This series has now reached the period that followed the death of Karl Marx in 1883; coincidentally, the bulk of the material that will be examined in the following two articles is located in the years between Marx’s death and the passing of Engels, which took place 100 years ago this year. The immensity of Marx’s contribution to the scientific understanding of communism has meant that a considerable part of this series has been devoted to the work of this one great figure in the workers’ movement. But just as Marx did not invent communism (see the second article in this series “How the proletariat won Marx to communism”, in International Review no.69), the communist movement did not cease elaborating and clarifying its historic goals once Marx had died. This task was taken on by the Social Democratic or Socialist parties which began to become a considerable force in the last two decades of the 19th century; Marx’s lifelong friend and comrade Engels naturally played a key role in the continuation of this work. As we shall see, he was not alone in this; but we can certainly offer Engels no more fitting tribute than to show the importance of his own share in defining the communist project of the working class.
There are many currents today who think that to claim the mantle of revolutionary communism means throwing off the garments of Social Democracy - disowning the whole period from Marx’s death until World War I (at least) as a kind of Dark Age, or an evolutionary blind alley in the road that leads from Marx to themselves. Councilists, modernists, anarcho-Bordigists like the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste and a host of other swamp-inhabiting sub-species insist that far from adding anything to our understanding of the communist revolution, the Socialist parties were no more than instruments for integrating the proletariat into bourgeois society. They “prove” this in the main by pointing to Social Democracy’s parliamentary and trade union activities, but at the same time they usually inform us that the very goal of these parties - the society which they most frequently referred to as “socialism” - was in reality no more than a form of state capitalism. In short, the parties which call themselves “socialist” today - Blair’s Labour party, Mitterand’s or Gonzales’ Socialist parties - are indeed the legitimate heirs of the Social Democratic parties of the 1880s, 90s and 1900s.
For some of these “anti-social-democratic” currents, authentic communism was only restored by the likes of Lenin and Luxemburg after World War I, the definitive death of the Second International and the betrayal of its parties. Others, more “radical”, have discovered that the Bolsheviks and the Spartacists were themselves no more than left social democrats: the first true revolutionaries of the 20th century were thus the left communists of the 20s and 30s. But since there is a direct line of continuity between the social democratic lefts (ie not only Lenin and Luxemburg, but also Pannekoek, Gorter, Bordiga and others) and the later communist left, our ultra-radicals often play safe by identifying none but themselves as the century’s first real communists. What’s more, this remorseless retrospective radicalism is applied to the precursors of Social Democracy as well: initially to Engels who, we are told, never really grasped Marx’s method and certainly became a bit of an old reformist in later life; then, not infrequently, the axe falls on Marx himself, with his tedious insistence on “bourgeois” notions like science, or historical progress and decline. By a strange coincidence, the final discovery is often this: that the true revolutionary tradition lies with the fiery insurrectionism of the Luddites or ... Mikhail Bakunin.
The ICC has already devoted an entire article to arguments of this type in International Review no.50, in our series in defence of the notion of capitalist decadence. We don’t intend to repeat all our counter-arguments here. Suffice it to say for now that the “method” behind such arguments is precisely that of ahistorical, idealist, moralising anarchism. For anarchism, consciousness is not seen as the product of a collective and historically evolving movement, so that the real lines of continuity and discontinuity in the real movement of the working class are of no interest to it. Thus, revolutionary ideas cease to be the product of a revolutionary class and its organisations, but become, in essence, the brainwave of brilliant individuals or circles of initiates. Hence the pathetic inability of the anti-social-democrats to see that today’s revolutionary groups and concepts have not sprung fully formed like Athene from the brow of Zeus, but are the organic descendants of a long process of gestation, of a whole series of struggles within the workers’ movement: the struggle to form the Communist League against the vestiges of utopianism and sectarianism; the struggle of the marxist tendency in the First International against “state socialism” on the one hand and anarchism on the other; the struggle to form the Second International on a marxist basis and the later struggle of the lefts to keep it on a marxist basis against the development of revisionism and centrism; the struggle of these same lefts to form the Third International after the death of the Second, and the struggle of the left fractions against the degeneration of the Communist International in the reflux of the post-war revolutionary wave; the struggle of these fractions to preserve communist principles and develop communist theory during the dark years of the counter-revolution; the struggle for the reappropriation of communist positions with the historical resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the 1960s. And indeed the central theme of this series has been that our very understanding of the means and goals of the communist revolution would not exist without these struggles.
But an understanding of what communist society is, and the means to reach it, cannot exist in a vacuum, in the heads of privileged individuals. It is developed and defended above all in the collective organisations of the working class: and the struggles listed above were nothing if not struggles for the revolutionary organisation, struggles for the party. The communist consciousness of the present would not exist without the chain of proletarian political organisations that connects us to the very beginnings of the workers’ movement.
For anarchists, by contrast, the struggle that connects them to the past is a struggle against the party, since anarchist ideology reflects the petty bourgeoisie’s despairing resistance against the precious organisational acquisitions of the working class. The marxist combat against the destructive actions of the Bakuninists in the First International took a heavy toll on the latter. But the fact that this combat was a historical, if not an immediate, success, was confirmed by the formation of the Social Democratic parties and the Second International on a more advanced basis than the International Workingmen’s Association. Whereas the latter was a heterogeneous collection of different political tendencies, the Socialist parties were explicitly founded on the basis of marxism; whereas the First International combined political tasks with those of the unitary organisations of the class, the parties of the Second International were quite distinct from the unitary organisations of the class of that time - the trade unions. All this is why, for all their criticisms of its programmatic weaknesses, the main Social Democratic party of the time, the German SPD, received the enthusiastic support of Marx and Engels.
We will not go further into the specific question of organisation here, although, precisely because it is so fundamental, such a sine qua non for any kind of revolutionary activity, it will inevitably reappear in the next phase of this study as it has in previous phases. Nor can we spend much time answering the arguments of the anti-social-democrats about the trade union and parliamentary questions, although we will be compelled to return to the latter in particular later on. The one thing that should be said here is that there is no common ground between the blanket condemnations of our ultra-radicals and the genuine criticisms that have to be made of the practises and theories of the Socialist parties. Whereas the latter come from inside the same movement, the former come from a totally divergent starting point. Thus, the anti-social-democrats will not listen to the marxist argument that trade union and parliamentary activities did have a sense for the working class last century, when capitalism was still in the ascendant and could still grant meaningful reforms, but lost this sense and became anti-working class in the period of decadence, when the proletarian revolution is on the historical agenda. This argument is rejected because the notion of decadence is rejected; the notion of decadence, in an increasing number of cases, is rejected, because it implies that capitalism was once ascendant; and this is rejected because it implies some concession to the notion of historical progress, which in the case of “consistent” anti-decadentists like the GCI or Wildcat, is an utterly bourgeois notion. But by now it has become clear that these hyper-ultra radicals have rejected any notion of historical materialism and have again lined up with the anarchists, for whom the social revolution has been possible for as long as there has been any suffering in the world.
The central aim of the next phase in this study, in order to maintain its continuity with the previous articles in the series, must be to show that the “society of the future” defined by the Socialist parties was indeed a communist society; that despite Marx’s death, the communist vision did not disappear or stagnate during this period, but advanced and deepened. It is only on this basis that we can examine the limitations of this vision and the weaknesses of these parties - particularly when it came to elaborating the “road to power”, the way the working class would arrive at the communist revolution.
In a previous article in this series (International Review no.78, “Communism against state socialism’), we saw that Marx and Engels were extremely critical of the programmatic bases of he SPD, formed in 1875 through the fusion of Bebel’s and Liebknecht’s marxist fraction with the Lassalean General Workers Association. Even the name of the new party irritated them: “Social Democratic” being a completely inadequate term for a party “whose economic programme is not just completely socialist, but directly communist, and whose final goal is the disappearance of the state, and thus also of democracy” (Engels, 1875). More significantly, Marx wrote his thorough-going Critique of the Gotha Programme to highlight the SPD’s shallow grasp of what the communist transformation actually entailed, showing that the German marxists had made altogether too many concessions to the Lassalean “state socialist” ideology. Engels did not water down these criticisms in later years. Indeed, his dissatisfaction with the SPD’s Erfurt Programme of 1891 prompted him to push through the publication of the Critique of the Gotha Programme. The latter had originally been “blocked” by Liebknecht, and Marx and Engels had not pursued the matter for fear of breaking the unity of the new party. But Engels obviously felt that the criticisms of the old programme were still relevant to the new one. We shall return to the question of the Erfurt programme later on, when we pay particular attention to the Social Democrats’ attitude to parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy.
Nevertheless, Engels’ writings on socialism in this period provide the clearest proof that, in the final analysis, the programme of Social Democracy was indeed “directly communist”. Engels’ most important theoretical work during this time was Anti-Dühring, first written in 1878 but revised, republished and translated several times during the 1880s and 90s. A section of the book was also published as a popular pamphlet in 1892, entitled Socialism: Utopian and Scientific; and this was without doubt one of the most widely read and influential marxist works of the day. And of course, Anti-Dühring was eminently a “party” text, since it was written in response to the grandiose claims of the German academic Dr Dühring that he had founded a complete “socialist system” far in advance of any hitherto existing theory of socialism, from the utopians to Marx himself. In particular, Marx and Engels had been concerned that “Dr Dühring openly proceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate party. It thus became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight out the struggle whether we liked it or not” (Introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, 1892). The first motivation of the text was thus to defend the unity of the party against the destructive effects of sectarianism. This led Engels to dwell at great length on Duhring’s pretentious “discoveries” in the fields of science, philosophy and history, defending the historical materialist method against Duhring’s new brew of stale idealism and vulgar materialism. At the same time, and particularly in the section that appeared as a separate pamphlet, Engels was also obliged to reaffirm a fundamental postulate of the Communist Manifesto: that socialist or communist ideas were not the invention of “would-be universal reformers” like professor Dühring, but were the product of a real historical movement, the movement of the proletariat. Dühring considered himself to be far above this prosaic movement of the masses; but in fact his “system” was an utter regression vis-à-vis the scientific socialism developed by Marx; indeed, even compared to utopians like Fourier, for whom Dühring had only disdain but who was greatly respected by Marx and Engels, Dühring was an intellectual dwarf.
Most pertinent to the context of this study is the fact that, against Duhring’s false vision of a “socialism” operating on the basis of commodity exchange, ie of the existing relations of production, Engels was led to reaffirm certain communist fundamentals, in particular:
- that capitalist commodity relations, once a factor of unprecedented material progress, could ultimately only lead bourgeois society into insoluble contradictions, crises and self-destruction: “the mode of production is in rebellion against the mode of exchange ... On the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to further direct these productive forces. On the other, these productive forces themselves, with increasing energy, press forward to the removal of the existing contradiction, to the abolition of their quality as capital, to the practical recognition of their character as social productive forces” (Anti-Dühring, Part III, Theoretical, Moscow edition, first printed in 1947, p327-8);
- that the take over of the means of production by the capitalist state was the bourgeoisie’s response to this situation, but not its solution. There could be no question of confusing this bourgeois statification with communist socialisation: “The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more it actually becomes the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head” (ibid, p330-1). Communists today are understandably fond of using this prophetic passage against all the modern varieties of state “socialism” - in fact, state capitalism - propagated today by those who claim to be the heirs of the 19th century workers’ movement - Labourites, Stalinists, Trotskyists, with their endless song and dance about the progressive nature of nationalisations and the need to “defend Clause 4” as the Labour Party’s socialist promise. Engels’ words show that clarity on this question existed in the workers movement a hundred years ago and more;
- that, against Duhring’s Prussian socialism where all citizens will be happy underneath a paternalistic state, the state has no place at all in a genuinely socialist society [1]: “As soon as there is no longer any social class to be held in subjection; as soon as class rule, and the individual struggle for existence based upon our present anarchy in production, with the collisions and excesses arising from these, are removed, nothing more remains to be repressed, and a special repressive force, a state, is no longer necessary. The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society - the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society [2] - this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then withers away of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It withers away” (ibid, p333);
- and, finally, against all attempts to manage the existing relations of production, socialism requires the abolition of commodity production: “With the seizing of the means of production by society, production of commodities is done away with, and, simultaneously, the mastery of the product over the producer. Anarchy in social production is replaced by plan-conforming, conscious organisation. The struggle for individual existence disappears. Then, for the first time man, in a certain sense, is finally marked off from the rest of the animal kingdom, and emerges from mere animal conditions of existence into really human ones. The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social organisation. The laws of his own social action, hitherto standing face to face with man as laws of nature foreign to, and dominating him, will then be used with full understanding, and so mastered by him. Man’s own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself. Only from that time will man himself, with full consciousness, make his own history - only from that time will the social causes set in movement by him have, in the main and in a constantly growing measure, the results intended by him. It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” (ibid, p335-6). In this exalted passage, Engels is clearly looking ahead to a very advanced stage of the communist future. But it certainly shows, against all those who try to drive a wedge between Marx and Engels, that the “General” shared the “Moor’s” conviction that the highest imaginable goal of communism is to cast off the scourge of alienation and begin a truly human life, where man’s social and creative powers no longer turn against him, but serve his true needs and desires.
But elsewhere in the same work, Engels returns from these “cosmic” reflections to a more earthly issue: the “ground principles of communist production and distribution” as the Dutch left was later to call them. After lambasting Duhring’s neo-Proudhonist fantasy of establishing “true value” and returning to the workers “the full value of what they produce”, Engels explains:
“From the moment when society enters into possession of the means of production and uses them in direct association for production, the labour of each individual, however varied its specifically useful character may be, becomes at the start and directly social labour. The quantity of social labour contained in a product need not then be established in a roundabout way; daily experience shows in a direct way how much of it is required on the average. Society can simply calculate how many hours of labour are contained in a steam engine, a bushel of wheat of the last harvest, or a hundred square yards of cloth of a certain quality. It could therefore never occur to it still to express the quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and in their absolute amounts, in a third product, in a measure which, besides, is only relative, fluctuating, inadequate, though formerly unavoidable for lack of a better, rather than express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time....Hence, on the assumptions we made above, society will not assign values to products. It will not express the simple fact that the hundred square yards of cloth have required for their production, say, a thousand hours of labour in the oblique and meaningless way, stating that they have the value of a thousand hours of labour. It is true that even then it will still be necessary for society to know how much labour each article of consumption requires for its production. It will have to arrange its plan of production in accordance with its means of production, which include, in particular, its labour power. The useful effects of the various articles of consumption, compared with one another and with the quantities of labour required for their production, will in the end determine the plan. People will be able to manage everything very simply, without the intervention of much-vaunted “value’” (ibid, “Distribution”, p 367)
This was Engels’ conception of socialist or communist society; but it was not his personal property. His position expressed all that was best in the Social Democratic parties, even if the latter contained elements and currents who did not see things so clearly.
To demonstrate that Engels’ views were not some individual exception, but the patrimony of a collective movement, we intend to examine the positions taken up by other figures in this movement who showed a particular preoccupation with the shape of the future society. And we do not think it accidental that the period we are considering is unusually rich in reflections about what a communist society might look like. We should recall that the 1880s and 1890s were the “swan song” of bourgeois society, the zenith of its imperial glory, the last phase of capitalist optimism before the darkling years that led up to the first world war. A period of tremendous economic and colonial conquests in which the last “uncivilised” areas of the globe were being opened up by the imperialist giants; a period too of rapid technological progress which saw the massive development of electricity, the coming of the telephone, the automobile and much else besides. It was a period in which painting pictures of the future became a stock in trade for numerous writers, scientists, historians ... and not a few out and out hucksters [3]. Although this dizzying bourgeois “progress” fascinated and turned the heads of many elements in the socialist movement, giving rise to the illusions of revisionism, the clearest elements in the movement, as we shall see shortly, were not taken in: they could see the storm clouds gathering in the distance. But while they did not lose their conviction that the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism would still be a necessity, they did begin to envisage the immense possibilities contained in the productive forces that capitalism had developed. They thus began to inquire into how these potentialities might be realised by socialist society in a more detailed manner than Marx or Engels had ever attempted - to the point indeed, where much of their work has been dismissed as “utopian”. This is a charge that we will consider carefully, but we can state forthwith that, even if there is some truth to the charge, it does not render all these reflections useless to us.
To be more specific, we intend to concentrate on three major figures in the socialist movement: August Bebel, William Morris, and Karl Kautsky. The latter we will look at in a future article, not at all because he is a lesser figure, but because his most important work was written in a slightly later period; and because he, more than the other two, raises the question of the means towards the social revolution. The first two, on the other hand, can be looked at mainly from the angle of determining how the late 19th century socialists defined the ultimate goals of their movement
The choice of these two is by no means arbitrary. Bebel, as we have seen, was a founding member of the SPD, a close associate of Marx and Engels for many years, and a figure of considerable authority in the international socialist movement. His best known political work, Woman and Socialism (first published in 1883, but substantially revised and developed over the next two decades) became one of the most influential documents of the workers’ movement in the late 19th century, not only because it dealt with the woman question, but above all because it contains a clear exposition of how things might operate in a socialist society, in all the main areas of life: not only the relation between the sexes, but also in the areas of work, of education, of the relationship between town and country ... Bebel’s book was an inspiration for hundreds of thousands of class conscious workers, eager to learn and to discuss how life could be lived in a truly human society. It is thus a very precise yardstick for measuring the Social Democratic movement’s understanding of its goals during this period.
William Morris is a far less well-known figure outside of Britain, but we still think it important to include some of his contributions on the question. A very “English” socialist, some marxists have been made wary of him by the fact that he is probably known more widely not as a socialist but as an artist and designer, as a poet and writer of heroic romances; Engels himself tended to dismiss him as a “sentimental socialist” and no doubt many comrades have, like Engels, been put off his book News from Nowhere (1890) not only because it approaches the question of communist society in the form of a “dream journey” to the future, but also by the tinge of mediaevalist nostalgia which hangs over this and much of his other work. But if William Morris began his criticism of bourgeois civilisation form the point of view of an artist, he became a genuine disciple of marxism and gave the whole of his later life to the cause of the class war and to the building a of a socialist organisation in Britain; and it was on this basis that he was able to develop a particularly strong insight into the alienation of labour under capitalism, and was able to make a real contribution to showing how this alienation might be overcome.
In the next article in this series, we will examine in greater depth the portraits of socialist society painted by Engels, Bebel and Morris, in particular the points they make about the more “social” aspects of the revolutionary transformation, such as the relations between men and women, and humanity’s interaction with the natural environment. But before doing that, it is necessary to add further proof that these mouthpieces of Social Democracy understood the fundamental characteristics of communist society, and that this understanding was in all essential features in accord with that of Marx and Engels.
The basic trick of the anti-social-democrats in their argument that social democracy was an instrument of capitalist recuperation from the start is to identify the Socialist parties with the reformist currents which arose within them. But these currents arose not as their organic product, but as a parasitic growth, nurtured by the noxious fumes of the surrounding bourgeois society. It is well known, for example, that the first thing the revisionist Bernstein “revised” was the marxist theory of crisis. Theorising the long period of capitalist “prosperity” at the end of the last century, revisionism declared crises to be a thing of the past and thus opened the door to the prospect of a gradual and peaceful transition to socialism. Later on in the history of the SPD, some of the former defenders of marxist “orthodoxy” on such questions, such as Kautsky, and Bebel himself, were indeed to make all kinds of concessions to these reformist perspectives. But at the time when Woman and Socialism was being written, this is what Bebel was saying: “the future of bourgeois society is threatened from all sides with grave dangers, and there is no way to escape them. Thus the crisis becomes permanent and international. It is a result of all the markets being overstocked with goods. And yet, still more could be produced; but the large majority of people suffer want in the necessaries of life because they have no income wherewith to satisfy their wants by purchase. They lack clothing, underwear, furniture, homes, food for the body and mind, and means of enjoyment, all of which they could consume in large quantities. But all that does not exist for them. Hundreds of thousands of workingmen are even thrown upon the sidewalk, and rendered wholly unable to consume because their labour power has become “superfluous” to the capitalists. Is it not obvious that our social system suffers of serious aliments? How could there be any “overproduction” when there is no lack of capacity to consume, ie of wants that crave satisfaction? Obviously, it is not production, in and of itself, that breeds these unhallowed conditions and contradictions: it is the system under which production is carried on, and the product is distributed” (Woman and Socialism, chapter VI, p252 of the 1904 English edition, reprinted as a Schocken paperback in 1971).
Far from repudiating the notion of capitalist crisis, Bebel here reaffirms that it is rooted in the basic contradictions of the system itself; furthermore, by introducing the concept of a “permanent” crisis, Bebel anticipates the onset of the historic decline of the system. And, like Engels who, shortly before his death, expressed his fears that the growth of militarism was dragging Europe towards a devastating war, Bebel also saw that the economic downfall of the system must bring about a military disaster:
“The political and military state of Europe has taken a development that cannot but end in a catastrophe, which will drag capitalist society down to its ruin. Having reached the height of its development, it produces conditions that end with rendering its own existence impossible; it digs its own grave; it slays itself with the identical means that itself, as the most revolutionary of all previous social systems, has called into life” (ibid, p 238).
It is precisely capitalism’s course towards catastrophe that makes the revolutionary overthrow of the system an absolute necessity:
“Accordingly, we suppose the arrival of a day when all the evils described will have reached such maturity that they will have become oppressingly sensible to the feeling as to the sight of the vast majority, to the extent of no longer being bearable; whereupon a general irresistible desire for radical change will seize society, and then the quickest will be regarded as the most effective remedy” (ibid, p 271).
Bebel also echoes Engels in making it clear that the statification of the economy by the existing regime is not the answer to the crisis of the system, still less a step towards socialism:
“ ... these institutions (telegraph, railway, post office, etc), administered by the state, are not socialist institutions, as they are mistakenly taken for. They are business plants that are exploited as capitalistically as if they were in private hands ... the socialist guards against allowing the present state ownership being regarded as socialism, as the realisation of socialist aspirations” (ibid, chap VII, p299).
William Morris wrote many diatribes against the encroaching tendencies towards “state socialism”, which in Britain were represented in particular by the reformist Fabian Society of Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, HG Wells and others. And News from Nowhere was written as a riposte to Edward Bellamy’s novel Looking Backward, which also purported to describe a socialist future, but one which came about quite pacifically, as the huge capitalist trusts evolved into “socialist” bodies; not surprisingly, this was a “socialism” where every detail of the individual’s life was planned by an omnipotent bureaucracy; in News from Nowhere, by contrast, the great revolution (set in 1952 ...) came about as the workers’ reaction against a long period of “state socialism”, when the latter was no longer able to stave off the contradictions of the system.
Against the apostles of “state socialism”, Bebel and Morris affirmed the basic tenet of marxism that socialism is a society without a state:
“The state is, accordingly, the inevitably necessary organisation of a social order that rests upon class rule. The moment class antagonisms fall through the abolition of private property, the state loses both the necessity and possibility for its existence...” (Woman and Socialism, chap VII, p 273). The old state machine, for Bebel, was to be replaced by a system of popular self-administration obviously modelled upon the Paris Commune:
“As in primitive society, all members of the community who are of age participate in the elections, without distinction of sex, and have a voice in the choice of persons who are to be entrusted with the administration. At the head of all the local administrations stands the central administration - as will be noted, not a Government, with power to rule, but an executive college of administrative functions. Whether the central administration shall be chosen directly by popular vote or appointed by the local administration is immaterial. These questions will not then have the importance they have today; the question is the no longer one of filling posts that bestow special honour, or that vest the incumbent with greater power and influence, or that yield larger incomes; it is then a question of filling positions of trust, for which the fittest, whether male or female, are taken; and these may be recalled or re-elected as circumstances may demand, or the electors may deem preferable. All posts are for given terms. The incumbents are, accordingly, clothed with no special “official qualities’; the feature of continuity of office is absent, likewise a hierarchical order of promotion” (ibid, p276). Similarly, in News from Nowhere, Morris envisions a society operating from a basis of local assemblies where all debate has the aim of achieving unanimity, but which uses the principle of majority rule where this cannot be reached. All this was diametrically opposed to the paternalistic conceptions of the Fabians and other “state socialists”, who, in their dotage, were horrified by the direct democracy of the October 1917 revolution, but found Stalin’s way of doing things quite to their taste: “we have seen the future, and it works”, as the Webbs put it after their trip to a Russia where the counter-revolution had done its work on all that troublesome “rule from below” nonsense.
Equally in accord with Engels’ definition of the new society, both Morris and Bebel affirm that socialism means the end of commodity production. Much of the humour in News from Nowhere consists in the visitor from the bad old days getting used to a society where neither goods nor labour have any “value”. Bebel puts it as follows: “Socialist society produces not “merchandise” in order to “buy” and to “sell’; it produces necessaries of life, that are used, consumed, and otherwise have no object. In socialist society, accordingly, the capacity to consume is not bounded, as in bourgeois society, by the individual’s capacity to buy; it is bounded by the collective capacity to produce. If labour and instruments of labour are in existence, all wants can be satisfied; the social capacity to consume is bounded only by the satisfaction of the consumers” (Woman and Socialism, chap VII, p 291).
And Bebel goes on to say that “there being no “merchandise” in socialist society, neither can there be any “money””(ibid); elsewhere, he talks about the system of labour time vouchers as a medium of distribution. This expresses a definite weakness in the way that Bebel presents the future society, making little or no distinction between the fully developed communist society and the transitional period towards it: for Marx, (and also for Morris, cf his notes to the Socialist League Manifesto, 1885), labour time vouchers were simply a transitional form towards completely free distribution, and carried certain of the scars of bourgeois society with them (see “Communism against state socialism”, International Review no.78). The full significance of this theoretical weakness will be examined in another article. What is important here is to establish that the Social Democratic movement was basically clear about its overall goals, even if the means to attain them often caused it much deeper problems.
In “Communism against state socialism” we noted that, in certain passages, even Marx and Engels made concessions to the idea that communism could, at least for a while, exist within the boundaries of a nation state. But such confusions were not hardened into a theory of “national” socialism; the overwhelming thrust of their thought is towards demonstrating that both the proletarian revolution itself, and the construction of communism, are only possible on an international scale.
The same can be said for the Socialist parties in the period we are considering. Even though a party like the SPD was weakened from the start by a programme which made far too many concessions in the direction of a “national” road to socialism, and even though such conceptions were to be theorised, with fatal consequences, as the Socialist parties became a more “respectable” part of national political life, the writings of Bebel and Morris are informed by an essentially international, and internationalist, vision of socialism:
“The new social system will then rear itself upon an international basis. The peoples will fraternise; they will reach one another the hand, and they will endeavour to gradually extend the new conditions over all the races of the earth” (Woman and Socialism, “Internationality”, p 352).
The Manifesto of Morris’ Socialist League, written in 1885, introduces the organisation as “advocating the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism; that is we seek a change in the basis of society - a change which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities” (published in EP Thompson, William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary, 1955). The Manifesto goes on to stress that “complete Revolutionary Socialism ... can never happen in any one country without the help of the workers of all civilisation. For us neither geographical boundaries, political history, race nor creed makes rivals or enemies; for us there are no nations, but only varied masses of workers and friends, whose mutual sympathies are checked or perverted by groups of masters and fleecers whose interest it is to stir up rivalries and hatreds between the dwellers in different lands”.
In an article published in The Commonweal, the League’s paper, in 1887, Morris links this international perspective with the question of production for use; in socialist society “all civilised [4] nations would form one great community, agreeing together as to the kind and amount of production and distribution needed; working at such and such production where it could be best produced; avoiding waste by all means. Please to think of the amount of waste which they would avoid, how much such a revolution would add to the wealth of the world!” (“How we live and how we might live”, republished in The Political Writings of William Morris, Lawrence and Wishart, 1973). Production for use can only be established when the world market has been replaced by a global community. It is possible to find passages where all the great socialist militants “forget” this. But these lapses did not express the real dynamic of their thought.
Furthermore, this international vision was not restricted to the distant revolutionary future; as can be seen from the passage from the Socialist League Manifesto, the vision also demanded an active opposition to the bourgeoisie’s present-day efforts to stir up national rivalries between workers. It demanded above all a concrete and intransigent attitude to inter-capitalist war.
For Marx and Engels, the internationalist position taken up by Bebel and Liebknecht during the Franco-Prussian war was the proof of their socialist credentials and convinced them of the need to persevere with the German comrades for all their theoretical shortcomings. Similarly, one of the reasons why Engels originally supported the group that was to form the Socialist League in their split with Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation in 1884 was the former’s principled opposition to Hyndman’s “Jingo socialism”, which approved of British imperialism’s colonial conquests and massacres under the pretext that they were bringing civilisation to the “barbarous” and “savage” peoples. And as the threat grew that the great imperialist powers would soon be fighting each other directly, Morris and the League took a clear internationalist position on the question of war:
“If war really becomes imminent our duties as socialists are clear enough, and do not differ from those we have to act on ordinarily. To further the spread of international feeling between the workers by all means possible; to point out to our own workmen that foreign competition and rivalry, or commercial war, culminating at last in open war, are necessities of the plundering classes, and that the race and commercial quarrels of these classes only concern us so far as we can use them as opportunities for fostering discontent and revolution; that the interests of the workmen are the same in all countries and they can never really be enemies of each other; that the men of our labouring classes, therefore, should turn a deaf ear to the recruiting sergeant, and refuse to allow themselves to be dressed up in red and taught to form a part of the modern killing machine for the honour and glory of a country in which they have only a dog’s share of many kicks and few halfpence - all this we have to preach always, though in the event of imminent war we may have to preach it more emphatically” (Commonweal, January 1, 1887, cited in EP Thompson, p 684).
There is no continuity whatever between such a declaration and the outpourings of the social-chauvinists who, in 1914, themselves became the recruiting sergeants of the bourgeoisie. Between one and the other there is a class rupture, a betrayal of the working class and its communist mission, which had been defended for three decades by the Socialist parties and the Second International.
CDW
[1] Engels makes little or no distinction between “socialism” or “communism” in this work, even if the latter, owing to its more proletarian and insurrectionary connotations, had generally been Marx’s and Engels’ preferred term for the future classless society. It was above all Stalinism which, picking on this or that phrase in the work of previous revolutionaries, was most concerned to make a hard and fast distinction between socialism and communism, since it had to be able to prove that a society dominated by an all-powerful bureaucracy and functioning on the basis of wage labour was indeed “socialism” or “the lower stage of communism”. And in fact the Stalinist hack who introduces the 1971 Moscow edition of The Society of the Future, a pamphlet drawn from the concluding sections of Bebel’s Woman and Socialism, is very anxious to criticise Bebel for calling his stateless, moneyless future society “socialism”. It’s also worth pointing out that an “anti-social democratic” group like Radical Chains also drives a wedge between socialism and communism: the latter is the real thing; the former accurately defines the programme of Stalinism, 20th century social democracy and the leftists. Radical Chains kindly informs us that this socialism has “failed”. This formulation thus saves Radical Chains’ fundamentally Trotskyist view that Stalinism and other forms of totalitarian state capitalism are not really capitalist at all. For all its criticisms of this horrible “socialism”, Radical Chains is still handcuffed to it.
[2] Here we should repeat the qualification made when we cited this passage in International Review no.78: “Engels is doubtless referring here to the post-revolutionary state formed after the destruction of the old bourgeois state. The experience of the Russian revolution, however, has led the revolutionary movement to question even this formulation: ownership of the means of production even by the “Commune state” does not lead to the disappearance of the state, and can even contribute to its reinforcement and perpetuation. But Engels could not have had the benefit of such hindsight of course”.
[3] This was a period in which the future, above all the future as both apparently and genuinely revealed by science, had a powerful gravitational pull. In the literary sphere, these years saw a rapid development of the “science fiction” genre (HG Wells being the most significant example).
[4] The use of the word “civilised” in this context reflects the fact that there were still areas of the globe that capitalism had only just begun to penetrate. It did not have any chauvinist connotations of superiority over indigenous peoples. We have already noted that Morris was a relentless critic of colonial oppression. And in his footnotes to the Manifesto of the Socialist League, written along with Belfort Bax, he demonstrates a clear grasp of the marxist historical dialectic, explaining that future communist society is the return to “a point which represents the older principle elevated to a higher plane” - the older principle being that of primitive communism (cited in Thompson, p739). See “Communism of the past and future” in International Review no.81 for a further elaboration of this theme.
To listen to the media, you would think that reason had triumphed at last: the action of the great powers, led by the United States, has made it possible to begin the resolution of the bloodiest conflict Europe has seen since 1945. The Dayton accord means the return of peace in ex- Yugoslavia. Similarly, optimism is uppermost in the Middle East, where Rabin's assassination has only strengthened the determination of the "doves" and their American mentor to take the "peace process" to its conclusion. And Washington's final Christmas present has been the hope of overcoming the oldest conflict in Europe, between the British state and the Republicans in Northern Ireland.
These are cynical lies. When they hear them, workers would do well to remember what the bourgeoisie was promising in 1989, after the collapse of the Eastern bloc: a "new world order", and a "new era of peace". We know what really happened: the Gulf War, the war in Yugoslavia, in Somalia, Rwanda, etc. Today, even less than five years ago, is no era of peace but of an unrestrained war of all against all that characterizes the relations between the planet's major imperialist powers.
The great imperialist powers are not, as the bourgeoisie's hired media hacks present them, "doves of peace" or firemen struggling to put out the fires of war. On the contrary, from Yugoslavia to Rwanda, via Algeria and the Middle East, they are the worst of the warmongers. Through the medium of client cliques or countries, they are waging a war which is no less ferocious for being partly hidden. The famous Dayton accords are only a moment in the war between the world's greatest power and its ex-allies of the defunct American bloc.
Behind the Dayton accords, the success of an American counter-offensive
The imposition of the Dayton accords, and the 30,000 heavily armed troops sent to ex-Yugoslavia, are aimed not at the Serbs or Croats, but at the United States' one-time European allies, who have become the main opponents of its world supremacy: France, Britain, and Germany, The USA's aim is not peace, but the reimposition of its own domination. In the same way, if the French, British and German bourgeoisies are sending their own contingents to ex-Yugoslavia, this is not to impose peace on the warring parties there or to defend the martyred population of Sarajevo, but to defend their own imperialist interests. Under cover of humanitarian action and the so-called peace forces of UNPROFOR, Paris, London and Bonn (the latter more discreetly, but with formidable efficacy) have not ceased to stir up the war by encouraging the action of their proteges. Under the aegis of NATO, I-For (the Implementation Force) will continue the same criminal activity, as we can see from the numbers of men and equipment that have been committed. The territory of ex-Yugoslavia will continue to be the main battle-field for the great imperialist powers in Europe.
The Americans' determination to dominate the situation in ex-Yugoslavia is as great as the strategic stakes involved in this country, placed at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East. But more important still, as Clinton has emphasized in speeches justifying the dispatch of US troops, and with the support of the whole American bourgeoisie, is "the assertion of American world leadership". And so that nobody should be in any doubt as to Washington's determination to reach its objective, he stated explicitly that he would "accept entire responsibility for any losses that might be suffered by American soldiers". This openly warlike language, and the firmness which contrasts so sharply with the American bourgeoisie's previous hesitations over ex-Yugoslavia, is explained by the extent of the opposition to US domination by Japan, Germany, and France, but also - a historic change - by its oldest and most faithful ally, Great Britain. Reduced to the role of a mere challenger in ex-Yugoslavia, the USA had to strike a strong blow to put a stop to the most serious contestation of its world superiority since 1945.
We have dealt in detail in International Review no.83 with the strategy set in motion in ex-Yugoslavia; we will not return to it here, but will consider the results of the prime world power's counter-offensive. This has been largely successful. Until now, the British and French bourgeoisie's have occupied the terrain almost alone, which gave them a wide margin of maneuver against their imperialist rivals, and culminated in the creation of the RRF (Rapid Reaction Force). Now that the UN has been pushed aside, to make way for an I-For under the aegis of NATO and so under direct American command, they will have to "coexist" with a powerful American contingent, and will have to submit, willy-nilly, to the dictates of Washington. Even the Dayton negotiations were completely circumscribed by the balance of forces that the Americans imposed on their European "allies". "According to a French source, these negotiations took place in an "intolerable" euro-american atmosphere. According to this source, these three weeks have been nothing but a series of vexations and humiliations inflicted on the Europeans by the Americans, who wanted to lead the dance alone" (Le Monde, 29th November, 1995). In Dayton, the famous "contact group" dominated by the Anglo-French couple was reduced to playing a bit part, and essentially had to accede to the conditions dictated by the USA:
- relegation of the UN to the status of mere observer, with the disappearance of UNPROFOR, the precious tool of French and British imperialist interests, and its replacement by the I-For, dominated and commanded by the Americans;
- the dissolution of the RRF;
- American delivery of weapons and training to the Bosnian army.
As for the French attempts to use the Russians' resistance to the American steamroller, by proposing to put the Russian I-For troops under their own control, thus trying to make a dent in the Russo-American alliance, they were a pitiful failure; in the end, the Russian contingent was placed under American command. Washington hammered the point home by emphasizing that the real negotiations were taking place in Dayton, and that the conference planned for December in Paris was nothing but a sounding-board for decisions taken in the United States ... and by them.
Thanks above all to their military power, and to the fact that might is the only right in the jungle of imperialism, the world's greatest power has not only spectacularly succeeded in re-establishing itself in ex-Yugoslavia; it has also dealt a serious blow to the pretentions of all those who dared to contest its domination, and in particular to the Anglo-French duo. The shock has been all the harder for the French and British bourgeoisies, because with their presence in ex-Yugoslavia, they were defending their status as top rank Mediterranean powers, and hence as powers which, though secondary and in decline, nonetheless intend to continue playing a role on the world stage. The reinforcement of the American presence in the Mediterranean directly threatens their imperialist rank. This vast American counter-offensive is aimed above all at punishing the British and French troublemakers.
Germany is also affected by this strategy. What is at stake for Germany is essentially access, through ex-Yugoslavia, to the Mediterranean and the Middle East. Thanks to the victories of its Croat clients, it had begun to achieve this objective. The American presence can only hinder it by limiting its room for maneuver. The fact that Hungary, a country which is tied to Germany, should agree to serve as a base for the American troops can only be a direct threat to the interests of German imperialism. This confirms that the alliance between Germany and America in the spring of 1995 was only temporary. The USA used Germany, via the Croats, to re-establish their position. Once the objective was reached, there was no longer any question of giving a free hand to their most dangerous rival, the only one of the great powers with the ability, eventually, to become the leader of a new imperialist bloc.
The United States have thus given a clear demonstration of who is in charge in the strategically vital Mediterranean region. They have dealt a heavy blow to all their rivals in imperialist banditry, right where the decisive conflicts are played out: in Europe. But this reminder of American determination to use its military strength is also part of a worldwide counter-offensive: for the US, the problem of defending its supremacy against the threat of unbridled self-interest, and the slow rise in power of German imperialism is posed worldwide. In the Middle East, from Iran to Iraq, by way of Syria the USA has increased its pressure to impose the pax americana, isolating and destabilising states which refuse Washington's dictates, and are open to the siren songs of Europe or Japan. It is trying to evict French imperialism from its African hunting grounds. It encourages the action of the Islamic fractions in Algeria, and does not hesitate an instant to use a weapon that until recently was reserved for the poor: terrorism[1]. The USA is certainly not unconnected with the disorder in Ivory Coast and Senegal, and just as Paris is trying to stabilize its relations with the new regime in Rwanda, the immediate result of the inexhaustible Jimmy Carter's latest mission has been a degradation in the relations between Paris and Kigali. In Asia, confronted with a Japan increasingly unwilling to put up with US domination - illustrated by the massive demonstrations against the US bases in Okinawa - and with a China that has every intention of profiting from the end of the blocs to assert its own imperialist pretentions, even when these go against America's, the US has alternated carrot and stick to keep control of all those that contest its domination. It has, for example, succeeded in imposing on Japan the continued presence of its military bases.
But the clearest demonstration of the American bourgeoisie's determination to punish "traitors", and re-establish its position, is undoubtedly Clinton's trip to Ireland. By imposing negotiations with the Irish nationalists on the British bourgeoisie, and by openly showing his sympathies with Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, Clinton is giving Britain a clear message, which basically boils down to the following: "if you don toe the line, and return to a complete loyalty to your American friend, then not even your own territory will be safe from our reprisals". This journey, then, was designed to apply a strong pressure to its British ex-ally, at the same level as the importance of the historic break within the 20th century's oldest and most solid imperialist alliance. However, the very fact that the Americans should be obliged to use such methods to bring what used to be their closest ally back into their orbit shows that despite its undoubted successes, there are limits to the American counter-offensive.
The limits to the counter-offensive
As the diplomats recognize themselves, the Dayton accords have settled none of the fundamental questions, either as to the future of a Bosnia divided into two, or even three parts, or as to the basic antagonism between Belgrade and Zaghreb. This "peace" is thus nothing other than a heavily armed truce, above all because the agreement imposed by Washington is only a moment in the balance of forces between the USA and the other great imperialist powers. For the moment, the balance of forces is clearly in favor of the United States, which has forced its rivals to give way; but the US has still only won the battle, not the war. The slow erosion of its world domination has been halted, but only for the moment.
No imperialism can hope to rival the world's greatest power on the strictly military terrain; this gives the latter a formidable advantage against its opponents, and considerably restricts their margin of maneuver. But the laws of imperialism force them, if only to remain in the imperialist arena, to continue to try by every means to free themselves from American tutelage. Since it is difficult for them to oppose the US directly, they have recourse to more indirect strategies.
France and Britain have thus been forced to accept the eviction of UNPROFOR and the RRF from ex-Yugoslavia, and their replacement with I-For, but the fact that they are taking part in the latter, with forces which, combined, are more numerous that the US contingent, does not in the least mean that they will docilely accept the orders of the American commander. With this kind of force, the Franco-British duo is giving itself the means to defend its imperialist prerogatives, and to counter Washington's activity at the first opportunity. The sabotage will be easier than during the Gulf War, first because of the nature of the terrain, second and most important because this time London and Paris are in the same camp opposing American policy, and lastly because the US contingent is much less imposing than during the "Desert Storm" operation. If France and Britain have increased still further their military presence in ex-Yugoslavia, it is to keep intact their ability to damage the USA and to put as many spanners in its works as possible, while preserving the means to counter the advance of German imperialism in the region.
Equally significant of this indirect strategy is the French bourgeoisie's noisy concern for the Serb districts of Sarajevo, with Chirac's letter to Clinton on the subject, and the support shown for Serb nationalist demonstrations by the French UNPROFOR officers stationed in Sarajevo. Faced with a firm reaction from Washington, Paris retreated, and pretended that this was only clumsiness on the part of a general who has since been relieved of his command, but the contest has only been put off for later. Another example is the successful French operation with the Algerian elections and the comfortable re-election of the French bourgeoisie's man, the sinister Zeroual. Paris' maneuvers around the so-called "failed meeting" between Chirac and Zeroual in New York, allowed France to take up the American demand for "free elections" in Algeria, and the US was thus unable to contest the results of such a well-attended election.
The recent French decision to rejoin NATO, with a permanent presence of its army chief of staff, is another illustration of the same strategy. Knowing that it cannot confront the American bourgeoisie head-on, the French bourgeoisie is doing the same within a US-dominated NATO, as the British are doing in a European Union dominated by Germany: joining in order to counter its policy.
The Euro-Mediterranean summit in Barcelona had also seen France hunting in an American preserve. On the one hand, it has strengthened Europe's ties with the main protagonists of the Middle-Eastern conflict, Syria and Israel, after the US had reduced Europe to the status of mere observer of the "peace process". On the other hand, France has opposed the destabilizing maneuvers directed against it in the Maghreb, by an attempt to coordinate security policy against Islamic terrorism. The results of this summit may have been limited, but their importance should not be underestimated, just as the Americans are strengthening their presence in the Mediterranean, and doing their utmost to impose the pax americana in the Middle East.
But the clearest expression of the US counter -offensive's limitations is the continuation, and even the reinforcement, of the Franco-British alliance. This has developed in recent months on issues as crucial as military cooperation, ex-Yugoslavia, and the coordination of the struggle against Islamic terrorism. After noisily supporting the renewal of French nuclear testing, the British bourgeoisie has directly opposed Washington by agreeing to help France in the struggle against an Islamic terrorism which is largely remote controlled from Washington, thereby emphasizing the extent of its estrangement with the US bourgeoisie.
All this illustrates the scale of the obstacles barring the way to a reassertion of US hegemony. The US can score points against its adversaries, and achieve some spectacular successes, but it cannot build a new order around itself on anything like the scale existing at the time of the American bloc. The disappearance of the two imperialist blocs that dominated the planet for forty years has put an end to the nuclear blackmail that allowed the two leaders to impose their dictates on their respective blocs, and has liberated unbridled self-interest, which has now become the dominant tendency in imperialist relationships. Whenever the US puffs itself up and makes a display of its military superiority, its rivals retreat, but the retreat is only tactical and temporary and in no way represents allegiance and submission. The more the USA tries to reassert its imperialist domination, brutally reminding its rivals who is the strongest, the more determined become the opponents of American order to put it in question, since for them it is a matter of life or death, of their ability to keep their rank in the imperialist arena.
This explains why the US success during the Gulf War has been so ephemeral, and why it was so quickly followed by the contestation of American authority at the world level - the divorce between Britain and the US being the most striking illustration. The operation being mounted by the US in ex-Yugoslavia is only a shadow of the deployment against Iraq, and the important points scored by the US since summer 1995 cannot fundamentally reverse the tendency to a historic weakening of its world supremacy, despite its military superiority.
"Every man for himself" and the instability of imperialist alliances
The unbridled self-interest which increasingly characterizes imperialist relationships lies at the root of the weakening of the American super-power, but it is not alone in suffering the consequences. Every imperialist alliance has been affected, including the most solid. The USA cannot resuscitate an alliance completely under its control, but its German rival, its most dangerous competitor and the only one that can hope one day to lead its own bloc, suffers from the same problem. Germany has scored a number or points on the imperialist scene: in ex-Yugoslavia, it has come closer to its goal of access to the Mediterranean and the Middle East via Croatia; it is solidly installed in Eastern Europe; in Africa, it has not hesitated to stir up trouble in the French sphere of influence; it is trying to develop its positions in the Far East, and in the Middle East where it is an influence to be reckoned with; not forgetting Latin America. Everywhere, German imperialism tends to assert itself as a conquering power against a United States on the defensive, and against the "second raters", France and Britain. Germany uses its economic strength to the hilt, but more and more it is also making discreet use of its military strength. The arsenal of conventional weapons recovered from East Germany has made Germany the world's second arms exporter, far ahead of Britain and France combined. Since 1945, the German army has never played such an important role as now. This advance corresponds to the embryonic tendency towards the formation of a German bloc, but the more German imperialism reveals its power, the more obstacles emerge against this tendency. The more Germany flexes its muscles, the more its most faithful and solid ally, France, takes its distance with its too powerful neighbor. One dispute after another has emerged between the two states: the question of ex-Yugoslavia, the renewal of French nuclear tests - essentially directed against Germany - the future of Europe. By contrast, excellent relations are being established between France and Germany's old and irreconcilable enemy, Great Britain. We should not be deceived by the proliferation of meetings between Chirac and Kohl, and the soothing declarations that follow them: these are more a sign of the degradation of Franco-German relations than of their good health. Within the framework of "every man for himself", the overall political, geographical, and historical factors tend towards a cooling of the Franco-German alliance. This was forged during the Cold War, within the framework of the Western bloc, and on the French side was seen as a way of countering the activity of the USA's Trojan horse in Europe, Great Britain. With the death of the Western bloc and the cooling of relations between the British bourgeoisie and its American mentor, these two factors have disappeared. Frightened by the power of its neighbor, which has defeated it in three wars since 1870, France is being pushed into a rapprochement with Britain, both to resist the pressure from the USA and to protect itself against an over-powerful Germany. France and Britain, the two declining imperialist powers, are trying to pool what is left of their military power to defend themselves against both Washington and Bonn. This is the root of the solidity of the Paris-London axis in ex-Yugoslavia, especially since neither of these Mediterranean powers can see their status diminished by a German advance and an increased American presence.
Given the close and long-standing relations between France and Germany, it is impossible abruptly to cut all the ties between them, especially on the economic level. But the Franco-German alliance looks more and more like a mere memory and this seriously hinders the formation of a future imperialist bloc
around Germany.
The development of unbridled self-interest engendered by the decomposition of the capitalist system, undermines the most solid of imperialist alliances: between Britain and the USA, or between France and Germany, albeit the latter did not have same solidity or age. This does not mean that there will be no more imperialist alliances. Alliances are vital to the survival of any imperialism. But henceforth, they will be less stable, more fragile, more prone to being broken. Some will be relatively solid, like the present Franco-British alliance, but this cannot be compared to the solidity of the almost century-long alliance between London and Washington, or even of that between Paris and Bonn since World War II. Others will be purely circumstantial, like that in the spring of 1995 between Germany and the USA. Still others will have a variable geometry, with one power on one question, with another on a different one.
The result will be a still more dangerous and unstable world, where the war of each against all of the great imperialist powers will bring in its wake ever more war, destruction and suffering for the vast mass of humanity. The use of brute force, on the same lines as the so-called civilized states in ex-Yugoslavia, cannot but intensify. As a new open recession of world capitalism pushes the bourgeoisie to rain new and terrible blows on the proletariat, workers must remember that capitalism is not just poverty, but also war and its train of awful barbarism, which only their struggle can bring to an end.
RN, 11th December 1995
[1] It would not be at all surprising if the USA were involved at some level in the wave of bomb attacks in France since summer 1995.
In the first part of this article (International Review No.81) we endeavoured to reclaim the real historical revolutionary experience of the working class in China. The Shanghai proletariat’s heroic attempted insurrection of 21st March 1927 was both the culmination of the spontaneous movement of the working class begun in 1919 in China, and the last glimmer of the international revolutionary wave that had shaken the capitalist world since 1917.
However, the combined forces of capitalist reaction - the Kuomintang, the “war lords”, the great imperialist powers, relying on the complicity of the Executive of the rapidly degenerating IIIrd International - completely defeated this movement.
The events that took place after this had nothing at all to do with the proletarian revolution. What official historians call the “Chinese popular revolution” was, in reality, an unbridled succession of struggles for control of the country between antagonistic bourgeois fractions, behind whom were always to be found one or other of the great powers. China was converted into one of the “hottest” regions of the imperialist confrontations that came to a head in World War II.
The year 1928, distinguished by the official historians as decisive in the life of the Communist Party of China, was the year of the creation of the “Red Army” and the beginning of the “New Strategy” based on the mobilisation of the peasants, the so-called foundations of the “popular revolution”. And, indeed, this was a decisive year for the CPC, although not in the sense the official historians mean. In fact, the year 1928 marked the liquidation of the Communist Party of China as an instrument of the working class. Understanding this event constitutes the point of departure for understanding subsequent events in China.
On the one hand, with the defeat of the proletariat, the party was broken up and decimated. As we have already mentioned, around 25,000 communist militants were killed and many thousands more persecuted by the Kuomintang. The militants constituted the cream of the revolutionary proletariat of the great cities, who, due to a lack of council type organisations, had regrouped inside the party during the previous years. From now on, not only would no new generation of workers be integrated into the party, but its social composition would be as radically changed - as we will see below - as its political principles.
The liquidation of the party was not only physical but, above all, political. The period of the most ferocious persecution against the communist party coincided with the unstoppable rise of Stalinism in the USSR and in the International. These simultaneous events dramatically accelerated the opportunism which had been inculcated in the CPC for many years by the Executive of the International, until it turned into a process of rapid degeneration. Thus, between August and December the party lead a series of reckless, desperate and chaotic uprisings, this “Autumn Revolt” also included: an uprising by thousands of peasants in certain regions which had fallen under the control of the party, a mutiny of nationalist troops in Nanchang (in which some communists were active); and finally, the so-called Canton “insurrection” - 11/14th December, which in reality was a “planned” attempted assault, which was not supported by the whole of the proletariat of the city and ended in yet another blood-bath. All of these actions ended in disastrous defeats at the hands of the forces of the Kuomintang, accelerating the dispersion and demoralisation of the Communist Party, and they marked the crushing of the last revolutionary impulses of the working class.
These reckless uprisings had been instigated by the elements that Stalin had placed at the head of the PCP, whose objective was to justify Stalin’s thesis about the “promotion of the Chinese revolution”. Later these failures were used to expel his opponents.
The year 1928 marked the triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution. The 9th Plenum of the International accepted the “rejection of Trotskyism” as a condition for adhesion and , finally, the 6th Congress of the International adopted the infamous theory of “Socialism in one country”, in other words the definitive abandonment of proletarian internationalism, which marked the death of the International as an organisation of the working class. In this context, the 6th Congress of the CPC, also held in the USSR, took the decision to prepare a team of young leaders who unconditionally supported Stalin, beginning, the “official” Stalinisation of the party, in other words, its transformation into a different party, an instrument of ascendant Russian imperialism. This team of so-called “returned students” were to take over the leadership of the party two years later, in 1930.
Stalinism was not the only road that the CPC took towards degeneration. The defeat of the series of adventures in the second half of 1927 had also lead to the flight of some participating groups towards regions where the governmental forces found access difficult. These groups began to unite into broader military detachments. One of these was that of Mao Tsetung.
It should be noted, that from his earliest years as a militant, Mao Tsetung had not given much proof of proletarian intransigence. As a representative of the opportunist wing, he had held an administrative post of secondary importance during the period of the alliance with the Kuomintang. When this broke up he fled to his native region of Hunan, where following the Stalinist dictates, he set about leading the “the Autumn peasants’ revolt”. The disastrous end of this adventure obliged him, along with hundreds of peasants, to withdraw even further, until they reached the massive mountain range of Chingkang. There, in order to establish himself, he made a pact with the bandits that controlled the area, whose methods of assault he learnt. Finally, his group fused with the remnants of a detachment of the Kuomintang under the command of the officer Chu Et, which had fled to the mountains after the failed uprising at Nanchang.
According to the official historians, Mao’s group was at the origins of the so-called “Red Army” or “People’s Army” and the “Red bases” (regions controlled by the CPC). Mao is supposed to have finally “discovered” the “correct strategy” for the Chinese revolution, according to this account. In reality, Mao’s detachment was one amongst many others in dozens of different regions. All of them began a policy of recruiting the peasants, offensives and the occupation of certain regions, which led to the resistance to the Kuomintang’s attacks for some years, until 1934. What is important to remember here is the ideological and political fusion between the opportunist wing of the CPC with parts of the Kuomintang (the party of the bourgeoisie), including mercenaries provided by gangs of déclassé peasants. In fact, the geographic displacement which took place in this historic scenario, from the cities to the countryside, did not correspond merely to a change in strategy, but clearly marked the change of the class character that took place in the Communist Party.
The Maoist historians tell us that the “Red Army” was a peasant army guided by the proletariat. In reality, it was not the working class which headed this army, but militants of the CPC almost all of them from petty-bourgeois backgrounds.These elements had never made the historical perspective of the class struggle completely theirs (a perspective that was definitively abandoned with the defeat of the revolutionary wave). Mixed in with these elements were embittered officials of the Kuomintang. Some years later, this mixture was further consolidated, by a new displacement of professors, university students, nationalists and liberals towards the countryside: these were to form the cadre of “educators” of the peasants during the war against Japan.
Socially, the Communist Party of China was thus converted into the representative of layers of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeoisie displaced by the prevailing conditions in China: intellectuals, professionals and career soldiers, who could find no place, either with the local governments which could only submit to the nobles, nor in Chiang Kai-Shek’s closed and monopolistic central government.
Consequently, the ideology of the leaders of the “Red Army” became a mixture of Stalinism and Sun Yat-Senism. A language full of pseudo-Marxist phrases about the “proletariat” hardly covered the increasingly openly declared aim of establishing another equally bourgeois, although “democratic”, government (with the support of a “friendly government”), opposed to the “dictatorship” of Chiang Kai-Shek. In the real world of capitalist decadence this meant completely immersing the new CPC and its “Red Army” in imperialist struggles.
One thing is certain however: that the ranks of the “Red Army” were basically formed by poor peasants. This fact (along with the party continuing to call itself “Communist”) is to be found at the base of the creation of the myth of the “Chinese popular revolution”.
From the middle of the 1920’s there already existed in the CPC a theorisation, especially amongst those with the least confidence in the working class, that attributed to the Chinese peasantry the character of being an especially revolutionary class. One could read, for example, that “the great peasant masses have risen up in order to complete their historic mission: breaking down of the rural feudal forces”.[1] [6] In other words, they considered the peasants as an historic class, capable of realising certain revolutionary aims independently of other classes. With the political degeneration of the CPC, these theorisations went even further, attributing to the Chinese peasantry the capacity to substitute itself for the proletariat in the revolutionary struggle![2] [7]
By pointing to the history of peasant rebellions in China, they claimed to demonstrate the existence of a revolutionary “tradition” (however, they do not talk about “consciousness”) amongst the Chinese peasantry. In reality, what this history demonstrates is precisely that the Chinese peasantry have lacked a viable revolutionary historic project of their own, as has been the case for the peasants in the rest of the world, and as Marxism has demonstrated time and time again. In the ascendant period of capitalism, in the majority of cases, they opened the way for the bourgeois revolution, but in the decadent period of capitalism the poor peasants can only carry out a revolutionary struggle if they adhere to the revolutionary aims of the working class, since otherwise they are turned into a tool of the ruling class.
Thus, the Taiping rebellion (the “purest” and most important movement of the Chinese peasantry, which exploded in 1850 against the Manchu dynasty and which was totally crushed by 1864) already demonstrated the limits of the peasant struggle. The Taiping wanted to install the reign of the gods on earth, a society without individual private property, in which an authentic monarch, truly the son of the gods, would dispose of all the riches of the community. That is to say, a recognition that private property was the cause of their ills. However, this didn’t lead to a viable project for a future society, but only a return to a utopia of an idyllic lost dynasty. During the initial years the European powers left the Taiping alone because they destabilised the dynasty and the rebellion spread throughout the reign, but the peasants were incapable of forming a central government and administering the land. The movement reached its culminating point in 1856 with the failure to take Peking the imperial capital and, finally, it began to be extinguished through massive repression in which the great capitalist powers collaborated. In this way, the Taiping rebellion weakened the Manchu dynasty, only in order to open the doors to the imperialist expansion of Great Britain, France and Russia. The peasantry did the bidding of the bourgeoisie.[3] [8]
Decades later, in 1898, a new, less widespread, revolt broke out, that of the Yi Ho-tuan (Boxers). Initially it was against the dynasty and foreigners. However, this revolt marked the decomposition of the independent peasant movements, since the Empress gained control of it and used it in her own war against the foreigners. With the disintegration of the dynasty and the fragmentation of China at the beginning of the century, an increasing number from among the floating mass of poor and landless peasants began to enrol in the professional armies of the regional “Warlords”. Finally, the traditional secret societies for the protection of the peasants were transformed into Mafiosi in the service of the capitalists, who used them in the cities to control the labour force and to act as strike-breakers.
It is true that the theorisations about the revolutionary character of the peasantry found a justification in the effective re-animation of the peasant movement, above all in Southern China. Nevertheless, these theorisations passed over the fact that it was the revolution in the great cities that had provoked this reanimation and that any hope of emancipation for the peasantry only could come from the victorious revolution of the urban proletariat.
But the formation of the Chinese “Red Army” had nothing to do with the proletariat nor with the revolution. Nor did it have anything, as we have said, to do with the formation of revolutionary militias in periods of insurrection. It is certain that the terrible living conditions the peasants suffered pushed them to joined the “Red Army” in the hope of winning and defending their land, but these were the same reasons that caused other peasants to join the armies of the warlords that infested China at the time.
In fact the “Red Army”’s leaders had to issue orders prohibiting the looting of conquered regions. For the proletariat, the “Red Army” was something totally alien, as was shown in 1930, when it took the important city of Changsha and was only able to hold the city for a few days, due fundamentally to the indifferent, if not hostile, reception it received from the workers of the city, who refused the call to support it through a new “insurrection”.
The difference between the traditional “warlords” and the leaders of the “Red Army”, was that the new “warlords”, had already established themselves within the social structure of China and were visibly part of the ruling class, while the second had to struggle just to open up the way into it. This allowed them to feed the hopes of the peasants and it also conferred a more dynamic and aggressive character on them, a more clever and flexible disposition in order to make alliances and to sell themselves to the highest imperialist bidder.
In short, the defeat of the working class in 1927 did not catapult the peasants to the head of the revolution but, on the contrary, left them to be tossed about in the storms of the nationalist and imperialist struggles. In these struggles the peasants served only as cannon fodder.
With the defeat of the working class, the Kuomintang, for a while, was turned into the most powerful institution in China, the only one capable of guaranteeing the unity of the country -combating and forming alliances with the regional “warlords”- and, therefore, was converted into the focus of disputes between the imperialist powers.
We have already mentioned, in the first part of this article, how from 1911, the great imperialist powers were to be found behind the struggle to form the national government. At the beginning of the 1930’s the relations of force between them had been modified in various ways.
On the one hand, the Stalinist counter-revolution initiated a new Russian imperialist policy. The “defence of the Socialist fatherland” of the USSR signified the creation of a zone of influence around it, which would also serve as a protective buffer at the same time. In China’s case, this became support for the “Red bases” formed from 1928 onwards - for which Stalin did not see a great future - and above all the search for an alliance with the Kuomintang government.
On the other hand, the United States, which was increasingly becoming an aspirant for the exclusive domination of all the regions bordering the Pacific Ocean, was replacing the old colonial domination by the old powers such as Britain and France with its growing financial domination. Moreover, in order to achieve this, it first had to deal with the expansionist dreams of Japan. In fact, at the beginning of the century it was already clear that the Pacific was not big enough for the United States and Japan. And an open confrontation between Japan and the United States broke out (10 years before Pearl Harbour) with the war for the control of China and the Kuomintang government.
Finally, there was Japan, one of the powers meddling most in China, whose increasing need for markets, sources of raw materials, and cheap labour, led it to take the initiative in the imperialist struggles for China. In September 1931 it occupied Manchuria, and from January it began to invade the Northern provinces of China, establishing its bridgehead in Shanghai, after which it carried out “preventive” bombings of the working class areas of the city. Japan formed alliances with some of the warlords and began to install its own puppet régimes. Chiang Kai-Shek only offered a token resistance to the invasion, since he had already entered into a treaty with the Japanese. Then the United States and the USSR reacted, each for their own interests, putting pressure on the government of Chiang Kai-Shek to begin an effective resistance against Japan. The United States, however, took things very calmly, since it hoped that Japan would become bogged down in a long and exhausting war in China (which is what effectively happened).
Stalin, for his part, in 1932 ordered the “Red bases” to declare war on Japan, while simultaneously establishing diplomatic relations with the régime of Chiang Kai-Shek during the same period as this régime was launching savage attacks on the “Red bases”. In 1933, Mao Tsetung and Fang Chimin proposed an alliance with some generals of the Kuomintang that had rebelled against Chiang Kai-Shek because of his policy of collaboration with the Japanese. However, the “Returned students” rejected this alliance in order not break the links between Russia and Chiang’s régime. This episode demonstrates that the CPC was already tied up in the game of inter-bourgeois struggles and alliances. At this time Stalin saw the “Red Army” only as an “element of pressure” and preferred to rely more on a enduring alliance with Chiang Kai-Shek.
It was in the framework of these mounting imperialist tensions during the Summer of 1934 that detachments of the “Red Army” based in the “guerrilla bases” in the South and Centre, began a movement towards the Northwest of China, through the rural regions most remote from the control of the Kuomintang, in order to concentrate themselves in the Shensi region. The movement known as the “Long March” is, for the official historians, the most significant and epic act of the “Chinese popular revolution”. The history books are full of heroic chapters about how detachments crossed rivers, swamps and mountains. However, an analysis of the events shows that hidden behind this movement are sordid bourgeois interests.
Above all, the fundamental aim of the “Long March” was to enrol the peasants in the imperialist war which was brewing between Japan, China, Russia and the United States. In fact, Po Ku (a Stalinist of the group of “returned students”) had already posed the possibility of some units of the “Red Army” being sent to fight against the Japanese. The history books underline that the departure from the “Soviet zone” of the Southern region of Kiangsi was due to the unbearable siege by the Kuomintang, but become ambiguous when they deal with the fact that the forces of the “Red Army” were expelled , in great part, because of a change of tactics ordered by the Stalinists: from the guerrilla struggles that allowed the “Red Army” to resist for several years, to frontal attacks on the Kuomintang. These confrontations provoked the rupture of the guerrilla zone’s “security” frontier and consequently meant it had to be abandoned. This was not a “grave error” by the “returned students” ( as Mao said later, although he participated in this strategy). This success for the Stalinists forced the armed peasants to abandon their land, which they had defended with much effort up until then, in order to march North and formed them into a regular army suitable only for the approaching war.
The history books usually confer on the “long march” the character of a kind of social movement or class struggle. The “Red Army” is supposed to have been “sowing the seeds of the revolution”, propagandising and also redistributing the land between the peasants as it went along. In reality, these actions had as their aim the utilisation of the peasants as protection for the rearguard of the “Red Army”. Already at the beginning of the “long march” the civilian population of the “Red bases” had been used as a defence to allow the retreat of the army. This tactic - praised by some historians as “very ingenious” and consisting of turning civilians into targets in order to protect the movement of the regular army - is a tactic of the armies of the ruling classes. Contrary to the history books there is nothing “heroic” about allowing children and old people to be killed in order that the soldiers can save themselves.
The “Long March” was not on the road of the class struggle. On the contrary, it was the road towards accords and alliances with those who up until then had been categorised as “feudal and capitalist reactionaries” and who as if by magic had been turned into “good patriots”. Thus, on the 1st of August 1935, with the detachments of the “long march” stationed in Sechuan, the CPC launched the call for the national unity of all classes in order to drive the Japanese from China. In other words, the CPC called on all workers to abandon the class struggle in order to unite with their exploiters and serve as cannon fodder in their wars. The call was the anticipated application of the resolutions of the Seventh and last Congress of the Communist International, which had taken place during this time, and which launched the infamous slogan of the “anti-fascist popular front”, through which the Stalinised Communist Parties collaborated with the national bourgeoisie, converting them into recruiters of the workers for the second world slaughter that was already approaching.
The “long march” officially ended in October 1935, when Mao’s detachment arrived in Yenan (the Shensi province in the North West of China). In later years, in the Maoist pantheon the “long march” was the exclusive and glorious work of Mao Tsetung. The official histories skip over the fact that Mao arrived at a “Red base” that had already been established before hand, and that his arrival marked a disaster because only about 7,000 of the 90,000 men who had originally left Kiangsi made it. Thousands had died (victims of nature more than of Kuomintang attacks), and thousands more remained in Sechuan, because of a split amongst the leading cliques. It was only at the end of 1936 that the bulk of the “Red army” was really gathered together with the arrival of the detachments from Junan and Sechuan.
From 1936, the work of recruiting the peasants carried out by the CPC was backed up by hundreds of nationalist students who moved to the countryside after the anti-Japanese movement of the intellectuals at the end of 1935.[4] [9] This does not mean the students became “Communists”, on the contrary, as we said above, the CPC was already an organisation that the bourgeoisie saw as one of their own, sharing the same class interests.
The Chinese bourgeoisie, however, was not unanimous in its opposition to the Japanese. There were divisions in their inclinations towards one or other of the great powers. This was reflected by Generalismo Chiang Kai-Shek who, as we have already seen, was uncertain about launching a frontal attack against the Japanese and tried to wait until the balance of imperialist forces clearly leant towards one gang or other. The Kuomintang generals and the regional “warlords” were similarly divided.
The so-called “Sian incident” took place in this atmosphere. In December 1936, Chang Hsuehliang - an anti-Japanese Kuomintang - and Yang Hucheng - the “warlord” of Sian - who were on good terms with the CPC, arrested Chiang Kai-Shek and were going to prosecute him as a traitor. However, Stalin immediately and incisively ordered the CPC not only to free Chiang Kai-Shek, but furthermore to include his forces in the “popular front”. In the days that followed talks took place between Chou Enlai, Yeh Chienying and Po Ku as representatives of the CPC (in other words of Stalin), Tu Song (the biggest and most corrupt monopolist in China, a relative of Chiang) as the United States’ representative, and Chiang Kai-Shek himself. The result of these negociations was that Chiang was “obliged” to take the United State’s and the USSR’s side - at this time the US and Russia were allied against Japan. In return for doing this he was allowed to remain as head of the national government, while the CPC and the “Red Army” (which would change its name to the “Eighth Army”) were placed under his command. Chou Enlai and other “Communists” took part in Chiang’s government, while the United States and the USSR supplied Chiang Kai-Shek with military support. As for Chang Hsuehliang and Yang Hucheng, they were abandoned to Chiang’s revenge, the first was imprisoned and the second killed.
Thus, the new alliance between the CPC and the Kuomintang was signed. It was only by means of the most grotesque ideological contortions and the most abject propaganda that the CPC could justify in the workers’ eyes its new treaty with Chiang Kai-Shek, the same butcher that had ordered the crushing of the proletarian revolution and the killing of tens of thousands of workers and communists in 1927. It is true, that from the middle of 1938, the hostilities between the forces of the Kuomintang led by Chiang and those of the “Red Army” were renewed. This allows the official historians to maintain the idea that the pact with the Kuomintang was only a “tactic” of the CPC in the “revolution”. However, the historical significance of the pact lay not in its disintegration or in the collaboration between the CPC and the Kuomintang, but in the fact that between these two forces there were no class antagonisms but on the contrary, the same class interests. This CPC had nothing in common with the CPC of the 20’s that had confronted capital: it was now nothing but a tool of capital, the number one recruiting sergeant of the peasants for the imperialist massacre.
In July 1937, the Japanese undertook a large-scale invasion of China: this was the beginning of the Sino-Japanese war. Only a handful of Left Communist groups that had survived the counter-revolution, such as the Dutch Internationalist Communist Group or the Italian Left Communist Group that published Bilan in France, were able to forecast and denounce the fact that what was happening in China was no “national liberation” war, still less the “revolution”, but a war for domination between the great powers with interests in the region: Japan, the USSR, and the United States; that the Sino-Japanese war, like the Spanish Civil War and other regional conflicts, was the deafening prelude to the second world imperialist slaughter. By contrast, Trotsky’s Left Opposition, which at its formation in 1928 had also denounced Stalin’s criminal policy of collaboration with the Kuomintang as one of the causes of the defeat of the proletarian revolution in China, was now prisoner of an incorrect analysis of the historic course, which made it see a new revolutionary possibility in each new regional imperialist conflict. Prisoner also of its own growing opportunism, it considered the Sino-Japanese war as “progressive”, and a step forwards towards the “third Chinese revolution”. At the end of 1937, Trotsky shamelessly declared that “if there is such a thing as a just war, then it is the war of the Chinese people against its conquerors... all the Chinese working class organisations, all the progressive forces in China, without giving up anything of their programme or political independence, will do their duty to the utmost in this war of liberation, independently of their attitude to the Chiang Kai-Shek government”.[5] [10] With this opportunist policy of national defence “independently of their attitude to the Chiang Kai-Shek government”, Trotsky opened wide the doors to recruiting the workers in imperialist war behind their governments, and with World War II, to the transformation of the Trotskyist groups into recruiting officers for capital. By contrast, the Italian Communist Left’s analysis of China firmly maintained the internationalist position of the working class. The position on China was one of the crucial points of rupture in its relations with Trotsky’s Left Opposition. For Bilan, “The communist position on the events in China, Spain, and the current international situation can only be fixed on the basis of the rigorous elimination of all those forces acting within the proletariat, and which tell the proletariat to take part in the slaughter of imperialist war”.[6] [11] “The whole problem is to determine which class is conducting the war, and to a establish a policy accordingly. In the present case, it cannot be denied that it is the Chinese bourgeoisie which is waging the war, and whether it be aggressor or victim, the proletariat’s duty is to struggle for revolutionary defeatism in China as much as in Japan”.[7] [12] In the same sense, the Belgian Fraction of the International Communist Left (allied with Bilan) wrote: “Alongside Chang Kai-Shek, the butcher of Canton, Stalinism is taking part in the assassination of the Chinese workers and peasants under the banner of a “war of independence”. And only a total break with the National Front, their fraternisation with the Japanese workers and peasants, their civil war against the Kuomintang and all its allies, under the leadership of a class party, can save them from disaster”.[8] [13] A defeated and demoralised working class failed to hear the firm voice of the groups of the Communist Left, and allowed itself to be dragged down into a worldwide massacre. However, these groups’ analytical method and positions represented the permanence and deepening of marxism and formed the bridge between the old revolutionary generation which had lived through the proletariat’s insurrectional wave at the beginning of the century, and the new revolutionary generation which emerged with the end of the counter-revolution at the end of the 1960s.
As we know, World War II ended in 1945 with the defeat of Japan and the Axis powers, and this defeat meant Japan's complete withdrawal from China. However, the end of World War II was not the end of imperialist confrontations, since immediately afterwards a rivalry between the two great powers - the USA and USSR - was established, which lasted for more than 40 years and brought the world close to a third - and last - world war. And China was immediately turned into a terrain of confrontation between the two powers.
The aim of this article is to demystify the so-called “Chinese popular revolution”, not to present the many interests related to the vicissitudes of the Sino-Japanese war. However, these interests highlight two aspects in relation to the policies carried out by the CPC during these years.
The first is related to the rapid expansion of the area occupied by the “Red Army” between 1936-1945. As we have said Chiang Kai-Shek did not engage his forces directly against the Japanese. Faced with the Japanese advance his forces fell back, retreated. On the other hand, the Japanese army’s rapid advance towards the Chinese interior was not backed up by an ability to set up their own administration in all the regions they occupied, and they were rapidly limited to occupying the communication routes and important cities. This situation gave rise to two phenomena: firstly, the regional warlords either remained loyal to the central government but were isolated from it, collaborated with the Japanese in the formation of puppet governments, or else collaborated with the “Red Army” in resisting the invasion. Secondly, the CPC cleverly used the power vacuum in the rural North West of China, created by the Japanese invasion, to establish its own administration.
This administration, known as the “new democracy”, has been praised by historians precisely as a “democratic” régime of a “new kind”. The only novelty about it, was that for the first time in history, a “Communist” party established a government of class collaboration,[9] [14] that is to say, it was concerned about zealously protecting the interests of the capitalists and the great landlords: the maintenance of stable relations of exploitation. The CPC discovered that it was not necessary to confiscate the land and give it to the peasants in order to gain their support. The peasants were so overburdened with levies that it was enough to bring about a small reduction in taxes (so small in fact that the landlords and capitalists agreed with it) for the peasants willingly to accept the CPC’s administration and enrol in the “Red Army”. In accordance with this “new régime” the CPC also established a government of class collaboration (between the bourgeoisie, the landlords and peasants), known as the government “of three parts”, where a third of posts were held by the “Communists”, a third by peasants’ organisations and another third by the landlords and capitalists. Once again, it was only through the most convoluted ideological contortions by “theoreticians” such as Mao Tsetung that the CPC could explain this “new kind” of government to the workers.
The second aspect of the CPC’s policy is less well known, since for ideological reasons, both the Maoist and pro-US historians want to hide it. The CPC was moving strongly towards the United States for the following reasons:
From 1944 the United States government established an observation commission in the main “Red Base” in Yenan, with the aim of sounding out the possibility of collaboration between the USA and the CPC. The leaders of the CPC - in particular Mao Tsetung and the Chu Teh clique - were clear that the United States would be the strongest victorious power at the end of the war and wanted to shelter in its shadow. The correspondence of John Service,[11] [16] one of the agents of the mission, insistently pointed out that the leaders of the CPC said:
The members of the United States mission insisted to their government that the future was on the side of the CPC. However, the United States never decided to help the “Communists” and, finally one year later in 1945, before the defeat of Japan, Russia rapidly invaded Northern China, leaving the CPC and Mao no other choice than to align themselves (temporarily!) with the USSR.
***
From 1946 to 1949, the confrontation between the two super powers led directly to a war between the CPC and the Kuomintang. During the war other Kuomintang generals went over, along with their arms and men,to the side of the “popular forces”. In this way, we can see four successive stages in which the bourgeoisie and the petty-bourgeoisie nourished the CPC: the one that followed the defeat of the working class, from 1928; the one rooted in the student movement of 1935; the period of the war against Japan and finally that provoked by the collapse of the Kuomintang. The “old” bourgeoisie - with the exception of the great monopolists linked directly with Chiang Kai-Shek, such as Soong - merged into the CPC and founded the “new” bourgeoisie that arose during the war.
In 1949 the Communist Party of China, headed by the Red Army, took power and proclaimed the People’s Republic. But this never had anything to do with Communism. The class character of the “Communist” party that took power in China was completely alien to communism and antagonistic to the working class. From the beginning, the régime was only a form of state capitalism. The USSR controlled China for hardly a decade and this ended with the breaking off of relations between both countries. From 1960, China played an “independent” game from the super powers and saw itself as a great power capable of creating a “third bloc”, although from 1970 it had moved definitively towards the US-dominated Western bloc. Many historians - beginning with the Russians - accused Mao of being a “traitor”. We now know that the China’s journey towards the United states was not treason by Mao, but the final realisation of his dream.
Ldo
[1] [17] “Report on an investigation of the peasant movement in Hunan”. March 1927. In Collected Works of Mao Tsetung, Peking 1976.
[2] [18] Isaac Deutscher, amongst others, some years later arrived at the same absurd conclusion that, if the displaced sections of the bourgeoisie and urban petty-bourgeoisie could lead the Communist Party, then there was no reason why the peasantry could not replace the proletariat in a “Socialist” revolution (Maoism, its origin and Outlook. The Chinese cultural revolution, 1971)
[3] [19] The absence of a viable historical project was a general characteristic shared by the great peasant movements (for example, the war in Germany in the 16th century, the Taiping rebellion and the 1910 “Mexican revolution” in the South): despite their communitarian features, their utopian ideology looked for the recovery of an irretrievably lost social situation; despite the way that the peasant armies were able to demolish the great landlords, they were unable to form unified central governments, the result of this was the opening of the way for the bourgeoisie (or fractions of it).
[4] [20] We need to remember that the universities of this period were not the massive universities of our day, to which some workers’ children go. In that period, amongst the students “many were the sons of well-to-do bourgeois or state functionaries of various levels... who had seen their incomes fall with the ruin of China and could see even more disasters to come due to the Japanese invasion” (La rivoluzione cinese, Enrica Colloti Pischel).
[5] [21] Lutte Ouvrière no.37, quoted in Bilan no.46, January 1938.
[6] [22] Bilan no.45, November 1937.
[7] [23] Bilan no.46, January 1938.
[8] [24] Communisme no.8, November 1937.
[9] [25] In the USSR the bourgeoisie also dominated, but that was a question of a new bourgeoisie, emerging from the counter-revolution.
[10] [26] From the middle of 1938, Chiang Kai-Shek once again began to act against the CPC. In the August of that year he outlawed the organisations of the “Communist” party and in October he laid siege to its Shensi base. Between 1939 and 1940 there were a number of confrontations between the Kuomintang and the “Red Army”, in January 1941 Chiang ambushed the 4th Army (another detachment of the “Red Army”), which had been formed in central China. With all these actions he looked to gain the support of the Japanese without breaking his ties with the Allies. Chiang continued to play one side off against the other, while waiting for a definite outcome to the war.
[11] [27] Published in 1974 after China’s turn towards the United States, with the title Lost chances in China. The World War II despatches of John S. Service, JW Esherick (editor), Vintage Books, 1974.
Hundreds of thousands of workers on strike. Public transport completely paralyzed. A strike spreading throughout the public sector: railways first, then the metro and buses, followed by the post office, electricity production and distribution, gas distribution, telecommunications, education, the health service. Some branches of private industry also involved in the struggle, like the miners who violently confront the police. Demonstrations that gather ever growing numbers from different sectors: on 7th December, about one million workers in the main French cities answered the call of various unions[1] to demonstrate against the Juppe plan[2]. On 12th December, there were 2 million.
The movement of workers' strikes and demonstrations unfolds against a background of student agitation, with the latter taking part in some of the workers' demonstrations and mass meetings. References to May 1968 are more and more frequent in the media, which do not hesitate to draw a parallel: a widespread feeling of exasperation, the students in the streets, and the spreading strikes.
Are we in the midst of a new social movement comparable to that of May 68, which started off the first international wave of class struggle after 50 years of counter-revolution? Nothing of the sort. In reality, the French proletariat is the target of a massive maneuver aimed at weakening its consciousness and combativity; a maneuver, moreover, which is also aimed at the working class in other countries, designed at making it draw the wrong lessons from the events in France. This is why the bourgeoisie in France and elsewhere has made sure that there events have been widely reported, whereas the opposite is the case when the working class struggles on its own initiative and its own terrain.
The bourgeoisie is using and reinforcing the difficulties of the working class
The events of May 68 in France were marked by a whole series of strikes, whose major characteristic was a tendency to overflow, or even to confront the trades unions. The situation is nothing like that today, in France or anywhere else.
It is true that the extent and generalization of attacks directed against the working class since the beginning of the 1990s tends to arouse its combativity, as we pointed out in the Resolution on the International Situation, adopted at our 11th International Congress:
"The massive movements in Italy in the autumn of 92, those in Germany in 93 and many others showed the huge potential combativity growing in the workers' ranks. Since then, this combativity has expressed itself slowly, with long moments of quiet; but it has not been refuted. The massive mobilizations in Italy in the autumn of 94, the series of strikes in the public sector in France in the spring of 95, are expressions, among others, of this combativity", (International Review no.82)
However, the development of this combativity is still profoundly marked by the retreat that the working class suffered after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and the unleashing of all the campaigns on the "death of communism". This retreat was the worst since the historic recovery of class struggle in 1968: "[The workers' struggles in recent years] are also testimony to the enormous difficulties which it is encountering on this path, owing to the breadth and depth of the reflux. The workers struggles are developing in a sinuous, jagged manner full of advances and retreats".
Everywhere, the working class faces a bourgeoisie on the offensive politically in order to weaken its ability to counter-attack, and to overcome the deep reflux in its class consciousness. And in the front line of this offensive, are the unions:
"However, the unions' present maneuvers have also, and above all, a preventive aim: that of strengthening their hold on the workers before the latter display a lot more combativity, a combativity which will necessarily result from their growing anger faced with the increasingly brutal attacks demanded by the crisis (...) the recent strikes in France, in fact union days of action, have been a success for the latter".
For several months, the working class internationally has been subjected to a veritable bombardment. Sweden, Belgium, Italy, Spain are only the latest examples. In France, the bourgeoisie has not dared to deal such a blow to the workers since the first Delors plan in 1983: an increase in VAT (a sales tax, ie a tax on consumption which of course means a rise in prices), in income tax, and in the daily charge for hospital care, a wage freeze for state employees, a diminution in pensions, and an increase in the number of years that must be worked in order to benefit from a pension; at the same time, the bourgeoisie's official figures are beginning to reveal a new rise in unemployment. As in other countries, the French bourgeoisie is facing an increasingly serious world capitalist crisis, which forces it into more and more violent attacks on proletarian living conditions. And it is all the more vital for the French bourgeoisie, coming after the years where the left, with Mitterrand and the SP, were in government, which left the social front largely unguarded, and compelled the bourgeoisie to observe a certain caution in its attacks on the workers.
Such an avalanche of attacks could only nourish the workers' combativity, which has already found expression at different times and in different countries: Sweden, France, Belgium, Spain ...
And indeed, the workers cannot remain passive. They have no way out, other than to defend themselves in struggle. But to prevent the working class from entering the combat with its own weapons, the bourgeoisie has taken the lead, and has pushed the workers into a premature struggle, completely under the control of the unions. It has not left the workers time to mobilize at their own rhythm and with their own methods: mass meetings, discussion, participation in other workers' meetings, the strike if the balance of forces is favorable, the election of strike committees, sending delegations to other workers involved in the struggle.
Thus although the recent strike movement in France reveals a deep discontent within the working class, it is above all the result of a maneuver on a very large scale by the bourgeoisie, aimed at leading the workers into a massive defeat, and above all at creating a profound disorientation in their ranks.
A trap for the workers
The bourgeoisie maneuvered masterfully to set its trap, creating an extremely effective cooperation among its different fractions: the right, the left, the media, and the unions, with their radical rank and file made up essentially of militants of the far left.
In the first place, to start the ball roIling, the bourgeoisie had to push one sector of the working class to strike. Although a real discontent was developing within the class in France, aggravated by the recent attacks on the Social Security, it was not yet at the point where it would provoke a massive entry into struggle by the most decisive sectors, especially the industrial ones. This worked in the bourgeoisie's favor, since it could provoke one sector to strike without any risk of the others following spontaneously and escaping from union control. The "chosen" sector was the train drivers. The "contract plan" announced for the national railways (SNCF) threatened the drivers with an extra eight years work before retirement, on the pretext that they were more "privileged" from this point of view than other state employees. This was so gross that the workers did not even stop to think before launching themselves into the conflict. This was precisely what the bourgeoisie wanted: they plunged headfirst into the control prepared by the unions. Within 24 hours, the drivers on the Paris buses and metro, threatened with the loss of similar benefits, were drawn into the same kind of trap. The unions did everything they could to get the strike started, whereas many workers remained perplexed at their haste. The management of the RATP (Paris public transport network) came to the unions' rescue, by closing down some lines and doing everything possible to prevent those who wanted to work from doing so.
Why did the bourgeoisie choose these two categories of workers to engage its maneuver?
Firstly, both categories do indeed have special contractual arrangements, whose modification was a ready-made pretext for unleashing an attack aimed explicitly at them. But most important was the guarantee that once the workers on the railways, metro, and buses came out, the entire public transport system would be paralyzed. Apart from the fact that no worker could fail to notice the event, this gave the bourgeoisie a further, and highly effective means of keeping the movement under control, since the aim was to spread the strike to other branches of the public sector. Without public transport, virtually the only way for workers to get to the demonstrations was to use the coaches laid on by the unions. It became impossible to send massive delegations to meet other striking workers in their own mass meetings. Finally, the transport strike is also a means of dividing workers by setting those who were confronting enormous difficulties in getting to work, against those on strike.
However, the rail workers were not just a means of the maneuver, they were also one of its targets. The bourgeoisie was aware of the advantage to be gained by exhausting and confusing the consciousness of this sector of the working class, which had demonstrated in December 1986 its ability to confront the unions' control in order to engage the struggle.
Once these two sectors were on strike, completely under union control, the next phase of the maneuver could be set in motion: the strike in a traditionally advanced and combative fraction of the working class, the post office, and especially the sorting offices. During the 1980s, the latter had often resisted the unions' traps, confronting the latter without hesitation. By incorporating this sector in the "movement", the bourgeoisie aimed to trammel it in the meshes of the maneuver, and inflict on it the same defeat as on other sectors. Moreover, the maneuver would gain in credibility amongst other sectors not yet on strike, by diminishing any distrust or skepticism about it. Nonetheless, the bourgeoisie had to approach this sector with more finesse than it had used on the railway or metro workers. It thus encouraged and organized "workers' delegations", with no outward signs of union membership (and probably made up of sincere workers deceived by the rank-and-file unionists), who came to mass meetings in the sorting offices, to call on their workers to join the strike. Deceived as to the real significance of these delegations, the workers of the main sorting offices let themselves be drawn into the struggle. To give the event maximum media impact, the bourgeoisie dispatched its journalists to the scene, and it was on the front page of Le Monde's evening edition that very day.
At this stage of the maneuver, its size gave the unions a further argument to involve new sectors: workers in the electricity, gas, and telecommunications industries, as well as the teachers. When some workers hesitated to "struggle now", and insisted on first discussing the methods of struggle and their demands, the unions were peremptory in insisting that "we've got to go for it now", and imposing a feeling of guilt on those not yet in the struggle: "we're the last ones not to have joined the strike".
To increase the number of strikers still further, it was necessary to give the impression of a vast, deep-rooted, and developing social movement. To listen to the left, the leftists, and the unions, the movement even provoked an immense hope throughout the working class. In this they were supported by the media's daily publication of the strike's "popularity index", which was always in favor, throughout the "population". It is true that the strike was "popular", and that many workers saw it as a means to prevent the government from pushing through its attacks. But the solicitude of the media, and above all of the TV, is a sure sign that this was just what the bourgeoisie intended.
The students were also used, unwittingly, as part of the show. They were led out into the streets to give the impression of a general rise in discontent, and of a similarity with the events of May 68. At the same time, they were used to drown the workers' demands with the inter-classist demands that are characteristic of students. They were even to be found, with the unions' blessing, in mass meetings in the workplace, "to join the workers' struggle"[3].
The working class, deprived of any initiative, had no alternative but to follow the unions. In the mass meetings called by the unions, the latter's insistence that workers should express themselves had no purpose other than to give a pretense of life to meetings where everything had already been decided elsewhere. Within the assemblies, there was such pressure to join the strike that many workers, dubious to say the least about the nature of the strike, dared not speak out. Others were completely taken in by the euphoria of an artificial unity. In fact, one of the keys' to this maneuver's success was the way in which the unions systematically adopted the working class' aspirations and methods of struggle, only to empty them and turn them against the workers:
- the need to react massively, in closed ranks, against the bourgeoisie's attacks'
- spreading the strike to several sectors, going beyond the boundaries of corporatism;
- daily mass meetings in every workplace, with the responsibility, in particular, of deciding on whether to join or to continue the movement;
- the organization of street demonstrations where masses of workers, from different sectors and different workplaces, can gain a feeling of solidarity and strength[4].
The unions also took care, for most of the movement, to make a show of unity. The media made much of the handshake between the leaders of the two traditionally antagonistic unions: the CGT and FO (which was formed during the Cold War after a split from the CGT, supported by the American trades unions). This trade union "unity", often found on demonstrations in the joint CGT-FO-CFDT-FSU banners, was a means to draw the largest possible number of workers into the strike; for years, the unions' endless bickering had been precisely one of the main reasons for their loss of credibility and for the workers' refusal to follow their slogans. The Trotskyists made their own little contribution in this domain, since they clamored endlessly for union unity, making it almost a precondition for the development of the struggle.
As for the right in power, after an initial display of determination, it pre-all the necessary publicity by the media), giving the impression that the strikers could win, force the withdrawal of the Juppe plan and even - why not? - the downfall of the government. In fact, the government dragged things out, knowing very well that workers who have fought a long strike are not disposed to return to work for nothing. Only after three weeks did it announce the withdrawal of some of the measures which had sparked off the explosion: the "contract plan" on the railways and, more generally, the measures concerning state employees' pensions. However, the essential elements of its policy remained: tax increases, wage freeze for state employees, and above all the attacks on social security.
The unions and the left parties immediately shouted victory, and thereafter set to getting the strikers back to work. They went about it so skillfully that they did not unmask themselves: their tactic consisted in allowing those assemblies in favor of a return to work express themselves freely. The unions trumpeted the railway workers' "victory", and it was the railway workers who, on Friday 15th December, gave the signal for the return to work, just as they had given the signal for the strike. The TV repeated over and over its pictures of the first trains to run again. On Saturday, the unions organized enormous demonstrations which the workers in private industry were urged to join. The movement was buried in great pomp, with a final wave of the flag to sugar the bitter pill of defeat on the workers' most important demands. In depot after depot, the railwaymen voted to end the strike. In the other sectors, this impetus combined with a general fatigue did the rest. By Monday, the return to work was almost complete. On Tuesday, the CGT organized, alone, a day of action and demonstrations: the mobilization was pitiful compared with that of previous weeks, which could only convince the remaining "die-hards" that the time had come to end the strike. On Thursday 21st, a "summit" and unions, which gave the unions the opportunity to denounce the government's proposals, and put themselves forward as "defenders of the workers".
A political attack against the working class
The ruling class has just succeeded in putting over a major attack - the Juppe plan - and exhausting the workers in order to reduce their ability to respond to more attacks in the future.
But the bourgeoisie's ambitions go much further. The way in which the maneuver was organized was designed not only to ensure that the workers would learn no lessons for future struggles from this defeat, but above all to render them vulnerable to the poisoned messages it wants to put over.
The bourgeoisie has provoked the most important mobilization for years, as far as the number of strikers and demonstrators is concerned, and the unions were clearly its architect. All this is designed to give weight to the idea that it is possible to achieve something with the unions. And this idea is lent all the more credit in that throughout the struggle, the unions were never in danger of being unmasked, even partially, as has been the case when they have had to break a spontaneous class movement. Their strategy even took account of the fact that although the majority of the class might follow them, fundamentally it does not trust them. This is why they were so careful to ensure the visible "participation" of non-unionized workers (either the sincere and naive, or the unions' own agents) in the various "organs of struggle", such as the self-proclaimed "strike committees". Thus, just as the maneuver will strengthen the unions' grip on the working class, so will it also diminish for some time to come the workers' confidence in their own strength, in other words in their ability to enter the struggle of their own accord, and to take charge of it themselves. This renewed credibility of the unions was one of the bourgeoisie's fundamental objectives, a vital precondition for dealing blows still more brutal than today's. Only on this condition can it hope to sabotage the struggles which will certainly surge up against these new attacks. It is certainly one of the most important aspects of the political defeat that the bourgeoisie has inflicted on the working class.
Another beneficiary of the maneuver, within the bourgeoisie itself, is the left of capital. The French presidential elections of May 1995 have placed all the forces of the left in opposition. None of them have been directly involved in deciding the present attacks. They have had their hands free to denounce the attacks, and to make workers forget that they themselves - the CP and the SP together have conducted the same anti-working class policy. The maneuver has thus strengthened the policy of the division of labor between the right in power and the left in opposition with the role of mystifying the proletariat, of controlling and sabotaging its struggles, especially through the trades unions.
Another of the bourgeoisie's prime objectives, on the basis of the defeat of a struggle that spread to different sectors, is to make the workers believe that there is no point in extending the struggle. There are large fractions of the working class which think that they have succeeded in extending the struggle to different sectors[5], in other words that they have achieved the tendency of workers' struggles since 1968, and until the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The bourgeoisie even relied on these gains of the struggle since 1968 to draw the sorting office workers into the struggle, as we can see from the arguments used by the unions to persuade them to walk out: "In 1974, the postal workers were defeated because they remained isolated. Just like the railwaymen in 1986, because they did not succeed in spreading their movement. Today, we have to seize the chance that is offered". It was these gains that the maneuver aimed to eradicate.
It is still too early to judge the impact of this aspect of the maneuver (whereas there is no doubt about the unions' renewed credibility). But it is clear that the workers' confusion is likely to be increased by the fact that the railway workers at least have won on the demand that started their struggle, following the withdrawal of the "company plan", and the attacks on pension rights. The illusion that it is possible to win something by struggling alone in one sector will thus develop, and provide a powerful stimulus to the growth of sectoralism. Not to mention the division created in the workers' ranks by the fact that those who followed the railwaymen into the struggle, and have won nothing at all, will feel betrayed.
At this level, there are important similarities with another maneuver: the one used in the health workers' struggle in autumn 1988. Then, it was designed to defuse a rise in combativity throughout the class, by provoking a premature struggle in a specific sector: the nurses. The latter were organized in an ultra-sectoralist coordination, prefabricated by the bourgeoisie to take the place of the discredited unions, and at the end of the struggle were granted a certain number of wage increases (the government had set aside a billion francs for precisely this even before the strike began). The other hospital workers, who had entered the strike at the same time as the nurses, got nothing. In other sectors, the combativity fell back as a result of the workers' disarray in the face of the nurses' elitism and sectoralism.
Finally, by invoking so persistently the supposed similarities with the movement of May 1968, the bourgeoisie hoped, as we have said, to involve as many workers as possible in the maneuver. But it was also a means to attack the workers' class consciousness. For millions of workers, May 68 is still a reference point, even for those who were too young to take part, or were not even born, or lived in other countries but nonetheless were fired with enthusiasm at this first sign of the proletariat's resurgence on its class terrain after forty years of counter-revolution. Those generations of workers, or fractions of the working class, who did not take a direct part in the events of 68, and who are more vulnerable to ideological intoxication around this theme, were a special target for the bourgeoisie, which aimed to give them the impression that there was not much difference between May 68 and today's union controlled strike. This is therefore yet another attack on the very identity of the working class; not as profound as the campaigns on "the death of communism", but a further obstacle on the road to recovery from the reflux that followed the collapse of the Eastern bloc.
The real lessons to be drawn from these events
Tragically, the first lesson that the ICC drew from nurses' struggle in 1988[6] remains true today: "it is important to emphasize the bourgeoisie's ability to take preventive action, and in particular to provoke premature social movements at a time when the proletariat as a whole is still not mature enough to achieve a real mobilization. This tactic has been used often in the past by the ruling class, in particular in situations where the stakes were far higher than in the present period. The most striking example is that of January 1919, when the Berlin workers answered a deliberate provocation by the social-democratic government by launching an uprising, despite the fact that workers in the provinces were not yet ready for insurrection. The massacre of workers which followed (as well as the murder of the German Communist Party's two main leaders: Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) dealt a fatal blow to the revolution in Germany, where the working class was finally defeated piecemeal".
Faced with such a danger, it is vital that the working class should learn the lessons of its experience as widely as possible, both at the historic level, and at the level of its struggles during the last decade.
Another important lesson is that the class struggle is a major preoccupation for the international bourgeoisie, and as its reaction to the struggle in Poland during 1980 has shown us, at this level it can put its divisions to one side. A blackout is imposed on movements that take place on a class terrain and run the risk of drawing other workers in their wake, whereas the spotlight is turned on the results of successful maneuvers against the working class, from one country to the next. We can have no illusions that the unleashing of trade wars and imperialist rivalries will prove any barrier to the bourgeoisie's international unity against the class struggle.
The recent strikes in France also show that the extension of the struggle in the hands of the unions is a weapon of the bourgeoisie. The wider the extension, the worse the defeat for the workers. Here again, it is vital that the workers learn to detect the traps of the bourgeoisie. Whenever the unions call for extension, it is either to stick with the movement as it develops, so as not to lose control of it, or to drag as many workers as possible to defeat when the movement enters a downturn. This is what they did with the rail workers in France at the beginning of 1987, when they called for the movement to "spread" and "harden", not as the movement was on the rise (when they actively opposed any extension), but during its decline, with the aim of drawing as many sectors of the working class as possible into the rail workers' defeat. These two situations highlight the absolute necessity for the workers to control their struggle, from beginning to end. Their sovereign general assemblies must take charge of spreading the struggle if it is not to fall into the hands of the unions. Obviously, the latter will not give up without a fight. The confrontation with the unions must be fought out in broad daylight, in general assemblies that elect their own revocable delegates, instead of being mere gatherings manipulated at will by the unions, as has been the case in the present wave of strikes.
But to take charge of their struggle, the workers must necessarily centralize all their assemblies, by sending delegates to a central assembly, which in turn elects a central struggle committee. It is this assembly's job to guarantee the permanent unity of the class, and which makes it possible to coordinate the struggle's action: whether a strike should be declared for such-and-such a day; which sectors should come out, etc. It is also the central assembly which must decide the return to work, and the retreat in good order when the immediate balance of forces makes this necessary. There is nothing abstract about this. The Russian workers created just such an organ - the Soviet - in 1905, then in 1917 during the Revolution. The centralization of the struggle by the Soviet was a vital lesson of the century's first revolutionary movement, which workers will have to reappropriate in their future struggles. This is what Trotsky had to say about them in his book, 1905:
"What was the soviet of workers' deputies? The soviet came into being as a response to an objective need - a need born of the course of events. It was an organization which was authoritative and yet had no traditions; which could immediately involve a scattered mass of hundreds of thousands of people while having virtually no organizational machinery; which united the revolutionary currents within the proletariat; which was capable of initiative and spontaneous self-control - and most important of all which could be brought out from underground within 24 hours (...) In order to have authority in the eyes of the masses on the very day it came into being, such an organization had to be based on the broadest representation. How was this to be achieved? The answer came of its own accord. Since the production process was the sole link between the proletarian masses who, in the organizational sense, were still quite inexperienced, representation had to be adapted to the factories and businesses"[7].
Although the first example of such living centralization of a class movement comes to us from a revolutionary period, this does not mean that it is only in such a period that the working class can centralize its struggle. The mass strike of Polish workers in 1980, while it did not produce soviets, which are organs for the seizure of power, nonetheless has given us a magnificent example. Very quickly, from the outset of the strike, general assemblies sent their delegates (in general, two for each company) to a central assembly for an entire region, the MKS. This assembly would meet daily in the premises of the leading company - the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk - and the delegates would then return to give an account of the discussions to the assemblies which had elected them, and which would then take position on these deliberations. In a country where previous class struggles had been mercilessly drowned in blood, the movement's strength paralyzed the bloody hand of the government, and forced it to come and negotiate with the MKS on the latter's home ground. Of course, the Polish workers in 1980 were able to adopt this organizational form because the official unions were completely discredited by their role as guardians of the Stalinist state (and the workers were crushed in blood in December 1981 only thanks to the formation of the "independent" union Solidarnosc). This is the best possible proof, not only that the unions are not even an imperfect organization of the workers' struggle, but on the contrary, as long as they are able to sow illusions, are the greatest obstacle to a real organization of the struggle. Their presence and action blocks the class' spontaneous movement towards a self-organization born of the needs of the struggle itself.
Obviously, the weight of trade unionism within the central capitalist countries means that the class' next struggles will not take the form of the MKS, still less of the soviets. Nonetheless, these must serve as a reference-point and a guide, and the workers will have to fight for their general assemblies to be really sovereign, and allow the extension, control and centralization of the movement by the workers themselves.
In fact, the next struggles of the working class, for some time to come, will be marked by the effects of the reflux, which the bourgeoisie will exploit with all sorts of maneuvers. Faced with this difficult situation, which still does not put in question the perspective of decisive class confrontations between bourgeoisie and proletariat, the intervention of revolutionaries is irreplaceable. For it to be as effective as possible, and not to aid, even unwittingly, the bourgeoisie's plans, revolutionaries in their analyses and slogans must leave not the slightest opening to the dominant ideology, and must be the first to discern and denounce the maneuvers of the class enemy.
The size of the maneuver set up by the French bourgeoisie, and especially the fact that it has gone so far as to provoke massive strikes which can only help to aggravate its economic problems, is an indication in itself that the working class and its struggle have not disappeared, contrary to all the assertions of the hired academic "experts". It shows that the ruling class knows perfectly well that the increasingly brutal attacks which it will have to unleash will necessarily provoke massive struggles in response. While it has scored a point today, and won a political victory, the battle is far from over. The bourgeoisie, in particular, cannot prevent the increasing collapse of its economic system, or the loss of credibility by the unions, as was the case during the 1980s, the more they sabotaged the workers' struggles. But the working class will only win if it is able to understand fully its enemy's ability, even on the basis of a moribund system, to lay the most subtle and sophisticated obstacles in its path.
BN, 23rd December 1995
[1] The Confederation Generale du Travail (CGT), transmission belt for the French "Communist" Party; the "social-democratic" Force Ouvriere (FO); the main teachers' union, the Federation de l'Education Nationale (FEN), close to the Socialist Party; the FSU, closer to the CP and the leftists, which split from the FEN a few years ago.
[2] Named after the Prime Minister called on to put it in motion. Amongst other things, this plan includes a whole series of attacks on Social Security and health insurance.
[3] It is worth noting that in 1968, the unions systematically barred entry to the factories, in order to prevent any contact between workers and students. It is true that, at the time, it was the students that talked most of "revolution", and above all that denounced most strongly the left parties (SP and CP). There was no danger then of the working class taking up the idea of revolution: it was only taking its first steps in struggle after four decades of counter-revolution. Moreover, the idea itself was singularly vague in the minds of the students, who gave it the kind of petty-bourgeois significance characteristic of their "movement". What the unions feared more than anything, was a still greater difficulty in controlling a movement which had begun independently, and which had surprised the entire ruling class.
[4] In his own way, Prime Minister Juppe helped swell the demonstrations by declaring, when announcing his plan, that the government would not survive if 2 million people came out on the streets: after each day of demonstrations, the unions and the media would count the numbers, to show that the figure could be reached. Some sections of the ruling class, including abroad, made believe that Juppe's declaration was a "blunder". In the same way, they reproached him for his "clumsiness" in launching all his attacks at the same moment:
"The strike movements are in large pan due to the fact that the government has behaved clumsily in trying to get all its reforms through at once" (The Wall Street Journal). He was also accused of arrogance: "Public anger is largely directed against Alain Juppe's autocratic style of government (...) This is as much a revolt against the arrogance of Gaullismas against budget rigor" (The Guardian). In reality, Juppe's "clumsiness" and "arrogance" were an important part of the provocation: the right in government was using the most effective means to increase the workers' anger and to make the unions' play easier.
[5] This was expressed clearly by one engine driver: "I joined the fight as a driver. Next day, I considered myself first and foremost a railwayman. Then I took on the pan of a state employee. Now, I just consider myself as a wage earner, just like those in the private sector whom I would like to rally to the cause ... If I were to stop tomorrow, I could never look a postman in the face again" (reported in Le Monde, l2/13th December).
[6] See the article on "The coordinations in the vanguard of sabotaging the struggle" International Review no. 56, and our French-language pamphlet on the nurses' struggle.
[7] See our article on "The Lessons of the 1905 Revolution" in International Review no 43.
Alongside the struggle of Bolshevism against Menshevism at the beginning of this century, the clash between marxism and anarchism within the 1st International is probably the most famous example of the defense of proletarian organizational principles in the history of the workers' movement. It is essential for revolutionaries today, separated from the living organizational history of their own class through half a century of Stalinist counter-revolution, to reappropriate the lessons of this experience. This first article will concentrate on the pre-history of this confrontation, showing how Bakunin came to the concept of taking over the leadership of the workers' movement by means of a secret organization under his own personal control. We will show how this concept led necessarily to Bakunin's manipulation by the ruling class with the aim of destroying the International. And we will demonstrate Bakunin's fundamentally anti-proletarian roots precisely at the organizational level.
The second article will then deal with the struggle which took place within the International itself, showing the radical opposition on the concept of functioning and of militantism between the marxist proletarian and the anarchist petty-bourgeois and déclassé viewpoints.
The historical significance of marxism's struggle against organizational anarchism
The 1st International has gone down in history above all because of the struggle between Marx and Bakunin, which at the Hague Congress in 1872 reached its first conclusion with the exclusion of Bakunin and his right hand man Guillaume. But what bourgeois historians present as a clash of personalities, and the anarchists as a fight between "authoritarian" and "libertarian" versions of socialism, was in reality a struggle of the entire International against those who trampled on its statutes. Bakunin and Guillaume were excluded in The Hague, because they had constructed a secret "brotherhood" within the International, an organization within the organization with its own structures and statutes. This organization, the so-called "Alliance of Socialist Democracy" existed and acted in hiding, with the goal of tearing the International out of the hands of its members and placing it under the control of Bakunin.
A deadly struggle between different organizational visions
The struggle which took place within the International was thus not between "authority and freedom" but rather between two completely opposed and hostile organizational principles.
1) On the one hand there was the position most determinedly defended by Marx and Engels, but which was that of the General Council as a whole and of the vast majority of members, according to which a proletarian organization cannot depend on the will of individuals, on the whims of "leading comrades", but has to function according to binding rules agreed on by all and binding for all, called statutes. These statutes have to guarantee the unitary, centralized, collective character of such an organization, ensuring an open, disciplined form of political debate and decision-making involving all its members. Whoever disagrees with the decisions of the organization, or no longer agrees with points of the statutes etc, has not only the possibility but the duty to present his or her critique openly in front of the whole organization, but within the framework designed for this purpose. This view of the organization, which the International Workingmen's Association developed for itself, corresponded to the collective, unitary, revolutionary character of the proletariat.
2) On the other hand Bakunin represented the elitist, petty-bourgeois vision of "brilliant leaders" whose extraordinary political clarity and determination is supposed to guarantee the revolutionary "passion" and trajectory. This leadership thus considers itself to be "morally justified" in collecting and organizing its disciples behind the back of the organization, in order to achieve control of the organization and assure the fulfillment of its historic mission. Since the membership as a whole is considered to be too stupid to be able to grasp the necessity of such revolutionary messiahs, they have to be brought to do what is "good for them" without them being aware of it, even against their will. The statutes, the sovereign decisions of congresses or elected bodies, are there for the others, but are only in the way of the elite.
This was the point of view of Bakunin. Before he joined the IWA, he explained to his disciples why the International was not a revolutionary organization, the Proudhonists having become reformist, the Blanquists old, the Germans and the General Council which they allegedly dominated being "authoritarian". It is striking how Bakunin considered the International to be the sum of its parts. What was above all lacking, according to Bakunin, was "revolutionary will". It was this which the Alliance intended to provide, by walking roughshod over the International's program and statutes and deceiving its members.
For Bakunin, the organization which the proletariat had constructed through years of hard work was worth nothing. What were everything to him were the conspiratorial sects which he himself created and controlled. It was not the class organisation which interested him, but his own personal status and reputation, his anarchist "freedom" or what is today known as "self realization". For Bakunin and his like the workers' movement was nothing but a vehicle for the realization of his own individual, individualist plans.
Without revolutionary organization, no revolutionary workers' movement
Marx and Engels, on the contrary, knew what the construction of the organization means for the proletariat. Whereas the history books believe that the conflict between Marx and Bakunin was essentially of a general political nature, the real history of the International reveals above all a struggle for the organization. Something which appears to be quite a boring affair to bourgeois historians. For us, on the contrary, its something excitingly important and full of lessons. What Marx shows us is that without proletarian organization there can be neither a revolutionary class movement nor a revolutionary theory.
And indeed, the idea that organizational solidity, development and growth are the prerequisites for the programmatic unfolding of the workers' movement, lies at the very heart of Marx and Engels' entire political activity[1]. The founders of scientific socialism knew only too well that proletarian class consciousness cannot be the product of individuals, but requires a collective, organized framework. This is why the construction of the revolutionary organization is one of the most important, if also one of the most difficult tasks of the revolutionary proletariat.
The struggle over the Statutes
Nowhere did Marx and Engels struggle with such determination, and as fruitfully, for this understanding as in the ranks of the 1st International. Founded in 1864, the International appeared at a time when the organized workers' movement was still mainly dominated by petty-bourgeois and reformist ideologies and sects. The International Workingmen's Association was in the first instance made up of these different tendencies. The opportunist representatives of the English trade unions, the petty-bourgeois reformist Proudhonism of the Latin countries, conspiratorial Blanquism, and in Germany the sect dominated by Lassalle, played a leading role within it. Although the different programs and world views clashed with each other, revolutionaries at that time were under enormous pressure for regroupment, from a working class clamoring for its unity. During the first meeting in London hardly anybody had the least idea how this unification was supposed to take place. In this situation the truly proletarian elements, with Marx at their head, pleaded for temporary postponement of the programmatic clarification between the different groupings. The revolutionaries' long years of political experience, and the international wave of struggle of the whole class should be used above all to forge a unitary organization. The international unity of this organization, embodied through the central organs, especially the General Council, and through the statutes, which had to be accepted by all members, would enable the International step by step to clarify the political divergences and achieve a unified point of view. This large scale regroupment had a chance of success as long as the international class struggle was still on the rise.
Marxism's most decisive contribution to the foundation of the 1st International lay therefore clearly at the level of the organizational question. The different sects present at the founding meeting were not able to concretize the will to international ties which the English and French workers above all had called for. The bourgeois Atto di Fratellanza, the followers of Mazzini, wanted to impose the conspiratorial statutes of a secret sect. The "inaugural address" and the statutes, which Marx, commissioned by the organizational committee, then presented, defended the proletarian and unitary character of the organization, and laid the indispensable basis for the further work of clarification. The International's ability to go further in overcoming utopian, petty-bourgeois, sectarian and conspiratorial visions, was in the first instance due to the fact that its different currents, in a more or less disciplined manner, abided by the common rules.
Amongst these different currents, the Bakuninists' specificity lay in their refusal to respect the statutes. That is why it was the Bakuninist Alliance which came close to destroying the first international party of the proletariat. The struggle against the Alliance has gone down in history as the great confrontation between marxism and anarchism. That was certainly the case. But at the heart of this confrontation were not general political questions such as the relation to the state, but organizational principles.
The Proudhonists, for example, shared many of Bakunin's views. But they were in favor of the clarification of their positions according to the rules of the organization. They also believed that the statutes of the organization should be respected by all members without exception. That is why in particular the Belgian "collectivists" were able to approach marxism on some important questions. Their best known spokesman, De Paepe, was a principled opponent of the kind of secret organization considered necessary by Bakunin.
Bakunin's secret Brotherhood
Precisely this question was at the center of the International's struggle against Bakunin. It is a fact which anarchist historians also accept, that Bakunin, when he joined the IWA in 1869, had a secret fraternity at his disposal, with which he wanted to seize control of the International.
"We are confronted here with a society, which behind the mask of extreme anarchism directs its attacks, not against the existing governments, but against the revolutionaries who do not submit to its orthodoxy and its leadership. Founded by the minority of a bourgeois congress, its members crept into the ranks of the international organizations of the working class, first of all trying to take over its leadership, and working towards its disorganization as soon as they saw that this plan had failed. In the most shameless manner they tried to slip in their own sectarian program and their limited ideas in place of the global program, the great efforts of our organization; it organizes in the public sections of the international its own little secret sections, which, obeying the same slogans, through common action agreed on in advance, in many cases has succeeded in getting control of them; they publically attack in their papers all those who refuse to submit to their leadership; they provoke open war - those are their own words - in our ranks".
These are the words of the report on "A Plot against the International Workingmen's Association" which Marx and Engels were commissioned to write by the Hague Congress of 1872 (Marx-Engels-Werke, Volume 18 Page 333).
The struggle of Bakunin and his supporters against the International was both the product of the specific historic situation at that time, and of more general factors still existing today. At the basis of his activities lay the infiltration of petty-bourgeois individualism and factionalism, incapable of submitting to the will and discipline of the organization. To this was added the conspiratorial attitude of the declasse Bohemian, who cannot do without maneuvers and plots in favor of his own personal goals. The workers' movement has always been confronted with such behavior, since the organization cannot completely shield itself from the influence of other social classes. On the other hand, Bakunin's plot took on the concrete historical form of the secret organization, something which also belonged to the past of the workers' movement of that time. We will have to look at the concrete history of Bakunin, in order also to be able to understand what is more generally valid, what is important for us to understand today.
Bakuninism opposed to the proletariat's break with petty-bourgeois sectarianism
The foundation of the International, signaling the end of the period of counter revolution after 1849, provoked the strongest (according to Marx even exaggerated) reactions of fear and hatred among the ruling classes: the remains of the feudal aristocracy and above all the bourgeoisie as the direct and historic opponent of the proletariat. Spies and agents provocateurs were sent to infiltrate its ranks. Coordinated, often hysterical slander campaigns were whipped up against it in the press. Its activities were wherever possible harassed and repressed by the police. Members were put on trial and in prison. But the ineffectiveness of these measures soon became clear as long as the class struggle and revolutionary movements were on the rise. It was not until the defeat of the Paris Commune 1871 that disarray in the ranks of the association began to get the upper hand.
What alarmed the bourgeoisie most, apart from the international unification of its enemy, was the rise of marxism and the fact that the workers' movement was abandoning the sectarian forms of clandestine organization and becoming a mass movement. The bourgeoisie felt much safer as long as the revolutionary workers' movement took the form of closed sectarian secret groupings around a single leading figure, representing some utopian scheme or plot, more or less completely isolated from the proletariat as a whole. Such sects were much more easily observed, infiltrated, misused and manipulated than a mass organization finding its main strength and security in its anchorage in the working class as a whole. For the bourgeoisie, it was above all the perspective of revolutionary socialist activity towards the proletariat as a class, something the utopian and conspiratorial sects of the prior period could never assume, which posed a danger for its very class domination. The link between socialism and class struggle, between the Communist Manifesto and large strike movements, between the political and the economic aspects of the class struggle of the proletriat - this was what caused the bourgeoisie so many sleepless nights from 1864 on. This was what explains the almost unbelievable savagery with which it slaughtered the Paris Commune, and the force of the international solidarity of all fractions of the exploiting classes with this massacre.
Thus, one of the main themes of bourgeois propaganda against the International was the accusation that in reality a powerful secret organization was behind it, and that the latter was conspiring to bring down the ruling order. Behind this propaganda, which also was an additional excuse for repressive measures, was above all the attempt of the bourgeoisie to convince the workers that what it still feared most were the secret conspirators and not its mass movement. It's clear that the exploiters did all they could to encourage the different sects and conspirers still active in the workers' movement to exert themselves at the expense of marxism and of the mass movement. In Germany Bismarck encouraged the Lassallean sect in its resistance to the strike movements of the class and to the marxist traditions of the Communist League. In France the press, but also the agents provocateurs, tried to whip up the ever present suspicion of the conspiratorial Blanquists against the mass activity of the International. In the Latin and Slavic countries a hysterical press campaign was whipped up against the alleged "German domination" of the International by the "authoritarian state-worshipping marxists".
But it was above all Bakuninism which felt encouraged by this propaganda. Before 1864, Bakunin had, despite himself, at least partly recognized the superiority of marxism over his own petty-bourgeois putschist version of revolutionary socialism. Since the rise of the International, and with it of the bourgeois political onslaught against it, Bakunin felt confirmed and strengthened in his suspicion towards marxism and the proletarian movement. In Italy, which had become the center of his activity, the different secret societies, the Carbonari, Mazzini, the Camorra etc. who had begun to denounce the International and combat its influence on the peninsula, acclaimed Bakunin as a "true" revolutionary. There were public declarations advocating that Bakunin take over the leadership of the European revolution. Bakunin's pan-slavism was welcomed as the natural ally of Italy in its struggle against the Austrian occupation forces. As opposed to this it was recalled that Marx considered the unification of Germany more important for the development of the revolution in Europe than the unification of Italy. Both the Italian and the more farsighted parts of the Swiss authorities began benevolently to tolerate the presence of Bakunin, who prior to this had been the victim of the most brutal European wide state repression.
The organizational debates on the question of conspiracy
Michael Bakunin, the son of small gentry, broke with his milieu and his class above all because of this great thirst for personal freedom, something which at that time could be achieved neither in the army, nor in the state bureaucracy nor on a landed estate. Already this motive shows how far away his political career was from the disciplined, collective character of the working class. At that time there was hardly any proletariat in Russia.
When Bakunin, at the beginning of the 1840s, reached Western Europe as a political refugee, with a history of political conspiracy already behind him, the debates within the workers' movement about organizational questions were already in full swing. Especially in France.
At that time the revolutionary workers' movement was mainly organized in the form of secret societies. This form arose not only because the workers' organizations were outlawed, but also because the proletariat, still numerically small and hardly yet separated from petty-bourgeois artisanry, had still not found its own road. As Marx wrote about the situation in France:
"It is a known fact that until 1830 the liberal bourgeoisie was at the head of the conspiracies against the restoration. After the July revolution the republican bourgeoisie took its place; the proletariat, already educated to conspire under the restoration, moved to the foreground to the extent that the republican bourgeoisie was scared off from conspiracy by the futile street battles. The Societe des Saisons, with which Barbes and Blanqui made the Uprising of 1839, was already exclusively proletarian, and so was the Nouvelles Saisons formed after the defeat (...) This conspiracy of course never embraced the great mass of the Paris proletariat" (Extracts from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx-Engels- Werke Vol 7 page 273).
But the proletarian elements did not restrict themselves to this decisive break with the bourgeoisie. They began to question, in practice, the domination of conspiracies and conspirators.
"To the extent that the Parisian proletariat itself came into the foreground as a political party, the conspirators lost their leading position, were broken up, found a dangerous competition in the proletarian secret societies, which were aimed, not at an immediate insurrection, but at the organization and development of the proletariat. Already the Insurrection of 1839 had a decisive proletarian and communist character. After it the splits began, about which the old conspirators complained so much; splits which arose from the needs of the workers to clarify their class interests, and which expressed themselves partly in the old conspiracies themselves, partly in the new propagandistic groupings. The powerful communist agitation which Cabet began soon after 1839, the controversy which arose within the communist party, soon went over the heads of the conspirators. Both Chemu and De la Hodde admit that the communists at the time of the February revolution were far and away the strongest fraction of the proletariat. The conspirators, in order not to lose their influence over the workers (...) had to follow this movement and adopt socialist or communist ideas" (Marx, ibid, Vol7, page 275).
The intermediate conclusion of this process was the Communist League, which not only adopted the Communist Manifesto, but also the first proletarian statutes of a class party freed of all conspiracy.
"The Communist League was thus no conspiratorial society, but rather a society, which went about the organization of the proletarian party in secret, since the German proletariat igni et aqua was publically outlawed from writing, speech and association. When such a society conspires, this takes place only in the sense in which steam and electricity conspire against the status quo" (Marx, "Revelations concerning the Communist Trials in Cologne", Werke Vol.8 P.461)
It was also this question which led to the split of the Willich-Schapper fraction.
"From the Communist League a fraction split off, or was split off, as you wish, which demanded, if not conspiracy, so at least the appearance of conspiracy, and therefore direct alliance with the democratic heroes of the day - the Willich-Schapper fraction" (ibid).
What made these people dissatisfied was the same thing that separated Bakunin from the workers' movement:
"It goes without saying that such a secret society, which aims at the formation of the future oppositional party and not the future government, is of little attraction for individuals who on the one hand hang the theatrical cloak of conspiracy over their own insignificance, and on the other want to satisfy their parochial ambitions on the day of the next revolution, but above all want to appear important, share in the booty of demagogy and be welcomed by the democratic market hawkers" (ibid).
After the defeat of the European revolutions of 1848-49 the League demonstrated one last time how far it had gone beyond the sect. It tried through a regroupment with the Chartists in England and the Blanquists in France, to found a new international organization: the Societe Universelle des Communistes Revolutionnaires. Such an organization was to be governed by statutes applicable internationally to all members, abolishing the division between a secret leadership and a base membership seen as a mass to be manipulated. This project, like the League itself, broke up because of the international retreat of the proletariat after the revolutionary defeat. That is why it was only more than a decade later, with the appearance of a new proletarian wave of struggle and the founding of the International, that this decisive blow against sectarianism could be struck.
First principles of proletarian organization
When Bakunin arrived back in Western Europe from Siberia at the beginning of the 1860s, the first main lessons of the proletariat's organizational struggle had already been drawn, and were available to anyone who wanted to assimilate them. These lessons were acquired in years of bitter experience during which the workers had consistently been used as cannon fodder by the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie in its own struggle against feudalism. During this struggle, the proletarian revolutionary elements had separated from the bourgeoisie not only politically but organizationally, developing principles of organization in accordance with their own class nature. The new statutes defined the organization as a united, collective and conscious organism. The separation between the base, composed of workers unaware of the real political life of the organization, and a leadership composed of professional conspirators, was overcome. The new principles of rigorous centralization, including the organization of illegal work, excluded the possibility of a secret organization within the organization or at its head. Whereas the petty bourgeoisie, and above all the radicalized déclassé elements, had justified the necessity of a secret functioning of a part of the organization in relation to the whole as a means of protecting it from the class enemy, the new proletarian understanding showed that precisely this conspiratorial elite led to the infiltration of the class enemy, in particular the political police, into the proletarian ranks. It was above all the Communist League which demonstrated that organizational transparency and solidity is the best protection against destruction through the state.
Marx drew a portrait of the conspirators from Paris before the 1848 revolution which could just as easily be applied to Bakunin. Here we find a clear expression of the critique of the petty-bourgeois nature of sectarianism, which opened the door wide not only to the police but also to the déclassé Bohemian.
"Their wavering existence, dependent in some cases more on luck than on their activity, their life without rules, whose only fixed points of reference are the pubs and wine merchants - the habitual meeting place of the conspirator - their unavoidable acquaintance with all kinds of dubious people, places them in that circle which in Paris is called "Bohemia". This democratic Bohemian of proletarian origin - there is also a democratic Bohemian of bourgeois origin, the democratic dossers and bar props - are either workers who have given up their work and thus become dissolute, or people from the lumpen proletariat, who bring all the dissolute habits of this class into their new existence. One can understand how under these circumstances we find a few jailbirds involved in almost every conspiracy.
The whole life of these professional conspirators expresses the most marked characteristics of the Bohemian. Recruiting officers of conspiracy, they go from one pub to the next, feeling the workers' pulse, picking out their people, cajoling them into their conspiracy, burdening either the society treasury or their new friends with the cost of the inevitable drinks (...) He can at any moment be called to the barricades and fall, at each step the police lay traps for him which can send him to prison or even to the gallows. Such dangers actually comprise the attraction of this craft; the greater the insecurity, the more the conspirator hurries to hold on to the pleasure of the moment. At the same time the habit of danger makes one to the greatest extent indifferent towards life and freedom" (ibid p.273).
It goes without saying that such people "despise most profoundly the more theoretical enlightenment of the workers about their class interests" (p.272)
"The main characteristic in the life of the conspirator is the struggle with the police, to which they have exactly the same relationship as the thief or the prostitute. The police tolerate the conspiracies, and not only as a necessary evil. They tolerate them as easily observed centers (...) The conspirators constantly maintain feelers to the police, they come into collision with them at every moment; they hunt the informers just as the informers hunt them. Spying is one of their main occupations. It is no wonder, therefore, that the small leap from the artisan of conspiracy to paid police spy, facilitated by misery and prison, by threats and promises, is made so often" (ibid, p.274).
This was the understanding at the basis of the statutes of the International, and which worried the bourgeoisie enough to make it openly express its preference for Bakuninism.
The politics of conspiracy: Bakunin in Italy
In order to understand how Bakunin could end up being manipulated by the ruling classes against the International, it is necessary briefly to recall his political trajectory, as well as the situation in Italy after 1864. Anarchist historians are full of praise for Bakunin's "great revolutionary work" in Italy, where he set up a series of secret sects, and attempted to infiltrate and gain influence over different "conspiracies". They generally agree that it was Italy which hoisted Bakunin onto the pedestal of a "pope of revolutionary Europe". But since they carefully avoid going into the details of the reality of this milieu, we will have to go to the trouble here.
Bakunin earned a reputation for himself within the socialist camp through his participation in the revolution of 1848-49 as a military leader in Dresden. Imprisoned, extradited to Russia, and finally banished to Siberia, Bakunin did not reach Europe again until he fled in 1861. As soon as he arrived in London he went to Herzen, the well-known Russian liberal revolutionary leader. There he immediately began, independently of Herzen, to group the political emigration around his own person. It was a circle of Slavs, which Bakunin attached to himself via a pan-slavism tinged with anarchism. He kept away both from the English workers' movement and from the communist, above all German workers' educational club in London. Lacking an opportunity for conspiracy, (the foundation of the International was approaching) he set off for Italy in 1864, in search of disciples for his reactionary "pan-slavism" and his secret groupings.
"In Italy he found a lot of political secret societies; he found here a déclassé intelligentsia ever ready to get involved in all kinds of conspiracies; a peasant mass always on the verge of famine, and finally a pullulating lumpen proletariat, in particular the Lazzaroni of Naples, where he soon moved from Florence, and where he lived for several years. These classes appeared to him to be the real motor of revolution" (Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of his Life, p.411, 412).
Bakunin fled from the workers of Western Europe to the déclassé of Italy.
The secret societies as vehicles of revolt
In the period of reaction after the defeat of Napoleon, during which the Holy Alliance under Metternich pursued the principle of armed intervention of the great powers against every attempted social upheaval, those classes of society excluded from power were obliged to organize themselves in secret societies. This was not only the case for the workers, the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, but also for parts of the liberal bourgeoisie and even dissatisfied aristocrats. Almost all of these conspiracies, from 1820 on, whether the Decabrists in Russia or the Carbonari in Italy, organized themselves according to the model of freemasonry, which arose in the 17th century in England, and whose goals of "international brotherhood" and resistance to the Catholic church attracted European enlighteners like Diderot and Voltaire, Lessing and Goethe, Pushkin etc. But like so many things in this "century of enlightenment", like the "enlightened despots" Katarina and Friedrich the Great or Marie-Therese, freemasonry possessed a reactionary essence in the form of its mystical ideology, its elitist organization in different "grades of initiation", its aristocratic character and its murkiness, its leanings towards conspiracy and manipulation. In Italy, at that time the Mecca of the non-proletarian, unbridled maneuvering and conspiring secret societies, the Guelfi, Federati, Adelfi and Carbonari were sprawling from the 1820s and 1830s on. The most famous of them, the Carbonari, was a terrorist secret society which advocated catholic mysticism, and whose structures and "symbols" were taken from freemasonry.
But at the time Bakunin came to Italy, the Carbonari were already in the shadow of Mazzini's conspiracy. Mazzinism represented a step forward in relation to the Carbonari, since it struggled for a united, centralized Italian republic. Mazzini not only burrowed underground, but also agitated towards the population. After 1848 workers' sections were even formed. Mazzini also represented a progress organizationally, since he abolished the Carbonari system according to which the base militants had to follow blindly the order of the secret leadership on pain of death. But as soon as the International rose as a proletarian force independent of his control, he began to combat it as a threat to his own nationalist movement.
When Bakunin arrived in Naples, he immediately took up the struggle against Mazzini - but from the point of view of the Carbonari, whose methods he defended! Far from being on his guard, Bakunin plunged himself into this whole murky milieu, in order to take over the leadership of the conspiratorial movement. He founded the Alliance of Social Democracy, and as its leadership the secret International Brotherhood, an "order of disciplined revolutionaries".
A milieu manipulated by the reaction
The déclassé revolutionary aristocrat Bakunin found in Italy, much more even than in Russia, a suitable terrain. It was here that his organizational concept ripened to its fullest flowering. It was a murky swamp which brought forth a whole series of anti-proletarian organizations. These groupings of ruined, often depraved aristocrats, déclassé youth, or even of pure criminals, appeared to him more revolutionary than the proletariat. One of these groupings was the Camorra, which corresponded to Bakunin's romantic vision of revolutionary banditry. The domination of Naples by the Camorra, a secret society which had developed out of an organization of convicts, had become quasi-official after the amnesty of 1860. In Sicily, at about the same time, the armed wing of the dispossessed rural aristocracy infiltrated the local secret organization of Mazzini. From then on it called itself "Mafia" according to the capital letters of its slogan of battle: "Mazzini autorizza furti, incendi, awelenamenti" ("Mazzini allows us to steal, bum and poison"). Bakunin failed to denounce these elements or clearly distance himself from them.
Direct state manipulation was also not missing in this milieu. We can safely assume that this manipulation played a part in the way the Italian milieu celebrated Bakunin as the true revolutionary alternative to the "German dictatorship of Marx". Indeed, this propaganda was absolutely identical to that spread by the police organs of Louis-Napoleon in France.
As Engels informs us, the Carbonari and many similar groups were manipulated and infiltrated by the Russian and other secret services (see Engels: "The Foreign Policy of Russian Tsarism", Werke Vo1.22). This state infiltration was reinforced above all after the defeat of the European-wide revolution of 1848. The French dictator, the adventurer Louis Napoleon, who after the defeat of this revolution, became the spearhead of the ensuing counter revolution, allied himself with Palmers ton in London, but above all with Russia, in order to hold down the European proletariat. From 1864 on, the secret police of Louis Napoleon was active above all in order to destroy the International. One of its agents was "Herr Vogt", an associate of Lassalle, who slandered Karl Marx in public as allegedly being the head of a blackmail gang.
But the main axis of the activity of Louis Napoleon's secret diplomacy lay in Italy, where France was trying to exploit the national movement to its own ends. In 1859 Marx and Engels pointed out that the French head of state was himself an ex-member of the Carbonari. ("The monetary policy in Europe; The Position of Louis-Napoleon". In Werke Vol. 13).
Bakunin, who was up to his neck in this swamp, of course believed that he could manipulate this rubbish heap for his own revolutionary purposes. In reality it was he himself who was manipulated. To this day we do not know in detail all the "elements" with whom he "conspired". But there are some indications. For example he wrote his "freemason's manuscripts" in 1865, "a text which aimed at presenting Bakunin's ideas to Italian freemasonry" as the anarchist historian Max Nettlau tells us.
"The freemason's manuscript refers to the infamous Syllabus, the papal damnation of human thought from 1864, and Bakunin wanted to connect up with the rage against the pope whipped up by this, in order to push forward freemasonry or at least that part of it capable of development; he begins by saying: in order to again become a living and useful body, freemasonry must once again seriously take up the service of mankind" (Nettlau, Geschichte der Anarchismus, Vol.2 p. 48, 49)
Nettlau even proudly tries to prove, through a comparison of different quotations, that Bakunin had influenced the thought of freemasonry at that time. In reality it was the other way around. It was at this time that Bakunin adopted parts of the reactionary, mystical, secret society ideology of freemasonry. A world view which Engels already perfectly described at the end of the 1840s concerning Karl Heinzen:
"He sees the communist writer as a prophet, priest or vicar, who possesses a secret wisdom of his own, but which he withholds from the uneducated in order to keep them on leash (...) as if the literary representatives of communism would have an interest in keeping the worker ignorant, as if they were simply using them as the Illuminati wanted to use the populace in the last century" (Engels, "The Communists and Karl Heinzen" , Vol.4 Werke, p.321)
Here also lies the key to the Bakuninist Mystery, according to which in the future anarchist society without state and authority a secret society will still be needed.
Marx and Engels, without having thought of Bakunin, expressed this in relation to the English philosopher and once pseudo socialist Carlyle:
"The historically created class difference thus becomes a natural difference, which one has to recognize and honor as part of the eternal laws of nature through bowing before what is noble and wise in nature: the cult of genius. The whole view of the historic process of development flattens into the shallow trivialities of the Illuminati and freemason wisdom of the last century (...) With this comes the old question, who then is supposed to rule, which is broadly discussed with the most self-important staleness and finally answered, that the noble, wise and knowledgeable shall rule" (Extracts from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Werke Vol. 7 p.261).
Bakunin "discovers" the International
From the very outset the European bourgeoisie had attempted to use the swamp of Italy's secret societies against the International. Already at its foundation 1864 in London, Mazzini's supporters had attempted to impose their own sectarian statutes and thereby seize control of the Association. The representative of Mazzini in this action, Major Wolff, was later to be exposed as a police agent. After the failure of this attempt, the bourgeoisie started up the League of Peace and Freedom, using it to attract Bakunin into the cobweb of the underminers of the International.
Bakunin was expecting the "revolution" in Italy. While he was maneuvering in the swamp of the ruined nobility, déclassé youth, and the urban lumpen proletariat, the International Workingmen's Association had, without his involvement, risen to become the leading revolutionary force in the world. Bakunin had to recognize that, in his attempt to become Europe's revolutionary pope, he had backed the wrong horse. It was now, in 1867, that the bourgeois League of Peace and Freedom was founded, very obviously against the International. Bakunin with his "brotherhood" joined the League with the goal of "joining up the League, with the Brotherhood within it as its revolutionary inspiring force, with the International" (Nettlau, ibid, p. 100)
With this step, logically enough, but without even noticing it himself, Bakunin became the spearhead of the ruling classes' attempt to destroy the International.
The League of Peace and Freedom
The League, originally the idea of the Italian guerilla leader Garibaldi and the French author Victor Hugo, was founded in particular by the Swiss bourgeoisie, and supported by part of the Italian secret societies. Its pacifist disarmament propaganda and its demands for a "United States of Europe" were in reality mainly aimed at splitting and weakening the First International. At a time when Europe was split between a western part developing capitalistically, and a feudal part under the Russian knout, the call for disarmament was a favorite demand of Russian diplomacy. The International, like the whole workers' movement, had from the beginning adopted the slogan of the reestablishment of a democratic Poland as a bulwark against Russia, which at that time was the mainstay of European reaction. The League now denounced this policy as "militarist", whereas Bakunin's pan-slavism was presented as being truly revolutionary and directed against all militarism. In this way the bourgeoisie strengthened the Bakuninists against the International.
"The Alliance of socialist democracy is truly of bourgeois origin. It did not originate from the International; it is a branch of the League of Peace and Freedom, a stillborn society of bourgeois republicans. The International was already solidly founded, when Michael Bakunin took it into his head to play the part of emancipator of the proletariat. It could only offer him the field of activity common to all members. In order to acquire a reputation within it, he would first of all have had to win his spurs through consistent and self-sacrificing work; he believed that he would find better prospects and an easier path on the side of the bourgeoisie of the League" ("A Plot Against the IWA - Report on the Activities of Bakunin", Werke Vol. 18, p.335)
The proposal that Bakunin himself made, of an alliance of the League with the IWA, was however rejected by the Brussels Congress of the International. At this time it was also already becoming clear that an overwhelming majority would reject the abandonment of the support for Poland against Russian reaction. Thus there was nothing left for Bakunin but to join the International in order to undermine it from within. This orientation was supported by the leadership of the League, within which he had already set up a power base.
"The alliance between bourgeois and workers should not be limited to an open alliance. The secret statutes of the Alliance (...) include indications, that Bakunin laid the basis, in the midst of the League itself, for a secret society which should rule over the latter. Not only are the names of the leading groups identical with those of the League ... but also it are declared in the secret statutes that the founding members of the Alliance are for the most part ex-members of the Bern Congress" ("A plot..." ibid p.337)
Those who are acquainted with the politics of the League can assume that from the outset it intended to use Bakunin against the International - a task for which Bakunin was well prepared in Italy. Also the fact that several activists in the proximity both of Bakunin and the League were later exposed as police agents, speaks for this. Indeed, nothing could be more dangerous for the International than its corrosion from within by elements who themselves were not agents of the state, and who had a certain reputation in the workers' movement, but who pursued their own personal goals at the expense of the movement.
Even if Bakunin did not want to serve the counter revolution in this manner, he and his like carry the full responsibility for this through the way in which they put themselves close to the most reactionary and murky elements of the ruling class.
It is true that the Workers' International was conscious of the dangers represented by such an infiltration. The London Delegate Conference, for instance, adopted the following resolution:
"In those countries where the regular organization of the International is presently not possible due to governmental interference, the Association and its local sections can reconstruct themselves under some other name. However, any formation of international sections in the form of secret societies is and remains forbidden" (Werke Vol. 17.P.422).
Marx, who proposed this resolution, justified it as follows:
"In France and Italy, where such a political situation exists, that the right of assembly is a penal act, people will be strongly inclined to let themselves get drawn into secret societies, the results of which are always negative. Apart from this, such kinds of organization stand in contradiction to the development of the proletarian movement, because these societies, instead of educating the workers, submit them to authoritarian and mystical laws which hinder their independence and lead their consciousness in a wrong direction" (Intervention by Marx at the London Conference, September 1871).
Nevertheless, despite this vigilance Bakunin's Alliance succeeded in penetrating the International. In the second article in this series we will describe the struggle within its ranks, going to the roots of the different conceptions of organization and militantism between the proletarian party and the petty-bourgeois sect.
Kr, December 1995
[1] Clearly, the starting-point for the formation of a revolutionary organization is agreement on a political program. Nothing is more foreign to marxism, and to the workers' movement generally, than regroupment without programmatic principles. This being said, and contrary to the Bordigist vision, the proletarian program is not given once and for all. On the contrary, it is developed, enriched, and its mistakes corrected through the living experience of the class. When the IWA was formed, in other words in the early days of the workers' movement, the program's essential elements - that which determined an organization's membership of the proletarian camp - came down to a few general principles, contained in the preamble to the International's Statutes. Bakunin and his followers did not call these principles into question. Their attack on the IWA was essentially against the Statutes themselves, the IWA's rules of functioning. However, this does not mean that program and statutes can be separated. The latter express and concretize the essential principles of the working class, and no other, and are therefore an integral part of the program.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1929/communism-and-19th-century-workers-movement
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/second-international
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/ireland
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/56/middle-east-and-caucasus
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/balkans
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftn1
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftn2
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftn3
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftn4
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftn5
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftn6
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftn7
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftn8
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftn9
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftn10
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftn11
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftnref1
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftnref2
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftnref3
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftnref4
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftnref5
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftnref6
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftnref7
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftnref8
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftnref9
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftnref10
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/084_china_2.html#_ftnref11
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/china
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/maoism
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/france
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/19/union-question
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/first-international