoundly syndicalist and capitalist character of Solidarnosc, but also numerous revolutionary elements and groups. The rejection and the overcoming of unionism in the organization of the extension by the workers themselves requires the unyielding and unwavering denunciation of the unions, of base unionism and its proponents, by the communist minorities, organized for that purpose. This is indispensable and determining for overcoming the traps of the bourgeoisie.
-- putting forward perspectives of struggle through the organization of the extension and of the generalization in the general assemblies. This is a permanent fight which has to be taken to the most combative and advanced workers, and, among them, the small communist groups in the struggles, in the assemblies, to organize the extension and the coordination against the trade unionism which opposes it.
Intervention, propaganda, the political combat of revolutionaries will determine more and more the capacity of the proletariat as a whole to reject the traps laid by the bourgeoisie and its unions in the struggles. The bourgeoisie for its part does not hesitate to ‘intervene', to be present, to occupy the terrain in order to block the development of the coming to consciousness of the workers, to obscure the political questions, to divert the struggles into dead ends. Here is the necessity for communist minorities to struggle within the class (the assemblies) to expose the maneuvers of the bourgeoisie and of all its agents, and to trace a clear perspective for the movement. "The revolutionary organization is the best defense of workers' autonomy". (IR, no 24, page 12 ‘On the Role of Revolutionaries')
These communist minorities, theoretically, politically, materially organized and "therefore the most resolute fraction of the proletariat" of all countries, the fraction which pushes forward the others (in accordance with the idea of Communist Manifesto). Revolutionary groups must march in the front line of the proletarian combat. They ‘direct' in the sense of orienting the working class towards the development of its struggles, along the road of the proletarian revolution. This development passes today via the inseparable necessities of self-organization and extension of the struggles against the unions.
That is the task that the ICC has assigned itself. It is the whole meaning of our combat in the movement of the present struggles.
R. L.
[1] On this subject, we want to correct a formulation which we have often used, in particular in the ‘Theses on the Present Resurgence of Class Struggle' in the International Review No 37: on page 4, point 2, it is said that: "it is the working class which holds the historic initiative, which on a global level has gone onto the offensive against the bourgeoisie..." It is true that the working class holds the key to the historic situation in the sense that its combat will decide its outcome in capitalist barbarism or in the proletarian revolution and communism. On the other hand, it is wrong to say that the working class has moved onto the offensive against capitalism. To move onto the offensive means for the proletariat that it is on the eve of the revolution, in a period of dual power, organized in workers' councils, that it is consciously preparing to attack the bourgeois state and to destroy it. We are still far away from that.
Belgium-Holland
Crisis and class struggle
If we have decided to publish in the IR a report devoted to the political, economic and social situation in two European countries, this is precisely because they are in no way particular or specific, but are exemplary expressions of the proletarian condition in all the industrialized countries.
The vicious austerity in these two countries, which only a few years ago boasted some of the highest living standards in Europe, and an enviable level of ‘social security’, highlights the evolution of the economic crisis at the heart of world capitalism and the force of the attack on workers’ living standards. Similarly, the workers’ ability to counter-attack and the bourgeoisie’s efforts at political adaptation provide valuable pointers to the development of the balance of class forces.
We therefore consider that this text is an excellent illustration of our overall approach applied to a concrete situation and that it shows clearly how indispensable is the deepening of our analytical framework regarding the role of the left in opposition, rank-and-file unionism, the historic course and the process of the generalization of class struggle based on the lessons of the previous wave of struggles in grasping today’s social reality.
********************
The Fourth Congress of the ICC’s section in Belgium (held in February 1982) took place two months after Jaruzelski’s putsch in Poland, when the working class was still stunned by the full force of the bourgeoisie’s international counteroffensive.
Within this framework, it was no accident that, after years of hesitation and under direct pressure from the rest of the western bloc, the Belgian bourgeoisie had just brought its policies into line with those of the bloc as a whole and launched a direct attack on the working class. The Congress resolution on the National Situation correctly described the bourgeoisie’s strategy as follows:
“the elections of November 1981 have legalized the bourgeoisie’s new battle order in confronting the class struggle; a qualitative step has been taken in the head-on attack against the working class:
a) a tough and arrogant right, firmly anchored in power as a long-term perspective and speaking the ‘language of truth’;
b) a necessary division of labor within the bourgeois political apparatus, between a tough right in government and a left in opposition confronting the class struggle, as well as various subdivisions in both government and opposition, allowing a more supple development of mystifications;
c) a radical-sounding opposition, whose present themes are no longer those of a responsible team developing the illusory perspective of a return to government and whose sole function today is to derail the class struggle and the reactions engendered by draconian austerity.” (Resolution on the Situation in Belgium and Holland, February 1982).
As early as February 1982, the Resolution clearly indicated the major axes of the bourgeoisie’s policy in Belgium for the two years to come. In Holland, the situation was still less clear-cut, and the left had just returned to power. In the report on the situation in Holland, we nonetheless emphasized that “the PvdA’s (Social-Democrat) participation in the government was nothing other than a temporary jury-rig solution” (idem), and this was quickly confirmed by the end of 1982. Overall, then, in both countries, the period that has just come to an end was characterized by draconian austerity and the continued sabotage undertaken by the left in opposition.
Under the inexorable pressure of the crisis and the austerity that came with it, the confrontation between the classes was renewed still more vigorously in the very heart of the industrialized countries. Belgium and Holland returned to the front rank in the renewal of the class struggle. This is the perspective for our evaluation of the results of the bourgeoisie’s strategy, on both the economic and political levels, and of its impact on the development of the proletarian struggle.
Crisis and austerity
A) Belgium: Two Years of Austerity and ‘Sacrifices’
“For several years, the situation of the Belgian economy has been characterized by multiple and severe imbalances. Their origin lies in the effects of the international crisis to which Belgium is particularly sensitive given its openness to the world outside. They also have internal causes, amongst the most important being, on the one hand, an insufficient adaptation of production to the evolution of internal and external demand and, on the other hand, a rigid incomes system which has led to important changes during the 1970s in the distribution of the national income.” (Etudes Economiques de l’OCDE-Belgique Luxembourg, May 1983, p. 9).
Put more clearly, Belgium, since the end of the 1970s has been in a particularly difficult economic situation, caused by:
a) the deepening of capitalism’s world crisis, which hits Belgium more directly and brutally than others due to its dependence on international markets resulting from the small size of the home market.
Exports as a % of production (OECD figures)
| Belgium | Holland | Germany | Main OECD countries |
1970 | 53.2 | 51.3 | 26.0 | 13.6 |
1980 | 85.4 | 64.4 | 38.3 | 20.7 |
b) the Belgium bourgeoisie’s hesitations in applying a rigorous social and economic policy aimed at rationalizing the economy and substantially reducing wages and social allowances.
Thus as soon as it came to power, the MartensGol government’s action concentrated on:
-- “transferring income from households to business,” (sic!) carried out by a policy of wage controls (with a partial restriction of the sliding scale) along with an 8.5% devaluation of the Belgian franc within the European Monetary System (EMS) and a restrictive budget policy (the aim being to reduce the budget deficit in 1982 and 1983 by 1.5% of GNP in order to diminish the weight of the civil service on the available financing for the economy (Etudes Economiques de 1’OCDE, p. 9);
-- rationalizing those sectors that are badly adapted “to the evolution of internal and external demand,”: the steel industry (Cockerill-Sambre), ship-building (Cockerill-Hoboken, Boel), the Limburg mines, the textile industry (Fabelta, Motte) and engineering (Nobels-Peelman, Boomse Metalwerken, Brugeoise and Nivelles) . As Gaudois, the government’s ‘special advisor’ cynically admitted, this is nothing other than a “socially camouflaged liquidation” by means of mergers, partial closures and state aid at the expense of large-scale wage cuts.
After two years in force, what are the results of this draconian austerity? This is an important question to the extent that Belgium, thanks to its situation at the beginning of the ‘years of truth’, has served as a laboratory for the western bourgeoisie in testing ways of imposing generalized austerity and an overall attack on working class living standards.
i) The Situation of the Belgian Economy
Despite two years of restriction and ‘sacrifices’ the economic indicators clearly show a situation that is far from brilliant, as we can see from the growth in GDP (Gross Domestic Product)
GDP – variation in volume | 1970-74 | + 4.9 |
1974-80 | + 2.1 | |
1981 | - 1.1 | |
1982 | - 0.3 | |
1983 | + 0.25 |
Still more explicit is the graph of industrial production (1974 = 100) which reveals a quasi-permanent stagnation since 1974.
Even in relation to the other industrialized countries taken as a whole, the Belgian economy can hardly be said to have made up lost ground. At best, the recession can only be said to have stabilized:
Growth of GDP in Volume | ||||
| 67-73 | 73-80 | 81 | 82 |
Belgium | 5.4 | 2.5 | -1.1 | -0.3 |
EEC | 5.0 | 2.3 | -0.4 | +0.2 |
OECD | 4.9 | 2.5 | 1.5 | -0.2 |
This general observation will be further detailed by a closer examination of the four factors that allow a more in-depth appreciation of the Belgian economy’s state of health.
a) Competitiveness. For the government, this is the key to the problem and the solution to the crisis: industry’s renewed competitiveness will allow production to take off again and re-absorb unemployment. On the face of it the results of government policy look spectacular.
However, three considerations strongly diminish the benefits of this renewed competitiveness:
-- the recovery in competitiveness is above all tied to a reduction in labor costs and, generally speaking, to a reduction in hours worked due to the increase in unemployment and not to any real development of production or exports (see above);
-- since the other industrialized countries have by now adopted similar measures (see the report on Holland) , the improvement in competitiveness will be quickly eliminated;
-- the recovery of company profits and competitiveness on the market has in no way led to a recovery in productive investment. The fall in capital equipment deliveries, as well as the volume of gross composition of fixed capital, confirm that investment continues to decline.
Gross Composition of Fixed Capital, annual rate of variation (OECD) | |||
1974 | +7.5% | 1979 | -2.4% |
1975 | -1.6% | 1980 | +5.2% |
1976 | +3.0% | 1981 | -16.2% |
1977 | -0.1% | 1982 | -4.9% |
1978 | +2.2% | 1983 | -4.0% |
Faced with the impossibility of selling on an over-saturated market and with the under-utilization of the productive apparatus, the bourgeoisie in prefers to use its capital for speculation (gold, currency, raw materials) . The industrial investments that are still made aim above all at rationalization: “On average, faced with persistently weak demand and the continued high cost of credit, companies seem to have been concerned above all to restructure their accounts and increase their rates of self-financing,” (Etudes Economiques de 1’OCDE, p. 31).
b) Exports. Here again, exports have risen by 2% in 1983.
But the balance of trade (the difference between exports and imports) is still in the red. Moreover, this improvement is explained:
-- by the drop in imports, due to devaluation and austerity policies;
-- by the devaluation, which reduced the export prices of Belgium products.
However, given that Belgium exports essentially to other industrialized countries (83% to the OECD, of which 70% goes to the EEC, as against 2% to Comecon and 5% to OPEC), the increasing austerity and subsequent import restrictions in these countries is likely to have a disastrous effect on Belgian exports.
c) Inflation. Despite the stagnation of industrial production and the drop in wages and consumption (see above) , inflation - after falling at the end of the ‘70s - is once again on the rise.
% Variation in Consumer Prices | |||||
70-75 | 75-80 | 80 | 81 | 82 | 83 |
8.4 | 6.4 | 6.6 | 7.6 | 8.7 | 9 |
d) Budget Deficit and State Finances. The budget deficit of the Belgium state remains catastrophic - 16.2% of GNP in 1981, 15.8% in 1982 and 15.5% in I983, according to government estimates - against a European average of 7%. Belgium’s current account deficit was 190 billion francs ($1 = 510 BF) in 1982 while the cost of servicing interest on state debts is today 8% of GNP - 20% of the administration’s regular income.
Interest Charges as % of GNP | |||
| 1971 | 1975 | 1981 |
Belgium | 3.3 | 3.5 | 8.0 |
13 OECD majors | 1.5 | 1.8 | 3.1 |
Moreover, since a large part of this indebtedness (the foreign debt) is calculated in dollars, the recent rise in US currency will have catastrophic effects on interest charges.
ii) The “Reduction of Social Costs”
If we had to sum up succinctly the last two years, it would undoubtedly be in terms of the head-on attack on working class living conditions.
Certainly workers’ living standards were already being bitten into in the 1970s, but indirectly through increases in income or indirect taxation, through rising productivity (see graph) and through galloping inflation. But with the ‘years of truth’, especially since the installation of the bourgeoisie’s present strategy (right in power, left in opposition), the attack has become brutal, massive and generalized: falling wages and social benefits, an accelerated rise productivity and constantly increasing unemployment.
a) Real Social Wage
“Belgian experts estimate that if consumer prices rise by the forecast 7.5% in 1983 (8-7% 1982), the effect of the measures of wage restraint will be to reduce wages by about 7.5% between December 1981 and December 1983, of which 4.5% occurred during 1982,” (Etudes Economiques de 1’OCDE, p 16). Since inflation in 1983 stood not at 7.5% but at an estimated 9%, the “official” drop in wages should exceed 8%. Another indication of the extent of the attack is the index of labor unit costs in manufacturing industry, calculated in relation to the 15 major OECD countries which in 1982 had fallen well below its 1970 level. At the same time, individual consumption is falling as we can see clearly from the collapse in the volume of retail sales:
b) Increase in Productivity. The improvement in competitiveness through devaluation and the reduction in wages has in no way led to a drop in unemployment, which continues to increase (see below), but to a strong growth in productivity through rationalization (a higher rate of use of the productive apparatus) and through intensive mechanizations and automation.
Productivity in manufacturing industry: Percentage variation on the previous year | ||||
| 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 |
By employee | 6.5 | 0.7 | 2.7 | 5.1 |
By hour worked | 5.5 | 3.2 | 4.1 | 5.5 |
c) The Growth in Unemployment. At the end of January 1984 there were 523,000 full-time unemployed receiving benefit and this figure gives a highly inaccurate picture of the real situation. According to the OECD, the real number of unemployed (including those not receiving benefit) in March 1983 was about 600,000 and the rate of increase had scarcely altered (over 16% in March 1983 against 20% for the previous 12 months).
Employment/Unemployment variation (in thousands) | ||||
| 74-80 | 81 | 82 | 83 |
Wage earners | -28 | -78 | -53 |
|
In administration | +110 | 0 | 0 |
|
In industry | -241 | -49 | -35 |
|
Full-time unemployed | +239 | -97 | -79 |
|
Rate of unemployed | 2.4% | 10.4% | 12.3% | 13.7% |
Moreover, some 180,000 people benefited from a program of state-aided employment (putting the unemployed to work, special temporary measures, etc) so that, in all, about 19% of the working population is outside the normal job circuit.
To conclude, the fierce austerity imposed by the5th Martens government is the first direct and generalized attack on the whole Belgian working class, without opening the way to an economic recovery which “is entirely dependent on external demand,” (OECD, p. 46) . The relative improvement in Belgian industry’s competitiveness is only a passing phenomenon which will soon be eliminated by the austerity and wage reduction programs being applied in the other industrialized countries. Capitalism’s generalized crisis leaves no other way out for the Belgian bourgeoisie than redoubled attacks on the working class.
B) Holland: An Ineluctable Economic Dead-end
Two years ago, the Dutch economy, in the wake of the German locomotive, still passed for one of the strongest; today, it boasts the most widespread unemployment and, after Belgium, the second largest budget deficit of the industrialized world. The economists can no longer see the end of the tunnel, but hope that it may still be found in the long-term, after several governmental terms - perhaps in the year 2005!
During 1982-83, the economic indicators abruptly deteriorated:
Fall in investments, indicated by gross fixed capital composition as a % of GDP (source: OECD) | |||
60-70 | 70-80 | 81 | 82 |
25% | 22% | 19.3% | 18.3% |
Moreover, the rate of utilization of the productive apparatus has fallen to 77% of total capacity in 1983, the same level as in 1975.
In 1982, the rate of utilization of the productive apparatus was 8% less than in 1973 and 6.5% less than in 1979. The budget deficit, which rose by 6.7% in 1981, rose by 9.4% in 1982 and a rise of 12.5% is forecast for 1983.
The growth in the Dutch state debt has been stunning, rising by 19% in 1981 and by 22% in 1982, to reach the impressive sum of 144.7 billion florins.
The foreign trade figures seem to contradict the above data since the balance of payments surplus rose by 9.8% in 1982 and by 12% in 1983. However, the significance of these figures is limited since they are largely the result of increased sales of natural gas and the fall in imports in turn resulting from the fall in domestic consumption. In reality, Dutch capital is not so well placed. “It owes its reputation to several powerful multi-nationals - Phillips, Royal Dutch Shell, Unilever. But its structure and its presence in the most buoyant sectors are weak. The textile, clothing and ship-building industries are in headlong decline. Over the years, Holland’s industrial fabric has worn thin. The strength of the florin and a strong tendency to invest abroad have played their part here,” (Le Monde, February 5, 1984).
As a result, from late 1982 onwards, the direct attack on the working class has increased in Holland as well, following the bourgeoisie’s reorganization of its political forces, with the left’s move into opposition and the right’s arrival in power (with the Lubbers government). While wages were already stagnant or falling at the beginning of the 1980s, thanks to the right wing Van Agt/Wiegel government and to more direct measures of the centre-left Van Agt/Den Uyl government in 1982, by the end of 1982 the attacks on workers’ living conditions fell thick and fast:
-- a 3.5% wage cut in 1983 and even a 5% cut for state employees;
-- a 15% cut in wages and benefits forecast for 1984-86.
Variation in Dutch wages (1972 = 100) | |||
1972 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 |
100 | 103.9 | 101.2 | 100.1 |
At the same time, unemployment has taken off spectacularly:
Unemployment as % of working population | |||||
67-71 | 72-74 | 75-80 | 81 | 82 | 83 |
1.3 | 2.3 | 5.5 | 8.6 | 11.4 | 14.0 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
In a few years, Holland has gone well beyond the OECD average of 10%.
*****
In conclusion, the years 1982-84 are characterised by an inescapable deepening of the economic crisis from which no country is immune, and by the unleashing of an unprecedented and generalised attack on working class living standards and conditions. In this framework, we have seen Holland - which, in Germany's wake, seemed to stand up better to the crisis in1981 - gradually join Belgium in the midst of the social and economic whirlwind.
While the ruling class is fundamentally weakened by the deepening of the generalized crisis, in that this reveals more and more clearly its inability to present any economic or ideological alternatives and sharpens its internal tensions, it is nonetheless able to silence its internecine struggles in order to confront the mortal danger of the proletariat.
The solutions that it lacks on an economic level are henceforth compensated by a remarkable skill on the political level. Every day, the ruling class demonstrates its ability to defend bitterly and intelligently its power and privileges. In the major industrial countries, the trump card of the bourgeois apparatus in imposing generalized austerity and the acceptance of war preparations is the left's move into opposition. This has been perfectly illustrated in Belgium and Holland.
a) The Need for the Left in Opposition in Belgium and Holland
As early as the recovery of workers' struggles in 1978, the ICC analyzed the ruling class' need for a left in opposition to break them from the inside, but experience has shown us that there are a mountain of difficulties between the bourgeoisie's objective need and its ability to satisfy it. In Belgium and Holland, while the bourgeoisie managed fairly adequately to adapt its defensive apparatus to the demands of the period, it nonetheless had great difficulty in carrying out concretely the left's move into opposition:
-- in Belgium, from 1980 on, a series of ‘transitional' governments tried to create the necessary conditions for the left's move into opposition (see the Report for the Fourth Congress) , but this only took place at the end of 1981;
-- in Holland, the right had already come to power in 1978 to carry out an austerity program (the Van Agt/Wiegel Christian-Liberal government) . However, from mid-1981 to mid-‘82 the left returned to power and this clearly ran counter to the needs of the bourgeoisie, at both the national level (the socialists lost elections and a draconian austerity had to be imposed) and the international level (generalized worldwide crisis). It was only after a year of governmental paralysis and a growing discrediting of the left that the bourgeoisie found a way to return to the situation of early '81.
All this delay and confusion was not, as some said, an expression of a better resistance to the crisis:
-- these are the two countries most geared to exports. They thus feel more quickly and heavily than others the weight of the world crisis of overproduction;
-- despite possessing its own energy resources, Holland's industrial tissue is in decline, which led the government to take austerity and rationalization measures as early as 1978 (DAF cars, the textile and shipbuilding industries);
-- in 1979 the crisis already provoked a reaction from the workers which showed that the left's place was in opposition (Rotterdam ‘79, the Limburg and Athus mines in '80, the struggles in Wallonia in 1981) .
The difficulty in putting the left into opposition was thus the expression of the Belgium and Dutch ruling classes' real internal weaknesses, whose origins lie essentially in the creation and organization of the Belgian and Dutch states:
-- the artificial creation of Belgium and Holland's restricted national frameworks slowed down the development of both these states, creating a multitude of contradictions within the Belgian bourgeoisie and hindering the development and centralization of Holland's economic and political forces;
-- the complexity and heterogeneity of the bourgeoisie's apparatus of political domination (in Belgium, the existence of regional parties made it necessary for a long time to keep the socialists in the government; in Holland, the multitude of religious and other parties ‑ hangovers from the country's historical development - makes all maneuvering very difficult for the bourgeoisie) imposed a certain delay on the left's move to the position where it could make itself most useful.
Nonetheless, despite these internal difficulties the Belgian and Dutch ruling class has shown under economic pressure and faced with the danger of the class struggle that it possesses a strong enough basis and a rich enough experience to develop a formidable apparatus designed to control and mystify the struggle.
b) The Role of the Left and the Renewal of Class Struggle
Although the development of the crisis leads to an identification of the present period with the 1930s, a comparison of the left's activity in each reveals their fundamental difference.
During the 1930s, faced with the crisis and the workers' struggles (the insurrectional strikes of 1932), the left (the Parti Ouvrier Belge ‑ Belgium Workers' Party) put forward a ‘Labor Plan' (or DeMan Plan) to "get Belgium out of the crisis." In this way, the working class was massively mobilized behind the perspective of state capitalism (nationalizations) and led to support the parliamentary action of the POB and PCB (CP) "to fight fascism".
Today, the left's tactics and activity are fundamentally different:
--it no longer speaks the language of realism, of national conciliation and of patriotic unity. On the contrary, it wants to appear critical, radical, even workerist . Ambiguous personalities (Cools, Simonet) are eliminated and it makes no effort to return to government;
-- its tactics are no longer offensive, but defensive. Far from trying to mobilise the workers behind the national capital, the left today is doing everything it can to prevent struggles from developing.
Whereas, in the ‘30s the control of the working class was directly assumed by the POB, the union commission being a mere appendage of the party, today the unions are in the front line, within the struggle, to try and derail it. The left's campaigns during the ‘30s, around the DeMan Plan for example, aimed to mobilize the workers in favor of radical measures in defense of the national economy, as a precursor to the defense of the nation. The struggles were ‘politicized' on a bourgeois terrain. The measures were new and able to deceive the workers who had lost all class perspective. Today, the only alternative that the left can propose is a ‘better-wrapped' or ‘fairer' austerity. After years of crisis, of socialist ministers and ‘reasonable' austerity, its plans no longer have the same power of deception. This is why the left's efforts are concentrated on the union terrain, to divide the class by emptying its struggles of any perspective and so breaking its combativity.
The left's different behavior today is explained by the complete reversal in the dynamic of the balance of class forces since the 1930s. In the 1920s, the working class had been defeated on the international level and in those countries where the workers had not been physically crushed the left's aim was to enroll them under the anti-fascist banner for a new world war. Today, an undefeated proletariat's struggle against austerity is tending towards unification on the national and international level; the left is trying to prevent this development and push the class off-course.
c) The Left in Opposition to Confront the Struggle
All through the last two years, the working class in Belgium and Holland has constantly come up against the left in opposition and often undergone the bitter experience of its refined sabotage techniques within the struggle. These revolve around three major axes:
-- occupying the terrain: the strength of both the left and the unions is not derived from any original perspectives or new solutions put forward to confront the deepening of the crisis. Their strength lies in their organization within the class; their apparatus for controlling the workers; the weight of old pre-conceived ideas within the proletariat - in particular the still wide-spread conviction that a struggle can only be developed, organized and won through a union organization. Through this occupation of the social terrain, the left and unions can still weigh heavily on the struggle's development and orientation;
-- isolating or refracting the working class response: faced with generalized austerity and attacks on working class living conditions, the left can defuse the thrust of the movement by preventing its quantitative extension (limiting it to the factory, the industry or the region) . In this respect, it must be said that the left makes very skilful use of the system's internal contradictions, of the false oppositions or various ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie to either divide or submerge the proletarian struggle;
-- regional conflicts (Flanders/Wallonia) are systematically used to prevent the extension of struggles throughout Belgium;
-- in Holland, feminism is used to divide the workers of different sexes, and set them against each other, while pacifism was used directly to break the state employees' strike.
Moreover, the struggle can also be isolated and controlled by defusing its combative dynamic. Thus, during the autumn of 1983 in Belgium the unions managed to take control of the movement and reduce it to an empty shell by means of a formal, but empty generalization of the strike. In reality their efforts at dispersal aim above all to separate the extension of the movement from its self-organization - these being the two components that are vital if it is to develop. To achieve this aim, the unions can act on different facets of the struggle:
-- at the level of methods of struggle: sit-down strikes, occupations, self-management, "new methods of struggle" ("savings strikes", etc);
-- at the level of preparation: emphasizing the financial and technical aspects (leaflets, strike pickets ...);
-- at the organizational level: putting the struggle under the control of the unions, or of union strike committees run by union officials or rank-and-filists;
-- at the level of the struggle's perspectives: keeping it within the logic of the system and its crisis; fighting for ‘real cooperation', to save the factory, the region, or for ‘fair sacrifices', or ‘to make the rich pay' for nationalizations ... ;
-- trapping the workers' anger within the union framework: as we have seen, the unions have a central role to play in the ‘left in opposition' strategy, and this role is even more important in Belgium and Holland due to the discrediting of the socialist parties by the bourgeoisie's own internal conflicts. This is why the union leaderships have ‘worn out' more quickly and explains, given the persistent combativity of the workers, the growing importance of rank-and-file unionism which has played a central part in both Belgium and Holland over the last few years in the major struggles that have broken out (Rotterdam ‘79, the 1981-82 strike wave in Belgium, the state employees' strike in Belgium and Holland in 1983). The vital function of rank-and-filism has been confirmed in the period that has just come to an end:
-- through the concentration of the leftists in union rank-and-file work;
-- through the attempts at coordinating rank-and-file ideas and forces on the national level ("Vakbond en Demokratie" in Belgium, or "Soliclariteit" in Holland) .
In today's struggles, rank-and-file unionism plays a double role:
-- taking control of radical struggles to prevent them going too far and therefore to sabotage them under cover of radical language and spectacular action (confrontations with the police in the 1982 steelworkers' strike) to restrain their extension and radicalization;
-- bringing the ‘lost sheep' back into the union fold while at the same time winning the confidence of the most combative workers through their radical talk and ‘tough' actions (Rotterdam 1979 and 1982, 1983 public sector strikes in Belgium and Holland) .
Rank-and-file unionism is already one of the bourgeoisie's most pernicious weapons, now that the traditional unions are more and more often contested and overtaken by the workers' struggle. Thanks to its flexibility, which can even tolerate a superficial anti-unionism, it will be used by the bourgeoisie right up to the revolutionary period and within the workers' councils to push the proletariat away from the combat for revolution towards the logic of unionism and self-management. While its already frequent utilization allows the bourgeoisie momentarily to control the movements, to stifle any perspective of revolutionary struggle and to cripple the self-organization of the class, it nonetheless indicates the bourgeoisie's historical weakness and in the long-term heralds the discrediting of its most radical weapons of mystification.
The proletariat against the left in opposition
The bourgeoisie's hesitations and its accumulated delay (which had to be overcome abruptly) in taking the necessary draconian austerity measures, Belgium's long-standing role as ‘laboratory' in the vanguard of the world bourgeoisie's attack on workers' living conditions in Western Europe, have all profoundly affected the conditions of the class struggle. Under heavy and almost continual attack, the class has been forced to react - and has done so at regular intervals (winter 1981, February-March 1982, September-October 1983). For this reason, the workers' struggles in Belgium and later in Holland have expressed especially clearly not only the obstacles and problems facing the world working class and which it will have to overcome (particularly in the industrialized countries) but also the movement's strength and dynamic.
From February 1981 on massive strikes broke out in a whole series of factories (Caterpillar, British Leyland, FN) in the steel industry and in public transport, in both Flanders and Wallonia, against the austerity measures applied by a government where socialist ministers held key positions (Economy and Labor ministries). They showed the bourgeoisie that a rapid and appropriate strategy was urgently needed to attack the working class directly. By November 1981, after an early election, the right was in power; a few weeks later, the left was demonstrating its formidable effectiveness in opposition.
a) The Strikes of February-March 1982: Disarray faced with the retreat in class struggle
The movement of February-March 1982, which mobilized tens of thousands of workers around the Liege, Charleroi and Hainaut steelworkers against the sharp drop in wages that followed devaluation, was without doubt the most important movement in Belgium since the 1960-61 general strike. Breaking out a few weeks after the putsch in Poland, they showed, through their great combativity and through the tendency towards widespread struggle going beyond corporations or particular demands in the face of a general anti-proletarian attack, through the tendency to express class spontaneity and to call into question control by the unions, through the confrontation with the state and especially with the police, that the defeat in Poland had not fundamentally shaken the world proletariat's combativity, and that the working class' disarray faced with the bourgeoisie's ideological counter-offensive was not eternal, and did not express a profound and long-term retreat in the class struggle.
Nonetheless, the proletariat's general confusion after the defeat in Poland and its inexperience in dealing with the maneuvers of the left in opposition were to affect the 1982 struggles profoundly and encouraged neither their development nor their ability to put forward clear perspectives. Thus, we should note:
-- firstly, the isolation of the struggle in Belgium, surrounded by complete social calm in the other industrialized countries, plunged in the depths of the bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns over Poland;
-- the limitations of the movement which developed around the actions of the steelworkers in Wallonia while the unions managed to defuse any attempts at resistance in Flanders (eg the long struggle at Boel/Tamise);
-- the relative ease with which the unions prevented the movement's extension by their open efforts at division: between unions, between sectors, between regions (Liege against Charleroi), allowing the bourgeoisie to keep the movement firmly under control, maintaining a particularly arrogant tone, while giving way on nothing.
b) September-November 1983: At the Heart of the Recovery in Class Struggle
The long struggle in the Belgium (September-October) and Dutch (October-November) public sectors is the most important movement of workers' struggle since the combats in Poland in 1980. It has renewed the positive characteristics of the previous movement, but benefits from the accumulation of objective conditions allowing an international recovery in class struggle:
-- a long period of austerity, unemployment and attacks on the working class, generalized throughout the industrialized world, without bringing the slightest improvement in the health of the economy;
-- the working class in Belgium has gone through the experience of the left in opposition and its mystifications at the same time as this experience has spread to neighboring countries (the left in opposition in Holland and Germany);
-- the struggles in Holland and Belgium are part of a new international wave of combats against capitalism.
This ripening of the objective conditions for the renewal of the class struggle is confirmed by the development of the following characteristics within the combats in Belgium and Holland:
1) A tendency towards massive and unitary movements involving large numbers of workers and affecting whole sectors, or even several sectors simultaneously in the same country. In 1983, in both Holland and Belgium, the whole public sector was in struggle - ie 20% of the working population. Workers from all the unions took part. Never in the history of the Dutch working class has the public sector fought on such a scale, while in Belgium, the movement overcame the divisions between Flanders and Wallonia and was on the point of extending to the private sector.
2) A tendency towards spontaneous upsurges of struggle, to some extent escaping from union control, especially at the beginning. The engine drivers in Belgium and the busmen in Holland came out spontaneously, against union orders. In Belgium, the other sectors (post office, local transport workers) joined the struggle spontaneously. The power of this spontaneous extension can be measured by the fact that:
-- the unions were obliged to give their blessing to the strike and even - formally - to extend it, adopting a laissez-faire attitude in the ranks in order to regain control of the movement;
-- the unions in Holland had enormous difficulty in stopping the strike.
3) A tendency towards a growing simultaneity of struggles on an international level. The movements in Belgium and Holland broke out in the same sectors, at almost the same moment, while at the same time, postal workers in France were also on strike; this in two neighboring countries whose large working class concentrations are outward-looking, well-versed in class struggle and at the heart of the industrialized world. This goes a long way to explain the fear of the bourgeoisie which showed itself in the international news blackout of these movements and in the conciliatory attitude of the Belgium government.
These characteristics have been confirmed by the strikes in April 1984 which, although not on the same scale as those the previous autumn, demonstrated the strengthening of the following tendencies:
-- the increasingly obvious simultaneity of struggles in a large number of industrialized countries (struggles in Belgium, France, Britain and Spain during the month of April), and the confrontation with both the mystifications of the left in opposition (Britain and Belgium) and the austerity of the left in power (Spain, France);
-- the accelerating rhythm of class confrontations (the April strikes followed only 5 months after the public sector movement);
-- the continual confrontation with the left in opposition, strengthening the workers' tendency to call into question trade union strategies and to take charge of the struggle themselves.
The central and persistent weakness, common to all these struggles, is the working class' inability on the one hand to stand up to the maneuvers of the left in opposition - especially the unions - within the struggles and on the other to put forward its own class perspectives. While the workers are becoming more and more aware of the unions' role in their daily attitude of champions of ‘reasonable austerity', they remain helpless when the same unions deploy all their cunning within the struggle. This weakness is linked to a lack of experience and self-confidence on the workers' side, and an impressive capacity for adaptation on the part of the bourgeoisie, especially through trade unionism.
The left in opposition's major form within the struggle is rank-and-file unionism, which is the spearhead of the bourgeoisie's response to class struggle. Making use of brief or isolated struggles, rank-and-file unionists use combative talk and pseudo-radical actions to win the confidence of combative sectors of the working class, and spread the idea of the possibility of a different kind of unionism from that of the ‘union leaderships' (within the traditional union structure if possible, outside it if necessary). Thus in Belgium, these ‘combat unionists' have taken the lead in a whole series of isolated struggles, often coming up hard against the union leaders (Boel/Tamise, Fabelta, Motte, ACEC, Valfil, FN, Brugeoise et Nivelles, etc). In Holland, the 1982 Rotterdam dock strike, for example, was entirely conducted by the ‘rank-and-file' under the slogan "We are the union!".
It is from such struggles that rank-and-file unionism has drawn its experience and won the necessary authority for derailing and sabotaging more large-scale strikes: for example, in 1982, the rank-and-file unionists took the initiative in setting up an inter-sector regional strike committee in Hainaut province, to isolate and exhaust the workers combativity within the regional framework. It was they who led the steelworkers towards a confrontation prepared and provoked by the bourgeoisie to liquidate the movement. In both Belgium and Holland 1983, it was they who had the job (in the framework of a generalization in form decreed by the bourgeoisie) of wearing down the movement with actions that were ‘radical', but at the same time dispersed, isolated and without any perspective.
These elements confirm and explain the slow development of the struggle in the industrialized countries. However, with the system in a total economic dead-end, with increasing attacks on working class living conditions and responses from the workers, even the bourgeoisie's most radical mystifications will tend to wear out as class confrontations become ever more massive, powerful and simultaneous.
The general conditions of the working class resurgence since 1968 and the implications for the process of regroupment for the party
1. The future party will not emerge as the result of a reaction against war but from a slow and uneven development of class struggle against a relatively slow evolution of an international crisis. This implies:
-- the possibility of a much greater maturation of working class consciousness before the final assault; this maturation would be expressed especially within revolutionary minorities;
-- the fact that the struggle is developing on an international scale creates the basis for a process of regroupment of revolutionary forces emerging directly on an international level.
2. The ‘uniqueness' of the period 1917-23 lies not so much in the rapidity of events (we should expect a much greater rapidity in the future, against a better prepared bourgeoisie, once the revolutionary process has begun) but rather in the fact that it came at a turning point in history.
Today, with seventy years of capitalist decadence behind us, a whole number of questions are now posed in much clearer terms than at the time of the first revolutionary wave: the nature of the unions, of democracy and parliamentarianism, the national question. Although we are still far from the insurrectional period, every workers' struggle is obliged to confront the forces of bourgeois mystification and control. Even in the midst of confusion, the present proletarian milieu is forced to take a stand on the lessons of these seventy years of decadence. The task of clarifying the conditions opening up for class struggle because of capitalist decadence is much easier today than in 1919.
3. Although the present period suffers from a lack of organic continuity with the movement of the past and despite the fact that this situation weighs heavily on revolutionary forces and their relations, it should be remembered that the organic continuity between the Second and Third Internationals, in providing the living forces of the Communist International, also determined many of its weaknesses. It was not only on the programmatic level that the vanguard was unable to offer a sufficiently profound critique of Social-Democratic traditions and take into account the new conditions of the period. On an organizational level as well, the different factions of the Left before 1914 had great difficulty understanding what they represented and realizing that they had to go beyond the stage of an opposition intent upon redressing the degenerating Social Democratic organization. The process of confrontation and regroupment itself was marked by the model of the Second International, functioning as a sum of national parties; even within nations, such as Germany, the Left was weighed down by habits of federalism. Thus:
-- even without any ‘organic break', the framework of discussion set up was not sufficiently international; it was difficult even in Germany alone;
-- the unfolding of the split with the Second International remained a series of national processes implying gaps in time and political heterogeneity.
The long period of defeat suffered by the proletariat after the failure of the revolution was at the same time a crucible where the class went as far as it could in an effort to draw the lessons of the revolutionary wave. Today we can draw on the living experience of October, the efforts of the fractions, Bilan and Internationalisme to prepare for the coming wave of struggle.
4. Today the organic break with the movement of the past means that revolutionary groups are no longer confronted with the need to break with organizations which have gone over to the enemy. They are no longer what Bilan was either, a fraction with the basic task of building a bridge towards the next revolutionary upsurge - drawing all the lessons of defeat from the depths of the triumphant counter-revolution. The existence and development of today's groups is above all determined by the emergence of open struggle in 1968.
5. Never before have conditions been better for carrying out what the text adopted as a Resolution of the Fifth ICC Congress ("On the Party and its Relationship to the Class" IR 35) puts forward: in the period of decadence "the political party can perfectly well emerge before the culminating point of the appearance of workers' councils."
The simplistic vision of the Bolsheviks as the "exemplary party" in contrast to the German situation where regroupment proved much more difficult does not take into account the fact that in 1917 the absence of an international party was a great weakness which weighed heavily on the whole revolutionary wave. The delay in the regroupment for the world party was felt on the international level, everywhere, and not just in Germany. The pole of clarification which the Communist International represented took off too late and lasted too short a time. Today, conditions are much better for the constitution of a pole of clarification before the decisive moment. Also, such a pole will be able to organize, must organize, on a clearer programmatic basis, integrating, at the very least, all the lessons of the first revolutionary wave.
6. Today, because conditions make it possible to have a clearer party, a more mature and more directly international one, these characteristics are more necessary than ever. Although the bourgeoisie can no longer take advantage of the crucial counter-revolutionary weapon of the mass organizations which had just gone over to the enemy in 1914, it has now developed more subtle methods of control and we have to expect a desperate effort to recuperate any bodies the class will create. Above all, the proletariat will face a bourgeoisie which is much more capable of unifying extremely rapidly on an international level. In such a situation, the clarity of the proletarian vanguard, its unity and its capacity to develop an international influence will be vital.
The proletarian milieu and the effort towards regroupment today
1. The failure of the cycle of international conferences which led to a crisis in the revolutionary milieu at exactly the time of the acceleration of history opening up today, shows to what extent communist minorities are weak and not up to their responsibilities. Thus, although objective conditions today exert a favorable influence on clarification and the unifying tendency among revolutionary forces, they are not enough in themselves to determine automatically a process of regroupment of the party.
2. The organic break with the past and fifty years of counter-revolution imply qualitatively different tasks for communist minorities today. The question is no longer posed in terms of assuring a continuity of the program by making a clear break with old, degenerated organizations. But the task ahead is no less difficult. Revolutionaries must carry through a long process of decantation which started with the proletarian resurgence in 1968. A decantation not only in the sense of a reappropriation of the lessons of the past but also a clarification of the new conditions opening up. This decantation implies an understanding of what these new conditions actually are and are not - linked to an analysis of the present period. Megalomania, the myth of pretending to be the party today and rejecting any confrontation with the milieu; sectarianism, the idea that history begins with ‘oneself' or that the party and the program have been ‘invariant' and unchangeable since 1848; the general confusion on the process of regroupment: these are all in fact expressions of the difficulty of the milieu in its efforts to deal with its responsibilities today.
3. In saying that conditions exist today for the party to emerge before the crucial moment we do not mean to say that it can be formed tomorrow morning. Its link with the development of class struggle means that for the party to be formed, the working class must answer the call of history and develop its consciousness in a dynamic movement towards internationalization of its struggle.
The appearance of proletarian parties requires such a dynamic not only so that the party can be ‘heard', not only because it is only at that stage that revolutionary ideas can become a ‘material force', but because only such a dynamic can bring to the regroupment of revolutionary forces on a world scale the essential elements of clarification in practice on such questions as: the problem of international generalization, the organizations of the class pitted against all the forces of the unions, the role of violence...and, especially, clarity on the question of the party and its relation to the workers' councils.
4. While rejecting the idea of a party artificially created around a ‘PCI + ICC + CWO' and the absurdity of such a hypothesis, the ICC does not consider the future party as a fatalistic, mechanical result of the pre-revolutionary period. For the party to be formed there must be an effort of will on the part of communist minorities starting today but with no immediatist illusions. Our will to participate in the Conferences initiated by the PCI (Battaglia Comunista) was based on:
-- the rejection of all sectarian practices which refuse debate;
-- the understanding that it could not be a question of creating any premature regroupment;
-- the need to create an arena of confrontation and decantation as large as possible but within the framework of class frontiers;
-- the need to have sufficiently clear criteria for participation, rejecting among others ‘anti-party' modernist currents or councilist ones, particularly so that the point of such conferences would be clear;
-- the objective these Conferences represented in relation to the class - working towards an active pole of reference capable of taking a stand on essential issues;
-- the need for agendas which deepen the effort towards unification of revolutionaries today; the analysis of the present period and of the crisis on the one hand, the question of the role of revolutionaries on the other hand (as one of the least clear questions today which makes such a confrontation of positions urgent).
It must be noted that sectarianism and the refusal of open debate have weighed heavily even on the groups which actively participated in the Conferences. The immaturity of the milieu was also expressed in the idea finally adopted by the PCI (BC) and the CWO (Communist Workers Organization) of much more immediatist conferences aimed at a precipitous regroupment before the debate even took place. They finally ended up expecting nothing more from the first Conferences than the material means to get rid of the ICC - in the name of a disagreement on the party that had not even been debated.
5. This experience shows the extent of the road still ahead of us. We have put the question of the party on the agenda in the ICC because we feel that this question crystallizes the understanding of the tasks of revolutionary minorities today and the attitude they should have towards each other. At the heart of the process of decantation which, like it or not, is happening within the milieu - even in the form of an open crisis leading to the disappearance of whole groups - is the question of the party and the process of the development of class consciousness.
The crisis the milieu is going through, which has not spared the ICC, is a serious warning.
It shows that confusions on the role of the political organizations of the working class, the search for an immediate result and impatience in relation to class struggle is the terrain for the destruction of communist organizations through the material and ideological pressure of the bourgeoisie.
We cannot get any satisfaction from the fact that the PCI (Programme Communiste) gave rise to a bourgeois organization (E1 Oumami) or from seeing the CWO flirt with nationalist groups. This shows that without a clear programmatic resistance to the pressure of the bourgeoisie, without developing a capacity to integrate new lessons from class struggle, any effort at decantation within the milieu can be destroyed from one day to the next.
6. Our understanding on the question of the party goes further than others in drawing the lessons of the first revolutionary wave. It is on this question that there is the most confusion in the milieu because the experience of 1917-1923 did not completely clarify the issue. We have often said that our position is more negative than positive. But we have to understand that only the coming movements of mass strikes can fully clarify this question on an international level.
The events of Poland with all their limitations were for us a clear confirmation of our positions on the development of class consciousness, the role of revolutionary minorities and the unitary forms of organization of the working class. They also compelled us to go further in our understanding of the problem of internationalization, of the rejection of the theory of the ‘weak link'. The entire milieu was tested by these events. Faced with such a movement in a more central country, how long could the CWO have continued to call for immediate insurrection? Would the PCI have continued to claim that there is no class movement without a previous organization of the workers by the party?
The coming movements, even more than the downswing at the beginning of the ‘80s, will severely test revolutionary groups. There will undoubtedly be other changes in the milieu; we will also see the appearance of new groups who will not be immune from the confusions of the past. To take in the lessons of future experiences of the working class, to constitute a pole of reference so that the new communist vanguards will not commit the same mistakes, an effort towards clarification must be carried out within the present milieu.
The skeleton of the future patty is not given once and for all by the currents and groups existing today. But it is their task today to carry through in this effort of decantation indispensable for the regroupment of tomorrow. That is why the working class produced them as soon as it took up once again the path to struggle.
JU
May 1983
Within the working class, there exists a historical ‘collective memory’. Revolutionary political organizations are an important sign of its existence, but not the only one. Throughout the class, conclusions have been drawn from the years past struggles and of ruling-class onslaughts, often more or less consciously, often in a purely negative form, more in the sense of knowing what not to do than disengaging a precise, clear and positive perspective. The power and depth of the workers’ movement in Poland were in large part the direct fruit of the successive experiences of 1956, 1970 and 1976.
This is why, within the worldwide unity of the proletariat, the different sections of the class are not all identical some have a longer tradition, a greater tradition than others. Old Western Europe regroups the proletariat with the strongest industrial heart (there are 41 million industrial wage-earners in the EEC, as opposed to 30 million in the USA and 20 million in Japan) and the longest historical experience; here the proletarian steel has been tempered by struggles that stretch from 1848 to the Paris Commune and the revolutionary wave at the end of World War I, by the confrontation with the counter-revolution in all its forms - Stalinist, fascist and ‘democratic’ (unionism and parliamentarism) - by hundreds of thousands of strikes of all forms and of sizes1.
Today, not only are the world proletariat’s major battalions concentrated in Western Europe, this is also the industrialized part of the US bloc where the revolutionary class, in the short- or medium-term, is destined to undergo the most violent economic attack. Western European capital is slowly collapsing, incapable of confronting (either on the world market or its own internal market) the economic competition of its American or Japanese 'partners' - a competition that has become all the more aggressive and merciless since these latter have themselves been plunged into the deepest crisis since the 1930s.
The combination of these subjective and objective conditions are transforming Western Europe into the formidable revolutionary detonator foretold by Marx.
The economic decline of Europe
In the decade from 1963-1973, the economies (GDP) of the EEC states grew by a yearly average of 4.6%. The rate fell to 2% in the decade that followed. At the beginning of the 1980s, it had fallen to zero or less in several countries. At the end of the 1960s, unemployment in the EEC stood at 2.3% of the working population. Today it is over 10% and has reached 17% in countries as different as Spain and the Netherlands. Between 1975 and 1982, the EEC’s ‘market share’ (measured by its share of total exports of manufactured products throughout the OECD) fell from 57% to 53%, while the USA’s remained stationary at 18% and Japan's rose from 13% to 16%.
In the second half of the ‘70s, the West European economy increasingly lost ground before the American and Japanese. This tendency speeded up at the beginning of the 1980s. At the same time, European capital's dependence on the power of its bloc leader - firmly established ever since the Second World War - has increased sharply.
Western Europe’s economic decline within the bloc is partly explained by the characteristics of international relations in decadent, militarized capitalism.
The law of the strongest
The laws that regulate relations between national capitals - even within the same military bloc - are those of the underworld. When the crisis hits, the economic competition by which the capitalist world lives rises to a paroxysm, just as gangsters shoot it out when the loot is rarer and more difficult to get.
In the present period this is expressed on the planetary level by the worsening tensions between the two military blocs. Within each bloc, each nation is under the absolute military control of the dominant power (the ammunition of the Japanese, like the Polish, army is kept at a strict minimum; it is supplied by its bloc leader). But economic antagonisms are none the weaker for all that.
Within the richer western bloc, a certain freedom of competition - much less than official propaganda pretends - makes it possible for economic antagonisms to appear in broad daylight: war is waged with reduced production costs, state export subsidies, protectionist measures and ‘market share’ bargaining, etc. In the poorer Eastern bloc, still more ruined by a gigantic effort of militarization, the economic tensions between national capitals appear less clearly, being more suppressed by military imperatives. (East Germany is proportionately more industrialized than the USSR; it is nonetheless obliged to buy Russian oil at an arbitrarily fixed price which is always higher than that of the world market and is usually obliged to pay in hard (western) currency).
However, with the acceleration of world capitalism’s crisis and decadence, it is the more backward bloc’s way of life that shows the shape of things to come for the better-off. As we said at our Second International Congress (1977), “The United States is going to impose rationing on Europe”. Since the beginning of the 1970s, the West has moved, not towards a greater freedom of trade and economic life, but on the contrary towards a proliferation of protectionist measures and the ever more merciless domination of the US over its rivals. The most recent reports of the GATT, the organization supposed to defend and stimulate free trade between nations, complain endlessly and denounce the suicidal sacrilege of proliferating customs barriers and other measures hindering ‘free trade’ between nations.
As for the USA’s economic relations with its industrialized partners, these are characterized - above all since the so-called oil crisis - by a series of economic maneuvers, whose concrete result boils down to ‘looting’. And the fruits of this plunder are essentially used by the dominant power to finance its military expenditure.
Like the USSR, the United States bears the heaviest military load of its bloc2. Ever since the Nixon presidency, the USA’s bloc-wide military-economic policies have forced its vassals to finance a part of its military strategy.
The violent increases in the price of oil (1974-75, 1979-80) whose production and distribution is largely controlled, directly or indirectly, by the US, have provided:
1) through the flood of dollars that poured into the Middle East from Europe and Japan, the means to finance the ‘Pax Americana’, essentially via Saudi Arabia;
2) through the enormous demand for dollars thus created (since oil is traded in dollars), an over-valuing of the green-back which allowed the US to buy anything, anywhere, at lower cost. This amounts to a forced revaluation of the dollar.
Since the beginning of the ‘80s, the US policy of high interest rates has had an analogous effect. The economic crisis creates a mass of ‘inactive’ capital, in the form of money, which cannot be profitably invested in the productive sector since the latter is constantly diminishing. If it is not to disappear (at least in part) it is forced to find placements in the speculative sector, where it is transformed into fictitious capital. These placements are made where interest rates are highest. US policy is thus sucking in an enormous mass of capital from throughout the world, which must be converted into dollars to be placed. The demand for the dollar grows and its price rises: it is overvalued (some January 1984 estimates put this over-valuation at 40%). Buying cheap (or rather, at the price it imposes), the US can afford the luxury of the biggest balance of payments deficit in its history ... without its currency being devalued; quite the reverse - at least for the moment. At the same time, and with the same impunity, the budget deficit has reached the unprecedented level of $200 billion, ie the equivalent of official defense spending estimates.
As we have pointed out several times in previous issues of this Review, this policy cannot go on forever. This headlong flight is simply laying the groundwork for gigantic financial explosions to come.
Conducting a policy of high real interest rates means being able to repay the borrowed capital with high real revenues. But the economic crisis, which is also devastating the US, deprives it of the real means for paying the interest. As for military production, which alone is undergoing any real development, this destroys rather than creates these means of payment. In reality the US pays these revenues with paper which is, in its turn, reinvested in the USA. At the end of this road, lies the bankruptcy of the world financial system3.
But the USA does not really have any choice and is not leaving any to its ‘allies’ either. The American economy 'supports' the European just as the rope supports a hanged man.
Just as in the rival bloc, and as in the whole of social life under decadent capitalism, economic relationships within the US bloc are increasingly modeled on and subservient to military relationships.
Speaking of relations between Europe and the bloc leader, Helmut Schmidt - an experienced representative of German capital - declared recently that Washington tends to “replace or supplant its political leadership by a strict military command, demanding that its allies obey orders without discussion, and within two days.” (Newsweek, 9.4.84)
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In the Eastern bloc, the USSR plunders its vassals directly, under the menace of its military might. In the Western bloc, the United States’ pillage is conducted essentially through the play of the economic mechanisms of the ‘market’ that they dominate militarily. But the result is the same. The bloc leader pays for its military strategy with the tribute of its vassals, whether direct or indirect.
Europe’s increasing lag is largely the result of the capitalist world’s law: the law of the strongest.
The intrinsic weaknesses of the European economy are those of a continent divided into a multitude of nations, competing amongst themselves and incapable of overcoming their divisions, in order to concentrate their forces to resist the economic competition of powers like America and Japan.
The myth of the common market
One of the most classic signs of economic crisis is the proliferation of company bankruptcies. For several years these have spread with growing rapidity, like an epidemic, throughout the major nations of the US bloc, reaching a rhythm unequalled since the great depression of the 1930s.
But bankruptcies are only an aspect of an equally significant phenomenon: the accelerating concentration of capital. In the capitalist jungle, where solvent markets are increasingly scarce, only the most modern companies, those able to produce at the lowest price, can survive. But in the present period the modernization of the productive apparatus demands ever more gigantic concentrations of capital. Against the American (and even the Jap anese) giants the Europeans - divided and unable to agree on anything other than how best to attack the proletariat - are less and less able to keep up in the technology race. It is easier and more profitable for a European company in diff iculty to make an alliance with US or Japanese capital than with other Europeans. And this is what happens in reality, despite the passionate declarations of the high priests of ‘United Europe’.
The EEC has been a unified market essentially for American and Japanese capital, which have the power or the material means to control a market of this size.
After years of effort, the EEC is only able to plan and organize the destruction and dismantling of the productive apparatus (the steel industry is only the most spectacular example).
From the standpoint of its objective conditions, Western Europe is turning into a social powder keg thanks to the acceleration of the economic crisis. But this is not the only reason. Two characteristics of capitalism in Western Europe make the class struggle particularly explosive and profound in this part of the world - the weight of the state in social life and the juxtaposition of a series of small nation-states.
The state’s weighting in social life makes the workers’ struggle more immediately political
The greater the state’s presence in economic life, the more each individual’s life depends directly on state ‘politics’. Social security, pensions, family allowances, unemployment benefit, state education, etc all make up a large part of the European workers’ wages. And this part is directly managed by the state. The greater the presence of the state’s institutions, the more the state is the boss of the whole working class. In these conditions, ‘austerity’, the attack on wages, takes on a directly political form and obliges the proletariat (in fighting back) to confront more directly the political heart of capital’s power.
With the development of the crisis, the class combat thus opens more immediately onto a political ground in Europe than in Japan or America. It is the governments, more than private companies that take the decisions that modify the workers’ conditions of existence. Austerity in Europe is the German government reducing scholarships and family allowances, the French government cutting unemployment benefit, the Spanish government proposing to lower the pension rate from 90% to 65%, the British government slashing the jobs of more than half a million state employees, the Italian government deciding to destroy the sliding wage-scale.
The weight of the state has grown regularly in all the Western bloc countries, including Japan and the USA. We can measure this weight in terms of the state administration’s total spending taken as a percentage of GDP. Between 1960 and 1981, this percentage grew from 18% to 34% in Japan and from 28% to 35% in the US. But at the same time, in 1981 it rose to:
47% in Britain
49% in Germany and France
51% in Italy
56% in Belgium
62% in Holland
65% in Sweden
This is one of the reasons that workers’ struggles in Western Europe tend, and will tend, to take on more immediately their political content.
The juxtaposition of several states makes the international nature of the proletarian struggle more obvious
Like wage-labor, the nation is a basic, characteristic institution of the capitalist mode of production. It constituted an important historical step forward, putting an end to the scattered isolation of feudal existence. But, like all capitalist social relations, it has now become a major barrier to any further development. One of the fundamental contradictions that historically condemns capitalism is the contradiction between the world scale on which production is carried out, and its national appropriation and orientation.
Nowhere in the world is this contradiction so striking as in old Western Europe. Nowhere does the identity of interests between proletarians of all countries, the possibility and necessity of the internationalization of the class struggle against the absurdity of the capitalist economic crisis, appear so immediately.
This generalization of the workers’ struggle across national frontiers will not happen overnight. It cannot be a mechanical response to objective conditions. A long period of simultaneous struggles throughout the small European countries will certainly be necessary for the working class to forge, from the boiling crucible of the prerevolutionary period, the consciousness of its international and revolutionary being, and the will to assume it. For this, the working class in Europe has the determining advantage of the greatest historical experience and revolutionary tradition. It is no accident if the proletariat’s main revolutionary political organizations are concentrated in Western Europe. Weak though they may still be today, these organizations have and will have a determining role to play in the revolutionary process.
The collapse of the capitalist economy is a planetary phenomenon affecting every country, creating the conditions for the world communist revolution. But it is Western Europe that, because of its place in the world productive process, its special position within the American military bloc, its political structure (importance of the state and multiplicity of nation-states), and the subjective conditions of proletarian existence, is necessarily at the epicenter of the world revolution.
RV
1 See ‘The Proletariat of Western Europe at the Heart of the Generalization of Class Struggle’ (IR 31, 4th quarter, 1982) and ‘Critique of the Weak Link Theory’ (IR 37, 2nd quarter, 1984)
2 Russia’s relative backwardness in relation to certain countries of its European slope, like the GDR, reflects the burden of its military costs. The only sectors where the USSR leads its bloc are the military ones.
3 The growing difficulties of American banks and the proliferation of bank failures are the first signs of the disaster that such a policy must lead to.
In IR 34 we published a text by a comrade in Hong Kong, LLM, on the question of the left in opposition, seeing it as one of the few serious attempts outside of our current to understand the basis for the present political maneuvers of the ruling class since, unlike all the ‘empiro-critics' who have done no more than scoff at our analysis, LLM's text; sought to penetrate to the underlying issue: the organization and consciousness of the bourgeoisie. The text argued that our method of analysis was valid, even if it did not share all the conclusions we draw from it. Various reactions within the revolutionary milieu have prompted LLM to write an ‘elaboration' of the original text. In the article below, we are replying to the arguments developed in this second text, which we are not publishing and which, far from being an elaboration or development of the previous one, simply expresses LLM's panic flight back to the camp of the empiricists - showing that, on this issue as on all others, there is no room for an impartial umpire who hands out points and penalties to the various elements within the revolutionary movement. The regression in LLM's thought is evident both in the text's form and content: in form, because of its condescending attitude, its convoluted argumentation and frequent recourse to hearsay; but above all, in content, since it is no more or less than an abandonment of any of the insights the comrade may previously have had about the machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie. At the same time, the text adopts the erroneous theory of a parallel course towards war or revolution, virtually indistinguishable from the ideas currently being propagated by Battaglia Comunista and the Communist Workers' Organization.
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In IR 34, arguing against the empiricists who deny the bourgeoisie's capacities to unify against the proletariat, LLM could write: "I am sure no one will deny that different states are capable of conspiring to achieve some common goals. For all who have eyes to see, the conspiracy between the US and the UK in the Falklands/Malvinas War, that between the US and Israel in the latter's invasion of Lebanon, etc are clear as daylight. Or if we go back into history a bit, are not the lessons of the Paris Commune and The Russian Revolution enough to drive home the lesson that, threatened by the proletariat, the bourgeoisie is capable of setting aside even its most powerful antagonisms to unite against it, as the ICC has correctly pointed out? Why, then is it that when it comes to a conspiracy between the right and the left of the bourgeoisie within national frontiers, it becomes so unimaginable? Did Noske murder the German proletariat consciously or unconsciously?" Now, following a trip to Europe - empirical evidence if ever there was - LLM has decided that the ICC does after all have an idealist conspiracy theory of history. Now it is his turn to find it "unimaginable" 'that the peace movement is organized by the bourgeoisie, that the conflict in El Salvador has been exacerbated to fuel anti-proletarian mystifications elsewhere, even that the Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua with the approval of US imperi[1]. In this new text, LLM's bourgeoisie is identical to that of the empiricists.
For example, when the ICC says that the peace campaigns are part of a strategy by the bourgeoisie to derail class struggle, LLM sings the old refrain of all those who simply cannot comprehend what it means to say, that the bourgeoisie acts as a class: "Who is this ‘it'? The bourgeoisie as a whole? In that case the whole bourgeoisie are Marxists", etc etc. To be sure this ‘it' is indeed incomprehensible from the standpoint of bourgeois empiricism which bewildered by the apparent disunity of the world, has always castigated marxism for its conspiratorial view of social life, merely because it talks about classes and their conscious activity.
It's true that LLM claims to recognize that "there can be no doubt that the bourgeoisie is conscious of its own needs"; but when it comes to the test of applying this general observation to concrete realities such as the present propaganda campaigns, LLM reduces this consciousness to the completely determined, "instinctive" reaction of a class incapable of formulating any real strategies at all:
"As to the so-called ‘campaigns' the bourgeoisie is supposed to be consciously waging against the proletariat, it need only be added... that nationalism (a major plank in these ‘campaigns') is ‘natural' to the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie ‘instinctively' knows that nationalism is in its interests and whips it up at any time (an international football match, launching of a spaceship...). Even disregarding the bourgeoisie's ‘consciousness' question, there is no need for it to know that whipping up nationalism helps it defeat the proletariat, it knows the other side of the same thing ‘instinctively'."
And because the ICC rejects this vision of the bourgeoisie and all the conclusions that flow from it, we are told that "the ICC sees the bourgeoisie as conscious of its own needs on the level of attaining a marxist materialistic understanding of history..."
The bourgeoisie's understanding of history
Of course the bourgeoisie does not have a "marxist materialistic understanding of histoty". But it does have a bourgeois materialist view of history, and there is quite a large historical gap between this view and the truly instinctive level of consciousness that human beings transcended when they departed from the rest of the animal kingdom. As Marx explained in his little parable about the architect and the bee, the capacity for seeing ahead, for planning in advance (and, consequently, awareness of a temporal, historical movement from past to future) is the key distinction between animal and human activity.
But while this ‘historical' consciousness is characteristic of all human activity, prior to capitalist society man remained within the horizons of natural economy, which gave rise to static or circular views of historical movement. These cyclical views were also, by definition, centered round various mythico-religious projections. By shattering the limits of the natural economies, the bourgeoisie also undermined these traditional conceptions, and constituted itself as the most historically and scientifically minded of all previous ruling classes.
Certainly all these advances took place within the confines of alienation, and thus of ideology. In fact, the bourgeoisie's ‘rational', ‘scientific' worldview coincides with the very pinnacle of alienation - a point never grasped by those ‘marxists' who see marxism and communist consciousness as a simple continuation or refinement of bourgeois rationalism and scientism. Under the reign of alienation, man's conscious activity is relentlessly subordinated to forces that are barely comprehended or controlled; consciousness, despite being in essence a collective and social product, is scattered into countless fragments by the division of labor, above all in the conditions of extreme atomization that characterizes a society dominated by commodity relations.
But, just as Rosa Luxemburg demonstrated that global capital is a reality which exists despite and even as a result of mutually antagonistic individual capitals, marxism affirms that there is, despite all its internal divisions, a ‘global' bourgeoisie with a ‘global' consciousness, a real class which engages in conscious life-activity. The fact that this remains a fragmented, estranged, hierarchical activity, dominated by unconscious motives, does not prevent it from functioning as an active factor in social life - as a determining and not merely determined force.
This means that the bourgeoisie is capable of formulating overall strategies for the defense of its most essential interests, even if the whole bourgeoisie can never be in on these plans, and even if not one bourgeois grasps the strategy as a whole. ‘Strategy' means forward planning, a serious capacity to weigh up contending forces and to foresee possible futures. To a large extent, and especially in the epoch of decadence, the bourgeoisie has understood (again, in its own mystified way - though we should take it as a rule of thumb that the bourgeoisie always tells less than it knows) that the defense of its most basic requirements cannot be entrusted to any one ‘faction' of capital, which is why it has developed huge state and bloc structures to ensure that this job gets done whatever the vagaries of this or that faction or party.
If we look at the example of the Falklands war, which LLM previously saw as a good example of the bourgeoisie's capacity to conspire, we can get some idea of how this division of labor works. There is no doubt that the protagonists entered into this conflict with varying immediate aims. Galtieri, for example, was certainly ‘suckered' by the gesticulations of the US and of Britain. At the same time there is obviously a grain of truth in the leftist argument that the Falklands War was the ‘war of Maggie's face', reflecting the ‘sectoral' political ambitions of Thatcher and the Tory party. But is precisely the function of leftism to fixate on these secondary aspects of the bourgeoisie's activity and thus to draw attention away from the real power in this social system - the capitalist state, and beyond that, the imperialist bloc. In the final analysis, the likes of Thatcher, Reagan or Galtieri are just figureheads, actors called upon to play a particular role at a particular time. The bourgeoisie's real strategies are the product of the state and bloc organisms that represent the true ‘community' of capital, and they are formulated according to an assessment on the needs of the system as a whole. Thus, the Falklands war, for all the more opportunistic and particularistic motivations that helped bring it about, can only really be understood when it is put in the context of the war plans of the entire western imperialist bloc. Whatever some revolutionaries may think, in formulating these plans the ruling class certainly mobilizes its most sophisticated techniques and intelligences; and it is truly "unimaginable" that the ruling class would draw up these plans without taking into account the most burning tissue of this epoch - the social question, the necessity to prepare the population, all the working class, to fall in with the march to war. The Falklands conflict wasn't just another football match, but part of a long-term strategy aimed at wiping out all real resistance to capital's drive towards a generalized imperialist bloodbath.
From Faust to Mephistopheles
LLM also accuses us of making more and more use of our ‘machiavellian' analysis, of taking it as the starting-point for examining each and every action of the ruling class. Here we make no apology because we are merely recognizing a historic reality - that since we are moving towards the most momentous class confrontations in history, we are witnessing the bourgeoisie becoming more unified, more ‘intelligent', than at any time in the past.
Certainly, this intelligence of the bourgeoisie is a total degeneration from the grand historical visions, the optimistic philosophies it elaborated in the heroic days of its youth. If, in the age of Goethe, Beethoven and Hegel, the bourgeoisie could be personified by Faust, high point in the restless upward strivings of humanity, in decadence the bourgeoisie's dark side has come into its own - and the dark side of Faust is Mephistopheles, whose vast intelligence and knowledge is a thin covering over a pit of despair, The Mephistophelean character of bourgeois consciousness in this epoch is determined by the underlying necessities of the age: this is the epoch in which the possibility and necessity for emancipating humanity from the historic division of society into antagonistic classes, from the exploitation of man by man, have at last come together; and yet all the bourgeoisie's science, all its technology, all the remnants of its own wisdom are directed towards the preservation of the same system of exploitation and oppression at the price of the most monstrous increase in human misery. Hence the fundamental cynicism and nihilism of the bourgeoisie in this epoch. But precisely because this is the period of history that demands "man's positive self-consciousness", the conscious mastery of productive activity and the productive forces, the bourgeoisie has only been able to survive within it by running its anarchic system as though it was under conscious human control. Thus capitalism in decadence, with its centralized planning, its international organization, and of course its ubiquitous ‘socialist' ideology, tends to present itself as a grotesque caricature of commonism. No longer can the bourgeoisie allow the free play of ‘market forces' (ie the law of value), either within or between nation states: it has been forced to organize and centralize itself, first at the level of the nation state, then at the level of the imperialist blocs, merely to stave off capital's accelerating tendency towards economic collapse. But this national and international organization of the bourgeoisie reaches its highest point when the bourgeoisie is threatened with the proletarian menace - a fact that, as LLM himself notes, has been demonstrated in response to all the major proletarian upheavals in history (eg 1871, 1918). Compared to these movements, the mass strikes in Poland 1980 were no more than a harbinger of things to come - yet the unified response of the bourgeoisie, being based on structures that have been in place for decades, in some ways operated on a far wider scale than any previous collaboration between the imperialist powers. This implies that, in the revolutionary struggles to come, we will encounter an enemy that will display an unprecedented degree of unity. In sum, we are moving towards the final concretization of the scenario envisaged by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:
"Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into too great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat".
In more immediate terms, this means that today, when these immense confrontations are already brewing, we can discern a tendency for the bourgeoisie to act in a more and more concerted manner, to try to restrict as much as possible the unfortunate effects of the more unpredictable aspects of the system. Thus, for example, if one compares the way the recent elections in Britain and Germany were stage-managed by the bourgeoisie[2], one can see that far less was left to chance than in election campaigns of a decade or two ago. Or we can compare the way that pacifist campaigns are now coordinated across the whole western bloc (and imitated in the eastern bloc) with the piecemeal manner in which they operated in the 1950s and ‘60s. Even if these strategies are often full of holes and contradictions, even if they don't represent the high point of bourgeois consciousness and unity, they do express a definite tendency towards the creation of a single ‘party of order' to confront the proletarian danger.
We repeat, for the benefit of the hard of hearing, none of this means that the bourgeoisie can have a ‘marxist' understanding of history; above all it cannot grasp the marxist postulate that its system can be superseded through the revolutionary action of the working class.
But - as we explained some years ago, in answering some typical leftist arguments against our view of the complimentarity of fascism and anti-fascism, the bourgeoisie is capable of seeing that the proletariat is the main threat to the mere preservation of its system:
"If it is true that they cannot believe in the possibility of a new society built by the workers, they still understand that, in order to ensure the functioning of society, there must be order, the workers must go regularly to work, accepting their misery without sulking, humbly respecting their employers and the state. The most cretinous exploiter, knows this quite well, even if he doesn't know how to read or write.
When all these historical illiterates begin to feel that something is amiss in the kingdom, when they are forced to close the factories, raise prices and lower wages, and when the seeds of revolt are beginning to grow in the factories ...history has shown a thousand times that after a more or less long period of dementia, the bourgeoisie always ends up by putting its confidence in a political solution that offers the re-establishment of order.
Under the pressure of their class interests, of events in general, empirically, pragmatically - this is how the bourgeoisie finally comes to accept solutions which it had hitherto regarded as ‘subversive' or ‘communist'." (‘Anti-fascism: an arm of capital', in WR 5 and RI 14)
No, the bourgeoisie won't ever become marxist. But in this century, and above all since 1917, the bourgeoisie has learned how to permanently usurp the mantle of marxism in order to distort and derail the real goals of the class struggle. In the particular phase we are moving through, the ‘socialist' posturing of the bourgeoisie in the advanced western countries is compelled to take the form of the left in opposition; tomorrow, faced with the revolution itself, it could well mean a new and more extreme version of the left in power. In neither case will the bourgeoisie have become marxist - but they can and will concoct an ideological witches' brew of sufficient potency to paralyze the movement towards the proletarian revolution, and that is the main issue for us. Nothing could be a more fatal weakness for the revolution than a lack of lucidity on the part of the proletariat and its political minorities concerning the full range of the weaponry available to our class enemy.
On the historic course
From the above, we obviously agree with LLM when he points out the connection between our view of the strategies of the bourgeoisie and the question of the historic course. The argument that the bourgeoisie is tending to unify its forces is predicated upon the idea that it is compelled to do so by an inexorable movement towards major class confrontations.
But for LLM, the regression in his understanding of the bourgeoisie is accompanied by another regression - towards the ‘parallel course' theory of Battaglia and the CWO (now also adopted by the Communist Bulletin Group, who even pretend that this was their view all along; the CBG' s influence on LLM's thought is apparent on a number of key issues, especially the organization question - see his text in no 5 of the Communist Bulletin) . In a previous issue of this Review (IR 36) we dedicated an article to Battaglia's views on this question, and we do not intend to go over the same ground here. We will instead restrict ourselves to answering just one of LLM's assertions - that the ICC is ‘suspending history' when it argues that the proletariat represents an obstacle to the bourgeoisie's war-drive.
On this point, it is none other than LLM who is ‘suspending history'. Thus, he points to the militant strikes in Russia before the 1914 war and says: ‘see, these strikes didn't stop the war, so how can you argue that today's combativity is a barrier to war?'. This method freezes history in 1914 and assumes that the bourgeoisie - after all it is restricted by ideology, is it not? - has drawn no lessons whatever from its experience of entering a world war with a proletariat whose combativity had not been completely crushed. In fact, the horrible example of 1917 taught the bourgeoisie a lesson it will never forget. This is why it spent the whole period of the 1930s ensuring that the last drops of proletarian resistance had been effectively drained, and that is precisely what it is trying to do again today.
It must also be said that the example of the Russian strikes taken out of context doesn't prove anything about 1914 either. Here we need only repeat the citation from Internationalisme 1945 that we used in our article on Battaglia:
"Thus, the partial resurgence of struggles and the 1913 strike wave in Russia in no way detracts from our affirmation. If we look more closely, we can see that the international proletariat's power on the eve of 1914, the electoral victories, the great social democratic parties and the mass union organizations (the pride and glory of the Second International) were only an appearance, a facade hiding a profound ideological decay. The workers' movement undermined and rotten with rampant opportunism was to collapse like a house of cards before the first blast of war." (Report to the July 1945 Conference of the Gauche Communiste de France)
And if the example of Russia 1913 ignores the real global balance of class forces of the day, LLM's ‘proof'' that the world's workers are ready to go to war because workers in Britain tended to display their "indifference" to the Falklands spectacle only demonstrates that LLM is depriving himself of any serious method for approaching these questions.
It is also rather ironic that the ICC should be accused of suspending history by someone who removes from consideration the actual motor-force of historical evolution - the class struggle. For LLM, the link between crisis and war (as between the crisis and the bourgeoisie's awareness of it) is entirely mechanical and automatic: "If capital's underlying dynamic (its accumulation) requires war, war will break out... whatever the state of the class struggle". Thus, the inner contradictions of capital are reduced to their most reified aspect - the objective economic laws of accumulation - while the contradiction between capital and labor, the essential social contradiction, is conjured out of existence. Instead of a dynamic combat between two social forces, we are presented with an entirely static picture: either the proletariat is making the revolution, or it "remains under the ruling ideology" and is "already ideologically defeated" (Battaglia expresses the same idea when they tell us that we're living under the heel of the counter-revolution until the revolution breaks out.) It's as though the two classes were standing opposite each other like statues in their combat postures, instead of engaging in a real fight which ebbs and flows, which moves back and forth, and in which increased aggression from one side demands corresponding reaction from the other. A true suspension of the movement of history.
One thing that LLM should recognize is that the Battaglia/CWO view of the historic course is (conditioned by their inability to see the proletariat as a social force even when it has not yet given rise to the world party. Such a blindness can easily lead yesterday's libertarians and councilists (see LLM's essentially anti-centralist article in the Communist Bulletin) to start toying with the idea that it's all a question of ‘leadership' and that the advent of the party is the sole moving factor in the situation. But for us, the real possibility for the reconstitution of the party is predicated upon the fact that we are moving towards massive class confrontations in the heartlands of the system. These confrontations will not only settle the problem of the course of history; they will also take us a giant step forward in our understanding of the question of consciousness - not only the consciousness of the bourgeoisie, but more profoundly, the consciousness of the proletariat and of the social humanity that will emerge out of the revolution. A qualitative leap in the class struggle will demand a corresponding leap on the theoretical level; but by seeking refuge in the tents of the empiricists and the skeptics in the revolutionary movement, comrade LLM is throwing away the possibility of making any real contribution to this fundamental question.
C D Ward
[1] LLM resorts to a subtle distortion of words here, implying that, for the ICC, the pacifist campaigns, and even the conflict in El Salvador, have been created ex nihilo, as it were, by an omnipotent bourgeoisie. He even implies in a footnote, omitted for lack of space, that this view was explicitly included in our resolution on the international situation at our 5th Congress, despite internal opposition. What does the resolution actually say? The text talks about the "huge pacifist campaigns which, with some success, have been organized in most western countries" and which are "based on a real disquiet about the preparations for war". In other words, the pacifist campaigns exist because the bourgeoisie needs to recuperate this anxiety and use it for anti-working class ends - not an ex nihilo creation but a subtle work of transforming energy. But does LLM claim that these campaigns are not organized by the bourgeoisie? Perhaps he has temporarily forgotten, in his anti-machiavellian zeal, that the left, CND, etc, are part of the bourgeoisie? We could make a similar point about E1 Salvador: obviously such conflicts in the underdeveloped regions have their objective basis. The question for us is what use does the world bourgeoisie make of these conflicts - which may certainly include exacerbating them for reasons of propaganda and mystification. Finally, concerning the USA's approval of the Sandinista take-over, see WR 27 ‘Sandinistas, agents of US imperialism'.
[2] The fixing of the recent elections in West Germany to get the classic right in power/left in opposition line-up was so obvious that the CWO, who are usually in the front line of the empiro-critics, could write an article in Workers Voice 11 which clearly takes as its starting point the idea that the new government was chosen, not by the free decision of the ‘German people', but by the western imperialist bloc as a whole.
The history of the workers’ movement is not only that of its great revolutionary battles, when millions of proletarians have launched themselves on “the assault of the heavens”; it is not only two centuries of constant resistance, of strikes, of incessant and unequal combats to limit the brutal oppression of capital. The history of the workers’ movement is also that of its political organisations – the communist organisations. The manner in which they have been constituted, divided, regrouped, the theoretical-political debates that have flowed through them like nourishing blood to their revolutionary passion – all this belongs, not to the particular individuals who were their members, but to the life of their class as a whole. Proletarian political organisations are only a part of the proletariat. Their life is part of the proletariat’s.
Understanding the life, the history and the historic future of the revolutionary class, also means understanding the life and history of its communist organisations.
The article that we are publishing below – a polemic with the Communist Workers’ Organisation (CWO) on the history of communist organisations between the 1920s and 1950s – has nothing to do with the academic concerns of university historians, but with the necessity for today’s revolutionaries to found their political orientations on the granite rock of their class’ experience.
However different the 1980s and the 1920s, the major problems confronting today’s proletarian combats have not changed since the 1920s. The understanding of capitalism’s historic tendencies (decadence and imperialism), the possibility of using the unionist and parliamentary forms of struggle, national liberation struggles, the dynamic of the mass strike, the role of revolutionary organisations – all these questions are at the core of the analyses and positions of communist organisations during the 1920s (marked by the Russian and German revolutions), during the ‘30s (marked by the triumph of the counter-revolution and its control over the proletariat), during the ‘40s (years of imperialist world war) and during the ‘50s at the beginning of the reconstruction period.
For a political organisation to ignore the successive contributions of the different currents of the workers’ movement during these years, or worse still to falsify their reality and deform their content, to alter their history with the derisory aim of drawing itself a more handsome family tree, not only means throwing out all methodological rigour – the indispensable instrument of marxist thought – it also means disarming the working class and hindering the process which leads to the reappropriation of its historical experience.
This is the kind of exercise that the CWO has indulged in, in number 21 of its theoretical journal, Revolutionary Perspectives.
Here we find an article that sets out to criticise our pamphlet on the history of the Italian Left Communists. We are already used to the CWO’s demonstrations of its lack of seriousness: for years they denounced the ICC as a counter-revolutionary force because we have always affirmed that proletarian life survived within the Communist International after 1921 (Kronstadt), until 1928 (with the adoption of ‘socialism in one country’). Now, in number 21 of RP, the CWO accuses the ICC, just as frivolously, of defending “euro-chauvinist” positions – which, if the CWO’s thought contained an iota of rigour, should exclude us ipso factor from the revolutionary camp.
With the same irresponsible light-heartedness the CWO has read our pamphlet following the Gallup sampling method – one page out of every ten. The barely-hidden aim of the criticism supposedly based on this reading is to minimise, if not to wipe out altogether from the history of the workers’ movement, the specific – and irreplaceable – contribution of the groups which published first Bilan and then Internationalisme; that is to say, to eliminate from the history of the workers’ movement all the currents of the communist left other than those from which the communist left other than those from which the CWO and its “fraternal organisation” the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Communista) specifically draw their origins.
In reply, the article that follows sets out, not only to re-establish certain historical truths, but also to show how revolutionary organisations should understand, integrate and overtake critically the successive contributions of the communist movement as a whole, and in particular of the International Communist Left.
“The ICC likes to portray itself as a fusion of the ‘best’ elements in the German Left (KAPD) and the Italian Left, regretting that Bordiga’s sectarian attitude prevented them uniting against Comintern opportunism... The ICC’s idea that only sectarianism prevented a fusion of the Italian and German lefts against the Comintern, and that a similar fusion is necessary today for the formation of a new party, is undermined by their own narrative.” (RP 21)
These extracts demonstrate clearly the confusions in which the CWO sets out to smother the motive force behind the different courses through which the Communist Left has taken historic expression. According to the CWO, the ICC would have liked a political and organisational fusion of the Italian and German Lefts in a united front against the CI. We have no idea where the comrades have found such idiocies. Even a child could understand that proposing such a fusion at such a time would have been madness. Not only because the Italian Left would never have accepted unification with a tendency that condemned trade unions and any work within them (even if, at the same time, it proposed a ‘revolutionary’ neo-syndicalism in the form of the ‘Unionen’) and, moreover, at times called into question the importance of the role of the class party; but also because the German Left would never have accepted unification with a tendency that did not understand the union’s integration into the state apparatus and blindly accepted Lenin’s support for national liberation struggles. What was in question, was not an impossible and useless fusion, but a common struggle against the degeneration denounced by both tendencies. To conduct this common struggle clearly the different forces of the left would have been obliged first and foremost to clarify their own disagreements on such crucial questions as the unions, national liberation struggles and the party. In this way the fundamental debates would have been conducted within and not against the CI. Without this debate, the CI missed the essential questions, proposing answers to these questions without getting at their roots, so that it was unable to defend itself against degeneration.
As the struggles ebbed, the German Left – which was more the expression of a deep-rooted thrust of workers’ struggles than of a complete programmatic clarity – was unable to contribute to the clarification of the proletarian programme and broke up in a multitude of little sects. It was the Italian Left (IL) – better armed theoretically, especially on the necessity and function of the revolutionary organisation – which understood the characteristics of the new period, took the debate forward in the form of a balance-sheet (‘bilan’) that the CI of Lenin’s day had been unable to draw up, and which was necessary to integrate the profound but incomplete intuition of the German Left (GL) into a solid marxist perspective:
“The international programme of the proletariat will be the result of the ideological intersection – and therefore of the class experience – of the Russian revolution and the battles in other countries, particularly Germany and Italy... For, while Lenin towers over Luxemburg in some domains it is obvious that in others Rosa saw more clearly than he did. The proletariat did not find itself in conditions that made it possible, as in Russia, to clarify completely its revolutionary tasks; on the contrary, in action against Europe’s most advanced capitalism, it could not help having, on certain problems, a better and more profound perception than the Bolsheviks... Understanding means completing the foundations which are too narrow and not intersected by the ideologies resulting from class battles in all countries – completing them with notions linked to the course of history as a whole right up to the world revolution. Lenin’s International couldn’t do this. The work has fallen on our shoulders.” (‘Deux Epoques: en marge d’un anniversaire’, Bilan 15, January 1935)
When the CWO reminds us that Reveil Communiste, a small group of Italians who had taken up the positions of the KAPD, ended up in councilism and then the void, they merely confirm our central thesis – that it was impossible to make a merger of 50% German Left and 50% Italian. On the contrary, what was in question was giving “the problems that the German proletariat perceived better and more deeply than the Bolsheviks” an anchorage in a consistent marxist framework. This is what Bilan set out to achieve.
History isn’t made with “ifs”. The inability of the Communist Lefts to locate the problems posed by the working class on capitalism’s entry into its decadent phase at the centre of the debate in the CI cannot be blamed either on Bordiga or Pannekoek. This inability was rather the fruit of the immaturity with which the world proletariat confronted this first decisive combat and which is reflected in the ‘mistakes’ of its revolutionary vanguard. Once the opportunity had passed, the work had to be done in the terrible conditions of the ebbing struggle, and by the IL alone, because only the IL had an adequate theoretical position for fulfilling such a role. And it was by taking this direction, Bilan’s direction, that the IL integrated the contributions and experiences of the different Left Communists, to attain “the elaboration of an international left political ideology.” (‘Letter from Bordiga to Korsch’, 1926.) Thanks to this work of historical synthesis, the IL succeeded in “completing the too narrow foundations” and tracing out the major elements of the programme of the International Communist Left (Gauche Communiste Internationale – GCI) that are still valid today for the proletariat all over the world. The CWO’s accusation (that we want today to fuse the different lefts) demonstrates not only their inability to distinguish a ‘historic left’ from a mechanical union, but above all their congenital inability to understand that this work has already been done and that not to take account of it means going 60 years backwards. As a result, yesterday’s CWO couldn’t get beyond the positions of the German Left in the 1930s, while today’s has returned to those of the Italian Left in the 1920s or even of Lenin. The positions change, but the regression remains.
“In fact for them (the ICC), the Italian Left is synonymous with the period of exile and in this period the ‘real lessons’ of the revolutionary wave were drawn. What a pessimistic viewpoint! The times when communist ideas gripped the masses are rejected and the period of defeat idolised... But idealisation of Bilan is misplaced. Certainly these comrades made great contributions to the communist programme... But it would be foolish to deny Bilan’s weaknesses... on the question of perspectives: the lack of a clear grounding in marxist economics (Bilan was Luxemburgist) led to erratic and erroneous views on the course of history. Arguing that arms production was a solution to the capitalist crisis they felt that capitalism was not in need of another imperialist war as the basis of renewed accumulation. ...Bilan dissolved itself into the review October in 1939 and the Fraction formed an International Bureau feeling that the proletarian revolution was on the agenda; thus they were totally dumb founded when the war broke out in 1939, leading to the dissolution of the Fraction altogether. The ICC tries to deny that this was Bilan’s view...” (RP 21, pp 30-31)
These extracts pose three types of problem:
1) our ‘idolisation’ of Bilan
2) the role of revolutionaries in period of counter-revolution;
3) the final ‘bankruptcy’ of the Italian Fraction abroad.
We’ll take them in order. First of all, let’s liquidate this idea that we idolise Bilan:
“Bilan never had the stupid pretension of having found the final answers to all the problems of the revolution. It was aware that it was often only groping towards an answer: it knew that ‘final’ answers could only be the result of the living experience of the class struggle, of confrontations and discussion within the communist movement. On many questions, the answers Bilan gave remained unsatisfactory ... It’s not simply a question of paying homage to this small group ... our task is to reappropriate what Bilan has left to us, to continue on their path a continuity which is not stagnation, but a process of going forward on the basis of the lessons and example given by Bilan.” (Introduction to Bilan’s texts on the Spanish Civil War, IR 4, 1976.)
This has always been our position. It is true that, at the time, the CWO defined us as counter-revolutionary precisely because we defended the Italian Left after 1921, which they had chosen as the magic date beyond which the CI became reactionary. This may explain the CWO’s inattentiveness in reading both the texts that we have republished from Bilan and our introductions.
Let us go on to the second point. We do not prefer periods of defeat to those of open proletarian struggle, but neither do we take refuge behind this kind of banality to hide the essential historical fact – that during the years of the revolutionary wave the CI did not succeed in carrying out all the work of clarifying the new class frontiers of the proletarian programme. This work fell largely to the revolutionary minorities that survived its degeneration. Certainly we would have preferred this synthesis to have been made when the German proletarians came out in arms onto the streets of Berlin, not only because it would have been done better but also because it would probably have given the world proletariat’s first revolutionary wave a very different outcome. Unfortunately, history is not made with “ifs” and the work fell mainly on Bilan.
If we insist so much on the work of the Italian fraction abroad, this isn’t because we prefer the 1930s to the 1920s but because the groups which ought to be its ‘continuators’ (the PCInt, artificially constituted at the end of the war) have covered it in a blanket of silence, so allowing it to be wiped from the historical memory of the workers’ movement. If we look at the press of all those groups that claim their origins in the Italian Left (including Battaglia) we can only be staggered by the fact that “the number of reprints from Bilan can be counted on the fingers of one hand.” (IR 4) Even today, when the ICC has published hundreds of pages in different languages plus a critical study of more than 200 pages, some of these groups continue to pretend that they have never so much as heard of Bilan. We are indeed up against the ‘policy of the ostrich’ and we were right to insist on this. With these details cleared up, there remains a fundamental question which the CWO’s article has not grasped: how are we to explain that such a contribution to the proletarian programme was worked out during the years of defeat, of a profound and general ebb in the class’ autonomous activity?
According to the CWO’s logic there can only be two replies:
-- Either deny or minimise the theoretical contribution of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left because it worked in a period of defeat and in a course towards war, and which the CWO and Battaglia do regularly along with the ICP (Communist Program);
-- Or recognise this contribution as an illustration of the idea that communist consciousness is born not from the struggle but from the revolutionary organisation, which must necessarily introduce it into the working class from the outside.
This kind of reply explains nothing and merely demonstrates a mechanical conception of the influence of the class struggle on the thought of revolutionary minorities. According to this kind of conception Bilan could only have counted on the experience of the defeats of the 1930s. But Bilan’s origins do not lie in the 1930s. They are to be found in “the times when communist ideas gripped the masses.” Its militants were trained not in the wake of the Popular Front but at the head of the revolutionary mass movements of the 1920s. What made it possible for Bilan to continue, against the tide, to deepen its revolutionary positions was its unshakable confidence in the revolutionary capacity of the working class; and this confidence was gained not through reading but through the participation of its militants in the class’ greatest attempt to create a classless society. From this point of view, the theoretical work of the left fractions was absolutely not independent or isolated from the historical experience of the proletarian masses. Not only was Bilan’s work carried out in the thrust of the previous revolutionary wave, it would have been meaningless outside the perspective of a new wave. The proof ‘a contrario’ of the very close, but not immediatist, influence of the class’ movement over the reflection of revolutionaries can be found in the fact that the greatest stagnation among the revolutionary minorities occurred not during the 1930s but during the 1950s, because the world bourgeoisie had succeeded in ending the Second World War without a new revolutionary upsurge and when the thrust of the previous revolutionary wave had been worn down by 30 years of counter-revolution.
We are aware that such a conception of the deepening of class consciousness – via a complex, non-rectilinear and sometimes hesitant trajectory – is hard to digest; but is the only conception faithful to the marxist method it is based on. Doubtless it is easier to imagine the party by itself working out a nice clean programme and then sending it to the working class at the right moment, like a letter in the post. It costs nothing to daydream...
We are left with the last question: that of the Fraction’s collapse due to Vercesi’s theory that the war economy made imperialist war useless. Firstly, we would point out that this was a new orientation, developed from 1937 to 1939, and one that contradicted the entire perspective put forward from 1928 onwards: that of a balance of forces unfavourable to the proletariat and leading to a new world conflict. Secondly, this was not the only position within the Gauche Communiste Internationale. This analysis was violently criticised by a majority of the Belgian Fraction and a large minority of the Italian Fraction. The result of this battle was not, as the CWO would have it, that the Fraction was dissolved definitively but that it was reconstituted by the minority in Marseille, in unoccupied southern France. Work continued regularly throughout the war, with a remarkable systematisation and deepening of programmatic positions. From 1941 onwards, the Fraction held annual conferences that produced (among other things) a condemnation of Vercesi’s revisionist theories on the war economy (‘Declaration politique’, May 1944). When the Fraction learnt that Vercesi’s confusion had finally gone to the point of taking part in an anti-fascist committee in Brussels, they reacted immediately by excluding him as politically untrustworthy (‘Resolution sur le cas Vercesi, January 1945). As we can see, the Fraction did not end its work by following Vercesi – it continued it by excluding him.)
We might point out in passing that this is the CWO’s umpteenth pathetic attempt to prop up one of its hobby-horses – which is that nobody who, like the ICC, defends Luxemburg’s economic theory on the saturation of markets can maintain a revolutionary political line. It should be clear that, strictly speaking, Bilan was not Luxemburgist but limited itself above all to the acceptance of the political consequences of Rosa’s analyses (rejections of national liberation struggles, etc). It is no accident if the defence of these economic analyses fell largely to comrades from other revolutionary groups: such as Mitchell (from the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes), or Marco (from Union Communiste). The Luxemburgist Mitchell was the leading critic of Vercesi’s revisionist theories before the war, and during the war it was the Luxemburgist Marco who corrected the weakest points of Rosa’s economic analyses. What does this show? That only Luxemburgists can be coherent marxists? No, as the presence of non-Luxemburgist comrades alongside Mitchell and Marco proves. What then? What it does show is that the CWO should stop hiding the essential facts behind secondary questions.
And this brings us to the essential fact, i.e. that the CWO has quite simply done a vanishing act on six years of the Fraction’s existence (and what years! – the years of imperialist war). Significantly, Programma Communista airily played the same trick when they were finally forced to speak of the Fraction. We answered them then as we answer the CWO now:
“The article speaks of the Fraction’s activity from 1930 to 1940. It remains completely silent on its existence and activity between 1940 and 1945 when it was dissolved. Is this simply through ignorance or to avoid being obliged to make a comparison between the positions defended by the Fraction during the war and those of the PCInt formed in 1943-44?” (IR 32, 1983)
Given that our study of the IL devotes no less than 17 pages to the Fraction’s activity from 1939 to 1945, the CWO should be accused not of ignorance but of blindness. The CWO has adopted the policy of the ostrich as well.
“The ICC presents the formation of the PCInt as a step back from Bilan, which is idolised in their press. But why was it a step back? According to the writer, ‘The Italian left degenerated profoundly after 1945 to the point of fossilising completely.’ (p. 186)
But surely it was no fossilisation to engage thousands of workers in revolutionary politics after the great strikes of 1943? And what of the Platform of the party, published in 1952, did this represent a step backwards? ... And on the war, after the confusions and prevarications of Bilan, surely the positions of the PCInt were a step forward ... an advance on the theories of the ‘disappearance’ of the proletariat in an imperialist war.” (RP 21, p. 31)
“When the PCInt was formed in 1943 the ICC’s ancestors refused to join not simply because they felt the theoretical basis of the new party was shaky but also because ... they believed that war was about to break out at that time, and thus they concluded that there was no point in doing anything: ‘When capitalism ‘finishes’ an imperialist world war which has lasted six years without any revolutionary flare-ups, this means the defeat of the proletariat’ (Internationalisme 1946).” (RP 20 p. 35)
“In fact, the French Fraction was expelled from the Communist Left for issuing a joint leaflet with two French Trotskyist groups on May Day 1945 ...” (RP 21 p. 31)
Instead of conducting a political argument, the CWO seems to have adopted the technique of the advertising clip where the brilliant whiteness of sheets washed in some super-detergent is demonstrated by comparing them with dirty sheets washed in ordinary detergent. What do we take as a reference point to see if the PCInt is a step forward or a step back? Vercesi’s revisionist theorises, which ended up denying all revolutionary activity during the war, given the proletariat’s ‘social non-existence’! And what do we offer as the only alternative? A little group that flirts with Trotskyists, declares all revolutionary activity useless and in the end gives up publication in 1952! Compared with this sorry spectacle, it is easy enough to make the PCInt’s positions seem brilliantly clear.
But how many falsifications and omissions were necessary to make this commercial? To highlight the PCInt’s activity from the middle of the war onwards, they simply erase the Italian Fraction’s activity from the beginning of the war to the end. The Italian Left is identified with Vercesi when, in fact, during the war the Vercesi tendency was first fought, then condemned and finally excluded. Still with the aim of wiping out the GCI’s activity during the war, a ferocious attack is then mounted against the Gauche Communiste de France which kept up its activity and the struggle against Vercesi the most vigorously. Here, the CWO is not ashamed to use the same falsifications as were employed by Vercesi himself, when he was responsible for the PCInt’s international work from 1945 onwards, in excluding this combative tendency from the Gauche Communiste Internationale.
In reality, the German RKD and the French CR [1] [42], two proletarian groups with which Internationalisme published (in several languages) a call for proletarian fraternisation, had already broken with Trotskyism in 1941 and had maintained an internationalist position throughout the war (as the documentation on pp 153-4 of the pamphlet amply proves). As for Internationalisme’s supposed refusal of all activity after 1945, the CWO should explain to us how it was that the only force of the Communist Left present in the famous wildcat strike – and in the strikes committee – at Renault in 1947 was precisely the Gauche Communiste de France, whereas the ‘second’ French Fraction (linked to the PCInt) shown by its total lack of interest in the only significant proletarian movement following World War II. Without deluding themselves as to the possibility of a revolution, the comrades of Internationalisme never failed in their tasks as communist militants. Thus, the GCF participated actively in the 1947 International Conference called by the Dutch Left, published 12 issues of a monthly paper, L’Etincelle, and 48 issues of the review, Internationalisme. The reason for its dissolution in 1952 was the extreme dispersal of its members (La Reunion in the Indian Ocean, South America, the USA and in Paris where very few members remained), which made its continued existence and activity materially impossible.
It is really neither interesting nor useful to follow the CWO in all its contortions. In RP 20, they quote our recognition of the PCInt’s “clear positions towards the partisans” on page 170 of the pamphlet to show that we lie wittingly in speaking of the PCInt’s confusion concerning the partisans. But why does the CWO not also quote page 171 where we describe the change in position of 1944, or page 177 where one of the PCInt’s leaders recognises (in 1945) the disastrous effects of this change? Does the CWO only read one page out of every ten? At all events, they certainly make a careful choice of which pages to quote ... But as if this were not enough, in RP 21 Internationalisme’s discussions with ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ are cited as proof of its opportunist nature. In the previous issue, on the other hand, Battaglia Communista’s discussions with ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ were presented as proof of BC’s “living and non-sectarian” nature. The same action in proof of a revolutionary spirit when it comes from BC and of eclecticism when it comes from Internationalisme! How are we supposed to answer such arguments seriously?
We do not idolise Internationalisme any more than Bilan. We are well aware how much they ‘Stammered’ in their permanent effort to clarify class positions. This is why we don’t limit ourselves to memorising their positions; we try to deepen them and overtake them critically where necessary. It does not embarrass us in the least to recognise that some of their mistakes, which led to the militants’ geographical dispersal, contributed to the impossibility of maintaining a regular press, which was a bad blow for the whole revolutionary movement. The CWO, on the contrary, thinks that the suspension of publication in 1952 is simply the definitive demonstration of Internationalisme’s lack of seriousness. With this kind of argument, the CWO hoists itself on its own petard. In fact, the CWO should explain to us how and why the Belgian Fraction and the ‘second’ French Fraction, both linked to the PCInt, both suspended publication in 1949 (three years before Internationalisme), without the Italian Party “with its thousands of militants” lifting so much as a little finger to do anything about it? How is it possible that a little group, which had no ideas beyond escaping to South America, managed to resist for years, against the tide, when the representatives of the PCInt abroad had already thrown in the towel? We will wait for the CWO’s reply ... And while we are waiting for the CWO to puzzle out these ‘mysterious’ events, let us return to the real problem: was the PCInt a regression in relation to the Fraction abroad or not? We have seen that the Fraction abroad remained active until 1945, further clarifying a number of problems that Bilan had left unresolved (e.g. the counter-revolutionary, capitalist and imperialist nature of the Russian state). We have also seen how the Gauche Communiste de France was formed in the thrust of the Italian Fraction’s last great effort, how it played an active part in the Fraction’s work and continued it after the latter’s dissolution. Let us now examine the other element of the comparison: the PCInt, founded in Italy in 1943.
At first sight, one cannot help being dumb-founded by the CWO’s presentation: not only were the PCInt’s positions perfectly clear – see the 1952 Platform – it had thousands of workers members. Evidently, this looks like a fine step forward compared with the ‘stammerings’ of a few dozen emigrants abroad! But as soon as we examine this ‘step’ a little more closely, we immediately come across several ‘discords’: why wait until 1952 to write a platform when the PCInt had been founded 10 years previously and when (from 1949 onwards) it had lost all its mass following? Moreover, the 1952 Platform obviously didn’t exist in 1943: so on what basis did all those “thousands of workers” join? The answer is simple – on the basis of the Platform of the PC Internationaliste written by Bordiga in 1945 and distributed in 1946 by the party abroad in a French edition with a political introduction by Vercesi. [2] [43] This platform was clear neither on the capitalist nature of the Russian state nor on the ‘partisan movements’. On the other hand, it declared very clearly that “the Party’s programmatic policy is that developed ... in the founding texts of the Moscow International” and that “the Party aims at the reconstitution of the united union confederation”. It was on the basis of these positions (which were simply a return to the CI of the 1920s) that it was possible to enrol “thousands of workers” – and then to lose them completely a little later. This was a double step backward, not only in relation to the conclusions drawn by the Fraction in its final period (1939-45) but even in relation to the Fraction’s initial (1928-30) positions. The weight of thousands of new members – enthusiastic, certainly, but with very little political training – was to be a serious hindrance to the efforts of the older militants who had not forgotten the Fraction’s work: for example, Stefanini who, at the 1945 National Conference, defended an anti-union position analogous to that of the Fraction, or Danielis, who recognised bitterly at the 1948 Congress that “One can’t help wondering if there has really been an ideological welding of the Party and the Fraction abroad: at the Brussels Congress of the Fraction we were assured that theoretical material was sent regularly to Italy” (Proceedings of the First Congress of the PCInt, p. 20). Through these disillusioned words of one of the Party’s leaders we can measure the step back taken by the PCInt in relation to the theoretical contributions of the Fraction.
One last question remains: how are we to situate the 1952 platform on whose basis the Damen tendency (Battaglia Comunista) parted company with that of Bordiga which was to form the now-collapsing Programma Comunista?
A glance is enough to see that this platform’s central positions (dictatorship of the class and not of the party, impossibility of recuperating the unions, rejection of national struggles) are a clear step forward in relation to the Platform of 1945. We have always said so very clearly. THE PROBLEM IS THAT ONE STEP FORWARD IS NOT ENOUGH AFTER TWO STEPS BACK. What’s more, after seven years of confrontation between tendencies within the PCInt, one could have hoped for some substantial progress in the clarity of terms used since the formulations that were still ‘open’ in 1942 were no longer so ten years later. Instead, BC takes little steps forward on every question and then stops half-way without really coming to a conclusion: the dictatorship is exercised by the class and not the Party. BUT it is the Party that organises and leads the class like a general staff; the unions cannot be won back, BUT we can work within them; revolutionary parliamentarism is impossible, BUT the Party cannot exclude the tactical use of elections; and so on ... The 1952 Platform brings to mind an ultra-extremist version of the theses of the International rather than an effective synthesis of the work carried out up to then by the GCI. Certainly it formed a good point of departure for catching up the delay accumulated due to the incoherence of the PCInt’s theoretical bases from 1943-45. However, the weight of the counter-revolution (at its greatest during the years that followed) prevented BC from taking any substantial steps forward even though some of the greater naiveties have recently been eliminated (e.g. the transformation of the “internationalist union groups” into “internationalist factory groups”).
If only it were enough to eliminate the term “union” to eliminate all ambiguities on the trade unions, everything would be fine ... what, in 1952, were incomplete obstacles to the penetration of opportunism are likely today to become a kind of sieve through which anything can pass, as BC’s recent misadventure with the Iranian nationalists of the UCM has shown.
“The ICC liked to portray itself as a fusion of the ‘best’ elements of the German Left (KAPD) and of the Italian Left ... though the ICC proclaims it as a virtue, nature abhors disequilibria. There can be no eclectic fusion of dissimilar political traditions. Today’s revolutionaries must base themselves firmly within the camp of the Italian Left, correcting its errors with its own weapons, Marxist dialectics.” (RP 21, p. 30)
In a recent article, we tried to show how BC and the CWO, with their vision of a still-active counter-revolution, are unable to understand the difference between today and the 1930s from the standpoint of the balance of class forces. In this conclusion, we will try to show that this is not the only point “where BC and the CWO are forty years behind the times” (IR 36). The CWO accuses us of “eclecticism” towards the Italian and German Lefts, maintaining that they cannot be “fused together”. We entirely agree. The theoretical involution of Reveil Communiste in the 1930s (and of the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste more recently) demonstrates this irrefutably. What was possible, on the other hand, was to subject the experience accumulated by the world proletariat in the first revolutionary wave “to the most intense criticism” (Bilan no. 1), to arrive after years of labour at a “historic synthesis” (Bilan 15).
The FACT that cannot be denied is that this historic synthesis has already been carried out, mainly under the impulse (and thanks to the work) of the Italian Left and that it constitutes the reference point for any position taken up today. The choice between the Italian Left, the German Left or a cocktail of the two is at all events meaningless, because from the point of view of the class’ historical movement these two tendencies no longer exist. The Fraction’s work of historical synthesis has allowed “the elaboration of an international left political ideology” that Bordiga called for in 1926. As a result, the only communist left that we feel ourselves to be part of is the ‘Gauche Communiste Internationale’ founded on the basis of this work. And this, today, is the only acceptable choice. The ICC, which was formed on the basis of this work and which has largely contributed to making it known, has chosen clearly. Programma Comunista has rejected this work, to return to the 1920s. As we have seen, BC and the CWO have not managed to determine themselves clearly. Faced with today’s choice – whether to base themselves on the Italian, French and Belgian Fractions, or on the regressions of the PCInt, these comrades stick eclectically half-way. “The problem with BC is that their reply to our Address, like their political positions, remains elusive. Sometimes it’s yes and sometimes no ... While Programma has a coherence in its errors, BC’s errors are incoherent.” (IR 36)
The CWO maintains that whomever practices eclecticism on fundamental questions, ends up losing their balance and so putting in danger the advances already made. We accept this judgement unreservedly – and, moreover, it is confirmed by the facts. In the ten years since its foundation the ICC has altered none of its original programmatic positions; the CWO, from the moment it approached BC’s eclectic positions, has turned its own platform inside out, abandoning the advances of the international left one after the other and turning towards the Leninism of the 1920s on all the fundamental issues. Before this process becomes irreversible, the comrades of the CWO would do well to remember that today, so-called ‘Leninism’ no longer has anything to do with Lenin’s revolutionary work and is merely another of the capitalist left’s counter-revolutionary ideologies.
Beyle.
[1] [44] RKD: German Revolutionary Communists, CR: Revolutionary Communists. See IR 32, p. 24, notes (1) and (2).
[2] [45] The CWO reproaches us bitterly and at length for having used the term “Bordigist” in an article in IR 32 to describe BC and the CWO. We are quite willing to admit that this was a lack of precision on our part which could lead to confusion. However, the CWO makes use of a misplaced comma to obscure the fundamental debate. For, firstly, the tendency which was to become BC identified with this Platform of Bordiga’s until 1952. Secondly, because BC’s criticisms of Bordiga, which the CWO identifies with, always remain ambiguous – at the half-way house.
Contribution to a history of the revolutionary movement
The Communistenbond Spartacus and the Councilist Current (1942-1948), II
In the first part of this article (in IR 38) devoted to the history of the Dutch Left, we showed the evolution of the Communistenbond Spartacus - coming from a movement situated to the right of Trotskyism in the 1930s towards revolutionary positions. Despite numerous theoretical confusions on such things as the historic period after the Second World War, the nature of the USSR, national liberation struggles etc, between 1942 and 1945 this conferred a heavy political responsibility on it at the international level in the regroupment of revolutionaries in western Europe.
The Communistenbond, conscious of its responsibility as the principal revolutionary organization in Holland, in proclaiming, tin December 45, the necessity for an international party of the proletariat as an active factor in the process of the homogenization of class consciousness was, therefore, very far from the openly councilist conceptions which it developed from 1947. Conceptions which from theoretical regressions led progressively down the path to fully-formed councilism - the rejection of the proletarian experience of the past (notably the Russian Revolution), the abandonment of an idea of political organization, negation of any distinction between communists and proletarians, a tendency to ouvrierism and immediatism, each strike being seen as a "small revolution."
This second part is devoted to analyzing the different stages in the degeneration of the councilist current (the germs of' which were already contained in the positions of the Communistenbond in 1945) which led to its disappearance in the seventies, leaving today only such epigones as the group Daad en Gedachte connected to the libertarian anti-panty current.
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It was inevitable that the orientation of the Bond towards a centralized organization and the importance attached to theoretical reflection - in the form of debates and of courses of political formation - would not satisfy the more activist elements of the Bond. The latter, grouped round Toon van den Berg maintained the old revolutionary-syndicalist spirit of the NAS. With a strong presence in the proletarian milieu in Rotterdam at the time of the strikes in the port, they had contributed to the construction of a small union - the EVB (Unitary Syndicalist Union) - which was born out of the struggle. It is symptomatic that the Bond - at the time of its Congress on 24-26 December 1945 - agreed to work in the EVB. Denouncing the activity of the organization in the unions, appendages of the state, its position on the unions remained theoretical. In leaving the Bond, Toon van den Berg and those who supported him followed the logic of a ‘tactical' participation in the small independent unions.[1]
The Bond found itself in a phase of reappropriation of the political positions of the GIC. Groping in this way, it disengaged itself little by little, in a more or less clear manner, from its own political and theoretical positions.
On the other hand, the centralization which this political work required upset the anarchistic elements of the Bond. It was in relation to the weekly journal Spartacus that a grave conflict developed in the organization. Certain comrades - supported by a part of the final editorship (Elnd-redactic) which was the publications commission - considered that the style of the paper was ‘journalistic'[2]. They wanted the paper to be the product of all the members and not of a political organ. The conflict reached its climax in March 1946 when a cleavage developed between the political commission, of which Stan Poppe was the secretary, and the final publications commission. It was reaffirmed that "the final editors are responsible to the political commission"[3], for the political choice of articles, but not for their style which remained the concern of the editorship. The political commission defended the principle of centralism through a collaboration between the two organs. The final editors believed that its mandate stemmed solely from the general assembly of the members of the Bond. They appealed to the youngsters who wanted the journal to be the expression of everyone, whereas the majority of the political commission, in particular Stan Poppe, defended the principle of a political control of articles by an organ; consequently the publications commission could only be a ‘sub-division' of the political commission. The participation of the members of the publications commission should follow the principle of ‘workers' democracy' and not the principle of ‘democratic centralism' which prevailed in the organizations of the ‘old style'[4]. This was not a question of a ‘policy of compromise', which was the accusation of the majority of the editorship and of the members in Amsterdam, but a practical question of cooperation between the two organs depending on the control and the participation of all the members of the Bond.
This confused debate, in which personal antagonisms and the particularities of the commissions were mixed up, could not but bring to the light of day the question of centralization. The initial blurring of editorial responsibilities was integrated into the political commission and this could only make things worse.
This grave crisis of the Bond expressed itself in the departure of many militants and, far from triumphing, the centralization of the Bond became more and more vague during 1946.
But in fact the departure of the least clear elements of the Bond, or the more activist ones, reinforced the political clarity of the Bond which could distinguish itself more clearly from the surrounding political milieu. Thus, in the summer of 1946, those members of the Bond who had voted for the CP in the elections left the organization. The same went for the members of the section in Deventer who had contacted the Trotskyists of the CRM in order to engage in ‘entryism' into the Dutch Communist Party[5].
These crises and departures represented in fact a crisis of growth of the Communistenbond which, in ‘purifying itself' gained in political clarity.
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In 1945-46 several theoretical questions were examined, those on which the Bond had remained vague during its period of clandestinity: the Russian, the national and the union questions. Those concerning the workers' councils, the post-war class struggle, barbarism and science, the characterization of the period following the Second World War were tackled in the light of the contribution of Pannekoek.
1) The Russian Question
The nature of the Russian state had not really been tackled by the Bond at its birth. The conferences held in 1945 and the publication of a theoretical article on the question permitted the taking up of an unambiguous position[6]. This article, which paid homage to the revolutionary defeatism of the MLL Front at the time of the German/Russian war in 1941, noted that "their attitude remained hesitant only regarding the Soviet Union." This hesitation was in fact that of the Bond in 1942-44. This was no longer the case in 1945.
Revolutionaries, noted the author of the article, have had enormous difficulties in recognizing the transformation of Soviet Russia into an imperialist state like the others: "One could not and didn't want to believe that the revolutionary Russia of 1917 had been transformed into a power similar to the capitalist countries."
It is interesting to note here that the Bond, as opposed to the GIC in the ‘30s, did not define the Russian Revolution as a ‘bourgeois revolution'. It tried to understand the stages in the transformation of revolution into counter-revolution. Like the Italian Communist Left (‘Bilan'), it situated the counter-revolutionary process above all at the level of the foreign policy of the Russian state, which marked its integration into the capitalist world. This process unfolded in stages: Rapallo in 1922, the alliance of the Comintern with the Kuomintang in China, the entry of the USSR into the League of Nations in 1929. However, the Bond considered that it was only in 1939 that Russia really became imperialist. The definition which is given here of imperialism is purely military and not economic. "Since 1939, it has become clear that Russia has entered a phase of imperialist expansion."
However, the Bond shows that the counter-revolutionary process is also internal, at the level of internal policy where, "under the direction of Stalin, a state bureaucracy has been cultivated." The class nature of the Russian bureaucracy is bourgeois: "The dominant bureaucracy fulfills the function of a dominant class which, in its essential goals, corresponds to the role played by the bourgeoisie in the modern capitalist countries."
It is to be noted here that the Russian bureaucracy is the bourgeoisie by virtue of its function more than by its nature. It is an agent of state capitalism. Although it is clear throughout the rest of the article that the ‘bureaucracy' is the form which the state bourgeoisie takes in the USSR, the impression given is that we are dealing with a ‘new class'. Indeed, it is affirmed that the bureaucracy has become the ‘dominant class'. This ‘dominant class' was to become - some years later, under the influence of ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie' - for the Bond, ‘a new class'.
The Bond shows that there are two classes existing in Russian society, in the capitalist relations of exploitation based on ‘the accumulation of surplus value': the working class and the ‘dominant class'. The existence of state capitalism - as collective capital - explains the imperialist policy of the Russian state.
"The state itself is here the sole capitalist, excluding all the other autonomous agents of capital; it is the monstrous organization of global capital. Thus, there are on the one hand the wage laborers who constitute the oppressed class; on the other hand the state which exploits the working class and thus basically enlarges itself through the appropriation of the surplus product created by the working class. This is the foundation of Russian society. It is also the source of its imperialist politics."
The distinction made here - implicitly, and not explicitly - between 'ruled' and 'rulers' was a foreshadowing of the future theory of the group 'Socialisme ou Barbarie'[7]. But with the difference that the Communistenbond ‘Spartacus' never abandoned the marxist vision of class antagonisms within capitalist society.
Despite the hesitations in its theoretical analysis, the Bond was very clear about the political consequences which flowed from its theoretical analysis. The non-defense of the capitalist USSR was a class frontier between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat: "To take sides with Russia means to abandon the class frontier between the workers and capitalism."
The non-defense of the USSR could only be revolutionary it were accompanied by an appeal to overthrow state capitalism in Russia through the class struggle and the formation of workers' councils: "Only the soviets, the workers' councils - as the autonomous workers' power - can take production in hand, with the goal of producing for the needs of the working population. The workers must, in Russia also, form the third front. From this point of view Russia is no different from the other countries."
2) The Colonial and National Question
In 1945, the position of the Bond on the colonial question was hardly different from that of the MLL Front. At the beginning of a long colonial war in Indonesia which went on until its independence in 1949, the Bond pronounced itself in favor of the "separation of the Dutch East Indies from Holland." Its position remained ‘Leninist' on the colonial question and it even participated - over a period of some months - in a ‘committee of anti-imperialist struggle' (Anti-imperialistisch Strijd Comite). This committee regrouped the Trotskyists of the CRM, the left socialist group ‘De Vonk' and the Communistenbond until the latter withdrew in December 1945. The Bond acknowledged[8] that this committee was nothing but a ‘cartel of organizations'.
The Bond in fact didn't have a theoretical position on the national and colonial questions. It implicitly took up the positions of the Second Congress of the CI. It affirmed that "the liberation of Indonesia is subordinated to and constitutes a sub-division of the class struggle of the world proletariat"[9]. At the same time it showed that the independence of Indonesia was a blind alley for the local proletariat: "there is presently no possibility of a proletarian revolution (in Indonesia)".
Little by little the conception of Pannekoek triumphed. Without really taking a position against the nationalist movements of ‘national liberation', Pannekoek - in his ‘Workers' Councils' - considered that they were being drawn into the clutches of American capital and would carry out an industrialization of the ‘liberated' countries. Such was the official position of the Bond in September 1945 with respect to Indonesia.[10] It considered that "the sole path remaining open can be none other than a future industrialization of Indonesia and a further intensification of work." The decolonization movement was taking place with "the support of American capital." It translated itself through the installation of a state apparatus "directed against the impoverished population."
The Bond had even more difficulty in theoretically orientating itself vis-a-vis the ‘national question'. The appearance of two currents (one accepting the Baku theses, the other returning to the conceptions of Luxemburg) pushed it to pronounce itself clearly. This is what happened in 1946 in an issue of ‘Spartacus-Wekblad' (n.12, 23 March). In an article devoted to national independence (‘Nationale onafh ankelijkheid') it attacked the Trotskyist position of the RCP which propagated the slogan ‘Detach Indonesia from Holland now!' (Indonesia los von Holland nun!) Such a slogan could only be an appeal for the exploitation of the Indonesian proletarians by other imperialisms:
"'‘Indonesie los von Holland. Nu!'" really means ‘exploitation of the Indonesian proletarians by America, Britain, Australia and/or their own new rulers'; and that in reality must not happen! Against all exploitation, the struggle of the Indonesian masses must arise."
More profoundly, the Bond took over unambiguously the conception of Rosa Luxemburg and rejected any ‘Leninist' slogan of a ‘right of nations to self-determination'. The latter could only be an abandonment of internationalism for the benefit of an imperialist camp:
"to have sympathy for this slogan is to place the working class on the side of one or other of the two rival imperialist giants, just like the slogan ‘for the right of nations to self-determination' in 1914 and that (of the struggle) ‘against German fascism' during the Second World War."
Thus the Bond definitively abandoned the position which had been its own in 1942. Subsequently, with the independence of countries like China and India, it was preoccupied above all with seeing to what extent ‘independence' was able to lead to a development of the productive forces and therefore objectively favor the coming into being of a strong industrial proletariat. Implicitly, the Bond posed the question of the ‘bourgeois revolutions' in the third world.
3) The Union Question
While having got rid of the syndicalist tendency of Toon van den Berg, the Communistenbond Spartacus remained marked until 1949-50 by the old revolutionary syndicalist spirit of the NAS.
During the war, the Bond had participated - with members of the Dutch CP - in the construction of a small secret union, the EVC (Central Unitary Union). Rejecting any kind of union work since its Congress of Christmas 1945, it had nonetheless sent delegates to the Congress of the EVC on 29 July 1946[11]. But, ‘tactically', the Bond worked in the small ‘independent' unions coming out of certain workers' struggles. Having worked in the EVB union - the origin of which was the transformation of an organism of workers' struggle in Rotterdam into a permanent structure - the Bond defended the idea of ‘factory organizations' created by the workers. These organizations were the ‘nucleus' (Kerne) which would regroup the ‘conscious workers' by ‘locality and enterprise'.[12]
It is evident that the Bond could only return here to the old conception of the KAPD on the unions and the factory organizations (Betriebsorganisationen). But, in contrast to the KAPD, it conducted in parallel a kind of unionist work under the pressure of workers who nurtured illusions regarding the formation of ‘really revolutionary unions'. This was also the case in 1948-49 with the formation of the OVB (Independent Union of Factory Organizations). The OVB was in fact a split (provoked in March 1948 by van den Berg) in the EVC in Rotterdam caused by the CP laying its hands on the EVC. Believing that the OVB would be the basis for ‘autonomous factory organizations' the Bond came to recognize later that it was nothing but a ‘small central union'.[13]
This ‘tactic' of the Bond was in contradiction with its theoretical position on the role and function of unions in the ‘semi-totalitarian society' of the western countries. The unions had become organs of the capitalist state:
"... there can be no question of struggling for conditions of work by means of the unions. The unions have become an integral part of capitalist social order. Their existence and their disappearance are irrevocably linked to the maintenance and to the fall of capitalism. In the future, it will no longer be a question of the working class still trying to take advantage of the unions. They have become strikebreaker organizations, which are there when the workers go spontaneously on strike and conduct it themselves."[14]
The propaganda of the Bond was therefore an unequivocal denunciation of the unions. The workers would not only be led to conduct their struggles against the unions through ‘wildcat strikes' but to understanding that every struggle directed by the unions was a defeat:
"Revolutionary propaganda does not consist in appealing for the transformation of the unions; it consists in clearly showing that the workers' struggle must avoid every kind of union control as being poison to its body. It should be stated clearly that any struggle which the unions succeed in taking control of is lost in advance.
The ‘wildcat strike' conducted against the unions was the very condition for the formation of proletarian organisms in struggle."
4) The Movement of the Class Struggle and the Councils
The publication of ‘Workers' Councils' in January 1946 had been decisive for the orientation of the Bond towards typically ‘councilist' positions. Whereas beforehand the Communistenbond Spartacus had an essentially political vision of the class struggle, it now developed more and more economistic positions. The class struggle was conceived of more as an economic movement than as a process of the growing organization of the proletariat.
Pannekoek's vision of the class struggle insisted more on the necessity of a general organization of the class than on the process of the struggle. He affirmed, in fact, that "organization is the vital principle of the working class, the condition of its emancipation."[15] This clear affirmation showed that the conception of council communism of this period was not that of anarchism. Contrary to this current, Pannekoek underlined that the class struggle is less a ‘direct action' than a coming to consciousness concerning the goals of the struggle, and that consciousness precedes action.
"Spiritual development is the most important factor in the coming to power of the proletariat. The proletarian revolution is not the product of brutal, physical force; it is a victory of the spirit ... at the beginning was the deed. But the deed is nothing but the beginning. Each absence of consciousness, each illusion concerning the essential, concerning the goal and concerning the force of the adversary leads to misfortune and a defeat, installing a new enslavement."[16]
It's this consciousness developing in the class which permits the spontaneous outbreak of "wildcat strikes (illegal or unofficial) as opposed to strikes launched by the unions respecting the rules and regulations." Spontaneity is not the negation of the organization; on the contrary "organization arises spontaneously, immediately."
But neither consciousness nor the organization of the struggle is the goal as such. They express a praxis in which consciousness and organization are embedded in a practical process of the extension of the struggle which leads to the unification of the proletariat:
" ... the wildcat strike, like a prairie fire, engulfs the other factories and embraces an ever greater mass of workers ... The first task to be taken up, the most important one, is to propagate the extension of the strike."
This idea of the extension of the wildcat strike was, however, in contradiction with that of the occupation of the factories propagated by Pannekoek. Pannekoek, like the militants of the Bond, had been very impressed by the phenomenon of the factory occupations during the ‘30s. The act of occupying the factories went down in history as the ‘Polish strike', ever since the Polish miners in 1931 had been the first to apply this tactic. This had subsequently spread to Rumania and Hungary, then to Belgium in 1935 and finally to France in 1936.
At this time, while saluting these explosions of the workers' struggles[17] the Italian communist left around Bilan had shown that these occupations brought with them a weakening of the workers in the factories, which corresponded to a counter-revolutionary course leading to war. On the other hand, a revolutionary course expresses itself essentially through a movement of extension of the struggle culminating with the coming into being of the workers' councils. The appearance of the councils did not necessarily involve a halt of production and the occupation of the factories. On the contrary, in the Russian Revolution the factories continued to function under the control of the factory councils. The movement was not an occupation of the factories but the political and economic domination of production by the councils under the form of daily general assemblies. That's why the transformation in 1920 of the factories of northern Italy into ‘fortresses' by the workers who occupied their places of work expressed a declining revolutionary course. This was the reason why Bordiga so heavily criticized Gramsci who had been the theoretician of the power of the occupied factories.
For the Italian communist left, it was necessary that the workers break the chains tying them to their factories, in order to create a class unity going beyond the narrow framework of the realm of work. On this question, Pannekoek and the Spartacusbond were attached to the factoryist conceptions of Gramsci in 1920. They considered the struggle in the factories to be an end in itself, considering the task of the workers to be the management of the productive apparatus as the first step towards the conquest of power:
"... in the factory occupations there stands out this future which is based on the clearest consciousness that the factories belong to the workers who together form a harmonious unity, and that the struggle for freedom will reach its conclusion in and through the factories ... here the workers become conscious of their close links with the factory ... it is a productive apparatus which they can put in motion - an organ which only becomes a living part of society through their work."[18]
Unlike Pannekoek, the Bond had a tendency to pass over in silence the different phases of the class struggle and to confound the immediate struggle (wildcat strikes) with the revolutionary struggle (the mass strike giving birth to the councils). Each strike committee - regardless of the historical period and the stage reached by the class struggle - was identified with a workers' council:
"The strike committee comprises delegates from different enterprises. It is therefore referred to as a ‘general strike committee', but could also be called a workers' council."[19]
In contrast, Pannekoek underlined in his ‘Five Theses on the Class Struggle' (1946) that the wildcat strike can only become revolutionary to the extent that it is "a struggle against the power of the state"; in this case "the strike committee should take up the general political and social functions, that is to say should take up the role of the workers' councils."
In his conception of the councils, Pannekoek was far from approaching anarchist positions, which were subsequently to triumph in the Dutch ‘councilist' movement. Loyal to marxism, he rejected neither class violence against the state nor the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But these should be on no account goals in themselves; they must be strictly subordinated to the goal of communism: the emancipation of the proletariat made conscious by its struggle, and the principle of action which was workers' democracy. The revolution through the councils is not "a brutal and imbecile force (which) can only destroy." "Revolutions, on the contrary, are new constructions flowing from new forms of organization and of thought. Revolutions are constructive periods in the evolution of humanity". That's why "if armed action (plays) also a large role in the class struggle", it is at the service of a goal: "not to break skulls, but to open minds." In this sense, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the very liberation of the proletariat in the realization of true workers' democracy:
"The conception of Marx of the dictatorship of the proletariat appears as being identical to the workers' democracy of the organization of the councils."
However, Pannekoek's conception of the democracy of the councils weakened the question of its power in the face of other classes and the state. The councils appear as the reflection of the different opinions of the workers. They are a parliament where different work groups coexist, but without either executive or legislative powers. They are not an instrument of the power of the proletariat, but an informal assembly:
"The councils do not govern; they transmit opinions, intentions, the will of work groups."
Very often in ‘Workers' Councils' an affirmation is followed by an antithesis, to such an extent that it is difficult to make out a coherent line of thought. In the paragraph just quoted, the workers' councils appear to be powerless. Further on, they are defined as organs of power "which will take up political functions" or "whatever they decide ... is put into practice by the workers." Which implies that the councils "establish a new right, a new law."
On the other hand, at no stage is there any question of an antagonism between the councils and the new state arising from the revolution. Pannekoek seems implicitly to conceive of the councils as the state, whose task becomes more and more economic since the workers "have made themselves masters of the factories." All of a sudden, the councils cease to be political organs and "are transformed ... into organs of production."[20] From this angle, it is difficult to see in what way Pannekoek's theory of the councils differs from that of the Bolsheviks after 1918.
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Thus, in the space of two years - from 1945 to 1947 - the theoretical conceptions of the Communistenbond Spartacus approached more and more the ‘councilist' theories of the GIC and of Pannekoek, although the latter was by no means a militant of the Bond.[21]
Certainly there were factors at work which explain the brutal contrast between the Bond of 1945 and the Bond of 1947. At first, an influx of militants after May 1945 had given rise to the impression that a period of a revolutionary course was being opened. Inevitably, the Bond believed that the world war would give rise to the revolution. The outbreak of wildcat strikes in Rotterdam in June 1945 directed against the unions strengthened the Bond in these hopes. More profoundly, the organization did not believe in the possibility of a reconstruction of the world economy. It considered in August 1945 that "the capitalist period of the history of humanity is coming to a close".[22] It was comforted by Pannekoek who wrote "we are today witnessing the beginning of the bankruptcy of capitalism as an economic system".[23]
Soon, with the beginning of the period of reconstruction, the Bond would recognize that neither a revolution nor an economic collapse were to be expected. However, the Bond and Pannekoek still remained convinced of the historic perspective of communism. To be sure, "a large portion of the path towards barbarism had already been covered but the other path, the path leading towards socialism, remains open."[24]
The beginning of the Cold War found the Bond undecided about the post-war historic course. On one hand it thought - with Pannekoek - that the post-war era would open new markets for American capital, with reconstruction and decolonization plus the war economy. On the other hand it seemed that every strike was "a revolution in miniature". Even though these strikes unfolded more and more in the context of the confrontation of the two blocs, ‘Spartacus' considered - at that time - that "it's the class struggle which puts a brake on preparations for a third world war."[25]
The awaited revolution didn't arrive, and this in the context of a particularly depressing trajectory for revolutionaries. The moral authority of Pannekoek and Canne-Meyer militated more and more towards a return to the mode of functioning which had prevailed in the old GIC. In the spring of 1947, critiques began to be made of the conception of the party. The old members of the GIC favored a return to the structures of ‘study groups' and ‘work groups'. This return had in fact been proposed in 1946, the Bond having called on Canne-Meyer[26] to take over the editorship of a review in Esperanto and thus to form an esperantist group. In reality, this amounted to the creation of groups within the Bond. In their intervention, the militants of the Bond had more and more the tendency to conceive of themselves as a sum of individuals at the service of the workers' struggle.
However, the Communistenbond was not isolated - despite the non-revolutionary course which it finally, belatedly recognized.[27] In Holland, the group ‘Socialisme van underop' (Socialism from below) was constituted, part of the ‘councilist' tendency. But it was above all with the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium that the Bond had the closest contacts. In 1945, a group was formed which was very close to the Bond, editing the review ‘Arbeiderswil' (Workers' Will). It was subsequently taken charge of by the ‘Vereniging van Radensocialisten' (Association of council socialists). The group declared itself to be a partisan of ‘power to the workers' councils' and ‘anti-militarism'. In its principle of organizational federalism it came close to anarchism.[28]
Such a political environment of localist groups could only push the Bond to withdraw into itself in Holland. However, in 1946, the Bond had gone about making its members familiar with the positions of the Bordigist current, by translating the declaration of principles of the Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left.[29] In July 1946, Canne-Meyer was dispatched to Paris to make contact with different groups, in particular ‘Internationalisme'. Theo Maassen subsequently followed up this effort to make contact with the internationalist milieu in France. It is worth noting that the contact was established through ex-members of the GIC, and not by ex-RSAP people who only had political contact with the group of Vereeken. The product of the council communist movement of the ‘20s and ‘30s, it had already discussed with the ‘Bordigist' current regrouped around the review ‘Bilan'.
In 1947, the Bond remained very open to international discussion and wished to break down the national and linguistic frontiers in which it was enclosed:
"The Bond does not set out to be a specifically Dutch organization. It considers state frontiers - the products of history and of capitalism - to be obstacles to the unity of the international working class."[30]
It is in this spirit that the Communistenbond took the initiative in calling an international conference of revolutionary groups existing in Europe. The conference was held on the 25-26 May 1947 in Brussels. By way of a discussion document, the Bond wrote a brochure ‘De nieuwe wereld' (The new world) which it took the trouble to translate into French.
The holding of the first post-war conference of internationalist groups was based on selection criteria. Without affirming so explicitly, the Bond eliminated the Trotskyist groups for their support for the USSR and their participation in the Resistance. However, they had chosen rather large, somewhat loose criteria for participation at the conference:
"We consider as essential: the rejection of any kind of parliamentarism; the conception that the masses must organize themselves in action, thereby directing their own struggles themselves. At the centre of the discussion, there is also the question of the mass movement, whereas questions such as the new communist (or communitary) economy, the formation of the party or groups, the dictatorship of the proletariat etc can only be considered to be consequences of the previous point. Communism is not a question of the party, but a question of the creation of a mass autonomous movement."[31]
Consequently, the Bond eliminated the Bordigist Internationalist PC of Italy which had participated in elections. On the other hand, the Autonomous Federation of Turin was invited (which had left the PCInt over divergences on the parliamentary question) and the French group ‘Internationalisme' which had detached itself from Bordigism. On the rather hand, Belgian and French Bordigist groups were invited which had divergences with the PCInt on the parliamentary and colonial questions.
Apart from these groups, coming from Bordigism or in opposition to it, the Communistenbond had invited informal groups, even individuals representing no-one but themselves from the anarcho-councilist tendency: from Holland, ‘Socialisme vanonderop'; from Belgium the ‘Vereniging van Radensocialisten'; from Switzerland the councilist groups ‘Klassenkampf'; from France the communist-revolutionaries of ‘Proletaire'.[32]
The invitation extended to the French Anarchist Federation was strongly criticized by ‘Internationalisme' which was concerned that the criteria for the conference should be rigorous. To underline the internationalist nature of the conference, the official anarchist movements which had participated in the war in Spain or in the maquis of the Resistance should be eliminated. ‘Internationalisme' determined four criteria of selection of groups participating in the internationalist conference:
-- the rejection of Trotskyism "as a political body situated inside the proletariat";
-- the rejection of the official anarchist current "on account of the participation of their Spanish comrades in the capitalist government of 1936-38", their participation "under the label of anti-fascism in the imperialist war in Spain" and "in the maquis of the Resistance in France" - so that this current had "no place in a regroupment of the proletariat";
-- in a general manner rejecting all the groups which "have effectively participated in one way or another in the imperialist war of 1939-45";
-- the recognition of the historic significance of October 1917 as "the fundamental criterion of every organization claiming to be part of the proletariat."
These four criteria "cannot but mark the class frontiers separating the proletariat from capitalism." However, the Bond did not withdraw its invitation to ‘Libertaire' (Anarchist Federation) which announced its participation and never turned up. The Bond had to recognize that anti-parliamentarianism and the recognition of the autonomous organization of the masses were vague criteria for selection.
In this sense the international conference could only be a conference establishing contact between new groups which had arisen since 1945 and the internationalist organizations of the avant-garde which the world-wide conflict had condemned to remaining isolated in their respective countries. It could not in any way be a new Zimmerwald, as the group ‘Le Proletaire' proposed, but a place of political and theoretical confrontation permitting their ‘organic existence' and ‘organic development'.
As ‘Internationlisme' (which had participated very actively in the conference) noted, the international context did not open the possibility of a revolutionary course. The conference was located in a period "in which the proletariat had suffered a disastrous defeat, opening a reactionary course throughout the world." It was a question therefore of closing ranks and working towards the creation of a political linkup through discussion, permitting the weaker groups to recover from the devastating effects of the reactionary course.
This was also the view of the ex-GIC members of the Bond. And it was not by chance that it was two old comrades of the GIC (Canne-Meyer and Willem) - and not a single member of the leadership of the Bond - who participated at the conference. The ex-RSAP people remained in fact very localist, despite the fact that the Bond had created an ‘International Contact Commission'.
Generally speaking, there was great distrust between the different groups invited, with many of them afraid of a political confrontation. Thus, neither the French Fraction nor ‘Socialisme van onderop' participated at the conference. Lucian of the Belgian Fraction could only be brought around to participating in the debates through the express demand of Marco of Internationalisme. Finally, only ‘Internationalisme' and the Autonomous Federation sent an official delegation. As for the ex-elements of the GIC, already in disagreement inside the Spartacusbond, they represented no-one but themselves. They nourished a certain suspicion towards ‘Internationalisme' who they accused of "losing itself in interminable discussion about the Russian revolution."[33]
Chaired by Willem, Marco of Internationalisme and an old anarcho- communist who had been a militant since the 1890s, the conference revealed a greater community of ideas than could have been supposed:
-- the majority of the groups rejected the theories of Burnham about the ‘society of managers' and the indefinite development of the capitalist system. The historic period was that of "decadent capitalism, of permanent crisis, finding in state capitalism its structural and political expression."
-- except for the anarchistic elements present, the council communists were in agreement with the groups coming from Bordigism on the necessity for an organization of revolutionaries. However, against their conception in 1945, they saw in the party an assembly of individual carriers of a proletarian science: "the new revolutionary parties are therefore the carriers of or the laboratories of proletarian knowledge." Taking up the conception of Pannekoek on the role of individuals, they affirmed that "there are always individuals who are conscious of these new truths."
-- a majority of participants supported the interventions of Marco of Internationalisme denying that either the Trotskyist or the anarchist current had their place "at a conference of revolutionary groups."[34] Only the representative of ‘Proletaire' - a group which was subsequently to evolve towards anarchism - took upon itself to advocate the invitation of non-official or ‘left' tendencies in such currents.
-- the groups present rejected any kind of union or parliamentary ‘tactic'. The silence of the ‘Bordigist' groups in opposition indicated their disagreement with the Italian Bordigist party.
It is significant that this conference - the most important of the immediate post-war period - of internationalist groups brought together organizations coming from two currents, Bordigism and council communism. This was at once the first and the last attempt towards political confrontation in the post-war period. During the 1930s such an attempt would have been impossible principally because of the greater isolation of these groups and the divergences on the Spanish question. The conference of 1947 permitted essentially the establishment of a delimitation - on the question of war and of anti-fascism - from the Trotskyist and anarchist currents. It expressed in a confused manner the common sentiment that the context of the Cold War had closed a very brief period of two years which had seen the development of new organizations, and had opened a course towards a disintegration of militant forces unless they consciously maintained a minimum of political contact.
This general consciousness was missing from the conference which ended without either practical decisions or common resolutions being adopted. Only the ex-members of the GIC and ‘Internationalisme' spoke out in favor of holding further conferences. This project proved to be beyond realization, thanks to the departure in August 1947[35] of the greater part of the old GIC members from the Bond. Apart from Theo Maassen, who considered the break to be unjustified, they believed that their divergences were too important to allow them to remain in the Communistenbond. In fact, the latter had decided to create - artificially - an ‘International Federation of Factory Groups' (IFBK) in the image of the ‘Betriebsorganisationen' of the KAPD.
But the profound cause of the split was the continuation of a militant and organized activity in the workers' struggles. The old members of the GIC were accused by the militants of the Bond of wanting to transform the organization into a ‘club of theoretical studies' and of denying the immediate workers' struggles:
"The point of view of the old comrades (of the GIC) was that - while continuing to propagate ‘production in the hands of the factory organizations', ‘all power to the workers' councils' and ‘for a communist production on the basis of a calculation of the cost of average labor time' - the Spartacusbond didn't have to intervene in the workers' struggles as they take place today. The propaganda of the Spartacusbond should be pure in its principles, and if the masses are not interested today this will change when the mass movements become revolutionary."[36]
Through an irony of history, the ex-members of the GIC returned to the same arguments as the tendency of Gorter - the so-called Essen tendency - in the ‘20s, against which the GIC was constituted in 1927. Because they defended active intervention in the economic struggles - the position of the Berlin tendency of the KAPD - they could avoid the rapid process of disintegration of the partisans of Gorter. The latter either disappeared politically or evolved - as an organization - towards trotskyist positions and towards left socialist ‘anti-fascism' before finally participating in the Dutch Resistance: Frits Kief, Bram Korper and Barend Luteraan - the leaders of the ‘Gorterist' tendency followed this trajectory.[37]
Constituting in Autumn 1947 a ‘Groep van Raden communisten' (Group of council communists), Canne-Meyer, B. A. Si jes and their partisans pursued political activity for a time. They wanted, despite everything, to maintain international contact. With a view towards a conference - which never took place - they edited a ‘Bulletin of Information and of International Discussion' in November 1947, of which just a single number appeared.[38] After having edited two members of ‘Radencommunisme' in 1948, the group disappeared. Canne-Meyer fell into the greatest pessimism regarding the revolutionary nature of the proletariat and began to doubt the theoretical value of marxism.[39] Sijes devoted himself entirely to his work as a historian on the ‘Strike of February 1941' before finally participating in an ‘International Committee of Research into Nazi War Crimes' which led him to testify at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem.[40] Bruun van Albada, who had not followed the old GIC members in the split, ceased militant life soon afterwards in 1948 after being appointed director of the astronomical observatory of Bandoeng in Indonesia. No longer organized, it didn't take long until he "no longer had any confidence in the working class."[41]
Thus, outside of any organized militant activity most of the militants of the GIC ended up rejecting any kind of militant marxist engagement. Only Theo Maassen, who remained in the Bond, maintained his engagement.
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What proved the split to have been unjustified - according to Theo Maassen - was the evolution of the Bond from the end of 1947 until its Christmas conference. This conference marked a decisive stage in the history of the Communistenbond Spartacus. The conception of the organization of the GIC triumphed completely and amounted to an abandonment of the positions of 1945 on the party. It was the beginning of an evolution towards a finished councilism, which led finally to the near-disappearance of the Spartacusbond in Holland.
The affirmation of a participation of the Bond on all the economic struggles of the proletariat led to a dissolution of the organization in the struggle. The organization was no longer a critical part of the proletariat but an organism at the service of the workers' struggles: "the Bond and the members of the Bond strive to serve the working class in struggle."[42] The ouvrierist theory triumphed and the communists of the Bond were confounded with the mass of workers in struggle. The distinction made by Marx between communists and proletarians, a distinction taken up by the ‘Theses on the party' of 1945, disappeared:
"The Bond should be an organization of workers who think for themselves, make propaganda themselves, organize themselves, and are administered by themselves."
However, this evolution towards ouvrierism was not total and the Bond was not afraid to affirm itself as an organization with an indispensable function in the class: "The Bond makes an indispensable contribution to the struggle. It is an organization of communists become conscious that the history of every society until now has been the history of class struggle, based on the development of the productive forces." Without using the term ‘party', the Bond spoke up for a regroupment of revolutionary forces at the international level: "The Bond considers it desirable that the avant-garde with the same orientation throughout the world regroup in an international organization."
The organizational measures taken at the conference stood in opposition to this principle of regroupment, which could only be realized if the political and organizational centralization of the Bond were maintained. The Bond ceased to be a centralized organization with statutes and executive organs. It became a federation of work, study and propaganda groups. The local sections (or ‘nuclei') were autonomous, without any other links than that of a ‘work group' specialized in inter-group relations, and the internal bulletin ‘Uit eigen Kring' (In our circle). There were also work groups with functions to fulfill: editorship; correspondence; administration; the editing of ‘De Vlam' of the Bond; international contacts; 'economic activities' linked to the foundation of the International of Factory Groups (IFBK).
This return to the federalist principle of the GIC led to a more and more ‘councilist' political regression at the theoretical level. A ‘councilism' with two characteristics: the characterization of the historic period since 1914 as an epoch of ‘bourgeois revolutions' in the under-developed countries; the rejection of any revolutionary political organization. This evolution took place particularly rapidly during the ‘50s. The affirmation of a theoretical continuity with the GIC - documented by the re-edition in 1950 of ‘Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution'[43] signaled the break with the original principles of the Bond of 1945.
During the 1950s, the Bond made a great theoretical effort in publishing the review ‘Daad en Gedachte' (Deed and thought), the editing of which was above all the responsibility of Cajo Brendel, who joined the organization in 1952. Along with Theo Maassen, he contributed to the publication of pamphlets on the insurrection of the East German workers in 1953; on the municipal workers' strike in Amsterdam in 1955; on the strike in Belgium in 1961. Alongside current events pamphlets the Bond published theoretical essays which revealed the growing influence of ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie'.[44]
The influence of this last group - with which political contact was taken up in 1953 and from whom texts were published in ‘Daad en Gedachte' - was no coincidence. The Bond had been the unconscious precursor of the theory of Castoriadis concerning ‘modern capitalism' and the opposition ‘rulers/ruled'. But as much as the Bond remained loyal to marxism in reaffirming the opposition between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, it also made concessions to ‘SoB' in defining the Russian ‘bureaucracy' as a ‘new class'. But for the Bond, this class was ‘new' above all in relation to its origins; it took the form of a ‘bureaucracy' which is "part and parcel of the bourgeoisie".[45] However, in associating it with a strata of collective non-owning ‘managers' of the means of production, the Bond took over the theory of Burnham which it had rejected at the conference of 1947. In spite of this, the Bond had been in 1945 the unconscious precursor of this theory, which it had, however, never fully developed. The master became the true ‘follower' of its disciple: ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie'. Like the latter, it slid progressively down the slope which was to lead to its dissolution.
This dislocation had two profound causes:
-- the rejection of any proletarian experience of the past, in particular the Russian experience;
-- the abandonment by the GIC tendency - inside the Bond - of any idea of a political organization.
The Rejection of the Russian Experience
After having tried to understand the causes of the degeneration of the Russian revolution, the Bond ceased to consider it to be proletarian only to see it - just like the GIC - as a ‘bourgeois' revolution. In a letter to Castoriadis-Chaulieu of 8 November 1953 - which was published by the Bond[46] - Pannekoek considered that this ‘last bourgeois revolution' had been ‘the work of the Russian workers also'. In this way, the proletarian nature of the revolution was denied (workers' councils, the taking of power in October 1917). Not wanting to see the process of the counter-revolution in Russia (the subordination of the workers' councils to the state, Kronstadt) Pannekoek and the Bond ended up with the idea that the Russian workers had fought for the ‘bourgeois' revolution and thus for their own self-exploitation. If October 1917 meant nothing for the revolutionary movement, it was logical that Pannekoek should affirm that "the proletarian revolution belongs to the future." In this way, the entire history of the workers' movement ceased to appear as a source of experiences for the proletariat and the point of departure for all theoretical reflection. The entire workers' movement of the 19th century became ‘bourgeois' and could only situate itself on the terrain of the ‘bourgeois revolution'.
This theoretical evolution was accompanied by an ever greater immediatism vis-a-vis each workers' strike. The class struggle became an eternal present, without a past - since there was no longer a history of the workers' movement - and without a future - since the Bond refused to consider itself to be an active factor capable of positively influencing the situation of the consciousness of the workers.
The Self-dissolution of the Organization
At the time of the discussion with ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie' the Bond had not renounced the conception of organization and of the party. As Theo Maassen wrote: "the avant-garde is a part of the militant class, composed of the most militant workers from all political directions." The organization was conceived of as the totality of the groups of the revolutionary milieu. This vague definition of the avant-garde which dissolved the Bond into the totality of existing groups was, however, a sign of life of the original principles of 1945. Although it considered this apparatus, the party, to be dangerous because it has ‘a life of its own' and develops ‘according to its own laws', the Bond still recognized its necessary role: that of being "a force of the class."[47]
But this ‘force of the class' came to disappear in the struggles of the workers in order not to break ‘their unity'. Which came down to saying that the party - and the organization of the Bond in particular - was an invertebrate organism, which should ‘dissolve itself in the struggle'.
This conception was the consequence of the workerist and immediatist vision of Dutch councilism. The proletariat in its entirety seemed to it to be the sole political avant-garde, the ‘teacher' of the ‘councilist' militants, which in reality were defined as a ‘rear-guard'. The identification between conscious communist and combative worker led to an identification with the immediate consciousness of the workers. The militant worker in a political organization no longer has to raise the consciousness of the workers in struggle, but negates himself in placing himself at the level of the immediate and still confused consciousness of the mass of the workers:
"It is essential that the socialist or communist of our epoch conform to and identify with the workers in struggle."[48]
This conception was defended particularly by Theo Maassen, Cajo Brendel and Jaap Meulenkamp. This led to a split in December 1964 in the Bond. The tendency which had consequently defended the anti-organization conception of the GIC became a review: ‘Daad en Gedachte'. This dislocation[49] of the Bond had in fact been prepared by the abandonment of everything which could symbolize the existence of a political organization. At the end of the ‘50s, the Communistenbond Spartacus had become the ‘Spartacusbond'. The rejection of the term 'communist' signified the abandonment of a political continuity with the old ‘council communist' movement. The increasingly family-like atmosphere in the Bond, with the word ‘comrade' being banished and replaced by ‘friend', was no longer that of a political body regrouping individuals on the basis of the common acceptance of the same vision and the same collective discipline.
From now on, there were two ‘councilist' ‘organizations' in Holland. One of them - the Spartacusbond - after having experienced a certain lease of life after 1968, being open to international confrontation with other groups, ended up disappearing at the end of the ‘70s. Opening itself up to the youngest and most impatient elements, immersed in the struggle of the ‘Kraakers' (squatters) in Amsterdam, it dissolved itself into a leftist populism before finally ceasing publication of the review ‘Spartacus'.[50]
‘Daad en Gedachte', on the other hand, survived in the form of a monthly review. Dominated by the personality of Cajo Brendel after the death of Theo Maassen, the review is the point of convergence for anarchistic elements. The ‘Daad en Gedachte' tendency has gone to the limit of the ‘councilist' logic in rejecting the workers' movement of the 19th century as ‘bourgeois' and cutting itself off from any revolutionary tradition, in particular that of the KAPD, a tradition which appeared to it to be too much marked by ‘the spirit of the party.'
But above all, ‘Daad en Gedachte' has progressively detached itself from the real tradition of the GIC at the theoretical level. It is above all an information bulletin about strikes, whereas the reviews of the GIC were true theoretical and political reviews.
This rupture with the true traditions of council communism led progressively towards the terrain of third worldism, characteristic of leftist groups.
"... the struggles of the colonial peoples have made a contribution to the revolutionary movement. The fact that badly armed peasant populations have been able to face up to the enormous force of modern imperialism has shaken the myth of the invincibility of the military, technological and scientific power of the west. Their struggle has also shown to millions of people the brutality and racism of capitalism and has led many people - especially youngsters and students - to enter the struggle against their own regime."[51]
It is striking to note here how, as for the Fourth International and Bordigism, the struggle which stems from the proletariat of industrial Europe is understood as the product of ‘national liberation struggles'. They appear as a by-product of students in revolt, if they are not denied as such.
Such a theory is not surprising. In taking up the theory of ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie' of a society divided not by class antagonisms but by the revolts of the ‘ruled' against the ‘rulers', the ‘councilist' current could only conceive of history as a succession of revolts of social categories and classes. The marxist theory of council communism of the ‘30s was followed by the Communistenbond of the ‘40s retreating in face of the conceptions of anarchism.[52]
Today in Holland, council communism has disappeared as a real current. It has left behind numerically very weak ‘councilist' tendencies - such as ‘Daad en Gedachte' - which have progressively linked themselves to the anti-party libertarian current.
At the international level, after the Second World War, the ‘council communist' current was only maintained by individuals such as Mattick, who remained loyal to revolutionary marxism. If groups - claiming to represent ‘Rate-Kommunismus' - have appeared in other countries, such as Germany and France, these have had very different foundations that those of the Communistenbond Spartacus.
Chardin
[1] On Toon van den Berg (1904-1977) see the article of the Spartacusbond: "Spartacus" no. 2, February-March 1978.
[2] "Uit eigen kring" no. 2, March 1946: Nota van de politike commissie" (Notes of the political committee).
[3] See UEK no. 2, March 1946, idem.
[4] At the same time as the question of centralization arose, a cleavage appeared between "academic" elements and militants who were more in favor of propaganda. The latter, such as Johan van Dinkel, denounced the danger for the Bond becoming a "club of theoretical studies". See UEK no. 2 March 1946, "Waar staat de Communistenbond? Theoretisch studie club or wordende Party?" (What is the Communistenbond? Theoretical study club or party in the making?)
[5] See the circular of 17 August 1946 containing the minutes of the national political commission of July 14. There are interventions of Stan Poppe, Bertus Nansink, van Albada, Jan Vastenhoew and Theo Maassen on the state of the organization.
[6] "Maandblad Spartacus" No 12, December 1945: "Het russische imperialisme en de revolutionaire arbeiders" (Russian imperialism and the revolutionary workers).
[7] The group "Socialisme au Barbarie", a split from Trotskyism, published its first number in 1949. Its motor force was C. Castoriadis (Chaulieu or Cardan). Above all the sub-products of "Socialisme ou Barbarie" - ICO, and the "Liaisons" of Henri Simon - pushed the theory of "rulers/ruled", "order givers/order takers" to its conclusion.
[8] The Conference of the Bond of 27 and 28 October 1945. See UEK No 6, December 1945.
[9] Report of a member of the political commission on the Indonesian question in UEK no 6, Dec ‘45
[10] "Maandblad Spartacus" No 9, September 1945: "Nederland - Indonesie".
[11] Decision of the political commission, July 14, 1946. See circular of August 27 with the minutes of the meeting of the central organ.
[12] "Spartacus" (Weekblad) No 23, June 7 1947: "Het wezen der revolutionaire bedrijfsorganisatie" (The nature of the revolutionary factory organization).
[13] In 1951, some members of the Bond considered that the OVB was none other than an "old union" with which it should have nothing to do. This was the point of view of view of "Spartacus" in 1978 which defined the OVB as "a small central union". Consult the article "Toon van den Berg" (No 2, February-March). The debate on the nature of the OVB is to be found in "Uit eigen kring" no 17, July 22, 1951.
[14] "De nieuwe Wereld" April 1947, translated into bad French f o the Conference of 1947 and published as a brochure "Le monde nouveau".
[15] "The workers councils", chapter "Direct Action".
[16] "The workers councils", chapter "Thought and Action".
[17] See "la Gauche Communiste d' Italie", chapter 4.
[18] "The Workers Councils" chapter 3, "The occupation of the factories".
[19] See "le nouveau monde" (The new world) 1947, p. 12. The Bond, like Pannekoek, had a tendency to consider strike committees to be permanent organs, which continue after the struggle. Pannekoek appeals for the formation - after the strike - of small independent unions "intermediary forms ... regrouping, , after a large scale strike, the nucleus of the best militants in a single union. Wherever a strike breaks out spontaneously, this union will be present with its organizers and its experienced propagandists." ("Les conseils ouvriers", p. 157).
[20] "The workers councils" chapter: "The workers revolution".
[21] Pannekoek only had individual contact with the old members of the GIC: Canne-Meyer, BA Si jes.
[22] "Maandblad Spartacus" No 8 August 1945: "Het zieke Kapitalisme" (Sick Capitalism)
[23] "The Workers Councils" p419 French edition. This affirmation of a collapse of capitalism was in contradiction with another thesis of the "workers councils" according to which capitalism experiences with decolonization a new upsurge: "Once it has integrated into its own domain the hundreds of millions of people who are crowded onto the fertile plains of China and India, the essential task of capitalism will have been accomplished". (p194) . This last idea cannot but recall the theses of Bordiga on "youthful capitalism."
[24] "Maandblad Spartacus" No 8, August 1945 op cit.
[25] "Spartacus" (Weekblad) No 22, May 31, 1947: "Nog twe jaren" (Two more years).
[26] The Bond had made Canne-Meyer responsible for the publication of an esperantist review: "Klasbatale". There was another attempt in 1951 to edit "Spartacus" in Esperanto. The fixation on this language, a fad of intellectuals, explains the lack of effort made by the Bond to publish its texts in English, German and French.
[27] The 1950 preface to "Grondbeginse len der communistische productie en distributie" speaks of a "definitely not revolutionary situation"; it does not use the concept of counter-revolution to define the period. This preface has two concerns:
a) to examine the world wide tendency towards state capitalism and its different expressions: in Russia the state directing the economy, in the USA the monopolies seizing hold of the state;
b) affirming the necessity of the immediate economic struggle as the basis of "new experiences" carrying the germs of a "new period".
[28] The "provisional statutes of the Vereniging van Radensocialisten" was published in April 1947 in "Uit eign kring" No 5.
[29] The translation and commentaries of the nucleus in Leiden on the "Draft program of the Belgian fraction" are to be found in the circular bulletin of April 27, 1946.
[30] "Uit eigen kring", bulletin of the Christmas Conference 1947.
[31] Quoted by "Spartakus" No 1, October 1947: "Die internationale Versammlung in Brussel, Pfingsten 1947". "Spartakus" was the organ of the RKD linked to the French group "Le Proletaire" (Revolutionary-Communists).
[32] Minutes of the Conference in the issue of "Spartakus" already quoted, and in "Internationalisme" No 23, June 15 1947: "Letter of the GCF to the Communistenbond ‘Spartacus'"; "An Internationconference of revolutionary groups"; "Rectifications" in No 24, July 15 1947.
[33] Account of a journey to make contact with the French RKD and "Internationalism" in August 1946. See "Uit eigen kring" No 4, April 1947.
[34] Quotes from the report of the Congress, "Internationalism" No 23.
[35] Circular letter of August 10 1947: "De splijting in de Communistenbond ‘Spartacus' op zontag 3 augus tus 1947" Quoted by Fri is Kool in "Die Linke gegen die Parteiherrschaft", 1970 p 626.
[36] "Uit eigen kring", special number, December 1947: "De plaats van Spartacus in de klassen‑ strijd" (The place of Spartacus in the class struggle).
[37] Frits Kief, after having been secretary of the KAPN from 1930 to 1932, founded along with Korper the group "De Arbeiderssraad" which evolved progressively towards Trotskyist and anti-fascist positions. During the war Frits Kief participated in the Dutch resistance, becoming a member of the "labor Party" after the war before ending up singing the song of "Yugoslavian Socialism". Bram Korper and his nephew returned to the CP. As for the Barend Luteran (1878-1970) who - more than the already sick Gorter - had been the founder of the KAPN, he followed the same route as Frits Kief.
[38] The technical preparation for this conference (Bulletins) was taken charge of by the "Groep va Raden-Communisten". In a letter written in October 1947, "Internationalisme" points out that a future conference could no longer be held "on a simple basis of affections" and must reject dilletantism in discussion.
[39] On the evolution of Canne-Meyer see his text from the 1950s "Socialism Lost" in IR 37.
[40] B.A. Sijes (1908-1981) however, contributed during the 60s and 70s to the council communist movement in taking charge of the prefaces and the re-edition of the works of Pannekoek. The edition of the "Memoirs" is the last part of this work.
[41] B. van Albada (1912-1972), while ceasing to be a militant, translated with his wife, "Lenin as Philosopher" into Dutch.
[42] This quotation and the following are extracts from "Uit eigen kring", special number, December 1947. "Sparatcus. Eugen werk, organisatie en propaganda".
[43] The "Principles" had been written in prison, in the 20s, by Jan Appel. They had been proofed and adapted by Canne-Meyer. Jan Appel wrote - according to the Spartacusbond in its preface of 1972 - along with Sijes and Canne-Meyer in 1946 the study: "De economische grondslagen van de radenmaatschappij" (The economic foundations of the council society). It doesn't appear as if Jan Appel became a member of the Bond in 1945. He was in disagreement with the ex-members of the GIC and with the Bond who refused to engage in revolutionary work towards the German Army. Other reasons (personal tensions) are given for his separation from a militant and political work which he wanted to engage in.
[44] The pamphlets mentioned and the review "Daad en Gedachte" can be ordered from the following address: Schouw 48-11, Lelystad, Holland.
[45] A pamphlet edited by Theo Maasen in 1961 "Van Beria tet Zjoekof" - Social-economische achter grond van de destalinisate". Translation in French "L'arriere-fond de la destalinisation" in Cahiers du communism des conseils" May 1971.
[46] See "A correspondence between A. Pannekoek and P. Chalieu" with an introduction by Cajo Brendel in "Chaiers du communism des conseils" no. 8 May 1971.
[47] Quotes from a letter of Theo Maasen to "Socialisme ou Barbarie". Published in the no. 18, January-March 1956 under the title "Once more on the question of the party."
[48] Quotes from the pamphlet "Van Beria tot Zjoekof".
[49] Meulenkamp left the Bond in 1964. Cajo Brendel and Theo Maasen, with two of their comrades, were excluded in December. The separation was not a "soft" one: the Bond recuperated the equipment and the pamphlets which belonged to it, even though the latter had been written by Brendel and Maasen. Jaap Meulenkamp referred to "Stalinist metnods" in "Brief van Jaap aan Radencommunisme" in "Iniatief tot een bijeenkomst van revolutionaire groepen", bulletin of January 20 1981. Subsequently, Daad en Gedachte, despite the invitations of the Bond, refused to sit "at the same table" at conferences and meetings such as that of January 1981.
[50] See the articles in the International Review on the Dutch Left - nos 2, 9, 16 and 17.
[51] Cajo Brendel: "Theses on the Chinese Revolution". the quotation is taken from the introduction to the English translation in 1971 by the Solidarity group of Abederdeen.
[52] A summary of the anarchist conceptions of Daad en Gendachte" is to be found in the bulletin of January 20 1981 in relation to a conference of diverse groups, in which the ICC and several individuals who represented themselves participated. "Kanttekeningen van Daad en Gedachte" (Marginal notes of Daad en Gedachte). Daad en Gedachte did not participate at the conference as a group but in an individual capacity.
The development, within the general context of the historic resurgence of class struggle since ‘68, of a third wave of' workers' struggles after those of ‘68-‘74 and ‘78-‘81, is now obvious. The succession of workers' battles which, since the middle of ‘83, has hit nearly all the advanced countries - notably those of western Europe -and which has reached its high point with the present miners' strike in Britain - has clearly demonstrated that the world working class has now come out of the apathy which both allowed for and followed the major defeat in Poland in December 1981. This is what we are once again showing in the first part of this article (following the articles in IR 37 and 38). This resurgence has now been recognized by all revolutionary groups, though somewhat belatedly. However, this delay in revolutionaries' understanding of the present situation poses the problem of the method with which to analyze the situation. It is this method, a precondition of the capacity of communists to be an active factor in the development of the class struggle, which we examine in the second part of the article.
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What point has the resurgence reached?
It took the proletariat two years to draw the lessons of the wave of struggles of ‘78-‘81, which notably comprised the movements in the steel industry in France and Britain, the miners' strike in the USA, the strike in the port of Rotterdam with its independent strike committee, and above all, the mass strike in Poland in August 1980. The international proletariat took two years to register, digest and understand the defeat it suffered in Poland, a defeat culminating in the imposition of martial rule of 13th December and the terrible repression that followed.
The retreat in struggle that the defeat provoked on the international level could not last long. Even before we clearly recognized the renewal of class combativity that would express itself first in the USA in July 1983 (the telephone strike) and then above all in Belgium in September (strike in the public sector), we said at the 5th Congress of the ICC, in July ‘83, that "Up to now, the central fraction of the proletariat in the industrialized countries has been relatively lightly attacked by the rigors of austerity, compared to its class brothers in the peripheral countries. But capitalism's plunge into the crisis forces the bourgeoisie into an ever more severe attack on the living conditions of the proletariat in the world's greatest industrial concentration - western Europe... This crisis pushes the proletariat to generalize its strikes and its consciousness, and to put forward in practice the revolutionary perspective." (IR 35 ‘Report on the international situation')
The year ‘83-‘84 has broadly confirmed this analysis. Without going into all the details again (see IRs 37 and 38 and the various territorial publications of the ICC) we can quickly repeat that the wave of struggle has hit all the continents, from Japan and India to Tunisia and Morocco (the hunger riots last winter), Brazil, Argentina, Chile, the Dominican Republic, the USA and western Europe. In the latter, every country has been affected and they are still being affected by workers' revolts: Spain, Italy, Greece, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, France, Britain and Germany. Here is the economic and, above all, the historic heart of capitalism. Here is the largest, oldest, and most experienced concentration of workers in the world.
After a summer in which class combativity did not even slow down (cf Britain), we are now at the beginning of a year in which events are going to speed up. With the worsening of the crisis of capitalism and the necessity for the bourgeoisie to make further attacks on the working class, the maintenance and strengthening of the bourgeois tactic of the ‘left in opposition' is still on the agenda. The left, posing as the ‘opponent' of the right-wing governing teams, has the specific task of sabotaging the workers' reaction to the measures of austerity and unemployment that are being undertaken in all countries.
Two events are particularly significant for this tactic of the bourgeoisie:
-- the presidential election in the USA. For this election, which will take place in November, the American bourgeoisie holds in Reagan the winning ‘ticket' for maintaining the role that has fallen to the government of the right - a role for which it has already been tried and trusted. For those who still have doubts about the ‘machiavellianism' of the bourgeoisie (cf IR 31), about the fact that putting the left in opposition is a well-thought-out policy, about the obvious will of the American bourgeoisie to avoid any unfortunate surprises, the media publicity about the tax returns of the Democratic candidate for the vice-presidency is only the most recent example of the kind of ‘scandals' and manipulations (in which the western bourgeoisie is a past master) for organizing elections...and their results. Keeping the Democratic Party in opposition will allow it to speak a more ‘popular', left-wing language and to strengthen its traditional links with the American trade unions, the AFL-CIO.
-- the departure from government of the French CP. This decision of the French CP, its growing and increasingly open opposition to the ‘socialist' Mitterand, is aimed at patching up a social front which has been dangerously exposed. In ‘81, the accidental accession to government of the SP and CP - the latter being the traditional force for containing and combating the working class in France - put the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie in an extremely weak position vis-a-vis the proletariat. This was the only country in Western Europe without an important left party in opposition to sabotage workers' struggles ‘from the inside'. The bourgeoisie is still paying the penalty for its mistake of May 1981 and for three years of a government of the ‘union of the left', a government which has carried out the most violent attacks on the French working class since World War II and the ‘reconstruction' which followed. However, the CP's departure from government and its adoption of a more and more open and ‘radical' opposition stance constitutes the first real attempt of the French bourgeoisie to overcome this weakness.
These two events - the French CP's move into opposition and especially the coming presidential election in the USA - are part of the strengthening and preparation of the bourgeoisie's political apparatus for confronting the proletariat on an international level. These two events indicate that the bourgeoisie knows that the economic crisis of capital is going to worsen and that it is going to have to attack the working class even harder; they indicate that in its own way it has recognized the international resurgence of workers' struggles.
A. The workers of Britain in the front rank of the international resurgence
It's within this general situation that the movement of workers' struggles in Britain must be located. Headed by the miners' strike (now seven months long) this movement has become the spearhead of the world proletarian struggle. It has reached the highest point since the mass strike in Poland 1980.
However, in this country the proletariat is up against a bourgeoisie that is particularly strong politically and which has been preparing itself for a long time for a confrontation with the working class. Britain is the oldest capitalist country. Throughout the last century the British bourgeoisie dominated the world. It has an experience of political rule which its counterparts in other capitalist countries can only envy, in particular through its skill in the democratic and parliamentary game. It's this unrivalled political experience which enabled it to be the first to be willing and able to apply the tactic of the left in opposition. Conscious of the danger posed by the workers' reaction to the economic attacks which were wearing down the credibility of the Labor Party in power, it was able in May 1979 to put the left into opposition and install Thatcher to play the part of the Iron Lady. It was able to divide the Labor Party (creation of the SDP) and weaken it electorally, while keeping it sufficiently strong to prevent and sabotage workers' struggles, alongside its union cohorts in the TUC.
The miners' strike, like the international resurgence in general, shows that this bourgeois card of the left in opposition has not managed to prevent an upsurge in workers' struggles, even if it can still be used to sabotage them. In this work of sabotage, the British ruling class also has a weapon envied by all the other bourgeoisies: its trade unions. As in the parliamentary and electoral game, the British ruling class is a past master in the art of presenting false oppositions to the proletariat: between the national leadership of the TUC on the one hand and Scargill (head of the miners' union) and the shop stewards on the other. The shop stewards are an institution going back over 60 years and they play the role of base unionism, the last and most radical rampart of trade unionism against the workers' struggle. But if the bourgeoisie in Britain is old and experienced, the proletariat is also old, experienced, and highly concentrated. It's in this sense that the present strike movement has such a profound significance.
The miners' struggle, whose fame and example have already crossed the Channel to continental Europe, has already helped to destroy a mystification which is a major one both in Britain and in other countries: the myth of British democracy and of the ‘unarmed' British police. The violent repression that has hit the miners is on a par with the sort of thing doled out in any South American dictatorship: 5000 arrests, 2000 injuries, 2 dead! Miners' towns and villages occupied by riot police, workers attacked in the street, in pubs, at home, the seizure of food stocks destined for miners' families, etc. The dictatorship of the bourgeois state has dropped its democratic mask.
Why has the bourgeoisie used such violence? To demoralize the miners, to discourage other sectors of the class who might be tempted to join them? Certainly. But it is above all to stop the strike pickets extending the strike to other pits, to other factories, to prevent a general extension of the movement. Because the bourgeoisie is afraid. It is afraid of the spontaneous walk-outs that have taken place on the railways (eg at Paddington) and at British Leyland, of the occupations that have taken place in the shipyards of Birkenhead and at British Aerospace near Bristol.
And it's this same fear of extension which has held it back from using the same level of state violence once the dockers came out in solidarity in July. The use of repression in this case would have set a match to the powder, accelerating the danger of the strike spreading throughout the class. Thanks to the maneuvers of the unions (see World Revolution 75) and to the media, the first strike was ended after 10 days.
The strike movement in Britain displays all the characteristics of the present international wave of struggle which we pointed to in our ‘Theses on the present resurgence of class struggle' (IR 37). We won't repeat what we said in that text. But we should emphasize the extraordinary combativity being expressed by the proletariat in Britain: after seven months, despite violent repression, despite the pressures from all directions, the miners are still on strike. At the time of writing, most of the dockers are again on strike in solidarity with the miners despite the failure of the first effort in July; they are conscious that their immediate class interests are the same as those of the miners and other sectors of the class.
Little by little, the whole working class is becoming aware that the miners' fight expresses their own class interest. Through this struggle, the question of the real extension of the struggle is being posed openly. It should be pointed out that apart from the dockers, the unemployed and miners' wives have also been fighting alongside the miners against the police. By raising the question of solidarity, the perspective of conscious extension has been posed openly in Britain for the workers of the world, and particularly of Western Europe. And through this extension, through the confrontation with the unions and left parties that it involves, the conditions are maturing for the mass strike in the heartlands of the system.
B. The significance of the strikes in West Germany
Apart from the struggles in Britain, one of the most striking aspects of this international resurgence has been the return of the German proletariat to the theatre of class confrontations, as exemplified in the occupations of the Hamburg and Bremen shipyards in September ‘83, the metal workers' and printers' strikes in spring ‘84. This is the most numerous, most concentrated, and also the most central fraction of the proletariat of Western Europe. This revival of workers' struggles in the heart of industrial Europe has a historic significance which goes well beyond the immediate importance of the strikes themselves. This marks the end of the important margin of maneuver enjoyed by the bourgeoisie of Europe against the working class thanks to the relative social calm in Germany in the 1970s.
This development in Germany confirms two important aspects of the marxist analysis of the world situation developed by the ICC:
-- the way in which the economic crisis, in the historical context of an undefeated working class, acts as the principal ally of the workers, progressively drawing the main battalions of the world proletariat into the class struggle and pushing them towards the front line of combat;
-- the way in which the historic resurgence of class struggle since 1968, as it gathers momentum, enables the proletariat to increasingly shake off the terrible effects of the longest and most savage counter-revolution which the workers' movement has ever suffered. Germany, indeed, was alongside Russia the principal storm-centre of this counter-revolution which followed the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23.
What these struggles show to the workers of the world is the bankruptcy of the post-war ‘economic miracle', the falsehood of the assertion that hard work, discipline and ‘social partnership' (the ‘model Germany' of the social democrats in the seventies) can open a way out of the economic crisis. More important still, these struggles show that the German proletariat has been neither smashed nor integrated into capitalism, (remember the theories of Marcuse in 1968), that all the onslaughts of social democracy and National Socialism, of the German and the world bourgeoisie have not succeeded in tearing the heart out of the European working class. We can affirm that, in the image of the rest of the international proletariat, the German workers are only at the beginning of their return to class combat.
All of this should not make us lose sight of the fact that the return of the German proletariat to its rightful place at the head of the international class struggle is only beginning and that this process will be a long and difficult one. In particular, we should recall:
-- that the degree of combativity of the German workers has still some way to go to reach the levels already attained in Britain, where the material conditions of the workers are still very much worse than in Germany, and where the class has already developed a tradition of militancy throughout the 1970s;
-- that the short term potentialities of the situation in Germany are nowhere like as rich as in neighboring France, since the bourgeoisie east of the Rhine is much more powerful and well organized than to its west (and has in particular implemented the strategy of placing its left factions - unions, left parties - in ‘opposition', a process only just begun in France) and since the present generation of German workers lacks the political experience of its French class comrades;
-- that in the struggles to date the proportions of the working class directly in struggle have been much smaller than say in Belgium, and have touched fewer sectors than, for example, Spain. Far from being at the head of the movement, the German workers are in fact still in the process of catching up on the rest of Europe. This is true at the level of combativity, of the scale of movements, of the degree of politicization, and of confrontation with the strategies of the left of capital, in particular base unionism, a weapon which the German bourgeoisie has not had to employ very much in the past. This ‘catching up' in Germany has become one of the most important aspects in the process leading towards the homogenization of class consciousness in the European proletariat, and of the conditions of struggle in western Europe.
The present resurgence of workers' struggles, the new step that it represents in the historical development of the class movement since ‘68, assigns a greater responsibility to revolutionary organizations particularly as regards the task of intervening actively in the process of coming to consciousness that is now going on in the class. Such an intervention has to be based on a deeper understanding of what is really at stake in the present situation. This underlines the importance for revolutionaries - and for the class as a whole - of the method they use to analyze social reality.
The method for analyzing social reality
A recognition and understanding of the international resurgence can only be based on the marxist method for analyzing social reality.
This method rejects the phenomenological approach. No social phenomenon can be understood and explained in itself, by itself and for itself. Only by situating it in the development of the general social movement can the social phenomenon, the class struggle, be grasped.
The social movement is not a sum of phenomena, but a whole containing each and all.
The movement of the proletarian struggle is both international and historical. Revolutionaries can therefore only comprehend social reality, the situation of the class struggle, from this world-historic standpoint. Furthermore, the theoretical and analytical work of revolutionaries is not a passive reflection of social reality, but has an active, indispensable role in the development of the proletarian struggle. It's not something outside the movement, outside the class struggle, but is an integral part of it. Just as revolutionaries are a part (a precise and particular part) of the working class, so their theoretical and political activity is an aspect of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat.
Communists can only grasp the marxist method by situating themselves as an active factor in the class movement, and by taking up a world-historic standpoint. By taking each struggle in itself, by examining it in a static, immediate, photographic manner, you deny yourself any possibility of seeing the significance of struggles - in particular the present resurgence of struggle. If we take some of the main characteristics of today's struggles (cf IR 37, ‘Theses on the present resurgence of class struggle') - the tendencies towards the outbreak of spontaneous movements, towards very broad movements involving whole sectors in the same country, towards extension and self-organization - if we take these characteristics in themselves, in a static, mechanical way, and if we compare them to the workers' revolt of August ‘80 in Poland, it becomes difficult to see any resurgence at all. The spontaneous movement of solidarity by dockers and other workers with the 135,000 miners on strike in Britain, the violent and spontaneous demonstrations that outflanked the unions in France last March, the 700,000 workers who demonstrated in Rome on 24 March, even the public sector strike in Belgium in September ‘83, may seem to be well below the level reached by the last wave, above all the mass strike in Poland. And yet...
And yet, the marxist method cannot be content with comparing two photographs taken some years apart. It cannot be content with remaining at the surface. For consistent revolutionaries, it's a questions of trying to grasp the underlying dynamic of the class movement.
The resurgence of class struggle is located mainly, though not solely, in the main industrial centers of the world, in western Europe and the USA. Thus it's no longer in a single country in the eastern bloc, nor simply in North Africa, the Dominican Republic or Brazil that we are seeing the outbreak of broad and spontaneous movements. It's in the main, the oldest capitalist countries, in the most ‘prosperous' countries of the industrial bastion of Europe. It's the oldest, most experienced and most concentrated sectors of the proletariat that are responding to the bourgeoisie's attack.
That is to say that two of the principal weapons used successfully against the proletariat in the previous wave, particularly in Poland, are no longer effective in maintaining workers' illusions and demoralization:
-- the weapon of the national specificity of the eastern bloc countries which kept the struggle in Poland isolated by presenting the economic crisis in these countries as a result of ‘bad management' by the local bureaucrats. The present struggles in Western Europe are shattering illusions about national, peaceful solutions to the economic crisis. The workers' revolt is not only hitting the countries of the East and the third world, but also the ‘democratic' and ‘rich' countries. It's the end of illusions about the necessity for temporary sacrifices in order to save the national economy. With the appearance of soup kitchens in major western cities, a parallel to the queues and deprivations suffered by the workers in Eastern Europe, the present resurgence of workers' struggles in the industrial metropoles of the west indicates that the international proletariat has a growing understanding of the irreversible, catastrophic and international character of the capitalist crisis.
-- the weapon of the left in opposition which worked so well both in western Europe and in Poland, via the Solidarity union. The present international resurgence shows that this weapon is no longer directly able to prevent strikes from breaking out (even if it is still very effective in sabotage them). Thus, illusions in ‘western democracy' and the unions and left parties are beginning to weaken. This growing awareness of the inevitable and irreversible nature of the world crisis of capital, and of the bourgeois nature of the left parties even when they're not in government, could - and can - only develop on the basis of workers' struggles in the oldest and most advanced industrial countries, countries in which the bourgeoisie disposes of a state apparatus well groomed in the game of democracy and parliament, countries in which illusions about the ‘consumer society' and ‘eternal prosperity' could grow up and have the maximum strength.
By responding to these two obstacles and going beyond them, the proletariat is taking up the struggle where it was left off in Poland.
To grasp the significance of the present period of struggle is to grasp the movement and the dynamic which animates it, it is to understand that the maturation of class consciousness in the proletariat is what produces and determines the international resurgence of workers' struggles. It's this maturation, this development of consciousness in the class, which gives the present struggles their significance and direction.
While the economic crisis is an indispensable precondition for the development of the class struggle, the deepening of the crisis is not enough to explain the development of the class struggle. The example of the crisis of 1929 and the years that preceded World War II are a proof of that. In the 1930s, the terrible blows of the economic crisis only resulted in a greater demoralization and disorientation in a proletariat that had just been through the greatest defeat in its history and was suffering the full weight of mystifications about anti-fascism and the ‘defense of the socialist fatherland' which were used to tie it to the capitalist state behind the left parties and unions. The situation is very different today. The proletariat is not defeated, and, as we have just seen, it's its capacity to digest the lessons of partial defeats, to respond to the ideological weapons of the bourgeoisie, which determines the present resurgence of the class struggle. The objective conditions, the economic crisis, the generalization of poverty are not the only ingredients; to this must be added the favorable subjective conditions, the conscious will of the workers to reject sacrifices in order to safeguard the national economy, the proletariat's lack of adherence to the economic and political projects of the bourgeoisie, the growing comprehension of the anti-working class nature of the left and the unions.
And the more the subjective factor becomes important in the development of workers' struggles, the more crucial becomes the role of revolutionaries within the struggle. As the highest expression of class consciousness, communists are indispensable; not only because of their theoretical and political work, their propaganda; not only tomorrow, in the revolutionary period, but right now; they are an indispensable factor in the present process of resurgent class struggle, of the maturation of the mass strike. By denouncing the traps and dead-ends that capitalism puts in the proletariat's path they stimulate, catalyze, accelerate the development within the class of a clear understanding of the nature of these traps and dead-ends, of the real role of the left, and the unions. Furthermore, while they can have no illusions about the importance of their immediate impact, they do help to orient the class towards a greater degree of autonomy from the bourgeoisie; towards the extension and coordination of struggles through the sending of massive delegations, through strike pickets and demonstrations; towards the organization of this extension by the workers themselves in general assemblies; towards the broadening and deepening of the class struggle.
The failure to recognize or the underestimation of the present resurgence, the mechanistic view of the development of the class struggle, the incomprehension of the active role of class consciousness in the development of the struggle lead - at least implicitly - to rejecting the necessity for the intervention of revolutionaries and thus for the world communist party of tomorrow.
It's not enough to shout about the need for the party at the top of one's voice (as certain groups do) to make a real contribution to the process which is leading to its constitution in the future. It's right now, in the present struggles which preparing the conditions for building the party, that the organizations that will help to constitute it are being selected, that communists are being called upon to prove their ability to be at the vanguard of the revolutionary struggles to come. And they won't be able to prove this unless they show themselves to be capable of rigorously defending the marxist method. To ignore or forget this method is to politically disarm the proletariat, to lead it to impotence and defeat.
RL 9/9/84
The report on the international situation adopted at the Sixth Congress of Revolution Internationale (July 1984) comprised three parts: the historic crisis of the economy, inter-imperialist conflicts and the development of class struggle. Under our regular rubric on the economic crisis in the International Review we are publishing the first part of this report[1] which deals with the different manifestations of the present crisis and the evolution of the crisis in the western bloc towards a new wave of recession.
Today, the disastrous consequences of the first recession of the ‘80s are clear all over the world - a sad spectacle of the catastrophic effects of the violent shock of the productive forces against capitalist social relations.
It is almost as though whole populations were hit by some natural disaster or an extremely violent and deadly conflict. Famine, scarcity, hunger strikes are today normal occurrences (1984 saw riots in Brazil, India, Tunisia, Morocco; expulsions; millions of fleeing refugees). In the developed countries, in the centers of the old world and in the United States, whole regions and cities are becoming like under-developed areas. And these are only the limited consequences of the first wave of recession in the ‘80s culminating in 1981-82.
On these unhealed wounds, a new wave of recession is unfolding.
A new major wave of recession
The major turn of world economic policies at the end of the ‘70s has in four years strongly accelerated the world crisis on a deeper level than the monetary crisis of ‘70-‘71 and the recession of 1974.
These past few years, the effects of moves against the ‘Keynesianism' in force since the Second World War have provoked the greatest world recession since the ‘30s with obvious human and social costs. Although the French and English governments began these moves, the American government has led the dance. Since the Second World War - during the reconstruction period and throughout the open crisis of the end of the ‘60s - the world economy has been dependent on the situation of capitalism in the US. During the years of reconstruction the US provided Europe with the means of reconstruction. In the ‘70s it played the role of locomotive for the entire world economy through easy credit, deficit spending and cheap paper money.
In the last two years the Third World has fallen apart and one wonders just how far capitalism can go in destroying mankind. These so-called ‘developing' countries are on their knees, crushed under the weight of their debts, their economies ready to give up the ghost. Yesterday's economic ‘miracles' very quickly become today's casualties. Oil-producing countries are collapsing with overproduction. In Latin America, Venezuela and Mexico are in potential bankruptcy (in a year the standard of living in Mexico and Venezuela has fallen by 50%). The Middle East is in a pitiful state: one of the main international financial backers and oil producers, Saudi Arabia, is in commercial deficit suffering from overproduction while two other important producers, Iran and Iraq, have had to cut production by 75% because of the war. In Africa, Nigeria - the ‘sun country', an economic exception on a continent where misery is indescribable - expelled a million and a half workers in two weeks (in January 1983) also because of oil overproduction. Food riots have broken out everywhere: Brazil, Columbia, India, Morocco, Tunisia and recently in the Caribbean. Such are the consequences of world overproduction in under-developed countries. The historic conclusions are not difficult to draw. These countries went from colonialism to decolonization only to fall into collapse. This is an expression of capitalism's inability to carry out its own accumulation process, to assure expansion by integrating other sectors of society into its mode of production.
The shock waves of crisis went deep in the industrialized countries as well. Measures to end deficit spending, the sharp slowdown in the American locomotive, have profoundly modified the economic habits of the countries of the metropole, particularly in Europe. Expansion rates which express the rate of capital accumulation have abruptly fallen to zero or below.
In three years, unemployment has sharply accelerated while wages continue to fall. The portion of wages contributed by the state has enormously declined in all forms. In other words, all the hard-won gains the working class thought were unalterable are being swept away. In our analyses we have always stressed the fact that as the crisis advances, the periods of ‘recovery' will be shorter and more limited and the recessions longer, deeper and broader. The facts certainly seem to support this thesis. To characterize the present situation we would have to add that, unlike previous recessions, the 1981-82 recession was not followed by a new Keynesian-style recovery boom. Quite the contrary: the inflationary consequences of Keynesian policies - which, ‘parallel to' deep-seated overproduction, led the world economy to the brink of a financial crash and threatened the breakdown of the entire monetary system - could no longer be tolerated. Thus a general ‘purging' policy followed the first recession of the ‘80s and continues today. (From a certain point of view the US constitutes a special case which we'll examine further on.)
Overproduction, no longer absorbed by deficits, has spread to all sectors of the economy and is blocking the entire mechanism. This characteristic of crisis in the period of decadence, the crisis generalized to all sectors of production, appears today more clearly than ever:
-- the sector producing the means of production, from machine tools to heavy industry (such as steel);
-- raw materials and power;
-- the production of consumer goods with the focus on agriculture and housing;
-- the production of means of transportation, from aeronautics to shipyards and the automobile industry;
-- the ‘service' industries of capital circulation (banks in particular, the main beneficiaries of the ‘inflationary' period which seemed to be the most solid of institutions, have been especially hard-hit in the first two years of the ‘80s)[2];
-- and finally the so-called public service sector; grossly inflated in the previous period, it has become a particular target of the purging policies.
We can already begin to see the importance of the generalized character of the crisis hitting all sectors in terms of the development and unification of workers' struggles. We'll now examine 1983 and 1984, particularly the so-called ‘recovery' in the US, not only to draw general conclusions about these first years of the decade but above all, to develop a perspective for the months and years to come.
The US recovery
All the different commentators of the economic situation agree that all the industrialized countries (except France) seem to have begun an ‘economic recovery', particularly the US. For the beginning of 1984 countries like the UK and West Germany can point to a clear fall in inflation, a stabilization of unemployment and an increase in GNP of 2 or 3% (which, incidentally, corresponds to the population growth). We shall not go further into the situation in the European countries since their evolution is totally dependent on the economic situation in the US. The readjustment of the trade balance in Japan and Europe was only possible at the price of a gigantic commercial deficit of the American economy. Only the US recorded an increase of 5% in GNP for 1984 - but at what price and with what perspective.
Growth of GNP (in %) |
|||
|
1982 |
1983 (estimate forecast) |
1984 (estimate forecast) |
US |
-1.9 |
3.5 |
5.0 |
Japan |
3.0 |
3.0 |
4.0 |
West Germany |
-1.1 |
1.2 |
2.0 |
France |
1.9 |
0.5 |
0 |
UK |
2.0 |
2.5 |
2.2 |
Italy |
-0.3 |
-1.5 |
2.0 |
Canada |
-4.4 |
3.0 |
5.0 |
Total 7 countries |
-0.5 |
2.5 |
3.7 |
Industrial production of the 7 countries |
-5.0 |
3.5 |
5.7 |
Beyond the aspects of monetary manipulation, we can already see what the ‘recovery' of the US economy really means and what it contains. At the end of ‘83, one of the high points of what was called the ‘recovery', we were told: "The Department of Commerce announces that orders for durable goods from US companies increased 4% in November to $37.1 billion. This increase, the highest since last June (+7.6%), is due in large part to increases in military expenditures (+46%) and orders of trucks and cars (+17.7%). Orders for household machines increased only 3% and orders for production equipment fell by 4.4%." (Le Monde, 24 December, 1983.)
This financing, 50% of which was destined to be used in the war effort produced by the US offensive, was only possible because of the manipulation of the dollar, the currency propping up all of world commerce. The dizzying rise in interest rates (up to 18%) drained millions of dollars which had been spread throughout the world back to the US. And even this wasn't enough. Despite the savings gained by cutting the welfare budgets in the US itself the American budget deficit went from $30 billion in 1979 to $60 billion in 1980 and $200 billion in 1984. In such a situation it isn't surprising that Volcker, President of the Reserve Bank, should say that the enormous US budget deficit is "a loaded gun pointing at the heart of the US economy and no-one can tell when it will go off." (Le Monde, 3 January, 1984.)
This is the basis of the recovery in the US:
-- the rise in interest rates, in the dollar, in the trade deficit (-$28.1 billion in ‘81; -$36.4 billion in ‘82; -$63.2 billion in ‘83; -$80 billion estimated for ‘84) ;
-- the deficit of the balance of current accounts (+$4.6 billion in 1981; -$11.2 billion in ‘82 and -$42.5 billion in ‘83) ;
-- the increase in the monetary mass through the printing of paper money (from July ‘82 to July ‘83 monetary expansion was 13.5%, the largest since World War II).
Looking at these figures, the giant bubble of this recovery in the US becomes obvious. Also the fact that behind the reduction of inflation on paper (13.5% in ‘80; 10.4% in ‘81; 6.1% in ‘82; 3.5% in ‘83) - essentially due to the rise in the price of dollar (the rise in the dollar lowered the price of imports by 10%) - hides a true hyper-inflation (in January ‘84 the over-valuation of the price of the dollar was put at 40%).
This explosive economic situation requires a look backward in order to draw more clearly conclusions for the future.
In 1979 the runaway dollar, the reference currency for all international trade, threatened a crash in the whole international monetary system. To deal with this situation, American authorities raised the interest rate to 18% to protect their currency and soak up the enormous international debt of the billions of dollars spread around the world. The result was, in 1981-82, the deepest recession since World War II. In the industrialized countries (particularly the US) whole industries collapsed like a house of cards. The ‘developing' countries can no longer pay back their debts. Over and above these bankruptcies a failure in the entire banking system of the developed countries appears on the horizon.
In 1982 the general asphyxiation of the economy pushed the American authorities to lower interest rates to 11% by the same voluntarist methods. This was still high enough to keep draining to the US the mass of dollars and capital fleeing investments in the rest of the world and low enough to enable American companies to borrow again.
In 1983-84 the downward spiral seemed to pause but as we have seen this was at the price of incredible deficits. Again a new international retreat of the dollar shook the monetary system. In one month, the price of the dollar lost in volume (nominally of course) what it had taken six months to gain and inflation almost doubled (from 3.5% to 5.5%). The only solution - American authorities were once again forced to raise interest rates and recession threatened again.
This threat or, in fact, this reality of a new recession with consequences still difficult to calculate (although the beginning of the ‘80s surely shows the general drift) and the conditions under which it is developing will eat even more into the flesh of mankind as all over the world capital's sphere of activity shrinks more and more.
Even the capitalist class has no illusions about the perspective for the months to come and it is preparing for an extremely violent shock. The attitude of capital in the US is in this respect very significant. These past two years (especially in the last few months) there has been a considerable acceleration of the concentration of capital, in large part financed by an influx of foreign capital. But this concentration is nothing like the capital concentration corresponding to an extension of capital activity as was the case in capitalist ascendancy. This concentration, fed by empiricism typical of capital, is the expression of a mortally wounded beast focusing all its last remaining energy on one point. The best proof of what we are saying is that the greatest concentration of companies took place in the US in the industries most affected by the world overproduction crisis: the oil industry and construction.
"Four years later (than 1977) mergers are 14 times greater representing $82,000 million. That year, just the buying up of Conoco (9th largest US oil company) by Dupont (the leading chemical company) involved $73 billion, a sum greater than the total value of all mergers in 1977." (Le Monde: Economic and Social Balance Sheet, ‘83.)
Thus, against the sharp decline in profit rates and above all in preparation for the next shocks, American industry is gathering its last forces, leaving the rest of the world drained, cold and paralyzed, like dislocated puppets.
The US trade deficit enables Europe and Japan to maintain a certain level of activity for a few months. But again, what a price has to be paid: not only the US deficit but also the price of the dollar. Despite this margin, the struggle to maintain exports pushes Europe, already on its knees, to cut into workers' living conditions with unprecedented brutality.
It is in this context that a new wave of world recession is preparing to break the bubble of the ‘recovery' in the US. When and how? It is difficult to say with precision but we can reasonably expect that it will develop after the US elections in November 1984.
But whatever the exact date of the new assault, it is close upon us with the characteristics of the world situation it implies - and the first years of the ‘80s and recent months have given us a foretaste of what is to come.
The dynamite of inflation accumulated in deficits, concentrated in the economic stronghold on which the entire world rests gives an idea of the force of the new wave of recession coming. The last recession brought unemployment to record highs, in some countries to a level not seen since the ‘30s (an average of 12% of the active population in the developed countries). In the months and years to come the unemployment rate which has almost doubled in the last three years will double again or even triple, reaching 20 or 30% of the active population.
The forecast figures given by the OECD in ‘83 counted on an ‘international recovery' and yet were still quite pessimistic:
"We realized that to maintain unemployment at its present levels in relation to the predictable increase in the active population, 18-20 million new jobs would have to be created before the end of the decade. The OECD experts estimated that there would have to be 15 million additional jobs if we wanted to return to 1979 levels, that is 19 million people without work. This would mean creating 20,000 jobs per day between ‘84 and ‘89 while between 1975 and 1980 (after the first oil crisis) the 24 member countries only created 11,000 jobs daily. Thus, quite pessimistic prediction followed, planning on 34.75 million unemployed in 1984; 19.75 for Europe and 2.45 for France." (OECD Report 1983)
But even more than the absolute number of unemployed, the characteristics of unemployment and the conditions under which it speeds up are significant indices of the proportions of the crisis. Unemployment benefit is being reduced to a pittance when it is not simply eliminated altogether. Unemployment is reaching whole sectors of the working class even though ‘young people' and immigrants suffer the hardest blows.
For millions the length of unemployed periods becomes longer and longer without hope of a solution.
Unemployed for more than one year as a percentage of total unemployment |
||
|
1982 |
1981 |
West Germany |
21.2 |
16.2 |
Belgium |
59.5 |
53.6 |
UK |
33.3 |
21.6 |
US |
7.7 |
6.7 |
France |
39.8 |
32.9 |
Source: OECD |
Unemployment among young people as a percentage of the active population under 25 |
|
West Germany |
13.5 |
Belgium |
32.6 |
UK |
23.5 |
US |
17.75 |
France |
24 |
Italy |
32.75 |
Japan |
5.5 |
At the end of its report the OECD did not fail to mention these characteristics and draw the appropriate conclusions:
"Beyond the furor this report will provoke, the OECD threw light on the deep-seated characteristics of unemployment ... The first element involves the length of unemployed periods which deprives an ever-increasing portion of the population of any social activity. The discouragement of the long-term unemployed is obvious. They are forced to accept part-time stop-gap jobs if they can or worse, some no longer declaring themselves on the register. From all points of view, this situation contains ominous social risks." (idem)
Unemployment is the spearhead of capital's attack on labor. Unemployment epitomizes the workers' condition; it is the human expression of overproduction, of the overproduction of labor power, of commodity relations, of labor's place as cannon-fodder for the system. As the historic crisis of capitalism leads to an absolute pauperization[3] of the working class, it also (and this is a fundamental point) profoundly modifies the class structures of society formed during the period of capitalist growth and expansion.
The stratification of the working class into layers of skilled and unskilled workers, white and blue collar workers, immigrants and non-immigrants; the possibility for certain skilled workers to reach a situation approaching the middle classes after years of effort by becoming foremen or getting white collar jobs mostly as technicians for themselves or their children: with the crisis, as it is developing today, all of this is finished. The working class no longer looks up to the top but down to the frightening depths below where all of yesterday's distinctions disappear. In this process accelerating right before our eyes, unemployment will play a central role especially when it involves 20 or 30% of the active population. With massive unemployment, the middle classes are squeezed apart and join the ranks of the working class in its most poverty-stricken ranks.
This isn't just a simple prediction we're making; it's a description of a real process happening right now. It's a process which not only opposes social classes but clearly shows up their irreconcilable differences. This reality sweeps away the smokescreen the middle classes represented in the high life days of ‘Keynesianism' and all the theories on the aristocracy of labor.
Conclusions
1. This brief survey of the economic picture of the first years of the eighties and the perspectives for the years to come, despite its limitations and imprecisions, gives an indication of the direction of the class struggle and its new impulsion today in all countries as it comes up against the ruling class. Rosa Luxemburg correctly declared that "for the revolution to happen, social life has to be ploughed up from end to end, what is deeply buried must rise to the surface and what is on the surface must fall to the bottom." (Mass Strike)
The unity created by renewed class struggle, by historical experience of the working class and the unprecedented economic crisis is in the process of accomplishing this task. The rapid and absolute pauperization produced by the economic crisis pushes the working class to look back to the past before it can look forward to the future, to think about the meaning of these 70 years of decadence.
2. We dedicated a large part of our analysis to the situation of capital in the US because, as we've said, this economy represents 45% of the production of western countries and a quarter of world production. It determines the evolution of the rest of the world economy. But this isn't all. There's another point about the deep crisis in the US which is extremely important from a historical point of view. US capitalism, a product of the decadent period with all of its basic characteristics (state capitalism, militarism) developed at the beginning, due to an immense internal market, and then further with the world war which eliminated its rivals. Only because of US capitalism could a completely decrepit Europe, totally exhausted by two world wars, have kept itself alive for the last 40 years; through the US-financed capitalist reconstruction from ‘45 to the ‘60s, during the ‘70s when the US played the role of world locomotive, and to a certain extent in ‘83-‘84 when only the enormous American commercial deficit has made it possible for Europe to keep afloat.
Today this period is over, ideologically and economically. The US can no longer play the role of a material support or an ideological support; it can no longer make people believe in an infinite, prosperous development of capitalism via the ‘American dream' which has become a veritable nightmare.
3. This conclusion to the report on the crisis of the economy leads us to criticize a point of view put forward in the report for the Fifth Congress of RI[4] where we maintained that the ‘70s would see the end of deficit spending. The ICC was entirely right to say that the ‘80s would see the failure of all the Keynesian policies which characterized the preceding years. But to draw the conclusion that this would be the end of deficit spending was a step that shouldn't have been taken.
Reality itself has made it clear that this idea was mistaken. In the past two years, both in the developed countries and in the under-developed countries, debts in all their diverse forms have not only grown but doubled, tripled, quadrupled in relation to the previous 10-20 years.
This situation is linked to the very nature of the crisis of capitalism, the overproduction crisis and the growing inability to continue the accumulation process without which capital cannot exist.
We have to make a distinction (and this was indeed our real concern at the beginning of the ‘80s) between debts as they developed in the ‘70s and in today's situation. In the ‘70s, despite a large deficit due to armaments world debt still allowed a certain level of accumulation and expansion. But the ‘80s have amply demonstrated this general tendency of decadent capitalism to substitute an accumulation of armaments for the accumulation process. Today's colossal debts, much greater than that of the ‘70s, are essentially based on armaments.
It's no secret that the American budget deficit is in exact proportion to the incredible increase in armaments. Capital flows out of Europe to participate in the war effort of the western bloc. Missiles have replaced them. In the Middle East, Africa, Asia and South America, ‘aid' is replaced by a gigantic accumulation of weapons. For the US itself, economic tutelage gives way to the use of military force. This is what Reagan calls "rediscovering the strength, the power, of America." Stupid puppet!
Today the capitalist crisis reveals clearly and unequivocally how the crisis of overproduction, the impossibility of continuing the process of accumulation leads inexorably and mercilessly to a self-destruction of capital. Self-destruction not of capitalism but of capital and the existence of hundreds of millions of human beings attached to this infernal machine.
This question of the self-destruction of capital is not a simple question of ‘theoretical interest'. It's a fundamental question for several reasons:
-- because it illustrates and makes explicit the link between the historic crisis of capitalism and war;
-- because it shows that it's not enough to say that the crisis "works in favor of the proletariat". In fact, we have fought for years against these conceptions which saw the proletarian revolution as a question of will - the whole idealist rag-bag. Today, when the crisis is clear, one must not fall into the opposite error and think that because the crisis is here it will necessarily turn into a social revolution. This conception is as wrong as the first. We must fight the idea that the capitalist crisis, the crisis of overproduction will appear as a simple accumulation of goods, unsold and unsaleable, that this overproduction linked to a sharp decline in the rate of profit will eventually make capitalism collapse under its own weight and that the proletariat will only have to reach out its hand to pick revolution like a ripe fruit.
This vision is fundamentally mistaken and we have lived through the ‘80s long enough to see this clearly.
Revolution Internationale
July 1984
[1] For the orientation of the report on other points, see the resolution on the international situation published in Revolution Internationale 123, August 1984.
[2] "The numbers of bank failures continues at a record high. Never before have US banks taken such losses as in the second half of 1983. Several of them have had to declare bankruptcy." (Le Monde Economique et Social: Bilan ‘83, p 11)
[3] Where are those ardent critics of Marx today, those who hammered this notion of pauperization without ever making any distinction between absolute and relative pauperization. Today, not only has the relative pauperization of the working class increased with the rise in productivity, but absolute pauperization is growing every day. History confirms as never before what the supposedly ‘outdated' Marx wrote: "Capitalism was born in blood and scum and tears and it will end in blood and scum and tears."
[4] International Review 31, 1982.
Links
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[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/29/class-consciousness
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/battaglia-comunista
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/128/historic-course
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1995/communist-left-after-world-war-ii
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/bordigism
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/international-bureau-revolutionary-party
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/037_natqn_02.html#_ftn1
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[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/037_natqn_02.html#_ftn3
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/034_natqn_01.html
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/042_natqn_03.html
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/037_natqn_02.html#_ftnref1
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/037_natqn_02.html#_ftnref2
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/037_natqn_02.html#_ftnref3
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/339/communists-and-national-question
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/contribution-discussion
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1980-mass-strike-poland
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/13/marxism-theory-revolution
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/councilism
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/council-communism
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/canne-mejer
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/german-and-dutch-left
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/communistenbond-spartacus
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/19/union-question
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/25/fake-workers-parties
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/life-icc
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/holland
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/40/belgium
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/correspondence
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/1976/machiavellianism
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_cwo.html#_ftn1
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_cwo.html#_ftn2
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_cwo.html#_ftnref1
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_cwo.html#_ftnref2
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/316/1980s-how-form-international-organisation
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-workers-organisation
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/international-communist-current
[50] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/resurgence-class-struggle
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/economic-crisis
[52] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics