We are publishing here large extracts from a reader who, while welcoming the overall approach of the leaflet on the Yellow Vest movement distributed by our section in France[1], also criticises certain of our positions, in particular the idea that nothing good for the proletariat can come out of this inter-classist movement. These questions touch on extremely important aspects of the proletarian struggle: what is the working class, its struggle, its perspective.
It’s only through a broad, open and animated debate that we can elaborate deeper responses, participate in the development of class consciousness, arm ourselves with the weapons of theory. We thus encourage all our readers to write to us, to formulate their criticisms, their agreements or their questions in order to fuel a debate that is vital for the proletariat. This is the spirit in which we are replying to this letter.
Reader’s letter
I have gone through various statements of position including those of the leftist groups who see this movement as a re-edition of 1968. The differences are obvious right away, but this comparison is used to justify their unbridled support
We can recognise, as your leaflet does, that the spontaneous outbreak of these blockades expresses a very deep social anger. An anger that is very diverse, if not contradictory, expressing the inter-classist nature of the movement and its “citizen” or even nationalist expressions. I basically agree with your critique about this.
On three points there can be a discussion:
There is also in the leaflet the idea that the working class is being prevented from struggling:
“This whole jolly scene, each with its particular credo, is occupying and patrolling the social terrain to prevent the workers from mobilising massively, from developing their autonomous struggle, their solidarity and unity against the attacks of the bourgeoisie”. Are the workers simply being “prevented” from openly struggling on their class terrain? Obviously not
This is indeed a mixed social movement, in which the balance of forces is not favourable to the working class and is giving a free hand to other strata out to defend their interests, which is hardly surprising today. In this sense, I agree with the passage that says “The proletarians want to express their deep anger but they don’t know how to struggle effectively to defend their living conditions against the growing attacks of the bourgeoisie and its government”;
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Our reply
Starting from a shared observation of the Yellow Vest movement, characterised by “an anger that is very diverse, if not contradictory, expressing the inter-classist nature of the movement and its ‘citizen’ or even nationalist expressions”, this reader poses three important questions:
A trap for the workers?
Our leaflet asserts that this movement is a real trap for the workers. But the comrade says: “What meaning should we give to this term ‘trap’? A trap presupposes an organisation that prepares and organises it. But we see nothing of that sort here”. It’s quite true that this movement was spontaneous. A young entrepreneur from Seine-et-Marne launched on social media a petition against the increase in petrol prices. Then a lorry driver, dressed up in a yellow vest, from the same department, called for roads to be blocked. Through a whole chain of clicks, these two cries of anger were propagated everywhere, testifying to a general feeling of being fed up throughout the population.
So this was not a trap laid by the bourgeoisie, its state, its parties, its unions or its media; it was a movement which was a trap for the workers because of its inter-classist nature. Because in an inter-classist movement where the workers (employed, students, pensioners, unemployed) are diluted as individual citizens in a milieu made up of all the other layers of society (petty bourgeoisie, peasants, artisans), the social aspirations and methods of struggle of these intermediate layers were dominant.
This why the point of departure for the movement was the explosion of anger among self-employed lorry drivers, taxi drivers and small bosses from the PME[2], in response to the tax increase on petrol that served to penalise their enterprises. This is why the main means of action was the occupation of roundabouts and crossings, then of the “the most beautiful avenue in the world”, the Champs-Élysées, a hi-viz yellow vest on their backs, in order to “be seen”, to “be heard” and above all “to be recognised”. This is why the Tricolore flag, La Marseillaise and the references to the French revolution of 1789 were omnipresent alongside the shouting about “the people of France”. These are methods which in no way express a mobilisation of the working class on its own terrain, putting into question capitalist exploitation through demands such as wage rises, opposition to lay-offs etc.
Furthermore the methods of struggle of the working class were never expressed. The absence of strikes in the different sectors of the class or of general assemblies, in which the exploited can debate and draw out the aims of their struggle, clearly confirms this.
Even worse, the rotten terrain of populism and xenophobia gangrened a large part of the movement. We saw some of the most nauseating expressions of the current historic period. Like the appeals to strengthen anti-immigrant laws and even xenophobic actions. Over 90% of the sympathisers of Marie le Pen’s Rassemblement National support the “Yellow Vests” and over 40% say that they are themselves taking part in the movement. This indeed is the snare that those workers who don the yellow vest are caught up in. This movement has been a real trap for them.
What are the causes of the political difficulties of the working class?
In a few lines this letter poses a central question: “There is also in the leaflet the idea that the working class is being prevented from struggling… Are the workers simply being “prevented” from openly struggling on their class terrain? Obviously not”. What are the causes of the current political difficulties of the working class? The answer can’t be found by taking a snapshot of the proletariat today – you have to examine the whole film of its history. So we can’t reply fully here to this complex question[3]. We can simply insist on one point. We should not underestimate the permanent work of sabotage by the trade unions whose specific role for the past century has precisely been that of undermining the struggle in the workplace and the consciousness of the class. A single example: just a few months before the Yellow Vest movement the trade unions organised the “stop-start strike of the railway workers”; thousands of very militant workers engaged in numerous strike days, completely isolated, cut off from other sectors of the proletariat. And yet at the same time, in the old age homes, in the post office, in the day nurseries, the hospitals, in certain factories etc, struggles were breaking out on a regular basis, each sector in its own corner. Then the CGT issued the call for the “convergence of struggles”, a simulated unity consisting of marching in the street, one sector behind the next, each with its own slogan, its own corporate demand … and then going home without any common general assembly, without discussion, without solidarity in the struggle. These union movements, which are repeated year after year, have the sole function of spreading the poison of division, of despair, of powerlessness. So yes, the systematic sabotage of working class unity is one of the major ingredients in the current weakness of the proletariat, a weakness which creates favourable soil for the explosion of inter-classist anger which has no perspective. In fact, the bourgeoisie is exploiting the weakness of the working class to try to drive it further into the ground. The working class has indeed been going through a very difficult period. Since 1989, with the campaigns on the collapse of Stalinism, which was identified with the so-called “failure of communism”, the proletariat has not been able to rediscover its class identity, to recognise itself as a revolutionary class. Unable to put forward the perspective of a society without exploitation, the exploited class remains very vulnerable, but above all extremely passive when it comes to the struggle. While large sectors of the proletariat have not recognised themselves in the popular revolt of the Yellow Vests, neither have these central sectors been able to mobilise themselves in a massive and unified way against the attacks of the government, on their own class terrain and with their own methods of struggle. However, despite these difficulties, the proletariat has not been defeated. Taking into account the general level of discontent and the new attacks to come, the great mass of the proletariat can still throw off its lethargy in the period ahead. The future still belongs to the class struggle.
The Yellow Vests, a springboard for the class struggle?
“Doesn’t the class struggle become autonomous in the course of the movement itself? Even if I share the critique of the content and methods of the movement, I remain open to the possibility of an evolution. You noted the spontaneous way in which these blockades emerged, and some are showing a concern for self-organisation, to function through real general assemblies, etc”
Even if it started on a bad basis, could the Yellow Vest movement transform itself into something different, into an authentic movement of the working class? In favour of this thesis, you could point to the widening of the demands raised, since the rejection of the tax increase on petrol took a back seat to a broader protest against poverty and in favour of increased buying power. Furthermore, the sympathy for the movement in the population was certainly real. If the movement has never been massive (around 300,000 Yellow Vests at the high point) and while the majority of workers in the big plants and public sector remained spectators, it remains the case that it enjoyed a lot of popularity. Again in support of this thesis, there are historical precedents. Here are three, by no means the least of them: the Paris Commune of 1871 began as an explosion of anger that in appearance was nationalist and anti-Prussian; the mass strike in Russia in 1905 began under a religious banner, led by a priest, Father Gapon; May 1968 in France was initiated by a movement of students who, at the time, had often come out of the petty bourgeoisie. Each time, the working class was finally able to put itself at the head of the struggle, with its own methods, its forms of organisation, its strength. To paraphrase our reader, “the class struggle became autonomous by emerging as such during the movement itself”.
So could the Yellow Vest movement transform itself into something else, into a real workers’ struggle? In fact, the comrade himself answers his own question in his letter: “This is indeed a mixed social movement, in which the balance of forces is not favourable to the working class and is giving a free hand to other strata out to defend their interests, which is hardly surprising today”.
But why is this? Because we are not in 1871, 1905, or 1968. In 1871, the Paris Commune was not an exception. In many regions of Europe, but particularly in France, the working class was in struggle and several “Communes” appeared. The mass strike in Russia in 1905 was preceded by a deep process of rising proletarian struggle, of developing consciousness and organisation, again at the international level, since the 1890s (Rosa Luxemburg masterfully described this process in her book The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions). May 68 broke out after a year marked by very important workers’ struggles, particularly in the big factories in the west of France.
Today, we are not seeing any of this. As we saw above, the working class is going through major difficulties. It is not even conscious of its existence as a social class antagonistic to the bourgeoisie and distinct from intermediate social layers like the petty bourgeoisie. It has lost the memory of its own past and is not able to refer to its immense historical experience; it’s even ashamed of it since the bourgeoisie is constantly assimilating the working class to an extinct species and uses the word “communism” to describe the barbarity of Stalinism.
In this situation, the Yellow Vest movement can in no way function as a kind of springboard or spark for an authentic struggle of the working class. On the contrary, the proletarians who have come out behind the slogans and methods of the petty bourgeoisie, drowned in the interclassist ideology of “citizenship”, diluted among all the other social strata, can only suffer the pressure of bourgeois democratism and nationalism.
In this sense its fortunate that the majority of the working class has contented itself with giving platonic support and that the mass of proletarians have not participated in a movement that has no perspective. This reticence reveals that, leaving aside the sympathy for some of the demands about poverty, the working class has from the start been very circumspect about the fixation on taxes and about the methods used (occupation of roundabouts) and concerned and even disgusted by the immediate support that has come from the right and extreme right.
This distrust shows that, despite its difficulties in engaging in the struggle on its own terrain, the proletariat has not been crushed, defeated, or massively mobilised behind the putrid ideology of the petty bourgeoisie and behind populist, anti-immigrant xenophobia.
In the last few weeks, amidst this whole swamp, there have been a few shafts of light: the high school students came out in struggle against the reform of the baccalauriat (without the Marseillaise and the Tricolore), not for themselves directly, but in solidarity with future pupils who will experience a much degraded education. At the same time, university students mobilised to oppose increasing fees for foreign students and raised the slogan “Solidarity with the immigrants”. The anger of the young educated generation – who are mainly future workers – is a sharp response both to the iniquitous measures of the government and the anti-immigrant slogans raised by the Yellow Vests. Solidarity is key to the strength of the working class.
The proletariat has momentarily lost its class identity. It has been cut off from its history and its experience. But it is still there, still alive. In its depths, reflection about the lack of perspective offered by capitalist society continues, especially among the most conscious and combative elements. Driven by the aggravation of the economic crisis, not yet conscious of its own strength, not yet confident in its capacity for self-organisation, the proletariat will be obliged to engage in the combat for the defence of its own living conditions.
Faced with the momentary paralysis of the class struggle, revolutionaries have to be patient, not fear isolation, all kinds of criticisms and misunderstandings. They have to unmask all the enemies of the proletariat, all the ideological traps and dead-ends, in order to participate, to the maximum of their still limited forces, in the real development of consciousness within the working class, with the conviction that only the class struggle can provide a perspective for the future of humanity.
Révolution Internationale, 24.12.18
[1] https://fr.internationalism.org/content/9801/face-a-misere-et-a-degradation-nos-conditions-vie-comment-lutter-faire-reculer [2]. A machine translation of this leaflet is available on our discussion forum: https://en.internationalism.org/forum/16600/france-yellow-vest-protests-about-fuel-and-taxes-general [3], post 15
[2] PME: petit ou moyenne enterprise, small or medium enterprises
[3] See for example “Why the proletariat has not yet overthrown capitalism”, International Review 103 and 104
In November 2018 the two main groups of the communist left in Britain, the ICC and the Communist Workers Organisation[1], held meetings in London on the centenary of the German revolution. From both meetings it was evident that there is fundamental agreement on a number of key points arising from this experience:
And yet there were also definite disagreements between our two organisations, which emerged at the CWO meeting and were further debated at the ICC meeting the following week, which was attended by a member of the CWO[3]. These disagreements are raised in the CWO article just mentioned:
“Given the above scenario it was therefore surprising that a member of the Internationalist Communist Current (the only other organisation present in the meeting), and whose other comrades made positive contributions to the discussion, should pose the question that August 1914 was too early for the Internationale group to split from German Social Democracy. He surprisingly argued that August 1914 was not a definitive betrayal of the international workers’ movement.
He went to say that as the ICC and ICT both came from the tradition of the Italian Communist Left that we should recognise that this was just like the members of the Communist Party of Italy (PCd’I) who went into exile in the 1920s. They had seen the party they founded taken over by the ‘centrists’ like Gramsci and Togliatti, with the support of the Communist International (even though the Left still had the support of the majority of the PCd’I). However as they had no clear evidence that this meant that the Third International had finally and irrevocably broken with the international revolution (and given the abrupt changes of policy of the Comintern this was a period of great confusion) they decided that they would form themselves into a ‘fraction’. The aim of the Fraction was either to persuade the Comintern to stick to revolutionary internationalism or, if that failed and the International did something which definitely showed that it had betrayed the working class, then the fraction should form the nucleus of a new party. In actual fact the Fraction did decide in 1935 that the Comintern had gone over to the other side of the class barricades (with the adoption of the Popular Front). However it was then divided between the followers of Vercesi, who now argued that the party could only be formed in conditions when it could win a mass following (similar to Luxemburg), and those who wanted to begin to build it in the 1930s. The issue was never resolved and the Fraction collapsed in 1939.
We replied that the two cases of Germany in 1914 and the Italian comrades in the 1920s were not the same. As the foregoing analysis shows, the SPD’s vote for war credits was a clear and obvious betrayal of the working class cause. And this judgment is not the product of hindsight. There were other socialists at the time (like Lenin, but not just him) who loudly said so. The need was for a new banner around which the revolutionary working class could rally. The sooner that banner was raised the quicker the revolutionaries could get to work to build for the movement which would break out, sooner or later, against the war. And the fact that Germany was a federal state saturated in localism made this task all the more urgent”.
The real tasks of a revolutionary fraction
We have quoted the CWO at length because we want to make sure our response deals accurately with their views. But in doing so, we will have to take up some important inaccuracies in the CWO’s account, regarding both certain historical elements and our own understanding of them.
To begin with, it is misleading to say that, for the ICC, “August 1914 was not a definitive betrayal of the international workers’ movement”. On the contrary: the capitulation of the majority social democrats, inside and outside parliament, was indeed a definite betrayal of everything that international social democracy had stood for and had voted on at major international congresses. It confirmed that the opportunist right wing of social democracy, against which militants like Luxemburg had been waging a determined struggle since before the end of the 19th century, had crossed the line into the enemy camp – a step from which there could be no turning back.
Our point however was that the betrayal of a substantial part of the organisation did not yet signify that the entire party had been integrated into the capitalist state; that precisely because - contrary to what some anarchists claim – social democracy had not been bourgeois from the beginning, the treason of August 1914 gave rise to a huge battle within the party, to a flood of reactions against the betrayal, many of them confused and inadequate, bounded by centrist and pacifist conceptions, but still expressing at root a proletarian internationalist reaction against war. The clearest, most determined and most famous amongst them were the Spartacists. And as long as this battle continued, as long as the various oppositions to the new official line could still operate within the party, the question of the fraction, of an organised, internal fight for the “soul” of the party - until either the purging of the traitors or the expulsion of the internationalists - was still entirely relevant[4].
In an internal discussion text on the nature of centrism, which we published in 2015, our comrade Marc Chirik gave a whole number of examples of the oppositional movement within the SPD after August 1914, both within parliament and in the party as a whole. The most determined expression of this reaction was provided by the group around Luxemburg and Liebknecht, who did not wait for the class to mobilise in massive numbers, but from the first day of the war began to organise their resistance in what later became the Spartakusbund and tried to regroup internationalist forces within the party around the slogan “don’t leave the party in the hands of the traitors”. Not long after this there was the decision of numerous deputies not to vote for further war credits; the resolutions from many local branches of the SPD that the leadership abandon the policy of the Union Sacrée; the formation of the “social democratic working collective” that would constitute the nucleus of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, the UPSD; the publishing of leaflets and manifestos, and the calling of demonstrations against the war and in solidarity with Karl Liebknecht for his intransigent opposition to the militarism of the ruling class. For Marc this was a confirmation that
“what is not true even for the life of individual human beings is a total absurdity at the level of an historic movement such as that of the proletariat. Here the passage from life to death is not measured in seconds or even minutes but in years. The moment when a workers’ party signs its own death certificate and its actual, definitive death, are not the same thing. This is perhaps difficult to understand for a radical phraseologist, but it is quite understandable for a marxist who doesn’t have the habit of deserting a ship like a rat when it begins to take in water. Revolutionaries know the historical meaning of an organisation which the class has given birth to, and as long as it still contains a breath of life they fight in order to save it, to hold onto it for the class”[5].
Neither is it true that the situation of the German revolutionaries in 1914 was fundamentally different from the comrades of the Italian left who decided to form a fraction to fight against the degeneration of the Communist Party of Italy in the 1920s. On the contrary: in both cases, you have a party that is being increasingly dominated by an openly bourgeois faction (social chauvinists in the SPD, Stalinists in the CP), and an opposition divided into a vacillating centre and a revolutionary left, which has rightly decided that, even if the tide is turning against the class, it remains an elementary duty to fight as long as possible for the real programme and traditions of the party as long as there is any proletarian life left in it. In contrast, the method of the CWO in describing the situation of the SPD in 1914 bears a curious resemblance to the old (essentially councilist) CWO position about the Bolsheviks and the Communist parties – that they were already totally bourgeois in 1921 and anyone who thought otherwise was basically an apologist for their subsequent crimes.
We could also take up the extremely simplistic presentation of the history of the debates within the Italian fraction up to 1939, but it would be better to come back to that in a separate article, since the CWO has recently republished an article by Battalgia Comunista [6]on the question of fraction and party, with a long introduction by the CWO which voices many of their criticism of the ICC, not only on the question of the fraction and the party but also on our analysis of the world situation[7]. But one of the key points that emerge from both the BC article and the new introduction is the idea that a fraction is basically just a discussion circle which has little interest in intervening in the class struggle: as they put it at the end of the article on the public meeting, “This is not a time for fractions or discussion circles. It is time to form nuclei of revolutionaries everywhere and for them to converge in the creation of an international and internationalist revolutionary party in preparation for the inevitable class conflicts of the future”.
If – despite their many weaknesses – the Spartacist group was fundamentally playing the role of a fraction within the SPD, whose long dynamic of degeneration accelerated dramatically towards a final point of rupture after the watershed of August 1914, then fraction work is clearly something very different from a retreat into academic debate removed from the daily reality of war and class struggle. On the contrary, there is no question that the Spartacists did “raise the banner” of the class struggle against the war. Within the SPD the Spartakusbund had its own organisational structure, published its own newspaper, put out many leaflets and was able, along with some of the most radical elements in the class (in particular the “Revolutionary Shop Stewards” or “Obleute” in the industrial centres) to call for demonstrations which regrouped thousands of workers. This distinct organisational structure was retained as a precondition for the Spartacists entering the USPD almost 3 years after the beginning of the war in April 1917, following the mass expulsion of the opposition from the SPD. This decision was taken, as Liebknecht put it, “in order to drive it forward, to have a platform for our position, to be able to reach thousands of elements.” As Marc comments in his text: “It is more than doubtful if this strategy was valid at this moment, but one thing is clear: if such a question was posed for Luxemburg and Liebknecht, then it was because they rightly considered the USPD to be a centrist movement and not a party of the bourgeoisie”. In sum, the fraction work of the Spartacists continued whether inside or outside a larger party, as an independent force seeking to create the conditions for a new party purged of both bourgeois and centrist elements – just as it continued for the Italian left in the late 20s and 30s after their expulsion from the party and even after their recognition that the CPs had passed over to the enemy.
Thus a part of the CWO’s criticism of the Spartacists for staying too long in the old party is founded on this misconception of the role of a fraction as a discussion circle whose activity is in some sense opposed to the formation of revolutionary nuclei who prepare the ground for the future world party. On the contrary: that was precisely the concept of the fraction as elaborated by the Italian left. The difference lies elsewhere: in the recognition (shared by both Luxemburg and the Italian left) that the constitution of a new international party was not the product of the will of revolutionaries alone, but was dependent on a much wider and deeper process of maturation in the class.
Bolsheviks and Spartacists
The CWO presentation at the meeting and the subsequent article lays great stress on the contrast between the Spartacists and the Bolsheviks:
“In Russia the Bolsheviks were estimated at only 8000 – 10,000 in number at the start of 1917 but they were present in almost every town or city and, more importantly, embedded in the wider working class. Thus when the revolutionary movement arose they were not only able to give a lead but grew inside it. Workers had called spontaneously in February 1917 for ‘soviet power’ (based on the memory of 1905) but by the summer of 1917 it was clear that only one party supported ‘all power to the soviets’ and this party in most estimates now had 300,000 members”.
It is certainly true that the Bolsheviks were in the vanguard of the revolutionary movement in the years 1914-19. On the question of war, the Bolshevik delegation to Zimmerwald defended a much more rigorous position than that of the Spartacists: they, along with the German “left radicals”, raised the slogan “turn the imperialist war into a civil war”, whereas the Spartacist delegation showed a tendency to make concessions to pacifism. In their actual practise in a revolutionary situation, the Bolsheviks were able to analyse the balance of class forces with great lucidity and thus play a key role at decisive moments: in July, when it was necessary to avoid the provocations of the bourgeoisie who were trying to draw revolutionary workers into a premature military confrontation; in October, when Lenin insisted that the conditions for the insurrection had definitely ripened and it had become vital to strike before the moment passed. This was in tragic contrast to the young German Communist Party which made the monumental error of taking the bourgeoisie’s bait in January 1919 in Berlin, in no small measure because the Spartacist leader Liebknecht broke party discipline in pushing for an immediate armed uprising.
However, the capacity of the Bolsheviks to play this role cannot be reduced to the notion of being “embedded” in the class. It was above all the product of a long struggle for political and organisational clarity within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which made it possible for the Bolsheviks to grasp what was really at stake after the February uprising, even if it required a determined struggle inside the party to chase out a very strong tendency towards support for bourgeois democracy and a “defencist” position in the war – this was the whole meaning of the debates around Lenin’s April Theses[8]. The fact that the Bolsheviks came out of this debate strengthened and more determined to fight for soviet power was the product of two essential factors: on the one hand, their organisational solidity, which made it possible to maintain the unity of the party despite the very sharp divergences that appeared within it during the revolutionary process; and on the other hand, the fact that, from the beginning, their political programme – even when it was not yet as clear as it became after 1917 – was always based on the principle of class independence from the bourgeoisie, in contrast to the other main tendency in Russian social democracy, the Mensheviks. But what all this really points to is that in the years between the birth of Bolshevism and the outbreak of the revolution, the Bolsheviks had themselves carried out the central tasks of a revolutionary fraction inside the Russian party and the Second International.
The Bolsheviks’ rigour on organisational and programmatic issues was one side of this capacity to make the transition from fraction to party; the other side was the rapid maturation within the Russian proletariat as a whole. This was a proletariat which was far less vulnerable to reformist illusions than its class brothers and sisters in Germany: both at the level of their living conditions, and of the political conditions imposed by the Tsarist regime, their struggle necessarily took on an explosive and revolutionary character which, in a sense, already indicated the circumstances that would face the working class in the most advanced countries in the new epoch of decadence. This was a proletariat which, largely denied the possibility of building mass defensive organisations inside the old system, gave rise in 1905 to the soviet form of organisation and gained an inestimably valuable foretaste of what it means to make a revolution. It must also be remembered that the Russian proletariat faced a much weaker bourgeoisie, whereas the German workers would be catapulted into revolutionary struggles against a powerful ruling class which knew it could count on the support of the SPD and the trade unions as well as that of the international bourgeoisie. From this point of view, we can better understand why the question is not reducible to a kind of physical presence of revolutionaries within the working class, however important that is. The German social democrats certainly had a huge presence within the working class, in all areas of its life – economic, political, cultural. The problem was that this influence within the class was increasingly geared towards institutionalising and thus neutralising the class struggle. The key difference between the SPD and the Bolsheviks was in the latter’s capacity to maintain and develop the class autonomy of the proletariat.
Finally, to really understand the contrast between the Bolsheviks and the Spartacists, to go deeper into the immense problems confronting the communist minority during the revolutionary wave after 1917, we must integrate the particular situations pertaining to this or that country into a wider international vision. The Second International did indeed fall apart in 1914: faced with the betrayal of substantial parts of its national components, it simply ceased to exist. This posed immediately the necessity for a new International, even if the conditions for its formation had not yet come together. The late formation of the Communist International - and its accompanying programmatic weaknesses - was to be a major handicap not only for the German revolution, but for the Russian soviet power and the whole revolutionary wave. We will come back to this in other articles. We have argued that the prior work of the left fractions is an indispensible basis for the formation of the party on a solid basis. But we also have to recognise that, in the early part of the 20th century, when the danger of opportunism within the social democratic parties was becoming increasingly evident, the left fractions who opposed this drift towards integration into the politics of the bourgeoisie were shackled by the federal structure of the Second International. This was an International which largely functioned as a kind of co-ordinating centre for a collection of national parties. There was solidarity and cooperation between the different left currents (for example, when Lenin and Luxemburg worked together to draft the Basel resolution on war in at the International Congress of 1912), but there was never an internationally centralised fraction which could develop a coherent policy in all countries, a unified response to all the dramatic changes that were being wrought by capitalism’s passage to an epoch of wars and revolutions.
Today’s revolutionary groups are not literally fractions in the sense of being an organic part of a former workers’ party, but they will not be able to prepare the ground for the party of tomorrow if they fail to understand what we can learn from the historical contribution of the left fractions.
Amos
[1] The CWO is the British affiliate of the International Communist Tendency; a comrade from their German group, the GIS, also took part in the meeting. While it was positive that both organisations recognise the historic importance of the revolution in Germany – which effectively put an end to the First World War and for a brief moment threatened to extend the political power of the working class from Russia to western Europe – it was a mark of the disunity of the existing revolutionary movement that two meetings on the same theme were held in the same city within a week of each other. The ICC had proposed the holding of a joint meeting to avoid this partial clash, but the CWO rejected our proposal for reasons which are not clear to us. This was in contrast to the meetings on the Russian revolution held in 2017, where the CWO agreed to give a presentation at our day of discussion in London https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201712/14536/icc-day-discussion-russian-revolution [5] For us, the fact that the groups of the communist left are more or less alone in preserving and elaborating the essential lessons of the revolution in Germany is sufficient reason for them to coordinate their response to the ideological distortions of this event put out by all factions of the ruling class (which also include its virtual erasure from the records of history).
[3] This disagreement was the main focus of the discussion at the CWO meeting. The discussion was again central at the ICC meeting, although there was also a debate around the questions posed by an internationalist anarchist comrade about whether there is a need for a party, and whether centralisation corresponds to the organisational needs of the working class. On this question of the need for centralisation as an expression of the tendency towards unity, the comrade later said that he found our arguments clear and convincing.
[4] See in particular the articles on the German revolution in International Review 81,82 and 85:
[6] Publication of the Internationalist Communist Party, the Italian affiliate of the ICT
[7] In the meantime comrades can refer to a series of articles which we have published criticising the views of Battaglia and the CWO on the question of the fraction: see International Reviews 59, 61, 64, 65 (https://en.internationalism.org/series/2042 [8].)
At the end of December 2018, the Israeli novelist Amos Oz died at the age of 79. As well as being a distinguished writer of novels that chronicled the troubled history of the modern Israeli state, he was also a consistent critic of its increasingly militarist policies. In 1967, amid the euphoria of victory in the Six Day War, Oz was one of the few who warned of the morally corrupting influence that the occupation would bring to Israeli society. He advocated an immediate end to the occupation and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. This view might have seemed radical at the time, but it was not long before it entered the mainstream, being at the heart of the Camp David accords in 2000.
In the era of unrestrained populism, however, even this moderate proposal seems utterly utopian. The right wing Netanyahu government in Israel , which has done all it can to scupper any progress towards the formation of a Palestinian state, is facing increasing pressure from those even further to the right who openly demand a “Greater Israel” - a one state solution which would certainly involve the mass deportation of Palestinian Arabs. Meanwhile the Palestinian national movement is increasingly dominated by Islamist factions who will settle for nothing less than the military destruction of the Zionist state, a solution which would no doubt demand another mass deportation - that of Israeli Jews.
In this increasingly poisonous atmosphere, we can only welcome the appearance of an article which is one of the rare expressions of a genuinely internationalist standpoint emanating from inside Israel. The author of the article takes up the marxist position that all national struggles and slogans in the epoch of capitalist decline have become reactionary, and does not hesitate to argue that the only way out of the trap created by imperialism in Israel-Palestine is the unification of Israeli and Palestinian workers on a class basis, leading towards a proletarian revolution against all bourgeois states.
The comrade quite rightly calls for the formation of a revolutionary party which would stand for this perspective. We would argue that this is only possible as part of an international development in which the working class, above all in the main centres of world capital, is able to re-appropriate its historical project of communism. By the same token, it is more than probable that any durable unity between Israeli and Palestinian workers will only be possible as part of a world-wide revival of class struggle, of a movement which is able to push back the waves of nationalism and xenophobia that have been growing in strength everywhere in recent years, but which because of its particular history exert an added force in Israel-Palestine.
Nevertheless, the appearance of even a tiny minority advocating a proletarian alternative in the Middle East is a vitally important link to this revolutionary future, which is still possible and more than ever necessary.
ICC
The early general elections in Israel, to be held in April 2019, will be marked by the instability of the Zionist state. The decision made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to call for early elections represents the dead- end in which the government in Tel Aviv is facing. Besides the expected decision of Israel's attorney-general to accuse Netanyahu of bribery and fraud, a factor that contributed to his decision to initiate early elections, the Zionist regime faces terrible economic and political crises.
In economic terms, the Israeli working class feels an awful deterioration in terms of its living conditions as well as its ability to continue paying the price for decades of military occupation. The healthcare and education system are underfunded, the costs of consumer goods and services are rising, and many layers among the impoverished workers of the country feel incapable of coping with their poor economic situation. Thus, 20 percent of the Israelis live in poverty and the country is one of the most unequal societies in the West.
In political terms, Israel is challenged by the Palestinian armed factions in the West Bank and Gaza that resist the Israeli occupation forces. Its Southern border is unstable due to continued attempts of the Hamas Islamic militants to advance armed resistance near the separation fence; the Islamic militants launch missiles against the Israeli population in the South and dig tunnels in order to attack the Israeli army. In the Northern border, Israel is busy with ongoing military attacks on bases of Iran's Revolutionary Guards in Syria. In addition, the Israeli forces and Hezbollah are closer than ever to another war. Supported by the US administration, Israel is carrying out aggressive policies on its borders in order to bring down the Islamists in Gaza (the enclave faces a terrible humanitarian situation due to the Israeli blockade) and drive the Iranian militias out of Syria (it fears that the latter might aid Hezbollah in a future war).
This situation of the Israeli regime indicates its instability and ongoing crisis. Being an Apartheid state, Israel seeks to maintain a condition in which the working class will pay the price for the occupation and the country's military aggressiveness, and at the same time will accept the capitalist way through which the government runs the economy. The Israeli ruling class, which fights the nationalist Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and is aided by right-populist and fascist leaders abroad, oppresses the masses in order to keep the Zionist colonization project alive. There are many Israeli workers and youth that are not ready anymore to accept the Israeli condition of national oppression and cruel capitalist exploitation. Some of them are already mobilized by the Israeli opposition parties against the Netanyahu government although these parties serve the Israeli bourgeois elite.
The Israeli political system is fragmented and fragile. The political right parties are traditionally organized around the Likud party led by Prime Minister Netanyahu. However, even among the right parties that rule the country there are splits and crises. While the biggest political faction in the Knesset is the Likud, an ultra-chauvinist and neo-liberal formation that was established in 1973, there are other parties, smaller than the Likud, whose policies are far more nationalist and chauvinist. These parties carry forward policies that aim to form the Greater Israel from which the Palestinians will be driven out. The only 'centrist' political faction that joined the Netanyahu coalition was formed by some former Likud members. However, this faction collaborated with Netanyahu and the political right in pushing the country's economy to the capitalist extreme.
The parties that constitute the opposition to Netanyahu are not homogeneous in terms of politics and ideology. Among them there are the Labour party whose opportunistic and social-chauvinist politics are distrusted by most of the Israelis and the small social-democratic and Zionist party Meretz whose political electorate is narrow. The Palestinians in Israel are represented in a joint list of nationalist political parties in which the Stalinist Communist Party of Israel plays a central role. The problem of this Left-Center mishmash block is not just its heterogeneity in political terms but also consists in the fact that none of them propose a way forward to the Israeli and Arab working class. Neither the pseudo-Left Zionist factions nor the anti-Zionist Arab and Communist parties propose a way out of decades of occupation, brutal capitalism, austerity and ongoing social crises.
This situation is regrettable but understandable as Israel as a settler-state continues to colonize the Palestinian masses. The problem of the Israeli occupation plays a central role in the politics of the country. While the political right desires to intensify the occupation and colonization, the political pseudo-left carries forward the already dead Two-State solution in which a small Palestinian Bantustan state will be established alongside Israel. While there is a great desire among the masses to see the end of this bloody conflict, the right prospers as it spreads radical chauvinism and poisonous nationalism in order to split the working class along national lines. The pseudo-left suggests nothing but a solution based on the imperialist order in which the capitalist system will continue to oppress the masses and exploit them. With no genuine alternative to more than 100 years of bloody conflict, nationalism flourishes and chauvinism continues to foil any change to real reconciliation between the Israeli workers and their Palestinian counterparts.
The new trend among some Leftist circles is the idea of one, bi-national state of Israel/Palestine, a state which will provide 'self-determination' for the two nations. This idea is becoming popular in the radical milieu that express its despair of the prospect to build two independent nation states in Palestine. However, the 'self-determination' slogan is deceiving. In the epoch of imperialism and the decadence of capitalism, the demand for self- determination means the establishment of a bourgeois regime. From the point of view of the working class, the idea of building a bourgeois state is a dead- end in terms of the class struggle. Besides the fact that calling for self- determination within capitalism constitutes a risky illusion in the bourgeois order, it brings about a situation in which the working class is not differentiated from the national bourgeoisie. In this situation, there is a split in the working class along national lines. Revolutionaries in countries in which the proletariat exists and is capable of revolutionary action cannot be satisfied with the call for 'self-determination.'
Furthermore, to support the 'right for self-determination' is to claim that this very right stands in contrast with the interests of the national bourgeoisie. This position contradicts the reality in Palestine as the bourgeoisies can only benefit from a situation of unified capitalist economy in one state. The interest of the Israeli and Palestinian proletariats is their unification along class lines; nationalism and the reactionary call for self- determination constitutes a weapon in the hands of the national bourgeoisie that wish to prevent the working class from achieving socialism. To this we should add the fact that in the epoch of imperialism, the struggle for national independence cannot be successful as capitalism seeks to destroy the nation- states as well as their economies and build a world market through the process of colonization. The radical impulse to return to the age in which it was possible to build truly independent nation-states is utopian and even reactionary.
Thus, the call for the establishment of one state of Palestine within the capitalist order means in fact a call for the bourgeoisie to build another capitalist country in which the working class will be oppressed and incapable of defending its rights against the capitalist ruling class. There is however a tiny minority, mainly Trotskyist groups, that call for the establishment of one socialist state of Palestine, namely a nation-state with socialist characteristics, based on the right for self-determination of the 'oppressed' people, namely the Palestinians. This distinction between 'oppressed' and 'oppressor' contradicts the revolutionary project that aims at empowering the working class; it blurs the class differences between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The unity of the masses will be achieved only upon the basis of proletarian revolution.
There are calls among these or those Leftists to vote for various parties – liberals, reformists, Stalinists or Trotskyists – in order to save the Israeli bourgeois democracy from being crushed by fascism. However, this call reflects the belief that, in the epoch of imperialism, the bourgeois democracy is a genuine democratic regime and not a sheer illusion. The masses do wish to see a democracy and the fascists do want to destroy the remnants of bourgeois democracy. Nonetheless, the idea that fascism will not triumph if bourgeois-democratic/liberal parties will win the general elections is not only an illusion but also a political strategy that reduces the power of the working class as a revolutionary agent. Fascism is to be defeated by the masses in direct and independent revolutionary action, not by those who support capitalism or defend it.
The current 'Left' parties in the Israeli political system do not differ from other parties across Europe and the US in the sense that they defend the capitalist order and spread illusions regarding the possibility of solving the national question within capitalism. They defend an order in decay, an order that suffers from its death agonies. These parties cannot rally the masses around them as the proletariat despises them and do not trust either their leadership or their programme. The proletariat needs its own revolutionary party that will carry forward the communist programme; however, the game suggested by some reformists and Stalinists, namely, to participate in the bourgeois parliament and thus to wait until the revolution will come from nowhere, is false and deceptive. The mystification of bourgeois democracy stems from a false analysis made by those who firmly believe in notions like 'citizenship'. In fact, in a class society the only true democracy, i.e. the rule of the proletariat, is to be achieved by proletarian revolution. This assertion doesn't mean that the revolution is close or nearing; it requires the conscious intervention of the proletariat. However, with illusions about working in bourgeois parliaments, the workers won't be emancipated.
This analysis is not aimed to call the working class in Israel/Palestine to spoil their ballots but rather to get organized in a unified revolutionary party based on a communist programme. The only way to get rid of capitalism as well as of nationalism and wars passes through revolution. Workers have no fatherland and therefore must be united together to build their future in a communist society.
DS
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/commune_lycee.jpg
[2] https://fr.internationalism.org/content/9801/face-a-misere-et-a-degradation-nos-conditions-vie-comment-lutter-faire-reculer
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/forum/16600/france-yellow-vest-protests-about-fuel-and-taxes-general
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/liebknecht_addresses_workers_rally_in_december_1918.jpg
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/201712/14536/icc-day-discussion-russian-revolution
[6] https://www.leftcom.org/en/articles/2018-11-23/the-significance-of-the-german-revolution
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/201508/13354/zimmerwald-and-centrist-currents-political-organisations-proletari
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/series/2042
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/international-review/199704/2088/april-theses-1917-signpost-proletarian-revolution
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/israel_palestine.jpg