Marx said that the truth of a theory is demonstrated in practice. For the proletariat, 70 years of bitter experience have clearly resolved the debate on the national question in favour of the position developed by Rosa Luxemburg and then by the groups of the Communist Left, especially Bilan, Internationalisme and our Current. In the first part of this article we saw how support for "national liberation of the people" played a crucial role in the defeat of the first international proletarian revolutionary wave between 1917 and 1923 (see International Review no 66 [3]). In this second part we will see that the "national liberation" struggles have been an instrument of the imperialist wars and confrontations that have wracked the planet for the last 70 years.
The First World War marked the end of the ascendant period of capitalism and its plunge into the cesspit of the struggle between nation states for the division of the saturated world market. In this context the formation of new national states and the national liberation struggles were no longer an instrument for the expansion of capitalist relations and the development of the productive forces. Instead, they were converted into a cog in the generalised imperialist tensions between the different capitalist bandits. Already before the First World War, with the Balkan wars which gave Serbia, Montenegro, Albania etc their independence, Rosa Luxemburg had argued that these new nations were as imperialist as the old powers and were clearly insinuated into the bloody spiral towards generalised war:
"... Serbia is formally engaged in a national war of defence. But its monarchy and its ruling classes are filled with expansionist desires as are the ruling classes in all the modern states... Thus Serbia is today reaching out towards the Adriatic coast where it is fighting out a real imperialistic conflict with Italy on the backs of the Albanians... But above all this we must not forget: behind Serbian nationalism stands Russian imperialism" (The Junius Pamphlet, Chapter VII).
The world which emerged from the First World War was marked by the development of the revolutionary proletariat and this implied two counter posed historical perspectives: the extension of the world revolution or the survival of a decadent capitalism trapped in a spiral of crisis and wars. The crushing of the international proletariat's revolutionary wave signalled the frenzied sharpening of the tensions between the victorious bloc (Great Britain and France) and its powerful neighbour (Germany), aggravated by the expansion of the United States that threatened them all.
In this historical/world context 'national liberation' can not be seen from the point of view of the situation of just one country: "From the point of view of Marxism, in discussing imperialism it is absurd to restrict oneself to conditions in one country alone, since all capitalist countries are closely bound together. Now, in time of war, this bond has grown immeasurably stronger. All humanity is thrown into a tangled bloody heap from which no nation can extricate itself on its own. Though there are more or less advanced countries, this war has bound them all together by so many threads that escape from this tangle for any single country acting on its own is inconceivable," (Lenin, 'Intervention on the Report on the Present Situation, at the 7th (April) Conference of the RSDLP(B), Collected Works, Vol. 2, page 73).
Using this method we can understand how 'national liberation' has been turned into the saviour of the imperialist policy of all states: the direct victors of the First World War, Great Britain and France, used it to justify their dismemberment of the defeated empires (the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman and Czarist) and to build a cordon sanitaire around the October Revolution. The United States elevated it to a universal doctrine, the 'principal' of the Society of Nations, in order, on the one hand, to combat the Russian Revolution, and on the other, to undermine the colonial empires of Great Britain and France which constituted the main obstacle to their own imperialist expansion. From the early 1920s, faced with the Treaty of Versailles, Germany used its 'national liberation' as the banner for the recovery of its imperialist potential. The 'just' and 'progressive' principle of the 'national liberation of Germany’, which was defended in 1923 by the KPD and the Communist International after the Second Congress, was transformed by the Nazi Party into the 'Germany's right to living space'. For its part, Mussolini's Italy considered itself a 'proletarian nation' (a concept taken up later by the 'Marxist-Leninist' Mao-Tse-Tung) and demanded its 'natural rights' in Africa, the Balkans, etc.
During the first years of the 1920's the victorious powers tried to implement a 'new world order' to serve their own interests. Its principle tool was the Treaty of Versailles (1919) officially based on 'democratic peace' and the 'right of self-determination', which granted independence to all the countries in Eastern and Central Europe: Finland, the Baltic countries, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland...
The independence of these countries served two objectives of British and French imperialism: on the one side, as we analysed in the 1st part of this series, to confront the Russian Revolution and, on the other, to create around defeated German imperialism a chain of hostile nations that would block its expansion into a zone which, for strategic, economic and historical reasons, constituted its natural area of influence.
The most devious machiavellianism could not have conceived of more unstable states, racked from the beginning by violent internal and external conflicts, obliged to submit to the tutelage of the great powers and to serve in their war games. Czechoslovakia contained two historical rivals, Czechs and Slovaks, and an important German minority in the Sudetenland; the Baltic states encompassed important Polish, Russian and German minorities; Romania housed Hungarians, Bulgaria had Turks; Poland the Germans... But the culmination of this work, without doubt, was Yugoslavia (today again rocked by a terrible bloodbath). This 'new' nation contained 6 nationalities with the most absurdly different levels of economic development one could imagine (from the economically developed Slovenia and Croatia to the semi-feudal Montenegro), whose areas of economic integration lay on the borders of neighbouring countries (Slovenia was complementary with Austria; Voivodina - part of Serbia - is a natural extension of the Hungarian plain; Macedonia is separated from the rest by mountains which connect it with Bulgaria and Greece), and it also contained Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims who are longstanding religious rivals! Even worse, each of these 'nationalities' contains minorities of a neighbouring nationality and more ludicrous still, of neighbouring states - Serbia has Albanians and Hungarians; Croatia is home to Italians and Serbs; Bosnia-Herzegovina has Serbs, Muslims and Croats.
"The recently created small bourgeois states are merely the by-products of imperialism. A whole series of little nations have been created to give temporary support to imperialism - Austria, Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia, Bohemia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia, etc. Whether openly oppressed or officially protected, in reality they remain vassals. By dominating them by means of the banks, the railways, the monopoly of coal, imperialism condemns them to suffer from intolerable economic and national difficulties, interminable quarrels and bloody conflicts" (Second Congress of the Communist International: 'The Capitalist World and the Communist International, Part 1, International Relations since Versailles’).
From the start, these new nations behaved in a clearly imperialist way, as the CI pointed out: "These artificially created small states, divided, exhausted from the economic point of view, within the limits to which they have been prescribed, struggle amongst themselves in order to gain ports, provinces, small cities, anything. They look for protection from the stronger powers, whose antagonisms grow daily" (ibid). Poland manifested its ambitions over the Ukraine provoking the war against the proletarian bastion in 1920. It also exerted pressure on Lithuania by appealing to the Polish minority in that country. In order to counter-act Germany, it allied itself with France faithfully serving its imperialist designs.
'Liberated' Poland fell under the iron dictatorship of Pilsudski. This tendency to annul the formalities of 'parliamentary democracy' which also took place in other countries (with the exception of Finland and Czechoslovakia) give the lie to the illusion - upon which the degenerating CI fed - that ‘national liberation' would lead to 'more open democracy'. On the contrary, in the milieu of world imperialism, the newly 'liberated' states' own imperialist tendencies, the chronic economic crisis and their congenital instability lead them to express in an extreme and caricatured way - through military dictatorship - the general tendency of decadent capitalism towards state capitalism.
The 1930's saw imperialist tensions reach fever pitch, demonstrating that the Treaty of Versailles was not an instrument for 'democratic peace' but the kindling for new and more terrible imperialist fires. A rebuilt German imperialism undertook the struggle against the 'order of Versailles', aimed at the re-conquest of Central and Eastern Europe. Its main ideological weapon was 'national liberation': it invoked 'the rights of national minorities' in order to work with the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia; it fostered Croatian 'national liberation' in order to counter Serbian hostility and to gain a foothold in the Mediterranean; in Austria its argument was 'union with Germany', while it offered the Baltic states protection against Russia...
The 'order of Versailles' collapsed. The claim that the new states could be a guarantee of 'peace and stability' - which the Kautskyists and Social Democrats had used to support the 'peace of Versailles' - was totally destroyed. Increasingly sucked towards the imperialist whirlwind, these states had no other option than to plunge right into it, thus contributing to its amplification and aggravation.
Along with Eastern and Central Europe, China was another hot spot of international imperialist tensions. In 1911 the Chinese bourgeoisie attempted a late and weak democratic revolution, which rapidly became a fiasco. The collapse of the imperial state lead to the general disintegration of the country into a thousand gangster territories dominated by warlords fighting amongst themselves, while at the same being manipulated by Great Britain, Japan, the USA and Russia in a bloody battle for the strategic domination of the Chinese subcontinent.
For Japanese imperialism, China was crucial for its domination of the Far East. With this aim it 'disinterestedly' supported the cause of independence for Manchuria, one of the most industrialised areas of China and the nerve centre for controlling Siberia, Mongolia and all of central China. Between 1924-28 they used the services of Chang-Tso-Ling, an old gangster who they converted into a Major-General and then into the Viceroy of Manchuria. In 1931 the Japanese bourgeoisie dispensed with him (by assassination), and used this as a pretext for their invasion and occupation of the whole of Manchuria, which they then converted into a sovereign state and elevated to an 'empire' placing Pou-Yi, the last decadent remnant of the Manchu dynasty, at its head.
This Japanese expansion clashed with Stalinist Russia that had a natural field of expansion in China. To satisfy the interests of Russian imperialism, Stalin openly betrayed the Chinese proletariat. This demonstrated unequivocally the irreconcilable antagonism between 'national liberation' and the proletarian revolution and, vice versa, the complete solidarity between 'national liberation' and imperialism. "In China where a proletarian revolutionary struggle developed, the Russian Stalinists looked for an alliance with the Kuomintang of Chiang-Kai-Chek, ordering the young Communist Party of China to renounce its organisational autonomy, forcing it to adhere to the Kuomintang, and inventing for the occasion the 'front of 4 classes'... However, the desperate economic situation pushed millions of workers, lead by the workers of Shanghai, to insurrection; they took over the city against both the imperialists and the Kuomintang. The insurrectionary workers, organised by the rank and file of the Chinese CP, decided to confront Chaing-Kai-Chek's liberation army, which was supported by Stalin. The latter then ordered the cadres of the International to carry out the disgraceful task of placing the workers, once again, under the orders of Chaing-Kai-Chek. This was to have terrible consequences" (Internacionalismo no 1: 'Democratic Peace, Armed Struggle and Marxism', 1964).
This crossfire of imperialist interests, fired also by British and Yankee imperialism also fanned, provoked a war that inflicted 30 years of death and destruction on the workers and peasants of China.
Italian imperialism's invasion of Ethiopia, along with its occupation of Libya and Somalia, not only threatened British imperialism's position in Egypt but also its imperialist domination of the Mediterranean and Africa, and its communications with India.
The Ethiopian war, along with the Spanish Civil War [1] [4], thus marked a decisive step in the build-up to World War II. An important aspect of this massacre was the enormous propaganda effort and ideological mobilisation of the population, which was carried out by both sets of bandits and especially by the 'democracies' (France and Great Britain). Their interest in the 'independence' of Ethiopia was wrapped in the banner of 'national liberation', while Italian imperialism invoked its 'humanitarian' and 'liberating' mission in order to justify its invasion: the Negus had not fulfilled his promise to abolish slavery.
The Ethiopian war revealed 'national liberation' as the ideological recruiting sergeant for imperialist war, as a preparation for the orgy of nationalism and chauvinism which both imperialist gangs were to unleash, a means of mobilisation for the terrible slaughter of World War II. It was a trick that Rosa Luxemburg had already denounced: "Today the nation is but a cloak that covers imperialist desires, a battle cry for imperialist rivalries, the last ideological measure with which the masses can be persuaded to play the role of cannon fodder in imperialist wars" (The Junius Pamphlet Chapter VII).
The Allied imperialists' victory in World War II marked a qualitative aggravation of decadent capitalism's tendencies towards militarism and the permanent war economy. The victorious bloc divided into two rival imperialist blocs - headed by the United States and the USSR - which rigidly controlled their spheres of influence through a network of military alliances - NATO and the Warsaw Pact - and ensured submission through a forest of organisations for 'economic cooperation', monetary regulation etc. All of which was backed up by the development of mind-boggling nuclear arsenals, which by the beginning of the 1960s could destroy the whole world.
In such conditions it is a macabre joke of talk of 'national liberation'. "Concretely, national liberation is impossible and unrealisable in the present framework of capitalism. The great blocs command the whole of capitalist life and no country escapes from one imperialist bloc without falling under the domination of the other... Of course, the national liberation movements are not merely pawns that Truman or Stalin move about as they please. Nonetheless, the end result is the same. If Ho-Chi-Minh, an expression of Vietnam's wretchedness, wants to consolidate his own wretched power, then while his own men fight with the bitterness born of desperation, he will be at the mercy of imperialist competition and will have to resign himself to joining with one or the other (...)" (Internationalisme no 21, page 25, May 1947, 'The Right of Peoples to Self-Determination').
In this historical period regional wars, systematically presented as "national liberation movements" were nothing but different episodes in the bloody confrontations between the two blocs.
The wave of 'independence for nations' in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, which swept the world between 1945-60 was in fact part of the larger struggle by American imperialism to dislodge the old colonial imperialisms from their positions, especially its most direct rival given the economic riches and strategic position of its colonies and naval power: British imperialism.
At the same time, the old colonial empires had turned into fetters for their metropoles: the saturation of the market and the development of world-wide competition, along with the increasing cost of colonial armies and administration, had transformed these fountains of profit into millstones around their necks.
Certainly, the local bourgeoisies wanted to wrest power from their former masters. They tended to organise in guerrilla movements or in parties of 'civil disobedience' - demanding of course the submission of the local proletariat to the struggle for 'national liberation' - and thus played an active role in the decolonisation process. However, this role was essentially secondary and always subordinated to the designs of the American or Russian bloc. The latter made good use of these conflicts of 'decolonisation' in order to conquer strategic positions outside its Euro-Asisatic zone of influence.
The decolonisation of the British empire clearly illustrates this process: "The British withdrawals from India and Palestine were the most spectacular moments in the break-up of the Empire, and the Suez Fiasco in 1956 marked the end of any illusions that Britain was still a 'first class power'” ('The Evolution of the British Situation Since the Second World War,' International Review 17).
The newly 'decolonised' countries were born in an even worse state than the 1919 Versailles vintage. Their frontiers were artificially drawn with set rule and square; ethnic, tribal, and religious divisions abounded; economies were dependent on just one crop or mineral; the bourgeoisie was weak or nonexistent; technical and administrative elites were ill-prepared and dependent on the old colonial powers...
India is an example of this catastrophic situation: in 1947 the newly born state suffered an apocalyptical war between Muslims and Hindus, which resulted in the secession of Pakistan, with the vast majority of the Muslim population. Ever since, these two states have been involved in devastating wars and today the imperialist tensions between them are a major source of world instability. Both states - whose populations suffer some of the worst living conditions in the world - maintain, regardless of cost, nuclear installations that allow them to produce atomic bombs. In this context of permanent imperialist confrontation, India in 1971 supported the war of 'national liberation' by the eastern 'part' of Pakistan - Bangladesh. This region itself was another absurd creation of imperialism, since it was more than 2000 kilometres from West Pakistan! However the war, which cost hundreds of thousands of lives, lead to the creation of an 'independent' state which has in its turn known nothing but coups, massacres, dictatorships, while the population has died from hunger or through devastating floods.
For 50 years, the Middle East has been a focus of imperialist tensions due to its enormous oil reserves and its vital strategic position. In the hands of the moribund Ottoman Empire before the 1914 war it was prey to the expansionist ambitions of Germany, Russia, France, Great Britain. After the World War, British imperialism took the largest part of the cake and left only crumbs for the French (Syria and Lebanon).
If in this period the local bourgeoisies began to push towards independence, it was the manoeuvres of British imperialism that determined the configuration of the region. Far from calming already existing rivalries these machinations lead to their explosion on a much vaster scale: "British imperialism, as we know, drew the Arab landowners and bourgeoisie onto its side during the World War by promising then an Arab national state. The Arab revolt was indeed a decisive element in the downfall of the Turkish-German front in the Near East" (Bilan 32, 'The Arab-Jewish Conflict in Palestine', June/July 1936). As a 'reward' Great Britain created a series of 'sovereign' states in Iraq, Trans-Jordan, Arabia, Yemen... confronting each other, with economically incoherent territories, undermined by ethnic and religious divisions: a well-known and typical manipulation by British imperialism which kept them all divided and constantly at loggerheads to subject the whole region to its designs. However it did not stop there: "As a counter-weight it solicited the support of the Jewish Zionists, telling them that Palestine would be given over to them both for administration and colonisation" (ibid).
If in the Middle Ages the Jews were expelled from many countries, during the 19th century they were in the process of integration, as much at the 'upper' levels of society - in the bourgeoisie - as at the 'lower' levels - the proletariat - into the nations in which they lived. This reveals the dynamic of integration and overcoming of racial and religious differences that took place in the capitalist nations during their period of progress. It was only at the end of the century, that is to say with the growing exhaustion of capitalism's dynamic of expansion, that sectors of the Jewish bourgeoisie launched the ideology of Zionism (the creation of a state in the 'promised land'). Its creation in 1948 not only constituted a manoeuvre by American imperialism to dislodge Britain from this zone and to stop Russia's meddling tendencies there, it also revealed - in connection with that imperialist objective - the reactionary character of the formation of new nations: it was not a manifestation of a dynamic of integration of populations as in the last century but of the separation and isolation of an ethnic group in order to use them as a lever to exclude another group - the Arabs.
The Israeli state from the beginning has been an immense barracks for permanent war which uses the colonisation of the desert lands as a military tool: the colonists are under military command, and receive military training; the state of Israel is a ruinous economic enterprise supported by enormous credits from the USA and based on a draconian exploitation of the workers, the Jews as much as the Palestinians [2] [5].
American support for Israel led the most unstable Arab states with major internal and external contradictions to ally themselves with Russian imperialism. Their ideological banner from the beginning was the 'Arab cause' and the 'national liberation of the Palestinian people’, which was converted into a favourite theme for the propaganda of the Russian bloc.
As in many other cases the Palestinians themselves were of the least importance. They were housed in wretched refugee camps in Egypt, Syria etc and were used as cheap labour in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, just as they were in Israel. The PLO was created in 1963 as a 'national liberation' movement; from its beginnings it has been a bunch of gangsters who have exacted a tribute from the miserable wages of the Palestinian workers in Israel, Lebanon and elsewhere. The PLO is a mere labour broker that controls the Palestinian work force and extorts up to half its pay. Its methods of discipline in the refugee camps and in the Palestinian communities are no better than those of the Israeli army and police.
Finally we must remember that the worst massacres of the Palestinians have been perpetrated by their 'brother' Arab governments: in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and, above all, in Jordan, where their 'friend' Hussein in September 1970 brutally bombed the Palestinian camps causing thousands of deaths.
It is important to underline in this respect the systematic utilisation by imperialism, as much by the great powers as the small ones, of the religious and ethnic divisions which are especially important in the most underdeveloped regions of the world: "That the Jewish and Palestinian populations are pawns in the international imperialist intrigues, is beyond doubt. That in order to carry out this work, these manipulators stir up and exploit the anachronistic and backward national prejudices and sentiments, which are so strong in the masses due to the persecutions to which they have been subjected, is no surprise to us. As can be seen in one of these local flare ups: the war in Palestine, where in an increasingly bloody frenzy, Jews and Arabs have slaughtered each other" ('On Particular Cases', Internationalisme 35, June 1948, page 18). Imperialism has played the sorcerer's apprentice with these conflicts: stimulating them, radicalising them and making them insoluble, because essentially the historical crisis of the system offers no terrain for absorbing them and in extreme cases they have finished up aggravating and making even worse the chaos and contradictions of the imperialist tensions, because they have taken on a 'life of their own'.
The wars in the Middle East have not had as their aim either 'Palestinian rights' or the 'national liberation' of the Arab people. The 1948 war served to dislodge British imperialism from the region. That of 1956 marked the reinforcement of American control. While those of 1967, 1973 and 1982 represented the American imperialism's counter-offensive against the growing penetration of Russian imperialism, which had made more or less stable alliances with Syria, Egypt and Iraq.
In all of this, the Arab states came off the worst, while the Jewish state was militarily strengthened. However the real victor was the United States.
At stake in this open war between the Russian and American imperialist blocs was America's ability to halt Russian expansion in the Far East. In the event, the American camp was successful.
The Russian gang presented its enterprise as a 'national liberation movement': "The Stalinist propaganda has especially insisted that its 'democrats' are supposed to be struggling for national emancipation and within the framework of the right of peoples to self-determination. Their arguments are lent indisputable weight by the extraordinary corruption which reigns inside the ruling clique in South Korea, its 'Japanese' methods of policing, its feudal inability to resolve the agrarian question. They even go so far as to present Kim Il Sung as the 'new Garibaldi'” (Internationalisme no 45, page 23: 'The Korean War').
Another element that marks the Korean War is the formation, as a direct result of inter-imperialist confrontation, of two national states on the same national territory: North and South Korea. This was also the case with East and West Germany, North and South Vietnam. From the point of view of the historical development of capitalism, this is a complete aberration that highlights the bloody and ruinous farce that is 'national liberation'. The existence of these states was directly linked not to a real 'nation' but to a real imperialist struggle between the blocs. These 'nations' were sustained as such, in a majority of cases, by means of brutal repression while their self-defeating and artificial character has been made clear by the spectacular collapse - within the general framework of the historic collapse of Stalinism - of the East German state.
The 'national liberation' struggle in Vietnam, which began in the 1920's, always fell into the orbit of one imperialist gang or the other. During World War 2 the Americans and British armed Ho-Chi-Minh and his Vietcong because he fought Japanese imperialism. After the Second World War, the Americans and British supported France - a Colonial power in Indo-China - given the pro-Russian inclination of the Vietnamese leaders. However, in 1946 both sides came to a 'compromise': confronted with a series of workers revolts which exploded in Hanoi, and in order to smash them, "The Vietnamese bourgeoisie still needs French troops to keep its affairs in order" (Internationalisme 13, 'The National and Colonial Question', September 1946).
However, from 1952-53, after its defeat in the Korean War, Russian imperialism turned towards Vietnam and for 20 years, the Vietcong confronted first the French and then the United States in a savage war where both sides committed the most appalling atrocities. The result was a devastated country which today, 16 years after its 'liberation', has not only been unable to rebuild but is increasingly sinking into catastrophe. The degeneracy and absurdity of this war is made clear when we see that Vietnam was made 'free' and 'united' because the United States had gained for its imperialist bloc the enormous prize constituted by Stalinist China and consequently, the Vietnamese pigmy became secondary in its plans.
It is important to underline the practice of the 'new anti-imperialist Vietnam', including before 1975, as a potential regional imperialist power in the whole of Indo-China: it submitted Laos and Cambodia to its influence. In Cambodia, under the pretext of 'liberating' the country from the barbarity of the Khmer-Rouge - which through its link to Peking was already tied to the American bloc - it invaded the country and installed a regime based on the occupying army.
The Vietnam War, especially in the 1960s, stirred up a formidable campaign by the Stalinists, Trotskyists, along with the old campaigners of the 'liberal' fractions of the bourgeoisie. This campaign presented this barbarity as the spear-head which would awaken the proletariat of the industrialised countries. In this grotesque way the Trotskyists tried to resuscitate the errors of the CI on the national and colonial question about the "unity between the workers' struggles in the metropolis and the struggle for national emancipation in the Third World" (for a critique of this idea see the first part of this series).
One of the arguments used to support this mystification was that the growing number of demonstrations against the Vietnam War in the US and Europe were a factor in the historical awakening of the workers’ struggle from 1968. In reality the defence of 'national liberation' struggles, along with the defence of the 'socialist countries', which was so fashionable in the student milieu, played on the contrary a role of mystification and thus constituted a barrier of the first order against the recovery of the proletarian struggle.
During the 1960's, Cuba was a major link in all the 'anti-imperialist' propaganda. A poster of the "heroic guerrilla" Che Guevara was an obligatory decoration for the room of any politically-minded student. Today, Cuba's disastrous economic situation (mass emigration, shortages of everything, even bread) perfectly illustrate the complete impossibility of any kind of 'national liberation'. At first, the bearded gangsters of the Sierra Maestra had no particular sympathy for Russia. Their desire to conduct a policy that would be ‘autonomous’ with regard to the United States inevitably pushed them into the arms of Russia capital.
In reality Fidel Castro headed a nationalist fraction that adopted ‘scientific socialism’, liquidating many of is former 'comrades' - who finished up in the Miami gang, i.e., the American bloc - because his only way of surviving was in the Russian bloc. This 'help' was amply paid for, amongst other things, by making the Cuban army the imperialist sergeant in Ethiopia - in support of the pro-Russian regime - in South Yemen and above all, in Angola, where Cuba sent 60,000 soldiers. This sub-imperialist role of providing cannon fodder for the wars in Africa has cost the lives of many Cuban workers - to which we must add the Africans who died for their 'liberation' - and which has contributed as much as to the atrocious misery to which the proletariat and Cuban population has been subject, as the actions of the American bloc.
After up-rooting the Russians from their positions in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, the American bloc continued its offensive to completely encircle the USSR. The war in Afghanistan has to be understood in this context. When the Soviets rolled into Afghanistan in 1979, the USA responded by forming a coalition of 7 Afghan guerrilla groups whom it armed with the most sophisticated weapons. This trapped the Russian troops in a dead end, which fed the enormous discontent that already existed in throughout the USSR and which was to contribute - within the global framework of the decomposition of capitalism and the historic collapse of Stalinism - to the spectacular collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989.
Arising out of this important strengthening of the American bloc, it was able to tear away from the Russians the mantle of defenders of 'national liberation’, which for 30 years Russia had monopolised.
As we have shown throughout this article, all the different imperialisms have been able to use 'national liberation' as a tool: the fascist gang employed it in every imaginable concoction and so has 'democracy'. However, from the 1950's, Stalinism tried to present itself as the 'progressive' and 'anti-imperialist' bloc, covering its criminal plans with ideological clothes which represented the 'socialist countries' not as 'imperialists' but on the contrary as 'militant anti-imperialists' and reaching the height of delirium, when it presented 'national liberation' as a direct step towards 'socialism'. This was a fraud which, despite its errors, the Thesis on the National and Colonial Question denounced: "A determined fight is necessary against the attempt to put a communist cloak around revolutionary liberation movements that are not really communist in the backward countries" (Theses on the National and Colonial Question, point 11, 2nd Congress of the CI, March 1920).
This entire strategy came undone in the 1980's. Along with the principal factor - the development of the workers' struggles and consciousness - the interminable twists and turns dictated by the imperialist necessities of Russia caused its decline: let us recall, amongst many others, the case of Ethiopia. Until 1974, when the Negus' regime was in the Western gang, Russia supported the National Liberation Front of Eritrea - converting it into a champion of 'socialism'. However with the fall of the Negus, replaced by nationalist officers orientated towards Russia, things changed: now Ethiopia was converted into a 'Marxist-Leninist socialist' regime and the Eritrean Front overnight was transformed into an 'agent of imperialism' when it allied itself to the American bloc.
The events of 1989, the thunderous fall of the Eastern bloc and the disintegration of the Stalinist regimes, has lead to the disappearance of the previous configuration of world imperialism, characterised by the division into two great enemy blocs and, therefore to an explosion of nationalist conflicts.
The Marxist analysis of this new situation - which is set in the understanding of the process of the decomposition of capitalism (see International Review's 57 and 62) - allows us to confirm conclusively the positions of the Communist Left against 'national liberation'.
In respect to the first part of the question - the nationalist explosion - we can see that the whirlwind Stalinism's collapse has created a bloody spiral of inter-ethnic conflicts, massacres and pogroms [3] [6]. This phenomenon is not specific to the old Stalinist regimes. The majority of African countries have old tribal and ethnic conflicts that - in the framework of the process of decomposition - have been accelerated in the last few years leading to massacres and interminable wars. In the same way India has suffered similar nationalist, religious and ethnic tensions, which have caused thousands of deaths.
"The absurd ethnic conflicts where populations massacre each other because they do not have the same religion or the same language, because different folk traditions which have been perpetuated for decades, appeared to be confined to the countries of the 'Third World', Africa, the Middle East... But now it is in Yugoslavia, only a few hundred kilometres from the industrial centres of Northern Italy and Austria, that we are seeing these absurdities unleashed... All these movements reveal an even greater absurdity: in a period where the internationalisation of the economy has reached levels never known before in history, where the bourgeoisie of the advanced countries has tried, without success, to give itself a framework beyond that of the nation in order to manage its economy - the EEC is an example of this - the dissolution of the nations which were bequeathed by the 2nd World War into a multitude of petty states is a pure aberration, even from the mere point of view of the capitalists' interests. As far as the fate of the population of these regions is concerned it is not going to be better but much worse: growing economic disorder, submission to chauvinist demagogues and xenophobia, the settling of accounts and pogroms between communities which have lived together until now and, above all, tragic divisions between different sectors of the working class. Yet more misery, oppression, terror, the destruction of class solidarity between workers in front of their exploiters, this is the meaning of nationalism today" (Manifesto of the 9th Congress of the ICC).
This nationalist explosion is the extreme consequence, of the aggravation of the contradictions of the imperialist politics of the last 70 years towards their culminating point. The destructive and chaotic tendencies of 'national liberation', which have been hidden by the mystifications of 'anti-imperialism' and 'developing economies' etc. and which had been clearly denounced by the Communist Left, have in their annihilating fury surpassed the most pessimistic visions. 'National liberation' in the phase of decomposition represents the rotten fruit of all the aberrant and destructive work carried out by imperialism.
"The phase of decomposition appears as the result of an accumulation of all of the characteristics of a moribund system, completing the 75-years death agony of a historically condemned mode of production. Concretely, not only do the imperialist nature of all states, the threat of world war, the absorption of civil society by the state Moloch, and the permanent crisis of the capitalist economy continue during the phase of decomposition, they reach a synthesis and an ultimate conclusion within it." (International Review 62: 'Decomposition, Final Phase of the Decadence of Capitalism, point 3, page 16).
The mini-states emerging from the dislocation of the ex-USSR and Yugoslavia are the first characteristic steps of this more brutal imperialism. Yeltsin the 'democratic hero' of the Russian Federation threatens his neighbours and savagely represses the move towards independence by the autonomous Chechen Republic. Lithuania represses the Polish minority; Moldavia its Russian minority. Azerbaijan openly confronts Armenia... The immense ex-Soviet sub-continent is giving way to 16 mini-imperialist states, which could well become involved in mutual conflicts that will make the slaughter in Yugoslavia look like a tea party. Amongst other dangers, they could bring into play the nuclear arsenals dispersed throughout the ex-USSR.
This heightened utilization of 'national liberation' will produce even more chaotic and catastrophic consequences than in the past. And this in turn can only lead to a bloody pandemonium of increasingly fierce conflicts.
The proletariat must recognise 'national liberation' more than ever as a policy, a slogan, a standard, which has been totally integrated by the reactionary and decadent capitalist order. Against it must develop the proletariat's own policy: Internationalism, the struggle for the world revolution.
Adalen 18.11.1991
[1] [7] In this article we do not analyse the War in Spain since we have published many articles in the Review on this (see International Reviews nos 7, 25, 47) as well the pamphlet which collects together the texts of Bilan on this question. The nationalist and anti-fascist mystifications which, in large dosages, fell on the local and international proletariat hid from them the reality that the Spanish war was a crucial episode, along with Ethiopia, in the maturation of World War Two.
[2] [8] "These latest events have rewarded us with a new state: the state of Israel. We have no intention within the framework of this article, to develop on the Jewish problem... The future of the Jewish 'people' does not consist in the reinstallation of its autonomy and its national rights but in the disappearance of all frontiers and all ideas of national existence. The bloody persecution of the Jews these last years and in the last war, though they were tragic, are not a particular case but a manifestation of the barbarity of a decadent society, which is struggling in the convulsions of its agony and of a humanity which has not been able to advance to its salvation: socialism," (Internationalisme no 35, June 1948).
[3] [9] For an analysis of these events see 'Nationalist Barbarity' in International Review no 62.
The American economy's plunge into recession continues, dragging the rest of the world down in its wake. The US leaders' official optimism of spring 1991 has died with the summer. Since September, the figures have made it impossible to maintain the illusion. There is no longer any room for confidence in a constantly rejuvenated capitalism, rising like a phoenix from its own ashes after each passing recession and continuing down in its pathless of endless growth[1]. Barely two years ago, the ruling classes triumphantly hailed liberal capitalism as humanity's only means of survival after its victory over the collapsing Stalinist "model" of state capitalism. Today, they are eating their words.
JJ, 28/11/91
Only the international working
class
can take humanity out of this barbarism
The 'new world order' announced less than two years ago by President Bush goes on accumulating horrors and corpses. Hardly had the massacre in the Gulf finished (ie those provoked directly by the coalition, because the massacre of the Kurds is still going on), when war began to flare up in Europe itself, in what used to be Yugoslavia. The horror that was uncovered when the Serbian army took Vukovar illustrates once again what lies were all the speeches about the 'new era' of peace, prosperity and respect for human rights which was supposed to accompany the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Europe and the disappearance of the old eastern bloc.
At the same time, the independence of Ukraine and, even more, the constitution of a 'commonwealth' of states comprising the Ukraine, Russia and Bylorussia[1] have underlined something that has been evident since the summer: the USSR no longer exists. What's more, this has not prevented the different bits of this ex-country from decomposing even further: today the Russian Federation itself, ie the most powerful republic of the former Soviet empire, is threatened with a break-up.
Faced with the chaos that the planet is sinking into more and more, the most advanced countries, and particularly the most powerful one, the USA, try to present themselves as islands of stability, as guarantors of world order. But in reality these countries themselves are not safe from the deadly convulsions shaking human society. In particular, the most powerful state on earth may be taking advantage of its enormous military superiority to emphasize its role of world policeman, as we have just seen with the Middle East 'peace' conference, but it can do nothing about the inexorable aggravation of the economic crisis, which is at the root of all the convulsions that humanity is now experiencing.
The barbarism at loose in the world today highlights the huge responsibility that lies on the shoulders of the world proletariat, a proletariat that is currently faced with an unprecedented campaign of maneuvers aimed at diverting it not only from its historic perspective, but also from the defense of its most basic interests.
In this Review we have regularly analyzed the evolution of the situation in the former USSR[2]. In particular, since the end of summer 1989 (ie, nearly two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall), the ICC stressed the extreme gravity of the convulsions shaking all the so-called 'socialist' countries[3]. Today, every day that passes further illustrates the breadth of the catastrophe which is unfolding in this part of the world.
The ex-USSR sinks into the abyss
Since the aborted putsch of August 1991, events have precipitated more and more in the former USSR. The departure from the 'Union' of the Baltic countries now seems to belong to the distant past. Today, it is the Ukraine that has become independent, ie the second republic of the Union, with 52 million inhabitants; the 'granary' of the Union which also made up 25 % of its industrial production.
Furthermore, this country has on its territory a considerable quantity of the old USSR's atomic weapons. By itself it has a capacity for nuclear destruction more than that of France and Britain combined. In this sense, Gorbachev's decision on 5 October to reduce the 'USSR's' tactical nuclear weapons from 12,000 to 2,000 was not simply the response to the similar decision adopted by Bush a week before, nor the simple concretization of the disappearance of the imperialist antagonism which had dominated the world for four decades, ie the one between the USA and the USSR. It also represented a move of elementary precaution aimed at preventing the republics which now hold these weapons, and Ukraine in particular, from using them as an instrument of blackmail. It is for the same reason that the Ukrainian authorities have for the moment refused to hand over these weapons.
And it hasn't taken long for events to show how justified were the anxieties of Gorbachev and the majority of the world's leaders about the problem of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. For at the beginning of November, we saw the conflict between the central authority of Russia and the autonomous republic of Checheno-Ingushia which had just announced its own 'independence'. In response to Yeltsin's decision to declare a state of emergency to be imposed by the special forces of the KGB, Doudev, an ex-general of the 'Red' Army turned small-time 'independentist' potentate, threatened to carry out terrorist actions against the nuclear installations in the region.
What's more, faced with the threat of bloody confrontations, the troops sent to carry out the repression refused to obey, and in the end it was the Russian Parliament which saved Yeltsin's skin by annulling his decision.
This event, apart from underlining the real danger represented by the huge nuclear forces distributed throughout the USSR at a time when this former power is falling to pieces, also highlights the degree of chaos in which this part of the world now finds itself. It's not only the USSR which is about to disintegrate: it's the ex-Union's biggest republic, Russia itself, which threatens to explode, without having any way of imposing order - except through veritable bloodbaths whose outcome is in any case entirely uncertain.
This tendency towards the dislocation of Russia itself is also expressed by the dissensions now developing within the 'reforming' clique now at the head of this republic. Thus, the measures of 'wildcat' liberalization announced by the Russian president at the end of October led the mayors of the two biggest cities of the country to put up their shields. Gavril Popov, the mayor of Moscow, declared that "he bore no responsibility for the liberation of prices", and his colleague in St Petersburg, Anatoli Sobchak accused Yeltsin of "wanting to starve Russia". In fact, these conflicts between politicians about economic matters simply reveal the total impasse facing the former Soviet economy. All these political leaders, beginning with Gorbachev, continue raising the alarm about the threat of famine in the winter ahead. On 10 November Sobchak: warned: "We have not set up sufficient food reserves, and without them the big Soviet cities and the main industrial centers simply won't be able to survive"
On the financial level, the situation has also become a nightmare. The central bank, the Gosbank, has been forced to turn out masses of funny money, which has resulted in a devaluation of the rouble by 3 % every week. On 29 November, this same bank announced that the salaries of its functionaries would not be paid. At the origin of this decision was the refusal by the majority Russian deputies at the Soviet parliament to authorize the 90 billion roubles of credit demanded by Gorbachev. The next day, Yeltsin, in order to be able to mark a further step in his struggle for influence against Gorbachev, promised that Russia itself would take care of paying these salaries.
In fact, the bankruptcy of the central bank doesn't only result from the refusal by the republics to pay their taxes to the 'centre'. They themselves are incapable of collecting the funds needed for their own functioning. Thus, the republics of Yakutia and Buratia, which belong to the Russian Federation, have for several months been blocking their deliveries of gold and diamonds which had formerly helped to fill the coffers of Russia and the Union. The various enterprises are also less and less paying their dues, either because their own coffers are dry, or because they consider (as is the case with the more 'prosperous' private enterprises, that 'liberalization' means the end of all fiscal responsibilities.
Thus, the ex-USSR is caught in an infernal spiral. Both the reforms and the political conflicts that derive from the economic catastrophe can only further aggravate this catastrophe, which will lead to a new headlong rush into new stillborn 'reforms' and clashes between cliques.
The governments of the most advanced countries are well aware of the scope of this catastrophe; it is quite clear to them that its repercussions do not stop at the borders of the former USSR[4]. It is for this reason that urgent plans have been drawn up to supply this region with basic necessities. But there is no guarantee that this aid will reach its destination because of the incredible corruption that reigns at all levels of the economy and because of the paralysis of the entire administrative and political apparatus (faced with political instability and the threat of being kicked out, the main concern of most of the 'decision-makers' is to ... not take any decisions), and the total disorganization of the means of transport (lack of spare parts, of fuel, and all the troubles that regularly affect the various territories).
In order to loosen the financial strangulation of the ex-USSR, the G7 agreed to a year's delay in the repayment of the interest on the Soviet debt, which now stands at 80 billion dollars. But this will be like putting a plaster on a wooden leg because in any case all the credits simply disappear down a huge hole. Two years ago there were all sorts of illusions floating around about the 'new markets' that were being opened up by the collapse of the Stalinist regimes. Today, when one of the expressions of the world economic crisis is a sharp crisis of liquidity[5], the banks are more and more reluctant to place their capital in this part of the world. As a French banker recently deplored: "We don't know whom we are lending to nor whom to ask for the repayments".
Even for the most optimistic bourgeois politicians, it is difficult to imagine how the situation of what was once the world's number two power can be redressed, whether on the political or the economic level. The independence of each of the republics, presented by the different local demagogues as a 'solution', a way to avoid going down with the rest of the ship, can only further aggravate the difficulties of an economy which for decades was based on an extreme division of labor (certain articles were only produced in one factory for the entire USSR).
In addition, the independence[6] of the republics brings with it all the particular demands of the various minorities spread all over the territory (there are now 40 or so 'autonomous regions' and even more ethnic groups). We can already see what lies in store for the whole territory of the ex-USSR when we look at the bloody confrontations between the Armenians and the Azeris over High-Karabakh, between Ossetians and Georgians in South Ossetia, between Kirghizes, Uzbeks and Tadjiks in Kirghistan. And the Russian populations spread throughout the Union (for example 38 % of the population of Kazakhstan, 22% of Ukraine) run the risk of paying the price of all these expressions of ‘independence'.
On top of which Yeltsin has warned that he considers himself the 'protector' of the 26 million Russians living outside Russia and that it is necessary to reexamine the question of Russia's frontiers with certain other republics. We heard similar talk not long ago from the Serbian leader Milosevic: we only have to look at the present situation in Yugoslavia to understand what sinister reality lurks behind all that, and this time on a far vaster scale.
Barbarism in Yugoslavia and antagonisms between the great powers
In just a few months, Yugoslavia
has descended into hell. Every day the television news sends us images of the
unspeakable barbarism which is being unleashed a few hundred kilometers from
the industrial metropoles of Northern Italy and Austria. Entire towns
destroyed, dismembered bodies littering the streets, mutilation, torture; a
huge slaughterhouse. Not since the Second World War has a European country seen
such atrocities. The horror which up till now seemed to be reserved for the
countries of the 'third world' is now reaching the zones immediately next to
the heart of capitalism. This is the 'great progress' that bourgeois society
has just realized: creating a Beirut-on-Danube one hour away from Milan and
Vienna. The hell that the least well-established countries have lived through
for decades was always an atrocity, a source of shame for humanity. The fact
that this hell is now at our gates is not in itself more scandalous. However,
it is the undeniable sign of the degree
of putrefaction reached by a system which for forty years managed to push onto
the peripheries the most abominable aspects of the barbarism that it engenders.
It is an evident expression of world capitalism's entry into a new phase, the
last phase, of its decline: that of the general decomposition of society[7].
One of the illustrations of this decomposition is the total irrationality of most of the political forces involved.
On the side of the Croatian authorities, the demand for independence is not based on any possibility for improving the position of the national capital. You only have to read the map for example to see the extra difficulties that will arise when this 'nation' accedes to its 'independence', owing to the position and form of its frontiers. Supposing that Vukovar and Dubrovnik were rebuilt, which today seems rather unlikely, and came back to Croatian hands, you couldn't get there via Zagreb (unless you wanted to travel another 500 kilometers) - you'd have to go via Sarajevo, the capital of another republic, Bosnia Herzegovina.
As for the 'Federal' (ie Serb) authorities, the attempt to subdue Croatia, or at least to conserve inside a 'Greater Serbia' the control of those Croat provinces inhabited by Serbs, does not give rise to great hopes on the economic front: the cost of the present war and the destruction it has brought about can only plunge the country further into a total economic shambles.
Since the beginning of the massacres in Yugoslavia, the media's professional purveyors of fine feelings have been wailing that 'something ought to be done!' It's true that the horror doled out to the Kurds of Iraq doesn't sell as well as it did a few months back[8]. However, 'concern' has gone well beyond the confines of the 'charity business' because the European Community has organized a special conference, the so-called La Haye conference, to put an end to the war. After about twenty derisory cease-fires and numerous voyages by the negotiator Lord Carrington, the massacres have just gone on and on. In fact, Europe's powerlessness to end a conflict whose absurdity is obvious to everyone is a flagrant illustration of the dissensions between the states that make it up.
These dissensions are in no way circumstantial or secondary. They hide definite and antagonistic imperialist interests. In particular, the fact that, since the beginning, Germany has been in favor of the independence of Slovenia and Croatia is not fortuitous. For Germany this is a precondition for its gaining access to the Mediterranean, whose strategic importance does not have to be demonstrated[9]. For their part, the other imperialist powers who do have a presence in the Mediterranean have no interest in seeing Germany's return to this zone. This is why, at the beginning of the Yugoslav conflict, the USA, Britain and France (not to mention the USSR, the traditional 'protector' of Serbia, but which today has other things on its plate) came out in favor of keeping a unified Yugoslavia[10].
Thus the Yugoslav tragedy has shown that the 'new world order' is synonymous with the sharpening of tensions, not only between national and ethnic groups in regions like central and eastern Europe, where the late development of capitalism has prevented the formation of viable and stable nation states, but also between the oldest capitalist states, states set up a long time ago and which up till recently were allies against the Soviet imperialist power.
The chaos into which the planet is now falling is not the simple product of the peripheral countries of capitalism. It also involves, and will more and more involve, the central countries, to the extent that it has its origins not in problems specific to the underdeveloped countries but above all in a world-wide phenomenon: the general decomposition of capitalist society, which can only be aggravated by the irreversible crisis of its economy.
The Middle East conference: America affirms its leadership
With the world tipping over into chaos, the leading power has to play the role of gendarme. Quite obviously, the USA has its own interests in taking up this task. The one which profits the most from the present 'world order' is the one most interested in preserving it. The Gulf war was an exemplary police action aimed at dissuading all other countries be they small or great, from taking any part in destabilizing the situation. Today the 'peace conference' in the Middle East is another wing of American strategy, complementary to war. After demonstrating that they are ready to 'maintain order' in the most brutal possible manner, the USA must now prove that it alone is capable of regulating the conflicts which have bloodied the planet for decades. And here the question of the Middle East is obviously one of the most significant.
It is indeed necessary to underline the considerable historic importance of this event. It is the first time in 43 years (since the partition of Palestine by the UN in November 1947 and the end of the British mandate in May 1948) that Israel finds itself sitting at the same table as the totality of its Arab neighbors, with whom it has already been involved in five wars (1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982).
In fact, this international conference is a direct consequence of the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989 and of the Gulf war of the beginning of 1991. It has been possible because both the Arab states (including the PLO) and Israel can no longer play on east-west rivalries in order to advance their interests.
The Arab states which have tried to confront Israel have definitely lost their Soviet 'protector'. Because of this, Israel has been deprived of an advantage that won it the unfailing support of the US - it could act as the main gendarme of the US bloc in the region against the pretensions of the Russian bloc[11].
However, although the question of the Middle East, because of itS historic and strategic importance, gives a particular importance to the Madrid conference, which is to be continued in Washington this December, its significance goes well beyond the problems of this part of the world. The US is not only asserting its authority towards the countries of this region, but also, and above all, the other great powers which are being tempted to play the card of 'independence' from the US.
In Madrid, because the UN[12] had no place (at Israel's request, but this suited the Americans very well), the only, other great power present, apart from the US was ... the USSR (if we can refer to it as a 'great power'!). The simple fact that Bush proposed Gorbachev as co-president of the conference, when the latter is the discredited 'ruler' of a country that hardly exists any more, was a real slap in the face for those-countries which still have some ambitions in the Middle East. This is notably the case with France (which has been definitively kicked out of the Lebanon) and even Britain (the main power in the region up to the Second World War and the ex-protector of Palestine, Egypt and Jordan). Things aren't so bad for the UK because it cannot conceive of defending its imperialist interests outside the framework of an alliance with its American big brother. But for France, its further proof of the second-rate role the US wants to give it despite (and partly because of) its efforts to have an independent policy.
And apart from France, Germany is an indirect target here. Even if the latter has for a long time had no interests (apart from economic ones, of course) in this region, the slap given to the country it was banking on to advance its own interests will also hit home. Furthermore, the role given to Europe at the Madrid conference - the presence, as an observer, of the foreign minister of the Netherlands - says a lot about how the US aims to deal with the European states or any alliances between them in world affairs. All they'll get is a walk-on part.
Finally, holding the conference on the Middle East at a time when, day after day, the European states were showing their powerlessness in the face of the Yugoslav situation once again underlines that the only gendarme capable of ensuring any order in the world is Uncle Sam. While the latter is offering a 'solution' to one of the oldest and most serious conflicts on the planet, 10,000 km away from its own territory, the European states can't even do a policeman's job on the other side of their borders.
Thus, through the Middle East conference, the USA has affirmed the message of the Gulf war: 'world order' depends entirely on American power, on its enormous military (and also economic) superiority. All countries, including the ones trying to play their own game, need this gendarme[13]. Their interest is thus to facilitate the policies of the world's first power.
Having said this, the discipline that the leading power is still managing to impose should not obscure the catastrophic situation which the capitalist world is in today, and which can only get worse. In particular, the method employed to guarantee this discipline itself generates new disorders. We have already seen this with the Gulf war with all its catastrophic consequences for the region (especially as regards the Kurdish question), and we are now seeing it with Yugoslavia, where the maintenance of American authority has meant plunging the country into fire and blood.
As marxists have always affirmed, there is no place in decadent capitalism for any 'Universal peace'. Even if they are blunted in the Middle East, tensions between rival bands of capitalist gangsters will only rise up somewhere else. And this is all the more true because the economic crisis of the capitalist mode of production, which in the final analysis is at the root of imperialist confrontations, is insoluble and can only get worse. Which is exactly what we are seeing today.
Aggravation of the crisis and attacks on the working class
While Bush celebrates his diplomatic and military triumphs, his 'internal front' gets worse and worse, in particular through a new aggravation of the recession. For several months, the American bourgeoisie, and with it the entire world bourgeoisie had been dreaming that the open recession which began to get going before the Gulf war would be of short duration. Today everyone is disappointed: despite all the efforts of the governments (who continue to pretend, while doing the very opposite, that you shouldn't intervene in the economy and that the laws of the market should be allowed to rule), the economy is still stuck in the mud and there's no sign of any way out. What we are really seeing is a new and considerable aggravation of the capitalist crisis. Already, numerous sectors of the bourgeoisie have been sent into a panic.
This aggravation of the crisis can only lead to intensified attacks on the working class. Right now, these attacks being unleashed all over the world: massive lay-offs (including the high-tech sectors, such as computers), wage freezes, the erosion of social benefits (retirement pensions, unemployment allocations, sick pay, etc), the intensification of work rates: it would take too long to make a list of all the different attacks in various countries are now feeling the impact of the crisis in their flesh and blood.
These attacks obviously create a lot of discontentment within the working class. And, in many countries, we are seeing a good deal of social agitation. But what is significant is the fact that, in contrast to the big struggles which marked the mid-80s, and which were subjected to an almost total black-out by the media, the present agitation is being dealt with in a spectacular manner by all the media. In fact we are at present seeing a vast maneuver by the bourgeoisie of most of the more developed countries, aimed at undermining the possibility of real class combats.
For the working class, there is no identity between anger and combativity, or between combativity and consciousness, even if there is a link between them. The situation in the former 'socialist' countries demonstrates this to us daily. These workers are today confronted with living conditions, with a level of poverty that has not been seen for decades. However, their struggles against exploitation are limited in breadth, and when they do develop, they fall into the most gross traps laid by the bourgeoisie (notably the trap of nationalism, as with the Ukrainian miners' strike in Spring 1991).
The situation is obviously far less catastrophic in the 'advanced' countries, as regards both the attacks on living conditions and the mystifications that weigh on the workers' consciousness. However, it is necessary to show the difficulties which the proletariat in these countries is faced with, precisely because the enemy class is using all its means to use them and reinforce them.
As our publications have stressed on numerous occasions, the major events of the past two years have been amply used by the bourgeoisie to strike at the combativity and above all the consciousness of the working class. By repeating over and over again that Stalinism was 'communism', that "the Stalinist regimes, whose bankruptcy became quite evident, were the inevitable consequence of the proletarian revolution, the campaigns of bourgeois propaganda had the aim of diverting the workers from any perspective of a different society and of making them accept that 'liberal democracy' was the only viable model for society.
Even though it was a particular form of capitalism which collapsed in the eastern countries under the pressure of the general crisis of the system, all the media have continually presented these events as the 'triumph' of capitalism.
This campaign has had a real impact on the workers, affecting their combativity and above all their consciousness. Although this combativity began to pick up again in the Spring of 1990, especially as a result of the attacks that went with the beginning of the open recession, it was again hit by the crisis and war in the Gulf.
These tragic events certainly put paid to the lies about the 'new world order' announced by the bourgeoisie at the time of the disappearance of the eastern bloc, which was supposed to be the main source of military tensions in the world. The massacres perpetrated by the 'great democracies', by the 'civilized countries', against the Iraqi population allowed many workers to understand the falsity of all the speeches by these same 'democracies' about 'peace' and 'human rights' .
But at the same time, the great majority of the working class in the advanced countries, following a new round of bourgeois propaganda campaigns, submitted to this war with a strong sense of powerlessness, which considerably weakened its struggles. The August 1991 putsch in the USSR and the new destabilization it provoked, as well as the civil war in Yugoslavia, contributed in their turn to reinforce this feeling of powerlessness. The break-up of the USSR and the barbaric war unfolding in Yugoslavia are expressions of the advanced decomposition of capitalist society today. But thanks to all the lies spread by the media, the bourgeoisie has managed to hide the real cause of these events and present them as a further manifestation of the 'death of communism' or as a question of 'the right of nations to self-determination', in the face of which workers have nothing to do but be passive spectators trusting to the wisdom of their governments.
After suffering a barrage like this for two years, the working class was bound to experience a real disarray and a strong sense of powerlessness. And it is precisely this feeling of powerlessness that the bourgeoisie is trying to use and reinforce through a series of maneuvers aimed at nipping in the bud any rebirth of combativity. The strategy has been to provoke premature confrontations on a terrain chosen by the bourgeoisie itself, so that the struggle is worn down by isolation and winds up in a dead end. The methods used vary, but their common point of departure is the intense involvement of the trade unions. .
Thus in Spain the putrid terrain of nationalism was used by the unions (especially the Workers Commissions close to the CP, and the UGT close to the SP) in order to lead the workers into a state of isolation. On 23 October, they called for a general strike in the Asturias, where nearly 50,000 jobs were to go with the 'rationalization' plans in the mines and steel. The slogan for the strike was 'Defend the Asturias'. With a slogan like that, the 'movement' got the support of shopkeepers, artisans, peasants, priests and even football players.
Because of the anger and concern within the working class, the movement got a big following, but with such a demand it could only serve to imprison the workers in their particular provinces or even localities. We saw this in the Basque country where they were called upon to mobilize behind a motion of the provincial parliament to 'save the left bank of the Bilbao River'.
In Holland and in Italy, the unions used other methods. They called for a national mobilization with big street demonstrations as soon as they heard about the budget for the year 1992, which contains major attacks against social benefits, wages and jobs. In Holland the movement was a success for the unions: the two demonstrations of 17 September and 5 October were the biggest since the Second World War. It was an occasion for the union machines to strengthen their control over the working class in preparation for future struggles, in particular by derailing discontent onto the terrain of 'defending the social gains of Dutch democracy'. In Italy, whose proletariat is one of the most militant in the world and where the official unions are largely discredited, the maneuver was more subtle. It consisted mainly in dividing and discouraging the workers thanks to a division of labor between, on the one hand the three big union federations (COIL, CSIL, UIL) who called for a strike and demonstrations for the 22 October and, on the other hand, the 'base' unions, (the COB AS) who called for an 'alternative strike' for the ... 25 October.
In France the tactic was different. It consisted above all in imprisoning the workers in corporatism. Thus the unions launched a whole series of 'movements' which got a lot of coverage in the media; these movements took place at different times and had different demands: in the railways, air transport, urban transport, the ports, steel, the schools, social services, etc. There was a particularly repulsive maneuver in the health sector where the official unions, who are largely discredited, called for 'unity' between the different categories while the coordinations, which had already shown their true face in the strikes of Autumn 1988[14] cultivated corporatism and 'specificities', especially among the nurses. The government did its bit to 'radicalize' the movement through a well-publicized violent police attack on one of the demonstrations. The peak was reached when the workers of this sector were called on to demonstrate alongside liberal doctors, health managers and pharmacists ' for the defense of the health service'. At the same time, the unions, with the active support of the leftist organizations, launched a strike in the Renault factory at Cleon, ie the enterprise which is the 'beacon' for the French proletariat. For weeks they came out with all kinds of radical talk, while shutting the workers up in this factory, only to suddenly change their tune and call for a return to work even though the bosses had made hardly any concessions. And as soon as work started at Cleon, they launched a strike in another factory of the same group, at Mans.
These are only some examples among many, but they are significant of the general strategy of the bourgeoisie against the workers. And it is precisely because it knows that it has not had a definitive success with the campaigns of the past two years that the ruling class is using all these maneuvers based on the present difficulties of the working class.
And indeed these difficulties are not final. The intensification and increasingly massive character of the attacks which capitalism will have to unleash will compel the working class to take up the struggle again on a grand scale. At the same time, and this is what the bourgeoisie fears the most when it comes down to it, the evident bankruptcy of a capitalist system which is supposed to be enjoying its greatest triumph will undermine the lies that have been dished out since the death of Stalinism.
Finally, we know that there is going to be an inevitable intensification of warlike tensions, involving not only the small states on the periphery but also the central countries of capitalism, the countries where the strongest detachments of the proletariat are concentrated (the Gulf war was a foretaste of this). This process will deal heavy blows to the lies of the bourgeoisie and highlight the fact that the survival of capitalism is a grave threat to the survival of humanity.
It's a long and difficult road that awaits the working class. It is up to the revolutionary organizations, through their denunciation both of the ideological campaigns about the 'death of communism', and of the maneuvers aimed at leading the workers' struggle into a dead-end, to contribute actively to the future revival of struggles, to help the class take the road that leads to its emancipation. FM 6.12.91
[1] News of the formation of this 'commonwealth' came when this Review was being put together. So we have integrated this event at the last moment in note 6.
[2] See in particular nos. 66 and 67 of the IR.
[3] " ... however the situation in the eastern bloc evolves, the events that are shaking it today mean the historic crisis, the definitive collapse of Stalinism ... In these countries, an unprecedented period of instability, convulsions and chaos has begun, whose implications go far beyond their frontiers ... The nationalist movements (which) today are profiting from a loosening of central control by the Russian party ... their dynamic is towards separation from Russia. In the end, if the central power in Moscow does not react, then we will see the explosion, not just of the Russian bloc, but of its dominant power. The Russian bourgeoisie, which today rules the world's second power, would find itself at the head of a second-rate power, a good deal weaker than Germany for example." ('Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the eastern countries, IR 60).
[4] See the editorial in IR 67
[5] See the article on the recession in this issue.
[6] The constitution on 8.12.91 of a 'commonwealth of states' by Russia, Ukraine and Bylorussia can only aggravate this situation. This erzatz Union which only regroups the Slav republics can only sharpen nationalism among the non-Slav populations, both in the other republics of the ex-USSR and in Russia itself. Far from stabilizing the situation, the agreement between Yeltsin and his acolytes will lead to further deterioration in a region of the world stuffed full of nuclear weapons.
[7] For our basic texts on the decomposition of capitalism see IRs 57, 62 and 64.
[8] As winter approaches, the situation of the Kurdish populations is even worse than it was after the Gulf war. But as the ruling class obviously doesn't know what to do about them, and as they are an encumbrance for the neighboring countries (notably for Turkey, which, even though it was one of the 'goodies' during the Gulf war, doesn't hesitate to use against them the same methods as Saddam Hussein, such as aerial bombing), it is preferable to suspend discretely all international aid and to withdraw on tiptoes with the advise that they should go back to their original homes, ie throw themselves into the arms of their executioners. The massacre of the Kurds by Hussein's soldiers was an excellent TV news story when it was a question of giving an after-the-event justification of the war against Iraq. This is one of the reasons that the 'coalition' prepared this massacre during the war by inciting these populations to rise up .against Baghdad, and then, after the war, leaving Saddam with the troops he needed to carry out his 'police operation'. But today the Calvary of the Kurds has lost all interest for the propaganda campaigns: for the 'civilized' bourgeoisie, it is better that they die in silence.
[9] See 'Towards the greatest chaos in history' in this issue.
[10] This doesn't mean that there will be a real 'harmony' between these other powers. Thus France, for example, which has ambitions about resisting US leadership, has formed, mainly against Britain, an alliance with Germany in the EC, the aim of which is to form a counter-weight to US influence and also to 'contain' the great power ambitions of its German ally (over which it at least has the advantage of the atomic bomb). It's also for this reason that France is the most ardent partisan of projects that allow the EC as a whole to assert a certain military independence: construction of a European space shuttle; constitution of a joint Franco-German division; strengthening of the diplomatic competence of the European executive; subjecting the Western European Union (the only European organism which has any military attributes) to the Council of Europe (and not NATO which is dominated by the US). And this, of course, is what Britain doesn't want.
[11] Having said this, even if Israel no longer has the same margin of maneuver as in the past, this country, which showed its 'sense of responsibility' during the Gulf war to the advantage of the USA, remains the essential pawn of American policy in the region: it has the most powerful and modem army (with more than 200 nuclear warheads) and is continually - mainly thanks to 3 billion dollars of US aid a year - strengthening its military potential. On top of this, it is managed by a regime which is much more stable than those in the Arab countries. This is why the USA isn't prepared to let go of what it's got by reversing its primary alliances, and all Israel's prevarications in response to the pressure by the USA prior to the Madrid and Washington meetings in recent months was more a way of raising the stakes vis-a-vis the Arab countries than the expression of a fundamental clash between Israel and the USA.
[12] Here we can see to what point the UN has become a simple instrument of US policy; it is given a big role when it comes to softening up recalcitrant allies (as during the Gulf war) but it's put on the shelf aa soon as it could be used by these same allies to playa role on the international arena.
[13] This is why, despite the disappearance of the western bloc (as a result of the collapse of its eastern rival) there is no immediate threat to this fundamental structure that the bloc set up, and which is totally dominated by the US - NATO. This was clearly expressed in the document adopted on November 8 at the NATO summit: "the threat of a massive and simultaneous attack on all of NATO's European fronts has been eliminated ... the new risks derive from the negative consequences of the instability which could be produced by the serious economic, social and political difficulties, including ethnic rivalries and territorial disputes, faced by a number of central and eastern European countries." In the world context of the disappearance of blocs, we are thus seeing a reconversion of NATO, which allowed Bush to say with satisfaction at the end of the meeting: "We have shown that we don't need the Soviet threat to exist".
[14] See 'France: the 'coordinations sabotage the struggle' in IR 56.
Since its foundation, but above all since the momentous events that have brought about the collapse of the eastern imperialist bloc and of the USSR itself, the ICC has published numerous articles attacking the lie that the Stalinist regimes were an example of ‘communism', and consequently that the death of Stalinism means the death of communism.
We have demonstrated the enormity of the lie by contrasting the reality of Stalinism with the real aims and principles of communism. Communism is international and internationalist and aims at a world without nation states; Stalinism is ferociously nationalist and imperialist. Communism means the abolition of wage labor and all forms of exploitation; Stalinism imposes the most savage levels of exploitation precisely through the wage labor system; communism means a society without a state, a classless society in which human beings freely control their own social powers; Stalinism means the overwhelming presence of a totalitarian state, a militaristic and hierarchical discipline imposed on the majority by a privileged minority of bureaucrats. And so on[1]. In sum, Stalinism is nothing but a brutal, aberrant expression of decadent capitalism.
We have also shown how this campaign of lies has been used to disorient and confuse the only social force capable of constructing a genuine communist society: the working class. In the east, the working class has lived directly under the shadow of the Stalinist lie, and this has had the disastrous effect of filling the vast majority of them with hatred for everything to do with marxism, communism, and the proletarian revolution of 1917. As a result, with the downfall of the Stalinist prison-house, they have fallen into the clutches of the most reactionary ideologies - nationalism, racism, religion, and the pernicious belief that salvation lies in following the ways of the ‘democratic west'. In the west itself, this campaign has above all been used to block the maturation of consciousness that was going on in the working class throughout the 80s. The essential trick has been to deprive the working class of any perspective for its combats. Much of the triumphant blather about the victory of capitalism, the ‘new order' of peace and harmony following the end of the ‘Cold War' may already be ringing very hollow in the wake of the catastrophic events of the last two years (Gulf war, Yugoslavia, famine, recession ... ). But what really matters for capitalism is that the negative side of this message gets through: that the end of communism 'means the end of any hope of changing the present order of things; that revolutions inevitably end in creating something even worse than what you started off with; that there's nothing to do but submit to the dog-eat-dog ideology of decomposing capitalism. In this bourgeois philosophy of despair, not only communism, but class struggle itself is an outmoded, discredited utopia.
The strength of bourgeois ideology lies mainly in the fact that the bourgeoisie monopolizes the means of mass dissemination, endlessly repeats the same lies and allows no real alternative views to be aired. In this sense Goebbels is indeed the ‘theoretician' of bourgeois propaganda: a lie repeated often enough becomes a truth, and the bigger the lie the better it works. And the lie that Stalinism equals communism certainly is a big lie - on the face of it, a stupid, obvious, despicable lie at that.
So evident is the lie to anyone who stops to think for a' few minutes that the bourgeoisie can't afford to leave it unprotected. In all kinds of political discourse, people who are extremely confused about the Stalinist regimes, who refer to them as communist and contrast them with capitalism, will in the next breath admit ‘of course, that's not real communism, that's not the idea that Karl Marx had about communism'. This contradiction is potentially dangerous for the ruling class, and that's why it needs to nip such things in the bud before they can lead to any real clarifications.
It does this in various ways. Faced with the more politically conscious elements, it offers sophisticated ‘marxist' alternatives like Trotskyism, which specialize in denouncing the ‘counter revolutionary role of Stalinism' - only to argue simultaneously that there are still ‘conquests of the workers' to be defended in the Stalinist regimes, such as the state ownership of the means of production, which for some obscure reason is supposed to mean that these regimes are ‘in transition' towards authentic communism. In other words, the same lie about the identity between Stalinism and communism, but in a ‘revolutionary' wrapping.
But we live in a world where the majority of workers want little or nothing to do with politics (in no small measure this is itself a result of the Stalinist nightmare, which has for decades served to turn workers in disgust from any kind of political activity). Bourgeois ideology, if it is to buttress its great lie about Stalinism, needs something a little more mass produced, a lot less overtly political than Trotskyism or its variants. And what it offers most of all is a benign cliche which can be relied on to entrap even, and especially, those who have seen that Stalinism is not communism: we refer to that oft-repeated refrain - ‘it's a nice idea, but it could never work' .
The first aim of the series of articles we are beginning here is to reaffirm the marxist position that communism is not a nice idea. As Marx put it in The German Ideology, "Communism is not for us a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself.
We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The condition of this movement result from premises now in existence".
Twenty five years later, Marx expressed the same thought in his reflections on the experience of the Paris Commune:
"The working class has no readymade utopias to introduce par decret du peuple. They know that in order to work out their own emancipation, and along with it that higher form to which present society is irresistibly tending by its own economical agencies, they will have to pass through long struggles, through a series of historic processes, trans- forming circumstances and men. They have no ideals to realize, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant" (The Civil War in France).
Against the notion that communism is no more than a "readymade utopia" invented by Marx or other good souls, marxism insists that the tendency towards communism is already contained in this society. Just before the passage from the GI cited above, Marx outlines the "premises now in existence" for the communist transformation:
In the passage from the Civil War in France, Marx strikes another note which is more than ever relevant today: the proletariat has merely to set free the potential contained in the "old collapsing bourgeois society". As we will develop elsewhere, communism here is revealed both as a possibility and a necessity: a possibility because it has created the productive capacities that can satisfy the material needs of humanity, and the social force; the proletariat, which has a direct and ‘selfish' interest in overturning capitalism and creating communism; and a necessity, because at a certain point in their development, these very productive forces revolt against the capitalist relations within which they previously developed and prospered, and inaugurate a period of catastrophe which threatens the very existence of society, of humanity itself.
In 1871 Marx was premature in declaring bourgeois society to be in state of collapse; today, in the last stages of decadent capitalism, the collapse is all around us, and the necessity for the communist revolution has never been greater.
Communism is the real movement, and the real movement is the movement of the proletariat. A movement which begins on the terrain of the defense of material interests against the encroachments of capital, but which is compelled to call into question and ultimately confront the very foundations of bourgeois society. A movement which becomes conscious of itself through its own practice, advances towards its goal by constant self-criticism. Communism is thus "scientific" (Engels); it is "critical communism" (Labriola). The main purpose of these articles will be to demonstrate precisely that, for the proletariat, communism is not a ready made utopia, a static idea, but an evolving, developing conception which has grown older and wiser both with the objective development of the productive forces and the subjective maturation of the proletariat through its· accumulated historical experience. We will therefore examine how the notion of communism and the means to achieve" gained in depth and in clarity through the work of Marx and Engels, through the contributions of the left wing of social democracy, through the reflections on the triumph and failure of the October revolution by the left communist fractions, . and so on. But communism is older than the proletariat: according to Marx, we can even say that "the entire movement of history is the act of genesis" of communism (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). To show that communism is more than an ideal, it is necessary to show that communism arises from the proletarian movement and thus predates Marx; but to understand what is specific to ‘modem', proletarian communism, it is also necessary to compare and contrast it with the forms of communism that predated the proletariat, and with the first immature forms of proletarian communism itself, which mark a process of transition between pre-proletarian communism and its modem, scientific form. As Labriola put it,
"Critical communism has never refused, and does not refuse, to welcome the rich and multiple ideological, ethical, psychological and pedagogical suggestions which can come from the knowledge and study of all forms of communism, from Phales the Calcedonian to Caber. What's more, it's through the study and knowledge of these forms that we can develop and establish an understanding of the separation of scientific socialism from all the rest" (In Memory of the Communist Manifesto, 1895).
According to the conventional wisdom, communism can never work because it is ‘against human nature'. Competition, greed, the need to do better than the next man, the desire to accumulate wealth, the need for the state - these, we are told, are inherent in human nature, as basic as the need for food or the sexual drive. The slightest acquaintance with human history dispels this version of human nature.
For the longest part of its history, for hundreds of tho.~ L sands, perhaps millions of years, humanity lived in a classless society, formed by communities where the essentials of wealth were shared without the medium of exchange and money; a society organized not by kings, priests, nobles or a state machine but by the tribal assembly. This society is what marxists refer to as primitive communism.
This notion of primitive communism is profoundly dis- concerting for the bourgeoisie and its ideology, and so it does everything it can to deny it or minimize its significance. Aware that the marxist conception of primitive society was greatly influenced by the work of Lewis Henry Morgan on the Iroquois and other ‘American Indian' tribes, modem academic anthropologists pour scorn on Morgan's work by discovering this or that factual inconsistency in his findings, this or that secondary error, and thus call the whole of his contribution into question. Or, again lapsing into the most narrow- minded empiricism, they deny that it is possible to know anything at all about human prehistory from the study of surviving primitive peoples. Or they point to the many and various limitations and shortcomings of primitive societies in order to knock down a straw man: the idea that these societies were a kind of paradise free of suffering and alienation.
Marxism, however, does not idealize these societies. It is aware that they were a necessary result not of some innate human goodness but of the low development of the productive forces, which compelled the earliest human communities to adopt a ‘communist' structure simply in order to survive. The appropriation of surplus labor by a particular part of society would have meant the disappearance pure and simple of the other part. In these conditions, it was impossible to produce a sufficient surplus to nourish the existence of a privileged class. Marxism is aware that this communism was, as a result, a restrictive one which did not allow the full flowering of the human individual. That is why, having spoken about the "personal dignity, straightforwardness, strength of character and bravery" of the surviving primitive peoples, Engels in his seminal work The Origin of the Family, Private Property And the State added the qualification that in these communities "the tribe remained the boundary for man, in relation to himself as well as to outsiders: the tribe, the gens and their institutions were sacred and inviolable, a superior power, instituted by nature, to which the individual remained absolutely subject in feeling, thought and deed. Impressive as the people of this epoch may appear to us, they differ in no way from one another, they are still bound, as Marx says, to the umbilical cord of the primordial community."
This communism of small groups, often hostile to other tribal groupings; this communism in which the individual was dominated by the community; this communism of scarcity is very different from the more advanced communism of tomorrow, which will be the unification of the human species, the mutual realization of individual and society, and a communism of abundance. This is why marxism has nothing in common with the various ‘primitivist' ideologies which idealize the archaic condition of man and express a nostalgic yearning to go back to it[2].
Nevertheless, the very fact that these communities existed, and existed as a result of material necessity, provides further proof that communism is neither a mere ‘good idea' , nor something that could ‘never work'. This point was stressed by Rosa Luxemburg in her Introduction to Political Economy:
"Morgan has provided new and powerful support to scientific socialism. Whereas Marx and Engels, through their economic analysis of capitalism, demonstrated the inevitable passage of society, in the near future, to a world communist economy, and thus gave a solid scientific foundation to socialist aspirations, Morgan has to a certain extent emphatically underlined the work of Marx and Engels by demonstrating that democratic communist society, albeit in its primitive forms, has encompassed all the long past of human history before the present civilization. The noble tradition of the distant past thus extends its hand to the revolutionary aspirations of the future, the circle of knowledge is harmoniously completed, and in this perspective, the existing world of class rule and exploitation, which pretends to be the nec plus ultra of civilization, the supreme goal of universal history, is simply a miniscule, passing stage in the great forward movement of humanity".
Primitive communism was not static. It evolved through various stages, and finally, faced with irresolvable contradictions, dissolved and gave birth to the first class societies. But the inequities of class society in turn gave rise to myths and philosophies that expressed a more or less conscious desire to do away with class antagonisms and private property. Classical mythographers such as Hesiod and Ovid recounted the myth of the Golden Age when there was no distinction be- tween ‘mine' and ‘thine'; some of the later Greek philosophers ‘invented' perfect societies where all things were held in common. In these musings, the not-so-ancient memory of a real tribal community was fused together with far older myths about man's fall from a primordial paradise.
But communistic ideas always became more widespread and more popular, and gave rise to actual attempts to realize them in practice, during times of social crisis and of mass re- volt against the class system of the day. In the great Spartacus revolt against the decadent Roman Empire, the rebellious slaves made some desperate, short-lived attempts to set up communities based on brotherhood and equality; but the paradigmatic ‘communist' trend of this epoch was of course Christianity, which, as Engels and Luxemburg have pointed out, began as a revolt of the slaves and other classes crushed by the Roman system before it was adopted by the decadent Roman Empire and then became the official ideology of the emerging feudal order. The early Christian communities preached universal human brotherhood and tried to institute a thorough-going communism of possessions. But as Luxemburg argued in her text ‘Socialism and the Churches', this was precisely the limitation of Christian communism: it was not posited on the revolutionary expropriation of the ruling class and the communisation of production, like modem communism. It merely advocated that the rich be charitable and share out their goods with the poor; it was a doctrine of social pacifism and class collaboration that could easily be adapted to the needs of a ruling class. The immaturity of this vision of communism was a product of the immaturity of the productive forces. This applies both to the productive capacities of the time, because in a society dying from a crisis of underproduction those rebelling against it could envisage nothing better than a sharing out of poverty; and to the character of the exploited and oppressed classes who were the original motor force behind the Christian revolt. These were classes with no common objectives and no historical perspective. "There was absolutely no common road to emancipation for all these elements. For all of them paradise lay lost be- hind them; for the ruined free men it was the former polis, the town and the state at the same time, of which their forefathers had been free citizens; for the war-captive slaves the time of freedom; for the small peasants the abolished gentile social system and communal landownership." This is how Engels, in ‘On the history of early Christianity' (Die Neue Zeit, Vol 1, 1894-5), points to the essentially backward-looking, nostalgic vision of the Christian revolt. It is true that Christianity, in continuity with the Hebrew religion, had marked a step forward from the various pagan mythologies in that it embodied a rupture with the old cyclical visions of time and asserted that humanity was caught up in a forward- moving, historical drama. But the inbuilt limitations of the classes behind the revolt ensured that this history was still seen in mystified, messianic terms, and the future salvation it promised was an Eschaton, an absolute and final end beyond the borders of this world.
Broadly the same can be said of the numerous peasant revolts against feudalism, although the fiery Lollard preacher John Ball, one of the leaders of the great Peasants' Revolt in England in 1381, was reported to have said that "matters cannot go well in England until all things be held in common; when there shall be neither vassals nor lords ...": such demands take us a step beyond a mere communism of possessions towards a vision of all social wealth becoming common property (this may well be because the Lollards were already a forerunner of later movements characteristic of the emergence of capitalism). But in general the revolts of the peas- ants suffered the same fundamental limitations as the rebel- lions of the slaves. The famous motto of the 1381 revolt - "When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?" - had a marvelous poetic power, but it also summed up the limitations of peasant communism, which like the early Christian revolt was condemned. To look back to an idyllic past - to Eden itself, to the first Christians, to ‘true English freedom before the Norman yoke'[3] ... Or, if it did look forward, it looked with the eyes of the first Christians to an apocalyptic millennium that would be installed by Christ returning in his glory. The peasants were not the revolutionary class of feudal society, even if their revolts could help to undermine the foundations of feudal order and so pave the way for the emergence of capitalism. And since they themselves carried no project for the reorganization of society, they could only see salvation coming from the outside - from Jesus, from the ‘Good Kings' misadvised by treacherous counselors, from people's heroes like Robin Hood.
The fact that these communistic dreams could grip the masses shows that they corresponded to real material needs, in the same way that the dreams of the individual express deep if unfulfilled desires. But because the conditions of history could not permit their realization, they were condemned to be no more than dreams.
"From its origin the bourgeoisie was saddled with its antithesis: capitalists cannot exist without wage workers, and in the same proportion as the medieval burgher of the guild developed into the modern bourgeois, the guild journeyman and the day-laborer, outside the guilds, developed into the proletarian. And although, upon the whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with the nobility, could claim to represent at the same time the interests of the different working classes of the period, yet in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants' War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Munzer.' in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution, Babeuf" (Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific).
In The Peasant War in Germany, Engels elaborates his thesis about Munzer and the Anabaptists. He considered that they represented an embryonic proletarian current within a much more eclectic ‘plebeian-peasant' movement. The Anabaptists were still a Christian sect, but an extremely heretical one, and Munzer's ‘theological' teachings veered dangerously close to a form of atheism, in continuity with previous mystical trends in Germany and elsewhere (eg Meister Eckhart). On the social and political level, "his political program approached communism, and even on the eve of the February Revolution more than one present-day communist sect lacked as comprehensive a theoretical article as was ‘Munzer's' in the sixteenth century. This program, less a compilation of the demands of the plebeians of that day than a visionary anticipation of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletarian elements that had scarcely begun to develop among the plebeians - this program demanded the immediate establishment of the kingdom of God, the prophesied millennium, by restoring the Church to its original condition and abolishing all the institutions that conflicted with this allegedly early-Christian but , in fact, very novel church. By the kingdom of God Munzer understood a society in which there would be no class differences or private property and no state authority independent of or foreign to the members of society. All the existing authorities, in so far as they re- fused to submit and join the revolution, were to be over- thrown, all work and all property shared in common, and complete equality introduced. A union was to be established to implement all this, not only throughout Germany, but throughout Christendom. "
Needless to say, since this was only the dawn of bourgeois society itself, the material conditions for so radical a transformation were completely lacking. Subjectively this was reflected in the grip that messianic-religious conceptions still defined the ideology of this movement. On the objective side, the ineluctable approach of capital's domination twisted all of its radical communist demands into practical suggestions for the development of bourgeois society. This was demonstrated beyond a doubt when Munzer's party was catapulted into power in the city of Muhlhausen in March 1525:
"Munzer's position at the head of the ‘eternal council' of Muhlhausen was indeed much more precarious than that of any modern revolutionary agent. Not only the movement of his time, but the age was not ripe for the ideas of which he himself had only a faint notion. The class which he represented was in its birth throes. It was not yet capable of assuming leadership over, and transforming society. The social changes that his fancy evoked had little ground in the then existing conditions. What is more, these conditions were paving the way for a social system that was diametrically opposite to what he aspired to. Nevertheless, he was bound to his early sermon of Christian equality and evangelical com- munity of ownership, and was compelled at least to attempt its realization. Community of ownership, universal and equal labor, and abolition of all rights to exercise authority were proclaimed. But in reality Muhlhausen remained a republican imperial city with a somewhat democratized constitution, a senate elected by universal suffrage and controlled by a forum, and with a hastily improvised system of care for the poor. The social upheaval that so horrified its Protestant burgher contemporaries actually never transcended a feeble, unconscious and premature attempt to establish the bourgeois society of a later period" (ibid).
The founders of marxism were not so well acquainted with the English bourgeois revolution as with the German reformation or the French revolution. This is a pity because as historians like Christopher Hill have shown, this revolution gave rise to a tremendous outburst of creative thought, to a dazzling profusion of audaciously radical parties, sects and movements. The Levellers to whom Engels refers were a heterogeneous movement rather than a formal party. Their moderate wing were no more than radical democrats who ardently defended the right of the individual to dispose of his property. But given the depth of the social mobilization that pushed the bourgeoisie's revolution forward, it inevitably gave birth to a left wing that concerned itself more and more with the needs of the propertyless masses and which took on a clearly communist character. This wing was represented by the ‘True Levellers' or Diggers, and their most coherent spokesman was Gerrard Winstanley.
In the writings of Winstanley, especially his later work, there is a much clearer move away from religious-messianic conceptions than Munzer could ever have made. His most important work, The Law of Freedom in Platform, represents, as its name implies, a definite shift onto the terrain of explicitly political discourse: the subsisting references to the Bible, particularly to the myth of the fall are essentially allegorical or symbolic in their function. Above all, for Winstanley, as opposed to the moderate Levellers, "there cannot be universal liberty till this universal community be established" (cited by Hill in his introduction to The Law of Freedom and other Writings, 1973 Penguin edition, p 49): political-constitutional rights that left the existing property relations untouched were a sham. And thus he outlines, in very great detail, his vision of a true commonwealth where all wage labor and buying and selling have been abolished, where education and science are promoted in place of religious obscurantism and a state church, and where the functions of the state have been reduced to a bare minimum. He even looked forward to the time when the entire "earth be- comes a common treasury again, as it must ... then this enmity of all lands will cease, and none shall dare to seek dominion over others", since "pleading for property and single interest divides the people of a land and the whole world into parties, and is the cause of all wars and bloodshed and contention everywhere" (cited by Hill in The World Turned Upside Down, p 139, 1984 Peregrine edition).
And yet, of course, what Engels says about Munzer remains the case with Winstanley: the new society emerging out of this great revolution was not the "universal community", but the society of capitalism. Winstanley's vision was a further step towards ‘modem' communism, but it remained entirely utopian. This was expressed above all in the inability of the True Levellers to see how the great transformation could come about. The Digger movement which appeared during the civil war restricted itself to attempts by small bands of poor and landless people to cultivate the wastes and commons. The Digger communities were to serve as a non- violent example to all the poor and dispossessed, but they were soon dispersed by the forces of Cromwellian order, and in any case their horizons did not really go beyond the time- honored assertion of ancient communal rights. Following the suppression of this movement, and of the Leveller current in general, Winstanley wrote the Law of Freedom in order to draw the lessons of the defeat. But it was a significant irony that while this work expressed the highpoint of communist theory at the time, it was dedicated to none other than Oliver Cromwell, who only three years before, in 1649, had crushed the Leveller revolt by force of arms in order to safeguard bourgeois property and order. Seeing no homogeneous force able to bring about the revolution from below, Winstanley was reduced to the vain hope of a revolution from above.
A very similar pattern appeared in the great French revolution: in the ebb tide of the movement there emerged an extreme left wing which expressed its dissatisfaction with the purely political freedoms allegedly enshrined in the new constitution, since they above all favored the freedom of capital to exploit the propertyless majority. The ‘Babeuvist' current expressed the efforts of the emerging urban proletariat, which had made so many sacrifices for the bourgeoisie I s revolution, to strike out in favor of its own class interests, and thus it ineluctably arrived at the demand for communism. In the Manifesto of the Equals it proclaimed the perspective of a new and final revolution: "The French Revolution is but the forerunner of another revolution, far more grand, far more solemn, and which will be the last ... ".
On the theoretical level, the Equals were a more mature expression of the communist impulse than the True Levellers of a century and a half before. Not only were they almost completely free of the old religious terminology, they also groped towards a materialist conception of history as the history of class struggle. Perhaps more significantly, they recognized the inevitability of armed insurrection against the power of the ruling class: the ‘Conspiracy of the Equals' in 1796 was the concretization of this understanding. Basing themselves on the experiences of direct democracy which had developed in the Paris sections and the ‘Commune' of 93, they also envisaged a revolutionary state that went beyond conventional parliamentarism by imposing the principle of revocability on its elected officials.
And yet, once again, the immaturity of the material conditions could not help but find their expression in the political immaturity of the Babeuvist ‘party'. Since the proletariat of Paris had not yet clearly emerged as a distinct force among the ‘sans culottes', the urban poor in general, the Babeuvists themselves were unclear about who the revolutionary subject could be: the Manifesto of the Equals was addressed not to the proletariat, but to the ‘People of France'. Lacking any clear vision of the revolutionary subject, the Babeuvist view of insurrection and revolutionary dictatorship was essentially elitist: a select few would seize power on behalf of the form- less masses, and would subsequently hold onto the power until these masses were truly able to .govern themselves (views of this kind were to persist in the workers' movement for some decades after the French revolution, above all in the Blanquist tendency which was organically descended from Babeuvism, particularly through the person of Buonarroti).
But the immaturity of Babeuvism was expressed not only in the means it advocated (which in any case ended in the total fiasco of the 1796 putsch), but also in the crudeness of its conception of communist society. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Marx lambasted the heirs of Babeuf as expressions of this "crude and thoughtless communism"; which is "only the culmination of this envy and of this level- ling-down proceeding from the preconceived minimum ... How little this annulment of private property is really an appropriation is in fact proved by the abstract negation of the entire world of culture and civilization, the regression to the unnatural simplicity of the poor and undemanding man who has not only failed to go beyond private property, but has not even reached it" (from the chapter ‘Private Property and Communism'). Marx even went so far as to say that this crude communism would really be a continuation of capital- ism: "The community is only a community of labor, and of equality of wages paid out by communal capital - the com- munity as the universal capitalist."[4] Marx was quite justified in attacking Babeuf s heirs whose views were by now quite obsolete, but the original problem was an objective one. At the end of the 18th century France was still largely an agricultural society and the communists of the day could not easily have seen the possibility of a society of abundance. Hence their communism could only be "ascetic, denouncing all the pleasures of life, Spartan" (Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific), a mere "leveling down proceeding from the preconceived minimum". It was another irony of history that it took the immense deprivations of the industrial revolution to awaken the exploited class to the possibility of a society in which sensuous enjoyment would replace Spartan self-denial.
The retreat of the great revolutionary tide at the end of the 1790s, the incapacity of the proletariat to act as an independent political force, did not mean that the virus of communism had been eradicated. It took on a new form - that of the Utopian Socialists. The Utopians - Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen and others - were far less insurrectionary, far less related to the revolutionary struggle of the masses than the Babeuvists had been. At first sight they could therefore look like a step backwards. It is true that they were the characteristic product of a period of reaction, and represented a flight away from the world of political combat. Nevertheless Marx
and Engels always recognized their debt to the Utopians, and considered them to have made. Significant advances over the ‘crude communism' of the Equals, above all in their criticisms of capitalist civilization and their elaboration of a possible communist alternative:
"These Socialist and Communist publications contain' also a critical element. They attack every principle of existing society. Hence they are full of the most valuable material for the enlightenment of the working class. The practical measures proposed in them - such as the abolition of the distinction between town and country, of the family, of the carrying on of industries for the account of private individuals, and of the wage system, the proclamation of social harmony, the conversion of the functions of the state into a mere superintendence of production, all these proposals point solely to the disappearance of class antagonisms which were, at that time, only just cropping ‘up, and which, in these publications, are recognized in their earliest and undejiite4 forms only" (Communist Manifesto, section on ‘Critical-Utopian Socialism and Communism').
In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific Engels goes into more detail about the specific contributions of the main Utopian thinkers: Saint-Simon is credited with recognizing the French revolution as a class war, and with foretelling the complete absorption of politics by economics, and thus the eventual abolition of the state. Fourier is presented as a brilliant critic and satirist of bourgeois hypocrisy, misery and alienation, and with having made masterly use of the dialectical method to uncover the principal stages of historical development. We might add that with Fourier in particular there is a definite rupture with the ascetic communism of the Equals, above all in his profound concern to replace alienated labor with joyful, creative activity. Engels' brief biography of Robert Owen focuses on his more practical, Anglo-Saxon search for an alternative to capitalist exploitation, whether in the ‘ideal' cotton mills at New Lanark or in his various experiments in cooperative and communal living. But Engels also recognizes Owen's bravery in breaking away from his own class and throwing in his lot with the proletariat; his later efforts to set up a grand trade union for all the workers of England marked a step beyond benevolent philanthropy in favor of participating in the proletariat's earliest attempts to find its own class identity and organization.
But in the final analysis, what applied to the earlier stirrings of proletarian communism applied in equal measure to the Utopians: the crudeness of their theories was the result of the crude conditions of capitalist production in which they emerged. Unable to see the social and economic contradictions that would ultimately lead to the downfall of capitalist exploitation, they could only envisage the new society coming about as the result of plans and inventions hatched in their own brains. Unable to recognize the revolutionary potential of the working class, they "consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society even that of the most favored. Hence they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see in. it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society. Hence, they reject all political and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social gospel" (Communist Manifesto, op cit).
Thus the Utopians ended up not only building castles in the air, but also preaching class collaboration and social pacifism. And what was understandable given the immaturity of the objective conditions in the first decades of the 19th century was no longer forgivable when the Communist Manifesto was being written. By this time, the descendants of Utopianism constituted a major obstacle to the development of the scientific communism embodied in the Marx-Engels fraction of the Communist League.
In the next article in this series we will examine the emergence and maturation of the marxist vision of communist society and of the road that leads to it. CDW.
[1] See for example the editorial to International Review 67, ‘It's not communism that's collapsing but the chaos of capitalism that's accelerating'; the article ‘Stalinism is the negation of communism' in World Revolution no. 148 and Revolution Internationale 205); and the Manifesto of the 9th Congress of the ICC: ‘Communist revolution or the destruction of humanity'.
[2] Today these ideologies are most often the characteristic expression of the decomposing petty bourgeoisie, in particular of anarchist currents disillusioned not only with the working class, but with the whole of history since the dawn if civilization, and seeking solace in a projecting the myth of the lost paradise onto the first human communities. Typical examples are the American paper The Fifth Estate and Freddy Perlman's book Against Leviathan. Against His-story. An irony often lost on these elements is that once you investigate the beliefs of the primitive peoples themselves, it be- comes clear that they too had their ‘lost paradise' buried in a far-past mythic age. If we take such myths to reflect an unresolved desire to transcend the boundaries of alienation, then it is obvious that primitive man also experienced a form of alienation, a conclusion consistent with the marxist view of these societies.
[3] The conservative nature of these revolts was reinforced by the fact that in all the class societies that preceded capitalism, vestiges of the old primordial communal bonds remained in existence to a greater or lesser extent. This meant that the revolts of the exploited classes were always heavily influenced by a desire to defend and preserve traditional communal rights that had been usurped by the extension of private property.
[4] In this critique of Babouvism, we can see that Marx already emphasized that capitalism was not just based on individual private property, since he talked about "collective capital". We can thus measure how far his conception of communism has nothing to do with the greatest lie of the 20th century, which tells us that state capitalism in the USSR was ‘communist' simply because the private bourgeoisie had been expropriated.
Towards the greatest chaos in history
Will the gigantic convulsions provoked by the collapse of the eastern bloc and the break-up of the USSR open up a more peaceful period? Faced with the threat of chaos, will the ferocity of relations between capitalist powers be attenuated? Is the constitution of new imperialist blocs still possible? What new contradictions will arise from capitalist decomposition at the level of world imperialism?
Rivalries between the powers aren't disappearing, they are being exacerbated
While the world has indeed been profoundly modified since the collapse of the western bloc, the barbaric laws which keep this moribund system going are still present. And, as capitalism sinks further and further into decomposition their destructive character, the threat they pose to the very survival of humanity, grow more and more pronounced. The scourge of war, that monstrous but natural offspring of imperialism, is still there and will continue to be there; the plague of chaos, which has already plunged the populations of the ‘third world' into an unspeakable hell, is now ravaging the whole of eastern Europe.
In fact, behind the pacifist proclamations of the great imperialist powers of the now-defunct American bloc, behind the masks of respectability and good intentions they all wear, relations between states are in fact regulated by gangster law. Like any bunch of thugs, it all comes ·down to nabbing the other's strip of territory, getting together to rid themselves of a rival whose claws are too sharp, figuring out ways of escaping the clutches of a boss who's become too powerful. These are the real questions which are the subject for ‘debate' between the bourgeoisies of these great ‘civilized' and 'democratic' countries.
"Imperialism is not the creation of . one country or one group of countries. It is the product of the world-wide evolution of capitalism ... an innately international phenomenon ... from which no state can hold aloof," (Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet).
When capitalism entered its decadent epoch, imperialism dominated the entire planet, it became "the means of survival of every nation, large or small, " (ICC Platform). It's not a policy ‘chosen' by the bourgeoisie, or this or that fraction of the bourgeoisie. It's an absolute necessity imposed upon them all.
This is why the collapse of the eastern bloc, and the resulting disappearance of the western bloc, in no way signifies the' end of the reign of imperialism. The end of the division of the world into' the ‘blocs' which arose after World War Two has on the contrary unleashed a whole series of new imperialist tensions, of local wars, sharpening the rivalries be- tween the great powers formerly disciplined by the western bloc.
Rivalries within the blocs themselves always existed, and sometimes broke out openly: for example between Turkey and Greece, both members of NATO, over Cyprus in 1974. However, these rivalries were kept under the firm control of the bloc. Once the iron corset of the bloc has gone, these tensions, held in for so long, can only be exacerbated.
American capital faced with the new appetite of its vassals
For decades, the submission of Europe and Japan to the US was the price paid for the military protection Washington provided against the ‘Soviet' threat. Since this threat has now disappeared, Europe and Japan no longer have the same interest in following American diktats. The tendency towards ‘every man for himself has been unchained.
This is what we saw very clearly in the autumn of 1990, when Germany, Japan and France tried to prevent the out- break of a war which could only reinforce American superiority[1]. The USA, by forcing the war through, by obliging Germany and Japan to pay up and by compelling France to take part in it, won a clear victory. For all this provided proof of the weakness of those who might be tempted to dispute America's domination. It demonstrated the US's vast military superiority, making it plain that no state, however economically powerful, could hope to rival it on the military level.
The ‘Desert Shield' and ‘Desert Storm' operations of sinister memory, a war imposed and taken to its logical conclusion by Bush and his team, by momentarily halting the rush towards ‘every man for himself amongst the central countries, had the essential aim of preventing and counter-acting the potential reconstitution of a rival bloc, of maintaining the USA as the sole super-power. "However, this immediate success of American policy is not a durable factor stabilizing the world situation to the extent that it could arrest the very causes of the chaos into which society is sinking. If the other powers have had to reign in their ambitions, their basic antagonism with the United States has not disappeared: ~ what is shown by the latent hostility that countries like France and Germany expresses vis a vis the American projects for the re-utilization of the structures of NATO in-the framework of a ‘rapid reaction force', commanded, as if by chance, by the only reliable ally of the US: Britain," (lR 67, ‘Resolution on the International Situation', 9th ICC Congress).
The subsequent evolution of the situation has fully confirmed this analysis. Deteriorating relations between the states of the European Community, and particularly France and Germany one the one hand, and the USA on the other - whether it's about the future of NATO and ‘European Defense' or the Yugoslav crisis - is an illustration of the limits of the blow struck by the Gulf war against the tendency to- wards ‘every man for himself among the main capitalist powers.
Today, challenging the present imperialist status quo, which has always been imposed by force, necessarily means confronting the world's leading power, the USA, which is the main beneficiary of this status quo. And since the ex- USSR no longer has the means to compete in the front ranks of the imperialist arena, the biggest imperialist tensions are now between the ‘victors of the Cold War' themselves, ie: between the central states of the now-defunct Western bloc[2].
But in the imperialist battle-ground, the disappearance of one system of blocs organically engenders a tendency to- wards the constitution of new blocs, since each state need allies in the struggle to assert itself on a global scale. Indeed, blocs are "the classic structure used by the main states in the period of decadence to ‘organize' their armed confrontations," ('Resolution on the International Situation', ibid).
Towards new blocs?
The present growth of imperialist tensions contains the tendency towards the constitution of new blocs, one of which would have to be directed against the USA. However, the interest in forming such a bloc varies considerably according to the states.
Who?
As far as Britain is concerned, it has no such interest, since it has decided on an unbreakable alliance with the USA[3].
For a whole series of countries like, for example, Holland and Denmark, there is the fear of being virtually absorbed if they allied with a German super-power in Europe, which would be facilitated by the economic links which already exist and by their geographical and linguistic proximity. Following the old principle of military strategy, which recommends that you shouldn't ally yourself with a too-powerful neighbor, they have very little interest in challenging American domination.
For a more important, but still middle-ranking power like France, contesting American leadership and participating in a new bloc isn't a very obvious option, because in order to do . this, it would have to follow German policies, whereas for France, German imperialism is the most immediate and dangerous rival, as the two world wars have shown.
Caught between the German anvil and the American hammer, France's imperialist policies can only oscillate between the two. However, like the mode of production which it reflects, imperialism is not a rational phenomenon. France, even though it has a lot to lose and though its potential gains are looking increasingly hazardous, is for the moment tend- ing to play the German card, opposing American domination vis-a-vis NATO and through the formation of a Franco-German brigade. This however doesn't exclude future changes of direction.
On the other hand, things are a lot clearer for first-rank: powers like Germany and Japan. For them, finding an imperialist rung in conformity with their economic strength can only mean disputing the world domination exerted by the USA. Moreover, only these two states have the potential means to play a world role.
But the chances of one or the other becoming leaders of a bloc opposed to the USA are not the same.
We shouldn't underestimate the strength and ambition of Japanese imperialism. It is also coming back to the imperialist arena. Evidence of this can be found in the plan to modify the constitution in order to permit Japanese troops to be sent abroad, the considerable strengthening of its navy, its determination to recoup the Kuile Islands, or some unambiguous declarations by Japanese officials (eg "it's time that Japan freed itself from its links with the USA,' T Kunugi, ex-Joint Secretary of the UN, quoted in Liberation 27.9. 91).
But Japan is very far away from the world's main industrial concentration, ie Europe, which remains the main focus for imperialist rivalries. At this level, it can't really rival Germany. Japanese imperialism is thus trying to extend its influence and increase its elbow room without too openly challenging the US muscle-man.
Germany, on the other hand, because of its central situation in Europe and its economic power, is being obliged more and more to oppose American policies, and now finds itself at the center of imperialist tensions, as can be seen from its reticence towards the US plans for NATO, its aim to set up an embryonic ‘European Defense Force', and above all, its attitude over Yugoslavia.
German capital stirs the pot in Yugoslavia
German imperialism has played the role of stirring the pot in Yugoslavia by supporting the secessionist demands of the Slovenians and above all the Croats, as can be seen from Germany's repeated intention to unilaterally recognize Croatian independence. Historically, the Yugoslav state was cobbled together to counter Germany's imperialist expansion and deny it access to the Mediterranean[4]. We can thus see why Croatian independence could open a whole new era for the German bourgeoisie and why the latter has been doing its best to profit from it. Given its close links with the leaders in Zagreb, Germany was hoping that, in case of independence, it would be able to use the precious Croatian ports in the Adriatic. It could thus have realized a vital strategic objective: access to the Mediterranean. This is why Germany, with the aid of Austria[5], has been stoking the fires by openly or covertly supporting Croatian secessionism, which could only accelerate the dislocation of Yugoslavia.
The US thwarts Germany
Conscious of what's at stake here, the American bourgeoisie, despite its apparent discretion, has done everything it could to block this attempted thrust by German imperialism, calling on the aid of Britain and Holland. Its Trojan Horse inside the EC, Britain, has systematically opposed any sending of a European military intervention force. The Serbian Stalinist military apparatus, which has signed and violated any number of cease-fires organized by the powerless, whinging EC, has been able to wage a methodical war of conquest in Croatia, tinder the consenting silence of the US.
It's already clear that Germany has failed in Yugoslavia; the divisions and impotence of the EC are equally clear. This failure shows all the strong points of the world's leading power in its fight to preserve its hegemony, and underlines the enormous difficulties German imperialism will have in disputing this hegemony.
However, this does not mean that there will be a return to some kind of stability in Yugoslavia, because the dynamic unleashed there will condemn the country to sink: further and further into a Lebanese type of situation. Nor does it mean that from now on, Germany Will submit tamely to all the diktats of Uncle Sam. German imperialism has lost a battle but it can't stop trying to undermine the USA's hegemony. This can be seen from its decision to set up an armed unit in collaboration with France, a clear expression of its intention to gain more autonomy from NATO and thus the USA.Chaos is holding back the constitution of new blocs
While it is necessary to recognize that there is already a tendency towards the constitution of new imperialist blocs, a process within which Germany occupies[6], and will. More and more occupy, a central place, it is not possible to assert that this tendency can really reach its conclusion. Because of decomposition, it comes up against a series of particularly significant obstacles and contradictions - most of them without precedent.
First of all, and this is a fundamental difference with the situation that preceded the First and Second World Wars, Germany does not have the military strength to match its imperialist ambitions. It is almost defenseless in the face of the formidable American superpower[7]. In order to develop the necessary muscle, it would take time, a minimum of 10 to 15 years, and the USA is doing everything it can to prevent Germany from developing in this direction. But there's also the fact that, in order to install the war economy required for such a rearmament, the German bourgeoisie would have to get the proletariat to submit to a real militarization of labor. And it could only do this by inflicting a total defeat on the working class. For the moment, however, the conditions for such a defeat are lacking. Even if we stop there, it's obvious that the obstacles are quite considerable.
But there's another equally essential factor which is acting against the evolution towards the reconstitution of a ‘bloc' under German leadership: the chaos that is now invading a growing number of countries. Not only does this make it more difficult to obtain the discipline needed to set up a ‘bloc' of imperialist alliances, but also the German bourgeoisie, like all the bourgeoisies of the most developed countries, is afraid of the advance of chaos - all the more so because of its geographic position. It's this fear, combined with the pressure exerted by the USA, which ensured that despite all its reservations the German bourgeoisie finally sup- ported Bush in the Gulf War, as did Japan and France.
Despite its desire to escape American ‘protection' the Ger- man bourgeoisie knows that for the moment only the US has the capacity to put some kind of block on the advance of chaos.
None of the great imperialist powers has any interest in the spread of chaos: the massive arrival of immigrants, immigrants who can hardly be integrated into production at a time when there are already massive lay-offs going on; the uncontrolled spread of armaments, including enormous stocks of atomic weapons; the risk of major industrial catastrophes, in particular nuclear ones, and so on. All this can only destabilize the states exposed to it, and make the management of their national capital even more difficult. If the system's rotting on its feet is, in present conditions, profoundly negative for the entire working class, it also threatens the bourgeoisie and the running of its system of exploitation.
In the front line of the most dangerous consequences of the collapse of the eastern bloc and the implosion of the USSR, Germany is, in part at least, forced to rally behind the in- junctions of the only power which can play the role of world cop: the USA.
Thus, in this period of decomposition, each national bourgeoisie of the most developed countries is faced with a new contradiction, in that it is compelled:The tendency towards the constitution of new imperialist blocs, which is built into the general tendency in imperialism towards confrontations between the biggest powers, is thus faced with a contradiction which means it will probably never reach its conclusion.
Even the ‘world cop', the USA, for whom the struggle against chaos is most completely and immediately identical to the struggle for the preservation of the current status quo, one in which it has a dominant position, can't escape from this dilemma. By unleashing the Gulf war, the USA wanted to make an example of its capacity to ‘maintain order' and so bring to heel anyone who might contest its world leadership. The result of this war has been even more instability in the region, from Turkey to Syria. In particular, we've seen the continuation of massacres of the Kurdish population, not only by the Iraqi army but also by the Turkish army!In Yugoslavia, the USA's implicit support for the Serbian camp has blocked Germany's push towards the Mediterranean, but it has also thrown oil on the fire, helping barbarism spread throughout Yugoslavian territory and destabilizing the entire ‘Balkans.' The only real resort of the ‘world cop' - militarism and war - inevitably aggravates the development of barbarism and pushes it to a point of paroxysm.
The dislocation of the USSR, because of its dimensions, its depth (Russia itself is now threatened with disintegration), is a major factor aggravating chaos on a world scale: the risk of the biggest population exodus in history, of major nuclear disasters ...[8]. Faced with such a cataclysm, the contradiction confronting the great powers can only be raised to the nth degree. On the one hand, there's a need for a minimum of unity faced with such a situation; on the other hand, the collapse of the former Soviet empire can only sharpen imperialist appetites.
Here again, Germany finds itself in a particularly delicate position. Eastern Europe, including Russia, is a traditional sphere of influence and expansion for German imperialism. Alliances and confrontations with Russia have always been at the nub of the history of German capitalism. History as well as geography is pushing German capital to extend its influence to the east, and it can't help trying to profit from the collapse of the eastern bloc and its leader. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it's obviously German capital which has had the greatest presence, both diplomatically and economically, in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and throughout the east, with the exception of Poland which, despite the economic links, is attempting to resist German influence for historical reasons.
But faced with the total dislocation of the USSR, the situation is becoming much more complex and difficult for Eu- rope's leading economic power. Germany may try to profit from the situation to defend its interests, it may in particular try to create a ‘Mittel Europa' a ‘Central Europe' under its influence, but the dislocation of the USSR and the collapse of all the eastern countries IS at the same time a more direct and dangerous threat to Germany than to any other country at the heart of the international capitalist system.
‘Unification' with the ex-GDR is already a heavy burden which is holding back the competitiveness of German capital and will more and more do so. The massive arrival of immigrants for whom Germany is the promised land, plus the nu- clear risks already mentioned, are provoking deep disquiet in the German ruling class.
Contrary to the situation in Yugoslavia which, despite its gravity, affects a country of no more than 22 million inhabitants, the situation in the ex-USSR makes the German bourgeoisie much more cautious.
This is why, while attempting to extend its influence, it is trying by all means at its disposal, to bring a minimum of stability to the situation, and for the moment is carefully avoiding throwing oil on the fire[9]. This is why it continues to be Gorbachev's strongest supporter and the main provider of economic aid to the ex-Empire. It has, in general, fol- lowed the USA's policies towards the ex-USSR. It could not but support the recent initiatives towards a ‘disarmament' of tactical nuclear weapons, since the aim of this was to help and compel the vestiges of central power in the USSR to get rid of weapons whose spread is a real sword of Damocles hanging not only over the ex-USSR, but also a good part of Europe[10].
The breadth of the dangers of chaos is forcing the most developed states to maintain a certain unity to try to deal with it, and for the moment none of them is playing the card of ‘the worse the better' in the ex-USSR. However, this unity is very temporary and limited. There's no way that the threat of chaos can allow the great powers to stifle their imperialist rivalries. This means that German capitalism cannot and will not renounce its imperialist appetites, any more than any other central power.
Even when confronted with the grave dangers brought about by the disintegration of the eastern bloc and the USSR, each imperialism will still try to defend its own interests as best it can. Thus, at the recent Bangkok summit on the subject of the economic aid to be given to the fallen leader of the ex-eastern bloc, all the governments present were aware of the necessity to strengthen this aid, in order to prevent the outbreak of catastrophes in the near future. But each one was also trying to ensure that this costs it as little as possible, and that it is the other, the rival, which hears the heaviest burden. The USA ‘generously' proposed to annul part of the Soviet debt, an offer firmly refused by Germany for the simple reason that it is already owed nearly 40 % of this debt itself!
This contradiction between the need of the major powers to hold back chaos, to limit its extension, and the equally vital need to defend their own imperialist interest, will reach a state of paroxysm the more what's left of the ex-USSR falls to pieces.
The tidal wave of chaos
Decomposition, by sharpening all the traits of decadence, in particular those of imperialism, has qualitatively overturned the world situation, especially at the level of inter-imperialist relations.
In a context of increasingly bloody barbarism, whose horror is more and more matched by its absurdity - an absurdity which reflects a mode of production which is totally obsolete from a historic point of view - the only future which the exploiting class can offer humanity is one marked by the greatest chaos in history.
The imperialist rivalries between the most developed states of the defunct western bloc are unfolding in the context of the generalized putrefaction of the capitalist system. Tensions between the ‘great democracies' can only sharpen, in particularly between the USA and the dominant power of the European continent, Germany. The fact that up till now this antagonism has been expressed in a covert manner does not lessen its reality.
Even if the most powerful national fractions of the world bourgeoisie have a common interest in the face of chaos, this community of interests can only be circumstantial and limited. It cannot eliminate the natural and organic tendency of imperialism towards sharpened competition, rivalry and military tensions. Today, this tendency participates to the hilt in . chaos and its aggravation. The imperialist free-for-all that the great powers are now involved in can only result in chaos advancing to the heart of Europe, as illustrated tragically by the barbaric war in Yugoslavia.
The oscillating and incoherent policies of the most solid states of the capitalist world will result in a growing instability of alliances. The latter will be more and more circumstantial and subject to all kins of changes of direction. Thus France, after to some extent playing the German card, could very easily play the American card tomorrow, and the day after start again. Germany, which has been supporting the ‘center' in Russia, could tomorrow choose the secessionist republics. The contradictory and incoherent character of the imperialist policies of the great powers expresses in the final analysis the tendency for the ruling class to lose control of a system ravaged by its advanced decadence, by its decomposition.
Putrefaction, the growing dislocation of the whole of society, this is the ‘radiant' perspective that this dying system offers humanity. This can only underline the extreme gravity of the present historic period, and the immense responsibility of the only class that can offer a real future: the proletariat. RN 18.11.91
[1] On the false unity between the industrialized countries during the Gulf war, see the editorial article in IR 64.
[2] See ‘The USSR in Pieces', IR 66: ‘Ex-USSR, it's not Communism that's collapsing' IR 67.
[3] On the respective attitudes of Britain and France vis a vis the USA, see ‘Report on the International Situation (Extracts)' in IR 67.
[4] See the article 'Bilan of 70 years of 'National Liberation" in this issue
[5] With their interminable oscillations, France and Italy have also contributed to this murderous destabilization.
[6] Germany is no more able than any other capitalist sate to escape the laws ruling all capitalist life in decadence. The problem faced by the push of German imperialism is not in itself the desire or will of the German bourgeoisie. No doubt this bourgeoisie, or at least some of it fractions, are concerned faced with this push, this plunge into the imperialist scramble. But whatever the concerns, the hesitations, it will be constrained (if only to prevent an adversary occupying its place) to more and more affirm its imperialist aims. This was the case with the Japanese bourgeoisie in 1940, where many of its fraction were reticent to enter the war. What counts is not the will but what the bourgeoisie is forced to do.
[7] Germany is still militarily occupied by the USA and in the main control over the German army's munitions is exerted by the American command. German troops have no autonomy beyond a few days. The Franco-German brigade has the aim of giving a greater autonomy to the German army.
[8] Recently the ‘Chechen' nationalists threatened to attack nuclear reactors; armored trains which may contain tactical nuclear weapons are circulating the frontiers of the USSR, outside of any control.
[9] See on the one hand the attitude to Germany towards the ‘Baltic' countries, and its ambitions to push for a ‘German republic of the Volga' and on the other hand its support to what remains of the ‘center' in the ex-USSR.
[10] This doesn't alter the fact that this 'disarmament' is a lie because it only aims to suppress weapons which have become obsolete and would in any case have had to be replaced by more modern and sophisticated ones.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1461/international-review-no68
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1462/quarter
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/066_natlib_01.html
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/068_natlib_02.html#_ftn1
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/068_natlib_02.html#_ftn2
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/068_natlib_02.html#_ftn3
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/068_natlib_02.html#_ftnref1
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/068_natlib_02.html#_ftnref2
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/068_natlib_02.html#_ftnref3
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/331/balance-sheet-70-years-national-liberation-struggles
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/massacres
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/ussr
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/yugoslavia
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1929/communism-and-19th-century-workers-movement
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1406/socialism
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1407/marxism
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1421/karl-marx
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1427/communism
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1446/social-class
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1447/bourgeoisie
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1448/society
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/32/decomposition
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism