Horror, barbarism and terror: the Gulf war has exposed the reality of capitalism.
Horror and barbarism. War, war between imperialist gangsters, continues. The coalition forces have begun their ground offensive. And Iraq will meet with defeat. Hundreds of thousands of dead - we don't know exactly how many for the moment - and no doubt as many wounded and missing; massive destruction in Iraq and Kuwait: this will be, and is already, the bloody and terrible result of this conflict.
Horror and cynicism of the bourgeoisie of the 'coalition' countries. Without any shame, reveling in blood, it has boasted of its technical prowess in this war. At first, in order to lull people's reticence about the butchery, it talked about a 'clean war': the missiles were only hitting military buildings. They could go through windows and elevator shafts, but they didn't kill anyone, at least not civilians. How marvelous - it' was no more than a 'surgical' operation. But the macabre reality couldn't be hidden for long. Thousands of civilians died under the massive bombardments of the B 52s and the cruise missiles. Will we ever know the frightful truth of all this? The height of cynicism: when the destruction of the Baghdad bunker undoubtedly left 400 dead, the Pentagon blamed the civilians, who shouldn't have taken refuge in this bunker and so put themselves in the path of the bombs!
The unlimited admiration of the media, the journalists, the military specialists for all this technical and scientific prowess put in the service of death and destruction is absolutely disgusting. Capitalism today is incapable of dealing with all sorts of epidemics in the world, cholera in Latin America, AIDS, and many others. Science and technology are at the service of death and destruction on a huge scale. This is the reality of capitalism.
Terror, capitalist terror, the terror of a rotting society, has descended on the populations. Terror on a huge scale on Iraq and Kuwait. The American coalition uses the most sophisticated, the most murderous, the most 'scientific' and massive weapons. We are not military specialists, and we have no taste for the sinister statistics. How much was it? At the lowest estimate, 100,000 tons of bombs have been dropped, 108,000 aerial sorties flown. How many cruise missiles launched from war ships in the Gulf, in the Mediterranean? The American bourgeoisie and its allies don't hesitate to use the most massive means of destruction except of course nuclear weapons, they are for next time no doubt - such as fuel air bombs and napalm. In comparison with this, the horrible exactions committed by Saddam' s soldiers were amateur stuff.
Even within the shelters, the civil populations are not safe. Can you imagine the damage, the fear, the panic and anguish of the children, the women, of men old and young in the midst of all the bombing: the explosions - when Basra was hit, the earth trembled in Iran - the sirens, and all the deaths and the injuries? We know that the American planes were often bombing 24 hours a day. We know that during the first night of the war, one and a half times the equivalent of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was unleashed on Iraq. We know that during one month, Iraq and Kuwait were hit by more bombs than Germany throughout World War Two!
One Patriot missile costs one million US dollars. The cost of one Stealth bomber is 100 million dollars. The total cost of the war will certainly be more than 80 million dollars, and that's just the most minimal estimate. In fact it will be a lot more, even if you only take into account the massive destructions in Iraq and Kuwait, and all the oil wells. The lowest estimates are already talking about 100 billion dollars for each of these countries. Twenty years' labor by the Iraqi workers has been annihilated. Is there any need to point out that Iraq's debt before the invasion of Kuwait was 'only' 70 billion? We are seeing a vast squandering of goods and riches.
Right now, three quarters of humanity are underfed and live in destitution. Right now, 40,000 children under five years old are dying of undernourishment all over the world. How many more will be marked by its effects throughout their lives?
The capacities of production are at the service of death and destruction, not of humanity and its well-being. This is the reality of capitalism.
Capitalist dictatorship and totalitarianism
Horror and shameful lies. Alongside the bombardment of Iraq, we have the propaganda bombardment by the media, aimed at the populations all over the world, and in particular the working class. The media are revealed for what they are: servants of the bourgeoisie and its war effort. From the first day of the war, the time of the 'clean war', the mobilization and enthusiasm of the media were sickening. But the manipulation of the news and the gung-ho prattle of the journalists wasn't enough. The different belligerent states, above all the USA and the most 'democratic' ones, imposed a military censorship worthy of the most vulgar fascist or Stalinist regimes, in order to ensure a completely dictatorial control over information and 'public opinion.' This is what the much-vaunted bourgeois democracy amounts to.
Another lie: this was a war for the respect of international law that had been transgressed by the Iraqi bourgeoisie. What kind of law is this, except the law of the strongest, capitalist law? It was either through naked self interest, as in the case of Egypt, Syria or Britain, or through bribes and threats as in the case of the USSR, China and France that the USA obtained the UN's agreement for a military intervention.
Saddam Hussein made a good move when he made a scandal out of the double standards that are operating in all this, when he pointed out that neither the UN nor of course the USA had used the same armed force to ensure that Israel would respect the resolutions calling on her to leave the occupied territories. The bourgeoisie only cares about law, about its law, when it serves its interests to do so.
After the war, neither peace nor reconstruction, but more imperialist wars
Once the conflict was unleashed, all 'reason' and 'morality' went by the board. The USA wants to bring Iraq to its knees, inflict colossal and irreparable destruction on the country. No matter what the cost this is the implacable logic of imperialist war. The American bourgeoisie has no choice. In order to fulfill its political objectives, to affirm without any ambiguity its imperialist hegemony over the world, it is forced to go all the way and use the enormous means of destruction at its disposal. Razing Iraq and Kuwait and ensuring Saddam's total capitulation are the objectives of the American bourgeoisie. These are the orders given to the military.
Saddam Hussein, in his desperation, has been pushed into the suicidal, unbridled use of everything to hand: Scuds, the oil slick in the Persian Gulf, burning the oil wells to protect himself from the incessant waves of bombers. He also has no choice.
Two countries, Iraq and Kuwait, have been covered in fire and blood. Their main wealth, oil, is burning and the wells will certainly be devastated for some time to come. The whole environment of the region is gravely threatened. The damage is already considerable. A large part may even be irreversible.
And in the midst of all this bloodletting, we have heard the lying, hypocritical wailing of the bourgeois 'opposition' to the war. The pacifists, the leftists who when they are not overtly supporting Iraqi imperialism like the Trotskyists do - call for demonstrations 'against the war for oil' and for peace. But peace is impossible under capitalism. It is just a moment for preparing war. Capitalism carries imperialist war within itself. The war in the Middle East is yet further proof of that.
Even if controlling oil remains important, it's not the main aim of the war. Since 2 August the oil wells of Iraq and Kuwait have been paralyzed, and after that they have been largely destroyed, but this hasn't led to a rise in the price of oil. On the contrary, prices have fallen. There is no threat of scarcity. There is overproduction of oil because there is a generalized overproduction of commodities and a world recession.
The war is not yet over and what are we seeing already? The ignoble vultures known as 'businessmen' are hovering over the carnage and hungrily seeking what profit they can make in the name of reconstruction. The British companies have waxed indignant about the rapacity of their American rivals. Making war together is a very moral and just thing to do, but business is business. Against these new lies, let's be clear that there won't be the kind of reconstruction that can lead to a revival of the world economy. A country like Iraq was already incapable of repaying its 70 billion dollar debt before the war. This was one of the reasons for its tragic adventure. So how and with what can it reconstruct? And that at a time when world capitalism has shown itself incapable of re-launching the ruined economies of the former Stalinist capitalist bloc.
All this is just lies and propaganda in order to sell the war and the sacrifices to the populations, and above all to the working class of the most industrialized countries. In order to offer 'reasons' to support the war effort.
But for humanity as a whole there is no reason to support this war or any imperialist war. Still less for the exploited, revolutionary class, the proletariat. Neither on the historic, nor the economic, nor the humanitarian level (see 'The proletariat and war' in this issue). This is just a massacre of human lives, an incredible waste of technical means and productive forces, which will disappear into a bottomless pit. And at the end of it, there won't be peace, but more wars. Contrary to all the lies, there will be no peace from all this, neither in the Middle East or the rest of the planet.
The war against Iraq prepares tomorrow's wars
The defeat of Iraq will obviously be a great victory for the USA. Despite all its declarations about peace, its moralizing about good and evil, the American bourgeoisie is in reality issuing a warning to all those who may be tempted to follow Saddam Hussein's example. The USA is the world's leading imperialist power, the only 'superpower' after the collapse of the USSR. Because it is the only country that can do it, it cannot stand idly by in the face of the multiplication of local wars, the questioning of frontiers, the development of 'every man for himself' between states, in sum, of chaos. This is the warning. They will guarantee the 'world order' of which they are the main beneficiary. This is one of the reasons for the bloody intransigence of the USA, their insistence on razing Iraq, on waging war to the bitter end. But this warning is not only addressed to Saddam's potential imitators - and there are plenty of them. There is another more fundamental reason for the USA's intransigence.
It is also and above all to issue a warning to the other great powers, Germany, Japan, the European countries and to a lesser extent the USSR. America's imperialist domination is still very real. Sending its armed forces to the Middle East, making a clear and murderous demonstration of its immense military superiority, dragging others, like France for example, into the intervention, waging the war to its bitter end, crushing Iraq in fire and blood - all this is the means it uses to reinforce its global 'leadership'. And above all to snuff out any pretensions towards independence, towards the emergence of another imperialist pole capable of challenging its domination. Even if the latter is highly improbable for the moment.
This is the reason for the USA's systematic rejection of all the peace plans and proposals for negotiation involving an Iraqi withdrawal, proposed in turn by France on 15 January and the USSR before the land offensive - each time supported by Germany, Italy, etc ... This is the reason for the increasingly intransigent replies, for the increasingly harsh ultimatums issued in reply to these peace proposals.
War, tens of thousands of tons of bombs, hundreds of thousands of dead, incalculable destruction, the razing of Iraq and Kuwait so that the American bourgeoisie can affirm and strengthen its domination, its imperialist grip over a world sunk in crisis, war and decomposition. These are the real aims of the war!
It was through the perspective and unleashing of war that the American bourgeoisie succeeded despite all the problems in forcing the other powers into 'coalition' behind its war aims. Each time that the pressure eased off, the centrifugal tendencies, the tendencies towards opposition to the USA, towards the emergence of an alternative to the USA's war-drive, came to the surface (see the editorial to IR 64). Proof that these countries were well aware that their American imperialist rival had led them into a trap which would make them weaker than ever.
Once the war is over, the tensions between the USA and the European powers, Germany in particular, and Japan, will inevitably develop. Faced with the economic strength of these countries, their rise to power, the USA will be led more and more to impose an iron grip over these nascent antagonisms, to use the strength at its disposal, ie its military strength, and thus war.
The war against Iraq is the preparation for other imperialist wars. Not for peace. On the one hand, the aggravation of the economic crisis and capitalism's slide into chaos and decomposition will inevitably push countries into military adventures like Iraq's. On the other hand, and in this situation, the leading imperialist power, faced with chaos, faced with its potential rivals, will more and more use its military strength and war in order to impose its 'order' and its domination. Everything is pushing towards the accentuation of economic and military tensions. Everything is pushing towards the multiplication of imperialist wars.
This is what the bloody military victory of the western coalition announces.
In this imperialist war in the Middle East, as in any other imperialist war, it's above all the working class that pays, that is the main victim. It pays with its life when it is in uniform, enrolled by force at the battlefront, or when it simply finds itself under a rain of bombs and missiles. It pays with its sweat, its labor and its misery when it is 'lucky' enough to not be directly massacred.
Marx and Lenin are dead and buried, claimed the bourgeoisie when Stalinism fell apart. However, Karl Marx's watchword 'workers of the world unite' is as relevant and as urgent as ever faced with the nationalist, warmongering madness that is descending on the whole of humanity.
Yes, the international proletariat is the only force, the only social class that can oppose this increasingly insane and hellish machine that is capitalism in decomposition. It is the only force that can do away with this barbarism and build another society where the causes of war and poverty have disappeared.
The road is still a long one. However, we must go along it with determination because the most dramatic deadlines are approaching day by day.
The first steps are to refuse to make economic sacrifices, to reject the logic of defending the national economy. Rejecting national unity and national discipline, rejecting social peace and the logic of imperialist war, this is the road to follow. These are the slogans that revolutionaries must put forward.
The economic crisis, the sharpening trade war, is exacerbating imperialism and war. Crisis and war are two sides of the capitalist coin. The first, the crisis, leads to war. The latter in turns aggravates the crisis. The two are linked. The workers' struggle for its class demands against attacks and sacrifices, and the struggle against imperialist war, are one and the same struggle: the revolutionary struggle of the working class, the struggle for communism.
Workers of the world unite!
RL 2.3.91
As readers of our territorial press will know already, our comrade Marc is dead. In the December issue of our French territorial press, we published, as usual, the list of donations; one was accompanied with these words: “In reply to many letters which have touched me deeply, and for a first combat fought and won, this donation for the ICC’s press...” As always, our comrade fought against his disease with lucidity and courage. But in the end, it was the disease - one of the most virulent forms of cancer - that had the upper hand, the 20th December 1990. With Marc’s death, not only has our organisation lost its most experienced militant, and its most fertile mind; the whole world proletariat has lost one of its best fighters.
Marxism has long since shown, against all the ideas of bourgeois individualism, that history is not made by great individuals, but that since the appearance of social classes, “The history of all societies, to this day, has been the history of class struggle”. The same is especially true of the history of the workers’ movement whose main protagonist is precisely that class which more than any other engages in associated labour, and struggles collectively. Within the proletariat, the communist minorities that express its revolutionary nature also act collectively. In this sense, these minorities’ activities are above all anonymous, and can have nothing to do with any cult of personality. Revolutionary militants cannot exist as such, outside the whole that is the communist organisation. Nonetheless, while the organisation must be able to count on all its members, it is evident that they do not all make an equal contribution to its activity. Certain militants’ personal history, experience, or character - as well as particular historical circumstances - lead them to play a special role in the organisations to which they belong, as motive forces in their activity, and especially in the one activity which lies at the heart of their very reason for existing: working out and deepening revolutionary political positions.
Marc was one of these. In particular, he belonged to that tiny minority of militants who survived and resisted the terrible counter-revolution which battened on the working class from the 1920’s to the 60’s: militants like Anton Pannekoek, Henk Canne-Meijer, Amadeo Bordiga, Onorato Damen, Paul Mattick, Jan Appel, or Munis. Moreover, not only did he maintain his untiring loyalty to the communist cause and his complete confidence in the proletariat’s revolutionary capabilities, he was able to pass on his experience to a new generation of militants, and to avoid becoming wrapped up in analyses and positions that had been overtaken by historical events. In this sense, his whole activity as a militant is an example of what marxism means: the living, constantly developing thought of the revolutionary class, which bears with it humanity’s future.
Needless to say, our comrade was a dynamic force in pushing forward the thought and action of the political organisation within the ICC. And this remained true until his final hour. In fact, his whole life as a militant was inspired by the same approach, by the same determination to defend communist principles tooth and nail, while always maintaining a critical spirit capable whenever necessary of calling into question what seemed to many to be untouchable and “invariant” dogma[1]. His life as a militant lasted 70 years; it began in the heat of the revolution itself.
Marc was born on 13th May 1907 in Kishiniev, the capital of Bessarabia (Moldavia), at a time when the region was still part of the old Tsarist Empire. He was not yet 10 years old when the 1917 revolution began. This is how he described, on his 80th birthday, this tremendous experience, which marked his whole life:
“I had the good fortune, while still a child, to live through and experience the Russian Revolution, both in February and October. I lived it intensely. You have to understand what it meant to be a “Gavroche” [2], a child in the streets in a revolutionary period, spending the days in demonstrations, going from one to another, from one meeting to another, spending the nights in clubs full of soldiers and workers, and of discussion, talk and confrontations; a time when on any street corner, suddenly, without any preparation, someone might stand at a window and begin to speak: immediately, a thousand people would gather round and begin to discuss. It was unforgettable, and of course it has marked my whole life. On top of this, I had the luck to have an older brother who was both a soldier and a Bolshevik, the Party secretary in our town, and I ran with him, hand in hand, from one meeting to the next where he defended the positions of the Bolsheviks.
I had the good fortune to be the youngest, the fifth in a family where all, one after the other, became members of the Party until they were either killed or expelled. All this meant that I lived in a house always full of people, of youngsters, where there were always discussions going on, for at first only one was Bolshevik, while the others were more or less socialists. They were in constant debate with their comrades, their workmates... It was an enormous good fortune for a child’s education”.
In 1919 during the civil war, Moldavia was occupied by counter-revolutionary Romanian troops. Marc’s family was under threat from the pogroms (his father was a rabbi), and was forced to flee to Palestine. His brothers and elder sister were among the founders of this country’s Communist Party. Here, in 1921, Marc (still not yet 13 years old) became a militant, entering (or rather helping to found) the Communist Party’s youth organisation. He very quickly came up against the position of the Communist International on the national question: a position that, as he put it, “stuck in his throat”. This disagreement led to his first exclusion from the Party in 1923. Already, though still an adolescent, Marc displayed a quality which would remain with him throughout his life as a militant: an unfailing intransigence in the defence of revolutionary principles, even if this meant opposing “authorities” of the workers’ movement as prestigious as the leaders of the Third International, and especially Lenin and Trotsky[3]. His complete commitment to the proletarian cause, his militant involvement in the communist organisation, and his deep respect for the great figures of the workers’ movement never made him give up the fight for his own positions, when he felt that those of the organisation went against its principles, or had been overtaken by new historical circumstances. For him, as for all the great revolutionaries like Lenin or Luxemburg, adherence to marxism, to the proletariat’s revolutionary theory, meant an adherence, not to its letter but to its spirit and method. In fact, our comrade’s audacious spirit (which, again, he shared with all the great revolutionaries) was the other side of his complete and undying commitment to the cause and programme of the proletariat. Because he was steeped in marxism, he was never paralysed by the fear of abandoning it when he criticised the outdated positions of the workers’ organisations. And he first applied this approach against the support for national liberation struggles, which had become a dogma for both the Second and Third Internationals[4].
In 1924, Marc, with one of his brothers, came to live in France. There, he joined the Communist Party’s Jewish section, so becoming once again a member of the same International from which he had just been excluded. He immediately joined the opposition fighting against the degeneration of the CI and its communist parties. With Albert Treint (General Secretary of the French CP from 1923-26) and Suzanne Girault (one-time Party treasurer), he took part in the foundation of Unite Léniniste. When Trotsky’s platform of the Russian opposition was published in France, he declared himself in agreement. By contrast, and unlike Treint, he rejected Trotsky’s declaration that he had been wrong in all his disagreements with Lenin prior to 1917. Marc considered this attitude absolutely wrong, first because Trotsky did not really believe what he was saying, and secondly because such a declaration could only trap Trotsky in all the incorrect positions which Lenin had defended in the past (in particular during the 1905 revolution on the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”). Once again, our comrade showed his ability to maintain a critical and lucid attitude towards the “authorities” of the workers’ movement. His adhesion to the International Opposition, after his exclusion from the PCF in 1928, did not mean that he shared all positions of its most important leader, despite the admiration he felt for Trotsky. And it was thanks to this critical spirit that he avoided being dragged into the Trotskyist movement’s slide into opportunism at the beginning of the 1930’s. After taking part, with Treint, in the formation of Redressement Communiste, in 1930 he joined the Ligue Communiste (the organisation which represented the Opposition in France), and became (with Treint again) a member of its Executive Commission in October 1931.
However, after defending a minority position against the rise of opportunism, both men left the Ligue in May 1932, and helped to found the Fraction Communiste de Gauche (known as the Bagnolet Group). In 1933, this organisation split and Marc broke with Treint, who had begun to defend a position on the USSR similar to the one later developed by Chaulieu and Burnham (“Bureaucratic Socialism”). He then took part in November 1933 in the formation of Union Communiste, along with Chaze (Gaston Davoust, died 1984), with whom he had been closely linked since the early 30’s when the latter was still a member of the PCF (he was excluded in 1932), and one of the leaders of the “l5ème Rayon” (in Paris’ western suburbs) which defended opposition orientations.
Marc remained a member of Union Communiste until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. This was one of the most tragic periods for the workers’ movement: as Victor Serge put it, this was “midnight in the century”. And as Marc said himself: “For all the generations which had remained revolutionary, it was a dreadful sadness to live through these years of terrible isolation which saw the French proletariat brandishing the tricolour, the flag of the ‘Versaillais’, and singing the Marseillaise, all in the name of communism”. And this feeling of isolation reached its height in the Spanish Civil War, when many organisations that had succeeded in remaining firm on class positions were swept away by the wave of “anti-fascism”. This was the case in particular with Union Communiste, which saw the events in Spain as a proletarian revolution, a struggle where the working class held the initiative. To be sure, this organisation did not go so far as to support the “Frente Popular” government. But it did call for enrolment in the anti-fascist militia, and entered into political contact with the left wing of the POUM, an anti-fascist organisation that took part in the government of the Catalan “Generalitat”.
Marc was intransigent in the defence of class principles; he could not accept such a capitulation before the ambient anti-fascist ideology, even dressed up as “solidarity with the Spanish proletariat”. He had remained in contact with the Fraction of the Italian Left, and when he was unable to turn Union Communiste against its position of support for the war, he left the group at the beginning of 1938, to join the Italian Fraction on an individual basis. The Italian Fraction had been formed in May 1928 in Pantin (a Parisian suburb); in the torment of the Spanish Civil War, and all its betrayals, the Fraction was one of very few groups to remain true to class principles. Its intransigent rejection of all the sirens of anti-fascism was based on its analysis of the historic course as one dominated by the counter-revolution. A civil war between, not the bourgeoisie and the working class, but the bourgeois Republic allied to the “democratic” imperialist camp, and another bourgeois government allied to the “fascist” imperialist camp, could only end in world war, not revolution. The fact that the Spanish workers took up arms spontaneously against the Franco putsch in July 1936 (a fact which the Fraction welcomed, of course) opened no revolutionary perspective once they were enrolled in anti-fascist organisations like the PS, the CP, and the anarcho-syndicalist CNT, and gave up the combat on the class terrain to fight as soldiers of the bourgeois Republic led by the “Frente Popular”. And for the Fraction, one of the clearest proofs that the Spanish proletariat was stuck in a tragic dead-end, was the fact that the country wholly lacked a revolutionary party[5].
Marc continued the revolutionary struggle as a militant of the Italian Fraction, exiled in France and Belgium[6]. In particular, he became very close to Vercesi (Ottorino Perrone), who was the Fraction’s main inspiration. Many years later, Marc would explain to the young militants of the ICC how much he had learnt from Vercesi, whom he admired greatly. “It was from him that I learnt what it means to be a militant”, he said on several occasions. And indeed, the Fraction’s remarkable firmness was largely thanks to Vercesi, who had fought constantly, first in the PSI (Italian Socialist Party) at the end of World War I, then in the PCI, for the defence of revolutionary principals against these organisations’ degeneration and opportunism. Unlike Bordiga, who was the PCI’s leading figure at its formation in 1921, and who led the Left in the Party only to abandon militant life after his exclusion from the Party in 1930, Vercesi put all his experience at the service of the continuing struggle against the counter-revolution. In particular, his contribution was decisive in developing the position on the role of the fraction in a proletarian organisation, especially in periods of reaction and degeneration of the Party[7]. But his contribution went much further than this. He understood that the task which falls to revolutionaries after the defeat of the revolution, and the victory of the counter-revolution is to draw up a ‘balance-sheet’ (‘bilan’ in French, whence the name of the Italian Fraction’s publication in that language) of past experience, in order to prepare “militants for the new proletarian parties”, and this without “any taboo or ostracism” (Bilan, no 1). On this basis, he inspired within fraction the task of reflection and theoretical elaboration that made the Italian Fraction one of the most fruitful organisations in the history of the workers’ movement. In particular, although a ‘Leninist’ by training, he was not afraid to adopt Rosa Luxemburg’s analysis of the economic causes of imperialism, and her rejection of national liberation struggles. On the former point, he made the most of the debates with the Belgian Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes (an organisation which split from Trotskyism, and moved away from it), whose minority adopted the Fraction’s positions on the Spanish Civil War, to form, with the Fraction in 1937, the International Communist Left. On the basis of the lessons he drew from the degeneration of the Russian revolution and the role of the Soviet state in the counter-revolution, Vercesi (along with Mitchell of the LCI) worked out the position which rejected any identification between the proletarian dictatorship and the state which emerges after the revolution. Lastly, on the organisational level he gave the example, within the Fraction’s Executive Commission, of how debate should be conducted when serious disagreements emerge. Faced with the minority, which broke all organisational discipline by enrolling in the anti-fascist militia and refusing to pay dues, Vercesi fought the idea of an over-hasty organisational split (although by the Fraction’s rules, the minority’s members could perfectly well have been expelled) in order to let the debate develop with maximum clarity. For Vercesi, as for the Fraction’s majority, political clarity was a vital priority in the role and activity of revolutionary organisations.
Many aspects of these lessons corresponded to the political method that Marc had already adopted. He assimilated them fully during the days when he worked alongside Vercesi. And he continued to base himself on the same lessons when Vercesi in his turn began to forget them and turn against marxist positions. Just as the International Communist Left (ICL) was formed, and Bilan gave way to Octobre, Vercesi began to develop a theory of the war economy as a definitive antidote to the capitalist crisis. Disorientated by the temporary success of the economic policies of Nazism and the New Deal, he came to the conclusion that arms production, which does not weigh on the supersaturated capitalist market, would allow capitalism to overcome its economic contradictions. He considered that the fantastic rearmament effort engaged by all countries at the end of the 1930’s constituted, not preparations for a future world war, but on the contrary a means of escaping it by eliminating its underlying cause: capitalism’s economic dead-end. In this context, the various local wars, and especially the Spanish Civil War, were to be considered, not as dress rehearsals for a future generalised conflict, but as a means for the bourgeoisie to crush the working class, and so put down a rising wave of revolutionary combats. This is why the ICL’s International Bureau called its publication Octobre: because it thought a new revolutionary period had begun. These positions were a sort of posthumous victory for the Fraction’s old minority.
These positions called into question Bilan’s most important lessons, and Marc took up the fight to defend the classic positions of both the Fraction and marxism. This was all the more difficult, because he had to fight against the errors of a militant whom he held in great esteem. But the majority of the Fraction’s members were blinded by their admiration for Vercesi, and followed him in his mistakes, so that Marc found himself in a minority. In the end, Vercesi’s positions led the Italian and Belgian Fractions into complete paralysis at the outbreak of World War II; Vercesi considered that there was no point in intervening against the war because the proletariat had “disappeared socially”. Marc was unable to take up the fight against this conception immediately, since he had been called up in the French army (despite his “stateless” status)[8]. It was not until August 1940, in Marseille in southern France, that he was able to renew his political activity and to regroup the elements of the Italian Fraction living in the same city.
Most of these militants refused to accept the dissolution of the Fractions that had been proclaimed by their International Bureau, under Vercesi’s influence. In 1941, they held a conference of the Fraction, reconstituted on the basis of a rejection of the direction taken from 1937 onwards: the theory of the war economy as a means of overcoming the crisis, “localised” wars against the working class, the “social disappearance of the proletariat”, etc. The Fraction also abandoned its old position on the USSR as a “degenerated workers’ state”[9], and recognised its capitalist nature. Throughout the war, in the most difficult conditions of clandestinity, the Fraction was to hold annual conferences which brought together militants from Marseille, Toulon, Paris and Lyon; despite the German occupation, it was also able establish links with militants in Belgium. It published an internal discussion bulletin, dealing with all the questions that had led to the collapse of 1939. On reading through the bulletin’s various issues, it is clear that most of the fundamental texts combating the direction taken by Vercesi, or elaborating the new positions demanded by the evolution of the situation, are signed ‘Marco’. Our comrade, who had only joined the Italian Fraction in 1938 and was its only “foreign” member, remained its main source of inspiration throughout the war.
At the same time, Marc undertook a series of discussions with a group of young militants, mostly from Trotskyism, with whom, in May 1942, he formed the French Nucleus of the Communist Left, on the same positions as the ICL. This group gave itself the objective of forming a French Fraction, but under Marc’s influence it refused any hasty proclamation of a new Fraction, rejecting the “recruitment campaigns” and “entryism” typical of the Trotskyists.
In 1942-43, massive class combats in Italy led to the overthrow of Mussolini (25th July 1943) and the creation of the pro-Allied government of Admiral Badoglio. A text from the Fraction’s Executive Commission, signed ‘Marco’, declared that “the revolutionary revolts which will put an end to the imperialist war will create in Europe a chaotic situation which will be extremely dangerous for the bourgeoisie”; at the same time, it warned against the attempts of the “anglo-americano-russian imperialist bloc” to crush these revolts from outside, and against the efforts by the left parties to “muzzle revolutionary consciousness”. The Fraction’s conference, held in August 1943 despite Vercesi’s opposition, declared that following the events in Italy, “the Fraction’s transformation into the Party” was on the agenda in Italy itself. However, due to material difficulties, compounded by Vercesi’s inertia since he disagreed with this approach, the Fraction was unable to return to Italy to intervene actively in the combats that had begun to break out. In particular, it was unaware that at the end of 1943, Onorato Damen and Bruno Maffi had formed the “Partito Comunista Internazionalista”, with the help of one-time members of the Fraction.
At the same time, both Fraction and Nucleus had undertaken contacts and discussions with other revolutionary elements, and especially with German and Austrian refugees, the “Revolutionäre Kommunisten Deutschlands” (RKD), who had emerged from Trotskyism. With them, the French Nucleus in particular was to conduct direct propaganda against the war addressed to the workers and soldiers of all nationalities, including the German workers in uniform. This activity was obviously extremely dangerous, since it had to confront not only the Gestapo, but also the Resistance. Indeed, it was the latter which proved most dangerous for our comrade. He and his companion were taken prisoner by the FFI (Forces Francaises de l’Interieur), which were stuffed with Stalinists; they escaped from death at the latter’s hands at the last minute. But the end of the war sounded the Fraction’s death-knell. After the “liberation” of Brussels in 1944, Vercesi, in continuity with his aberrant positions, and still turning his back on the principles he had defended in the past, took charge of an “Anti-fascist Coalition”; this latter published L’Italia di Domani, which used its assistance to Italian refugees and prisoners as a cover for a clear support for the Allied war effort. At first, the Fraction did not believe the reports of Vercesi’s activity. When these proved to be true, its EC followed Marc’s lead in expelling Vercesi on 25th January 1945. This decision was not a result of the disagreements on various analytical points that existed between Vercesi and the majority of the Fraction. The policy of the EC, and especially of Marc who adopted Vercesi’s attitude towards the minority of 1936-37, was to conduct the debates with the greatest possible clarity. In 1944-45, however, Vercesi was accused not simply of political disagreement but of playing an active, and even a leading, part in a bourgeois organism directly involved in the imperialist war. But this last display of intransigence was no more than the Fraction’s swan-song. At its May 1945 Conference, the Fraction had learned of the PCInt’s existence in Italy, and the majority of its members decided to dissolve the Fraction and join the new “Party” on an individual basis. Marc fought vigorously against what he considered to be a complete negation of the whole approach on which the Fraction had been based. He demanded that the Fraction should be maintained, at least until it had been able to verify the new organisation’s positions, which were still unclear outside Italy. His caution proved wholly justified, if we consider that the Party in question, joined by elements close to Bordiga who remained in the south of Italy (certain of whom had engaged in entryism in the Italian CP), moved towards wholly opportunist positions to the point where it even compromised itself with the anti-fascist partisan movement (see our International Review nos. 32, 34). In protest against this desertion of principles, Marc announced his resignation from the EC and left the Conference; the latter also refused to recognise the French Fraction of the Communist Left (FFCL), which had been set up by the French Nucleus at the end of 1944, adopting the basic positions of the International Communist Left. Vercesi, on the other hand, joined the new “Party”, which asked for no account of his role in the Brussels anti-fascist coalition. It was the end of the effort that he had conducted himself for years, to make the Fraction a “bridge” between the old party, which had deserted to the enemy, and the new, which would be reconstituted with the resurgence of the proletarian class struggle. Far from continuing the combat for these positions, he remained ferociously hostile, along with the rest of the PCInt, to the only organisation which had remained faithful to the classic positions of the Italian Fraction and the International Communist Left: the FFCL. He even encouraged a split in the latter, which was to form another FFCL[10]. This group published a paper under the same name as the FFCL’s: L’Etincelle. It welcomed into its ranks the members of Bilan’s old minority, against whom Vercesi had fought at the time, as well as one-time members of Union Communiste. It was this second ‘FFCL’ that the PCInt and the Belgian Fraction (reconstituted after the war around Vercesi in Brussels) were to recognise as the “only representative of the Communist Left”.
Henceforth, Marc remained the only member of the Italian Left to continue with the combat and the positions that had given this organisation its strength and its political clarity. He began this new stage in his political life within the Gauche Communiste de France (French Communist Left), as the FFCL now called itself
ICC, 199
When it comes to recounting a comrade’s life, and to paying our respects to his commitment, we would have preferred to treat it as a whole and publish this article in full in the International Review. However, because his life was so much a part of this century’s history, and of the revolutionary minorities of the workers’ movement, we have felt it necessary, not just to describe our comrade’s life, but to develop at greater length the most important political questions which he had to confront, and the life of the organisations where he was a member. Given the imperatives of the international situation today, and our limited space, the article has thus been divided into two; the second part will be published in the next issue of this Review.
[1] These are only the best known among those militants who managed to pass through the period of counter-revolution without abandoning their communist convictions. But it should be said that, unlike Marc, most of them did not succeed in founding or maintaining revolutionary organisation. This was the case, for example, with Mattick, Pannekoek, and Canne-Meijer, these leading figures of the “councilist” movement were paralysed by their own conceptions of organisation, or even, in Canne-Meijer’s case (see the article “Lost Socialism”, in our International Review no. 37) by the idea that capitalism could go on overcoming its crises and so postpone indefinitely any possibility of socialism. Similarly Munis, a courageous militant who came from the Spanish section of the Trotskyist current, was never able to break completely with his original conceptions and remained trapped in a voluntarist vision which rejected the role of the economic crisis in the development of the class struggle; he was thus unable to give the new elements who joined him in the Ferment Ouvrier Révolutionnaire (FOR) a theoretical framework which would enable them to maintain the organisation’s activity on any serious level alter the death of its founder. Bordiga and Damen on the other hand, were able to set up organisations that survived their founders (the International and Internationalist Communist Parties respectively); however, they found it extremely difficult (especially in Bordiga’s case) to go beyond those positions of the Communist International, which had become out-of-date. This has proved a handicap for their organisations, and led to an extremely serious crisis in the PCI at the beginning of the 80’s, or in the PCInt’s case to a constant ambiguity on vital questions like the trade union, parliamentary or national questions (as we saw at the international conferences at the end of the 1970’s). It was also the case, to an extent, with Jan Appel, one of the great names of the KAPD who remained marked by its positions without really being able to adapt them to the present. Nonetheless, when the ICC was formed this comrade identified with our organisation’s general orientation and gave it all the support that his strength allowed. It should be noted that Marc, despite all their sometimes substantial disagreements, held all these militants in great esteem, and felt a great affection for most of them. Nor were these feelings limited to these comrades alone. They extended also to other less well-known militants, who had the immense merit in Marc’s eyes’ of having remained faithful to the revolutionary cause during the worst moments in the proletariat’s history.
[2] Gavroche is a character in Victor Hugo’s great novel Lea Misérables. He is a ten-year-old child, from a poor family, who spends most of his time in the streets. When the June 1832 insurrection breaks out in Paris, he plunges into it, and meets his death on the barricades. Since then, the name has entered the French language as a synonym for street-wise kids with the same kind of character.
[3] Marc enjoyed recalling the episode in the life of Rosa Luxemburg when she dared to stand against all the “authorities” of the Socialist International at its 1896 Congress (she was 26 years old at the time), to attack what seemed to have become an untouchable principle of the workers’ movement: the demand for Polish independence.
[4] This approach is completely opposed to Bordiga’s, who considered the proletarian programme “invariant” since 1848. This being said, it clearly has nothing to do either with the approach of “revisionists” like Bernstein, or more recently like Chaulieu [Castoriadis/Cardan], the mentor of the “Socialisme ou Barbarie” group (1949-65). It is also completely different from the approach of the councilist movement which, because the 1917 revolution ended up in a variant of capitalism, considered it no more than a bourgeois revolution, or claimed appartenance to a “new” as opposed to an “old” (i.e. Second and Third Internationals) workers’ movement, which had failed completely.
[5] On the Fraction’s attitude to the events in Spain, see in particular IRs nos. 4, 6, 7.
[6] On the Italian Fraction see our book The Italian Communist Left.
[7] On the question of the relationship between Party and Fraction, see our series of articles in the International Review nos. 59, 61, and 64.
[8] For 15 years, our comrade had no official papers other than an expulsion order from French territory; every two weeks, he had to ask the police for a “stay of execution” of the order. The very “democratic” government of France - the so-called “land of sanctuary and the rights of man” - thus held a sword of Damocles over his head, since he had to renounce all political activity: needless to say, he failed to respect this promise. When the war broke out, the same government decided that this “undesirable alien” was nonetheless perfectly apt to serve as canon-fodder in defence of the fatherland. He was taken prisoner by the Germans, but managed to escape before the occupying authorities realised that he was Jewish. With his companion Clara, he made his way to Marseille, where the police discovered his pre-war status and refused to give him any kind of official identity. Ironically, it was the military authorities who forced the civilians to alter their decision in favour of this “servant of France”, all the more “deserving” in their eyes, in that he was not even French!
[9] It should be noted that this analysis, although similar to that of the Trotskyists, never led the Fraction to call for the “defence of the USSR”. From the beginning of the 1930’s, the Fraction considered the “Soviet” state to be the worst enemy of the working class; the war in Spain perfectly illustrated this position.
[10] We should point out that despite Vercesi’s mistakes, Marc always held him personally in great esteem. This extended, moreover, to all the members of the Italian Fraction, of whom he always spoke in the warmest terms. One had to listen to Marc speaking of these militants, of Piccino, Tulio, Stefanini... workers almost to a man, to measure the affection he felt for them.
What's behind the 'new world order' announced by the western powers? What is the historic significance of the Gulf war? What stage has the world economic crisis reached? What are the perspectives for the class struggle? What should be the main themes in the intervention of revolutionaries?
These are the questions examined in this resolution adopted by the ICC in January 1991.
The phenomenon of the acceleration of history, which was pointed out by the ICC at the beginning of the 80s, has accentuated considerably in the last year and a half. In a few months, the whole configuration of the world established at the end of the Second World War was turned upside down. The collapse of the eastern imperialist bloc at the end of the 80s announced and opened the door to an end-of-the-millennium dominated by a greater instability and chaos than humanity has ever known.
1) The most immediately significant and dangerous expression of what is not a 'new order' but a new world chaos is at the level of imperialist antagonisms. The war in the Gulf has highlighted the reality of a phenomenon which flowed inevitably from the disappearance of the eastern bloc: the disintegration of its imperialist rival,' the western bloc. This phenomenon was already at the origins of Iraq's 'hold up' in Kuwait: it was because the world had ceased to be divided up into two imperialist constellations that a country like Iraq believed it possible to lay its hands on a former ally of the same bloc. This phenomenon was also revealed in an obvious manner during October in the various attempts of the European countries (notably France and Germany) and Japan to undermine US policy in the Gulf through separate negotiations in the name of freeing the hostages. The USA's aim is to make the punishment of Iraq an 'example' which will discourage any future temptations to imitate the behavior of this country (and indeed to obtain this 'example' the USA did all it could prior to 2 August to provoke and facilitate the Iraqi adventure[1]). It is targeted at the countries of the periphery, where the convulsions are so far advanced that they are permanently pushed towards adventures of this kind. But it is not limited to this aim. In fact its fundamental goal is much more general: faced with a world that is more and more falling into chaos and 'every man for himself', what's required is to impose a minimum of order and discipline, above all on the most important countries of the former western bloc. It is for this very reason that these countries (with the exception of Britain which long ago chose to .make an unbreakable alliance with the USA) have more than dragged their feet in aligning themselves with the US position and associating themselves with its war effort. While they need American power to police the world, they are concerned that too great a display of this power, which is inevitable in a direct armed intervention, will overshadow their own positions.
2) In fact the Gulf war reveals in a particularly significant way what's at stake in the new period at the level of imperialist rivalries. No longer is the world dominated by two superpowers, and imperialist antagonisms are no longer subjected to the fundamental antagonism between them. But at the same time, and as the ICC said over a year ago, such a situation, far from putting an end to imperialist confrontations, has meant that these confrontations are being unleashed more sharply than ever, in the absence of the discipline of the blocs. In this sense, imperialism and the barbarism of war, which are essential characteristics of the period of the decadence of capitalism, can only be further aggravated in the phase that we are now going through, that of the general decomposition of capitalist society. In a world dominated by chaotic wars, by the 'law of the jungle', it's up to the only superpower left - because it has the most to lose in this world disorder, and because it is the only one that has the means - to play he role of the gendarme of capitalism. And it will only be able to play this role by increasingly imprisoning the world in the iron corset of militarism. In such a situation, for a long time to come, and perhaps until the end of capitalism, the conditions don't exist for a new division of the planet into two imperialist blocs. There may be temporary and circumstantial alliances around or against the USA, but in the absence of another military superpower capable of rivaling the US (and the latter will do all it can to prevent such a power arising), the world will be ravaged by all kinds of military confrontations, which even if they are not able to lead up to a third world war, threaten to bring about the most terrible devastation, up to and including, in combination with other calamities typical of the period of decomposition (pollution, famines, epidemics), the destruction of humanity.
3) Another immediate consequence of the collapse of the eastern bloc is the considerable aggravation of the situation that caused it in the first place: economic and political chaos in the countries of Eastern Europe, and above all in the country which was their leader two years ago, the USSR. In fact this country has right now ceased to exist as a state entity: the considerable reduction in Russia's participation in the budget of the 'Union', decided by parliament on 27/12, simply confirmed the irreversible break-up and dislocation of the USSR. A dislocation that the probable reaction of the 'conservative' forces, and particularly the organs of security (as illustrated by Shevarnadze's resignation) can only delay for short time, while at the same time provoking even more chaos and bloodbaths.
Concerning the former 'peoples' democracies', their situation, while not reaching the same level of gravity as that of the USSR, can also only sink into growing chaos as can be seen right now from the catastrophic production figures (which have fallen by 40% in certain countries) and the political instability which has developed in the last few months in countries like Bulgaria, Rumania, Poland (presidential elections) and Yugoslavia (Slovenia's declaration of independence).
4) The crisis of capitalism, which in the last instance is behind all the convulsions the world is now going through, is itself being aggravated by these convulsions:
- the war in the Middle East and the resulting growth in military expenditure can only have a negative effect on the world economic situation (in contrast to the Vietnam war, for example, which made it possible to delay the American and world economy from entering into recession at the beginning of the 60s), owing to the fact that for a long time now the war economy has been one of the main factors aggravating the crisis;
- the dislocation of the western bloc can only deliver a mortal blow to the coordination of economic policy at the level of the bloc, which in the past made it possible to slow down the rhythm of the collapse of the capitalist economy. The perspective is one of a ruthless trade war (as illustrated by the recent failure of the GATT talks) in which all countries will be mauled;
- the convulsions in the zone of the former eastern bloc will also help to aggravate the world crisis by widening the scope of global chaos and, in particular, by forcing the western countries to devote considerable funds to the attempt to limit this chaos (for example by sending 'humanitarian aid' aimed at slowing down the massive emigrations into the west).
5) This said, it is important that revolutionaries show the ultimate factors behind the aggravation of the crisis:
- the generalized overproduction of a system that can't create outlets for the totality 'of commodities produced, as clearly illustrated by the new open recession which is already hitting the premier world power;
- the frenzied flight into external and internal, public and private debt by this same power all through the 80s; this may have made it possible for production to pick up momentarily in a certain number of countries, but it made the USA into easily the world's number one debtor;
- the impossibility of continuing this policy indefinitely, of buying without paying, of selling against promises which more and more obviously will never be repaid; a policy which has simply made the contradictions all the more explosive.
The demonstration of this reality is all the more important to the extent that it is a primary factor in the development of consciousness in the proletariat in the face of the current ideological campaigns. As in 1974 (when it was the 'greedy oil sheikhs') and 1980-82 (when it was the 'mad Khomeini '), the bourgeoisie will try once again (and has already done so) to blame the present open recession on a 'baddy'. Today Saddam Hussein, the 'bloody and megalomaniac dictator', the 'new Hitler' of our time, is ideal for this role. It is thus vital that revolutionaries make it very clear that the present recession, no more than the ones in 74-75 and 80-82, is not the result of a mere oil price rise, but that it began well before the Gulf crisis and that it reveals the fundamental contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.
6) More generally, it is important that revolutionaries draw out of the present situation the elements most likely to facilitate the development of class consciousness.
Today, the development of consciousness is still being held back by the effects of the collapse of Stalinism and the eastern bloc. The way that the very ideas of socialism and revolution were cast into discredit last year, especially under the impact of a gigantic campaign of lies, is something that has still not been overcome. In addition, the impending massive arrival of emigrants from an eastern Europe that has fallen into chaos cannot fail to create further disarray in the working class on both sides of the old iron curtain: among the workers who imagine that they can escape from unbearable misery by exiling themselves to the western Eldorado, and among those who will have the feeling that this immigration will rob them of the meager 'gains' that they still have. This will make the latter more vulnerable to nationalist mystifications. Such a danger is particularly acute in countries like Germany which will be in the front line of any such flood of immigrants.
However, the increasingly obvious bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production, including and above all in its 'liberal' form, the growing revelation of the warmongering nature of the system, will play a powerful role in wearing out the illusions that were engendered by the events of late 1989. In particular, the promise of a 'new world order' following the disappearance of the Russian bloc has suffered a decisive blow in less than a year.
In fact, the warmongering barbarity that will more and more be a feature of capitalism in decomposition will increasingly stamp itself on the whole process through which the proletariat becomes conscious of what's at stake in its struggle. War does not constitute in itself and automatically a factor in the clarification of the proletariat's consciousness. Thus, the second world war led to a strengthening of the ideological grip of the counter-revolution. Similarly, although the sound of marching boots which has been heard since last summer has had the merit of refuting all the speeches about the new era of peace, it has also given rise, initially, to a feeling of powerlessness, an undeniable paralysis in the' great mass of the working class in the advanced countries. But the present conditions for the development of the class struggle will not allow this disarray to last for long:
- because the proletariat today, unlike in the 30s and 40s, has come out of the counter-revolution; its decisive sectors are not dragooned behind bourgeois flags such as nationalism, defense of the 'socialist fatherland', or of democracy against fascism;
- because the working class of the central countries is not directly mobilized for the war, it's not gagged by being enrolled under a military authority; this gives it much more latitude to engage in a thorough-going reflection about the barbarism of war, whose effects it will be the first to suffer through increasing austerity and poverty;
- because the profound and increasingly overt aggravation of the crisis of capitalism, of which the workers will evidently be the main victims and against which they will be forced to develop their class militancy, will more and more lead them to make the link between the capitalist crisis and war, between the struggle against the latter and the resistance against economic attacks, which will enable them to protect themselves against the traps of pacifism and inter-classist ideologies.
In reality, while the disarray provoked by the events in the Gulf may on the surface resemble the one provoked by the collapse of the eastern bloc, it obeys a different dynamic: whereas what came from the east (elimination of the vestiges of Stalinism, nationalist conflicts, immigration, etc) can only, for some time to come, have an essentially negative effect on the consciousness of the proletariat, the more and more permanent presence of war in the life of society will tend to reawaken class consciousness.
7) While despite its temporary disarray, the world proletariat still holds the key to the future in its hands, it is necessary to point out that not all sectors of the class are in the same position to offer humanity a perspective. In particular, the economic and political situation developing in the former eastern bloc countries bears witness to the extreme political weakness of the working class in this part of the world. Having been crushed by the most brutal and pernicious form of the counter-revolution - Stalinism - ; carried away by democratic and trade unionist illusions; torn apart by nationalist conflicts and confrontations between bourgeois cliques, the proletariat of Russia, the Ukraine, the Baltic countries, Poland, Hungary etc faces the most extreme difficulties in the development of its class consciousness. The struggles which the workers of these countries will be forced to wage in the face of unprecedented economic attacks will, when they are not directly diverted onto a bourgeois terrain like nationalism, come up against the whole weight of social and political decomposition, which will stifle their ability to serve as a soil for the germination of consciousness. And this will continue to be the case as long as the proletariat of the great capitalist metropoles, and particularly those of Western Europe, is unable to put forward, even at an embryonic level, a general perspective for the struggle.
8) The new stage in the process of the maturation of consciousness in the proletariat, the premises of which are being laid by the present situation of capitalism, is for the moment only at the beginning. On the one hand, the class has to go a long way to shake off the effects of the implosion of Stalinism and the way the bourgeoisie made use of it. On the other hand, even if it won't last as long as the impact of the former, the disarray produced by the campaigns around the Gulf war has yet to be overcome. In making this step, the proletariat will be confronted by the difficulties sown by the general decomposition of society and by the traps set by the forces of the bourgeoisie, especially the trade unions, which will try to channel its militancy into dead-ends, which includes pushing it into premature battles. In this process, revolutionaries will have a growing responsibility:
- in warning against all the dangers represented by decomposition, particularly, it goes without saying, the barbarity of war;
- in denouncing all the bourgeois maneuvers, an essential aspect of which will be the attempt to hide or deform the fundamental link between the struggle against economic attacks and the more general struggle against imperialist war, which will be an increasingly ubiquitous element in the life of society;
- by putting forward, against all the pacifist mystifications, and more generally, against all the bourgeois ideologies which tend to undermine the proletariat's confidence in itself and its future, the only perspective which can counter the aggravation of war: the development and generalization of the class struggle against capitalism as a whole, with the ultimate aim of overthrowing it once and for all.
4th January, 1991
Note (1): Even if they are not completely in control of this aspect (Iraq also has something to say about it), the date chosen by the USA for beginning the conflict is not the result of chance. For the USA, it's important to act quickly before the dislocation of its former bloc has gone even further; but also before the tendency towards the revival of workers' struggles (following the reflux provoked by the collapse of the eastern bloc, and given an impetus by the world recession) could manifest itself too openly, as it had begun to do before the summer of 90.
[1] Even if they are not completely in control of this aspect (Iraq has something to say about it), the date chosen by the USA for beginning the conflict is not the result of chance. For the USA, it's important to act quickly before the dislocation of its former bloc has gone even further; but also before the tendency towards the revival of workers' struggles (following the reflux provoked by the collapse of the eastern bloc, and given an impetus by the world recession) could manifest itself too openly, as it had begun to do before the summer of 90.
The present acceleration of history, capitalism's entry into its phase of decomposition, sharply poses the necessity for the proletarian revolution, as the only way out of the barbarism of capitalism in crisis. History teaches us that this revolution can only triumph if the class manages to organize itself autonomously from other classes (the workers' councils) and to secrete the vanguard that will guide it towards victory: the class party. However, today, this party doesn't exist, and many are those who simply fold their arms because, faced with the gigantic tasks that await us, the activity of the small revolutionary groups who do exist may appear to be senseless. Within the revolutionary camp itself, the majority of groups respond to the absence of the party by endlessly repeating its very Holy Name, invoking it like some kind of deus ex machina that can solve all the problems of the class. Individual disengagement and overblown declarations about commitment are two classic ways of running away from the struggle for the party, a struggle which is going on here and now, in continuity with the activity of the left fractions who broke with the degenerating Communist International in the 20s. In the first two parts of this work, we analyzed the activity of the Italian Communist Left, which was organized as a fraction in the 30s and 40s, and the premature, completely artificial foundation of the Internationalist Communist Party by the comrades of Battaglia Comunista in 1942[1]. In this third part, we first showed[2] that the method of working as a fraction in unfavorable periods when there is no possibility of a class party existing, was the very method employed by Marx himself. In this issue we will also show that this marxist method of working towards the party found its essential definition through the tenacious struggle of the Bolshevik fraction in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Against all those who gargle eulogies to the iron party of Lenin, and who refer ironically to the 'little grouplets that were the left fractions', we reaffirm that "the history of the fractions is the history of Lenin"[3] and that only on the basis of the work that they accomplished will it be possible to reconstruct tomorrow's world communist party.
In the passages cited in the previous issue, we saw how Battaglia doesn't lose any opportunity to make ironical comments about What Is To Be Done of 1902 being the perfect text book for the fractionists, and to paint a distorted picture of things for the umpteenth time[4]. If the comrades would stop getting so excited about the word party and would begin a sober study of the history of the party, they would discover that What Is To Be Done in 1902 could hardly talk about the Bolshevik fraction, due to the fact that it was formed in Geneva in June ... 1904 (the meeting of the '22')[5]. It's from here that the Bolsheviks began to develop the notion of the fraction and its relations with the whole party, a notion which took a definitive form with the 1905 revolution, and above all the period of reaction which allowed its defeat[6].
"A faction is an organization within a party, united, by its place of work, language or other objective conditions, but by a particular platform of views on questions"[7].
"A party can contain a whole gamut of opinions and shades of opinion, the extremes of which may be sharply contradictory ... That is not the case within a section. A section in a party is a group of like-minded persons formed for the purpose of securing acceptance for their principles in the party in the purest possible form. For this, real unanimity of opinion is necessary. The different standards we set for party unity and sectional unity must be grasped by everyone who wants to know how the question of the internal discord in the Bolshevik section really stands"[8].
"But as a wing, ie a union of like-minded people in the party, we cannot work without unanimity on fundamental issues. To break away from a wing is not the same as breaking away from the Party. The people who have broken away from our wing in no way lose the possibility of working in the Party"[9].
The fraction was thus seen as an organization within the party, clearly identified and with a precise platform, and which fights to influence the party, with the final aim of seeing its principles triumph in the party "in their purest form", ie. without any mediation or homogenization. The fraction works within the party, with other fractions defending other platforms, so that practical experience and public political debate allow the whole party to recognize which platform is most correct. This coexistence is possible on condition that there is no room in the party for those who have already taken choices which will lead them out of the party, so that keeping them within the organization can only lead to the liquidation of the organization itself. In Russia this applied to the 'liquidators' who fought for the dissolution of the illegal party and its submission to Tsarist 'legality'. There was a fundamental difference between the Bolsheviks and the other fractions precisely on this point: while the latter in general condemned the liquidators, they still considered them to be members of the party. The Bolsheviks, by contrast, considered that there could be a place in the socialist party for all opinions - except those which are anti-socialist:
"The very foundation of conciliation ism is false - the wish to base the unity of the party of the proletariat on an alliance of all factions, including the anti-Social Democratic, non-proletarian factions; false are its unprincipled 'unity' schemes which lead to nothing; false are its phrases against 'factions' (when in fact a new faction is formed) ... "[10].
It is interesting to note that these lines by Lenin were directed against Trotsky, who, within the RSDLP, was the main opponent of the organized existence of fractions, something he saw as useless and damaging for the party. Trotsky's total incomprehension of the necessity for fraction work would have catastrophic consequences during and after the degeneration of the Russian revolution.
"It should be noted that Trotsky - on all the questions relating to the 1905 revolution, and during the whole period that followed - was generally with the Bolsheviks on all questions of principle and with the Mensheviks on all questions of organization. His incomprehension of the correct notion of the party, during the course of this period, resulted in him standing 'outside the fractions' in favor of unity at any price.
His pitiful position of today - which is pushing him into the arms of social democracy - proves to us that on this question, Trotsky has learned nothing from events"[11].
Naturally, Lenin was violently attacked, both in the Russian movement and the international movement, for his sectarianism, his mania for splits, and everyone sang fine songs about the 'end of factionalism'. In fact, Lenin was the first to be for the end of factionalism, because he knew quite well that the existence of fractions was the symptom of a crisis in the party. But he also knew that the open, practical struggle of the fraction was the only remedy for the party's malady, since it was only through a public confrontation of platforms that a clear way forward could emerge.
"Every faction is convinced that its platform and its policy are the best means of abolishing factions, for no one regards the existence of factions as ideal. The only difference is that factions with clear, consistent, integral platforms openly defend their platforms, while unprincipled factions hide behind cheap shots about their virtue, about their non-factionalism"[12].
One of the big lies inherited from Stalinism is that Bolshevism was a monolithic tradition where there was no place for empty chatter and pseudo-intellectual debate; this lie is in continuity with the Mensheviks' constant accusation that the Bolsheviks were 'closed to debate'. Of course, it's quite true that among the Mensheviks and the conciliators, discussion was 'free', whereas among the Bolsheviks it was obligatory. But it's true in the sense that the first felt free to discuss when it suited them and to keep quiet when they had divergences to hide. For the Bolsheviks on the other hand, discussion wasn't free, it was obligatory, and became all the more obligatory when divergences arose within the fraction, divergences which had to be discussed publicly so that they could either be reabsorbed or pushed to their conclusion, with an organizational separation based on clear motives.
"That is why we have initiated a discussion on these questions in Proletary. We have published everything that was sent to us, and reprinted all that the Bolsheviks in Russia have written on the subject. So far, we have not rejected a single contribution to the discussion, and we shall continue to pursue the same course. Unfortunately, the otzavist comrades and those who sympathize with them have, so far, sent us little material, and, in general, have avoided making a frank and complete statement of their theoretical credo in the press. They prefer to talk 'among themselves'. We invite all comrades, otzavists and orthodox Bolsheviks alike, to state their views in the columns of Proletary. If necessary we shall publish these contributions in pamphlet form .... Our supporters should not be afraid of an internal ideological struggle, once it is necessary. They will be all the stronger for it"[13].
This demonstrates that Lenin made an enormous contribution to the historic definition of the nature and function of the fraction, in spite of all Battaglia's quips about the "ten commandments of the fractionist faith". Let's note in passing that Battaglia also talks in one phrase about the party alternative from 1902 on, and in another, says that the party was acting as such "at least from 1912". So what was Lenin doing between 1902 and 1912 if he wasn't doing fraction work? Macrobiotic cooking? Actually what BC is really concerned about is affirming that the Bolsheviks didn't restrict themselves to theoretical work and the formation of cadres, but that they worked towards the masses and thus couldn't have been a fraction. For Battaglia, if you choose to work as a fraction, you're running away from the class struggle, refusing to dirty your hands with the problems of the masses, which means "limiting yourself to a policy of measured proselytism and propaganda, focusing on the study of so-called basic problems, reducing the tasks of the party to the tasks of a fraction if not of a sect"[14].
The lines are drawn: on one side you have Lenin, who thinks of the masses, and who thus can only be in the party; on the other, the Italian Left in exile in the 30s, which works as a fraction and can therefore be no more than a club of students and little professors. We've seen what Lenin's real activity was; let's now look at the real activity of the Italian Left:
"It might seem that the tasks of the fraction are exclusively didactic. But such a criticism can be refuted by marxists with the same argument used against those charlatans who consider that the proletariat's struggle for the revolution and for the transformation of the world can be put at the same level as electoral activity.
It is perfectly true that the specific role of the fractions is above all a role of educating cadres through the experience of events, and thanks to the rigorous confirmation of the significance of these events. However, it is also true that this work, above all an ideological one, is done in consideration of the mass movements and constantly supplies the political solution for their success. Without the work of the fractions, Lenin himself would have been a mere bookworm, not a revolutionary leader.
The fractions are thus the only historic place where the proletariat can continue its work for its class organization. From 1928 until now, comrade Trotsky has completely neglected this work of building fractions, and, because of this, he has not contributed to realizing the effective conditions for mass movements"[15].
As can be seen, Battaglia' s sarcasms about the fraction as a sect running away from the masses fall very flat. Bilan's concern was the same as the Bolsheviks' "to contribute to the realization of the effective conditions for mass movements". The fact that the Bolsheviks had much greater links with the masses in the 1910s than the Italian Left in the 30s did not derive from the personal features of so-and-so, but from the objective conditions of the class struggle, which differed hugely. The Bolshevik fraction was not made up of a group of comrades who had survived the degeneration of the party in a period of counter-revolution and deep defeat for the proletariat. It was a part (often the majority) of a mass proletarian party (like all the parties of the 2nd International), which was constituted in an immediately pre-revolutionary phase which for two years (1905-6) was to shake the entire Russian empire, from the Urals to Poland. If you want to make a quantitative comparison between the activity of the fraction of the Italian Left and that of the Bolsheviks, you must refer to a period which has certain historically comparable aspects, ie. the revolutionary years between 1917 and 1921. In those years, the Abstentionist Communist Fraction (the left fraction of the PSI) developed to the point that when it constituted itself as the Communist Party of Italy, it absorbed into its ranks one third of the membership of the old mass socialist party and all the youth federations. The comrades who had been able to guide this process were the ones who ten years later were militating in the Left Fraction in exile, but by then they had been reduced to a small handful. What had changed? Was it that those comrades no longer had the will to lead mass movements? Obviously not:
"Since we have been in existence, it has not been possible for us to lead any class movements. It has to be understood that this isn't anything to do with our will, our incapacity, or the fact that we are a fraction. It is the result of a situation of which we have been a victim, just as the world-wide revolutionary proletariat has also been a victim of it" (Bilan 28, 1935).
What had changed was the objective situation of the class struggle, which had gone from a pre-revolutionary phase which put on the agenda the transformation of the fraction into a party, to a counter-revolutionary phase which compelled the fraction to resist against the tide, to carry on a work which would contribute to the eventual emergence of a new situation, again putting on the agenda the transformation of the fraction into a party.
As always, when one criticizes the positions of Battaglia, one has to return to the crucial issue, ie. the conditions for the rebirth of the party. We've seen how BC would like to whitewash Lenin of the infamous charge of adhering to the ''fractionist faith", from as early as 1902. In their willingness to make concessions, they grit their teeth and are ready to admit that the Bolshevik party only existed after 1912, on condition that it's clear that the party did exist as such before the revolutionary period which began in February 1917. What they try to avoid admitting at any cost is that the struggle of the Bolshevik fraction of the RSDLP was concluded by its transformation into the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik) in 1917, because that would mean admitting that
"the transformation of the fraction into a party is conditioned... by the upsurge of revolutionary movements enabling the fraction to assume the leadership of struggles for the insurrection" (Bilan KNOB. 1933). We thus have to clear up whether or not this transformation took place in 1912 - five years before the revolution.
What did happen in 1912? In Prague there was a conference of the territorial organizations of the RSDLP, the groups working in Russia. This conference reorganized the party after it had been demolished by the reaction which followed the defeat of the 1905 revolution, and elected a new Central Committee to replace the one which was thenceforward dissolved. The conference and the CC were dominated by the Bolsheviks, whereas the other tendencies in the RSDLP didn't participate in Lenin's 'splitting' initiative. At first sight, it looks as though Battaglia is right: a conference of Bolsheviks has taken the initiative of reconstructing the party, independently of the other fractions; thus, from now on, the Bolsheviks are acting as a party, without waiting for the opening of a pre-revolutionary phase. But if we look a bit closer, we can see that things are rather different. The birth of a revolutionary fraction within the old party takes place in reaction to the party's illness, to its inability to come up with an adequate response to the necessities of history, to lacunae in its programme. The transformation of the fraction into the party doesn't mean that we just return to the old status quo, to the old party purged of opportunists; it means the formation of a new party, founded on a new program which eliminates previous ambiguities and takes up the principles of the revolutionary fraction "in their purest form". Otherwise you would simply be going back to where you started, and that would lay the groundwork for the reappearance of all the opportunist deviations that had just been chased away. And is this what Lenin did in 1912, transform the fraction into a party based on a new program? Not at all. In the first place, the resolution approved by the conference declared that it had been called with the aim of "rallying all the Party organizations in Russia irrespective of factional affiliation, and (of) re-establishing our Party as an all-Russian organization"[16]. It was thus not a purely Bolshevik conference, all the more because its organization was to a large extent carried out by the Kiev territorial committee which was dominated by pro-party Mensheviks, and it was a Menshevik who presided over the commission for the verification of mandates[17]. There was no talk of modifying the old program and the decisions taken consisted simply in putting into practice the resolutions condemning the liquidators, approved in 1908 and 1910 by "the representatives of all the factions". Thus the conference was not only composed of party members, "irrespective of factional affiliation", but was based on a resolution approved by "all the factions". It's obvious that this wasn't the constitution of the new Bolshevik party, but simply the reorganization of the old social democratic party. It's worth underlining that such a reorganization was only considered possible "in association with the revival of the workers' movement"[18] after the years of reaction between 1907 and 1910. As we can see, Lenin not only didn't think of founding a new party before the revolutionary battles, but didn't even have the illusion of reorganizing the old party in the absence of a new period of struggle. The comrades of Battaglia - and not only them - are so hypnotized by the word party that they have become incapable of analyzing facts lucidly, reading something as a decisive turning point when it was only an important step in the process of demarcation with opportunism. The election of a Central Committee in 1912 by a conference dominated by Bolsheviks cannot be considered to be the end of the fraction phase and the beginning of the party phase, for the simple reason that in London in 1905 there had been an exclusively Bolshevik conference which proclaimed itself to be the III Congress of the party, and which had elected an entirely Bolshevik CC, considering the Mensheviks to be outside the party. But by the following year, Lenin had recognized that this had been a mistake, and at the 1906 congress the party was reunified, maintaining the two fractions as fractions of the same party. In a similar way, between 1912 and 1914, Lenin considered that the period of the struggle of the fraction was coming to an end and that the time had come for a definitive selection. This may have been true from a strictly Russian point of view, but it would certainly have been premature from an international point of view:
"Lenin's fractional work took place uniquely within the Russian party and there was no attempt to expand it onto the international level. To be convinced of this you only have to read his interventions at different congresses and you'll see that this work remained completely unknown outside the Russian sphere."[19].
In fact, the definitive selection took place in the years 1914 to 1917, in the face of the dual test of war and revolution, dividing the socialists into social patriots and internationalists. Lenin was well aware of this and - as in 1906 when he fought for the unification of the party - in February 1915, replying to Trotsky's Nashe Slovo group, he wrote:
"We agree absolutely with you that the union of all the real internationalist social-democrats is one of the most vital tasks of the present moment"[20]. The problem was that for Lenin the unification of the internationalists in a really communist party was only possible if one made a clear break with those who weren't really internationalists, whereas Trotsky, as usual, wanted to reconcile the irreconcilable, wanted to base the unity of the internationalist party "on the union of all the fractions", including those who weren't prepared to break with the enemies of internationalism. For three years, Lenin fought incessantly against these illusions, transferring his fractional struggle for clarity from the purely Russian soil to the international one of the Zimmerwald Left[21]. This grandiose international struggle was the apogee and conclusion of the Bolshevik's fraction work, which would bear its fruit with the outbreak of the revolution in Russia. Thanks to this tradition of struggle and to the development of a revolutionary situation, Lenin was able, as soon as he returned to Russia, to propose the unification of the Bolsheviks with the other consistent internationalists, on the basis of a new program and under the name of the Communist Party, replacing the old term 'social democrat'. This led to the final selection, with the Bolshevik right (Voitinsky, Goldenberg) going over to Menshevism, while the 'Old Bolshevik' center (Zinoviev, Kamenev) opposed Lenin in the name... of the old program upon which the 1912 conference had based itself. Lenin was accused of being the "gravedigger of the party's tradition"; he replied by showing that the entire struggle of the Bolsheviks had simply been the preparation for a real communist party:
"Let us create a proletarian Communist Party; its elements have already been created by the best adherents of Bolshevism"[22]. Here is the conclusion of the grand struggle of the Bolshevik fraction; here is the real transformation into the party. We say real because, from a formal point of view, the name Communist Party wasn't adopted until March 1918, and the definitive version of the new program would only be ratified in March 1919. But the substantial transformation took place in April 1917 (VIII Pan-Russian Bolshevik Conference). We shouldn't forget that what distinguishes a party from a fraction is its capacity to have a direct influence on events. The party is "a program, but also a will to action" (Bordiga), providing obviously that this will is expressed in conditions objectively favorable to the development of a class party. In February 1917, there were only a few thousand Bolsheviks and they had not played any leadership role in the spontaneous uprising which opened the revolutionary period. At the end of April, there were more than 60,000 of them and they were already standing out as the only real opposition to the bourgeois Provisional Government. With the acceptance of the April Theses and the necessity to adopt a new program, the fraction became a party and posed the bases of Red October.
In the next part of this work, we will see how the particular, historically original conditions of the degeneration of the Russian revolution prevented the emergence of a left fraction that could resume, inside the degenerating Bolshevik party, Lenin's battle inside the social democratic party. The incapacity of the Russian opposition to form itself into a fraction would later be at the root of the historic failure of the Trotskyist international opposition, whereas the Italian Left, by carrying on the methods of Marx and Lenin, was able to form itself into the International Communist Left in 1937[23]. We will also see how the abandonment of these methods by the comrades who founded the Internationalist Communist Party in 1943 has been the source of the incapacity to act as a pole of revolutionary regroupment displayed by the two organizations (Battaglia, Programma Comunista) who derive from that party .
Beyle.
[1] The first two parts were published in IR 59 and 61. For a deeper analysis of the activity of this current, we recommend reading our two pamphlets La Gauche Communiste D'Italie 1927-52 and Rapports entre la fraction de gauche du PC d'Italie et l'Opposition de Gauche Internationale 1929-33
[2] See ‘Third Part: from Marx to Lenin, 1848-1917. 1. From Marx to the Second International' in IR 64
[3] Bordiga's intervention at the 6th Enlarged Executive Committee of the Communist International, in 1926
[4] "In 1902, Lenin had laid the tactical and organizational bases upon which were to be built the alternative to the opportunism of Russian social democracy, a party alternative, unless you want to pass off What Is To Be Done as the ten commandments of the fractionist faith" (‘Fraction and Party in the Experience of the Italian Left', Prometeo 2, March 1979).
[5] The Bolshevik (‘Majority') at the 1903 congress of the RSDLP were the fruit of a temporary alliance between Lenin and Plekhanov. The 1904 fraction called itself Bolshevik in order to lay claim to the positions defended by the Congress majority of 1903
[6] It is significant that the complete theorization of the concept of the fraction by Lenin was not achieved until the years of reaction following the 1905 revolution. It is only the activity of the fraction that makes it possible to hold out in unfavorable periods.
[7] ‘The new faction of conciliators, or the virtuous', Social Democrat no. 24, October 18 (31), Lenin, Collected Works, 17
[8] ‘Conference of the extended editorial board of Proletary, 8-17 (21-30) June 1901, supplement to no 46 of Proletary, Collected Works, 15.
[9] ‘The liquidation of liquidationism', Proletary no. 46, 11 (24) July 1909, Collected Works, 15
[10] Idem note 4
[11] ‘The problem of the fraction in the Second International', Bilan 24, 1935
[12] Idem note 4
[13] ‘On the article Questions of the Day', Poletary no 42, 12 (25) February 1909, Collected Works, 15. Otzovism was a dissident current inside the Bolshevik fraction in the darkest years of the reflux, it tended towards reducing fraction work to that of a mere network.
[14] Political Platform of the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Communista), 1952. In a recent publication of this text (1982), this passage was reproduced unchanged.
[15] ‘Towards the Two and Three-Quarter International', in Bilan 1, 1933; extracts published in the Bulletin D'etude et de Discussion, Revolution Internationale, no 6, April 1974.
[16] 6th General Conference of the RSDLP, Prague conference 6-17 (18-30) January 1912, Resolution on the Russian organizing commission for the convening of a conference, Collected Works, 17
[17] ‘The situation in RSDLP and the immediate tasks of the Party', 16 July 1912, Gazeta Robotnicza no. 15-16, Collected Works, 18: "It was a delegate from that organization (Kiev) that was chairman of the Credentials Committee at the Conference!"
[18] Taken from the resolutions of the conference. Lenin came back to this subject in 1915: "The years 1912-14 marked the beginning of a great new revolutionary upswing in Russia. We again witnessed a great strike movement, the like of which the world has never known. The number involved in the mass revolutionary strike in 1913 was, at the very lowest estimate, one and a half million, and in 1914 it rose to over two million, approaching the 1905 level" (Socialism and War, July-August 1915, Chapter II, ‘The working class and the war', Collected Works, 21.
[19] ‘The problem of the Fraction in the II International', Bilan 24, 1935.
[20] Letter from the CC of RSDLP to the editorial board of Nashe Slovo, 10 (23) March 1915, Collected Works, 15
[21] For a better understanding of the role of the Bolsheviks in the Zimmerwald Left, see our article in IR 57.
[22] ‘The dual power', Pravda no. 28, 9 April 1917, Collected Works, 24
[23] For an analysis of the work of the Italian Fraction in the 30s, see the first part of this work, in IR 59.
IR 65 2nd Qtr 1991
The fantastic violence of the Gulf War has served as a reminder that capitalism means war. The historic responsibility of the working class, as the only force capable of opposing capital, has been highlighted all the more. But to take up this responsibility, the revolutionary class must reappropriate the theoretical and practical experience of its own struggle against war. It must draw from this experience confidence in its revolutionary capacities and the means to fight successfully.
The world working class has suffered from the Gulf war, not only as a massacre of a part of itself, but also as a stupefying blow from the ruling class.
But the balance of forces between the proletariat and the local ruling class is not the same on each side of the battle front.
In Iraq, the government was able to send conscripts to the slaughter: workers, peasants and their children (sometimes only 15 years old). The working class is in a minority, drowned in a rural or semi-marginalised slum population. Its historical experience of struggle against capital is virtually nil. And above all, the absence of any significant struggles on the part of the workers in the most industrialised countries makes it unable to imagine the possibility of a truly internationalist combat. It has therefore been unable to resist the ideological and military control that forced it to serve as canon-fodder for the imperialist ambitions of its bourgeoisie. The ability of workers in these regions to overcome religious or nationalist mystifications depends first and foremost on the internationalist, anti-capitalist stance of the proletarians in the central countries.
The situation is different in the imperialist metropoles of Britain, France or the United States. The bourgeoisie had to send professional armies into the massacre. Why? Because the balance of forces between the classes was not the same. The ruling class knows that the workers are not ready, yet again, to pay the blood tax. Since the end of the sixties and the renewal of struggles marked by the massive 1968 strikes in France, the oldest working class in the world – and which has already suffered two world wars – has acquired an immense distrust of all the bourgeoisie’s politicians and their promises, and of the so-called “working class” organisations (left parties, trade unions), designed to keep them under control. It is this combativity, this disengagement from the ruling ideology, which has up to now prevented the outbreak of World War III, and the enlistment, once again, of the workers in an imperialist conflict.
However, recent events have shown that this is not enough to prevent capitalism from making war. If the working class went no further than this “implicit” resistance, then capital would eventually put the whole planet, including its industrial centres, to fire and sword.
The 1917-23 revolutionary wave, which put an end to World War I, showed that the proletariat is the only force able to stand against the barbarity of decadent capitalism’s imperialist war. The bourgeoisie is doing everything it can to make workers forget this, and to submerge them in a feeling of impotence, especially through the current gigantic campaign on the collapse of the USSR, with its ignoble lie: “the workers’ revolutionary struggle can only lead to the gulag and the most totalitarian militarism”.
For the working class today, to “forget” its revolutionary nature would mean a suicide that would drag the whole of humanity down with it. If it is left in the hands of the capitalist class, then human society is heading for a definitive disaster. The technological barbarity of the Gulf war is there to remind us. If the proletariat, the producer of the greater part of social wealth, lets itself be lulled by the sirens of pacifism and their hypocritical hymns to a capitalism without war, if it lets itself be dissolved in the rotten atmosphere of “every man for himself”, if it is unable to rediscover the path of the revolutionary struggle against capitalism as a system, then the human race will be definitively condemned to barbarity and destruction. “War or revolution. Socialism or barbarism”; more than ever, the question is posed thus.
More than ever, it is urgent that the proletariat reappropriate its historical lucidity and experience, the result of more than two centuries’ struggle against capital and its wars.
The proletariat, because it is the bearer of communism, is the first class in history to be able to envisage war as something other than an eternal and inevitable scourge. From the start, the workers’ movement declared its general opposition to capitalism’s wars. The Communist Manifesto, whose publication in 1848 corresponded to the first struggles where the proletariat stood forward on history’s stage as an independent force, is unequivocal: “The workers have no country... Workers of all countries, unite!”
The proletariat and war during the 19th century
The attitude of proletarian political organisations towards war has, logically, differed according to historical periods. In the 19th century, some capitalist wars still had a progressive anti-feudal character, in that they encouraged the development of the necessary conditions for the future communist revolution, through the formation of new nations and the growth of the productive forces. On several occasions, the marxist current was thus led to take a position in favour of one camp or the other in a national war, or to support the liberation struggle in certain nations (e.g., Poland against the Russian empire, the bastion of feudalism in Europe).
But in every case, the workers’ movement has always considered war as a capitalist scourge whose first victims are the exploited classes. Important confusions existed, at first because of the immaturity of historical conditions, then because of the weight of reformism. At the time of the First International’s foundation (1864), it was thought that a means to put an end to war had been found in the demand for the replacement of standing armies by people’s militias. This position was criticised from within the International itself, which declared in 1867 “ that it is not enough to abolish standing armies to do away with war; to this end, a transformation of the entire social order is also necessary”. The Second International, founded in 1889, also took position against wars in general. But this was the golden age of capitalism, and of the development of reformism. The International’s First Congress went back to the old slogan of “replacing the standing armies with people’s militias”. At the London Congress in 1896, a resolution on war declared: “the working class in all countries must oppose the violence provoked by war”. In 1900, the International’s parties had grown, and even had representatives in the Parliaments of the most important countries. One principal was solemnly stated: “the socialist members of parliament in every country are required to vote against military and naval credits, and against colonial expeditions”.
But in reality, the question of war had not yet been sharply posed. Apart from the colonial expeditions, the watershed between the two centuries was still marked by peace between the main capitalist powers. It was still the “belle époque”. While the conditions that would lead to the outbreak of World War I ripened, the workers’ movement seemed to be advancing from social conquest to parliamentary triumph, and for many the question of war seemed to be a purely theoretical one.
“All this explains – and we are speaking here from experience – the fact that we, the generation that struggled before the 1914 imperialist war, perhaps considered the problem of war more as an ideological struggle than as a real and imminent danger; the conclusion of several serious conflicts, such as Fashoda or Agadir, without recourse to arms, led us to believe, wrongly, that economic “interdependence”, the ever more numerous and tighter links between countries, formed a sure defence against the outbreak of war between the European powers, and that the different imperialisms’ growing military preparations, rather than leading inevitably to war, confirmed the Roman principle “si vis pacem para bellum”: if you want peace, prepare for war” (Gatto Mamonne, in Bilan no. 21, 1935 [1] [15]).
The conditions of this period of capitalism’s apogee, the development of the mass workers’ parties with their parliamentary representatives and their enormous union bureaucracies, the real reforms torn from the capitalist class, all encouraged the development of reformist ideology within the workers’ movement, and of its corollary: pacifism. The workers’ organisations were infected by the illusion of a capitalism without wars.
Against reformism, there emerged a left wing that stuck to revolutionary principals and understood that capitalism was entering into its phase of imperialist decadence. Rosa Luxemburg, and the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social-Democratic party maintained and developed revolutionary positions on the question of war. At the Stuttgart Congress of the International in 1907, they managed to have adopted an amendment that shut the door on pacifist conceptions. This stated that it was not enough to fight against an eventual outbreak of war, or to bring it to an end as quickly as possible, but that during the war it was necessary “to profit in any way possible from the economic and political crisis to rouse the people and in this way hasten the collapse of capitalist domination”. In 1912, under the pressure of the same minority, the Basle Congress denounced the coming European war as “criminal” and “reactionary”, “accelerating the capitalism’s downfall by inevitably provoking the proletarian revolution”.
Despite the adoption of these positions, when war broke out two years later the International collapsed. The leaderships of the national parties, rotten with reformism and pacifism, lined up alongside their national bourgeoisies in the name of “defence against aggression”. The Social-Democrat members of parliament voted the war credits.
Only the revolutionary minorities within the main parties, grouped around the German Spartakists and the Russian Bolsheviks, continued the fight against the war.
The revolutionary struggle puts an end to World War I
The revolutionary forces were now reduced to their simplest expression. When they met for the first time at the international conference of 1915 at Zimmerwald, Trotsky could joke that the proletariat’s revolutionary representatives could fit into a few taxis. But their intransigent internationalist position, their perspective of revolution rising from the war, and that only this revolution rising from the war, and that only this revolution could put an end to the barbarity that had been unleashed, were to be born out by events. By 1915, the first strikes broke out against the privations caused by the war, notably in Britain. In 1916, the workers in Germany and Russia took up the struggle, despite ferocious repression. In February 1917, a demonstration of Russian working class women against shortages set in motion the process that was to lead to the proletariat’s first international revolutionary attempt.
We have not the space here to recount, even briefly, the history of the struggles that put an end to the imperialist slaughter through the Russian workers’ soviets’ seizure of power in October 1917, and the 1918-19 insurrection by the German proletariat. We want here to highlight, nonetheless, two fundamental lessons of this experience.
The first is that, contrary to the claims of the bourgeoisie’s disgusting propaganda, the exploited classes are not impotent and weaponless against capital and its wars. If the proletariat is capable of uniting consciously, if it succeeds in discovering its own enormous strength, then it can not only prevent capitalist war, it can disarm the power of capital and overthrow its armed power by disintegrating it. The revolutionary wave which put an end to World War I has provided practical proof that the combat of the working class constitutes the only force able to halt the military barbarity of capitalist decadence, and this society’s only revolutionary force.
The second lesson concerns the relation between the proletariat’s struggle in the workplace and the struggle of soldiers in the barracks and at the front. However important the soldiers’ struggle, and the fraternisation of German and Russian soldiers in the trenches during World War I, they were not at the heart of the revolution which put an end to the war, but a moment within it. These actions were preceded by a whole fermentation in the factories, whether in the form of strikes, or of demonstrations against the effects of the war. Soldiers’ desertions, and actions against officers only became truly massive and determining once they became part of the proletarian movement, which shook the bourgeoisie’s power in its economic and political centres. Without the massive political and revolutionary struggle of the working class, there is no real struggle against capitalist war.
The proletariat unable to prevent World War II
The proletariat did not succeed in renewing its revolutionary struggle during World War II, despite the hopes of the revolutionary minorities, and despite the workers’ struggles that marked its end, especially Germany, Italy and Greece. The fundamental reason was that the working class had not yet got over the physical and ideological defeat it suffered during the Social-Democrat and Stalinist counter-revolution of the 20s and 30s.
The defeat of the 1919-23 German revolution, the isolation and degeneration of the Russian revolution have had tragic consequences for the whole workers’ movement. The very form that the counter-revolution took in Russia during the 20’s and 30’s – Stalinism – has been a source of inextricable confusion. The counter-revolution came dressed in the clothes of the revolution.
Despite their exemplary combativity, the Spanish workers’ struggles in 1936 were derailed onto the terrain of anti-fascism and the defence of the bourgeois republic. On the international scale, fascism and anti-fascism (notably the left parties and the Popular Fronts) shared the task of enrolling the workers by terror, or by lies presenting bourgeois democracy as a workers’ conquest, to be defended to the detriment of their own class interests. By the time war broke out, the proletariat was ideologically under control. The bourgeoisie turned the workers into cannon-fodder once again, without them being able to rediscover their class consciousness and their ability to resist and organise. The horrors of war were not enough to open their eyes, and set them anew one the road to revolutionary struggle.
The ruling class had also learnt from experience since the First World War. In 1917-18, the bourgeoisie had been “surprised” by the proletarian revolutionary struggle. This time, it kept constantly in mind, at the beginning, but especially at the end of the war, the immense fear it had felt 25 years before. With absolutely conscious cynicism, Churchill left the Fascist government, supported by the Germans, to suppress the workers’ revolts in Italy during 1943; Stalin stopped the Russian army within sight of Warsaw, allowing the Nazis to massacre the popular uprising in the city; and the Allied forces, after the German bourgeoisie’s capitulation and in cooperation with it, prevented the return of POW’s to Germany in order to avoid any explosion that their mingling with the civilian population might have provoked. The reasons for the systematic extermination of the civilian population by the allied bombardments of the working class districts in Germany (Hamburg, Dresden: twice as many dead as at Hiroshima) were not purely military.
During the war, the bourgeoisie was dealing with proletarian generations whose revolutionary strength had been shattered by the deepest counter-revolution in history. All the same, the ruling class took no risks.
On the whole, the effect of the war on the world proletariat was of another annihilation, which it would take decades to recover from.
The renewal of the class struggle since 1968
Since World War II, the planet has not had a moment’s peace. The main imperialist powers have continued to confront each other militarily, mostly through local conflicts (Korea, the Arab-Israeli wars) but also through the so-called “national liberation struggles” (Indochina, Algeria, Vietnam, etc). The working class has only been able to suffer under these wars, as under the effects of capitalism as a whole.
But with the massive strike of 1968 in France, followed by the struggles in Italy 1969, Poland 1970, and elsewhere, the proletariat returned to the historical stage. It rediscovered massive combat on its own class terrain, and escaped the crushing weight of the counter-revolution. At the very moment that the capitalist crisis provoked by the end of the reconstruction period pushed world capital towards a Third World War, the working class was detaching itself from the dominant ideology, slowly, but enough to make its immediate enrolment in another imperialist massacre impossible.
Today, after 20 years of stalemate where the ruling class has been unable to unleash its “solution” of worldwide apocalypse, but where the proletariat has not had the strength to impose its own revolutionary solution, capitalism has entered a state of decomposition which engenders a new kind of conflict: the Gulf war is its first major concretisation.
For the world working class, and especially for workers in the main industrialised countries, the warning is clear: either the class will be able to develop its fight to a revolutionary conclusion, or the dynamic of decomposing capitalism, from one “local” war to the next, will eventually call humanity’s very survival into question.
First of all, what the working class must reject.
Pacifism means impotence
Before the Gulf war began, as before the First and Second World Wars, capitalism was readying its physical weapons, its warmongering brainwash, and its ideological weapon of capitalism.
“Pacifism” is not defined by the demand for “peace”. Everybody wants peace. The warmongers themselves never stop proclaiming that they only want war in order to prepare for peace. The distinguishing feature of pacifism is its claim that it is possible to fight for peace, as such, without touching the foundations of capitalist power. The proletarians whose revolutionary struggle, in Russia and Germany, put an end to World War I, also wanted peace. But their combat’s success was because they fought not with the “pacifists” but in spite of and against them. As soon as it became clear that only the revolutionary struggle would stop the imperialist slaughter, the workers of Russia and Germany found themselves facing not just the bourgeoisie’s “hawks”, but also and especially the original pacifists: the Mensheviks, the “Socialist Revolutionaries”, the Social Democrats, who defended both ideologically and militarily what was dearest to them: capitalist order.
War does not exist “as such”, outside social relations, in other words relations between classes. In decadent capitalism, war is only a moment in the life of the system, and there can be no struggle against war without a struggle against capitalism. To struggle against war without struggling against capitalism is to be condemned to impotence. The aim of pacifism has always been to make the revolt of the exploited against war harmless for capital.
History gives us edifying examples of this kind of manoeuvre. The efforts that we can see at work today were already being vigorously denounced by revolutionaries 50 years ago: “The necessity for the bourgeoisie is precisely that, with hypocritical talk of peace, the workers be turned away from the revolutionary struggle” wrote Lenin in 1916. The use of pacifism has not changed: “The unity of principle between the social-chauvinists (Plekhanov, Scheidemann) and the social-pacifists (Turati, Kautsky), lies in that both, objectively speaking, are the servants of imperialism: the former serve it by presenting the imperialist war as a ‘defence of the fatherland’, while the others serve the same imperialism by disguising the imperialist peace that is being prepared today with talk about a democratic peace. The imperialist bourgeoisie needs both kinds of lackey, with each kind of nuance: it needs the Plekhanovs to encourage the peoples to massacre each other shouting ‘down with the conquerors’; it needs the Kautskys to console and calm the exasperated masses with hymns and declamations in honour of peace,” (Lenin, January 1917).
What was true during World War I has invariably been confirmed since. Today, yet again, with the Gulf war, the bourgeoisie in all the belligerent powers has organised the pacifist machine. “Responsible” (having taken part in government, in the sabotage of strikes and other forms of the struggle of the exploited classes, or having played the recruiting sergeant in previous conflicts) parties, or fractions of political parties are given the job of taking the lead in the pacifist movements. We must “demand!”, they say; we must “impose!”... a peaceful capitalism. From Ramsey Clark (one-time adviser to Lyndon Johnson) in the US, to the Social-democracy in Germany (the same ones who sent the German proletariat into World War I, and was directly responsible for the murder in 1919 of the revolutionary movement’s most important figures, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg); from the pacifist fractions of the British Labour Party to those of Chevenement and Cheysson in the French PS, via the Stalinist CP’s of France, Italy and Spain (with their inevitable Trotskyist acolytes) whose have long since become master recruiters of canon-fodder: all these fine people have appeared at the head of the great pacifist demonstrations of January 1991 in Washington, London, Paris, Bonn, or Rome. All these patriots (whether they defend big countries or little ones – Iraq for example – changes nothing) obviously believe in peace as little to day as they did yesterday. They are simply playing the part of pacifism: channelling the discontent and the revolt provoked by the war into an impotent dead-end.
After all the “petitions”, the “demonstrations” in the company of all the ruling class’ “concerned people”, the “progressive” priests, the show-biz starts and such like “lovers of (...capitalist) peace”, what can there be left in the minds of those who thought that this would be a means of opposing the war, if not a feeling of sterility and impotence? Pacifism has never prevented capitalism wars. It has always prepared and accompanied them.
Pacifism always has a “radical” fellow-traveller: anti-militarism. In general, this is characterised by a more or less complete rejection of “peaceful” pacifism. It calls for more radical methods to combat war, directly attacking military force: individual desertion and the “execution of officers” are its most typical slogans. On the eve of World War I, its best known exponent was Gustave Herve, and he encountered a certain echo in the face of reformist social-democracy’s flabby pacifism. In Toulon, France, one poor soldier was so far taken in by this “radical” language that he even tried to shoot his colonel. Needless to say, this got nobody anywhere... with the exception of Herve who ended the war as an abject patriot and supporter of Clemenceau.
It is obvious that the revolution will also be expressed in desertions from the army, and the struggle against the officers. But in this case, as in the German and Russian Revolutions, these will be mass actions by soldiers, and a part of the mass proletarian struggle. It is absurd to think that there can be an individualist solution to so eminently social a problem as capitalist war. At best, this is an expression of the suicidal despair of the petty bourgeois incapable of understanding the revolutionary role of the working class, and at worst it is a dead-end consciously used by the police to reinforce a feeling of impotence in the face of militarism and war. The dissolution cannot be achieved by individual actions of nihilist revolt; it can only be the result of the conscious, massive, and collective revolutionary action of the proletariat.
The struggle against war can only be the struggle against capital. But the conditions of this struggle today are radically different from what they were during the revolutionary movements of the past. In the past, proletarian revolutions have all been more or less directly linked to wars: the Paris Commune sprang from the conditions created by the 1870 Franco-Prussian war; the 1905 revolution in Russia was a response to the Russo-Japanese war; the wave of 1917-23, to World War I. Some revolutionaries have deduced that capitalist war is a precondition, or at least a highly favourable condition, for the communist revolution. This was only partly true in the past. War creates conditions that do indeed push the proletariat to act in a revolutionary manner. However, firstly, this only happens in the defeated countries. The proletariat in the victorious countries generally remains much more strongly subjected, ideologically, to the ruling class; this counters the worldwide extension of revolutionary power, which is vital to its survival. Secondly, when the struggle succeeds in forcing the bourgeoisie to make peace, it thereby deprives itself of the extraordinary conditions that gave birth to it [2] [16]. In Germany, for example, the revolutionary movement after the armistice suffered badly from the tendency of many soldiers returning from the front to forget everything but the desire to enjoy the peace they had so dearly won. Moreover, as we have seen above, by the time of the Second World War the bourgeoisie had drawn the lessons of the first and acted to prevent any revolutionary social explosions.
Above all, however, and quite apart from all these considerations, if the present historical course is ever overturned and a war breaks out involving the masses of the proletariat in the imperialist metropoles, then it will set in motion such terrible means of destruction that there will be no, or virtually no, possibility of fraternisation or revolutionary action.
If there is one lesson that workers must retain from their past experience, then it is this: to struggle against war today, they must act before a world war; during it will be too late.
An analysis of today’s historic conditions allows us to state that the conditions for a new international revolutionary situation could arise without capitalism having been able to enrol the proletariat of the central countries in a generalised butchery.
The processes leading to a revolutionary proletarian response are neither rapid nor easy. Those who today lament the lack of an immediate response to the Gulf war by the proletariat in the industrialised countries, forget that the revolutionary response to war in 1917 only came after three years of dreadful suffering. Nobody can say when and how the world working class will raise its combat to the level of its historic tasks. What we do know is that it will come up against enormous difficulties, not the least being the debilitating effects of the general atmosphere of decomposition engendered by capitalism’s advanced state of decadence accompanied by the widespread spirit of “every man for himself”, and the nauseating stink of putrefying Stalinism. But we also know that, contrary to the period of the economic crisis in the 1930’s and of World War II, the proletariat in the central countries is neither physically crushed nor has its consciousness been destroyed.
The very fact that the proletariat in the great powers could not be enrolled in the Gulf war (forcing the governments to use professionals); the multitude of precautions taken by governments to justify the war, are so many signs of this balance of forces.
As for the effects of this war on consciousness in the class, in the short term they have provoked a relative paralysis, accompanied however by an anxious and deep-seated reflection on what is historically at stake.
At this level, the Gulf war is distinct from the World Wars of the past in one particularly important aspect: the World Wars were special in that they hid from the proletariat the economic crises that they sprang from. During the war, the unemployed disappeared into the army, the factories which had shut down restarted to produce the weapons goods necessary for total war: the economic crisis seemed to have disappeared. The situation is quite different today. Just as the bourgeoisie unleashed its hellfire over the Middle East, its economy, at the heart of its industrialised zones, plunged into an unprecedented recession... with no hope of a new Marshall Plan. At the same time, we have witnessed a war that clearly announced the apocalyptic perspective of capitalism, and the deepening of the economic crisis. The first has given the proletariat the measure of what is at stake historically, the second is creating the conditions that will force it, in responding to the attacks on its living conditions, to affirm itself as a class and recognise itself as such.
For today’s generations of workers, the present situation is a new historical challenge. They will be able to rise to it, if they are able to profit from the last twenty years of economic struggles which have taught them the worth of capitalism’s promises, and what this system’s future holds in store; if they are able to take to its conclusion the mistrust and hatred that they have developed for the so-called workers’ organisations (unions and left parties), which have systematically sabotaged all their important struggles; and if they are capable of fully understanding that their own struggle is only the continuation of two centuries of combat by our epoch’s revolutionary class.
To do so, the proletariat has no choice but to develop its struggle against capital, on its own class terrain, a thousand miles from the inter-classiest terrain of pacifism and other nationalist snares.
This terrain can be defined in the most clear-cut way as a viewpoint on each moment of the struggle: the intransigent defence of workers’ interests against those of capital. It is not the trade union terrain, which divides workers by national, region, or industrial branch. It is not the terrain of the unions and left-wing parties, which pretend that “the defence of workers’ interests is the best defence of the nation”, to conclude that workers’ struggles should take account of the nation’s interests, and so of the national capital. The class terrain is defined by the irreconcilable opposition between the interests of the exploited class and those of the moribund capitalist system.
The class terrain has class, not national frontiers. By itself, it negates the foundations of capitalist war. It is the fertile ground where the dynamic develops which will lead the proletariat to assume, from the defence of its “immediate” interests, the defence of its historic interests: the world communist revolution.
Capitalist war is no more inevitable than the aberrations of decomposing capitalism. The capitalist mode of production is no more eternal than were the ancient slave-holding societies, or feudalism. Only the struggle to overthrow this society, and to build a truly communist society without exploitation or nations, can rid humanity of the threat of destruction in the holocaust of capitalist war.
The only struggle against war is the struggle against capitalism. The class war is the only “war” worth waging.
RV
[1] [17] Workers like Gatto Mammone who thought, before 1914, that the question of war was an “ideological” one, forgot (like those who only a short while ago let themselves be lulled by the hymns to “the end of the Cold War” and the united Europe of 1992) that the development of economic interdependence, far from resolving imperialist antagonisms, only serves to exacerbate them. They forgot one of marxism’s fundamental discoveries: the insoluble contradiction between the more and more international nature of capitalist production, on the one hand, and the private, national nature of the appropriation of this production by the capitalists on the other. Under the pressure of competition, the search both for raw materials and for outlets for its production leads each national capital to develop, irreversibly, the international division of labour. There is thus a constant international development of economic interdependence amongst all the national capitals. This tendency, which has existed since the dawn of capitalism, was reinforced by the world’s organisation into two blocs following World War II, and by the development of so-called “multinational” companies. But capitalism is nonetheless incapable of abandoning the basis of its very existence: private property and its organisation into nation states. Moreover, the decadence of capitalism has been accompanied by a strengthening of the tendency towards state capitalism, in other words each national capital’s dependence on its state apparatus overseeing the whole of social life. This essential contradiction between internationally organised production, and continued national appropriation is one of the objective bases for the necessity and possibility of a communist society without nations or private property. But for capitalism, it is an insoluble dilemma which can lead only to chaos and the barbarity of war.
[2] [18] “The war has incontestably played an enormous role in the development of our revolution; it materially disorganised absolutism; it dislocated the army; it breathed daring into the hesitating mass. But it did not create the revolution, and this is fortunate because a revolution born of war is impotent: it is the product of extraordinary circumstances, depends on an external force, and in the end proves incapable of defending the positions it has won” (Trotsky, in Our Revolution, writing about the role of the Russo-Japanese war in the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution in Russia.)
Only the international working class can create a real new world order
As we go to press, the Gulf war has been officially ended. It finished very quickly, much quicker than the military commands had led people to believe, perhaps quicker than they themselves had thought. The editorial article that follows was written at the beginning of the ground offensive by the US-led coalition against Iraq. It is thus dated. However, its denunciation of the butchery of this war is still very relevant. The introduction demonstrates how much the political positions and analyses it puts forward have been confirmed from the very first days of the 'post war' phase.
Introduction
The Gulf War ends: the USA, World Policeman
The end of the war has clearly confirmed the real objectives of the American bourgeoisie: demonstrating its enormous military superiority, not only vis-a-vis peripheral countries like Iraq who are being pushed into military adventures by the severity of the economic crisis, but also and above all the other world powers, and particularly those who used to make up the western bloc: Japan and the great European powers.
The disappearance of the eastern bloc, by eliminating these powers' need for the American military 'umbrella', has resulted in the disappearance of the western bloc itself and given rise to the tendency towards the formation of a new imperialist bloc. The complete effacement, during the course of the war, of the only two serious candidates for the 'leadership' of a new bloc, Germany and Japan, the demonstration of their complete military impotence, is America's warning for the future: whatever the economic dynamism of these countries (in reality, their capacity to stand up to the crisis more effectively than their rivals), the USA is not prepared to let anyone muscle in on its patch. Similarly, all of France's little attempts to 'affirm its differences' (see the editorial of International Review 64) up until 17 January went up in smoke the minute the USA succeeded in imposing its 'solution' to the crisis: the military crushing of Iraq. Today France is reduced to wagging its tail like a poodle when Schwarzkopf congratulates the French troops for doing an "absolutely superb job", and when Bush receives Mitterrand with all the right civilities. As for the European Community, which some people have seen as future great rival of the USA, it has been completely non-existent throughout the war. In short, if it necessary to identify the real objectives of the making this war inevitable and in waging it to e results are there to make everything crystal clear.
A Pyrrhic Victory
Similarly, with the end of the fighting, we have seen the rapid confirmation of the perspective we put forward from the beginning (see IR 63): war would not be followed by peace, but by chaos and more war. Chaos and war in Iraq, as illustrated tragically by the confrontations and massacres in the cities of the south and in Kurdistan. Chaos, war and disorder throughout the region: Lebanon, Israel, and the occupied territories. In short, the glorious victory of the 'allies', the 'new world order' that they claim to be setting up, are giving their first fruits: disorder, misery and massacres for the populations; wars here, there and everywhere. The new world order? Already the Middle East is more unstable now than it ever was before!
And this instability won't be limited to the Middle East. The end of the war against Iraq is not opening up the prospect of a diminution of tensions between the big imperialist powers. On the contrary. Thus, the different European bourgeoisies are already preoccupied with the need to adapt, modernize and strengthen their weaponry - and that's not with a 'new era of peace' in mind. We are also seeing countries like Japan, Germany and even Italy demanding a reevaluation of their international status by calling for a permanent place on the UN Security Council. Thus, while the USA has succeeded through this war in proving its vast military superiority, while it has for the moment slowed down the tendency towards every man for himself, this is really a Pyrrhic victory. The exacerbation of imperialist tensions and the spread of chaos all over the planet are inevitable, as is the aggravation of the economic crisis which is at the origin of all this. And there will have to be more 'punitive actions' like the one inflicted on Iraq, other monstrous massacres to serve as an 'example' and to bolster 'law and order'.
The 'New World Order': Poverty, famine, barbarism, war
Just over a year ago, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bourgeoisie, its governments and its media, triumphantly claimed that 'liberal' capitalism had won, that an era of peace and prosperity was opening up with the disappearance of the eastern bloc and the opening up of these countries' markets. These lies have been shattered: instead of markets in the east, we have had economies ravaged by chaos. Instead of peace, we have had the most gigantic military intervention since the Second World War. Today, just as triumphantly, the leading sectors of the world bourgeoisie tell us that with the defeat of Iraq, the dawn of the new world order has definitely arrived: peace will be achieved, international stability ensured. These lies are also going to be shattered.
The rapid end of the war, the low number of deaths on the 'allied' side, have allowed the bourgeoisie to disorient the working class of the capitalist metropoles, the fraction of the proletariat which is key to the final outcome of the worldwide, historic battle between the classes. Even though many workers feel deeply wounded by the extermination of tens or hundreds of thousands of the exploited and the oppressed of Iraq, they also feel powerless in the face of the campaign of triumphant chauvinism which, thanks to the lies of the media, has temporarily deafened people's minds. But the future of poverty, famine, chaos, and ever more monstrous imperialist massacres, which is all the ruling class can offer, will open the eyes of the working masses and allow their struggles to be more and more impregnated with an awareness of the need to do away with this system. Revolutionaries must play an active part in this development of consciousness.
RF 11.3.91
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/gulf-war
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1998/history-gcf
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/german-and-dutch-left
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/french-communist-left
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/international-communist-current
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/marc-chirik
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/international-situation
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/2042/party-and-fraction-marxist-tradition
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/battaglia-comunista
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/lenin
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/065_prole_and_war.html#_ftn1
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/065_prole_and_war.html#_ftn2
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/065_prole_and_war.html#_ftnref1
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/065_prole_and_war.html#_ftnref2
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/328/war
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/zimmerwald-movement
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/war
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis