The bourgeoisie celebrates 500 years of capitalism
The ruling class is celebrating the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus' discovery in style. The Universal Exhibition in Seville - the port of departure for this first expedition to reach the Caribbean islands - is the high point for all these hyper-media festivities. But the show will not stop there. The biggest fleet of sailing ships ever to cross the Atlantic is retracing the course of the renowned discoverer; there will be several films of the Columbus epic; dozens of historical novels and university studies have been published, recounting the story of the discovery of America and analyzing its significance. TV programs all over the world have been devoted to the historic event, and the press has not been left behind, since it also has printed hundreds of articles all over the world. Rarely have such resources been devoted to celebrating an event which figures in every child's history book. And this is no accident. Christopher Columbus' arrival on the shores of the New World opened the doors to a period which the historians of the ruling class paint in glowing colors; they call this historical period, beginning in the mid-15th century, the Age of Discovery, or the Renaissance. For this is when capitalism got into its stride in Europe, and began its conquest of the world. The ruling class is not just celebrating the 500th anniversary of a particularly important historical event, but symbolically, half a millennium of capitalist rule.
A discovery made possible by the development of capitalism
The wind swelling the sails of the Caravelles and driving them on to new horizons was mercantile capitalism in search of new trade routes to India and Asia, and the spices and silks "more valuable than gold". This was so true that Columbus believed, to the day he died in 1506, that the shores where his ships had beached were those of India, the land that he had tried so obstinately to reach via a new Western route. The new continent, that he had in fact discovered without ever realizing it, was never to bear his name, but that of America after the navigator Amerigo Vespucci who in 1507 was to be the first to establish that the lands they had discovered were in fact a new continent.
Today we know that the Vikings had already landed on the coast of North America several centuries before, and it is even probable that at other moments in human history, bold navigators had already crossed the Atlantic from East to West. But these "discoveries" fell into oblivion, because they did not correspond to the economic needs of their age. This did not happen to Columbus. His discovery of America was not an accident, a merely individual and extraordinary adventure. Columbus was no isolated adventurer, but one navigator among many launched on the conquest of the ocean. His discovery was a product of the needs of developing capitalism in Europe; it was part of an overall movement which pushed the navigators to seek out new trade routes.
The origins of this overall movement are to be found in the economic, cultural, and social upheavals shaking Europe, with the decadence of feudalism and the rise of mercantile capitalism.
Since the 13th century, commercial, banking, and financial activity had flourished in the Italian republics which held the monopoly of trade with the East. "From the 15th century, the bourgeoisie in the towns had become more vital to society than the feudal nobility... the needs of the nobles themselves had grown and been transformed to the point where even they could not do without the towns; did they not depend on the towns for their only instruments of production, their armor and weapons? Local cloth, furniture and jewellery, the silks of Italy, the lace of Brabant, the furs from the North, the perfumes of Arabia, the fruits of the Levant, the spices of India: all must be bought in the towns... A certain degree of world trade had developed; the Italians roamed the Mediterranean and beyond, to the Atlantic coasts right up to Flanders; despite the appearance of Dutch and English, the Hansa merchants still dominated the North Sea and the Baltic... While the nobility became increasingly superfluous and even a hindrance on social evolution, the bourgeois were becoming the class that personified the advance of industry and commerce, as well as of culture and the political and social institutions," (Engels: The Decadence of Feudalism and the Rise of The Bourgeoisie).
The 15th century was marked by the increase in knowledge which signaled the beginning of the Renaissance, characterized not only by the rediscovery of the texts of antiquity, but also by the wonders of the Orient, like gunpowder, which merchants were bringing back to Europe, and by new discoveries like printing, and the advance of new techniques in metal-working or textiles made possible by the development of the economy. One of the sectors most affected by the new knowledge was that of navigation, a central sector for the development of commerce, since most trade went by water. With new knowledge came the invention of new ships, more sturdy, bigger, and better adapted to navigating the high seas, better sailing techniques, and a better understanding of geography. "Moreover, navigation was a clearly bourgeois industry, which has marked even modern fleets with its anti-feudal nature" (Engels, op cit).
At the same time, the great feudal states were created and strengthened. This movement, however, expressed not the reinforcement of feudalism but its regression, crisis and decadence. "It is obvious that... the crown was a factor of progress. It represented order in disorder, the nation in formation against the fragmentation of rival vassal states. All the revolutionary elements which were forming below the surface of feudal society were as much forced to rely on the crown, as the latter was forced to rely on them." (Engels, op cit).
The extension of Ottoman rule into the Middle East and Eastern Europe, concretized in the fall of Constantinople in 1453, led to the war with the Venetian Republic in 1463, and cut the Italian merchants off from the lucrative trade routes to Asia which had virtually been their monopoly. The economic necessity of opening new routes to the treasures of the mythical Indies, Cathay (China), and Cipango (Japan), and the hope of laying hands on the source of Genoan and Venetian wealth, were enough to encourage the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal to finance their maritime expeditions.
And so, during the 15th century, the conditions and the means came together in Europe, which were to make possible the sea-borne exploration of the world:
* the creation of a mercantile and industrial class, the bourgeoisie,
* the development of new knowledge and techniques, especially in the field of navigation,
* the formation of the states which would support seafaring expeditions,
* the end to the traditional trade with Asia, which encouraged the search for new routes.
From the beginning of the 15th century, Henry the Navigator, King of Portugal, financed expeditions down the coast of Africa, and set up the first trading posts there (Ceuta in 1415). The African off-shore islands were colonized in passing: Madeira in 1419, the Azores in 1431, the Capo Verde islands in 1457. Then under the reign of John II, the Congo was reached in 1482, and in 1498 Bartolomeo Diaz rounded the Cape of Storms (later to become the Cape of Good Hope), opening the route to India and its spices which Vasco da Gama was to follow in 1498. Columbus' expedition was thus one among many.
At first, he offered his services to the Portuguese, to explore a Western route to the Indies, but the latter (who had probably reached Newfoundland in 1474) refused, because they were concentrating on opening a route around southern Africa. Just as Columbus benefited from the experience of the Portuguese sailors, so his own experience was to help John Cabot who reached Labrador in 1496 in the service of England. For Spain, Pinzon and Lope in 1499 discovered the mouth of the Orinoco; Cabal reached the coast of Brazil in 1500, while searching for a way round Africa. In 1513, Balboa admired the waves of what was to be called the Pacific Ocean. And in 1519 began the Magellan expedition: the first to circumnavigate the world. "But despite the feudal or semi-feudal forms in which it appeared at first, this urge to seek adventure far away was already incompatible at heart with feudalism, whose basis was agriculture, and whose wars of conquest basically aimed at the conquest of territory." (Engels, op cit).
Thus it is not the great discoveries which provoked the development of capitalism, but on the contrary the development of capitalism in Europe which made these discoveries possible, whether on the level of geography or of technique. Like Gutenberg, Columbus was the product of capitalism's historic development. Nonetheless, these discoveries were to be a powerful factor in accelerating the development both of capitalism and the class which it embodies it: the bourgeoisie.
"The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a new development." (Marx, Engels: The Communist Manifesto).
"From the 16th to the 17th centuries, the great geographical discoveries provoked profound upheavals in trade and accelerated the growth of mercantile capital. It is certain that the passage from the feudal to the capitalist mode of production was also accelerated, and it is precisely this fact which is at the source of certain thoroughly erroneous conceptions. The sudden extension of the world market, the proliferation of commodities in circulation, the rivalry between European nations to seize the products of Asia and the treasures of America, and finally the colonial system, made a great contribution to liberating production from its feudal chains. However, in its manufacturing period, the modern mode of production only appeared where the appropriate conditions had been formed during the Middle Ages, for example if we compare Portugal to Holland. If, during the 16th, and in part also during the 17th centuries, the sudden extension of trade and the creation of a new world market played a preponderant role in the decline of the old mode of production and the rise of capitalist production, this is because it took place, inversely, on the basis of an already existing capitalist production. On the one hand, the world market formed the basis for capitalism; on the other, it is the latter's need to produce on a constantly wider scale that pushed it continually to extend the world market: here, it is not trade that revolutionized industry, but industry which constantly revolutionized trade" (Marx, Capital).
"Manufacture and the movement of production in general received an enormous impetus through the extension of intercourse which came with the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies. The new products imported thence, particularly the masses of gold and silver which came into circulation, had totally changed the position of the classes towards one another, dealing a hard blow to feudal landed property and to the workers; the expeditions of adventurers, colonization, and above all the extension of markets into a world market, which had now become possible and was daily becoming more and more a fact, called forth a new phase of historical development..." (Marx, The German Ideology)
With the discovery of America in 1492, symbolically, a new page was turned in the history of humanity. A new epoch opened, where capitalism began its triumphal march towards world domination. "World trade and the world market inaugurate, in the 16th century, the modern biography of capitalism," (Marx). "The modern history of capital dates from the creation of trade and a market between the old and new world in the 16th century," (Marx). "Although the first outlines of capitalist production appeared early in some towns of the Mediterranean, the capitalist era only starts with the 16th century," (Marx, Capital VIII).
Today, the bourgeoisie's sumptuous festivities are celebrating the opening of this new era, the era of its own domination, the beginning of the construction of the capitalist world market. "Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the development of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages." (The Communist Manifesto).
Before the great discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries, the Incas and Aztecs were of course completely unknown, but the civilizations of India, China and Japan were almost as much so, and what was known contained as much fable as fact. The discovery of America marked the end of a historical period characterized by the development of multiple civilizations, which either knew nothing of each other, or barely communicated by means of a relatively limited trade. Now came not only the exploration of new sea-lanes, but the opening of new trade routes to European commodities. The development of trade put an end to the separate development of civilizations outside Europe. "The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate." (ibid). "The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country... [Industry's] products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature." (ibid).
This is the eminently revolutionary role that the bourgeoisie has played: it has unified the world. By celebrating, as it does today, the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus and the first significant step in this unification by the creation of the world market, the bourgeoisie is only singing its own praises.
The bourgeoisie enjoys honoring this 16th century, which witnessed its own affirmation in Europe, and heralded its worldwide rule to come, as the century of the Renaissance, of the Age of Discovery, of the flourishing of science and the arts. The ruling class likes to see itself in those Renaissance men who symbolize the prodigious advances in technique, concretized in the tumultuous development of the productive forces that capitalism was to make possible. In them, it salutes the quest for universality which is its specific characteristic, and which it has imposed on the world, by fashioning the world in its own image. The ruling class could not ask for a more flattering picture of itself, and one that best epitomizes the progress that the bourgeoisie once represented for humanity.
But there is another side to every coin, and the other side to the wonderful adventure of Columbus discovering the new world is the brutal colonization and merciless enslavement of the Indians, the reality of capitalism as a system of exploitation and oppression. The treasures that left the colonies for the mother-country, there to make capital run smooth, were extorted "by the forced labor of the indigenous population reduced to slavery, by violence, pillage, and murder" (Marx, Capital VIII).
The colonization of America: capitalist barbarity at work
Capitalism did not only provide the techniques and the accumulated knowledge which made possible the voyage of Columbus and the discovery of America. It also provided the new God, the ideology which drove the adventurers on, to the conquest of the seas.
Columbus was driven, not by the love of discovery, but by the lust for profit: "Gold is the best thing in the world, it can even send souls to paradise", he declared, while Cortes went further: "We Spaniards suffer from a sickness of the heart whose only cure is gold". Thus: "It was gold that the Portuguese sought on the African coast, in the Indies, and throughout the Far East; gold was the magic word which drove the Spaniards across the Atlantic to America; gold was the first thing the white man asked for, as soon as he accosted on a newly discovered shore" (Engels, op cit).
"Following Columbus' report, the Council of Castille decided to take possession of a country whose inhabitants were quite unable to defend themselves. The pious project of making converts to Christianity sanctified its injustice. But the hope of finding treasure was the real motive behind the enterprise ... All the Spaniards' other enterprises in the New World, after Columbus, seem to have had the same motive. This was the sacrilegious thirst for gold ..." (Adam Smith).
The great civilizing work of European capitalism initially took the form of genocide. In the name of this "sacrilegious thirst for gold", the Indian populations were subjected to pillage and forced labor, to slavery in the mines, and decimated by the diseases imported by the Conquistadors (syphilis, tuberculosis, etc). Las Casas estimated that between 1495 and 1503, the islands' population fell by more than 3 million, massacred in the wars, sent as slaves to Castille or exhausted in the mines and other forced labors: "Who will believe this in future generations? Even I, who write these lines, who have seen with my own eyes and know everything that happened, can hardly believe that such a thing was possible." In just over a century, the Indian population fell by 90% in Mexico (from 25 to 1.5 million), and by 95% in Peru. The African slave trade was developed to make up for the dearth of labor as a result of the massacre, and throughout the 16th century hundreds of thousands of negroes were deported to repopulate America, the movement only increasing in intensity during the centuries that followed. To this should be added the transportation of thousands of Europeans condemned to forced labor in the mines and plantations of America. "The discoveries of gold and silver in America; the extirpation of the indigens in some instances, their enslavement or their entombment in the mines in others; the beginnings of the conquest and looting of the East Indies; the transformation of Africa into a precinct for the supply of the negroes who were the raw material of the slave trade - these were the incidents that characterized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production" (Marx, Capital, Chap 24)
The thousands of tons of gold and silver that flooded into Europe from the American colonies, and which served to finance the gigantic upsurge of European capitalism, were soaked in the blood of millions of slaves. But this violence, characteristic of capitalism's colonial enterprise, was not reserved for far-off countries. It is proper to capitalism in every aspect of its development, including in its European homeland.
Capitalism's violent conquest of Europe
The methods used, without restraint in the ferocious exploitation of the indigenous population in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, were used in Europe to drive the peasants from the land and transform them into wage slaves to satisfy the demands of the rapidly expanding manufactures. For millions of peasants and laborers, the period of the Renaissance which the bourgeoisie likes to display in the agreeable light of scientific discovery and artistic achievement was a time of poverty and terror.
Capitalism's development in Europe was characterized by the expropriation of land; millions of peasants were thrown off the land, to wander the highways. "The expropriation of the immediate producers is effected with ruthless vandalism; and under the stimulus of the most infamous, the basest, the meanest, and the most odious of passions" (Marx, Capital, Chap 24). "A whole series of thefts, outrages, and tribulations ... accompanied the forcible expropriation of the people in the period that lasted from the end of the 15th century to the end of the 18th" (Marx, Capital, Chap 24). "The spoliation of the property of the church, the fraudulent alienation of the state domains, the theft of the common lands, the transformation of feudal property and clan property into modern private property (a usurpation effected by a system of ruthless terrorism) - these were the idyllic methods of primary accumulation. They cleared the ground for capitalist agriculture, made the land part and parcel of capital, while providing for the needs of urban industry the requisite supply of masterless proletarians" (Marx, Capital).
"Thus it comes to pass that a greedy and insatiable cormorant and very plague of his native country, may encompass about and enclose many thousand acres of ground together within one pale or hedge, the husbandmen be thrust out of their own, or else, either by cunning and fraud, or by violent oppression, they be put besides it, or by wrongs and injuries they be so wearied that they be compelled to sell all: by one means, therefore, or by other, either by hook or crook, they must needs depart away, poor, silly, wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers with their young babes, and their whole household, small in substance, and much in number, as husbandry requireth many hands. Always they trudge, I say, out of their known, accustomed houses, finding no place to rest in. All their household stuff, which is very little worth, though it might well abide the sale, yet being suddenly thrust out they be constrained to sell it for a thing of naught. And when they have wandered abroad till that be spent, what can they then else do but steal, and then justly, pardie, be hanged, or else go about begging. And yet then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds because they go about and work not; whom no man will set a work though they never so willingly proffer themselves thereto" (Thomas More's Utopia, quoted by Marx in Capital, Chap 24).
"A masterless proletariat had been created by the breaking-up of the bands of feudal retainers, and by successive acts of forcible expropriation of the land. But it was impossible that those who had been thus hunted off the land could be absorbed by the rising system of manufactures as quickly as they were "set free. ... Large numbers of them became beggars, thieves, and vagabonds; in part from inclination, but far more often under pressure of circumstances. In the end of the 15th century, and throughout the 16th, there were enacted all over Western Europe cruel laws against vagrancy. The ancestors of the present working class were punished for becoming vagabonds and paupers, although the condition of vagabondage and pauperism had been forced on them" (Marx, Capital, Chap 24).
Punished, and how! In England under Henry VIII (1509-1547), healthy vagabonds were condemned to flogging and imprisonment. On a second offence, the sentence was a further flogging and the loss of half an ear, while at the third offence the vagabond was considered as a felon and executed as an enemy of the state. During Henry's reign, 72,000 poor devils were executed in this way. Under his successor Edward VI, a law passed in 1547 declared that any individual unwilling to work would be judged a slave of the person who had denounced him; should he try to run away, he would be branded with an "S" on the cheek, while a second attempt to escape was punished by death. "In Elizabeth's time, 'rogues were trussed up apace, and that there was not one year commonly wherein three or four hundred were not devoured and eaten up by the gallows'" (Holinshed's Chronicles of England, quoted by Marx). Meanwhile, in France, "it was prescribed that every man in good health from 16 to 60 years of age, if without means of subsistence and not practicing a trade, was to be sent to the galleys. Of like nature are the statute of Charles V for the Netherlands, dated October 1537 ...Thus was the agricultural population - forcibly expropriated from the soil, driven from home, coerced into vagrancy, and then whipped, branded, and tortured by grotesque and terrible laws - constrained to accept the discipline required by the wage system" (Marx, Capital, Chap 24).
"Throughout the developed countries, the number of vagabonds has never been so great as it was during the first half of the 16th century. Some of these vagabonds joined the army in time of war, others roamed the country begging, others went to the towns to try to scrape a wretched living out of day labor, or other occupations not regulated by the guilds" (Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War, Chap I).
The peasants, stripped of their lands and thrown out to wander the country were thus not only reduced to beggary or obliged to submit to wage labor, they were also abundantly used as cannon fodder. The new canons and arquebuses were infinitely more destructive than the pikes, swords, bows and crossbows of the old feudal wars, and demanded an ever growing mass of soldiers to assuage their bloody appetites; the technical and scientific progress of the Renaissance were used to good effect in perfecting both weapons and the means of producing them. The 16th century was a warlike one: "...wars and devastation were day-to-day phenomena at the time" (Engels, ibid). Wars of colonial conquest, but also and above all wars in Europe itself: the "Italian" wars of Francois I of France, the Hapsburgs' wars against the Turks, who besieged Vienna in 1529 and were defeated by the Spanish navy at the battle of Lepanto in 1571, the Dutch war for independence from Spain from 1568 onwards, the war between England and Spain which led to the annihilation in 1588 of the Spanish Armada, the greatest war fleet ever to sail, by the English navy and bad weather. The innumerable wars between German princelings, the wars of religion... These wars were the product of the upheavals shaking Europe with the development of capitalism. "Even in what are called the wars of religion during the 16th century, it was really a matter above all of very positive material class interests, and these wars were class wars, just as much as the internal collisions which occurred later in England and France" (ibid). But the bitter conflicts (behind the banners of religion) among the national states emerging from the Middle Ages, the feudal princes, and the new bourgeois cliques, were all forgotten when it came to putting down, with utter ferocity, the peasant revolts provoked by poverty. Faced with the peasants revolts in Germany, "Bourgeois and princes, nobility and clergy, Luther and the Pope, all united against 'these peasant bands, looting and murdering'" (the title of a pamphlet by Luther published in 1525 in the midst of the peasant rising, as Engels noted). "They must be torn apart, strangled, their throats cut, in secret and in public, as we strike down rabid dogs!" cried Luther. ‘And so, my dear lords, cut their throats, strike them down, strangle them, liberate here, save there! If you fall in the struggle, you could never have a holier death!'" (ibid).
The 16th century was not one of emerging liberty, as the bourgeoisie would have us think. It was one of a new oppression that rose from the ruins of disintegrating feudalism, of religious persecution and the bloody suppression of plebeian revolt. It is certainly no accident that the Spanish Inquisition was founded in 1492, the same year as the discovery of the New World. Millions of Jews and Muslims were forcibly converted to Christianity, or forced into exile in fear for the lives. This was not unique to Spain, still deeply marked by feudalism, and the intransigent Catholicism that was its ideological mainstay; throughout Europe, pogroms and religious massacres were commonplace, the persecution of religious or racial minorities a constant, and the oppression of the masses the rule. The horror of the Inquisition was echoed by Luther's rage against the rebellious peasants in Germany: "The peasants have their heads full of oat-straw; they do not hear the words of God, they are stupid; this is why they must be taught the whip, and the arquebuse, and it is their own fault. Pray for them, that they are obedient. Otherwise, no mercy!". Thus spoke the father of the Reformation, the new religious ideology which covered the bourgeoisie's advance in its struggle against feudal Catholicism.
At this price, by these methods, capitalism imposed its law, and by undermining the foundations of the old feudal order, liberated the development of the productive forces and produced a wealth that humanity had never dreamt of. But if the 16th century enormously increased the wealth of the bourgeois merchants and the states, the same could not be said for the workers. "In the 16th century, the situation of the workers had, as we know, got much worse. Money wages had risen, but not at all in proportion to the devaluation of money and a corresponding rise in the price of commodities. In reality, they had therefore fallen." In Spain, between 1500 and 1600 prices increased three or four-fold; in Italy between 1520 and 1599, the price of wheat was multiplied by 3.3; in England, between the first and the last quarter of the 16th century prices were multiplied by 2.6, and in France by 2.2. The fall in real wages as a result has been estimated at 50%! The merchant bourgeoisie and the reigning princes were quick to act on Machiavelli's advice: "In a well-organized government, the state should be rich and the citizen poor" (Machiavelli, The Prince, 1514).
"So much pains did it cost to establish the 'eternal natural laws' of the capitalist method of production, to complete the divorce of the workers from the means of labor, to transform at one pole the social means of production and the social means of subsistence into capital, while transforming at the other pole the masses of the population into wage workers, into 'free laboring poor', that artificial product of modern history. As Augier said, money 'comes into the world with a birthmark on the cheek'; it is no less true that capital comes into the world soiled with mire from top to toe, and oozing blood from every pore" (Marx, Capital, Chap 24). Rosa Luxemburg, writing about the relationship between capital and non-capitalist modes of production, which take place "on the international stage", notes that: "Its predominant methods are colonial policy, an international loan system - a policy of spheres of interest - and war. Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the stern laws of the economic process.
Bourgeois liberal theory takes into account only 'peaceful competition', the marvels of technology and pure commodity exchange; it separates it violently from the other aspect: the realm of capital's blustering violence which is regarded as more or less incidental to foreign policy and quite independent of the economic sphere of capital.
"In reality, political power is nothing but a vehicle for the economic process. The conditions for the reproduction of capital provide the organic link between these two aspects of the accumulation of capital. The historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking them together. 'Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe' characterizes not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the world at every step, and thus capitalism prepares its own downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions," (The Accumulation of Capital).
Today's bourgeois humanists, who are celebrating so fervently the discovery of America, would like us to think that the extreme brutality of the colonization which followed was only an excess of emerging capitalism, in its mercantile forms, and still entangled in the meshes of a brutal Spanish feudalism - hardly more than a youthful misdemeanor. But this violence was not limited to the Spanish and the Portuguese. The work begun by the conquistadors was to be continued by the Dutch, the French, the British and by the young North American democracy that emerged from the war of independence against British imperialism in the 18th century: slavery survived until 1868, and in North America the massacre of the Indians continued until the very eve of the 20th century. And as we have seen, such violence was not limited to the colonies. It was universal, indelibly stamped on the whole life of capital. It was carried over from capital's mercantile phase into the brutal development of large-scale industry, where the methods tried out in the colonies were used to intensify exploitation in the metropolis. "The cotton industry, while introducing child slavery into England, gave at the same time an impetus towards the transformation of the slave system of the United States, which had hitherto been a more or less patriarchal one, into a commercial system of exploitation. Speaking generally, the veiled slavery of the European wage earners became the pedestal of unqualified slavery in the New World" (Marx, Capital, Chap 24).
Obviously, as it celebrates the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America, the bourgeoisie is not celebrating these great deeds, this merciless massacre driven on by criminal greed. The bourgeoisie prefers to sweep capitalism's barbaric reality under the carpet, and to offer us only the agreeable image of the progress of the Renaissance, with its artistic, geographical, technical, and scientific discoveries.
Half a millennium after Columbus: capitalism in its crisis of decadence
Today, the ruling class is singing its own praises as it celebrates Columbus' discovery of America; it is using this historic event in its ideological propaganda, in order to justify its own existence. But times have changed since the Renaissance.
The bourgeoisie is no longer a revolutionary class, rising to overthrow a decadent and disintegrating feudalism. It is long time since it imposed its rule on the farthest corners of the planet. Columbus' discovery heralded the creation of the world capitalist market, and this was completed at the turn of the century. The dynamic of colonization inaugurated in the New World has spread everywhere. Like the pre-Columbian civilizations of America, the ancient pre-capitalist civilizations of Asia collapsed under the blows of the development of capitalist exchange. By the beginning of the 20th century, there was not a single pre-capitalist market that was not either directly controlled or under the influence of one or other of the great capitalist powers. The dynamic of colonization, which enriched mercantile Europe through pillage and the ferocious exploitation of native populations, and which opened new markets to the tumultuous expansion of capitalist industry, had itself come up against the limits of planetary geography. "From the geographical viewpoint, the market is limited: the internal market is limited in relation to the internal and external market, which in turn is limited in relation to the world market, and this, although it can be expanded, is itself limited in time" (Marx, 'Mat‚riaux pour l'‚conomie: limites du march‚ et accroissement de la consommation'). Confronted for more than a century with this objective limit to the market, capitalism can no longer find solvent outlets in proportion to its productive capacity, and is sinking into an inexorable crisis of over-production. "Over-production is a particular consequence of the law of general production of capital: produce in proportion to the productive forces (ie, according to the possibility of exploiting, with a given mass of capital, the maximum mass of labour), without taking account of the real limits of the market nor of solvent needs..." (Marx, Mat‚riaux pour l'‚conomie: besoins, surproduction, et crise).
"At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is but a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters." (Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).
This reality, which once determined the end of the feudal system and the necessity for the development of capitalism as a progressive factor in the liberation of the productive forces, has today come home to capitalism itself. It is no longer a source of progress. It has become a barrier to the development of the productive forces. In its turn, it has entered its epoch of decadence.
The consequences have been dramatic for the whole of humanity. In the days of Columbus and the Renaissance, until the construction of the world market was finally completed, capitalism, despite its barbarity and violence, was synonymous with progress, because it was identified with the growth of the productive forces, and with the resulting fantastic explosion of discoveries. Today all this is finished, and capitalism has become a barrier to the development of the productive forces. It no longer embodies progress, and only its barbaric side is left.
The 20th century has amply demonstrated this sinister reality: constant imperialist conflicts, punctuated by two World Wars, massive repression, famines such as humanity has never suffered before - these have caused more deaths in the last eighty years than in centuries of brutal development. The permanent crisis has plunged the majority of the world's population into hunger. Throughout the world, the population is being subjected to a process of accelerated pauperization, and a tragic degradation of living conditions.
Characteristically, whereas the 19th century was marked by the development of medicine, the ebb of the great epidemics, and the rise in life expectancy, in this last quarter of the 20th century, the epidemic diseases have returned in strength: cholera, malaria, and of course AIDS. The development of cancer is the symbol of capitalism's present impotence. Just like the great epidemics of bubonic plague which demonstrated the decadence of feudalism, today's epidemics are dramatic expressions of the decadence of capitalism, and its inability to defeat the disasters that have plunged humanity into suffering. Life expectancy is now stagnant in the developed countries, and is declining in the under-developed ones.
The capacity for discovery and innovation which needs to be mobilized to confront these diseases are increasingly held back by the contradictions of a system in crisis. Austerity budgets are imposing more and more cuts in funds for research. The greatest efforts of invention are devoted to military research, sacrificed on the altar of the arms race, devoted to the manufacture of ever more sophisticated and barbaric means of destruction. The forces of life have been press-ganged into the service of death.
We see this reality, of a capitalism which has become decadent and a barrier to human progress, at every level of social life. And this the ruling class absolutely has to hide. For centuries, the fantastic progress of discovery and new exploits was there for all to see, and upheld the bourgeoisie's ideological rule over the exploited masses, which it subjected to the brutal law of profit. Today, there are no such exploits any more. Let us take just one, significant, example: the conquest of the moon. Presented twenty years ago as a repetition of Columbus' adventure, it has remained sterile. The conquest of space, the new frontier which was to fire the ambitions of today's generation and make them believe in the constantly renewed possibilities of capitalist expansion, has dwindled away under the weight of the economic crisis and technological failure. Today, it looks like an impossible Utopia. The hope of travelling to other planets and far-off stars, the great project, has been reduced to a plodding and routine commercial or military use of earth's upper atmosphere. Capitalism is incapable of carrying out humanity's leap out of our earthly garden, because in near space there are no markets to conquer, no natives to reduce to slavery. There is no more America, and no more Christopher Columbus.
The New World has aged. North America, which for centuries represented a new world for the oppressed of the entire planet, an escape from poverty where anything was possible (even if this was in large part an illusion), has now become the symbol of the rotten decomposition of the capitalist world and its aberrant contradictions. In America, that classic symbol of capitalism, the dream is dead and only the nightmare is left.
The bourgeoisie no longer has anything, anywhere, to show to justify its criminal rule. To justify today's barbarity, it can only glorify its past. This is the meaning of all the din over Columbus' journey five hundred years ago. To polish up its blemished image, the bourgeoisie only has its past glories to offer, and since this past is itself none too magnificent, it has to embellish it with virtues it never had. Like a senile old man, the bourgeois are lost in their memories; they are trying to forget themselves, and to forget that they are frightened of the present, because they have no future. JJ, 1.6.92.
Chaos and massacres: Only the working class can find the answer
We are publishing below (starting on page 9) a resolution on the international situation adopted by the ICC in April 1992. Since this document was written, events have amply illustrated the analyses contained in it. Decomposition and chaos, particularly at the level of inter-imperialist antagonisms, have become more and more aggravated, as we can see for example with the massacres in Yugoslavia. At the same time, the world economic crisis has continued on its catastrophic path, creating the conditions for a revival of the class struggle - something the bourgeoisie is actively preparing against.
*****
The collapse of the eastern bloc in the second half of 1989 continues to make its consequences felt. The 'new world order', which according to President Bush was supposed to emerge in its wake, can be seen in reality to be an even more catastrophic disorder than the previous one, a bloody chaos which day after day piles up ruins and corpses, while at the same time the old antagonisms between great powers have given way to new and increasingly explosive ones.
The unleashing of imperialist antagonisms
In decadent capitalism, and particularly when the open economic crisis bears decisive witness to the impasse facing the system, there is no possibility for any attenuation of conflicts between different national bourgeoisies. Since there is no way out for the capitalist economy, since all the policies aimed at overcoming the crisis only make the catastrophe worse, since all the remedies prove to be poisons which aggravate the sickness, there is no alternative for the bourgeoisie, whatever its power and the means at its disposal, other than to rush headlong towards war and preparations for war.
This is why the disappearance in 1989 of one of the two military blocs which had divided up the world since the end of the Second World War has not at all brought about the 'new era of peace' promised us by the sirens of the bourgeoisie. In particular, since the threat of the 'Evil Empire' no longer weighed on them, yesterday's 'allies' - ie the main countries of the western bloc - have begun to flap their wings and put forward their own specific interests against the US 'big brother'. Alliances contracted by the different national bourgeoisies have never been marriages of love but of necessity, marriages of convenience. Just as we can witness spectacular 'reconciliations', in which the reciprocal hatred which the states had for decades inculcated in their respective populations gives way to a 'new-found friendship', so yesterday's allies, 'united for ever by history', by their 'common values', by 'shared trials' and the rest, don't hesitate to convert themselves into bitter enemies as soon as their interests no longer converge. This was the case during and after the second world war, when the USSR was presented by the western 'democracies' first as a henchman of the devil Hitler, then as a 'heroic companion in the struggle', then once again as the incarnation of evil.
Today, even if the basic structures of the American bloc (NATO, OECD, IMF, etc) still formally exist, if the speeches of the bourgeoisie still talk about the unity of the great 'democracies', in fact the Atlantic Alliance is finished. All the events which have unfolded over the last two years have only confirmed this reality: the collapse of the eastern bloc could only result in the disappearance of the military bloc set up to oppose it, and which won the victory in the cold war waged between them for over 40 years. Because of this, not only has the solidarity between the main western countries fallen to pieces, we can already see, in embryonic form, the tendencies towards the formation of a new system of alliances, in which the main antagonism is between the US and its allies on the one hand, and a coalition led by Germany on the other. As the ICC press has shown at length, the Gulf war at the beginning of 1991 had its main origin in the USA's attempt to block the process of the disintegration of the western bloc and to nip in the bud any effort to set up a new system of alliances. The events in Yugoslavia since the summer of 91 have shown that the enormous operation launched by Washington has only had limited effects, and that no sooner was the fighting over in the Gulf than the solidarity between the members of the coalition ceased to apply and all the antagonisms came back to the surface.
The present renewal of confrontations in ex-Yugoslavia, this time in Bosnia-Herzegovina, is, whatever the appearance, confirming this aggravation of tensions between the great powers which used to make up the western bloc.
Massacres and speeches about peace in ex-Yugoslavia: war at the heart of Europe
At the time of writing, war is again raging through ex-Yugoslavia. After months of massacres in different parts of Croatia, and when the situation seems to be easing off in that region, fire and blood is descending on Bosnia-Herzegovina. In two months, the number of dead has already gone past 5,000. There are tens of thousands wounded and hundreds of thousands have been forced to leave the combat zones; the UN mission to Sarajevo, which was supposed to bring a minimum of protection to the population, has also left.
Today, Serbia is being made a 'pariah' among nations as the journalists put it. On 30 May, the UN adopted rigorous measures of embargo against this country, comparable to those imposed on Iraq before the Gulf war, in order to force it, along with the Serbian militias, from laying waste Bosnia-Herzegovina. And it's Uncle Sam which has taken the lead in this big campaign against Serbia, while at the same time proclaiming itself the defender of 'democratic Bosnia'. On 23 May Baker didn't hesitate to evoke the possibility of a military intervention to make Serbia tow the line. And it was under very heavy American pressure that the members of the Security Council who could have had reticences, like France and Russia, finally rallied to a 'hard' motion against Serbia. At the same time, the USA hasn't missed an opportunity to make it clear that the maintenance of order in ex-Yugoslavia is fundamentally up to the European countries and the EEC, and that the US was only mixing in this situation to the extent that the Europeans were showing their impotence.
For those who have followed the games being played by the big powers since the beginning of the confrontations in Yugoslavia, the current position of the leading world power might seem to be a mystery. For months, notably after the proclamation of independence by Slovenia and Croatia in the summer of 91, the USA has appeared to be a real ally of Serbia, in particular by condemning the dismantling of Yugoslavia, which was the inevitable result of the secession of the two northern republics. Within the EEC, the two countries traditionally closest to the US, Britain and Holland, did everything they could to leave Serbia with a free hand in its operations to crush Croatia, or at least to amputate a good third of its territory. For months, the USA railed against 'European impotence' which they had done a great deal to aggravate, only to finally appear on the scene like Zorro and obtain through the UN emissary, American diplomat Cyrus Vance (what a stroke of luck), a cease-fire in Croatia, when Serbia had already achieved its essential war aims in the region.
In fact, this action by American diplomacy can be perfectly well understood. If Croatian independence had been strongly encouraged by Germany, it's because it coincided with the new imperialist ambitions of this country, whose power and position in Europe makes it the most serious claimant to the role of leader of a new coalition directed against the USA, now that the threat from the east is over. For the German bourgeoisie, an independent and 'friendly' Croatia was the condition for opening up access to the Mediterranean, which is an indispensable prize for any power aiming to play a global role. And this is what the USA wanted to avoid at any price. Its support to Serbia during the confrontations in Croatia, which seriously ravaged the latter, enabled the US to show both Croatia and Germany what it costs to follow policies that don't suit the USA. But precisely because the world's leading power didn't have to get mixed up in this situation in the second half of 91 and the beginning of 92, and was letting the EEC reveal its impotence, it could then come onto the scene in force and make a scapegoat out of yesterday's ally, Serbia.
Today, the USA's sudden passion for the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina obviously has nothing to do with the fact that the authorities of the latter are more 'democratic' than those in Croatia. The same race of gangsters rule in Sarajevo, Zagreb, Belgrade and ... Washington. In reality, from the USA's point of view, the great superiority of Bosnia-Herzegovina over Croatia lies in the fact that it can act as a major counter-weight to German presence in the region. For both historic and geographical reasons, Germany was from the start the country best placed to pull an independent Croatia into its sphere of influence. This is why the USA did not immediately try to compete for influence in Croatia, but on the contrary did all it could to oppose this country's independence. But once Germany had played its cards in Croatia, it fell to the American bourgeoisie to reaffirm its position as world cop and thus to arrive in force in a region normally left to the European states. The cynicism and brutality of the Serbian state and its militias have given it an ideal opportunity. By declaring itself the great protector of the populations of Bosnia who are victims of this brutality, Uncle Sam aims to achieve a number of things:
* it has once again shown, as it did during the Gulf war and the Madrid conference on the Middle East, that no important problem in international relations can be dealt with without the intervention of Washington;
* it has issued a message to the leading circles of the two big neighbours of ex-Yugoslavia, states of considerable strategic importance, Italy and Turkey, in order to convince them to remain loyal;
* it is reopening the wounds caused by the Yugoslav question in the special alliance between Germany and France (even if these difficulties are not great enough to call into question the convergence of interest between these two countries)[1];
* it is preparing its implantation in Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to deprive Germany of free access to the Croatian ports in Dalmatia.
Concerning the latter point, you only have to look at the map to see that Dalmatia is made up of a narrow strip of territory between the sea and the heights held by Herzegovina. If Germany, thanks to its alliance with Croatia, dreamed of setting up military bases in the ports of Split, Zadar and Dubrovnik as points of support for a Mediterranean fleet, it would be confronted by the fact that these ports are respectively 80, 40 and 10 km from the 'enemy' frontier. In case of an international crisis, it would be easy for the USA to blockade these ports, as Serbia has already shown, cutting off these German positions from their rear and rendering them useless
Concerning the 'message' transmitted to Italy, it takes on its whole importance at a time when, like other European bourgeoisies (for example the French bourgeoisie in which the neo-Gaullist party, the RPR, is divided between partisans and adversaries of a closer alliance with Germany within the EEC), the bourgeoisie in Italy is divided about its international alignments, as can be seen from the current paralysis in its political apparatus. Taking into account the important position of this country in the Mediterranean (control of the passage between east and west in this sea, the presence in Naples of the US 6th fleet), the USA is ready to do what is necessary to dissuade it from joining the Franco-German tandem.
Similarly, the US warning to Turkey can be well understood at a time when this country is aiming to combine its own regional ambitions vis-a-vis the Muslim republics of the ex-USSR (which it wants to detach from the influence of Russia, now an ally of the US), with an alliance with Germany and support for the imperialist ambitions of this country in the Middle East. Turkey also occupies a highly strategic position since it controls the passage between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Thus, its current rapprochement with Germany (highlighted notably by the 'scandal' of the delivery of military material destined for the repression of the Kurds, a scandal revealed thanks to the 'good offices' of Washington) represents a very serious threat for the USA. The latter has already begun to react by supporting the Kurdish nationalists and they are ready to use even more significant means to stop this rapprochement. In particular, the 'protection' now being given by the world's first power to the Muslim populations of Bosnia-Herzegovina (a majority in this country) is seen as a slap in the face to Turkey which is supposed to be the big protector of the Muslims of the region[2].
Thus the present situation in ex-Yugoslavia reveals, behind all the speeches about the return of peace and the protection of populations, the continuation and aggravation of the antagonisms between the great powers. Antagonisms which have been fed by the chaos that the collapse of Stalinism has engendered in this country and which have in their turn aggravated this chaos. Even if the pressure from the US, or even a direct intervention, might momentarily calm things down (for example by obliging Serbia to renounce some of its pretensions), the future of ex-Yugoslavia, like that of the rest of this part of the world (Balkans, eastern Europe) can only be one of new antagonisms and increasingly violent conflicts, given its strategic importance for the great powers. It's an illustration of the irreversible advance of the general decomposition of capitalist society. A new Lebanon is being created at the very gates of the great European metropoles.
However, what the massacres in Yugoslavia show is that even if decomposition is a phenomenon which escapes the control of all sectors of the bourgeoisie, including those in the most developed and powerful countries, these latter sectors do not remain inactive and passive faced with such a phenomenon. Contrary to the new government teams set up in the countries of the old eastern bloc (not to mention, of course, the situation in the 'third world'), who are completely swamped by the economic and political situation (notably by the explosion of nationalisms and ethnic conflicts), the governments of the most developed countries are still capable of taking advantage of decomposition for the defense of the interests of their national capital. This was demonstrated in particular at the beginning of May by the riots in Los Angeles.
How the bourgeoisie uses its own decomposition
As the ICC has shown[3], the general decomposition of capitalist society developing today reveals the total historic dead-end reached by this system. As with crises and wars, decomposition is not a matter of the good or bad intent of the bourgeoisie, or of some erroneous policy on its part. It is imposed on it in an insurmountable and irreversible manner. The fact that decomposition, in the same way as a third world war, can only lead, in the context of capitalism, to the extinction of humanity doesn't change any of this. This is what was shown by the 'Earth Summit' held in Rio in June. As could have been predicted, the mountain gave birth to a molehill despite the increasing gravity of the environmental problems demonstrated by the majority of scientists. At a time when, as a result of the Greenhouse Effect, terrible famines are looming on the horizon, and even the disappearance of the human species, everyone is passing the buck to make sure that nothing gets done (North against South, Europe against the USA, etc).
But while the bourgeoisie is proving itself to be absolutely incapable of arriving at any long-term, global policy, even when its own survival is threatened, along with that of the rest of humanity, it is still capable of reacting against the effects of decomposition in the short term and for the defense of its national interests. Thus, the riots in Los Angeles have revealed that the most powerful bourgeoisies still have a considerable ability to maneuver.
Los Angeles is a sort of concentrate of all the characteristics of American society: opulence and poverty, hi-tec and violence. Symbol of the American dream, it's also become a symbol of the American nightmare. As we have already pointed out in our texts on decomposition, this phenomenon, like the economic crisis which lies behind it, has its starting point in the heart of capitalism, even if it takes its most extreme and catastrophic forms in the peripheries. And LA is the heart of the heart. For a number of years now, decomposition has ravaged it in a tragic manner, especially in the black ghettoes. In most American cities, these ghettoes have become real hells, dominated by unbearable poverty, by 'third world' conditions of housing and health (for example, infant mortality has reached levels typical of the most backward countries; AIDS has taken an immense toll, etc), and above all by a generalized despair which has led a considerable proportion of young people, from the very beginning of adolescence, towards drugs, prostitution and gangsterism. Because of this, violence and murder are part of daily life in these areas: the main cause of death among black males between 15 and 34 is homicide; nearly a quarter of black males between 20 and 29 are in prison or on remand; 45% of the prison population is black (blacks make up 12% of the total population). In Harlem, the black ghetto of New York, as a result of drug overdoses, murder and illness, the life expectancy of a man is lower than it is in Bangladesh.
This situation has got worse and worse through the 80s, but the current recession, with its dizzying rise in unemployment, is magnifying it even more. As a result, for months now numerous 'specialists' have been predicting riots and explosions of violence in these areas. And this is precisely the threat the American bourgeoisie has reacted against. Rather than allowing itself to be surprised by a succession of spontaneous and uncontrollable explosions, it has preferred to organize a veritable fire-brake, enabling it to choose the time and place of such an upsurge of violence and so to prevent future outbreaks as much as possible.
The place: Los Angeles, the paradigm of urban hell in the USA, where more than 10,000 young people live by the drug trade, and where the ghettoes are patrolled by hundreds of armed gangs who slaughter each other for the control of a street or a sales pitch for crack.
The moment: at the beginning of the presidential campaigns, which are well underway, but at a respectable distance from the election itself, so that there are no uncontrolled outbreaks coming at the last minute to put President Bush in a bad light, especially after the opinion polls have not put him in a very strong position.
The method: first, a very broad media campaign around the trial of four white cops who had been filmed savagely beating up a black motorist: television viewers were shown this revolting scene over and over again. Then the cops were acquitted by a jury deliberately set up in a town known for its conservatism, its 'taste for order' and its sympathies for the police. Finally, as soon as the predictable disturbances arose after the result of the trial was announced, the police received orders from on high to desert the 'hot' neighborhoods, thus allowing the riot to achieve a considerable breadth. At the same time these same police forces remained very much in view in the nearby bourgeois neighborhoods, such as Beverly Hills. This tactic had the advantage of depriving the rioters of their traditional enemy, the cops, which meant that their anger was more than ever channelled towards pillaging shops, burning houses belonging to other communities, or the settling of scores between gangs. This tactic meant that the majority of the 58 deaths resulting from this explosion were not due to the police force but to confrontations between the inhabitants of the ghettoes (particularly between young rioters and small shopkeepers determined to protect their property with guns in their hands).
The means and conditions of the return to order were also part of the maneuver: the same soldiers who, hardly a year and a half ago were defending 'international law' and 'democracy' in the Gulf were now participating in the pacification of the riotous neighborhoods. The repression was not very bloody but it was on a wide-scale: 12,000 arrests, and for weeks after, the TV showed hundreds of trials in which rioters were sent to prison. The message was clear: even if it did not behave like some 'third world' regime that simply slaughters those who threaten public order (this was all the easier because, thanks to their provocation, the authorities were at no point overrun by the events), 'US democracy' showed that it can be as firm as it needs to be. It was a warning against those who might want to get involved in riots in the future.
The 'management' of the LA riots allowed the leading team of the American bourgeoisie to show all the other sectors that, despite all the difficulties it's facing, despite the cancerous growth of the ghettoes and of urban violence, it is still capable of discharging its responsibilities. In a world more and more subject to all kinds of convulsions, the question of the authority, both internal and external, of the planet's biggest power is of the highest importance for the bourgeoisie of this country. By provoking Saddam Hussein in the summer of 1990, then by mounting Operation Desert Storm at the beginning of 91, Bush showed that he could display such authority at the international level. Los Angeles, with all the spectacular media campaigns around it, comparable to the ones launched during the Gulf war, proved that the present administration also knows how to react on the 'domestic' level, and that no matter how catastrophic it is, the internal situation in the USA is still under control.
However, the riots provoked in LA were not only a means for the state and the government to reaffirm their authority faced with the various expressions of decomposition. They were also instruments in a wide-scale offensive against the working class.
The bourgeoisie prepares for a revival of the class struggle
As the resolution points out, "the considerable aggravation of the capitalist crisis, and particularly in the most developed countries, is a prime factor in refuting all the lies about the 'triumph' of capitalism, even in the absence of any workers' struggles. In the same way, the accumulation of discontent provoked by the multiplication and intensification of attacks resulting from the aggravation of the crisis will eventually open the way to broad movements which will restore a sense of confidence to the working class ... For the moment, workers' struggles are at their lowest level since the second world war. But we must be certain of the fact that right now the condition for future upsurges are developing ..." (Point 16).
In all the advanced countries, the bourgeoisie is well aware of this situation, and this applies particularly to the US bourgeoisie. This is why the LA riots were also aimed at a preventative weakening of future workers' struggles. In particular, thanks to the images which allowed them to present the blacks as real savages (such as the pictures of young blacks attacking white truck drivers), the ruling class has succeeded in reinforcing one of the weak points of the American working class: the division between white workers and black workers, or workers from other ethnic groups. As a bourgeois expert put it: "the level of sympathy that whites might have had for the blacks has considerably diminished because of the fear provoked among whites by the constant increase in black criminality" (C Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, 6.5.92). In this sense, the image that the bourgeoisie gave of a re-establishment of order against gangs of black delinquents, looter and dealers could be welcomed by a proportion of white workers, who are often victims of urban insecurity. On this occasion, the 'efficiency' of the forces sent by the Federal state (which was supposedly in contrast to the 'inefficiency' of the local police forces) could only increase the authority of the former.
At the same time this upsurge of racism has been exploited by the professionals of anti-racism in order to launch new diversionary a-classist campaigns, which far from facilitating the class unity of the proletariat, tend to dilute it in the population as a whole and tie it to the chariot of 'democracy'. Meanwhile, the unions and the Democratic Party have taken advantage of the situation in order to denounce the social policies of the Republican administration since the beginning of the 80s, which are blamed for the growth of urban poverty. In other words, for things to get better, you have to go and vote for the 'best candidate' - an idea which gives a boost to an electoral campaign which hasn't mobilized many people so far[4].
The different manifestations of decomposition, such as the urban riots in the 'third world' and the advanced countries, will be used by the bourgeoisie against the working class as long as the latter is not able to put forward its own class perspective - the overthrow of capitalism. And this is true whether such events are spontaneous or provoked. But when the bourgeoisie is able to choose the moment and the circumstances of such explosions, it's much more effective for the defense of its social order. The fact that the LA riots came at a very good time for using them against the working class is confirmed by all the other maneuvers being used by the ruling class against the exploited class in other advanced countries. The most significant example of this bourgeois policy has been given to us recently in one of the most important countries of the capitalist world, Germany.
Offensive of the bourgeoisie against the working class in Germany
The importance of this country does not only derive from its economic weight and its growing strategic role. This is also a country in which one of the most powerful working classes in the world lives, works and struggles, a proletariat which, given its numbers and concentration in the heart of industrial Europe, as well as its incomparable historical experience, holds many of the keys to the future movement of the working class towards the world revolution. It's precisely for this reason that the political offensive of the bourgeoisie against the working class in Germany, which was spearheaded by the biggest public sector strike in 18 years, a strike masterfully led by the unions, was not only aimed at the working class of this country. The considerable echo which this strike had in the media of the various European countries (whereas, normally, workers' struggles are subject to an almost complete black-out abroad) demonstrated that the whole European proletariat is the target of this offensive.
The specific conditions of Germany at the present moment allow us to understand why such an action was launched now in this country. Apart from its economic and historic importance, which are permanent factors, apart from the fact that the German bourgeoisie, like all its class brothers, has to deal with a new and major aggravation of the economic crisis, the bourgeoisie of this country is currently confronted with the problem of reunification (in fact, the 'digestion' of the east by the west). This reunification is a bottomless pit for billions of Deutsch Marks. The state deficit has risen to unprecedented levels for this 'virtuous' country. For the bourgeoisie then, the important thing is to prepare the working class for unprecedented attacks in order to make it accept the costs of reunification. It's a question of making it understand that the fat years are over and that it must be ready to make major sacrifices. This is why the wage offers in the public sector (4.9%), at a time when taxes of all kinds are being imposed, was below the level of inflation. This was the battle cry of the unions, who were more radical than they had been for decades, organizing massive rolling strikes (more than 100,000 workers a day), which on some days led to real chaos in transport and other public services (which had the consequence of isolating the strikers from other sectors of the working class). After raising wage demands of 9%, the unions lowered their claim to 5.4%, presenting this figure as a 'victory' for the workers and a 'defeat' for Kohl. Obviously, the majority of workers considered that after three weeks on strike, this was hardly sufficient (only 0.5% more than the original offer, around 20DM a month) and the popularity of the very mediagenic Monika Mathies, president of the OTV, suffered a few dents. But, for the bourgeoisie, several important objectives had been attained:
* demonstrating that, despite a very massive strike and some 'hard' actions, it was impossible to undermine the bourgeoisie's determination to limit wage rises;
* presenting the unions which had systematically organized all the actions, and kept the workers in the greatest possible passivity, as real protagonists of the struggle against the bosses, and also as the social insurance you had to join in order to get your strike pay (during the strike, the workers queued up to get a union card valid for two years);
* reinforcing a little bit more the division between the workers of the east and those of the west: the former didn't understand why the western workers were asking for higher wages, since in the west wages are already much higher and unemployment is much lower; the latter, meanwhile, don't want to pay for the 'ossies' who are presented as lazy and incompetent.
In other countries, the image of Germany as a 'model' was a bit tarnished by the strikes. But the bourgeoisie was quick to bang in the nail against the consciousness of the working class:
* the strike by the 'privileged' German workers was supposed to be worsening the financial and economic situation of the west;
* despite all their strength (which was identified with that of the unions) and the prosperity of their country, the German workers weren't able to win much, so what's the point of fighting against the decline in living standards?
Thus, the most powerful bourgeoisie in Europe has given the keynote for the political offensive against the working class which will inevitably accompany economic attacks of an unprecedented brutality. For the moment, the maneuver has succeeded, but the breadth it has assumed is in proportion to the fear that the proletariat inspires in the bourgeoisie. The events of the past two years, and all the campaigns which have accompanied them, have significantly weakened the combativity and consciousness of the working class. But the class has not spoken its last word. Even before it has engaged in wide-scale struggles on its own terrain, all the preparations of the ruling class demonstrate the importance of its coming battles. FM, 14.6.92
[1] As the resolution points out, Germany and France don't have exactly the same expectations from their alliance. In particular, the latter country is counting on its military advantages to compensate for its economic inferiority to the former, so that it doesn't end up as a vassal. It wants to have a sort of co-leadership of an alliance of the main European states (with the exception of Britain, obviously). This is why France is not at all interested in a German presence in the Mediterranean, which would considerably diminish the value of its own fleet there and deprive it of a major card in its trade-offs with its 'friend'.
[2] It should not be ruled out that the US support for the Croatian populations in Bosnia, who are currently victims of Serbia, is aimed at showing Croatia that it has every interest in swooping German 'protection', which has proved to be of very limited usefulness, for a much more effective American protection.
[3] See in particular the articles in IR 57 and 62
[4] The media-based ascent of the Texan clown Perrot is also part of this maneuver aimed at giving a lease of life to the democratic game.
The conditions for a resurgence of class struggle are developing
Two and a half years after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe and the USSR, the world situation continues to be determined to a large degree by this historic event. In particular, it has proved an unprecedented aggravating factor in the decomposition of capitalism, especially on the level of imperialist antagonisms, which are increasingly marked by the chaos which springs from it. However, the economic crisis of the capitalist mode of production, which is worsening sharply as we write, and first and foremost in the capitalist metropoles, is tending to return to centre stage. By destroying the illusions in the "superiority of capitalism" poured out since the collapse of Stalinism, by highlighting more and more the system's utter lack of perspective, and by forcing the working class to mobilize to defend its economic interests against the increasingly brutal attacks unleashed by the bourgeoisie, the crisis constitutes a powerful factor in allowing the working class to overcome the difficulties it has encountered since the collapse of the Eastern bloc.
1) The invasion of the whole life of capitalism by the phenomenon of decomposition is a process going back to the beginning of the 1980s, and even to the end of the 1970s (for example, the convulsions in Iran which led to the formation of an "Islamic" republic and the loss of control over this country by its bloc overlord, the USA). The death agony of the Stalinist regimes, their final demise, and the collapse of the imperialist bloc dominated by the USSR are expressions of this process. But at the same time, these immense historic events have seriously accelerated it. This is why we can say that these events mark capitalism's entry into a new phase of its decadence - the phase of decomposition - in the same way that World War I was the first great convulsion of the system's entry into its decadence, and was enormously to amplify the different expressions of this decadence.
Thus, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe marks the opening of a period of catastrophic convulsions in the countries they once ruled. But the characteristics of the new period, and chaos especially, take form still more at the level of worldwide imperialist antagonisms. Chaos is the best way to describe the present situation of imperialist relations between states.
2) The Gulf War in early 1991 was the first large-scale sign of this new "state of affairs":
* it was a result of the disappearance of the Eastern bloc, and of the first signs of its inevitable consequence: the disappearance of the Western bloc as well;
* the world's greatest power undertook a massive campaign in order to limit this phenomenon, by forcing its erstwhile allies (and primarily, Germany, Japan, and France) to show their "solidarity" under its own leadership, against the world's destabilization;
* the barbaric bloodletting it provoked has given an example of what the rest of humanity can expect henceforward;
* despite the huge resources set in motion, this war has only slowed, but certainly not reversed, the major tendencies at work since the disappearance of the Russian bloc: the dislocation of the Western bloc, the first steps towards the formation of a new imperialist bloc led by Germany, the increasing chaos in international relations.
3) The barbaric war unleashed in Yugoslavia only a few months after the end of the Gulf War is a striking and irrefutable illustration of this last point. In particular, although the events which triggered this barbarity (the declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia) are themselves an expression of chaos and the sharpening of nationalism which characterize all the regions previously under Stalinist control, they could never have happened had these nations not been assured of support from Germany, the greatest power in Europe. The German bourgeoisie's diplomatic maneuvering in the Balkans (much more than its indiscipline during the Gulf crisis, as evidenced by Brandt's voyage to Baghdad with Kohl's blessing), was aimed at opening up a strategic outlet to the Mediterranean through an "independent" Croatia under its control, and was its first decisive act as candidate to the leadership of a new imperialist bloc.
4) For the moment, the USA's enormous military superiority, which was spectacularly and murderously demonstrated during the Gulf War, will obviously force the German bourgeoisie to keep a tight rein on its ambitions. Still on the leash on the diplomatic and military level (treaties forbidding military intervention outside its frontiers, the presence of US troops on its territory), without nuclear weapons or a high-grade armaments industry, Germany is still only at the beginning of a road which could lead it to take the head of a new imperialist bloc. Moreover, as we have seen in Yugoslavia, Germany's pushing its own new ambitions can only destabilize the situation in Eastern Europe still further, and so aggravate the chaos in that part of the world. Given its geographical position, this region is a huge threat for Germany (notably in the form of massive immigration), even more than for the other major Western powers. It is largely for this reason that Germany continues to take part in NATO. As it made clear at its last summit, NATO's objective is no longer to confront a Russian imperialism in total disarray, but to provide a shield against the convulsions in Eastern Europe. Germany's need to remain faithful to NATO can
only limit its room for maneuver in relation to the US which dominates the alliance.
5) Lastly, to attain the status of a world power, Germany needs top flight allies in Western Europe, and this for the moment has come up against some substantial obstacles. Within the EEC, it cannot count at all on Great Britain (the USA's most faithful ally), nor on Holland (whose very close economic links with its neighbor incite it precisely to turn to Britain and the USA to avoid becoming a mere German province). Of all the great European countries, France is the most interested in closer links with Germany, given that it cannot take the place of the USA's favored lieutenant in Europe, since a common language and above all geography have definitively attributed this position to Britain. However, the Franco-German alliance cannot be as solid as that uniting the two Anglo-Saxon powers, in that:
* the two partners are looking for something different from the alliance (Germany aspiring to a dominant position, while France wants to maintain its equality, relying on its nuclear arsenal and its imperialist positions in Africa to compensate for its economic inferiority), which can lead to the adoption of divergent diplomatic positions, as we saw in the case of Yugoslavia;
* the US power has already made France pay dearly for its infidelity (France's eviction from the Lebanon, the support for Hissen Habre in Chad and support for the FIS in Algeria, etc).
6) Nonetheless, neither its enormous military backwardness, nor the obstacles that the US power will place in its way, nor the danger of worsening chaos, will turn Germany from the path down which it has started. As the capitalist crisis gets worse, so inevitably will imperialist tensions. The tendency for these tensions to end in a new division of the world into two imperialist blocs, Germany's economic power and its place in Europe, can only push it still further down the same path, which will constitute a further factor of instability in the world today.
More generally, although the threat of chaos may at times restrain the great powers from asserting their own imperialist interests, the dominant tendency is towards an exacerbation of these antagonisms, however disastrous this may be. In particular, the USA's determination, openly declared in the Gulf War, to play "world cop" can in the final analysis only lead to an increased use of military force and blackmail when faced with the threat of chaos - which will only make the latter worse (as we can see, for example, with the Kurdish problem in the post-war Middle East situation). Whatever attempts the great powers may make to improve matters; it is chaos which will increasingly dominate international relations: chaos will be at the origin and the conclusion of armed conflicts, and can only get worse with the inevitable aggravation of the crisis.
7) The open recession which has engulfed the world's greatest power for the last two years has tolled the knell of many illusions sown by the ruling class during most of the 1980's. The vaunted "Reaganomics" which allowed the longest ever period of continuous growth in those figures which supposedly express a country's wealth (such as GNP) stand revealed as a stunning failure, which has left the USA the world's most indebted country, and finding it increasingly difficult to finance its debt.
The state of the US economy is a clear sign of the catastrophic situation facing the whole world economy: $10 trillion of debt, a fall of 4.7% in investment during 1991 despite a historic low in interest rates, a 1992 budget deficit of $348 billion. Since the end of the 1960s, the world economy has only been able to confront the ineluctable contraction of solvent markets thanks to a headlong flight into debt. The serious world recession of 1974-75 was only overcome with a massive injection of credit to the "Third World" and the Eastern bloc, so that for a short period their purchases could get production going again in the industrialized countries. This rapidly led the debtor countries into effective bankruptcy. The recession of 1981-82, which was the inevitable result of this situation, was only surmounted by a new flood of debt, not in the peripheral countries this time but in the world's greatest power. The US trade deficit served as the new "locomotive" for world production, while: internal "growth" was stimulated by ever more colossal budget deficits. This is why the economic swamp in which the US bourgeoisie is struggling today is a serious danger for the whole world economy.
Henceforth, there are no "locomotives that capitalism can count on. Stifled by debt, it will less and less be able to escape, either worldwide or in individual countries, from the inevitable consequences of the crisis of overproduction: falling production, the scrapping of ever wider sectors of the productive apparatus, a drastic reduction in the labor force, strings of bankruptcies especially in the financial sector, alongside which those of the last few years will look like chickenfeed.
8) This perspective will not be altered in the slightest by the upheavals in the old self-styled "socialist" countries. In these countries, the measures of "liberalization" and privatization have only added utter disorganization and massive falls in production to the dilapidation and low productivity which lay at the heart of the Stalinist regimes' collapse. Already, or in the very short term, the population in some of these countries is threatened with famine. What most of these countries can expect, especially those emerging from the ex-USSR where inter-ethnic and nationalist conflicts can only make things worse, is a descent into the Third World. We have not had to wait even two years for the mirage of the miraculous "markets" opening up in the East to be swept away. These countries are already up to their necks in debt, and will not be able to buy much from the more developed countries. As for the latter, they are already confronted with an unprecedented cash flow crisis and will be sparing in pouring credits down what looks like a bottomless pit. There will be no "Marshall Plan" for the ex-Eastern bloc, no real reconstruction of their economies which would make it possible to relaunch production, by however little, in the most industrialized countries.
9) The increasing gravity of the world economic situation will mean unprecedented capitalist attacks against the working class in all countries. With the unleashing of trade wars and competition for ever more restricted markets, falling real wages and worsening working conditions (faster production lines, cutbacks in safety, etc) will be accompanied by a sharp drop in the social wage (education, health, pensions, etc) , and in the numbers of those in work. Unemployment, which has risen abruptly in 1991 (to 28 million in the OECD against 24.6 million in 1990) is going to exceed by far its worst levels of the early 80s. The working class can expect a sordid and unbearable poverty, not just in the less developed countries but in the richest ones as well. The fate of the workers in the ex -" socialist" countries is an indication for workers in the West of what they can expect. However, it would be quite wrong to "see in poverty nothing but poverty", as Marx put it in criticizing Proudhon. Despite, and indeed because of the terrible suffering that this will mean for the working class, the present and future aggravation of the capitalist crisis will bring with it the recovery of the class' combat and the advance of consciousness in the ranks of the working class.
10) It is paradoxical, but quite understandable and already foreseen by the ICC in the autumn of 1989, that the collapse of Stalinism, in other words of the spearhead of the counter-revolution that followed the post-World War I revolutionary wave, should have caused a serious retreat in the consciousness of the working class. This collapse allowed the ruling class to unleash an unprecedented series of campaigns on the theme of the "death of communism", "the victory of capitalism" and "democracy", which could only increase the disorientation of a great majority of workers as to the perspectives for their combats. Nonetheless, this event's impact on workers' combativity was limited, both in depth and duration, as we could see from the struggles of spring 1990 in various countries. By contrast, from the summer of 1990 onwards, the crisis and then the war in the Gulf developed a strong feeling of impotence within the working class of the advanced countries (which were all involved, directly or indirectly in the action of the "coalition"), and proved an important factor in paralyzing its activity: At the same time, these latest events laid bare the lies about the "new world order", and unveiled the criminal behavior of the "great democracies" and all the certified "defenders of human rights"; in doing so, they continued to soften the blow on workers' consciousness of the campaigns in the preceding period. This indeed is why the main fractions of the bourgeoisie were very careful to cover up their "exploits" in the Middle East with such a screen of lies, media campaigns, and fraudulent "humanitarian" operations, especially with regard to the Kurds whom they had themselves handed over for repression by Saddam Hussein's regime.
11) The last act in this series of events affecting conditions for the development of consciousness and combativity in the working class has been played out since summer 1991 with:
* the failed putsch in the USSR, the disappearance of its leading Party, and the country's disintegration;
* the civil war in Yugoslavia.
These two events have provoked a real reflux in the working class, both at the level of consciousness and of combativity. Although its impact has not been comparable to that exercised by the events of late 89, the collapse of the self-styled "communist" regime in the USSR and the disintegration of the country which saw the first victorious proletarian revolution, attacked still more profoundly the perspective of communism in the consciousness of the working masses. At the same time, new threats of catastrophic military confrontations, including nuclear conflicts, have emerged from this disintegration, and have only sharpened still further the feeling of impotent anxiety. Matters were made still worse by the civil war in Yugoslavia, a few hundred kilometers from the great working-class concentrations of Western Europe, where the workers could only look on as spectators at this absurd massacre, and leave it to the good offices of governments and international institutions (EEC, UN) to bring it to an end. Moreover, the temporary end to this conflict, with the dispatch by the great powers of their troops with a "mission of peace" under the aegis of the UN, has refurbished their image, which had been somewhat tarnished by the Gulf War.
12) The events in Yugoslavia have highlighted the complexity of the links between war and the development of proletarian consciousness. Historically, war has been a powerful factor both in mobilizing the proletariat and in raising its consciousness. The Paris Commune, the revolutions of 1905 and of 1917 in Russia, the 1918 revolution in Germany, were all the results of war. But at the same time, as the ICC has pointed out, war does not create the most favorable conditions for the extension of revolution on a world scale. In the same way, World War II has shown that it would henceforth be illusory to expect a proletarian upsurge during a generalized imperialist conflict, and that this on the contrary is another factor plunging the working class further into the counter-revolution. Nonetheless, imperialist war has not altogether lost its ability to point out for workers the profoundly barbaric nature of decadent capitalism, the threat it represents for the whole of humanity, the banditry of all those "men of good will" who rule the bourgeois world, and the fact that the working class is their principal victim. This is why the Gulf War acted in part as an antidote to the ideological poison poured out during 1989. But for war to have such a positive impact in the consciousness of the working masses, it is necessary that the proletariat should be clearly
aware of what is at stake, which presupposes:
* that the workers are not enrolled en masse under the national flag (which is why all the different conflicts in the regions once ruled by Stalinism only serve to increase the disarray of the workers there); .
* that the responsibility for the barbarity and massacres should lie clearly at the door of the advanced countries, and not be hidden by local circumstances (ethnic conflicts, ancient hatreds), or by "humanitarian" operations (like the UN's "peace" missions).
In the coming period, we cannot expect any increase in class consciousness to spring from events like those in Yugoslavia or the Caucuses. By contrast; the need for the great powers to become more and more directly involved in military conflicts will be an important factor in developing workers' consciousness, especially in the decisive sectors of the proletariat which live in these countries.
13) More generally speaking, the various consequences of the historic dead-end in which the capitalist mode of production is stuck do not act in the same direction from the viewpoint of the development of consciousness throughout the working class. The specific characteristics of the decomposition period and of chaos will for the moment be a factor in increasing confusion within the working class. This is the case, for example, with the dramatic convulsions affecting the political apparatus of certain countries emerging from the so-called "real socialism", or in certain Muslim countries (with the rise of fundamentalism). In the more advanced countries, the various upheavals of the political apparatus, though of course they are on a much smaller scale and do not escape the control of the bourgeoisie's dominant forces (rise of xenophobic movements in France, Belgium, East Germany, electoral success for regional parties in Italy, and of the ecologists in France and Belgium), are effectively used to attack workers' consciousness. In reality, the only elements which act favorably on workers' consciousness are those which are characteristic of decadence as a whole, and not specific to its phase of decomposition: imperialist war, with the direct participation of the great capitalist powers, and the crisis of the capitalist economy.
14) Just as we must be able to distinguish how different aspects of the tragic dead-end in which society finds itself affect the development of consciousness throughout the working class, so it is necessary to ascertain the various ways in which this situation can affect the different sectors of the class. In particular, it should be clear, as the ICC has already pointed out at the beginning of the 80s, that the proletariat in the ex-"socialist" countries faces enormous difficulties in the development of its consciousness. Despite the terrible attacks it has already undergone, and which will only get worse, and despite even the large-scale struggles it has conducted against these attacks, this sector of the working class remains politically weak and a relatively easy prey for the demagogic maneuvers of bourgeois politicians. Only the experience and the example of workers' combats in the most advanced sectors of the class, especially in Western Europe, against the bourgeoisie's most sophisticated pitfalls, will make it possible for East European workers to take decisive steps forward' in developing their own consciousness.
15) In the same way, within the world working class as a whole, we must establish a clear distinction, in the way that the upheavals since 1989 have been perceived, between the great mass of the proletariat and the vanguard minorities. Whereas the former has suffered the full extent of the bourgeoisie's campaigns, to the point of turning away altogether from any perspective of overthrowing capitalism, the same events and campaigns have revived an interest for revolutionary positions on the part of small minorities which have refused to be taken in by the deafening barrage on the "death of communism". This is a new illustration of the fact that there is only one antidote to the despair, the disarray that different aspects of decomposition impose on the whole of society: the affirmation of the communist perspective. The recent growth in the audience for revolutionary positions is also a confirmation of the nature of the historic course, as it has developed since the end of the 1960s: a course towards class confrontations, not towards counter-revolution; a course which the events of the last few years have not been able to overturn, however bad they may have been for the consciousness of the majority of the proletariat.
16) And it is precisely because the historic course has not been overthrown, because the bourgeoisie despite all its campaigns has not succeeded in inflicting a decisive defeat on the proletariat in the advanced countries, and enrolling it under the national banner, that the class' retreat, both in consciousness and in combativity, must necessarily be overcome. Already, the worsening of the capitalist crisis, especially in the developed countries, is a prime factor in overturning all the lies about capitalism's "triumph". Similarly, the accumulation of discontent provoked by the intensification and proliferation of attacks as a result of the crisis will eventually open the way to large-scale movements, which will give the working class back its confidence, will remind the workers that they are a power in society and will make it possible for growing masses of workers to turn once more to the perspective of overthrowing capitalism. Obviously, it is still too early to see when such movements will break out. For the moment, workers struggles are at their lowest level since World War II. But we are certain, that in the depths are brewing the conditions for their resurgence: it is for revolutionaries to keep a constant watch; not to be taken by surprise by the upsurge of struggle when it comes; to be ready to intervene in it to put forward the communist perspective. ICC 29/03/92
In the first two articles in this series (IR 68 and 69), we began our refutation of the claim that communism is no more than the invention of a few "would-be universal reformers" by examining the historical development of communist ideas and showing them to be the product of profoundly material forces in society - above all, of the rebellion of the oppressed and exploited classes against the conditions of class domination. In the second article in particular we showed that the marxist conception of communism, far from being a schema hatched out in Marx's brain, only became possible when the proletariat won over men like Marx and Engels to its struggle for emancipation.
The next two articles in this series deal with Marx's first definitions of communist society, and in particular with his vision of communism as the overcoming of man's alienation. The article that follows therefore pays particular attention to the concept of alienation. At first sight this might appear to be a detour from the main argument in the series: i.e., that communism is a material necessity imposed by the inner contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Superficially, the question of alienation would seem to be a purely subjective factor, something that concerns ideas and feelings rather than the solid material bases of society. But as we argue in the columns below, it was precisely the merit and strength of Marx's conception of alienation that he took it down from the clouds of woolly speculation and located its roots in the fundamental social relationships between human beings. And, by the same token, Marx made it perfectly clear that the communist society that would allow man to overcome his alienation could only come about through a thorough-going transformation of these social relationships; in sum, through the revolutionary struggle of the working class.
It is often said that Marx was never interested in drawing up blueprints for the future communist society. This is true insofar as, unlike the utopian socialists, who saw communism as the pure invention of enlightened minds, Marx realised that it was fruitless to draw up detailed plans of the structure and mode of operation of communist society, since the latter could only be the creation of a massive social movement which would have to find practical solutions to the unprecedented task of constructing a social order qualitatively superior to any that had gone before it.
But this perfectly valid opposition to any attempt to cram the real movement of history into the straitjacket of ready-made schemas did not at all mean that Marx, or the marxist tradition in general, had no interest in defining the ultimate goals of the movement. On the contrary: this is one of the distinguishing functions of the communist minority, that "they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement" (Communist Manifesto). What separates marxism from all brands of utopianism is not that the former has no vision of the "ultimate general results", but that it draws out the real connection between these results and the "conditions" and the "line of march" which lead towards them. In other words, it bases its vision of the future society on a thorough analysis of the concrete conditions of the existing society; so that, for example, the demand for the abolition of the market economy is not derived from a purely moral objection to buying and selling, but from the recognition that a society founded on generalised commodity production is doomed to break down under the weight of its own inner contradictions, thus posing the necessity for a higher form of social organisation, founded on production for use. At the same time, marxism takes its conception of the path, the line of march towards this higher form from the actual experiences of the proletariat's struggle against capitalism. Hence while the call for the dictatorship of the proletariat appeared at the very beginning of the marxist movement, the shape that this dictatorship would have to assume was made much more precise by the great revolutionary events of working class history, in particular the Paris Commune and the October revolution.
Without a general vision of the kind of society it is aiming for, the communist movement would be blind. Instead of being the highest embodiment of that unique human capacity to plan ahead, to "raise his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality" [1], communism would be no more than an instinctive reaction against capitalist misery. In its permanent battle against the domination of bourgeois ideology, it would have no power to convince workers and all the other oppressed strata of society that their only hope lies in the communist revolution, that the apparently insoluble problems posed by capitalist society can find practical solutions in a communist one. And, once the revolutionary transformation had actually got underway, it would have no yardstick by which to measure the progress being made towards its final goals.
And yet we must not forget that there is a distinction between these final goals, the "ultimate general results", and the "line of march towards them". As we have already said, the latter is subject to constant clarification by the practical experience of the class movement: the Paris Commune made it clear to Marx and Engels that the proletariat had to destroy the old state machine before erecting its own apparatus of power; the appearance of the soviets in 1905 and 1917 convinced Trotsky and Lenin that they were the finally discovered form of the proletarian dictatorship, and so on. With regard to the higher goals of communism, on the other hand, they must remain very general conclusions based on a critique of capitalist society until such point as the real movement has begun to put them on the practical agenda. This is all the more true in that the proletarian revolution is by definition a political revolution first, a social and economic transformation second. Since the authentic instances of working class revolution have, hitherto, gone no further than the conquest of political power in a given county, the lessons they have bequeathed to us relate fundamentally to the political problems of the forms and methods of the proletarian dictatorship (relations between party, class, and state, etc); only to a limited extent have they left us any definite guidance about the social and economic measures that need to be taken to lay the foundations of communist production and distribution, and these are largely negative ones (for example, that statification does not equal socialisation). Concerning the fully-fledged communist society that will only emerge after a more or less long period of transition, the historical experience of the working class has not and could not have brought about any qualitative break-throughs in the communists' own portrayal of such a society.
It is thus no accident that the most inspired and inspiring descriptions of the higher goals of communism occur at the beginning of Marx's political life, coinciding with his adhesion to the cause of the proletariat, with his explicit identification of himself as a communist in 1844 [2]. These first pictures of what humanity could be like once the shackles of capitalism and of preceding class societies had been thrown off were rarely improved upon in Marx's later writings. We will shortly be replying to the argument that Marx abandoned these early definitions as mere youthful folly. But for the moment we simply want to say that Marx's approach to this problem is entirely consistent with his overall method: on the basis of a profound critique of the impoverishment and deformation of human activity under the prevailing social conditions, he deduced what was required to negate and overcome this impoverishment. But once he had sketched out the ultimate goals of communism, what was essential was to plunge into the emerging proletarian movement, into the grime and din of its political and economic struggles, which alone had the capacity to make these distant goals a reality.
In the summer of 1844, Marx was living in Paris, surrounded by the numerous communist groupings which had been such an important element in winning him to the communist cause. It was here that he wrote the now famous Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, which he later referred to as the groundwork both for the Grundrisse and Capital itself. Here he attempted to come to grips with political economy from the standpoint of the exploited class, making his first forays into such questions as wages, profits, ground rent and the accumulation of capital, questions which were to occupy such an immense part of his later work; even though, in his introductory remarks to the Manuscripts, he announces his plan for a monumental series of 'brochures' of which the sections on economics were only the beginning. In the same notebooks there is also Marx's most thorough attempt to settle scores with the idealistic Hegelian philosophy which had now outgrown its usefulness, having been 'put the right way up' by the emergence of a materialist theory of historical evolution. But the Manuscripts are certainly best known for their treatment of the problem of alienated labour, and (though perhaps less so) for their efforts to define the kind of human activity that would replace it in the future communist society.
The EPM were not published until 1927: in other words, they were not known about during the most crucial, revolutionary period in the history of the workers' movement; their publication coincided with the last gasps of the revolutionary wave that shook the capitalist world in the decade after 1917. 1927 was the year which saw the defeat both of the Chinese revolution and of the left opposition within the Communist Parties; one year later the Communist International was to announce its own demise by adopting the infamous theory of 'socialism in one country'. As a result of this irony of history, it is the bourgeoisie rather than the workers' movement which has had the most to say about the EPM and their significance. In particular, there has been a great controversy in the sterile halls of academic and left-bourgeois 'theory' over the alleged break between the 'Young Marx' and the 'Old Marx'. Since Marx never published the EPM himself, and since he covered areas in them which were seemingly undeveloped in later writings, it is alleged by some that the EPM represent an immature, Feuerbachian, even Hegelian Marx which the later, more mature and scientific Marx decisively rejected. The main proponents of this view are ... the Stalinists, and above all that arch-obscurantist Althusser. According to them, what Marx abandoned above all was the conception of human nature found in the EPM, and in particular the notion of alienation.
It should be obvious that such views can't be separated from the class nature of Stalinism. The critique of alienated labour in the EPM is intimately linked to a critique of 'barracks communism', a communism in which the community became an abstract, wage-paying capitalist - the vision of communism propounded by the genuinely immature proletarian currents of the day, such as the Blanquists [3]. Marx roundly condemned such visions of communism in the EPM because for him communism only made sense if it put an end to the suppression of man's creative capacities and transformed the drudgery of labour into joyful, free activity. The Stalinists, on the other hand, are defined by the notion that socialism is consistent with a regime of destitution and back-breaking exploitation, typified by the conditions in the factories and labour camps of the so-called 'socialist' countries. Here however we are no longer dealing with an immature expression of the proletarian movement, but a full blown apologia for the capitalist counter-revolution. Since alienated labour clearly existed in spades in the 'really existing socialism' of the east, it is hardly surprising that the Stalinists should feel somewhat uncomfortable with the whole notion. We could continue here: for example, Marx's vision of the proper relationship between man and nature in the EPM does not sit too well alongside the ecological catastrophe brought about by Stalinism's 'interpretation' of this question. But in any case this boils down to the same point: the vision of communism elaborated in the EPM undermines the fraud of Stalinist 'socialism' because the two start from alien class standpoints.
At the opposite end of the bourgeois political spectrum, various strands of liberal humanism, including Protestant theologians and a whole gaggle of sociologists, have also made an attempt to separate the 'two Marx's'. Only this time they definitely prefer the warm-hearted, romantic idealist young Marx to the cold, materialistic author of Capital. But at least such interpretations don't usually claim to be marxist ...
Bordiga, writing in the 50s, is one of the few elements in the proletarian movement to have attempted to make a commentary on the EPM, and he clearly rejected this artificial division: "Another very vulgar commonplace is that Marx was a Hegelian in his youthful writings and it was only afterwards that he was a theoretician of historical materialism, and that, when he was older, he ended up a vulgar opportunist" [4]. Against such clichés, Bordiga rightly defended the continuity of Marx's thought from the point that he first joined the proletarian cause. But in doing so, and in reaction against the various theories of the day, which either proclaimed the obsolescence of marxism or tried to spice it up with various additions, such as existentialism, Bordiga mistook this continuity for "the monolithism of the whole system from its birth to the death of Marx and even afterwards (the fundamental concept of invariance, the fundamental rejection of the enriching evolution of the party doctrine)" [5]. This conception reduces marxism to a static dogma, like Islam - for the true Muslim, the Koran is the word of God precisely because not a jot or a comma has been changed since it was first 'dictated'. It is a dangerous notion which has made the Bordigists forget the real 'enrichments' made by the very current from which they are descended - the Italian Left Fraction - and return to positions made obsolete by the onset of the epoch of capitalist decay. In relation to the matter at hand, the EPM, it also makes no sense. If we compare the EPM to the Grundrisse, which was if you like the second draft of the same great work, the continuity is absolutely clear: against the idea that Marx abandoned the concept of alienation, both the word and the concept appear again and again throughout this work of the 'mature' Marx, just as they do in Capital itself. But there is no doubt that the Grundrisse represents an enrichment with regard to the EPM. For example, it clarifies certain fundamental questions such as the distinction between labour and labour power, and is thus able to uncover the secret of surplus value. In its analysis of the phenomenon of alienation, it is able to pose the problem more historically than the earlier work, because it draws on a deep study of the modes of production that preceded capitalism. For us, the correct way of looking at this problem is to affirm both the continuity and the progressive enrichment of the 'party doctrine', because marxism is both a deeply historical tradition and a living method.
We remain convinced that the concept of alienation is essential to the elaboration of a communist critique of the present social order. Without a thorough-going examination of the problem we are trying to solve, without a grasp of how deep the problem is, there can be no question of formulating a solution. We will therefore follow Marx's method in the EPM: in order to define the final goals of the communist transformation, in order, that is to say, to draw the outlines of a really human society, we must first establish how far man has strayed from his own humanity.
The notion that man has become estranged or alienated from his own true powers is very old. But in all the societies that preceded capitalism, the concept was bound to be enveloped in mythical or religious forms - above all in the myth of man's fall from a primordial paradise in which he enjoyed godlike powers.
This myth predates class society and is indeed central to the beliefs and practises of the primitive communist societies. The Australian aborigines, for example, believed that their ancestors were the prodigiously creative beings of the primordial 'dreamtime', and that since the closing of this mythical epoch, human beings have greatly diminished in power and knowledge.
Like religion, which descends from it, myth is both a protest against alienation and an expression of it. In both, man projects powers that are really his own onto supernatural beings outside himself. But myth is the characteristic ideology of society prior to the emergence of class divisions. In this immensely long historical epoch, alienation only exists in an embryonic form: the harsh conditions of the struggle for survival impose the harsh domination of the tribe over the individual, via the unchanging customs and traditions laid down by the mythical ancestors. But this is not yet a relationship of class domination. Ideologically, this situation is reflected in a second aspect of the dreamtime beliefs: the dreamtime can be periodically restored through the collective festivals, and each member of the tribe retains a secret identity with the dreamtime ancestors. In short, man does not yet feel totally divorced from his own creative powers.
With the dissolution of the primitive community and the development of class society, the onset of alienation properly speaking is mirrored in the emergence of the strictly religious outlook. In societies like ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the outward form of the old cyclical festivals of renewal is retained; but now the masses are mere spectators of an elaborate ritual performed by the priests with the aim of glorifying a divinised despot. A gulf has opened up between man and the gods, reflecting the growing gulf between man and man.
In the Judaeo-Christian religions, the deeply conservative cyclical conceptions of primitive and Asiatic society are replaced by the revolutionary idea that the drama of man's fall and redemption is a historical progression through time. But parallel to this development, the gulf between man and God becomes almost unbridgeable: God orders Adam to depart from Eden precisely for the sin of trying to raise himself to the divine level.
Within the western religious traditions, however, there emerged a number of esoteric and mystical currents which saw the Fall not so much as man's punishment for disobeying a distant Father figure, but as a dynamic cosmic process in which the original Mind 'forgot' itself and plunged into the world of division and apparent reality. In this conception, the estrangement between the created world and the ultimate ground of being was not absolute: the possibility remained for the properly trained initiate to 'remember' his underlying unity with the supreme Mind. Such views were held, for example, by the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition and its numerous Christian, alchemical and hermetic offshoots. It is significant that such currents - which frequently tipped over into the heresies of pantheism and atheism - became more and more influential with the breakdown of feudal-Catholic orthodoxy and were, as Engels points out in The Peasant War in Germany, often associated with subversive social movements in the period of nascent capitalism.
There is a definite, though seldom explored, link between the thinking of Hegel and some of these esoteric traditions, particularly through the works of a radical Protestant, visionary artisan whom Marx himself once referred to as "the inspired Jakob Boehme" [6]. But Hegel was also the most advanced theoretician of the revolutionary bourgeoisie, and consequently an heir to the rationalising philosophy of the Ancient Greeks. As such he made a grandiose attempt to take the whole problem of alienation away from the terrain of myth and of mysticism, and to pose it scientifically. For Hegel this meant that what had once been esoteric, locked up in the secret mental recesses of a privileged few, had to be grasped consciously, clearly and collectively: "Only what is perfectly determinate in form is at the same time exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned and possessed by everybody. Intelligibility is the form in which science is offered to everyone, and is the open road to it made plain for all" [7]. With Hegel, therefore, there is the attempt to grasp man's estrangement from a consciously dialectical and historical standpoint, and Marx even credits him with having achieved certain insights into the key role of labour in man's self-genesis. And yet, as Marx, following Feuerbach, pointed out, the Hegelian system takes only one or two steps towards science before falling back into mysticism. It can be readily seen that Hegel's notion of history as the 'alienation of the Absolute Idea' is a restatement of the Kabbalistic version of the original cosmic fall. Whereas for Marx, the issue was not God's history, but the history of "nature developing into man" [8]; not the descent from a primordial Consciousness into the vulgar realms of matter, but the material ascent from unconscious being to conscious being.
In so far as Hegel dealt with alienation as an aspect of concrete human experience, here again it became timeless and ahistorical, in that it was posed as an absolute category of man's relationship to the external world: in Marx's terms, Hegel confused objectification - the human capacity to separate subject from object - with alienation. Consequently, if this estrangement between man and the world could be overcome at all, it could only be done so in the abstract realm of thought - the philosopher's own realm, which for Marx was itself no more than a reflection of alienation.
But Marx did not abandon the concept of alienation to the Hegelians. Instead he attempted to restore it to its material foundations by locating its origins in human society. Feuerbach had explained that Hegel's Absolute Idea, like all previous manifestations of God, was really the projection of man unable to realise his own powers, of man alienated from himself. But Marx went further, recognising that the fact that "the secular basis detaches itself from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the cleavages and self-contradictions within this secular basis" (Theses on Feuerbach). The concept of alienation remained vital to Marx because it became a weapon in his assault on the "secular basis", i.e. on bourgeois society, and above all on bourgeois political economy.
Confronted with the triumphant march of bourgeois society, with all the 'miracles of progress' that it had brought about, Marx utilised the concept of alienation to show what all this progress meant for the real producers of wealth, the proletarians. He showed that the increasing wealth of capitalist society meant the increasing impoverishment of the worker. Not only his physical impoverishment, but also the impoverishment of his inner life:
" ...the more the worker exerts himself, the more powerful becomes the alien world of objects which he creates over and against himself, the poorer he himself - his inner world - becomes, the less belongs to him as his own. It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object. Hence, the greater this activity, the greater is the worker's lack of objects. Whatever the product of his labour is, he is not; therefore the greater this product, the less he is himself. The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien" [9].
Here Marx's approach is plain: against the abstractions of Hegel (which took on a caricatural form in the work of the Young Hegelians around Bruno Bauer), Marx roots his concept of alienation in "present day-economic facts " [10]. He shows that alienation is an irreducible element of the wage labour system, which can only mean that the more the worker produces, the more he enriches not himself, but capital, this alien power standing over him.
Thus alienation ceases to be a mere state of mind, an inherent aspect of man's relationship to the world (in which case it could never be overcome) and becomes a particular product of man's historical evolution. It did not begin with capitalism: wage labour, as Marx points out in the Grundrisse, is merely the final and highest form of alienation. But because it is its most advanced form, it provides the key to understanding the history of alienation in general, just as the appearance of bourgeois political economy made it possible to examine the economic foundations of previous modes of production. Under bourgeois conditions of production, the roots of alienation are laid bare: they lie not in the clouds, not in man's head alone, but in the labour process, in the concrete and practical relations between man and man and man and nature. Having made this theoretical break-through, it then becomes possible to show how man's alienation in the act of labour extends outwards to all his other activities; by the same token, it opens up the possibility of investigating the historical origins of alienation and its evolution through previous human societies - although it must be said that Marx and the marxist movement have done no more than lay down the premises for such an investigation, since other tasks necessarily took precedence over this one.
Although Marx's theory of alienation is far from complete, his treatment of it in the EPM shows how concerned he was that it should be far removed from any vagueness and uncertainty. In the chapter on 'Estranged labour' he therefore examines the problem in a very precise manner, identifying four distinct but interconnected aspects of alienation.
The first aspect is the one dealt with in the previous citation from the EPM and briefly summarised in another passage: "The relation of the worker to the product of labour as an alien object exercising power over him. This relation is at the same time the relation to the sensuous external world, to the objects of nature, as an alien world inimically opposed to him". Under conditions of alienation, the products of men's own hands turn against them, and though this applies to previous modes of class exploitation, it reaches its peak under capitalism which is a completely impersonal, inhuman power, created by men's labour but utterly escaping their control, and periodically plunging the whole of society into catastrophic crises. This definition obviously applies to the immediate act of production: capital, in the form of machinery and technology, dominates the worker, and instead of increasing his leisure, intensifies his exhaustion. Furthermore, the critique of wage labour as by definition alienated labour defies all the bourgeoisie's attempts to separate the two: for example, the fraudulent schemes popular in the 1960s, which aimed at creating 'job satisfaction' by reducing the extreme specialisation characteristic of factory work, by instituting work teams, 'workers' participation' and all the rest. From the marxist point of view, none of this alters the fact that the workers are creating objects over which they have no control and which serve only to enrich others at their expense - and this remains true no matter how 'well paid' the workers are judged to be. But this whole problematic can also be given a much wider application than the immediate process of production. It is increasingly apparent, for example, especially in the period of capitalism's decadence, that the entire political, bureaucratic and military machinery of capital has taken on a bloated life of its own, that it crushes human beings like a vast juggernaut. The nuclear bomb typifies this tendency: in a society regulated by inhuman forces, the forces of the market and capitalist competition, what man produces has so far escaped his control that it threatens him with extinction. The same can be said about the relation between man and nature in capitalism: the latter did not in itself produce the alienation between man and nature, which has a far older history, but it takes it to its ultimate point. By 'perfecting' the hostility between man and nature, by reducing the whole natural world to the status of a commodity, the development of capitalist production is now threatening to destroy the very fabric of planetary life [11].
The second dimension of alienation traced by Marx is "the relation of labour to the act of production within the labour process ... here we have self-estrangement, as previously we had the estrangement of the thing". In this process, labour "does not belong to (the worker's) essential being ... in his work, therefore he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but mortifies his body and ruins his mind. The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labour is therefore not voluntary but coerced; it is forced labour. It is therefore not the satisfaction of a need; it is merely a means to satisfy needs external to it. Its alien character emerges clearly in the fact that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague."
Anyone who has had a 'normal' job in the day-to-day life of capitalist society, but above all anyone who has ever worked in a factory, can recognise himself and his feelings in these words. In a capitalist society that has long established its domination over the world, the fact that work should be a hateful experience for the vast majority of mankind is presented almost as a law of nature. But for Marx and marxism there was and is nothing natural about this. Previous forms of production (for example, primitive communal labour, artisan labour) had not completed this divorce between the act of production and sensuous enjoyment; this in itself was proof that the total separation achieved by capital was a historical and not a natural product. Armed with this knowledge, Marx was able to expose the truly scandalous quality of the situation brought about by wage labour. And this leads on to the next aspect of alienation: alienation from the life of the species.
This third aspect of Marx's theory of alienation is almost certainly the most complex, profound, and little understood. In this section of the same chapter, Marx asserts that man has become estranged from his human nature. For Althusser and other critics of the 'Young Marx', such ideas are proof that the 1844 Manuscripts do not represent a decisive break with Feuerbach and radical philosophy in general. We disagree. What Marx rejected in Feuerbach was the notion of a fixed and unchanging human nature. Since nature itself is not fixed and unchanging, this would clearly be a theoretical dead-end, a form of idolatry in fact. Marx's conception of human nature was not this. It was dialectical: man was still a part of nature, nature was "man's inorganic body" as he put it in one passage in the EPM; man was still a creature of instincts, as he put it elsewhere in the same work[12]. But man distinguished himself from all the other natural creatures by his capacity to transform this body through conscious creative activity. Man's most essential nature, his species being, as Marx put it, was that of the creator, the transformer of nature.
Vulgar critics of marxism sometimes claim that Marx reduced man to 'homo faber', a mere drudge, an economic category. But these critics are blinded by the proximity of wage labour, by the conditions of capitalist production. In defining man as the conscious producer, Marx was actually elevating him to the gates of heaven: for who is God but the estranged image of man when truly man - of man the creator? For Marx, man was only truly man when he was producing in a state of freedom. Whereas the animal "produces only under the dominion of immediate physical need, man produces even when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom from it" [13].
This is certainly one of the most radical statements that Marx ever made. While capitalist ideology pretends that is an eternal fact of nature that work should be a form of mental and physical torture, Marx says that man is only man, not simply when he is producing, but when he produces for the sheer joy of producing, when he is free of the whip of immediate physical need. Otherwise, man is living a purely animal existence. Engels made the same point many years later, in the conclusion to Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, when he said that man won't really mark himself off from the rest of animal kind until he has entered the realm of freedom, the highest stages of communist society.
It could even be said that alienated labour reduces man to a level below that of the animals: "In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over the animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken away from him. Similarly in degrading spontaneous, free, activity, to a means, estranged labour make's man's species life a means to his physical existence" [14].
In other words: man's capacity for conscious labour is what makes him human, what separated him from all the other creatures. But under conditions of alienation this advance becomes a disadvance: man's capacity to separate subject from object, which is a fundamental element in the specifically human consciousness, is perverted into a relation of hostility to nature, to the sensuous 'objective' world. At the same time, alienated labour, above all capitalist wage labour, has turned man's most essential and most exalted characteristic - his spontaneous, free, conscious life activity - into a mere means of survival, has in fact turned it into something to be bought and sold on the market place. In sum, the 'normality' of working under capitalism is the most refined insult to man's "species being".
The fourth facet of alienation flows directly from the previous three:
"An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labour, from his life activity, from his species being is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man."
The alienation of labour in its fully fledged form implies a relationship of exploitation: the appropriation of surplus labour by a ruling class. In the first class societies (in this chapter Marx mentions Egypt, India, Peru, examples of what he later called the Asiatic mode of production), although this surplus was formally consecrated to the gods, the real alien power ruling over the labour of the exploited was not the gods but other men: "The alien being, to whom labour and the product of labour belongs, in whose service labour is done and for whose benefit the product of labour is provided, can only be man himself" (15).
This fundamental cleavage at the heart of social life inevitably creates a fundamental estrangement between human beings. From the point of view of the ruling class in any class society, the producers of wealth, the exploited, are so many things, mere chattel who only exist for their benefit (although here again it must be said that only under capitalism is this alienation complete, since in this mode of production relations of exploitation lose all personal character and become utterly inhuman and mechanical). From the point of view of the exploited class, the rulers of society are also hidden behind a fog of mystification, appearing now as gods, now as devils according to circumstance; it is not until the emergence of proletarian class consciousness, which is the negation of all ideological forms of perception, that it becomes possible for an exploited class to see its exploiters in the clear light of day, as the mere product of social and historical relationships [15].
But this cleavage is not restricted to the direct relationship between exploiter and exploited. For Marx, man's species being is not an isolated essence locked up in each individual; it is the 'Gemeinwesen' a key term implying that man's nature is social, that communal existence is the only really human form of existence. Man is not the isolated, individual producer. He is by definition the social labourer, the collective producer. And yet - and this element is developed in the pages of the Grundrisse in particular - man's history since tribal times can be seen as the continuous dissolution of the original communal bonds which held the first human societies together. This process is intimately linked to the development of commodity relations, since these above all are the dissolving agent of community-existence. This could already be seen in classical society, where the unprecedented growth of mercantile relations had profoundly undermined the old gentile ties and were already tending to make society a 'war of each against all ' a fact noted by Marx as early as his doctoral thesis on Greek philosophy. But the domination of commodity relations of course reached its apogee under capitalism, the first society to generalise commodity relations to the very heart of the social organism, the productive process itself. This aspect of capitalism society as the society of universal egoism, in which competition and separation set all men at war with each other, was emphasised particularly in the article 'On the Jewish Question', where Marx makes his first critique of the bourgeois conception of a purely political emancipation.
" ... not one of the so-called rights of man goes beyond egoistic man, man as a member of civil society, namely an individual withdrawn into himself, his private interest and his private desires and separated from the community. In the rights of man it is not man who appears as a species being; on the contrary, species life itself, society, appears as a framework extraneous to the individuals, as a limitation of their original independence ..."
This atomisation of man in civil, i.e. bourgeois society, is an indispensable key for analysing all the social questions that lie outside the immediate process of production: the relations between the sexes and the institution of the family; the phenomenon of 'mass loneliness' which has so intrigued the sociologists and which seems so characteristic of 20th century civilisation; and in general the whole sphere of interpersonal relations. But it also has a more direct meaning for the struggle of the proletariat, since it relates to the way in which capitalism divides the proletariat itself and makes each worker a competitor with his fellow worker, thus inhibiting the proletariat's inherent tendency to unite in defence of common interests against capitalist exploitation.
The phenomenon of atomisation is particularly acute today, in the final phase of capitalist decadence, the phase of the generalised break-up and decomposition of social relations. As we have said in numerous texts[16], this phase is above all typified by the flight into individualism and 'every man for himself', by despair, suicide, drug addiction and mental illness on a scale never before seen in history. It is the phase whose motto could be Thatcher's claim that "there's no such thing as society, only individuals and their families"; it is, as the bloody events unfolding in the ex-USSR confirm, a phase of universal cannibalism, in which masses of human beings are being driven into the most irrational and murderous conflicts, into pogroms, fratricides, and wars that pose a dire threat to the very future of the human race. It goes without saying that the roots of this irrationality lie in the fundamental alienations at the centre of bourgeois society; and that their solution lies solely at this centre, in a radical change in the social relations of production.
For it must not be forgotten that Marx did not elaborate the theory of alienation in order to bewail the misery that he saw around him, or to present, as did the various brands of 'true' and feudal socialism, human history as nothing but a regrettable fall from an original state of fullness. For Marx the alienation of man was the necessary product of human evolution, and as such contained the seeds of its own supercession: "The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world" [17]. But the creation of this vast "outer wealth", this wealth estranged from those who have created it, also finally makes it possible for human beings to emerge from alienation into freedom. As Marx puts it in the Grundrisse:
"It will be shown ...that the most extreme form of alienation, wherein labour appears in the relation of capital and wage labour, and labour, productive activity, appears in relation to its own conditions and its own product, is a necessary point of transition - and therefore contains in itself, in a still only inverted from, turned on its head, the dissolution of all limited presuppositions of production, and moreover creates and produces the unconditional presuppositions of production, and therewith the full material conditions for the total, universal development of the productive forces of the individual" [18].
There are two aspects to this: in the first place, because of the unprecedented productivity of labour achieved under the capitalist mode of production, the old dream of a society of abundance, where all human beings, and not just a privileged few, have the leisure to devote themselves to the "total, universal development" of their creative powers, can cease to be a dream and become a reality. But the possibility of communism is not simply a matter of technological possibility. It is above a social possibility linked to the existence of a class which has a material interest in bringing it about. And here again Marx's theory of alienation shows how both in spite and because of the alienation it suffers in bourgeois society, the proletariat will be driven to rebel against its conditions of existence:
"The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-estrangement. But the former class feels at ease and strengthened in this estrangement, it recognises estrangement as its own power and has in it the semblance of human existence. The latter feels annihilated in estrangement; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existence. It is, to use an expression of Hegel, in its abasement the indignation at that abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradictions between its human nature and its conditions of life, which is the outright, resolute and comprehensive negation of that nature" [19].
The theory of alienation is thus nothing if it is not a theory of class revolt, a theory of revolution, a theory of the historic struggle for communism. In the next chapter we will look at the first sketches of communist society that Marx 'deduced' from his critique of capitalist alienation. CDW
[1] Marx, Capital, Chapter seven, Section one. In this passage the 'mature' Marx develops a fundamental question addressed in the EPM: the distinction between human labour and the "life-activity" of other animals.
[2] See the previous article in this series, 'How the proletariat won Marx to communism', IR 69
[3] On Marx's criticisms of 'crude communism', see the first article in this series, in IR 68.
[4] Bordiga, 'Commentary on the 1844 Manuscripts'. In Bordiga et le passion du communisme, compiled by Jacques Camatte, Spartacus Editions, 1974
[5] Ibid
[6] Marx, 'The leading article of no. 179 of Kolnische Zeitung', published in the Rheinische Zeitung, 1842
[7] Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, 1807, Preface; p. 76 in the Harper Colophon edition
[8] EPM, chapter on 'Private property and communism'
[9] EPM, chapter on 'Estranged labour'
[10] ibid
[11] See 'It's capitalism that's poisoning the Earth', in IR 63
[12] EPM: the phrase cited is from the chapter on 'Estranged Labour'. The reference to man's instincts occurs in the chapter called 'Critique of Hegelian philosophy'
[13] ibid, chapter on 'Estranged labour'
[14] ibid
[15] On the specificities of proletarian consciousness, see in particular Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness; and the ICC pamphlet, Class Consciousness and Communist Organisations
[16] See especially, 'Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism', in IR 62
[17] EPM, chapter on 'Private property and communism'
[18] Grundrisse (Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, Rough Draft, written in the winter of 1857-8), Section 2, 'The circulation process of capital'; sub-heading 'Exchange of labour for labour rests on worker's propertylessness'
[19] Marx and Engels, The Holy Family, 1844, chapter IV
From political irresponsibility to the void
The proletarian political milieu is composed of a certain number of organizations which, despite their confusions and analytical errors, sometimes very serious ones, represent the real historical effort of the working class to become conscious of itself. However, on the margins of this milieu, there is a whole series of small groups which are not part of any real historical tradition and whose only basis for existing is the sectarian spirit, personal questions and other petty issues. Such groups are basically parasites of the genuinely revolutionary organizations. Not only is their existence devoid of any foundation from the point of view of working class interests; they also serve to discredit, in the eyes of the workers, the positions and activity of serious organizations. The EFICC ('External Fraction of the International Communist Current') is a particularly significant example of a parasitic group. This has been illustrated to a tragi-comic degree by the way this group has responded to the major historical events which have shaken the world over the past two years. In nos 44 and 45 of this Review, we dealt with the circumstances in which the EFIC was formed. We will only very briefly go over this ground again here.
The EFICC was formed by a certain number of former militants of our organization who voluntarily left it at its 6th Congress in November 1985. A few months before, these comrades had formed themselves into a tendency around a document which attempted to make a synthesis of different and contradictory viewpoints that had been developed against the ICC's orientations. But apart from their lack of homogeneity and coherence, the positions expressed at this time by these comrades were characterized by a lack of firmness, by concessions to councilist ideas - in short, by a centrist attitude towards councilism. Although such positions could have had pernicious consequences if they had won over the whole organization, they did not at all justify an organizational separation. This is why we saw this split as a real desertion which showed all the signs of irresponsibility and sectarianism. What's more, the splitters themselves were well aware that their attitude was unjustifiable because, from the time they left to the present day, they have stuck to the fable that they were expelled from the ICC. We lack the space in this article to go back over this lie (which we have already amply dealt with in IR 45). Rather like primitive communities, sects usually need a founding myth to justify their existence. The 'expulsion from the ICC' is one of the founding myths of this sect called the EFICC.
However, lies are not the only characteristic of the EFICC. We also have to add stupidity. That's because it gives you the stick to beat it with by confirming that it was in no way expelled from the ICC but left under its own steam.
"Staying in a degenerating organization like the ICC means cutting yourself off from the possibility of facing and eventually overcoming the crisis of marxism ... And all this is covered over with a thin veneer of respectability by a new dogma the ICC conveniently invented 6 or 7 years ago: that militants supposedly have to stay in an organization until it has crossed the class line to the capitalist class enemy. Prisoners for life. Like battered women who pathetically claim that 'he loves me', the militants of the ICC have discovered the sanctity of marriage" (IP 20, 'For a living practice of marxist theory').
The reader can form his own opinion of the comparison between the ICC and a brutal husband. Since it began the EFICC has habitually used this kind of language. What it shows however is that the EFICC (does it consider itself as a battered wife?) vehemently demanded a divorce whereas the ICC was opposed to it.
Once again, we don't have the space to refute all the many stupid and lying accusations made by the EFICC against our organization. In particular, we will if it's still necessary return in another article to one of the battle-cries of the EFICC: the ICC's supposed abandonment of its programmatic principles. However, there's one accusation whose inanity has been very sharply revealed by the events of the last two years: the accusation of theoretical regression.
The EFFIC and theoretical development
Alongside the accusation that we have abandoned our principles, the EFICC has also decreed that "the ICC had not only ceased to be a laboratory for the development of marxist theory/praxis (the sine qua non for an organization of revolutionaries), but ... it was even incapable of maintaining the theoretical acquisitions on which it was founded" (IP 3, 'Why do we call ourselves a Fraction?'). The EFICC on the other hand has given itself the task of safeguarding and enriching these acquisitions: "For an organization to live and develop, it is not enough to put its platform in the archives ... History goes forward and raises old questions in new forms, and those who are unable to keep up are condemned to fall by the wayside" ('The tasks of the Fraction', IP 1). Obviously the EFICC doesn't know the story of the pot that called the kettle black. This is clearly demonstrated by the great events that have taken place since the autumn of 89.
As the EFICC wrote in December 89: "The events that have been shaking Eastern Europe for several months require the elaboration, on the part of revolutionaries, of a clear marxist analysis of the real causes and consequences at the level of the inter-imperialist balance of forces and of the class struggle." And indeed, the EFICC has observed that: "Russia has no bloc anymore. For the moment, it has stopped being a major player on the world scene, a challenger of US imperialism ... The division of the world into two rival blocs, which was not only a characteristic of the last half century but also a precondition for global conflict, today does not exist." Bravo! This is almost exactly what we wrote in the late summer of '89, ie nearly two months before the fall of the Berlin wall[1]. The only problem is that this analysis of the EFICC's doesn't date from the same period, but only appeared for the first time in IP 21 ('The future of imperialism'), dated winter of 91-92 - that is more than two years after we adopted our analysis.
As Marx said in the Theses on Feuerbach: "Man must prove the truth, ie the reality and power, the this-sidedness of his thinking in practice." When the theoretical capacities of revolutionary organizations were put to the test in practice, we were able to see how far the EFICC had succeeded in taking up the torch of theoretical elaboration, allegedly dropped by the ICC. This is what it wrote on 16 December 89 (over a month after the fall of the Berlin wall):
"The events of Eastern Europe are part of the 'perestroika' begun in Russia four years ago when Gorbachev took power ... The objectives of perestroika are ... Militarily, on an imperialist level, to stop the Western offensive with an ideological counter-offensive whose aim is to divide the Western bloc and make it reduce arms spending, while trying to gain the technological and economic mastery needed to eventually compete with the West militarily ... In the imperialist sphere, Russia had no choice but to try to destabilize Europe in the hopes of gaining some benefit. Europe has always been the ultimate theatre of world imperialist conflicts and it remains so, more than ever, for Russia ... By accelerating the reforms in Eastern European countries, Russia is trying to modify the ground rules of the European problem, and open the EEC to the East in order to divide and neutralize it. The destruction of the Berlin Wall, far from a sign of peace, is a time bomb planted in the heart of Europe ... The dissolution of Stalinism in Eastern Europe as a form of the domination of capital is an eventual possibility which cannot be excluded[2] because of the history of these countries and the possibility of their being pulled into the Western orbit. But it is a different matter for Russia itself." (Resolution of the EFFIC on the upheavals in Eastern Europe, supplement to IP 15)
Luckily, you can't die of ridicule, or the members of the EFICC would be six feet under. We can however grant them one quality: pluck. You must have a lot of it to go on defending an organization which has adopted such inept positions, which has managed to get the historic situation so wrong. The proletarian political milieu as a whole has had great difficulties in arriving at a clear and correct analysis of the events of the second half of 89 (see our article 'Faced with the events in the east, a vanguard that came late', IR 62). But one has to admit that the EFICC is way ahead of them all. It's also true that we can't really place them in the political milieu strictly speaking.
In fact, a blindness as monumental as the EFICC's has few equivalents in the history of the political milieu[3]: the only comparable example is that of the FOR (Ferment Ouvrier Revolutionaire) which, for over 20 years, has denied the existence of the economic crisis of capitalism. Because even when the force of circumstances compelled it to admit its initial errors, the EFICC still had no understanding of what was going on. Thus, at its IVth Conference in summer 91, the EFICC still hadn't recognized the disappearance of the eastern bloc. What's more, the way it dealt with this question in IP 20 is typical of its congenital centrism: on the one hand, it noted "The collapse of the Warsaw Pact and of COMECON" (which is the least it could do since they had by now formally dissolved, merely confirming a collapse which had taken place well beforehand); it discovered that: "In effect, the events of the past two years have constituted a veritable revocation of the Yalta treaty!" ('The evolution of inter-imperialist tensions: an orientation for the 1990s')[4]; it pointed out that Russian imperialism had lost all its former positions of influence (Central Europe, Middle East, South East Asia, Africa, Central America and Cuba). But, on the other hand, the EFICC refused to talk explicitly of the 'disappearance' or even the 'collapse' of the eastern bloc. In this document, the "American bloc" is set against "Russian imperialism" or its "potential Russian adversary" without at any moment talking about what has happened to the Russian bloc[5]. For centrism, there are words that must not be spoken, as if one can thereby avoid taking a clear and definite position. And since the essence of a centrist position is that it's untenable, you are forced, one day or another, under the pressure of reality, because "facts are stubborn" (as Lenin put it), to chuck them into the bin. This is what IP 21 did, two years late. Bravo, comrades, a great effort.
The house of straw
Obviously, the exploits of the EFICC concerning the events which have shaken the world in the recent period are not limited to the 'elaboration' of an 'analysis' so wrong that it had to be put into question month after month. It has given further proof of its stupidity and blindness in its criticism of revolutionary organizations, the ICC in particular. Thus in IP 16, we can find an explicit article called 'The ICC and eastern Europe: a degenerating organization makes a 180 degree turn', which proposed to make a "denunciation" of the ICC's position because it not only "reflects profound confusions but also because of the dishonest way in which it was arrived at: like Stalinist organizations, the ICC changes positions monolithically, without any open debate". No more or less, if you please.
The article is scandalized by the fact that "According to the ICC, the Eastern bloc is disappearing through 'implosion', as a result of the economic crisis". This is indeed, in broad outline, the conception defended by the ICC from the start, one which we didn't put into question at any moment. But for the EFICC: "This analysis implicitly rejects the concept of decadence." It's a "fundamental theoretical regression because it concerns the comprehension of one of the basic mechanisms of capitalism and its crisis"; it's "negating purely and simply the framework of imperialism and the very nature of the bourgeoisie"; it's "certainly giving credit to the bourgeois ideological barrage, but it certainly isn't understanding reality with a marxist framework"; it's "denying the warlike character of imperialist states," etc. Obviously we can't reproduce all the accusations of this kind. It would bore the reader rigid. But what the article basically shows is that for the EFICC, its "framework of analysis" (which one, actually?) is more important than reality itself. And if the latter doesn't fit into its schemas, well it doesn't exist. And all this in the name of 'marxism', thank you very much.
As it happens, it's not enough to pull out quotes from Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, as the article does, in order to develop a marxist line of thought (the Stalinists have proved that long ago). You also have to understand what they mean and to avoid getting into theoretical nonsenses like the confusion between imperialism and imperialist blocs. This is however precisely what the article does when it takes a perfectly correct statement by Rosa Luxemburg: "Imperialist policies are not the work of one country or group of countries. They are the product of the worldwide evolution of capitalism at a given moment of its maturation. By its nature, it is an international phenomenon, an indivisible whole which can only be understood by its reciprocal relations and from which no country can escape" - and assumes that this demonstrates the permanent character of the division of the world into two blocs (something not verified by history). Comrades of the EFICC - you'd better go back to primary school and learn how to read[6].
If theoretical rigor isn't the EFICC's strongpoint, it's not really a problem for them. The main aim of the article, as announced in the title and the introduction, is to denigrate our organization. At all costs they have to illustrate the thesis of the 'degeneration of the ICC', which is one of the founding myths of the EFICC. The conclusion can't stress this enough: "Swept away by the dominant ideology, unable to grasp daily events with class principles and marxist methodology, the ICC is becoming a vehicle for the class enemy. ... We hope that (these articles) will contribute to the debate in the revolutionary milieu and, who knows, even act as a salutary shock among the healthy elements still in the ICC". The "healthy elements" of the ICC are really grateful for the EFICC's concern ... and for the way it has, throughout the recent period, demonstrated the absurdity of its accusations against the ICC.
Seriously though, while we can't ask the EFICC to realize its plans for 'theoretical development' (its analyses over the past two years have shown that this is way beyond their capacities), it is high time, for the sake of dignity in the relations between revolutionaries, that it stopped making these ridiculous but repellent insults about the 'Stalinist tactics' of the ICC. In IR 45 we have already dealt with these accusations about the way the ICC reacted to the appearance within its ranks of the minority that went on to form the EFICC. Today, the EFICC tries to give a new twist to this legend by pointing out that the ICC press did not publish any texts by members in disagreement with its analysis of the events in the east. But this is absurd. The fact that the EFICC's successive changes of position provoked numerous disagreements[7] in its ranks is easily understood: when your positions are so removed from reality, it's hard for them to be accepted unanimously or even for them to lead to a minimum of homogeneity in the organization. The EFICC knows quite well that there have been debates within the ICC throughout the events of the last period. But it also knows, because its members agreed with the principle when they were militants of the ICC that these debates, if they are to lead to a real clarification in the class, are only taken to the outside world when they have reached a certain level of development. Now, while the analysis of the events in the east adopted by the ICC at the beginning of October 89 (and put forward for discussion in mid-September) provoked some disagreements at the time, these were reabsorbed very quickly because, day after day, reality was confirming the validity of the analysis. Is it a proof of the 'degeneration of the ICC' that its analysis and its understanding of marxism enabled it, much more quickly than the other groups in the political milieu, to grasp the significance and the implications of the events in the east?
Before finishing with the EFICC's accusations against the ICC over the events in the east, there are two pearls deserving of mention (among many others that we can't talk about due to lack of space): our so-called "180 degree turn" and the question of "superimperialism."
Incapable of recognizing the changes which have taken place on the international scene (despite all its speeches about the 'sclerosis' of the ICC), changes which have really amounted to a "180 degree turn", the EFICC was only able to see the positions adopted by the ICC as a renunciation of its fundamental framework of analysis. Here again, the criticism ("denunciation", to use the EFICC's terms) is imbecilic and in bad faith. All the more so because, in the orientation text on the events in the east, published in IR 60, we leant heavily on the analysis of the Stalinist regimes and the eastern bloc which the ICC had developed at the beginning of the 80s (and which in turn were based on the advances made by the Gauche Communiste de France), following the military coup in Poland (cf IR 34). On the other hand, in the numerous 'analyses', all the geometrically varied positions (minority, majority, majority of the minority or minority of the majority) advanced by the EFICC, there's not one reference to this framework, even one putting it into question - despite the fact that the members of the EFICC had themselves adopted this framework since they were still militants of the ICC at the time[8]. The next time the EFICC tries to write that the ICC "is incapable of maintaining its theoretical acquisitions" we will advise it to begin by looking at itself in the mirror.
We can give the same advice if it is again tempted (as it was for example in the article in IP 19 'The revolutionary milieu and the Gulf war') to accuse us of holding a typically bourgeois position like "superimperialism". This theory, outlined by Kautsky and the reformists on the eve of and during the First World War, sought to show that the dominant sectors of world capital would be able to unify in order to impose their rule over the whole planet, thus ensuring global peace and stability. The EFICC knows quite well, when it attributes such a theory to us, that since the very beginning of the events in the east, we have clearly rejected it:
"Does this disappearance of the Eastern bloc mean that capitalism will no longer be subjected to imperialist confrontations? Such a hypothesis would be entirely foreign to marxism ... Today, the collapse of this bloc does not give any support to analyses of this type (ie 'superimperialism'): the collapse of the eastern bloc also means the disappearance of the western bloc ... The deepening convulsions of the world economy can only sharpen the opposition between different states, including and increasingly on the military level ... The disappearance of the two major imperialist constellations which emerged from World War 2 brings with it the tendency towards the recomposition of two new blocs." ('After the collapse of the eastern bloc, destabilization and chaos', IR 61)
But it's precisely this conception of superimperialism which appears in IP 21 ('The Future of imperialism'):
"Only one bloc survived the crisis. It has no challenger at this point. Yet, contrary to the predictions of the ICC and others, for the moment it shows no signs of falling apart. Its existence is no longer based upon imperialist rivalry with Russia but on ruling the world according to the needs of the strongest capitals."
The editorial of this issue of the International Review, following on a number of other articles, puts paid to this idea of the cohesion of the western bloc: once again, the EFICC refuses to see reality. But what's even more serious is that in doing so it puts into question one of the essential acquisitions of marxism this century.
Thus, to support the idea that powers like Germany and Japan can do nothing but stay firmly inside the 'American bloc', the EFICC tells us that: "The states of the American or Western bloc have become economically dependent on the functioning of these institutions (World Bank, IMF, GATT etc) and the network of trade and financial links they have forged."
This is a modern version of the conception held by the reformists at the beginning of the century, and denounced vigorously by the revolutionaries of the day: the idea that the development of economic, financial and commercial links between countries was a fetter on their imperialist antagonisms and would do away with the danger of war between them. The EFICC is very well placed to talk about the ICC's 'denial of marxism', its 'capitulation' to bourgeois ideology. When you go to wipe someone else's' nose, better check first that your own isn't snotty. In fact, this is one of the favorite practices of the EFICC - in order to hide its own faults, it attributes them generously to the ICC. It's a procedure as old as politics but it's never exalted those who've used it, particularly when they're revolutionaries.
What use is the EFICC?
If we accept, as the EFICC quite rightly says itself, that "the events shaking Eastern Europe require, on the part of revolutionaries, a clear marxist analysis of their real causes and consequences" then there's no element of denigration to conclude that the EFICC has completely failed in this task. It recognizes it itself: "This new reality led us to recognize the insufficiency of our prior analyses, which in important respects remained imprisoned by outdated stereotypes" (IP 20, report on the 4th Conference of the EFICC), even if it adds a bit further on (you have to swagger a bit and keep up the morale of the militants) that "considering our capacity to analyze the situation to be positive ... we decided to continue on the same path as previously."
More generally, we must affirm that the EFICC has failed completely in its attempts to preserve and develop the theoretical acquisitions of the ICC, a task which it claims we have abandoned. When its pretensions were confronted with the proof of events, it's evident that it didn't even manage to hang on to the ICC's coat-tails. It wanted to give us a lesson in theoretical far-sightedness, it has attacked our analyses in the most defamatory terms for two years, but in the end it has been forced to accept, to all intents and purposes, though without recognizing it, the point of view which we have defended from the start[9] - a point of view which it presented as the irrefutable proof of the 'degeneration' of our organization. The only difference it now has with the analysis we put forward two and a half years ago is that it has now taken up the bourgeois position of superimperialism, which it had lyingly attributed to us. Thus, its whole demonstration of the 'regression of the ICC' has turned against it: it's not the ICC which has regressed, it's the EFICC; it has understood nothing of the situation despite its self-proclaimed theoretical superiority. And if an incapacity to grasp what was at stake in the events in the east was a sign of regression, as it has rightly affirmed over the past two years, it's certainly not our organization which has regressed but the EFICC itself.
To the question 'what use is the EFICC?' one is thus tempted to reply 'no use at all.' Unfortunately this isn't the case. Even if the EFICC's influence is insignificant, it does have the capacity to do harm. This is why we have written this article. To the extent that its magazine has a certain number of readers, or that some people go to its public meetings, or that it intervenes in the political milieu, all the while reclaiming the platform of the most important organization in this milieu, the ICC, it constitutes an added element of confusion within the working class. In particular, its councilist tendencies and its lack of theoretical rigor can't help gaining an echo in a country like the USA which is marked by the weakness of its political milieu and by a strong impregnation of councilist and libertarian ideas. Thus a group like the EFICC undoubtedly helps preserve and aggravate the under-developed nature of the proletarian milieu in such a country.
But even more fundamental is the fact that the EFICC serves to discredit serious revolutionary work, and in the first place, marxism itself. In the name of 'marxism' this group has been coming out with so many inept ideas that it has given marxism a bad name. Thus the EFICC makes its own little contribution to the present campaign about the 'death of communism'. It's true that there's a text in IP 17 'Is Marxism Dead?' which denounces these lies, and, in its way, reaffirms the validity of marxism. But once again revolutionaries have to prove the validity of marxism in practice, through the verification of their analyses. And the EFICC is very poorly placed to do this. But, unfortunately its contribution to the repulsive campaigns against marxism doesn't stop at an inadequate defense of marxist theory. In IP 20 it participates in it deliberately. The front cover is already ambiguous: '"Communism" must die that communism can live'. As if there weren't already enough confusions between communism and Stalinism, as if the latter's death-agony can somehow be seen as a 'victory' for the working class, whereas it has been turned against it by the entire 'democratic' bourgeoisie. On top of that, the editorial joyfully proclaims: 'Let the statues [ie of Lenin] fall'. It's obviously true that the working class doesn't need statues of revolutionaries (the bourgeoisie put them up precisely to turn them into "inoffensive icons", as Lenin himself put it); but we shouldn't make any mistake about the significance of such actions in the recent period: they correspond to a rejection of the very idea of proletarian revolution, and the bourgeoisie has promoted and encouraged this.
This editorial tells us that revolutionaries "must rid themselves of the tendency to look for a model in the Bolshevik revolution." In the present circumstances, the term "Bolshevik revolution" is already pernicious because it gives the impression, as the bourgeoisie repeats in an obsessive manner, that the October revolution was a purely Bolshevik affair. This can only add weight to the theory that this revolution was nothing but a coup d'état by Lenin and Co against the will of the population, or even of the working class. And to bolster these confusions, the editorial is headed by a drawing which shows Lenin shedding tears which have Stalin's head: in other words, Stalin really is in some ways the heir of Lenin. Once again: the communist left, and the ICC in particular, has never been afraid of shedding light on the errors of revolutionaries which have facilitated the work of the counter-revolutions. But they have always been able to see the priorities of the moment: today, it's certainly not to 'run with the pack' but to stand against the bourgeoisie's campaigns and to reaffirm the fundamental validity of the experience of the post-World War One revolutionary wave. All the rest is just opportunism.
Finally, the same issue of IP contains an article ('For a living practice of marxist theory') which goes on at length about the "crisis of marxism." We can understand that the EFICC is feeling a bit uneasy after its inability to understand the events in the east has been so blatant. This is no reason for peremptorily affirming that "no one in this (revolutionary) milieu predicted these events." Certainly the EFICC didn't manage to foresee anything, but it's not alone in the world and our own organization does not feel concerned by such assertions. In this sense, it's not marxism as developed by the communist left and then by the ICC which is responsible for the failure of the EFICC's analyses. We mustn't aim at the wrong target: it's not marxism that's in crisis, it's the EFICC. But articles like this, which put the whole proletarian milieu in the same sack, and which generously attribute one's own nothingness to all the other groups, can only add grist to the mill of those who claim that it's marxism 'in general' which has failed.
But the EFICC's contribution to spreading confusion in the ranks of the working class and its political milieu isn't limited to these meanderings about the 'crisis of marxism'. It's also shown by its current rapprochement with the Communist Bulletin Group (CBG). This group came out of the 1981 split by the secret tendency formed around the dubious element Chenier (who, a few months after his expulsion, was carrying a CFDT banner and is now an official of the Socialist Party which governs France). At the time they left, the members of this 'tendency', including those who were to form the CBG, stole material and funds from our organization. This is what the ICC wrote about this group in 1983, with the full agreement of the comrades who later formed the EFICC:
"In the first issues of The Bulletin they covered all this up with baseless personal attacks against the ICC of the vilest and most stupid sort[10]. Today (probably because this attitude did not bring the results they counted on) they have changed their tune and hypocritically discovered 'the need for healthy polemic' ... How can they talk about 'solidarity' and the 'recognition of the political milieu of the proletariat' when the very basis for this doesn't exist for them? The CBG actually put pen to paper to write 'the existence of the milieu engenders a community of obligations and responsibilities'. But what these words actually mean is: watch out the day after we disagree with you, because stealing, or whatever else comes into our head, will then automatically become 'anti-petty bourgeois' activity. Or perhaps their view can be formulated as follows: when one splits, one can take whatever is at hand but when, at last, one is one's own master, with one's 'own' little group, the ex-highwayman joins the circle of property owners ... What are its positions? The same (more or less) as the ICC! Another group whose existence is politically parasitical. A provincial version of the ICC platform minus the coherence and plus the stealing ... Most little circles which split before first clarifying their positions follow the path of least resistance at first and adopt the same platform as the group they left. But quite soon, to justify their separate existence once the drama has died down, all kinds of secondary differences are discovered and before you know it, principles are changed ... the CBG is already following the same route by rejecting any coherence on the organization question." (IR 36, 'Address to proletarian political groups: in answer to the replies')[11].
This is how the EFICC itself described the CBG in 1986: "Those who left in 1981 used deceit to appropriate ICC material. Some of those who later formed the CBG made matters even worse by threatening to call the police against ICC members that recuperated the stolen material ... In the pages of The Bulletin 5, the CBG has condemned such threats as 'behavior totally alien to revolutionary practice'. It also states that 'splitters should return hardware belonging to the group and any funds of the organization. This self-critique is however, at best half-hearted. So far as we are aware, the CBG still has funds that it held in escrow for the ICC when it was still part of that organization. ... In practice, the CBG has not unequivocally repudiated gangsterist behavior in the milieu" ('The revolutionary milieu and Internationalist Perspective)
At the beginning, the EFICC was more than a little reticent about the CBG's approaches to it. But much water has flown under the bridge since then and the CBG was guest of honor at the EFICC's 4th Conference since the two of them "as a result of prior discussions and meetings ... share agreement on basic questions of principle"
It's true that in the meantime, after nearly 9 years, the CBG returned the funds and material it stole from the ICC. The EFICC had made this a sort of precondition: "At our insistence, and as a precondition of the meeting, the CBG agreed to return the material in their possession to the ICC" (IP 15, 'Report on a meeting with the CBG').
As we can see, it's not because it's suddenly become honest that the CBG has given back what it stole from us. It has simply bought its respectability, in Pounds Sterling, from the EFICC, which can now close its eyes to its past "gangsterist behavior" (to use its own phrase). The EFICC has behaved like the daughter of a good family who, afraid of remaining a spinster after several failed love affairs[12] is ready to accept the advances of a former thief. But because she has a sense of honor she insists that they can only get engaged if her suitor returns his ill-gotten gains to his victims. The EFICC may think that opportunism can't exist in the period of decadence: in fact it's a living proof of the contrary, And this is all the more true when it claims that the ICC took on many of the features of the 1981 tendency: "Many aspects of the ICC's programmatic degeneration in 1985 (the search for immediate influence, the tendency to substitutionism, the blurring of the class nature of rank and file unionism, etc) were precisely points that were defended by Chenier and other splitters in 1981" (IP 3, 'The revolutionary milieu and Internationalist Perspective').
In the final analysis, it's obviously not accidental that the EFICC is now involved in a perfectly opportunist regroupment with a group which the whole ICC (including the comrades of the future EFICC) have recognized as 'parasitic'. This is because the EFICC cannot, fundamentally, be distinguished from the CBG (except that it knows that you don't steal material from revolutionary organizations). Both of them are parasitic groups which in no way correspond to a historical effort towards consciousness, even an incomplete one, by the proletariat and its political organizations. Their only reason for existing is precisely to act as parasites on organizations of the proletariat (in the real sense of living off them while at the same time weakening them).
One of the proofs that the EFICC has no autonomous existence, as a political group, vis-a-vis the ICC, is the fact that, on average, one third of its publications (and sometimes virtually entire issues) is devoted to attacking and denigrating our organization[13].
This parasitic approach also enables us to understand the huge difficulties the EFICC has had in understanding the events in the east: since it must at all costs distinguish itself from the ICC in order to justify its existence (and 'demonstrate' the degeneration of the ICC) it's been forced to talk nonsense about these events since the ICC was the first organization in the political milieu to analyze them clearly. The only chance for the EFICC to say something sensible is if we start going in the wrong direction. But this is a bit much to ask of us. In fact, it's the fate of parasitic groups to wallow in incoherence and aberrant analyses - and this is even more the case when the group that is their reference point has correct and coherent positions. Systematic opposition to coherence can only give rise to incoherence.
What's more, the parasitic nature of the EFICC appears in its very name. For a worker who is not well up on the arcana of the political milieu, to receive a leaflet or a publication which refers itself to the ICC without being the ICC can only sow disquiet. The absurdities written by the EFICC risk being wrongly attributed to our organization and even if the EFICC writes things that are correct (this happens sometimes because its platform is the ICC's), it can only lead to the conclusion that revolutionaries are people who are not very serious and who take a malign pleasure in sowing confusion.
Fundamentally, the function of such groups is to weaken the activity of revolutionaries in the class, to discredit revolutionary ideas themselves. This is why we think today as we thought in 1986 that: "What we said about the CBG goes for the EFICC: 'another group whose existence is politically parasitic'. The best thing we could hope for, both for the working class and the comrades who comprise it, is that the EFICC disappears as quickly as possible".
And if the EFICC won't do this service to the working class, we can at least ask it to let go of the bone in its mouth and stop referring to our organization in its own name: we have no wish to go on enduring the discredit which the stupidities and opportunism of the EFICC bring to the name of the ICC. FM, March '92
Notes: Due to lack of space, this article, written in March 92, didn't appear in the previous issue of our Review. Since then, the EFICC has published a new issue of IP, which we couldn't refer to without further lengthening our article. However, it's worth citing a text from IP 22, written by a former member of the EFICC, who knows very well the state of mind that reigns in this group: "The Fraction didn't want to use the notion of decomposition, no doubt because that would mean going in the same direction as the ICC (our emphasis). It's difficult to understand why the Fraction criticizes the use of the term 'decomposition' and accuses the ICC of abandoning the framework of marxism when this organization uses and develops this notion. It's as if there was an orthodoxy of decadence, an invariance of decadence which it would be fatal to alter. Instead of being critical, thought turns into a form of immobilism, a magical formula struggling to unlock the mysteries ... As a result, we're heading straight towards the kind of situation caused by our insufficiencies in analyzing the events in the east. We recognized the disappearance of the eastern bloc two years late; we'll recognize the reality of social decomposition after an equally stunning delay" ('Decadence of capitalism, social decomposition and revolution'). We couldn't have put it better ourselves!
[1] "... however the situation in the Eastern bloc evolves, the events that are shaking it today mean the historic crisis, the definitive collapse of Stalinism, this monstrous symbol of the most terrible counter-revolution the proletariat has ever known ... In these countries, an unprecedented period of instability, convulsions, and chaos has begun, whose implications go far beyond their frontiers. In particular, the weakening, which will continue, of the Russian bloc, opens the gates to a destabilization of the whole system of international relations and imperialist constellations which emerged from World War II with the Yalta Agreements ...The events presently shaking the so-called 'socialist countries', the de facto disappearance of the Russian bloc ... constitute, along with the international resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the sixties, the most important historic facts since the second world war" ('Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the eastern countries', IR 60).
"The world's geopolitical configuration as it has lasted since World War II has been completely overturned by the events of the second half of 1989. There are no longer two imperialist blocs sharing the world between them ... at the present time, a course towards world war is excluded by the non-existence of two imperialist blocs" ('After the collapse of the eastern bloc, destabilization and chaos', IR 61).
[2] A reminder: this text was written when the only Stalinist regimes in Europe still standing were Albania and Rumania. In the latter, we were only two weeks away from Ceausescu's overthrow. No comment.
[3] However, we can say that the events in the east have shown the EFICC to be right on certain points: as we predicted at the beginning of our analyses, these events have indeed provoked the division of the western bloc and the EEC. But it's not very probable that this is what Gorbachev had planned, unless we think he adopted the attitude of a betrayed husband who kills himself in order to plunge his wife into guilt and despair ... The EFICC can think about this hypothesis in the context of its theory of the battered wife, an integral part of its effort to "deepen marxism".
[4] As is often the case, the EFICC is funny without meaning to be. Given the fact that it's been obliged to modify its analyses throughout the last two years (in virtually every issue of IP, but without managing to arrive at a correct analysis), the idea of proposing an orientation for a whole decade is positively demented. If the EFICC's pretensions were not as overblown as its capacities for analysis were rickety, in other words if it had the slightest sense of the ridiculous, it would have been able to propose "an orientation for the next three months", ie until its next issue came out. It would then have avoided the embarrassment in IP 21 of having to throw out (without recognizing it) the long-term predictions of IP 20.
[5] To be honest, we should say that in its presentation of its conference, the EFICC is still going on about the eastern bloc: "COMECON has disappeared as a system of imperialist relations between the head of the bloc, the USSR, and its satellites, which have ceased to be simple vassals". This is at least clear - clear that the EFICC wants to drown the fish. COMECON has disappeared, certainly (that's just observing what has already been officially announced), but is there another "system of imperialist relations between ... the USSR and its satellites"? This is a mystery. What 'bloc' are we talking about here the one that's disappeared, or the one that will survive under a different form? The reader can only guess. And what's happened to the satellites? Are they still vassals, but no longer "simple" ones? And when will the EFICC stop treating its readers as though they were simple?
[6] There is no limit to the theoretical ignorance and paucity of the EFICC (especially when it's trying to show up the ICC). Thus, in IP 17 ('Grasping the significance of the events in eastern Europe') we read that "the theory of state capitalism is based on the existence of military blocs". This is idiocy. The two phenomena certainly have a common origin: imperialism or, more generally, capitalist decadence, but this doesn't mean there's a cause and effect relation between them. If measles gives you spots and a fever, are we to conclude that it's the spots that are responsible for the fever? In the same article, the EFICC says with fine irony: "How intriguing to conjecture about the end of an entire imperialist bloc without a war or even a shot fired. Either bloc would undoubtedly be overjoyed if the other were to disappear due to the economic effects of the crisis alone, without even having to fire a missile. Think how much time and effort could be saved!" And yes, it is "intriguing". Especially for those who write that "history advances, poses new problems, poses old problems in a new form". But this is what did happen, even if it took two years for the authors of these lines to recognize it. Think of the time and energy which could be spared revolutionary organizations (and the working class) if they weren't encumbered by stupid and pretentious parasites like the EFICC! And to prove that misplaced irony is a specialty of the EFICC, and particularly the author of the previous lines (JA), there's a jibe at the same level in IP 20, and by the same author: "Some even tell us that imperialist rivalry between the US bloc and the Russian bloc is a thing of the past. Oh brave new world!" ('For a living practice of marxist theory'). Three months later the EFICC was singing the same song. Better late than never - but does it understand the words?
[7] See IP 16, where it seems that there are as many positions as members of the EFICC (which confirms that the latter reproduces the same heterogeneity that already existed in the old 'tendency').
[8] It should be noted that, in the two texts (the EFICC's and the text of the minority at the time) of December 89, there is no reference to the document 'Theses on Gorbachev' published in IP 14 and which was supposed to represent the framework for understanding perestroika. In particular, there is no reference to the question of the passage from the 'formal to the real domination of capital', which is the latest hobbyhorse of the EFICC and presented as one of its great 'theoretical contributions' (see IR 60 for our article refuting the meanderings of the EFICC and other groups on this question). It would seem that the EFICC's 'discoveries' aren't much use to it for understanding the world today. It was only later on, when it was trying to pick up the pieces, that it made a rather lukewarm reference to it.
[9] There is evidently a fundamental difference in the way the EFICC ended up understanding the implications of the events in the east and the way the ICC did two and a half years ago. The EFICC came to recognize reality in a totally empiricist way, under the massive pressure of irrefutable realities. On the other hand, if the ICC managed to identify the new historic reality at a time when its outward expressions were still practically imperceptible to the majority of observers (whether they belonged to the capitalist camp or the proletarian camp), it's not because we had recourse to a medium or the prophecies of Nostradamus. It was because we based ourselves on our previous analyses and relied firmly on the marxist method when it came to reconsidering certain aspects of this framework. Empiricism (at best) against the marxist method - this is the real distinction between the EFICC and the ICC at the level of theoretical reflection.
[10] To get an idea of the level of 'polemic' that the CBG engages in, here's a little extract from its prose at the time: "a process of maneuvering in which X and his then bedfellow Y played a prominent part" ('Open letter to the proletarian milieu on the Chenier affair', The Bulletin 1).
[11] It's a bit ironical that this article was written by JA, today a member of the EFICC and the main critic of our organization in the columns of IP. At that time she still defended the principles of the ICC. We wish her much pleasure, and the 'highwaymen' of the CBG, in the close relations now developing between the EFICC and the CBG.
[12] See IP 13 ('International Review of the Communist Movement: the limits of an initiative') for an account of its attempts to participate, in 1987, in a rapprochement between various confused and parasitic political groups.
[13] This is why we find it hard to believe it when it writes: "Our critique of the way the 'new style' ICC thinks and acts has only sharpened, not because of 'anti-ICC' obsessions, but because it is essential for us to speak out on revolutionary principles" (IP 10, 'What kind of 'struggle groups').
As far as the economy is concerned, the whole world seems to be hanging on one question: will there be a recovery in the United States? Does the locomotive that has drawn the world economy for two decades have the strength to start up one more time?
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/america
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/capitalism
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/1848/mexico
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/war
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/massacres
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/chaos
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/international-situation
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1929/communism-and-19th-century-workers-movement
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1407/marxism
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1421/karl-marx
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1427/communism
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1429/marx
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1448/society
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1451/man
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1452/labour
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/31/1453/alienation
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/33/alienation
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/external-fraction-icc-eficc
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis