The recent collapse of the Eastern bloc is, along with the historic resurgence of the proletariat at the end of the 60's, the most important event since World War II. What has taken place since mid-1989 has put an end to a world situation which has lasted for decades. The 'Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the Eastern bloc countries', drawn up in September 89, provide a framework for understanding the causes of these events, and their implications. Most of this analysis' main points have been amply confirmed in recent months. This is why it is unnecessary to go over it again at length here, other than to take account of the major events which have occurred since the publication of the last issue of our Review. By contrast, it is essential for revolutionaries to examine the implications of this new historical situation, because its differences with the previous situation are extremely significant. This is what we propose to do in the following article.
For several months, the evolution of the situation in Eastern Europe has apparently fulfilled all the bourgeoisie's dreams of "peaceful democratization". However, by the end of December 89, the "Theses'" forecast of murderous confrontations was to be tragically confirmed. The bloodbaths in Romania and Soviet Azrbaidjan are not likely to remain an exception. This country's "democratization" constitutes the end of a period in Stalinism's collapse: that of the disappearance of the "people's democracies"[1]. At the same time, it inaugurates a new period: that of bloody confrontations throughout this part of the world, and especially in the one European country still ruled by a Stalinist party (apart from tiny Albania) the USSR itself. Recent weeks' events in Russia confirm the authorities' complete loss of control over the situation, even if for the moment Gorbachev seems capable of maintaining his position at the head of the Party. The Russian tanks in Baku are certainly no demonstration of the strength of the USSR's ruling regime; on the contrary, they are a terrible admission of weakness. Gorbachev had promised that the authorities would no longer use armed force against the population: the bloodbath in the Caucasus has completely written off his policy of "restructuring". What has happened in this region is only a foretaste of far greater convulsions which will shake the USSR, and eventually bring it crashing to the ground.
The USSR plunges into the chaos
In just a few months, the USSR has lost the imperialist bloc that it dominated up until last summer. From now on, the "Eastern bloc" no longer exists; it has been ripped to shreds, at the same time as the Stalinist regimes in power in the "peoples' democracies" collapsed like a house of cards. But a reversal on this scale cannot stop there: given that the prime cause behind the bloc's decomposition is the utter economic and political bankruptcy of its dominant power faced with the inexorable aggravation of the world capitalist crisis, it is inevitable that this collapse should be most brutally expressed within this same ruling power. The nationalist explosions in the Caucasus, the 'armed confrontations between Azeris and Armenians, the pogroms in Baku, all these convulsions which were at the origin of the "Red" Army's massive and bloody intervention, are yet one more step towards the collapse and breakup of what was, less than a year ago, the second world super-power. The open secession by Azrbaidjan (where even the local Supreme Soviet set itself against Moscow), but also by Armenia where the streets are patrolled by armed forces which have nothing to do with the official regime, are only the beginning of a secession of all Russia's surrounding regions. The Moscow authorities, by using military force, have tried to put a stop to such a process whose next stages are heralded by the "peaceful" secession of Lithuania and the nationalist demonstrations in the Ukraine during January. But repression can at most only put off the deadline. Even in Baku, not to mention in the surrounding towns and countryside; the situation is far from being under control. The media silence since Russian troops went in does not mean in the least that things have 'gone back to normal'. "Glasnost" is selective in the USSR, just as it is in the West. The aim is to avoid encouraging other nationalities to follow the example of the Armenians and Azeris. And even if the tanks have for the moment suppressed the nationalist demonstrations, for the government in Moscow, nothing is settled. Until recently, only a part of the population has been actively mobilized against Russian tutelage; the tanks' arrival, and the massacres that followed, have welded the whole Azeri population against the "occupier". Today, it is not only the Armenians who go in fear of their lives: the Russian population within Azrbaidjan is also threatened thanks to this military operation. Moreover, the authorities in Moscow do not have the means to use the same methods to "maintain order" everywhere. For one thing, the Azeris only represent 5% of all the USSR's non-Russian population. We can only wonder what means the government would have to employ to put down 40 million Ukrainians, for example. Moreover, the authorities cannot even count on the loyalty of the "Red" Army. Soldiers from the various national minorities that today are clamoring for independence are less and less inclined to go and get killed to defend continued Russian domination over these same minorities. The Russians themselves are increasingly reluctant to take on this kind of job. This can be seen in demonstrations such as those of 19th January in Krasnodar (southern Russia), whose slogans have shown clearly that the population is not ready to accept a new Afghanistan; as a result of these demonstrations, the authorities were obliged to demobilize the reservists who had been called up only a few days previously.
The same process which led, a few months ago, to the explosion of the Russian bloc, is continuing today with the explosion of its leading member. Like the Stalinist regimes themselves, the Eastern bloc was only held together by terror, and by the threat - carried out on several occasions - of brutal military repression. No sooner did economic collapse and the resulting paralysis of the economic and military apparatus destroy the USSR's ability to exercise such repression, than its empire fell apart. But this disintegration brings in its wake the disintegration of the USSR itself, since it also is made up of a mosaic of nationalities under Russian domination. Stalinism's merciless repression only prevented the nationalism of these minorities from appearing openly; enforced silence only served to strengthen it, and now that Gorbachev's "perestroika" has removed the immediate threat of repression, it has been unleashed. As a result, repression is today once more on the cards, but it is already too late to turn back the wheel of history. The political situation, like the economic, is now completely out of the control of Gorbachev and his Party. All that "perestroika" has brought is still emptier shelves in the shops, still more misery, and the liberation of the worst kind of chauvinism and xenophobia, accompanied by every sort of pogrom and massacre.
And this is only a beginning. The chaos which holds sway today in the USSR can only get worse, since neither the ruling regime nor the state of its economy offer any other perspective. The failure of "perestroika" (ie the 'step-by-step' attempt to adapt a political and economic apparatus paralyzed by the deepening world crisis) becomes more evident every day. A return to the previous situation, the reassertion of complete centralized control of the economic apparatus, and of the terror of the Stalin or Brezhnev era, even were it to be attempted by the apparatus' "conservative" sectors, would solve nothing. These methods have already failed, and perestroika started from the recognition of this failure. Since then, the situation has wor-se.ne d considerably at every level. The still powerful resistance on the part of the bureaucratic apparatus, which can see the very bases of its power and privilege dissolving under it, must lead to new massacres, but without surmounting the overall chaos. Finally, the establishment of more classical forms of capitalist domination self-management for individual factories, the introduction of market criteria of profitability - may be the only alternative possible; .in the short term, it can only heighten economic chaos. We can see its consequences today in Poland: 900% inflation, an unstoppable rise in unemployment (in the 4th quarter 1989, the production of manufactured foodstuffs fell by 41%, and of clothes by 28%). In the midst of this kind of economic chaos, there is no room for "gradual democratization" and economic stability.
Thus, whatever the policy finally decided on by the leading bodies of the Communist Party of the USSR, whoever eventually succeeds Gorbachev, the result will hardly be any different. For this country, the perspective is one of growing convulsions, but on a far greater scale than those of the last few weeks: starvation, massacres, armed vendettas between members of the "Nomenklatura", or between populations drunk with nationalism. The communist October Revolution of 1917 fell victim to its own isolation; Stalinism established its power on the corpse with appalling barbarity. Today it is dying in barbarity and chaos.
The situation in the USSR and in most of the East European countries will increasingly resemble that of countries in the 'Third World'. Less and less will the situation of countries like Lebanon, subjected to the total decomposition of all social life and the law of the armed gang, be limited to zones outside the heart of capitalism. Today, the whole part of the world until recently dominated by the second world power is threatened with just such a 'Lebanonisation'. And this is in Europe itself, only a few hundred kilometers from the world's oldest and largest industrial concentrations.
This is why the collapse of the Eastern imperialist bloc does not only mean an upheaval for the countries within this zone, and for the imperialist arrangements that emerged from World War II, it also brings with it a general instability which cannot help affecting every country in the world, including the most solid amongst them. In this sense, revolutionaries must be able to come to grips with these upheavals, bring up to date the analytical framework which remained valid up until last summer, when our last International Congress was held (see International Review no.59), but which events have since partly overtaken. This is what we now propose to do for the three "classic" aspects of the international situation:
- the capitalist crisis,
- inter-imperialist conflicts,
- the class struggle.
The capitalist crisis
It is on this point that the analyses of the last Congress retain their greatest validity. In fact, the world economy's evolution during the last 6 months has fully confirmed the Congress' analysis of the aggravation of its crisis. The illusions, based in particular on the 1988-89 figures for GNP growth, which the bourgeois "specialists" tried to present as proof of "growth" and "an end to the crisis" have been blown away (see the articles in this and the previous issue of the International Review).
As far as the Eastern ex-bloc countries are concerned, "Glasnost" not only allows us to get a more realistic view of their real situation, it also makes it possible to measure the full extent of their economic disaster. Previous official figures (like those used in the report on the international situation presented to the 8th Congress), which already revealed a disaster on a large scale, have proved to be well short of reality. The economies of the Eastern countries resemble a vast ruin, their agriculture (despite employing a far higher proportion of the population than in Western countries) absolutely incapable of feeding the population, and their industry not only out-of-date and obsolete, but completely paralyzed and unable to function due to failures in transport and the supply of spares, mechanical fatigue, etc, and above all due to a general lack of interest on the part of its human elements, from the blue-collar workers to the managing directors. Almost half a century after World War II, the economy which according to Khrushchev at the beginning of the 60's was to catch up and overtake those of the Western countries and so "prove 'socialism's' superiority over capitalism", looks as if the war had only just ended. Although the complete economic bankruptcy that has become evident in recent years is behind the collapse of the Eastern bloc, this bankruptcy has not yet hit bottom: far from it. And this is all the more true in that the world economic crisis not only can only get worse, but will be still further amplified by the consequences of the disaster that has struck the Eastern bloc.
We have to emphasize what nonsense it is (nonsense that is put about by some sectors of the bourgeoisie, but also by certain revolutionary groups) to suppose that the Eastern economies' opening to the world market will give the capitalist economy as a whole a "shot arm". Reality is quite different.
In the first place, for the Eastern countries to help improve the situation of the world economy, they would have to constitute a real market. There is no shortage of needs, any more than there is in the Third World. The question is: how can they buy what they lack? And here is where we immediately perceive the absurdity of such an analysis. These countries have nothing to pay with. They have absolutely no financial resources; in fact, they joined the ranks of highly indebted countries long ago (in1989, the combined foreign debt of the ex-"people's democracies" stood at $100 billion[2], ie a figure comparable to that of Brazil, for a roughly equal population and GNP). For them to buy, they must first be able to sell. But what can they sell on the world market, when the major cause of the Stalinist regimes' collapse (within the context of the overall capitalist crisis of course) was precisely their complete lack of economic competitivity on precisely the same market?
Some sectors of the bourgeoisie answer this objection with the idea of a new 'Marshall Plan' to rebuild these countries' economic potential. In reality, although the Eastern countries' economies have some points in common with that of Europe as a whole at the end of the last war, a new 'Marshall Plan' is completely impossible today. This plan (whose aim was not so much to rebuild Europe but to prevent it falling under the control of the USSR) was able to succeed only because the entire world (except the USA) had to be rebuilt. There was no problem, at the time, of a generalized over-production of commodities; and the origins of the open crisis which we have known since the end of the 60's lie precisely in the end of the reconstruction of Western Europe and Japan. This is why a massive injection of capital to develop the Eastern countries' economic and especially industrial potential cannot be on the cards today. Even supposing that their productive capacity could be put back on its feet, the commodities they produced would only overburden an already saturated world market. The countries emerging from Stalinism today are in the same situation as the under-developed countries: the policy of massive injections of credit in the latter during the 70's' and 80's only ended in disaster ($1500 billion of debt, and economies in a still worse state than previously). The fate of the Eastern countries (whose economies are in many ways like those of the Third World) cannot be any different. The financiers of the great Western nations have no illusions on this score: they are hardly falling over themselves to bring capital to the newly "desalinized" countries, which are nonetheless clamoring for it (Poland for example, is sending its Nobel prize 'worker' Walesa out to beg for $10 billion in the next three years). And since Western bankers are anything but philanthropists, there will be neither loans nor massive sales from the more developed nations for those countries which have just 'discovered' the 'virtues' of liberalism and 'democracy'. The best they can hope for is the dispatch of emergency credit or aid to avoid open bankruptcy and famines which would only aggravate the convulsions that rack them. And this is hardly going to give the world economy a "shot in the arm".
The DDR (East Germany) is obviously an exception amongst the countries of the one-time in the Eastern bloc. This country will not in fact survive as such. Its coming absorption into West Germany has by now been reluctantly accepted not only by all the great powers, but even by its present government. However, the economic integration which is the first step in this "reunification" process, and which is the only way to curb the massive exodus of the population from East to West Germany, is already posing considerable problems both for West Germany itself and for its Western "partners". Financially, the salvage of the East German economy will represent an enormous burden. Although the investments which will certainly be made may provide a temporary "outlet" for some branches of West German and European industry, they will also aggravate still further the capitalist economy's overall endebtedness, while at the same time increasing the saturation of the world market. This is why the recent announcement of the forthcoming monetary union between the two Germanies (a decision which was more political than economic, as is evidenced by the reluctance of the Federal Bank's president) was far from arousing general enthusiasm in all the Western countries. On the economic level, the DDR is in fact a poisoned gift for West Germany. For dowry, the DDR brings with it only a dilapidated industry, a worn-out economy, a mountain of debts and truckloads of Ost-Marks which are hardly worth the paper they are printed on but which the Federal Republic will have to buy at top rates as soon as the Deutsche Mark becomes the common currency of both Germanies. The printing press has a busy time ahead; inflation likewise.
In fact, the capitalist economy can expect no diminution of its crisis from the collapse of the Eastern bloc, but increasing difficulties. On the one hand, as we have seen, the financial crisis (the mountain of insolvent debt) can only get worse, while the declining cohesion, and eventual disappearance of the Western bloc (see below) hold a perspective of increasing difficulties for the world economy. As we have long since pointed out, one of the main reasons behind capitalism's ability until now to slow down the rhythm of its collapse has been a state capitalist policy at the level of the entire Western bloc (ie, the dominant sphere of the capitalist world). Such a policy presupposes a serious degree of discipline on the part of the various countries that make up the bloc. This discipline has been obtained largely thanks to the United States' authority over its allies, as a result of its economic, but also its military strength. The US 'military umbrella' against the 'Soviet threat' (as well, of course, as its and its currency's preponderant position in the international financial system) was given in exchange for deference to US aims in the economic domain. Today, with the disappearance of the USSR as a military threat to the states of the Western bloc (especially those of Western Europe and Japan), the USA has lost much of its ability to put pressure on its 'allies'; all the more so in that the US economy, with its enormous deficits and its continued drop in competitivity on the world market, is fast losing ground to its major competitors. The tendency will therefore be increasingly towards an attempt by the best performing economies, with Germany and Japan in the lead, to disengage them serves from US tutelage to play their own game on the world economic arena; this will lead to a sharpening of trade wars and an increase in the capitalist economy's overall instability.
In the final analysis, we must affirm clearly that the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the economic and political convulsions of its erstwhile members, do not presage the slightest improvement in capitalist society's economic situation. The Stalinist regimes' economic bankruptcy as a result of the general crisis of the world economy only heralds the collapse of the economy's most developed sectors.
Imperialist antagonisms
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.
It is obvious, even to those sectors of the bourgeoisie which for years have been alarmed by the danger of the "Evil Empire" and its "formidable military strength", that the Eastern bloc has ceased to exist. This has been confirmed by a whole series of recent events:
- the main Western leaders' (Bush, Thatcher, Mitterand especially) support for Gorbachev (often accompanied by extravagant words of praise);
- it is apparent from the results of the recent summit meetings (Bush-Gorbachev, Mitterand-Gorbachev, etc) that the antagonisms which opposed East and West for forty years really are disappearing;
- the USSR's announcement that it intends to withdraw all its troops based abroad;
- the already planned reduction in US military spending;
- the joint decision to cut rapidly the numbers of Soviet and US troops stationed in central Europe (essentially in the two Germanies) to 195,000, which in fact corresponds to a withdrawal of 405,000 men by the USSR, and of 90,000 by the USA;
- the attitude of the main Western leaders during the events in Romania, asking the USSR to intervene militarily to support the "democratic" forces against the final resistance of Ceausescu's followers;
- the support also given by the West to the intervention in Baku by Russian tanks in January.
Ten years after the universal outcry provoked among the Western countries when these same tanks arrived in Kabul, this different attitude could not be more indicative of the complete overthrow of the planet's imperialist order. This has been further confirmed by the Conference held in Ottawa in early February (jointly presided by Canada and Czechoslovakia) between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, during which the USSR acceded to virtually all the Western demands.
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. Contrary to the idea defended by the CWO, it is not just the great powers at the head of a bloc that are imperialist. In the period of capitalist decadence, all states are imperialist, and take the necessary measures to satisfy their appetites: war economy, arms production, etc. We must state clearly that the deepening convulsions of the world economy can only sharpen the opposition between different states, including and increasingly on the military level. The difference, in the coming period, will be that these antagonisms which were previously contained and used by the two great imperialist blocs will now come to the fore. The disappearance of the Russian imperialist gendarme, and that to come of the American gendarme as far as its one-time. "partners" are concerned, opens the door to the unleashing of a whole series of more local rivalries. For the moment, these rivalries and confrontations cannot degenerate into a world war (even supposing that the proletariat were no longer capable of putting up a resistance). However, with the disappearance of the discipline imposed by the two blocs, these conflicts are liable to become more frequent and more violent, especially of course in those areas where the proletariat is weakest.
Up to now, during the period of decadence, such a situation where the various imperialist antagonisms are dispersed, where the world (or at least its decisive zones) is not divided up between two blocs, has never lasted long. The disappearance of the two major imperialist constellations which emerged from World War II brings with it the tendency towards the recomposition of two new blocs. Such a situation, however, is not yet on the agenda, due to:
- the permanence of a certain number of structures belonging to the previous order (eg the continued formal existence of the two great military alliances, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, and their corresponding military deployments);
- the absence of a great power capable of taking over the role which the USSR has definitively lost: leader of a bloc able to confront the USA.
A country like Germany, once it is reunified, would obviously be well placed to fill this role. This is why there is already a good deal of common interest between Western countries and the USSR in slowing down (or at least trying to control) the process of this reunification. However, while on the one hand we must take account of a considerable weakening (which can only get worse) of the US bloc's cohesion, on the other we have to be careful not to announce prematurely the formation of a bloc headed by Germany. From the military standpoint, it is far from ready to play this role. Because Germany was beaten in World War II, its army is far from the equal of its economic strength. In particular, West Germany has to date not been allowed to deploy nuclear weapons. The enormous quantity of nuclear weapons on its territory are entirely under NATO control. This is all the more true in that the tendency towards a new share-out of the planet between two military blocs is countered, and may even be definitively compromised, by the increasingly profound and widespread decomposition of capitalist society, which we have already pointed out (see International Review no. 57) .
This phenomenon of decomposition, which has developed throughout the 1980's, springs from the inability of either of society's two fundamental classes to impose their own historic answer to the hopeless crisis into which the capitalist mode of production is plunging. Although its refusal to be marched off behind the banners of the bourgeoisie, as it was in the 1930's, has to date prevented capitalism from unleashing a Third World War, the working class has still not found the strength to set forward clearly its own perspective: the communist revolution. And although, as a result, society is temporarily "frozen" and without any perspective, this does not put an end to the crisis, nor does it make history come to a halt. History's "course" is expressed in a spreading putrefaction of the entire social body, whose various manifestations we have already analyzed in the International Review: the drug scourge, the generalized corruption in high places, the threat to the environment, the proliferation of so-called 'natural' or 'accidental' disasters, the development of criminality, despair, and nihilism amongst young people. One expression of this decomposition is the bourgeoisie's growing inability to control not only the economic but the political situation also. This state of affairs is of course particularly advanced in the countries on the capitalist periphery, which arrived at industrial development too late, and which were therefore the first and hardest hit by the crisis. Today, the developing economic and political chaos in Eastern Europe, the local bourgeoisie's complete loss of control over the situation, is a new sign of this general phenomenon. Even the strongest bourgeoisie, in the advanced European countries and in North America, is well aware that it is not immune from this kind of convulsion. This is why they fully support Gorbachev in his attempts to "put his empire's house in order", bloodily if necessary as in Baku. They are too frightened that, like the fall-out from Chernobyl, the spreading chaos in the East may cross the frontier and invade the West.
The evolution of the German situation is significant in this respect. The fantastic speed of events since last autumn in no way means that the bourgeoisie has been infected by a frenzy of "democratization". In reality, while the situation in the DDR has long since ceased to have anything to do with any deliberate policy of the local ruling class, this is now increasingly true of the West German bourgeoisie, and indeed of the world bourgeoisie in general. Only a few weeks ago, German reunification was desired by none of the 'victors' of 1945 (three months ago, Gorbachev envisaged it happening "in a century"), for fear that the reconstitution of a "Greater German" hegemony in Europe should sharpen its imperialist appetites; today, it is seen as the only way to combat the chaos in the DDR, and by contagion in its neighboring countries. Even the West German bourgeoisie finds that things are going "too fast". In today's conditions, this reunification which it has advocated for decades can only bring it new difficulties. But the longer the moment is put off, the greater the difficulties will become. If the West German bourgeoisie, one of the most solid in the world, is forced to run to keep up with events, this says much about what the rest of the world ruling class can expect.
Given the world bourgeoisie's loss of control over the situation, it is not certain that its dominant sectors will today be capable of enforcing the discipline and coordination necessary for the reconstitution of military blocs. A bourgeoisie which is unable to master the situation at home is ill placed to impose itself on others (as we have seen with the collapse of the Eastern bloc, whose prime cause was precisely the economic and political collapse of its dominant power).
This is why in our analyses, we must clearly highlight the fact that while the proletarian solution - the communist revolution - is alone able to oppose the destruction of humanity (the only "answer" that the bourgeoisie is capable of giving to the crisis), this destruction need not necessarily be the result of a third World War. It could also come about as a logical and extreme conclusion of the process of decomposition.
For most of the 20th century, the historic alternative of "socialism or barbarism" highlighted by marxism has taken the form of "socialism or imperialist world war", and in recent decades, thanks to the development of nuclear weapons, the still more terrifying "socialism or destruction of humanity". This perspective remains absolutely valid following the Eastern bloc's collapse. But we must be clear that this destruction may be the result either of imperialist world war, or of society's decomposition.
The ebb in consciousness within the working class
The 'Theses on the economic and political crisis in the Eastern countries' (International Review no.60) point out that the Eastern bloc's collapse and the death of Stalinism will cause an ebb in the proletariat's consciousness. The reasons behind this reflux are analyzed in the same issue, in the article 'New difficulties for the proletariat'. They can be summed up as follows:
- the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the death of Stalinism will allow an upsurge of democratic illusions, not only in the proletariat of Eastern Europe but in the West as well, in just the same way as the appearance in 1980 of an 'independent' union in Poland, but on a far greater scale given the extent of today's events:
"the fact that this historic event has taken place independently of the proletariat's own action cannot help but produce within the class a feeling of powerlessness" (ibid);
- "to the extent that the collapse of the Eastern bloc comes after the period of 'cold war' with the West, which the latter seems to have 'won' without striking a blow, it will create a feeling of euphoria amongst the populations in the West, including the workers, and a feeling of confidence in their governments similar (though to a lesser degree) to that which weighed on the proletariat in the 'victorious' countries after the two world wars" (ibid);
- the dislocation of the Eastern bloc cannot but exacerbate feelings of nationalism in the peripheral republics of the USSR and in the ex-‘people's democracies', but also in some Western countries, and especially in a country as important as Germany as a result of reunification;
- "These nationalist mystifications will also weigh on the workers in the West ( ... ) through the discredit and distortion of the very idea of proletarian ititernationeliem, This conception has already been completely disfigured by Stalinism, and in Stalinism's wake by the rest of the bourgeoisie, which identified it with the USSR's domination of its bloc" (ibid);
- "in fact ( ... ) it is the very perspective of world communist revolution [that is tainted] with the collapse of Stalinism ( ... ) In the 1930's, the bourgeoisie used [the lie of the identity between Stalinism and communism] to enroll the working class behind Stalinism and to complete its defeat ( ... ); now that Stalinism has lost all its credit in the workers' eyes, the same lie is being used to turn them away from the perspective of communism" (ibid).
We can complete these elements by considering the evolution of what remains of the Stalinist parties in the Western countries.
The collapse of the Eastern bloc implies eventually the disappearance of the Stalinist parties, not only in those countries where they were at the head of the state, but also in those where their function was to control the working class. Either these parties will be radically transformed, as is happening with the Italian CP at this very moment, by the complete abandonment of everything that set them apart (including the name), or they will be reduced to the status of little sects (as is already the case in the United States and in most of Northern Europe). They may still be of interest to ethnologists or archaeologists, but they will no longer play any serious part in controlling and sabotaging the workers' struggles. The place they occupied in a certain number of countries will be taken by the social-democracy or its left wing. As a result, the proletariat will less and less have the occasion to confront Stalinism as it develops its struggle; this can only increase the impact of the lie which identifies Stalinism and communism.
The perspectives for the class struggle
The Eastern bloc's collapse and the death of Stalinism thus create new difficulties for the development of consciousness within the proletariat. Does this mean that these events will also provoke a noticeable slowdown in the class struggle? On this point, we should remember firstly that the Theses speak of a "reflux in consciousness", and not an ebb in proletarian combativity. They even make it clear that "capitalism's increasingly brutal attacks will force the workers to enter the combat", for it would be wrong to imagine that a reflux in consciousness would necessarily be accompanied by an ebb in combativity. We have already pointed out on a number of occasions the non-identity between these two elements. This is not therefore the place to go back over the question in general. In the precise case of the present situation, it should be emphasized that the present reflux in consciousness does not spring from a direct defeat in combat of the working class. The events which are today sowing confusion in its ranks took place completely outside the working class and its struggles. Consequently, demoralization is not the major problem today. Although the class' consciousness may be affected, its combativity fundamentally is not. And with the increasingly brutal attacks which are about to be unleashed, this potential could make its appearance at any moment. We must not be taken by surprise by the foreseeable explosions of this combativity.We should neither interpret them as calling our analysis of the reflux of consciousness into question, nor "forget" that it is our responsibility to intervene within them.
Secondly, we must be careful not to establish any continuity between the evolution of proletarian struggles and consciousness during the period preceding the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and now. In the period which has just come to an end, the ICC criticized the dominant tendency within the proletarian political movement to under-estimate the importance of the class' struggles, and the steps made in the development of class consciousness. The fact that today we are insisting on the reflux in this development of consciousness does not in the least mean that we are calling into question our analyses of the previous period, in particular those which were drawn up by the ICC's 8th Congress (see International Review no.59).
It is true that 1988 and the first half of 1989 were marked by certain difficulties in the development of the class struggle and consciousness, and especially by a return to the fore by the unions. This had already been brought up before the 8th Congress, notably in the editorial of International Review no. 58, which pointed out that "this strategy (of the bourgeoisie) has for the moment succeeded in disorieriteting the working class and hindering the march towards the unification of its combat". However, our analysis drew on the data of the then current international situation to point out the limits of this difficult moment. In fact, the difficulties encountered by the workers in 1988 and early 1989 were on the same level (though more serious) as those of 1985 (pointed out during the ICC's 6th Congress; see the 'Resolution on the International Situation', adopted by the Congress and published in International Review no.44). They did not in the least exclude the possibility of "new, increasingly determined and conscious, mass upsurges of the proletarian struggle" (IR 58), just as the slow-down in 1985 had led in 1986 to such important movements as the massive Belgian strikes during the spring, and the strike on the French railways. By contrast, the proletariat's difficulties today are on quite a different level. The collapse of the Eastern bloc and of Stalinism is a great historic event, whose repercussions will be immense on every aspect of the world situation. From the point of view of its impact on the working class, such an event cannot be placed on the same level as any series of bourgeois maneuvers such as we have seen during the last 20 years, including the use of the left in opposition from the beginning of the 1970's.
The period that has opened up today is in fact quite distinct from the last 20 years. Since 1968, the general movement of the class struggle has developed, despite moments of slow-down or brief setbacks, in the direction of increasingly conscious struggles, increasingly free from the grip of the trade unions. By contrast, the conditions in which the Eastern bloc has collapsed, and in particular the fact that Stalinism was not beaten by the working class but by an internal political and economic implosion, determine the development of an ideological veil (even independently of today's flood of media campaigns), and a disarray within the class on a quite different scale from anything it has had to confront up to now, even including the defeat of 1981. We have to say that even were the Eastern bloc's collapse to have occurred at the height of the proletarian struggles (eg late 83- early 84, or in 1986), this would have changed absolutely nothing as to the reflux that the event would have provoked in the class (even though it might have delayed its effects being felt).
This is why in particular, we have to update the ICC's analysis of "the left in opposition". This was a necessary card for the bourgeoisie at the end of the 70's and throughout the 80's due to the class' general dynamic towards increasingly determined and conscious combats, and its growing rejection of democratic, electoral, and trade union mystifications. The difficulties some countries encountered in setting it up (in France for example) in no way alter the fact that this was the lynchpin of the bourgeoisie's strategy against the working class, illustrated by the right-wing governments in the USA, Germany, and Britain. By contrast, the class' present reflux means that for a while this strategy will no longer be a priority for the bourgeoisie. This does not necessarily mean that these countries will see the left return to government: as we have said on several occasions (see, in particular, the IR no.18), this is only absolutely necessary in periods of war or revolution. By contrast, we should not be surprised if it does happen, nor should we put it down to 'accident' or to a 'specific weakness' of the bourgeoisie in these countries. Society's general decomposition means for the ruling class a growing difficulty in mastering its political game, but we have not reached the point where the strongest bourgeoisies in the world are going to leave the social front unprotected against a threat from the proletariat (even in the future, it would be dangerous to count on this kind of weakness in the ruling class).
From the standpoint of the class struggle, the world situation thus presents very different characteristics from those prevailing before the Eastern bloc's collapse. However, highlighting the extent of the reflux in consciousness within the class should not lead us to call into question the historic course, as the ICC has analyzed it for the last 20 years (even if we are led to make it more precise: see above).
Firstly, the course towards war is excluded today since there do not exist two imperialist blocs.
Secondly, we should underline the limits of the class' present reflux. In particular, although we have compared in kind the democratic mystifications which are being reinforced today in the proletariat, to those unleashed during the post-war 'Liberation', we must also point out the differences between the two situations. On the one hand, the major industrialized countries, and thus the very heart of the world proletariat, were involved in World War II. Consequently, democratic euphoria weighed directly on the proletariat in these countries. By contrast, the sectors of the class, in the Eastern countries, which are today in the front line of these mystifications, are relatively peripheral. The proletariat in the West has to confront these difficulties because of the "wind from the East", not because it is itself "at the heart of the storm". Moreover, the post-war democratic mystifications were powerfully amplified by the 'prosperity' that accompanied reconstruction. For two decades, the belief in democracy as "the best of all possible worlds" could find support in a real improvement in working class living conditions in the advanced countries, and on the impression that capitalism gave of having overcome its contradictions (which even impressed certain revolutionaries).
Today, the situation is entirely different. The bourgeois talk about the 'superiority' of 'democratic' capitalism will come up against the stubborn facts of an insurmountable and increasingly profound economic crisis.
This being said, nor should we lull ourselves to sleep with illusions. Even if world war is no longer a threat to humanity at present, and perhaps for good, it may be replaced by the decomposition of society. This is all the more true in that, while the outbreak of world war requires the proletariat's adherence to the bourgeoisie's ideals, which is hardly on the agenda for its decisive battalions, decomposition has no need at all of this adherence to destroy humanity. The decomposition of society is not in fact, properly speaking, an 'answer' - even a bourgeois one - to the world economy's open crisis. On the contrary, this phenomenon is able to develop precisely because the ruling class is unable to bring the proletariat under its banner in order to give its real answer to the crisis: world imperialist war. By developing its struggle (as it has done since the end of the 60's), and by refusing to march behind the banners of the bourgeoisie, the working class can prevent the bourgeoisie from unleashing world war. By contrast, only capitalism's overthrow can put an end to society's decomposition. Just as they cannot prevent capitalism's economic collapse, so the proletariat's struggles cannot hold back social decomposition.
In this sense, whereas up to now we considered that "time was on our side", and that the slow development of the class' combats allowed it, and its revolutionary organizations, to rebuild an experience that had been swallowed up by the counter-revolution, we can no longer continue to do so. There can be no question of becoming impatient, and trying to "force the hand of history", but revolutionaries must be aware of the situation's increasing seriousness if we want to live up to our responsibilities.
This is why, while their intervention must emphasize that the historic situation still remains in the hands of the proletariat, and that the class is perfectly capable, through its combat, of overcoming the barriers that the bourgeoisie puts in its way, we must also insist on how high are the stakes, and therefore on its responsibility.
The present perspective for the working class is thus one of continuing combat in the face of growing economic attacks. For some time, these struggles will take place in a difficult political and ideological context. This is especially true, of course, for the proletariat in countries where 'democracy' is being newly installed. In these countries, the working class is in a position of extreme weakness, confirmed daily by events (inability to express the least independent class demand in the different ‘popular movements', enrollment in nationalist conflicts, especially in the USSR, even participation in typically xenophobic strikes against an ethnic minority, eg recently in Bulgaria). These countries give us an example of a working class ready to be enrolled in imperialist war.
For the proletariat in the Western countries, the situation is of course very different. It is far from being subjected to the same difficulties as in the East. The reflux in consciousness will be expressed in particular by a strong return of the trade unions, whose work will be made easier by the increase in democratic mystifications and reformist illusions: "the bosses can pay", "profit sharing", "taking part in growth", mystifications which all make it easier for the proletariat to identify their interests with those of the national capital.
In particular, the continuing and worsening rot of capitalist society will have still worse effects on class consciousness than during the 80's. It weighs down the whole of society with a general feeling of despair; the putrid stink of rotting bourgeois ideology poisons the very air that the proletariat breathes. Right up to the pre-revolutionary period, this will sow further difficulties in the way of the development of class consciousness.
There is no other road for the proletariat than to reject inter-classist participation in the struggles against certain aspects of this moribund society (eg ecology). The only terrain where it can for the moment mobilize as an independent class (and this is all the more crucial in today's flood of democratic mystification, which only recognizes 'citizens' or 'the people') is the one where its interests cannot be confused with those of other classes in society, and which, more globally, determines all other aspects of society: the economy. And it is precisely in this sense, as we have said for a long time, that "the crisis is the proletariat's best ally". The worsening crisis will force the proletariat to come together on its own terrain, to develop the struggles which are the precondition for it to overcome the present barriers to its consciousness; it will open the workers' eyes to the lies about capitalism's 'superiority'; it will force them to lose their illusions as to capitalism's ability to come out of the crisis, and therefore also as to all those left parties and trade unions which want to attach them to the 'national interest', with their talk of "profit sharing" and suchlike nonsense.
Today, as the proletariat struggles against the smokescreens that the bourgeoisie has succeeded in blinding it with for the moment, Marx's words are truer than ever:
"The question is not what a particular proletarian, or even the proletariat as a whole at a particular moment, imagines the goal to be. It is, what is the proletariat's being, and what in accordance with this being it will be obliged historically to do".
It is up to revolutionaries, and to our organization in particular, to contribute fully to develop the class' consciousness of the aim assigned to it by history, so that it can transform into reality the historical necessity of the revolution: never has the need been more urgent.
The ICC : 10-02-90
* The above text was based on a report adopted by the ICC at an international meeting held at the end of January 1990
[1] The feeble resistance put up by almost the old leaders of the "people's democracies", and which made possible such an "easy" transition in these countries, does not in the least mean that these leaders, any more than the apparatus of the Stalinist parties, have sacrificed their power and privileges willingly. In fact, this phenomenon demonstrates not only these regimes' complete economic bankruptcy, but their extreme political fragility. We have pointed out this fragility long ago, but it has turned out to be far greater even than could have been imagined.
[2] Poland and Hungary are "champions" amongst these countries, with the debts of respectively $40.6 and $20.1 billion dollars, in other words 63.4% and 64.6% of their annual GNP. Brazil, comparatively, looks positively "sensible", with a debt of only 39.2% of GNP.
The collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc is an event of truly historic proportions, bringing to an end the world order established by the great powers in 1945. It goes without saying that an event on such a scale is a real test for the political organizations of the working class, a kind of ordeal by fire which will show whether or not they possess the theoretical and organizational armory demanded by the situation.
This test operates on two closely connected levels of revolutionary activity. First, the events in the east have initiated a whole new phase in the life of world capitalism, a period of flux and uncertainty, of growing chaos, which makes it absolutely indispensable for revolutionaries to develop a clear analysis of the origin and direction of events, their implications for the major classes in society. Such an analysis must be based on solid theoretical foundations that are able to stand up to the storms and doubts of the moment, and yet must also reject any conservative attachment to schemes and assumptions which have proved themselves obsolete.
Secondly, the collapse of the eastern bloc has opened up a difficult period for the working class, in which we have seen the workers in the east being engulfed by a tide of democratic and nationalist illusions, and in which the entire world bourgeoisie has seized the opportunity to assault the workers' ears with a deafening campaign about the 'failure of communism' and the 'triumph of democracy'. In the face of this ideological torrent, revolutionaries are called upon to intervene against the stream, to hold fast to basic class principles in response to a cacophony of lies which is having a real impact on the working class. As far as the ICC is concerned, we refer readers to the articles of this International Review and the preceding issue, as well as our territorial press. The aim of this article is to examine how the other groups of the revolutionary milieu have responded to the test[1].
The IBRP: One step forward, but how many back?
We will begin by examining the response of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, which is the most important force in the proletarian political milieu outside the ICC. The IBRP's main components are the Internationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) in Italy and the Communist Workers Organization in Britain. These are serious groups with a regular press, and it is natural that most of their recent issues should have focused on the events in the east. This is important in itself, since, as we shall see, one of the main features of the milieu's response to events has been ... no response at all, or at best a lamentable delay in responding. But since we do take the IBRP seriously, our main concern here is with the content or quality of their response. And although it is too early to draw up a definitive balance sheet, we can say at this stage that although there are elements of clarity contained in the articles written by the IBRP, these positive elements are weakened if not undermined by a series of misunderstandings and outright confusions.
The CWO (Workers Voice)
Our initial impression is that of the two main components of the IBRP, it is the CWO which has responded more adequately.
The collapse of the eastern bloc is not only an event of enormous historic proportions: it also has no exact precedent in history. Never before has an entire imperialist bloc fallen apart, not through military defeat or proletarian insurrection, but first and foremost through its total incapacity to cope with the world economic crisis.
In this sense, the manner in which these events have unfolded, not to mention their extraordinary rapidity, could not have been predicted. As a result, not only was the bourgeoisie taken by surprise - the revolutionary minority was as well, and this includes the ICC. Thus, we should give credit to the CWO for seeing as early as April/May last year that Russia was losing its grip over its east European satellites (in Workers Voice no 47) - a position that we wrongly criticized in World Revolution 125 as a concession to the bourgeoisie's pacifist campaigns, since we were late in seeing the real disintegration of the Stalinist system.
The December/January issue of Workers' Voice (WV 49), the first to be published after the effective collapse of the bloc, leads with an article that correctly denounces the lie that 'communism is in crisis' and, in various other articles, displays a level of clarity on the following three central iasues:
- the disintegration of the Stalinist regimes is the product of the world economic crisis, which hits these regimes with particular severity;
- this crisis isn't the result of 'people's power', still less of the working class. The massive demonstrations in the GDR and Czechoslovakia are not on a proletarian terrain;
- these are "events of world historic importance", signifying "the incipient collapse of the world order created towards the end of the Second World War" and opening up a period of the "reformation of capitalist blocs."
However, these insights, important as they are, are not taken to their conclusion. Thus, although the end of the post-45 imperialist set-up is seen as "incipient", it remains unclear whether the Russian bloc really is finished or not. The events are said to be of "world historic importance", but this is hardly conveyed by the rather frivolous tone of the front page articles, or by the fact that this statement is tucked away on page 5 of the paper.
More importantly, the CWO's insights are based more on an empirical observation of events rather than being grounded in a clear analytical framework, which means that they may easily be eclipsed as events move on. In our 'Theses on the Economic and Political Crisis in the USSR and the Eastern Countries' (International Review 60), we have attempted to provide such a framework; in particular, we have explained why the collapse has been so sudden and thorough-going by highlighting the peculiar rigidity and immobility of the Stalinist political/economic form. In the absence of such a framework, the CWO is equivocal about how profound the collapse of Stalinism really is. Thus, although one article says that Gorbachev's policy of non-intervention - which meant that there was nothing holding up the Stalinist governments in eastern Europe - was "hardly voluntary but one which is being forced on the Kremlin by the appalling state of the Soviet economy," elsewhere they give the impression that behind non-intervention is a conscious strategy by Gorbachev to integrate Russia into a new Europe-based imperialism and to improve the economy through the import of western technology. This underestimates the degree to which the Russian bourgeoisie has lost control of the situation and is simply fighting for survival on a day-to-day basis, with no serious long-term strategy at all.
Again, the CWO's treatment of the mass demonstrations in Eastern Europe, and the enormous exodus of refugees from the GDR, fails to grasp the gravity of the situation. These phenomena are rather airily dismissed as part of a "middle class revolt against state capitalism", motivated by a desire for posh western goods: "They wanted BMWs and Estee Lauder too!. Listening to them talk of waiting 10 years for a new car made one's heart bleed!" This contemptuous attitude misses a crucial point: the workers of the GDR and Czechoslovakia participated en masse in these manifestations, not as a class, but as individuals atomized into 'the people.' This is a serious matter for revolutionaries because it means the working class was being mobilized behind the banners of its class enemy. The CWO takes a rather silly side-swipe at the ICC because the repression that we had seen as one possibility for the East German bourgeoisie didn't take place. But the tragic and bloody consequences of the workers being dragged onto the false terrain of democracy were illustrated very graphically by the events in Romania just over a month later, and again by the violent developments in Azerbaijan and other outlying republics of the USSR.
By the same token, the December WV doesn't really respond to the campaigns about ‘democracy' in the west, nor does it take any position on the negative consequences these events are having for the class struggle, east and west.
The PClnt (Battaglia Comunista)
Although the CWO and Battaglia are part of the same international regroupment, there has always been considerable heterogeneity between the two groups, both on the programmatic level and in their response to immediate developments in the world situation. With the events in the east, this heterogeneity stands out very clearly. And in this case, it appears that Battaglia - despite being the group with the greatest political experience - has been beset by far worse confusions than the CWO. This becomes evident when you examine the last few issues of Battaglia Comunista.
October: Battaglia publishes an article 'The western bourgeoisie applauds the opening up of the eastern countries', which affirms that the Stalinist regimes are capitalist and that the source of their troubles is the world economic crisis. But here, as we argue in a critique of this article in Revolution Internationale 187, the good points end, and the rest of the text shows an extraordinary underestimation of the level of economic and political collapse in the east. While our 'Thesis', adopted at around the same time ie before the spectacular events in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Rumania recognized the effective disintegration of the Russian bloc, BC sees the "eastern empire still solidly held under the Russian boot". And, again in contrast to our 'Thesis', it seems from this article that BC thinks that the formation of 'democratic' (ie, multi-party ) regimes in eastern Europe is perfectly compatible with the cohesion of the bloc. At the same time, for BC, the economic crisis which is behind these events may have hit the western countries in the 70's, but it only hit the Stalinist regimes "more recently" - whereas in fact these countries have been sinking into an economic morass for the last twenty years. Perhaps this strange illusion about the relative health of the Stalinist economies explains their touching belief that opening up the eastern 'market' represents a real hope for the world capitalist economy:
"The collapse of the markets in the peripheries of capitalism, for example Latin America, has created new problems of insolvency for the reward on capital ... The new opportunities opening up in eastern Europe could represent: a safety-valve with regard to this need for investment ... If this wide process of east-west collaboration becomes concretized, it would be a shot of oxygen for international capitalism."
We have already published an answer to the bourgeoisie's claims about the 'new opportunities' opening up in the east (see IR 60), so we will say no more than this here: the eastern economies are in a state of ruination no less severe than the economies of Latin America. Riddled through by debt, inflation, waste and pollution, they offer precious little to the west in terms of opportunities for investment and expansion. The idea of the east as a 'new market' is pure bourgeois propaganda and, along with our article in RI we have to conclude that Battaglia has fallen for it hook line and sinker,
November: at the time of the massive demonstrations in the GDR and Czechoslovakia, in which millions of workers marched behind the banners of 'democracy', without raising a single class demand, BC unfortunately leads with an editorial titled 'Resurgence of class struggle in the east', which is further evidence of Baltaglia's difficulty in keeping up with the situation. The article in question refers not to the events in eastern Europe but, in the main, to the miners' struggles in the USSR, which, though they had developed on a massive scale the previous summer, had by then been well and truly eclipsed by the democratic and nationalist 'revolution' sweeping the bloc. Furthermore the article contains some ambiguities about the democratic demands raised by the Russian workers alongside demands expressing their real interest as a class. Although it admits that the first type of demand can easily be used by the 'radical' wing of the ruling class, we also find the following passage:
"... For these masses imbued with anti-Stalinism and the ideology of western capitalism, the first possible and necessary demands are those for the overthrow of the 'Communist' regime, for a liberalization of the productive apparatus, and for the conquest of 'democratic freedoms'. "
There's no doubt that the workers in the Stalinist regimes have, during the course of their struggles, raised bourgeois political demands (even when these aren't infiltrated in from the outside by agents of the enemy class). But, these demands aren't "necessary" to the proletarian struggle: on the contrary, they are always used to lead the struggle into a dead-end, and revolutionaries can only oppose them. But Battaglia's use of the term "necessary" is not at all due to the slip of the pen. It is fully in line with the theorizations about the "necessity" for democratic demands contained in their 'These on the tasks of Communists in the Peripheral Countries'[2]; it is clear that the same logic is now being applied to the countries of the former eastern bloc.
In all, this issue of Battaglia constitutes a very inadequate response to the flood of 'democratic' mystifications that has been unleashed on the world proletariat. Having refused to recognize the real resurgence of class struggle for over 20 years, Battaglia suddenly starts seeing it and proclaiming it at the very moment that the bourgeoisie's 'democratic' offensive has forced it into a temporary retreat!
December: even after the events in the GDR, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria, BC publishes an article 'Collapse of illusions in Real Socialism' which contains a number of different lines of thought, but which seems to be directed against the ICC's these of a collapse of the bloc.
"Russian Perestroika involves an abandonment of the old policy towards the satellite countries, and has the objective of transforming the latter. The USSR must open up to western technologies, and COMECON must do the same, not - as certain people think - in a process of the disintegration of the east bloc and of the total disengagement of the USSR from the European countries, but in order to facilitate, through reviving the COMECON economies, the revival of the soviet economy."
Once again, as with the CWO, we are given a description of a process that corresponds to a well-laid plan by Gorbachev aimed at integrating Russia into a new European prosperity. But whatever fantasies Gorbachev or Battaglia might indulge in, the actual policies of the Russian ruling class are being imposed on it by a process of inner disintegration over which it has no control, and whose outcome it cannot hope to foresee.
January: This issue contains a long article 'La Deriva del Continent Sovietico' which develops similar ideas about the aims of Gorbachev's foreign policy, but which at the same time seems to admit that there might indeed be a 'dislocation' of the eastern bloc. Perhaps BC has made some progress here. But if there is a step forward, its article on the events in Romania constitutes several steps backwards - towards the leftist abyss.
Bourgeois propaganda from right to left portrays the events in Romania last December as an authentic 'people's revolution', a spontaneous uprising of the whole population against the hated Ceaucescu. It's true that in Timisoara, in Bucharest and in many other towns hundreds of thousands of people, fired by a legitimate loathing for the regime, took to the streets in defiance of the Securitate and the army, prepared to give their lives for the overthrow of that monstrous apparatus of terror. But it's also true that these masses, this amorphous 'people' in which the working class was never present as an autonomous force, was only too easily used as cannon fodder by Ceaucescu's bourgeois opponents, those who are now running the more-or-less unchanged machinery of state repression. The 'reformist' Stalinist politicians, army generals, and former Securitate bosses who now constitute the 'National Salvation Front' had to a large extent laid their plans well in advance: the National Salvation Front itself had been set up, in secret, up to six months before the December events. They were just waiting for the moment to arrive, and it came with the massacres in Timisoara and the ensuing mass demonstrations. One minute the army generals were ordering their soldiers to shoot the demonstrators; the next minute, they 'went over to the people' ie, used the people as a stepping stone to climb into the seat of government. This wasn't a revolution, which in today's period can only take place when the proletariat organizes itself as a class and dissolves the bourgeoisie's state apparatus, in particular the police and the army. At best this was a desperate revolt that was immediately channeled onto a capitalist political terrain by the still very much intact forces of the bourgeois opposition. In the face of this immense tragedy, in which thousands of workers gave their life blood for a cause that was not their own, revolutionaries have a clear duly to speak out against the tide of bourgeois propaganda that describes it as a revolution.
But how does BC respond? By falling headfirst into the trap: "Romania is the first country in the industrialized regions in which the world economic crisis has given rise to a real and authentic popular insurrection with the resulting overthrow of the reigning governments," ('Ceausescu is Dead, but Capitalism lives On'). Indeed, "In Romania, all the objective conditions and nearly all the subjective conditions were there for turning the insurrection into a real and authentic social revolution" (ibid). And it's not hard to guess which particular "subjective" factor was missing: "the absence of a genuine class political force left the field open to the forces who worked for the maintenance of bourgeois relations of production," (ibid).
"A real and authentic popular insurrection" what kind of creature is this? Strictly speaking: insurrection means the armed seizure of power by an organised, conscious working class, as in October 1917. A "popular insurrection" is a contradiction in terms, because the "people" as such, which for marxism can only mean an amorphous conglomerate of classes (when it's not a code-word for the forces of the bourgeoisie), cannot take power. What's really happening here is that, once again, Battaglia is yielding an uncomfortably large amount of ground to the bourgeoisie's campaign's about the 'people's revolution', campaigns in which the leftists have played a particularly important role.
These passages also reveal Battaglia's deep-seated idealism when it comes to the question of the party. How can they possibly claim that the only "subjective" element missing in Romania was the political organization? An indispensable subjective element for the revolution is also a working class that is organizing itself in its autonomous, unitary organs, the workers' councils. In Romania, not only was this not happening, but the working class wasn't even fighting on its most elementary terrain; throughout the December events, there was no sign of any class demands being raised by the workers. Any strikes that did take place were immediately channeled into the bourgeois "civil war" which ravaged the country.
The political organization of the class isn't a dues ex machina. It can only gain a significant influence in the class, it can only tip the scales towards revolution, when the workers are moving towards massive and open confrontations with the bourgeoisie. But in Romania, the workers weren't even struggling for their most basic class interests: all their courage and fighting spirit had been mobilized in the service of the bourgeoisie. In this sense, they were further away from revolution than all the defensive struggles in western Europe over the last decade, struggles which Battaglia has had such difficulty in seeing at all.
Considering that the IBRP is the second main pole of the international proletarian milieu, Battaglia's disarray in the face of the 'wind from the east' is a sad indication of the more general weaknesses of the milieu. And given Battaglia's weight within the IBRP itself, there's a strong possibility that the CWO will be pulled back towards Battaglia's confusions rather than push towards greater clarity (in particular, we must wait to see what they say about the ‘revolution ' in Romania). In any case, the IBRP's inability to speak with one voice about these historic events is a revelation of a weakness which will be mercilessly punished in the coming period.
Bordigism, Neo-Bordigism, Councilism, Neo-Councilism, etc
As we've said, outside the ICC and the IBRP, the most characteristic response has either been silence, or a refusal to throw aside the routine of regular or infrequent publication, and a failure to make a particular effort to respond to these world-historic changes. Though even here there are different degrees.
Thus, after a long silence the Ferment Ouvriere Revolutionnaire in France published an issue of Alarme in response to the events (though not until the end of January). The editorial is a relatively clear response to the bourgeoisie's campaigns about the 'failure of communism'. But when in a second article the FOR descend from this general level to the concrete events in Romania, they come up with positions very dose to those of Battaglia: this may not have been a revolution, but it was an "insurrection", and "although probably no-one in Rumania dreamed of talking about communism, measures like the arming of the workers, the maintenance of committees of vigilance and their taking charge of the organization of the struggle, of production (food and medical necessities, to be defined in their nature, their quantity and quality), the demand for the dissolution of the armed bodies of the state (army, militia, police ... ), and the conjunction with for example the committee occupying the presidential palace, constituted the first steps of a communist revolution.
Like Battaglia, the FOR has long been depressed about the 'absence' of the class struggle; now it sees the "first steps of a communist revolution" at a moment when the working class had been derailed onto the terrain of the bourgeoisie. It's the same when it considers the 'positive' effects of the collapse of the Russian bloc (which it seems to recognize, since it writes "we can consider that the Stalinist bloc has been defeated''). According to the FOR this will help workers see the identity of their conditions internationally. This may well be true eventually, but to stress this point at this moment is to ignore the essentially negative impact that the bourgeoisie's current ideological offensive is having on the proletariat.
The 'orthodox' Bordigist current still possesses a certain political solidity, being as it is the product of a historic tradition in the revolutionary movement. We can see the 'remnants' of this solidity, for example, in the latest edition of Le Proletaire, publication in France of the International Communist Party (Programma Comunista).
In contrast to the misplaced enthusiasm for the events in Romania displayed by BC and the FOR, the Dec/Jan/Feb issue of Le Proletaire takes a firm stand against the idea that a revolution, or at least the "first steps" towards one, has been emerging out of the mass mobilizations in eastern Europe:
"As well as the aspirations towards freedom and democracy, the common trait of the demonstrators in Berlin, Prague and Bucharest is nationalism. Nationalism and democratic ideology, which claim to englobe 'the whole people' are class ideologies, bourgeois ideologies. And in fact it is the bourgeois or petty bourgeois strata frustrated at having been kept away from power who have been the real actors in these movements, and who have finally succeeded in replacing their representatives in the new governments. The working class did not manifest itself as a class, for its own interests. When it came out on strike, as in Romania or Czechoslovakia, it was in response to the calls by the students, as a simple, undifferentiated component of the 'people'. Up till now, it hasn't had the strength to reject these calls for the union of the people, for the national union of all classes. "
Even when these mobilizations take on a violent character, they don't add up to a 'popular insurrection': "in Romania, the murderous combats which decided the outcome were between the regular army and the special repressive forces ('Securitate'), ie between fractions of the state apparatus, not against this apparatus."
Concerning the historic causes and results of these events, Le Proletaire seems to recognize the key role of the economic crisis, and it also affirms that "the disintegration of the western bloc is the necessary consequence of the disintegration of the eastern bloc." It is also aware that the so-called collapse of 'socialism' is being used to muddy the consciousness of workers everywhere, and so correctly denounces the lie that the eastern bloc regimes were anything but capitalist.
On the negative side, Le Proletaire still appears to underestimate the real scale of the collapse in the east, since it argues that "although the USSR has perhaps been weakened, it is still, for world capitalism, responsible for maintaining order in its zone of influence": in fact, world capitalism is well aware that the USSR can no longer even be relied on to maintain order inside its own borders. At the same time, it overestimates the capacity of the workers in the east to overcome illusions in democracy through their own struggles - indeed, it seems to think that it will be the struggles against the new 'democracies' in the east that will help workers in the west to reject these illusions, whereas if anything, the reverse is true.
Given that the ICP has, in the past, been increasingly pulled towards openly bourgeois positions on such crucial issues as 'national liberation' and the union question, Le Proletaire's relatively healthy response to the events in the east proves that there is still proletarian life in the organism. But we don't think that this represents a really new lease of life: it's the Bordigists' 'classic' antipathy to democratic illusions, rather than any critical reexamination of the opportunist basis of their politics, that has allowed them to defend a class position on this question.
The same could be said for the 'other' ICP, which publishes Il Partito Comunista in Italy and Le Gauche Comuniste in France. In reference both to the events in China last summer, and East Germany last autumn, it is able to assert clearly that the working class did not emerge on its own terrain. In the article 'In China, the state defends the freedom of Capital against all comers', it comes to the difficult but necessary conclusion that "even though the machine-gun fire which swept the streets was also turned against it (the Chinese proletariat) it had the strength and the will not to be drawn into an example that was certainly heroic, but which didn't concern it." (Le Gauche Comuniste)
With regard to East Germany, it writes: "For the moment there are inter-classist movements situated on the democratic and national terrain. The proletariat is being drowned in a petty bourgeois mass and does not differentiate itself at all at the level of political demands."
Not bad. But how on earth can the ICP reconcile this sober reality with the article it published on the miners' strikes in Russia, where it claims that the proletariat in the Stalinist regimes is less permeated with democratic ideology than the workers in the west![3]
Outside the orthodox Bordigist currents we have a number of sects who, like their 'Italian Left' spiced with a dash of modernism or anarchism, but above all, accademicism. And so several months into these epoch-making events, nothing has disturbed the tranquility of groups like Communisme ou Civilisation or Mouvement Communiste (pour le parti communiste mondiale, of course), who continue with their schedule of research into the critique of political economy, convinced that they are treading in the foot-steps of Marx when he retired from the 'formal party' in order to concentrate on Das Kapital. As if Marx would ever have remained silent in face of historical developments on such a scale! But to date, even the more activist elements in this current, like the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, seem to be nodding off in the warmth of their libraries. It is cold and windy outside, after all.
What about the councilists? Not much to report. In Britain, silence from Wildcat and Subversion. A London-based group, the Red Manace, apologize for not putting anything about Eastern Europe in the January issue of its bulletin. Its energies have been focused on the far more pressing necessity of denouncing ... Islam, since that is the main content of the leaflet it has produced recently. However, since this leaflet also equates Bolshevism with Stalinism, the October revolution with the bourgeois counter-revolution, it also provides a useful reminder of how councilism echoes the campaigns of the bourgeoisie, who are also extremely eager to show that there's a simple line of continuity between 1917 and the Stalinist labor camps.
As for the neo-councilists of the 'External Fraction of the ICC', we can say little at this stage, since their current issue is contemporary with last summer's events and they haven't seen fit to publish any special items in response to subsequent developments. But their current issue (Internationalist Perspective no 15) doesn't inspire much confidence, to say the least. For the EFICC, the installation of the Solidarnosc government in Poland didn't imply any loss of control by the Stalinists: on the contrary, it revealed their capacity to use the democratic card to fool the workers. Equally, one can hardly expect a clear class response to the bloodbath in Romania since they saw behind the massacres in China not a savage feud between bourgeois factions but an embryonic mass strike, and they roundly denounce the ICC for failing to spot this. And if recent statements at some public meetings in Belgium are anything to go by, the EFICC will continue to be guided by that old principle of the workers' movement - saying the opposite of what the ICC says. They seem especially keen to deny that the eastern bloc has collapsed. An imperialist bloc can only collapse through military defeat or the class struggle, they say, because this is how it's happened in the past. For a group which pretends to be the scourge of all ossified, dogmatic versions of marxism, this looks like a pathetic attempt to cling to tried and tested schemas. But we'll say no more until we have their positions in black and white.
The new period and the responsibility of revolutionaries
Although we are dealing with a situation that is still evolving, "We already possess enough elements to conclude that the events in the east have sharply exposed the weaknesses in the existing proletarian milieu. Outside of the ICC, which despite some initial delays and errors has been able to carry out its basic responsibilities in the face of these developments, and apart from the limited elements of clarity displayed by the more serious political groups, we have seen varying degrees of confusion or a complete inability to say anything at all.
For us this situation does not give rise to any hollow feelings of 'superiority', but it does emphasize the enormous responsibility weighing on the ICC as the most coherent reference point in the political milieu. Given that we are entering a period of reflux in the consciousness of the class, the difficulties of the milieu are not going to attenuate in the years ahead. On the contrary. But this is no argument for falling into passivity or pessimism. For one thing, the acceleration of history is going to accelerate the process of decantation that we have already observed to be going on in the milieu. Ephemeral and parasitic groups who have shown themselves utterly incapable of responding to the new period are going to be ground up by the remorseless wheels of history, but even the more substantial currents in the milieu are going to be shaken to their foundations if they are not able to overcome their errors and equivocations. This process will certainly be painful, but it need not be negative - providing the most advanced elements in the milieu, and the ICC in particular, are able to put forward a clear orientation that can serve as a 'guide to the perplexed' in a perplexing moment of history.
And there again, a general retreat in the consciousness of the class, ie at the level of the extension of consciousness throughout the class, does not signify the 'disappearance' of class consciousness, an end to its development in depth. We have already seen, in fact, that the events in the east have provided considerable stimulus to a minority of elements who are seeking to understand what's going on and who have entered into or renewed contact with the political vanguard. Even this development will be subject to fluctuations, but the underlying process will continue. Our class has not suffered a historical defeat, and there is every possibility that it will recover from its present set-backs to challenge capitalism in a more profound way than ever before.
For the revolutionary minority, this is undoubtedly a time when the tasks' of political clarification and general propaganda will tend to take precedence over a more agitational kind of intervention. But that does not mean that revolutionaries should be retreating into their studies. Our task is to remain in and with our class, even when our intervention is carried out in more difficult conditions and will often be compelled to go 'against the stream'. More than ever the voices of the revolutionaries must make themselves heard today; indeed, this is one of the preconditions for the class to overcome its present difficulties and push its way back to the centre of the historical stage.
CDW, February 1990
[1] At the time we're putting this issue together, we received a number of new publication: Workers' Voice, Battaglia Communista, Supplement to Internationalist Perspective, but didn't have time to integrate a critique of these publications into this article. Generally speaking, WV maintains the same analysis of the period, while denouncing the dangers for the proletariat more clearly. BC seems to some extent to be moving away from its delirium about the ‘popular insurrection' in Romania. IP entirely minimizes the collapse of the bloc, and, while keeping quiet about its great ‘theoretical' discovery about ‘the transition from the formal to the real domination of capital' as an explanation for the situation in the USSR, sees the situation as being well controlled by Gorbachev. The minority position in the same IP admits more clearly the collapse of the Russian bloc and its roots in the economic crisis. The evolution of positions shows that events are pushing towards some kind of clarification, but the problem of the general framework of analysis is still posed in the way we envisaged in the present article, before this latest publications.
[2] See our critique on this text in IR 46
[3] See our article ‘The responsibility of Revolutionaries' in Revoluzione Internazionale 62.
The article we reproduce below was published by the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) in no. 10 of their magazine Internationalisme, which came out in May 1946. Internationalisme saw itself as the continuation of Bilan and Octobre, published by the International Communist Left before the outbreak of the Second World War. The GCF had its origins in this current and maintained its general orientations. But Internationalisme wasn’t just a continuation of Bilan: it also went beyond it.
The Russian question was at the centre of the preoccupations and discussions of the proletarian political milieu at the beginning of the 1930s, and these debates became more and more intense during the war and in its aftermath. Broadly speaking, there were four different analyses in these debates:
1) Those who denied any proletarian character to the revolution of October 1917 and to the Bolshevik Party and who saw the Russian revolution as no more than a bourgeois revolution. The main defenders of this analysis were the groups of the councilist movement, in particular Pannekoek and the Dutch Left.
2) At the opposite extreme, we find Trotsky’s Left Opposition for whom, despite all the counter-revolutionary policies of Stalinism, Russia still retained the fundamental acquisitions of the October proletarian revolution: expropriation of the bourgeoisie, a statified and planned economy, monopoly of foreign trade. Consequently, the regime in Russia was a degenerated workers’ state and had to be defended each time it entered into armed conflict with other powers: the duty of the Russian and international proletariat was to defend it unconditionally.
3) A third ‘anti-defencist’ position was based on the analysis that the regime and the state in Russia were ‘neither capitalist nor working class’, but a ‘bureaucratic collectivist regime’. This analysis saw itself as a complement to the Marxist alternative: capitalist barbarism or proletarian revolution for a socialist society, adding a third way, that of a new society not foreseen by Marxism: a bureaucratic anti-capitalist society[1] [4]. This third current had its adepts in the ranks of Trotskyism before and during the war, and in 1948 some of these broke with Trotskyism to give birth to the Socialisme ou Barbarie group under the leadership of Chaulieu/Castoriadis[2] [5].
4) The Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left fought energetically against this aberrant theory of a ‘third alternative’ claiming to bring a ‘correction’, an ‘innovation’ to marxism. But since it itself hadn’t developed an adequate analysis of the real evolution of decadent capitalism, it preferred in the meantime to stand on the solid ground of the classic formula: capitalism = private property; limitation of private property = a move towards socialism. Applied to the Russian regime this gave rise to the following position: persistence of a degenerated workers’ state with a counter-revolutionary policy, non-defence of Russia in case of war.
This hybrid, contradictory formula, which opened the door to all sorts of dangerous confusions, had already provoked criticisms within the Italian Fraction on the eve of the war, but these criticisms were somewhat eclipsed by a much more urgent question - the perspective of the outbreak of generalised imperialist war, which was denied by the leadership of the Fraction (the Vercesi tendency).
The discussion on the class nature of Stalinist Russia was taken up again, during the war, by the Italian Fraction that had been reconstituted in the south of France in 1940 (this had been done without the Vercesi tendency which denied any possibility of the existence of a revolutionary organisation, with its theory of the social disappearance of the proletariat during this war). This discussion quickly led to the categorical rejection of all the ambiguities and sophistries contained in the notion of the degenerated workers’ state defended by the Fraction before the war. Instead the Stalinist state was analysed as a product of state capitalism[3] [6].
But after 1945 it was above all the GCF, which, in its review Internationalisme, deepened and widened the notion of state capitalism in Russia, integrating it into an overall conception of the general tendencies of capitalism in its period of decadence.
The article we’re republishing here was one of many texts by Internationalisme devoted to the problem of state capitalism. The article by no means exhausts the question on its own, but in publishing it, leaving aside its undeniable interest, we want to show the continuity and development of thought and theory in the international left communist movement that we come from.
Internationalisme put a definite end to the ‘mystery’ of the Stalinist state in Russia by showing that it was part of a general, historic tendency towards state capitalism. It also pointed out that the specificities of Russian state capitalism, which far from expressing a “transition from the formal domination to the real domination of capital” as our dissidents in the EFICC stupidly claim, have their source in the triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution after the October revolution had annihilated the old bourgeois class.
But Internationalisme didn’t have time to push its analysis of state capitalism further, particularly the question of the objective limits of this tendency. Even though it did write that “The economic tendency towards state capitalism, although it can’t be completed in a total socialisation and collectivisation inside capitalist society, nevertheless remains a very real tendency” (Internationalisme no. 9), it wasn’t able to develop an analysis of the reasons why this tendency couldn’t be completed. It’s up to the ICC to approach this problem in the framework drawn up by Internationalisme.
We have to show that state capitalism, far from resolving the insurmountable contradictions of the period of decadence, in fact only brings new contradictions, new factors that end up aggravating the situation of world capitalism. One of these factors is the creation of a swollen mass of parasitic strata, a growing loss of any sense of responsibility by these state agents who, paradoxically, have the job of directing, orienting and managing the economy.
The recent collapse of the Stalinist bloc, the multiplication of scandals about the corruption that reigns in the state apparatus all over the world is a confirmation of this ‘parasitisation’, if we may so speak, of the whole ruling class. It’s absolutely necessary to pursue this work of researching into and exposing the tendency towards the parasitism and irresponsibility of all high functionaries, a tendency accelerated under the regime of state capitalism.
MC (1990)
Internationalisme, no. 10, Gauche Communiste de France, 1946.
There’s no doubt any more: the first experience of the proletarian revolution, both in its positive acquisitions, and even more in the negative lessons that can be drawn from it, is today at the base of the whole modern workers’ movement. As long as the balance sheet of this experience hasn’t been made, as long as its lessons haven’t been brought to light and assimilated, the working class and the revolutionary vanguard will be condemned to running on the spot.
Even if we imagine the impossible, i.e. that the proletariat comes to power through a combination of miraculously favourable circumstances, it wouldn’t be able to hold out in these conditions. In a very short while it would lose control of the revolution, and would soon be shunted back towards capitalism.
Revolutionaries can’t be satisfied simply with taking a position on the Russia of today. The problem of the defence or non-defence of Russia has long ceased to be a debate within the camp of the vanguard.
The imperialist war of 1939-45, in which Russia showed itself, before the eyes of the whole world, to be one of the most bloody and rapacious of the imperialist powers, has once and for all revealed those who defend Russia, in whatever form they present themselves, as agencies, political arms of the Russian imperialist state within the proletariat, just as the 1914-18 war revealed that the Socialist parties had definitively become integrated into the national capitalist state.
We don’t intend to go back over this question in this study. Neither will we be looking at the nature of the Russian state, which the opportunist tendency within the international communist left still tries to portray as ‘proletarian with a counter-revolutionary function’, as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’. We think that we’ve finished with this subtle sophistry which claims that there is an opposition between the proletarian nature and the counter-revolutionary function of the Russian state, and which, without making any analysis or explanation of Russia’s evolution, leads directly to the reinforcement of Stalinism, of the Russian capitalist state and of international capitalism. We also note that since our study of and polemic against this conception, which appeared in no. 6 of the Internal Bulletin of the Italian Fraction in June 1944, the defenders of this theory haven’t dared to reply openly. The communist left of Belgium has made it known officially that it rejects this conception. The Internationalist Communist Party of Italy doesn’t yet seem to have taken a position. And while we don’t find an open, methodical defence of this erroneous conception, neither do we find an explicit rejection of it. Which explains why, in the ICP’s publications, we see constantly the term ‘degenerated workers’ state’ when they are in fact referring to the Russian capitalist state.
It’s obvious that this isn’t just a matter of terminology, but one of the persistence of an incorrect analysis of Russian society, of a lack of theoretical precision, something we also find in relation to other political and programmatic questions.
The aim of our study is exclusively concerned with drawing out the fundamental lessons of the Russian experience. We don’t intend to write a history of the events which unfolded in Russia, however important they were. Such a task is beyond our capacities at present. We only want to look at that part of the Russian experience which goes beyond the context of a particular historical situation and contains lessons valid for all countries and for the whole social revolution to come. In this way we hope to make our contribution to a study of fundamental questions whose solution can only come through the efforts of all the revolutionary groups in the framework of an international discussion.
The Marxist concept of the private ownership of the means of production as a fundamental element of capitalist production, and thus of capitalist society, seemed to imply the validity of another formula: the disappearance of the private possession of the means of production would be equivalent to the disappearance of capitalist society. Thus throughout Marxist literature we find that the disappearance of the private ownership of the means of production is presented as synonymous with socialism. But the development of capitalism, or more precisely, of capitalism in its decadent phase, displays a more or less accentuated, but nevertheless generalised tendency towards the limitation of the private ownership of the means of production - towards their nationalisation.
But nationalisations are not socialism and we won’t spend any time here demonstrating this. What interests us here is the tendency itself, and its class nature.
If you consider that the private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental basis of capitalist society, any recognition that there’s a tendency towards limiting this kind of ownership leads to an insurmountable contradiction: capitalism is beginning to abolish itself, to undermine the very basis of its existence.
It would be a waste of time to juggle with words and speculate on the inherent contradictions of the capitalist regime.
When one talks, for example, about the mortal contradiction of capitalism, i.e. that in order to develop its production, capitalism needs to conquer new markets, but that in the act of acquiring these new markets it incorporates them into its system of production and so destroys the market without which it cannot live, one is talking about a real contradiction, arising out of the objective development of capitalist production, independent of its will, and presenting an insoluble problem for it. It’s the same thing when one refers to imperialist war and the war economy, in which capitalism, through its internal contradictions, produces its own self-destruction.
The same applies to all the objective contradictions of capitalist evolution.
But it’s a different thing with the private ownership of the means of production: it’s impossible to see what forces are obliging capitalism deliberately and consciously to take on a structure which would alter its very nature and essence.
In other words, in proclaiming that the private ownership of the means of production is the nature of capitalism, you are at the same time proclaiming that capitalism can’t exist without private ownership. By the same token, you are saying that any change towards limiting this private ownership means a limitation of capitalism, a change in a direction opposed to capitalism, an anti-capitalist direction. The question of the scale of this limitation isn’t the issue here. To get lost in quantitative calculations, or to try to demonstrate that the scale involved is negligible, is simply to avoid the question. In any case it would be wrong: you only have to refer to the breadth of this tendency in the totalitarian countries and in Russia, where it involves the entire means of production, to be convinced of this. What’s at issue here isn’t the scale of the tendency, but its very nature.
If the tendency towards the liquidation of private ownership really meant a tendency towards anti-capitalism, you would arrive at the following stupefying conclusion: seeing that this tendency operates under the direction of the state, the capitalist state would then be the agent of its own destruction.
And indeed, all the ‘socialist’ partisans of nationalisations, of the command economy, all the makers of ‘plans’ who, if they’re not consciously trying to strengthen capitalism, are nevertheless reformers in the service of capitalism, like the groups Abondance, CETES, etc, end up with this theory of the anti-capitalist capitalist state.
The Trotskyists, who don’t reason very well, are obviously in favour of these limitations, since for them anything opposed to the alleged nature of capitalism must necessarily be proletarian. They may be a bit sceptical, but they think it would be criminal to neglect the least opportunity. For them, nationalisations are a weakening of capitalist private property. If, unlike the Stalinists and the Socialists, they don’t actually say that they are a slice of socialism inside the regime of capitalism, they are convinced that they are ‘progressive’. In their cunning way, they hope to get the capitalist state to do a job which would otherwise have to be done by the proletariat after the revolution. “It means that there’ll be less for us to do” they say, rubbing their hands in the conviction that they’ve outsmarted the capitalist state.
But “that’s reformism,” exclaims the left communist of the Vercesi type. And, as a good ‘Marxist’, he gets down not to explaining the problem, but to denying it, trying for example to prove that nationalisations don’t exist, can’t exist, that they’re nothing but inventions, demagogic lies of the reformists.
Why this indignation, this persistent denial, which at first sight seems rather surprising? Because the point of departure is the same as that of the reformists, and on it rests the whole theory of the proletarian nature of Russian society.
And since they have the same criterion for appreciating the class nature of the economy, to recognise such a tendency in the capitalist countries could only mean recognising that capitalism is evolving into socialism.
It’s not so much that this position clings to the ‘Marxist’ formula about private property, but rather that it’s fixated on the formula in reverse, on its caricature, i.e. that the absence of private ownership of the means of production is the criterion for the proletarian nature of the Russian state. This is why it’s led to deny the tendency towards, the possibility of, limiting the private ownership of the means of production within capitalism. Rather than observing the real and objective development of capitalism and its tendency towards state capitalism, and thus rectifying his position on the nature of the Russian state, Vercesi prefers to hold onto the formula and save his theory of the proletarian nature of Russia, and too bad for reality. And since the contradiction between the formula and reality is insurmountable, reality is simply denied, and the game is complete!
A third tendency tries to find the solution in the negation of Marxism. “This doctrine”, it says, “was true as long as it was being applied to capitalist society, but what Marx didn’t foresee, and what ‘goes beyond’ Marxism, is the emergence of a new class which is gradually, and to some extent peacefully (!) taking over economic and political power in society at the expense both of capitalism and of the proletariat.” This new (?) class is, for some, the bureaucracy, for others, the technocracy, and for yet others, the ‘synarchy’.
Let’s leave all these speculations aside and get back to the main issue. It’s an undeniable fact that there is a tendency towards limiting the private ownership of the means of production, and that this is accentuating each day in all countries. This tendency is concretised in the general formation of a statified capitalism, managing the main branches of production and the economic life of the country. State capitalism isn’t the speciality of one bourgeois faction or of a particular ideological school. We’ve seen it installed in democratic America and Hitler’s Germany, in ‘Labour’ Britain and ‘Soviet’ Russia.
We can’t in the limits of this study go into an in-depth analysis of state capitalism, of the historic causes and conditions determining this form. We will simply say that state capitalism is the form corresponding to the decadent phase of capitalism, just as monopoly capitalism corresponded to its phase of full development. Another remark. A characteristic trait of state capitalism seems to be that it develops in a more accentuated manner in direct ratio to the effects of the permanent economic crisis in the various capitalist countries.
But state capitalism is not at all a negation of capitalism, still less does it represent a gradual transformation into socialism as the reformists of various schools claim.
The fear of falling into reformism by recognising the tendency towards state capitalism resides in the mistaken notion of the nature of capitalism. This isn’t defined by the private ownership of the means of production, which is just one form of capitalism, characteristic of a given period, the period of liberal capitalism. What defines the nature of capitalism is the separation of the producer from the means of production.
Capitalism is the separation between past labour, accumulated in the hands of an exploiting, directing class, and the living labour of another class. It matters little how the possessing class distributes its wealth among itself. Under capitalism, this distribution is constantly being altered through economic competition or military violence. However important it may be to study the way this distribution is carried out, this isn’t what we’re looking at here.
Whatever changes may take place in the relations between different layers of the capitalist class, looking at the social system of class relations as a whole, the relationship between the possessing class and the producer class remains capitalist.
The surplus value extracted from the workers in the production process may be distributed in different ways, the parts going to finance, commercial, or industrial capital may be more or less large, but this changes nothing about the nature of the surplus value itself. For capitalist production to take place, it’s a matter of complete indifference whether there’s individual or collective ownership of the means of production. What determines the capitalist character of production is the existence of capital, i.e. of labour accumulated in the hands of one class that commands the living labour of others in order to produce surplus value. The transfer of capital from individual, private hands into state hands doesn’t signify a change in the nature of capitalism towards non-capitalism, but is simply a concentration of capital ensuring a more rational and efficient exploitation of labour power.
What has been shown up as false here isn’t the Marxist conception, but simply a restricted understanding of it, a narrow and formal interpretation of it. What gives a capitalist character to production isn’t the private ownership of the means of production. Private property and the private ownership of the means of production also existed in slavery and in feudal society. What makes production capitalist production is the separation of the means of production from the producers, their transformation into a means of buying and commanding living labour power with the aim of making it produce surplus value, or in other words the transformation of the means of production from a simple tool in the production process into something which exists as capital.
The form in which capital exists, whether individual or concentrated (trust, monopoly, state) doesn’t undermine its existence any more than the scale of the surplus value produced, or the forms the latter takes (profit, land rent). Forms are simply manifestations of the substance and can only express it in various ways.
In the epoch of liberal capitalism, the form in which capital existed was essentially that of private, individual capitalism. Thus Marxists could without any great inconvenience use a formula that basically represented the form as a way of expressing and representing the content.
When it came to propaganda among the masses, this actually had the advantage of making it possible to translate a somewhat abstract idea into a living, concrete image that could more easily be grasped.
“Private possession of the means of production = capitalism” and “getting rid of private possession = socialism” were striking formulae, but they were only partially true.
The inconvenience only arose when the form tended to change. The habit of representing the content through the form, which at a given moment did correspond to each other, was turned into a false identification, and led to the error of replacing the content with the form. We find this error taking place very clearly in the Russian revolution.
Socialism requires a very high level of the development of the productive forces, which is only conceivable in the wake of a considerable concentration and centralisation of the forces of production.
This concentration will involve the dispossession of private owners of the means of production. But this dispossession, whether at national or international level, this concentration of the forces of production after the triumph of the proletarian revolution, is only a condition for the movement towards socialism, but in itself it’s not socialism at all.
The most far-reaching expropriation may lead to the disappearance of the capitalists as individuals benefiting from surplus value, but it doesn’t in itself make the production of surplus value, i.e. capitalism itself, disappear.
This assertion may at first sight appear paradoxical, but a closer examination of the Russian experience will prove its validity. For socialism to exist, or even a move towards socialism, it’s not enough for expropriation to take place: what's essential is that the means of production cease to exist as capital. In other words, the capitalist principle of production has to be overturned.
The capitalist principle of accumulated labour commanding living labour with a view to producing surplus value must be replaced by the principle of living labour commanding accumulated labour with a view to producing consumer goods to satisfy the needs of society's members.
It’s in this principle alone, that socialism resides.
The mistake of the Russian revolution and of the Bolshevik Party was to have put the accent on the condition, on expropriation, which in itself isn’t socialism or a factor that pushes the economy in a socialist direction, and to have neglected or relegated to second place the basic principle of a socialist economy.
There’s nothing more instructive in this matter than reading the numerous speeches and writings by Lenin on the necessity for a growing development of industry and production in Soviet Russia. For Lenin the development of industry was identical to the development of socialism. He used openly and more or less indifferently the terms state capitalism and state socialism, without really distinguishing them. Formulations like ‘socialism = soviets plus electrification’ expressed the stammerings and confusions of the leaders of the October revolution in this domain.
It is very characteristic that Lenin’s attention was fixed on the private sector and on small peasant property, which according to him were the source of the danger of the Russian economy evolving towards capitalism. In so doing he completely neglected the much more decisive and concrete danger coming from state industry.
History has clearly shown that Lenin was wrong on this point. The liquidation of small peasant property could and did involve a strengthening not of a socialist sector, but of a state sector whose development meant the reinforcement of state capitalism.
There’s no doubt that the difficulties the Russian revolution ran into because of its isolation, and because of the backward state of its economy, would have been gradually attenuated by the development of the world revolution. It’s only on the international scale that there can be a socialist development of society and of each country. It remains the case that even on an international scale, the fundamental problem resides not in expropriation, but in the basic principle of production.
Not only in the backward countries, but even where capitalism has reached its highest state of development, private property will subsist for a certain period and in certain sectors of production, and it will only be completely absorbed slowly and gradually.
However the danger of a return to capitalism will not come mainly from this sector, because a society in evolution towards socialism will not be able to return towards a primitive stage of capitalism, one which capitalism itself has left behind.
The real danger of a return to capitalism will come essentially from the statified sector: All the more so because here capitalism attains an impersonal, almost ethereal form. Statification can serve to camouflage, for a considerable period, a process opposed to socialism.
The proletariat will only overcome this danger to the extent that it rejects the identification between expropriation and socialism, to the extent that it is able to distinguish statification with a ‘socialist’ adjective from the actual socialist principle of production.
The Russian experience teaches us and reminds us that it’s not the capitalists who make capitalism, but the reverse: it’s capitalism which engenders capitalists. Capitalists can’t live outside of capitalism but the reverse isn’t true.
The capitalist principle of production can continue to exist after the juridical, even the material disappearance of capitalists as the beneficiaries of surplus value. In this case, surplus value, just as under private capitalism, is reinvested in the production process in order to extract a greater mass of surplus value.
Before long, the existence of surplus value gives rise to men who form the class that appropriates surplus value. The function creates the organ. Whether they are parasites, bureaucrats, or technicians who participate in production, whether surplus value is redistributed in a direct manner, or indirectly through the intervention of the state, in the form of high salaries or various types of privileges (as is the case in Russia), this changes nothing about the fact that we’re dealing with the rise of a new capitalist class.
The central element in capitalist production is the difference between the value of labour power, determined by necessary labour time, and that labour power which reproduces more than its own value. This is expressed in the difference between the labour time necessary for the worker to reproduce his own subsistence, and for which he’s paid, and the extra labour time for which he isn’t paid and which constitutes the surplus value taken by the capitalist. The distinction between socialist production and capitalist production lies in the relationship between paid labour time and unpaid labour time.
Every society needs an economic reserve fund in order to ensure the continuation and enlargement of production. This fund is drawn from an indispensable amount of surplus labour. At the same time a quantity of surplus labour is required to meet the needs of the unproductive members of society.
Capitalist society is tending to destroy the enormous mass of accumulated labour drawn from the ferocious exploitation of the proletariat. In the aftermath of the revolution, the victorious proletariat will be faced with ruins and with a catastrophic economic situation, inherited from capitalist society. It will have to reconstruct an economic reserve fund.
This means that, at the beginning, the amount of surplus labour the proletariat has to perform will be as great as it was under capitalism. Thus the socialist economic principle will not, in its immediate application, be able to be measured quantitatively in the relation between paid and unpaid labour. Only the trajectory, the tendency towards altering this relationship can serve as an indication of which way the economy is going, as a barometer of the class nature of production.
The proletariat and its class party will thus have to be extremely vigilant. The greatest industrial conquests (even where the part going to the workers is greater in absolute terms, but less in relative terms) can easily involve a return to the capitalist principle of production.
All the subtle arguments about private capitalism disappearing through the nationalisation of the means of production can’t hide this reality.
Refusing to be misled by this sophistry, which aims at perpetuating the exploitation of the workers, the proletariat and its party will immediately have to embark upon an implacable struggle to halt any tendency towards a return to capitalism, and to impose by all the means available an economic policy that leads in the direction of socialism.
In conclusion, we will cite the following passage from Marx to illustrate and summarise our thinking: “The great difference between the capitalist principle of production and the socialist principle is this: with the first the workers confront the means of production as capital, and can only set it to work to increase the surplus product and the surplus value in the interests of their exploiters. With the second, instead of being occupied by these means of production, they use them to produce wealth in their own interests.” (Source unknown in English).
[1] [7] Among the first to hold this theory, we should mention Albert Treint, who in 1932 published two documents with the overall title of The Russian Enigma, and who, on this position, broke with the group known as the Groupe de Bagnolet. Albert Treint, a former general secretary of the PCF, and a former leader of the left opposition group L’Unite Leniniste in 1927, and of Redressement Communiste from 1928 to 1931, went through an evolution after breaking with the Groupe de Bagnolet which, like so many others, took him to the Socialist Party in 1935, and into the Resistance during the war. In 1945, he was not only reintegrated into the army with a rank of captain, but also became the commandant of a battalion occupying Germany.
[2] [8] It should be noted that the councilists of the Dutch left, and Pannekoek in particular, agreed with the broad lines of this brilliant analysis of a third alternative (see the correspondence between Chaulieu and Pannekoek in Socialisme ou Barbarie)..
[3] [9] In 1945, with the ad hoc constitution of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy, the precipitous dissolution of the Fraction, the arrival of Bordiga with his theories of the ‘invariance’ of marxism, of the ‘double revolution’, of ‘support for national liberation’, of the distinction between ‘geographical areas’, of proclaiming US imperialism to be ‘enemy number one’, this new party went through a clear regression on the question of the class nature of the Stalinist regime, involving a denial of the notion of decadence and of its political expression: state capitalism.
The polemic which we continue in this publication isn't an academic debate about history. The proletariat's only weapons are its organizational capacity and its consciousness. This consciousness is historic, because it's an instrument of and for the future, but also because it feeds on the past experience of two centuries of proletarian struggles. Here, it's a question of transforming for the present and the future the terrible experience of revolutionaries in the years that preceded and followed the Second World War, in particular of knowing how and within what conditions the revolutionary groups can become real political parties of the proletariat. But to do this, it's necessary to put some historical facts in their true light and to fight the falsifications which, unfortunately were developed, even among the revolutionary milieu.
In Part 1[1] we showed how, in the crucial years between 1935 and 1937, the Fraction of the Italian Left abroad paid the price of a terrible political isolation to keep unbroken the red thread of marxist continuity as all the other left currents sank into democratic anti-fascism, including the most important amongst them: the Trotskyists[2]. This dramatic historic demarcation laid the political and programmatic foundations which remain today the basis for the forces of the international communist left. We have also shown that for the comrades of BC (Battaglia Comunista, the organ of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista), all this is valid only up to a certain point, since for them the central question in 1935 was to respond to the passage of the old parties into the counter-revolutionary camp with the transformation of the Fraction into a new Communist Party. This position, which in 1935 was defended by an activist minority (who split from the communist left the following year to take part in the "anti-fascist" war in Spain), was rejected by the majority of the Fraction. They remained faithful to what had always been the Left's position: that the Fraction could only be transformed into a new Party with the renewal of the class struggle. According to the comrades of Battaglia, the majority which defended this supposedly incorrect "wait and see" position in1935 had abandoned it in 1936, only to return to it in 1937 with disastrous consequences.
In particular, the majority's most prestigious spokesman, Vercesi, "settled the controversy in 1936 between the "wait-and-see" Bianco and the pro-party Piero-Tito in favor of the latter: 'we have to consider that in the present period, although we do not have and cannot yet have any influence on the masses, we are confronted by the need to act no longer as a fraction of a party which has betrayed, but as a party in miniature' (Bilan, no. 28). In practice, in this phase, Vercesi appears closer to a more dialectical vision, whereby the treason of the centrist parties should be answered by the creation of new parties, not to guide the masses (who were not ready to follow anyway) towards the seizure of power by sheer willpower, (...) but to represent the broken class continuity, to fill the political void which had appeared, and to give the class once again that political reference point which is indispensable even in periods of reflux, and which would, even on a tiny scale, be capable of growing with events, rather than waiting for them to bring the messiah with them. But in 1937, he went back on these positions, and in his 'report on the international situation' once again put forward the fractions as the only possible political expression for the moment, implicitly renouncing any transformation at all. ( ... ) Quite apart from Vercesi's individual chopping and changing, when war broke out the Fraction to all intents and purposes ceased to function. This meant an end to all the publications (internal bulletins, Prometeo, Bilan, and Octobre), and a decline in, if not an end to contacts between the French and Belgian sections. In 1945, the Fraction broke up, without having resolved in practice one of the most important problems which had led to its creation at Pantin in 1928. The Party was born nonetheless, in 1942 under the impulse of comrades who had remained in Italy (Partito Comunista Internazionalista). At the end of the war, this party was joined by many of the elements of the dissolved Fraction."[3].
As usual, the comrades of BC have rewritten history to suit themselves. Firstly, Vercesi was not the spokesman of the "wait-and-see" (as Battaglia calls it) majority; he was trying to find a compromise between two positions which surfaced, though ambiguously, at the end of the1935 Congress. Early in 1936, Vercesi once again made use of an expression which did in fact contain the ambiguity that the majority fought against, and which is quoted in the above extracts. True, the exact quote speaks of "the need to act no longer as a fraction of a party which has betrayed, but - if we can put it like this - as a party in miniature". But even in this conditional form, which the comrades of Battaglia have rather dishonestly removed, the expression remains full of ambiguity, when it tries to present the Fraction as a party with a small number of militants, when in fact it is a form of organization specific to phases of the class struggle when the existence of a party big or small is impossible. The real spokesmen for the majority had every reason to protest at these contradictory formulations which introduced on the sly the idea that it would have been possible to move towards acting as a party, when the preconditions were absolutely non-existent. It is no accident that an article by Bianco (in Bilan no.28) against Vercesi's, was titled "A little clarity, please!". And indeed, this clarity as to the fact that current conditions only made possible the existence of a Fraction was reestablished, though not in 1937 as Battaglia's article would have it. It was events in Spain that brought matters to a head, when the minority cut loose definitively and sank into anti-fascism. This clarified in practice what talk about "putting an end to 'wait and-see-ism'" leads to. Faced with this upset, Vercesi came to his senses, and for the moment (but alas, only for the moment) he gave up his ideas about "new phases". By standing full-square on its positions during the crucial period from July '36 to May '37 (massacre of the of workers in Barcelona), the Fraction was able to lay the foundations for today's International Communist Left, though only at the price of a total isolation from a political milieu completely in the grip of democratic decomposition. This terrible pressure could not help leaving its mark within the Italian, and in the new Belgian Fractions. A few comrades began to put forward the idea that the very fact that war was approaching brought the moment of proletarian counter-attack nearer, and that to be ready for these future reactions, it was necessary to begin a "different" activity. Towards the end of 1937, Vercesi began to theorize the idea that rather than a World War, there would be a multitude of "local wars" designed as "preventive massacres" against the proletarian threat sprung from who knew where. To prepare for these convulsions, it was necessary to "do more", and suddenly there reappeared, though in other terms, the idea that the Fraction should act - "if we can put it like this" - as a miniature party. To have the "activity" of a party, in September 1937 the Fractions embarked on an absurd project of collecting funds for the victims of the war in Spain, in order to compete at the level of "mass" work with the Social-Stalinist organisms such as "Secours Rouge" ("Red Help"), by descending to the same level. While in December 1936, Bilan no.38 reprinted the 1933 proposal for an International Information Bureau, noting bitterly that it remained impossible even to get this minimum proposal accepted, in September 1937, Vercesi declared in Bilan no.43 that a mere Information Bureau would henceforth be "irrelevant, and that we must enter another phase of our work" by forming an International Bureau of left fractions. In itself, the formation of a coordinating body for the only two existing fractions was entirely correct. The problem was, that instead of coordinating the activity of clarification and of training new militants, which was the only work possible for the fractions under the conditions of the time, this Bureau was more and more thought of as an organ which should be ready when the class struggle recovered, in order to coordinate "the construction of new parties and the new International". In January 1938, still putting the cart before the horse, the publication of Bilan was stopped, and replaced by a review whose name alone - Octobre - anticipated new revolutionary convulsions which were nowhere to be seen, and which it was intended should be published in French, English, and German! The result of this obsession with "acting like a miniature party" could have been foreseen: the review which was supposed to be published in three languages did not even appear regularly in French, the Bureau virtually stopped functioning, and - far worse - demoralization and resignations spread amongst militants in a state of utter confusion.
The outbreak of war in August 1939 completed the collapse, which was made still worse by the switch to clandestinity, the assassination of some of the best militants, and the arrest of many others; the fractions were thus in fact completely disorganized. Things were made still worse by the fact that with the outbreak of war Vercesi, who till then had maintained that the work of the Fraction was useless, and that it was necessary to work as a "mini-party" began to put forward the theory that since there was no reaction from the proletariat, it had "ceased to exist socially" and that in these conditions the work of the Fraction no longer served any purpose.
The constantly recurring theme here is the calling into question of the fraction as the organ of revolutionary activity in historically unfavorable periods. From all this, BC tries to draw the conclusion that those who continued to work as a fraction during the war learnt nothing from it. In reality, those who - like Vercesi - learnt nothing during the war, were precisely those who refused to work as a fraction. Contrary to what Battaglia would like us to believe, the fraction's activity did not come to a halt. On the initiative of its section in Marseilles, which had been at the forefront of the opposition to Vercesi, the fraction was reorganized at the beginning of 1940, held annual underground conferences, reestablished sections in Lyon, Toulouse, and Paris, and renewed contact with comrades who had remained in Belgium. Despite unimaginable material difficulties, a discussion bulletin was once again published regularly, as a tool for training militants, and for circulating the Executive Commission's orientation texts, which served as a basis for discussion with other groups, when they entered into contact. This underground work led to the formation (between 1942 and 1944) of a new French fraction, and to closer contact with a number of German and Austrian communists who had broken with a Trotskyist movement that had by then passed into the counter-revolutionary camp.
We do not understand how all this could have been done, in incredibly difficult conditions, by militants who according to Battaglia took "cosy" refuge in their "theorizations", waiting for the "messianic" arrival of the masses, capable at last of recognizing them as the rightful leadership.
Here we come to the nub of the question. Battaglia considers the fraction as an organ (the term "cultural circle" would be more apt) which limits itself, as long as the proletariat is not on the offensive, to theoretical studies, since there is no point in intervening in the class. On the contrary, it is the fraction that makes it possible to maintain the continuity of communist intervention in the class, even in the blackest periods when that intervention encounters no immediate echo. This is demonstrated by the whole history of the Left Communist fractions. As well as Bilan, its theoretical review, the Italian Fraction also published a newspaper in Italian, Prometeo, with a bigger circulation in France than the paper of those past-masters of activism, the French Trotskyists. The fraction's militants were so well-known for their commitment to the class struggle, that the unions' national leaderships were obliged to intervene directly and brutally to dislodge them from the rank-and-file organizations which defended them. These comrades distributed their press despite being hunted down both by the police and the patriotic unions. They were beaten up, and came back to hand out leaflets with a revolver stuck in the belt, ready to be shot down where they stood rather than abandon their intervention in the class. A worker like Piccino was taken by the Stalinists while selling the press, and handed over to the French police; he was beaten up so badly that he remained crippled for life, but nonetheless continued to sell the press. In a letter written in April 29, Togliatti asked for help from Stalin's repressive apparatus to get rid of the "Bordigist debris", admitting that their dedication was causing him more than a few headaches wherever Italian workers were to be found. From the class enemy, this is the highest form of recognition.
It requires extraordinary nerve to present as slippered theoreticians all those militants who were liquidated in the concentration camps, or arrested by the Gestapo as they secretly crossed the border to keep up contacts with comrades in Belgium, who took part in illegal strikes while on the run from the police and without proper papers, or who only escaped from the Stalinist killers waiting for them outside the factory gate by climbing the wall to get out. Battaglia writes that the comrades in exile should have fought for the transformation of imperialist war into civil war, and that "more attention should have been paid to Lenin's teaching", especially by "comrades who had grown up in the Leninist tradition". But what else were the comrades of the French and Italian fractions doing when they distributed leaflets calling' for revolutionary defeatism, written in French and German, in German troop trains, or when they risked their lives in the midst of an orgy of patriotism, to call on workers to desert the partisans?
Clearly, it is completely wrong to write that "the sole possibility of organizing the slightest opposition to imperialism's attempts to solve its contradictions through war, lay in the formation of new parties". If the transformation into a civil war did not take place, this was not due to any "lack of opposition" from the fractions, but to the fact that world capitalism had succeeded in breaking the first attempts in this direction, first in Italy and then in Germany, so pushing back any revolutionary perspective. According to Battaglia, if the fraction had transformed itself into a party despite everything, this would of changed things. But how? And in what direction?
To answer this question, let us consider the activity of the Internationalist Communist Party founded in Italy at the end of 1942 by comrades grouped around Onorato Damen. Unlike the fraction, which broke all its links with the PCI (Italian CP) in 1928, this comrade remained in the party until the mid-30's; in 1933, he was one of the leaders of the Civitavecchia communist prisoners revolt. In the article quoted above, Battaglia Comunista (where Damen was one of the leading militants until his death) waxes ironic on the call made by the 1935 Congress of the Fraction for militants to quit the communist parties which by then had gone over to the counter-revolution. BC wonders: if the party could not be transformed because at the time the masses remained deaf to the fraction, then who on earth could this appeal be addressed to? "We can't help wondering whether this call was not made in the hope that there would be no answer forthcoming from the proletariat, so as not to create any problems which would call into question the presenter's abstract schema". Battaglia's irony is particularly ill-chosen: this call was in fact addressed to comrades, like Damen, who had remained in the CPs in the hope of being able to defend class positions there, and would have concerned Damen himself, had the Stalinists not already solved the problem by expelling him from the party at the end of 1934. Or does Battaglia think that Bilan was wrong to call on these comrades to leave the CP's which had gone over to the bourgeoisie, and to join the fraction, which was the only place where the battle to reconstitute the class party still continued?
In fact, according to Battaglia, by 1935 it was clear for any marxist that the definitive departure from the PCI automatically implied the formation of a new party. But if this was so clear, why did Damen not form a new party in 1935? Why did he set himself to the patient, underground, work of selecting and training militants, just as the Fraction was doing in exile? If it is true that "the only possibility of organizing any kind of opposition" to the war lay in the formation of new parties, then why was this party not created in 1939, when in reality it waited until 1942, after three and a half years of imperialist massacre? According to BC's analyses, these seven lost years should be regarded as either madness or treason. For us, on the contrary, this is the best possible proof that it is not enough, to form a new party, that the old should have gone over to the enemy.
If the PClnt (Partito Comunista Internazionalista) as created at the end of 1942, then this was due to the development of a strong tendency towards the renewal of the class struggle against fascism and the imperialist war; in a few months, this led to the strikes of March 1943, the collapse of fascism, and Italian bourgeoisie suing for a separate peace. Although the world bourgeoisie rapidly succeeded in derailing this class reaction of the Italian proletariat, it nonetheless remains true that it was on this basis that the comrades in Italy considered that the time had come to form a new party. It is no accident that the comrades in exile came, quite independently, to the same conclusion, as soon as the heard the news of the March 1943 strikes: in August, the Fraction's Conference declared open "the phase of the fraction's return to Italy and its transformation into a party". This organized return, however, remained impossible, partly due to virtually insurmountable material difficulties (remember that it was only in 1945 that the PClnt founded in Italy was able to make its existence known abroad); these difficulties were made worse by the assassination and arrest of many comrades.
But the fundamental weakness was political: the minority of the Italian Fraction around Vercesi, along with the Belgian Fraction, denied any class nature in the 1943 strikes, and opposed any organized activity on the grounds that it was "voluntarist". The 1944 annual conference condemned the positions of the Vercesi tendency, and at the beginning of 1945 Vercesi himself was expelled from the Fraction for his participation in the Brussels "Anti-fascist Coalition Committee". But this long struggle had helped to reduce the forces available for an organized return to Italy, and in the end it was replaced by a policy of individual return by many militants; once in Italy, they discovered the party's existence and entered it on an individual basis. This policy was bitterly criticized by a part of the Fraction, and especially by the Fraction in France, which was increasingly developing underground work against the war, and which criticized the Italian Fraction's lack of determination to make an organized return to Italy. Then in spring 1945, came the bombshell: the news that there had been for years a party in Italy, already with "thousands of members", and including such comrades as Damen and Bord iga, The majority of the Fraction was overwhelmed with enthusiasm, and in a hurried conference in May 1945, decided its own dissolution and that its militants should join a party whose political positions they knew nothing about. When the French Fraction supported the minority that opposed this political suicide, the majority of the conference broke off all organizational links with the French group, taking as a pretext the revolutionary defeatist work that the French comrades had carried out with German and Austrian internationalists who did not belong to any of the Fractions of the Communist Left.
This decision to dissolve the Fraction had extremely serious consequences for the later development of the Communist Left. The Fraction was the sole depository of the fundamental political lessons which had been drawn during the selection of communist forces carried out between 1935 and 1937; it had a historical duty to ensure that new party was founded on the basis of these lessons, which we summed up in the previous article:
1) the party must be formed by individual adherence to the programmatic positions of the Left, set out by the Fractions, and excluding any integration of groups of comrades situated half'-way between the Left and Trotskyism;
2) the party's revolutionary defeatism must be guaranteed by the head-on denunciation of any form of "partisan militia" designed to enroll the workers in the war, such as the Spanish "workers' militias" in 1936.
Since the Fraction was unable to fulfill this function, due to its dissolution in 1945 and the absence of any organized return to Italy, we must now see whether the Party in Italy had been able to form on these bases. And this is not to determine how we should appreciate this party in particular, but to understand whether or not the fraction's work is a vital precondition for the reconstitution of the class party.
****
Let us start with the party's political positions and methods of recruitment. The PCInt's first Congress (28th December 1945 - 1st January 1946) held after the integration of the militants from the Fraction, declared that the PCInt had been founded in 1942, "on the basis of precisely this political tradition"[4] represented by the Fraction in exile from 1927 onwards. The first groups referred to "a platform constituted by a brief document which fixed the directives for the party to follow, and which for the most part it still follows today". It is hard to say how far this document was based on the Fraction's positions for the simple reason that as far as we know Battaglia has always declined to publish it (despite its "brevity"!), while in BC's 1974 pamphlet on the PClnt's Platforms its existence is not even mentioned. What a strange fate for the Party's founding document ... Consequently, we are obliged to refer to the Platform drawn up by Bordiga in 1945 and approved by the first Congress early in 1946.
Without analyzing this text in detail, suffice it to say that it allows the possibility of participating in elections (a position already rejected by the Left at the time of the pre-1914 abstentionist fraction of the Italian Socialist Party, led by Bordiga), that it takes "the founding texts of the Moscow International" as its theoretical basis (so rejecting the Fraction's critique of these texts from 1927 onwards), that there is no real denunciation of national liberation struggles (a position established by the Left in 1935), and that to crown it all, it exalts the workers' enrollment in the partisans' armed gangs as a "historical event of the first order". The Platform is also unacceptable on other questions (on the trade unions, in the first place), but we have considered here only those points where the Platform is outside the class frontiers already drawn up thanks to the programmatic elaboration of the Communist Left.
The party's methods of recruitment were in harmony with this ideological hodge-podge; or rather, the ideological hodge-podge was the inevitable result of the methods of recruitment, based on the absorption of groups of comrades holding the most divers, if not wholly contradictory positions. In the end, the Central Committee contained the first comrades of 1942, the leaders of the Fraction which had expelled Vercesi in 1944, and Vercesi himself, who was admitted at the same time as the members of the minority expelled in 1936 for having taken part in the anti-fascist war in Spain. There were even admitted groups like the "Fraction of left communists and socialists" from the south, which in 1944 still believed in the possibility of "correcting" first the Stalinist party, and even the Socialist Party (!) along with it. By contrast, Amadeo Bordiga, the Platform's author and main theoretician, was not even a member (he seems to have joined only in 1949).
On the second question that had been settled during the years from 1935-37 - the danger represented by the partisan militias - the PCInt's degeneration coincided with its numerical growth at the expense of principles. In 1943, the PCInt courageously and unequivocally denounced the imperialist role of the partisan movement. By 1944, it was already obliged to make concessions to illusions on the "democratic" war: "The communist elements believe sincerely in the necessity of the struggle against Nazism and fascism and think that once this obstacle is demolished, they will be able to march towards the conquest of power, destroying capitalism" (Prometeo, no.15, August 1944).
In 1945, the circle was completed with the participation of whole federations (as in Turin) in the patriotic insurrection of 25th April, and the adoption of a Platform which defined the partisan movement as "a tendency for local proletarian groups to organize and arm in order to take and keep control in local situations", only deploring these movements' "inadequate political orientation" (!). This is the same as the position on the Spanish Civil War defended by the minority in 1936, and which led to their expulsion from the Communist Left.
It is clear enough that the PCInt's overall positions did not match the level of clarification already reached by the Fraction, and considered as the unalterable bases for the formation of the new party. The comrades of Battaglia, by contrast, consider the party "formed in late 1942" as the high point of political clarity existing at the time. How do they reconcile this statement with the existence of the kind of confusions and ambiguities which we have only touched on here? Quite simply: by denying that these confusions were those of the party, and attributing them solely to Bordiga's followers, who were to leave the PCInt in 1952 to found Programa Comunista. We have already answered this in the International Review: "in other words: we and they formed the party together: what was good was us, what was bad was them. Even admitting that this were true, it remains a fact that the "bad" was a fundamental and unitary element in the party's formation, and that nobody had anything to say about this".
We now aim to show that these weaknesses were those of the party as a whole, and not just of a particular fraction which happened to be passing through. BC has always denied that the Party was open to anyone who was kind enough to join. But according to BC themselves, the presence of Vercesi on the Central Committee was explained by the fact that the latter "considered it his duty to join the Party"[5]. Is this a political party or a golf club? (though even in a golf club, you have to be accepted by the other members in order to join ... ). Moreover, it should be remembered that Vercesi "considered it his duty to join" the PCInt's Central Committee directly, thus becoming one of its main leaders. BC informs us that although Vercesi was on the CC, the Party was not responsible for what he said or did: "The positions expressed by comrade Perrone [ie Vercesi] at the Turin Conference (1946) ( ... ) were the free expressions of a wholly personal experience and a whimsical political perspective, which it is inadmissible to take as reference points in criticizing the formation of the PCInt"[6]. Well said. What a pity that when we read the proceedings of this first National Conference of the PCInt, we find (on page 13) that these "free expressions" of "political whimsy" were nothing other than the report on "The Party and international problems", presented to the Conference by Vercesi on behalf of the Central Committee. But the surprises don't end here, for when we come to page 16, we find that it is none other than Damen himself who gives the conclusion to Vercesi's report, and declares that at this point, "there are no disagreements, just different viewpoints which allow problems to be clarified organically". If Damen thought that Vercesi's report veered on political whimsy, why did he deny that there was any disagreement? Perhaps because he found an unprincipled alliance with Vercesi useful at the time?
Let us pass now directly to the Platform, written by Bordiga in 1945. Battaglia republished it in 1974, along with a proposed program distributed by the Damen group in 1944, with an introduction affirming that the 1944 proposal is much clearer than the 1945 Platform. This is certainly true on some points (the evaluation of the Russian Revolution, for example). On others, it makes much greater concessions than the 1945 document. On the matter of tactics in particular, it says: "our party, which does not under-estimate the influence of the other mass parties, defends the 'united front'". However, if we return to the Turin Conference, we find Lecci's (Tullio) report on the work of the Fraction in exile, and its demarcation from the Trotskyists: "this demarcation presupposed in the first place the liquidation of the tactic of the united front of political blocs" (Proceedings, page 8). Certain key points of the 1944 proposal were thus already considered by the 1946 Conference as incompatible with the positions of the Communist Left. Let us continue now with a look at the 1974 Introduction to the 1945 Platform:
"In 1945, the Central Committee received a proposal for a political Platform from comrade Bordiga, who, we should emphasize, was not a member of the Party at the time. The document, whose acceptance was demanded in the terms of an ultimatum, was recognized as being incompatible with the firm positions adopted by the Party on the most important problems, and despite some modifications the document was always considered as a contribution to the debate, and not as a de facto Platform ( ... ) As we have seen, the Central Committee could only accept the document as a wholly personal contribution to the debate at a future Congress; this was put off until 1948, and was to highlight very different positions (see the Proceedings of the Florence Congress)"[7]. This is how the comrades of Battaglia presented events in 1974. To see whether they correspond to reality, let us return to the January 1946 Conference, which was to have taken a position on the "acceptance demanded in the terms of an ultimatum" of Bordiga's Platform. On page 17 of the Proceedings, we read: "At the end of the debate, since no substantial disagreements had appeared, the 'Platform of the Party' was accepted, and the discussion on the 'Proposal for a Program', and on other documents currently being drawn up will be taken up at the next Congress". As we can see, what happened is exactly the opposite of what Battaglia is saying today: at the 1946 Conference, the comrades of Battaglia themselves voted unanimously to accept Bordiga's Platform, which henceforth became the official basis for joining the party (and which was published externally as such). The French delegates also joined the Party at the Conference on the basis of the recognition of the Platform's correctness (page 6), and the resolution on the formation of an International Bureau of the Communist Left begins in these terms: "the Central Committee recognizes that the Platform of the Internationalist Communist Party is the only document which gives a marxist answer to the problems encountered with the defeat of the Russian Revolution and with the Second World War, and affirms that it is the basis of this document and the heritage of the Italian Left that the International Bureau of the Communist Left can and must be constituted".
To conclude, let us say simply that there was indeed a document considered simply as a contribution to the debate, and whose discussion was put off to the following Congress; only, it was not Bordiga's Platform but... the proposed Program drawn up in 1944 by the Damen group, and which Battaglia is today passing off as the PCInt's de facto Platform during the 1940's. No words are hard enough to condemn the utter falsification of history carried out all these years by the comrades of Battaglia. They descend to the level of the Stalinist falsification of the history of the Bolshevik Party, which wiped out the names of Lenin's executed comrades, or attributed Stalin's mistakes to Trotsky. To try to give things an air of coherence, Battaglia has made its own Platform disappear from the Party's history, and in other documents[8] has not hesitated to attribute to "the ICC's ancestors", the comrades of the French Communist Left, the acrobatics of Vercesi, with whom their own "ancestors" made an opportunist alliance in 1945 when they admitted him onto the Party's Central Committee. We are well aware that this is a very harsh judgment. Nonetheless, it is based on the PCInt's own official documents, such as the Proceedings of the January 1946 Conference, which Battaglia has taken care to keep hidden, whereas it has republished the Proceedings of the 1948 Congress, since by then the opportunist alliance with Vercesi had been broken. We submit our conclusions, and our judgment, to the critique of the comrades of the international movement of the Communist Left. If the documents we have cited are false, let Battaglia say so and prove it. Otherwise, it will be clear, once again, who are the falsifiers.
****
At all events, one problem remains to be cleared up: how is it possible that comrades of the caliber of Onorato Damen, who had held high the flame of internationalism during the blackest days of our class' history, should lower themselves to such a falsification of this period of their own history? How is it possible that the comrades of Programa Comunista (who parted company with Battaglia Comunista in 1952) should come to the point of making all their history from 1926 to 1952 vanish into thin air? From what we have seen in this article, the answer is clear: in the crucial years surrounding World War II, neither were fundamentally capable of ensuring the historical continuity of the Left Fractions, which is the only possible basis of the Party of tomorrow. Certainly, we cannot reproach them for thinking in 1943 that the conditions were ripe for the Party's rebirth, since even the Fractions in exile shared this illusion on the basis of the beginnings of a proletarian response to the war contained in the 1943 strikes in Italy. But by January 1946 and the Turin Congress, it was clear that capitalism had succeeded in breaking the proletarian response, and in transforming it into a moment in the imperialist war, through the workers' enrollment in the partisan gangs. In this situation, it was necessary to recognize that the preconditions for the Party's formation were absolutely nonexistent, and to devote the revolutionary forces to the work of a fraction: drawing up a balance sheet of events, and training new militants on this basis. Neither group was capable of undertaking this task, and this explains their contortions since then. The Damen tendency began to theorize the idea that the formation of the party has nothing to do with the renewal of the class struggle, so denying their own experience in 1943. The Vercesi tendency (close to Bordiga) began to move towards something which was not yet the Party, but which was no longer the Fraction (the old "miniature party" of 1936 was recycled as "enlarged fraction" of 1948), anticipating all Programa Comunista's future balancing acts between the "historic" and the "formal" party. Only the French Communist Left (Internationalisme), which today's ICC recognizes as its predecessors, was able to recognize openly the mistakes it had made in 1943 when it thought the conditions for the Party's formation existed, and to devote itself to the work of drawing up a historical balance-sheet which the times demanded. Whatever its limitations, this work remains the indispensable basis for the work of reconstituting the Party tomorrow.
In a forthcoming article, we will analyze what this contribution represents.
Beyle
[1] International Review no 59, 4th Quarter 1989.
[2] See the ICC pamphlet La Gauche Communiste d' Italie (shortly to be published in English), on the relationship between the Italian Left and the International Left Opposition.
[3] "Frazione-Partito nell ‘esperienza della Sinistra Italiana', Prometeo no 2, March 1929.
[4] "Proceedings of the first national conference of the Internationalist Communist Party of Italy", Publications de la Gauche Communiste Internationale, 1946.
[5] "Letter from Battaglia Comunista to the ICC", published together with our reply, in International Review no 8, December 1976.
[6] Prometeo, no 18, 1972.
[7] "Documents of the Italian Left", Ed. Prometeo, January 1974.
[8] Battaglia Comunista no 3, February 1983; the article has been republished in the International Review no 34, 3rd Quarter 1983, without reply.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/collapse-eastern-bloc
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/international-bureau-revolutionary-party
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/polemic
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/062/the-russian-experience#_ftn1
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/062/the-russian-experience#_ftn2
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/062/the-russian-experience#_ftn3
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/062/the-russian-experience#_ftnref1
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/062/the-russian-experience#_ftnref2
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/062/the-russian-experience#_ftnref3
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1996/state-capitalism-after-world-war-ii
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/27/dictatorship-proletariat
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/french-communist-left
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/16/state-capitalism
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/2042/party-and-fraction-marxist-tradition
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/battaglia-comunista
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2043/ottorino-perrone-vercesi