Faced with the war that is ravaging the Middle East, and with the recent conflict which has bathed Lebanon and Israel in blood, the position of revolutionaries must be completely unambiguous. This is why we fully support the rare internationalist and revolutionary voices that are raised in this region, such as the Enternasyonalist Komunist Sol group in Turkey . We have published this group’s position statement on the situation in the Lebanon and Palestine in various organs of our territorial press. In it they firmly reject any support for the cliques and factions of the rival bourgeoisies that are fighting it out and whose immediate victims are millions of proletarians, be they Palestinian, Jewish, Shi'ite, Kurdish, Druze or whatever. It states quite correctly that “imperialism is the natural policy carried out by any national state or any organisation that functions as a national state.” It also denounces the fact that “in Turkey, as in the rest of the world, most leftists gave total support to the PLO and Hamas. In the most recent conflict they have all said with one voice ‘we are all Hezbollah’. By following this logic, which holds that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’, they fully supported this violent organisation which has pushed the working class into a disastrous nationalist war. The support that the leftists give to nationalism shows us why they do not have much to say that differs from what is said by the MPH (national movement party – the fascist grey wolves) (…) The war between the Hezbollah and Israel and the war in Palestine are both inter-imperialist wars and the various camps involved use nationalism to drag the working class of their region into their camp. The more that workers are sucked into nationalism, the more they lose their ability to act as a class. That is why Israel, Hezbollah, the PLO and Hamas should not be supported in any circumstances.” This shows that the proletarian perspective lives and is still affirmed. This can be seen not only through the development of working class struggles throughout the world: in Europe, the United States, Latin America, India and Bangladesh but also through the appearance in various countries of small groups and politicised elements trying to defend internationalist positions. Such positions are the hallmark of proletarian politics.
The war in the Lebanon last summer represented a new stage covering the whole of the Middle East in blood and flame and pushing the planet further into the grip of increasingly uncontrollable chaos. All the imperialist powers within the so-called “international community”, from the biggest to the smallest, have contributed to this war. 7,000 aerial attacks on Lebanese territory alone, not to mention the innumerable rocket strikes on northern Israel, more than 1,200 deaths in Lebanon and Israel (300 of which were children under 12 years old), nearly 5,000 wounded, a million civilians who had to flee from the bombs or combat zones. Others, too poor to flee, dug themselves in as best they could, terror in their hearts… Districts and villages have been reduced to ruins; hospitals are overworked and full to bursting point. This is the balance sheet of a month of war in Lebanon and Israel following the Tsahal offensive to reduce Hezbollah’s powerful hold and in response to one of the numerous murderous attacks of Islamic militia beyond the Israeli-Lebanese border. The destruction is estimated at 6 billion euros, not counting the military cost of the war itself.
Brutally and relentlessly, the Israeli state has thrown itself into a veritable scorched earth policy against the civilian population in the villages of South Lebanon. The latter have been carelessly chased off their land, out of their homes, starved to death. They have no drinking water and are exposed to the most terrible epidemics. There are also 90 bridges and countless communication routes that have been systematically cut (roads, motorways…), three power stations and thousands of homes have been destroyed. The pollution is overwhelming and the bombardments incessant. The Israeli government and its army have never stopped declaring that they want to “spare civilians” and a massacre like the one in Canaan was called a “regrettable accident”. This is reminiscent of the famous “collateral damage” during the wars in the Gulf and in the Balkans. However it is in the civilian population that the bulk of the victims are to be found: 90% of those killed!
As for Hezbollah, although their means are more limited and therefore less spectacular, they have carried out exactly the same murderous and bloody policy of random bombing. Its missiles fell on the civilian population and the towns in the north of Israel (75% of those killed were actually part of the Arab population that they pretend to protect).
Hamas' arrival in power in the Palestinian territories was itself an expression of the political impasse in the Middle East. The intransigence of the Israeli government contributed to this victory by “radicalising” a majority of the Palestinian population and the open splits between fractions of the Palestinian bourgeoisie, mainly between Fatah and Hamas prevented any solution through negotiation. In the face of this impasse, Israel’s reaction was one that is increasingly favoured by every state in today’s world: it leapt in headlong. In order to reassert its authority Israel launched an attack with the intention of blocking the growing influence in South Lebanon of Hezbollah, which is aided, financed and armed by the Iranian regime. The first pretext given by Israel for starting the war was that it was to liberate two Israeli soldiers taken prisoner by Hezbollah. Four months after they were taken, they are still prisonersShi'ite. The second, was the need to “neutralise” and disarm Hezbollah, whose incursions from South Lebanon are a permanent threat to Israeli security.
The war ended in a serioussetback for Israel, brutally exploding the myth of the invincibility and invulnerability of its army. Civilian and military members of the Israeli bourgeoisie blame the fact that the war was badly prepared. Hezbollah by contrast came out of the conflict strengthened and has gained new legitimacy in the eyes of the Arab populations because of its resistance. At the beginning Hezbollah, like Hamas, was just one of the innumerable Islamic militia formed against the state of Israel. It was formed at the time of the Israeli offensive in South Lebanon in 1982. Because of its Shi'ite component it prospered under the copious financial support of the Iranian ayatollahs and mullahs. Syria also made use of it, giving it important logistic support which enabled it to create a rear base when it was forced to withdraw from Lebanon in 2005. This band of blood-soaked killers has patiently created a network of recruiting sergeants under the cover of providing medical, health and social aid, helped by generous funds drawn from the oil revenue of the Iranian state. These funds also enable it to finance the repair of houses destroyed or damaged by bombs or rockets in order to enrol the civilian population into its ranks. According to some reports, this “shadowy army” includes children between 10 and 15 years old, who serve as cannon fodder in these bloody settlings of accounts.
At the moment Syria and Iran form the most homogenous bloc around Hamas and Hezbollah. Iran in particular clearly has ambitions to become the main imperialist power in the region. The possession of atomic weapons would guarantee it this role. This is understandably one of the big concerns of the American super power since the “Islamic republic” has, from its foundation in 1979, shown permanent hostility towards the United States.
So it was with the green light from the US that Israel launched its offensive against Lebanon. Buried up to its neck in the mire of the Iraq and Afghan wars and following the failure of its “peace plan” to solve the Palestinian question, the United States' strategy to establish a “Pax Americana” in the Middle East is a patent failure. In particular the American presence in Iraq over the last three years is directly responsible for a horrific civil war between rival factions, with 80-100 deaths per day among the civilian population. In this situation it was out of the question for the United States to intervene in person although their objective in the region is to attack those countries that they denounce as “terrorist” and the incarnation of the “axis of evil”. For them this means Syria and, above all Iran, which supports Hezbollah. The Israeli offensive, which was supposed to act as a warning to these two states, shows the perfect convergence of interests between the White House and the Israeli bourgeoisie. This is why Israel’s failure also means a new retreat for the United States and a continued weakening of American leadership.
A high point of cynicism and hypocrisy was reached by the UN, which during the month long war in the Lebanon never stopped proclaiming its “desire for peace”, while adding that it was “powerless”[1] [1]. This is a disgusting lie. This “thieves’ den” (to use Lenin's term for the UN’s predecessor, the League of Nations) is the swamp in which wallow the most monstrous crocodiles of the planet. The five permanent members of the Security Council are the foremost states that prey on the planet:
Other powers have also entered the lists, such as Italy which, in exchange for a larger contingent of UN forces, in February 2006 was given the supreme command of the UNIFIL in Lebanon. Only a few months after the withdrawal of Italian troops from Iraq, Romano Prodi, having harshly criticised the Berlusconi government's commitment there, offered the same number for Lebanon. This confirms the ambition of Italy to sit at the table of the big powers, even at the risk of getting its fingers burned again. All the powers are wallowing in war.
The Middle East gives a concentrated picture of the irrational nature of war today, in which every imperialism gets bogged down more and more trying to defend its own interests and, so doing, enlarges the zone of conflicts, which become bloodier and bloodier and involve more and more states. The extension of the regions of the world in which there are bloody conflicts is a demonstration of capitalism's inevitably war-like nature. War and militarism have become well and truly the permanent way of life of decadent capitalism in advanced decomposition. This is one of the essential characteristics of the tragic impasse of a system that has nothing to offer humanity except misery and death.
The guardian of “world order” has now itself become a powerful and active factor in the acceleration of chaos.
How is it possible that the world's foremost army, with the most up to date technology, the most powerful reconnaissance service, sophisticated armaments able to locate and reach precise targets thousands of kilometres away, has got entangled in such a mess? How is it possible that the United States, the most powerful country in the world, is led by a semi-moron surrounded by a pack of activists which hardly conforms to the traditional image of a responsible “great democracy” of the bourgeoisie? It is true that Bush Junior, described by the writer Norman Mailer as the “worst president in the history of the United States: ignorant, arrogant and completely stupid” is surrounded by a team of particularly “enlightened” “thinkers” who dictate his policy. These range from the vice-president Dick Cheney to the secretary of State for Defence Donald Rumsfeld and include his guru-manager Karl Rove and the “theoretician” Paul Wolfowitz. From the beginning of the 1990s Wolfowitz has been the most consistent spokesman for a “doctrine” which states clearly that “the essential political and military mission of America in the period following the Cold War will be to ensure that no rival super-power can emerge in Western Europe, Asia or in the territory of the ex-Soviet Union”. This “doctrine” was made public in March 1992, just after the collapse of the USSR and the re-unification of Germany and when the American bourgeoisie still had illusions in the success of its strategy. With this aim in mind, these same people stated a few years ago that in order to mobilise the nation and impose American democratic values upon the whole world and prevent imperialist rivalries, “a new Pearl Harbour was necessary”. We should remember that the Japanese attack on the American naval base in December 1941, which killed or injured 4,500 on the American side, enabled the United States to enter the war on the allied side because it tipped a public opinion which till then had hesitated to enter the war. The highest political authorities in America were aware of the attack plan and did not intervene. Since Cheney and company came to power, thanks to the victory of Bush Junior in 2000, they have been putting their planned policy into operation. The 11th September attacks served as the “new Pearl Harbour” and it was in the name of their new crusade against terrorism that they justified the invasion of Afghanistan and then of Iraq. At the same time, new and particularly expensive military programmes were set up and an unprecedented strengthening of police control over the population was brought in. The fact that the United States uses such leaders to play out the fate of the planet like so many sorcerers’ apprentices obeys the same logic of decadent capitalism in crisis as that which brought Hitler to power in Germany in a different period. It is not this or that individual at the head of the state that makes capitalism develop in a certain direction. On the contrary, it is this system's decay that brings this or that individual to power, to represent this development and putt it into action. This is a very clear expression of the historic impasse in which capitalism is foundering.
The result of this policy is catastrophic: 3,000 soldiers dead since the beginning of the war in Iraq three years ago (over 2,800 of these are American troops), 655,000 Iraqis killed between March 2003 and July 2006. In the meantime the murderous attacks and the confrontations between Shi'ite and Sunni factions have intensified. The 160,000 occupation troops that are on Iraqi soil under the high command of the United States, are incapable of “fulfilling their mission to maintain order” in a country that is on the brink of civil war. In the north the Shi'ite militia are trying to impose their control and increase their demonstrations of force. In the south the Sunni activists, who proudly proclaim their links with the Taliban and Al Qaeda, have just announced the formation of an “Islamic Republic”. In the centre, around Baghdad, the population is exposed to bands of looters and booby-trapped cars and if the American troops make any attempt to walk abroad they run the risk of running into an ambush.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have swallowed up colossal sums which increasingly swell both the budget deficit and the United States' enormous debt. The situation in Afghanistan is no less disastrous. The interminable hunt for Al Qaeda and the presence there of an occupation army has given credibility to the Taliban, who were ousted from power in 2002 but, being re-armed by Iran and more discretely by China, are now increasing their ambushes and attacks. The “terrorist devils”, as Bin Laden and the Taliban regime are now called, were both in former times the “creatures” the United States used to oppose the USSR in the period of the imperialist blocs and after the invasion of Afghanistan by Russian troops. Bin Laden is a former spy recruited by the CIA in 1979, who served in Istanbul as a financial mediator to traffic arms from Saudi Arabia and the United States to Afghan underground forces. From the beginning of the Russian intervention, he became quite “naturally” the mediator allowing the United States to finance the Afghan resistance. The Taliban were originally armed and financed by the United States and came to power with the full blessing of Uncle Sam.
It is also clear that the great crusade against terrorism has by no means managed to eradicate it but has, on the contrary, led to an increase in terrorist actions and kamikaze attacks in which the only aim is to create as many victims as possible. Today the White House remains impotent while the Iranian state cocks a snoot at it in the most humiliating way. This is encouraging fourth or fifth rate powers such as North Korea, which went ahead with a nuclear test on 8th October, becoming the 8th country possessing nuclear arms. This challenge endangers the balance of power in the whole of South East Asia and will in its turn encourage other aspiring powers to acquire nuclear weapons. It will also serve as a justification for the rapid re-militarization and re-armament of Japan and its orientation towards the production of nuclear weapons in order to confront its immediate neighbour. This “domino effect” of the rush towards militarism and of “every man for himself” is by no means an insignificant danger.
Nor should we neglect the appalling chaos that ravages the Gaza strip. Following the electoral victory of Hamas at the end of January, direct international aid was suspended and the Israeli government organised a blockade on the transfer of funds to the Palestinian Authority from taxes and customs duty. 165,000 PA employees have not been paid for 7 months. However their anger as well as that of the population, 70% of whom live below the poverty line and with an unemployment rate of 44%, is easily dispersed in the street confrontations which have taken place regularly between Hamas and Fatah militants since 1st October. One attempt after another to form a government of national unity has aborted. Even while it was withdrawing from South Lebanon, Tsahal besieged the zones bordering on Egypt on the edge of the Gaza Strip and again started missile bombardments of the town of Rafallah. The pretext was that it was hunting down Hamas activists. For those who manage to keep a job there are interminable controls. The population lives in a constant climate of terror and insecurity. Since 25th June, 300 deaths have been counted in this zone.
It is obvious that American policy is a fiasco. This is why the Bush administration is seriously challenged even by its own Republican camp. The ceremonies commemorating the 5th anniversary of 11th September occasioned a spate of heated criticisms of Bush reported in the American media. Five years ago the ICC was accused of having a Machiavellian vision of history when it put forward the hypothesis that the White House knew about the planned attacks and allowed them to take place in order to justify the military adventures that they were planning[2] [2]. Today an unbelievable number of books, documentaries and articles on the Internet not only cast doubt on the official version of 11th September but many of them also put forward much cruder theories and denounce it as a plot and a manoeuvre of the Bush team. According to the most recent opinion polls, within the population itself more than one third of Americans and almost a half of the New York population think that the attacks were manipulated and that 11th September was an “inside job”.
In addition, 60% of the American population think that the war in Iraq was a “bad thing”; a majority of them do not believe that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms or links with Al Qaeda and think that such claims were an excuse to justify an intervention in Iraq. Half a dozen recent books (including one by the star journalist Bob Woodward who uncovered the Watergate scandal at the time of the Nixon administration) make relentless inquiries that denounce the “lie” of the state and call for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. This does not at all mean that the militarist policy of the United States has been scuttled. However the government is obliged to take into account and try to deal with its contradictions in order to adapt. Bush’s so-called “gaffe”, when he admitted that there was a similarity with the Vietnam war, goes together with the “leaks”… orchestrated by interviews given by James Baker himself. The old head of general staff in the Reagan period, who was also secretary of state at the time of Bush senior, proposed to open up a dialogue with Syria and Iran and for a partial withdrawal of troops from Iraq. This very limited attempt at a riposte shows to what extent the American bourgeoisie has been weakened. To simply withdraw from Iraq would constitute the most burning affront in the whole of its history and this is something that it cannot possibly allow. The comparison with Vietnam is really a deceptive under-estimation. At the time, the withdrawal of its troops from Vietnam made it possible for the United States to re-orient its strategy and pull China into its own camp against the USSR. Today the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq would be nothing other than a capitulation without compensation and would completely discredit the American superpower. It would also bring about the collapse of Iraq which would, in turn, considerably worsen the chaos throughout the region. These contradictions are a telling demonstration of the crisis and weakening of American leadership and the development of “everyone for himself”, which testifies to the growing chaos in international relations. Moreover, a change in the Congress majority at the next mid-term elections and even the eventual election of a democratic president in two years time will not make possible any “choice” other than a flight into new military adventures. The incompetence of the present American administration is almost unprecedented. But whatever team takes over, it cannot change one fundamental fact. Confronted with a capitalist system which is bogged down in its mortal crisis, the ruling class is unable to give any response other than the flight towards military barbarism. And the world's leading bourgeoisie cannot but defend its rank in this domain.
In the United States, the weight of chauvinism that was wide-spread just after 11th September has largely disappeared following the double fiasco of the anti-terrorist struggle and the quagmire of the war in Iraq. Recruitment campaigns for the army have difficulty finding candidates willing to risk their skins in Iraq while the troops there are prey to demoralisation. Despite the risks, thousands of deserters have sought refuge in Canada.
This situation does not show the impasse of the bourgeoisie alone; it also announces another alternative. The increasingly unbearable weight of war and barbarism upon society is an indispensable element for the development of consciousness by the proletariat of the unstoppable bankruptcy of the capitalist system. The only way that the working class can oppose imperialist war, the only way it can offer solidarity to its class brothers exposed to the most terrible massacres is to mobilise on its own class terrain against its exploiters. It must fight and develop its struggles on the social terrain against its own national bourgeoisie. This is something that the working class is beginning to do, for example the solidarity strike of employees at Heathrow airport in August 2005 with the Pakistani workers sacked by the restaurant group, Gate Gourmet. This took place in the midst of the anti-terrorist campaign following the bomb attacks in London. Another example is the mobilisation of future proletarians against the CPE in France or the metal workers of Vigo in Spain. We can also cite the 18,000 Boeing mechanics in America, September 2005 who fought against the reduction of pension payments while refusing the states discrimination between young and old workers. Then there is the strike of the New York tube and public transport workers just before Christmas 2005 against an attack on pensions that was aimed at those who would be employed in the future. In this way they affirmed the awareness that to fight for the future of their children is part of their struggle. These struggles are still very weak and the path that will lead to a decisive confrontation between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is still long and difficult but they attest to a recovery of class combats at an international level. They constitute the only possible glimmer of hope for a different future, of an alternative for humanity to capitalist barbarism.
W (21/10/06)
[1] [3] This cynicism and hypocrisy is amply demonstrated by an episode that took place during the last days of the war. A convoy composed of part of the population of a Lebanese village including a number of women and children, who were trying to flee from the combat zone, broke down and came under fire from the Tsahal. The members of the convey sought refuge in a nearby UN camp. They were told that it was impossible to give them shelter, that there was no mandate for that. The majority (58 of them) were gunned down by the Israeli army and the UNIFIL forces looked on passively. This is according to evidence given to television news by a mother who managed to escape.
[2] [4] Read our article “Pearl Harbour 1941, the ‘Twin Towers’ 2001, the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie [5]” in International Review n°108.
On the night of the 23rd and 24th October 1956 the Budapest workers, followed almost immediately by those in the rest of Hungary, rose up in an armed insurrection involving the whole country. They were outraged by the terrible exploitation and terror imposed by the Stalinist regime in power since 1948. Within 24 hours the strike spread to the main industrial cities and the working class, organised in councils, took control of the uprising.
This was a real revolt of the Hungarian proletariat against the capitalist order in its Stalinist form, which weighed like a leaden yoke upon the workers of the Eastern European countries. This is a fact that the bourgeoisie has spent the last 50 years hiding or (more often) distorting. In the censured, falsified version, the role and the decisive action of the proletariat are reduced to a minimum. And when it comes to the central role of the workers’ councils, no more than lip service is paid to them in anecdote. Or else they are lost in a mishmash of committees, national or municipal councils, each more nationalist than the other, when they are not quite simply tossed into the dustbin.
Even in 1956 the most disgusting lies circulated in the East as well as the West. According to the Kremlin, and this was relayed by the European CPs, the events in Hungary were no more than a “fascist insurrection” manipulated by “western imperialists”. For the Stalinists at the time there were two aims. They had to prepare and justify the crushing of the Hungarian proletariat by Russian tanks. They also had to maintain the illusion in the eyes of workers in the West that the Soviet bloc was “socialist” and prevent them at all costs from realising that the uprising of their Hungarian brothers was a proletarian struggle.
So the Hungarian insurrection was presented by one side as ”the work of fascist bands in the pay of the United States”, whereas for the other, the bourgeoisie of the Western bloc, it was palmed off as a struggle for “the triumph of democracy”, for “freedom” and “national independence”. These two lies are complementary and share the aim of hiding from the working class its own history and therefore its profoundly revolutionary nature. However, it is the version claiming that it was a patriotic struggle, in which there was a hodgepodge of classes called “the people” fighting for “the victory of democracy”, that has become the sole axis of bourgeois propaganda, now that the crimes of Stalinism have come to light and the Eastern bloc has collapsed.
By commemorating the crushing of this struggle every ten years, the bourgeoisie is continuing the work it began at the time of the events. Its sole aim is to prevent the working class from understanding that the Hungarian revolution expresses its own revolutionary nature, its ability to confront the state and organise itself into councils in order to do so. This, its revolutionary nature, is all the more striking in that it manifested itself in 1956, in the midst of the most difficult period of counter-revolution. In that epoch the proletariat internationally was at its weakest, beaten down by the Second World War, muzzled and controlled by the unions and their partner, the political police. This is also why, given the difficulties of the period, the 1956 revolt could not have matured into a conscious attempt on the part of the proletariat to take political power and build a new society.
As usual, reality is very different from how the bourgeoisie present it.
The Hungarian insurrection was, above all, a proletarian response to the savage overexploitation that was being extracted in those countries that had fallen under the imperialist domination of the USSR after the Second World War.
Following the agony of war, the battering from the fascist regime under Admiral Horthy[1] [8] and then those of the transitional government (1944-1948), the blows of the Stalinists marked another descent into hell for the Hungarian workers.
At the end of the war, in those areas in Eastern Europe that had supposedly been “liberated” from Nazi occupation, the Soviet “liberator” had the firm intention of establishing itself and of extending its empire up to the doors of Austria. The Red Army (closely followed by the Russian political police, the NKVD) dominated a zone from the Baltic to the Balkans. Throughout the region pillaging, theft and mass deportation to forced work camps were a bloody accompaniment to Soviet occupation and gave a foretaste of the Stalinist regimes that were soon to be set up. In Hungary it was from 1948, once the hegemony of the Communist Party over the political apparatus was firmly established, that the Stalinisation of the country became an accomplished fact. Matyas Rakosi,[2] [9] said to be Stalin’s best pupil, surrounded by his gang of assassins and torturers (like the sinister Gerö[3] [10]), became the very personification of the whole Stalinist edifice in Hungary. Its main pillars were (according to the well-known recipe): political terror and the limitless exploitation of the working class.
The Soviet Union, as victor and occupier of Eastern Europe, demanded that the vanquished and occupied countries, particularly those such as Hungary who had collaborated with the axis powers, pay huge reparations. In fact this was no more than an excuse to annex the productive apparatus of the countries that had just become its satellites and to make them work at full power for the exclusive economic and imperialist interests of the USSR. A veritable blood-sucking system was set up from 1945-1946 with, for example, the dismantling of factories and their transfer (workers included) to Russian soil.
In the same vein, COMECON was established in 1949. This was a market “for privileged exchange”, in which the privileges were decidedly one-way. The Russian state could dispose of its production by selling it at a price much higher than that offered on the world market. On the other hand, from its satellites it got goods at ridiculously low prices.
So it was that the entire Hungarian economy had to bend to the whims and the production plans of the Russian head office. This was demonstrated very eloquently in 1953 when the Korean war broke out and the USSR forced Hungary to convert the majority of its factories to arms production. From then on it became the Soviet Union’s main arms supplier.
In order to satisfy Russian economic desires and military imperatives, Hungarian industrialisation policy had to proceed at high speed and under great pressure. The five year plans, especially that of 1950, give rise to an unprecedented leap in production and productivity. However, as miracles do not fall from the sky, on the tracks and under the wheels of this galloping industrialisation we find, unsurprisingly, the frantic exploitation of the working class. Every ounce of its energy was to be sacrificed to the realisation of the 1950-1954 plan, priority being given to heavy industry associated with armaments production. This would be quintupled at the end of the plan. Everything was set-up to bleed the Hungarian proletariat dry. In this spirit, piece work was introduced and regulated and was accompanied by production quotas that were raised periodically. The Rumanian CP said with a good dose of cynicism that “piece work is a revolutionary system which eliminates inertia…everyone has the possibility to work harder…”. In fact the system “eliminates” above all those who refuse this “possibility”. The workers can choose between dying of starvation or dying at their post for a wretched salary.
Rather like the mythical Sisyphus, who was condemned in Hades to forever push a rock to the top of a mountain, the Hungarian Sisyphuses were condemned to infernal and relentless rhythms of work.
In most factories the administration realised at the end of each month that they were seriously late in relation to the inhuman expectations of the plan. So the signal was given for the ‘great rush’, an explosion of speed-ups equivalent to the “Stourmovtchina”[4] [11] regularly experienced by the Russian workers. These “Stourmovtchina” took place not only at the end of each month but, increasingly, at the end of each week. The number of hours overtime increased dramatically, as did the number of work accidents. Men and machines were pushed to the ultimate limit.
To crown it all, it was not unusual for the workers to have the lovely surprise of discovering, when they arrived at the factory, a “letter of commitment” signed and sent in their name by...the union. Already exhausted, they found in their hands , “the solemn commitment” to increase production (once again) in honour of this or that anniversary or celebration. In fact, any occasion would do for launching this sort of “voluntary” day of work, which was also (it goes without saying) unpaid. From March 1950 to February 1951, there were up to eleven such days: “liberation” day, 1st May, week for Korea, Rakosi’s birthday and other events worthy of rejoicing and unpaid overtime.
During the period of the first five year plan, although production was doubled and productivity increased by 63%, the living conditions of the workers plummeted inexorably. In five years, from 1949 to 1954, take-home pay was reduced by 20%, and in the year 1956 only 15% of families lived above the subsistence level defined by the regime’s own experts!
The era of Stakhanovism was obviously not introduced into Hungary on a voluntary basis and because of love of the “socialist fatherland”. It is clear that the ruling class enforced it by means of terror, threats of violent reprisals and very heavy sanctions if production norms were not met (moreover, these continually reached new heights).
Stalinist terror took a grip in the factories. So, on 9th January 1950, the government passed a law forbidding the workers to leave the workplace without permission. Discipline was strict and “infractions” were punished by heavy fines.
Such daily terror made it necessary to have an omnipresent police infrastructure. The police and unions had to be everywhere, to the point that in certain places the situation became ridiculous. The MOFAR factory in Magyarovar, whose workforce had tripled between 1950 and 1956, had to recruit, in order to ensure the repression of the workers, not three but ten times more surveillance personnel: officials of the union, the party and the factory police.
The statutes given by the regime to the unions in 1950 are unequivocal on this point: “...organise and extend socialist emulation on the part of the workers, fight for better organisation of work, for the reinforcement of discipline...and the increase of productivity”.
But fines and bullying were not the only sanctions against those who were “recalcitrant”.
On 6th December 1948, while on a visit to the town of Debrecen, the minister for industry, Istvan Kossa gave out against “…workers [who] have a terrorist attitude towards the managers of nationalised industries…”. In other words, those who did not bow “whole heartedly” to the Stakhanovist norms or else who simply could not attain the improbable production quotas demanded. From then on, workers who did not look sufficiently “enamoured” of their work were regularly denounced as “agents of western capitalism”, “fascists” or “crooks”. In his discourse Kossa added that if they did not change their “attitude”, a period of forced labour might help them. This was not an empty threat, as is illustrated by the following case, among many, of a worker at the Györ car factory. He was accused of “wage fraud” and condemned to imprisonment in an internment camp. The statement of Sandor Kopacsi, internment manager in 1949 and prefect of police for Budapest in 1956, is also informative: “I would say that the camps contained workers, unfortunate farmers, some people from classes hostile to the regime. The job [of the director] was simple: he had to extend the detainees period of internment, generally by six months. […] Six months detention and six months extension. Of course it was not the ‘ten years’ and ‘fifteen years’ extra hard labour time in the Siberian wastes…Nevertheless the detainees did not go back to civil life from this internment – and it was internment, with the system of prolonging it ‘from six months by another six months – any more than did those who had served fifteen to twenty-five years in the great Siberian north.”[5] [12] In 1955 the number of prisoners increased dramatically and the majority of them, strangely enough, were “recalcitrant” workers.
Under the Rakosi regime tens of thousands of people disappeared without trace…they were in fact arrested and interned. At the time it was said that a profound evil afflicted Hungary: “the doorbell evil”. That meant that when the doorbell rang in the morning at someone’s home, they never knew whether it was the milkman or an agent of the political police (AVH).
However, the reign of terror, the presence of the Red Army and the torturers of the AVH did not have the desired effect: the anger within the proletariat became more and more palpable from 1948 onwards. The workers’ resentment was very close to exploding onto the streets. They felt the growing and irrepressible need to get rid of the whole hierarchical apparatus of soviet bureaucracy from those at the top, who took the key decisions about the level and norms of production, down to the foreman and other supervisors who, watch in hand, pushed them to transform these plans into finished products.
The exhausted workers were at the end of their tether. The conditions of exploitation were no longer bearable, the insurrection was incubating.
The situation that the USSR had created in Hungary was identical to what was happening in the other Stalinist states of the Eastern bloc. That is why the discontent of the workers was constant. From the beginning of June 1953 the Czech workers in Pilsen were confronted by the Stalinist state apparatus because they refused to go on being paid in the form of the famous piece work wages. A couple of weeks later, the 17th June 1953, a big strike of workers in the building industry broke out in East Berlin following the general rise in production norms by 10% and wage reductions of 30%. The workers marched down the Stalin Allee to the cry of “Down with the tyranny of the norms” , “we are workers, not slaves”. Strike committees arose spontaneously to extend the struggle and they marched towards the other part of the city to call on the western workers to join them. As the famous wall had not yet been built, the western allies decided to hurriedly close their sector. It was the Russian tanks stationed in the GDR (East Germany) which put an end to this strike. In this way the bourgeoisie in the East and that in the West joined forces in perfect agreement to confront the proletarian response. At the same time demonstrations and workers' revolts occurred in seven Polish cities. Martial law was proclaimed in Warsaw, Krakow, and in Silesia: there too the Russian tanks had to intervene to suppress workers' agitation. Hungary was also in motion. Strikes broke out initially in the working class district of the big centre for iron and steel production at Csepel in Budapest. It then spread to other industrial cities such as Ozd and Diösgyör.
The wind of revolt against Stalinism, which blew across the Eastern countries, was to find its high point in the Hungarian insurrection of October 1956.
The climate of agitation that spread over Hungary obviously worried the Kremlin exceedingly. In an attempt to let off the steam in this overheated cauldron, Moscow decided to remove from power the man who personified the terror of the regime. Matyas Rakosi was relieved of his post as first minister in June 1953, returned to power in 1955, followed by another reshuffle in July 1956, But this made no difference as the tension that had built up was too great and living conditions did not improve. The cauldron was ready to explode.
In this pre-insurrectional atmosphere, which could have brought down the regime in power, the nationalist faction of the Hungarian bourgeoisie quickly understood that they had a card in hand to change their position as vassal of Moscow. Or else they could at least loosen the dog collar and lengthen the leash. The rapid and forced sovietization of the Hungarian state, the total and undivided control of power by the Kremlin’s men supported by Red Army tanks, industry placed entirely at the service of the economic and imperialist interests of the USSR…this was too much for the national bourgeoisie. They were awaiting their moment to get rid of the occupier. Aspirations for national independence were very much present, even among some Hungarian Stalinists, the “national communists”, who called for a “Hungarian path to socialism” as propounded by a good number of intellectuals. They made Imre Nagy[6] [13] their champion, the “hero” of the October insurrection. Likewise, the army could not have been sovietized without making concessions to the nationalism of the old officers. For them, the alliance with the USSR was not in the national interest, which was traditionally oriented towards the West. When the October uprising took place, the army too glimpsed the possibility of freeing itself from Stalinist fetters. This is why it participated in part in the street fighting. This patriotic resistance was personified by the general Pal Maleter and the troops from the Kilian barracks in Budapest. These factions of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie poisoned the atmosphere of the workers’ revolt with their nationalist propaganda. It is no accident that to this very day the dominant class tries to turn Nagy and Maleter into mythical characters in the events of 1956. By presenting only these bourgeois “icons”, it gives credence to the lie that it was a “revolution for democratic and national liberation”.
This is why, after the dismissal of Rakosi in July, the climate of agitation was maintained by pressure from petty bourgeois elements, the nationalist intellectuals of the Writers’ Union and the students of the Petofi Circle. On 23rd October the latter organised a peaceful demonstration in Budapest which numerous workers attended. When they got to the foot of the statue of General Bem a resolution of the Writers’ Union was read out, which expressed the so-called aspirations for independence of the “Hungarian people”.
For the bourgeoisie this is the essence of the Hungarian insurrection …a collection of students and intellectuals fighting for national liberation from the Muscovite yoke. For the last fifty years the ruling class has thrown a veil over the main actor in the uprising, the working class, and its motivation, which far from being for national resistance and love of the fatherland, was above all attempting to resist the terrible living conditions imposed upon it.
When the workers came out of the factories, the masses of Budapest workers joined the demonstration. Although the gathering was officially over, the workers did not disperse, quite the contrary. Instead, they converged on parliament square and Stalin’s statue, which they began to destroy with sledgehammers and blowlamps. Then the human tide moved towards the Radio building to protest against a statement made by the Prime minister, Gerö, which accused the demonstrators of being no more that a “band of nationalist adventurers trying to break the power of the working class”. That was when the political police (AVH) opened fire on the crowd and the protest movement became on armed insurrection. The nationalist intellectuals, who had initiated the demonstration, were overtaken at this point by the turn of events and, at the admission of the secretary of the Petofi circle himself, Balazs Nagy, they “were braking the movement rather than driving it forward”.
Within 24 hours the general strike, involving four million workers, spread throughout Hungary. In the large industrial centres workers' councils arose spontaneously. This was how the working class organised and controlled the insurrection.
The workers undoubtedly formed the backbone of the movement and they showed it by their unfailing combativity and determination. They armed themselves and built barricades everywhere. On every street corner of the capital they fought the AVH and the Russian tanks, against overwhelming odds. In fact, the AVH was very soon overtaken by events and a new government, formed urgently and led by the “progressive” Imre Nagy, called without hesitation for the intervention of soviet tanks to protect the regime from the anger of the workers. Nagy called ceaselessly for the restoration of order and the “surrender of the insurgents”. Later on this champion of democracy was to declare that the intervention of Soviet forces “was necessary in the interests of socialist discipline”.
The tanks entered Budapest on 24th October at about 2 o’clock in the morning and the armoured vehicles came up against the first barricades in the workers’ districts on the outskirts of the town. The Csepel factory with its thousands of engineering workers put up the most stubborn resistance; obsolete guns and Molotov cocktails against divisions of Russian armoured vehicles.
Nagy, the legitimate candidate of all nationalist aspirations, was unable to impose calm. He never got the confidence and disarmament of the workers because, unlike the intellectuals and part of the Hungarian army, the workers were not fighting for “national deliverance”. Although they may have been contaminated by patriotic propaganda, they were basically fighting against terror and exploitation. On 4th November, coinciding with Moscow’s replacement of Nagy by Janos Kadar, 6,000 soviet tanks entered the capital for a second round in order to definitively end the uprising. The bulk of the attack was against the workers’ districts on the outskirts: red Csepel, Ujpest, Kobanya, Dunapentele. Although the enemy was a hundred times stronger in terms of men and weapons, the workers continued to resist and fought like lions. “At Csepel, the workers were determined to fight. On 7th November an artillery barrage was unleashed, backed up by aerial bombardment. The next day a Soviet emissary came to ask the workers to surrender. They refused and the battle continued. The following day another officer gave a last ultimatum: if they did not give up their arms they would have no district. Again the insurgents refused to submit. Artillery fire became more and more intense. The soviet forces used mortars with rocket launchers, which caused a lot of damage to the factories and buildings nearby. The workers ceased fighting only when the ammunition ran out". (Budapest, the insurrection by Francois Fejtö)
Only hunger and lack of ammunition seemed able to end the fighting and the workers’ resistance.
The workers’ districts were razed to the ground and some estimates put the number of deaths at tens of thousands. However, in spite of the massacres, the strike went on for several weeks. Even when it was finished, resistance continued to appear sporadically up until January 1957.
Courage, the struggle against poverty, exasperation at the conditions of exploitation and Stalinist terror are the elements that explain the tenacious resistance of the Hungarian workers but another aspect must be taken into account; the fact that this revolt was organised by means of workers’ councils.
In Budapest, as in the provinces, the insurrection was immediately accompanied by the constitution of councils. For the first time in 40 years their struggle against Stalinist bureaucracy led the Hungarian workers to spontaneously discover this form of organisation and proletarian power. The council form had first been created by their fathers in Russia during the 1905 revolution and then in the revolutionary wave beginning in Petrograd in 1917 and spreading to Budapest in 1919 with its brief Republic of Councils. From 25th October 1956, the towns of Dunapentele, Szolnok (a large rail centre), Pecs (the mines in the south-west), Debrecen, Szeged, Miscolk, Györ were directed by workers’ councils, which organised the armament of the insurgents, the provisioning and presenting of economic and political demands.
This was also how the strike was controlled in the main industrial centres in Hungary. Sectors that were fundamental for the mobility of the proletariat, such as transport, or those that were vital, such as hospitals or electricity, continued to function in many cases on the order of the councils. It was the same for the insurrection: the councils formed and controlled the workers’ militias, distributed arms (under the control of the workers in the arsenals) and demanded the dissolution of certain state organisms.
Very early, on the 25th October, the council of Miscolk called upon the workers councils of all towns to “coordinate their efforts in order to create a single and unique movement”. The concretisation was to be very slow and chaotic. After 4th November an attempt was made to coordinate at a district level the activity of the Csepel councils. In the 13th and 14th zone the first district workers’ council was set up. Later, 13th November, the council of Ujpest was behind the creation of a powerful council for the whole of the capital. So was born the Central Council of Greater Budapest. This was the first, though belated, step towards a unified authority of the working class.
However, for the Hungarian workers, the political role of the councils, although at the very heart of this organ aimed at taking power, was no more than a stopgap, a role that the situation imposed for want of a better one In the meantime they waited for the “specialists”, the “political experts” to take over the reigns of power again: “No-one is suggesting that the workers councils themselves could be the political representation of the workers. Certainly…the workers’ council must carry out certain political functions because it is opposed to a regime and the workers have no other representation but this is provisional.” (Statement made by Ferenc Töke, vice president of the Central Council of Greater Budapest.)
This reveals one of the most serious limitations of the uprising: the low level of consciousness of the Hungarian proletariat, who could go no further given the lack of revolutionary perspective and without the support of the international proletariat. In fact the events in Hungary were against the general trend, they took place in a sinister period, that of the counter revolution, which weighed on the working class in the East as well as the West.
The workers were indeed the motive force of the insurrection against a government that was supported by Russian tanks. But although the movement was motivated by the bitter proletarian resistance against exploitation, the enormous combativeness of the Hungarian workers should not be confused with a clear demonstration of revolutionary consciousness. The workers’ insurrection of 1956 marked an inevitable reflux in the level of consciousness of workers in relation to that in 1917-23, at the time of the revolutionary wave. Although the workers’ councils at the end of the First World War appeared as political organs of the working class, the expression of its dictatorship; the 1956 councils on the other hand never threatened the state. Although on 29th October, the Miscolk workers’ council announced “the suppression of the AVH” (which was easier to connect with the terror of the regime), in the confusion it also added: “The government should depend only on two armed forces: the national army and the regular police.” Not only was the existence of the capitalist state not threatened but also its two main instruments for armed defence went unmolested.
By contrast, the councils of 1919, that had a clear understanding of the historic goal of their struggle, raised the need to dissolve the army. In the same period, when the Csepel factories created their councils, it was with the slogans:
“* down with the bourgeoisie and its institutions
* long live the dictatorship of the proletariat
* mobilise for the defence of the gains of the revolution by arming the people.”
Moreover, in 1956 the councils went so far as to undermine themselves by considering themselves to be no more than organs for the economic management of the factories: “We do not claim to have an economic role. On the whole we think that, just as specialists are needed to manage the economy, so too political leadership must be taken by experts.” (Ferenc Töke).
Sometimes they went as far as to see themselves as a sort of committee for the workplace. “The factory belongs to the workers, the latter pay the state a tax calculated on the basis of production of dividends fixed according to the profits…the workers' council decides if there is conflict at the level of hiring and firing of workers” (resolution of the Council of Greater Budapest).
During the dark days of the 1950s, the international proletariat was bled dry. The appeals of the Budapest councils to “the workers of the rest of the world” to “strike in solidarity” remained a dead letter. Moreover, like their class brothers in other countries, the consciousness of the Hungarian workers was very low in spite of their courage. In this situation, the councils arose instinctively but their role, the seizure of power, was inevitably absent. The councils of 1956 were “the form without content” and so can only be viewed as “incomplete” councils or at best a rough sketch of councils.
This made it all the easier for the Hungarian officers and intellectuals to imprison the workers in the prison of nationalist ideas and for the Russian tanks to massacre them.
Although the workers did not see the councils as political organs, Kadar, the Russian high command, and the great Western democracies considered them, on the basis of their experience, to be extremely political organs. In fact, in spite of the great weakness of the working class because of the period, the crushing of the Hungarian proletariat shows just how much the bourgeoisie fears any expression of the proletarian struggle at any time.
From the beginning, when Nagy talked about disarming the working class, he was thinking of the sub machine guns of course but also and, above all, of the councils. In addition, when Janos Kadar regained power in November, he expressed the same preoccupation: the councils must “be taken in hand and purged of the demagogues who have no place in them.”
From the moment that the councils appeared, the unions in the pay of the regime threw themselves into the work that they know best: sabotage. When the National Council of Unions (NCU) “proposed to the workers and employees to start…electing workers councils in the workshops, factories, mines and in all workplaces…” it was to better get control of them, to reinforce their tendency to confine themselves to economic tasks, prevent them from raising the question of the seizure of power and to integrate them into the state apparatus. “The workers’ council will be responsible for its management before all the workers and before the state…[the councils] have the immediate and essential task of ensuring the return to work, to establish and guarantee order and discipline.” (Declaration of the NCU presidium, 27th October).
Fortunately the unions, which had been formed under the Rakosi government, had very little credibility with the workers, as is testified by this rectification made by the council of Greater Budapest on 27th November: “The unions are at present trying to give the impression that the workers’ councils are constituted by the unions. It is superfluous to say that this is a gratuitous assertion. The workers alone fought for the creation of the workers councils and the struggle of the councils in many cases was obstructed by the unions, which made sure they did no tgive them any help.”
On 6th December the arrest of members of the councils began (they were a prelude to more massive and bloody ones). Several factories were surrounded by Russian troops and the AVH. On the island of Csepel, hundreds of workers gathered the little force that remained to them and made a last stand to stop the police from entering the factories and making arrests. On 15th December, the death penalty for striking was enforced by special tribunals authorised to execute on the spot any worker found “guilty”…lines of bodies that had been strung up adorned the bridges of the Danube.
On 26th December, Gyorgy Marosan, social democrat and minister of the Kadar, declared that, if necessary, the government would put to death 10,000 people to prove that it and not the workers’ councils were the real government.
Together with the Kadarist repression, it was the relentlessness of the Kremlin that crushed the working class. For Moscow, it was certainly necessary to pull into line its satellites and their aspirations for independence. However, more important still, they had to eradicate the spectre of the proletarian threat and its symbol, the workers’ councils. This is why the Titos, Maos and the Stalinists of the whole world gave their unconditional support to the Kremlin’s line.
The bloc of the great democracies also gave their full agreement to the repression. The American ambassador in Moscow, Charles Bohlen, tells in his memoirs that on 29th October 1956, the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, delivered him an urgent message for the Soviet leaders, Krushchev, Zhukov and Bulganin, Dulles was to tell the leaders of the USSR that the United States did not consider Hungary or any other satellite to be a possible military ally. In other words, “Gentlemen you are the masters in your own house, it is up to you to clean up.”
Contrary to all the lies that the bourgeoisie has continued to heap on the memory of the 1956 insurrection in Hungary, what took place was a workers’ struggle against capitalist exploitation. Certainly the period was not a propitious one. The whole working class was no longer directed towards the perspective of an international revolutionary wave as in 1917-23, which had produced the shortlived Hungarian Republic of Councils in March 1919. For this reason the Hungarian workers could not clearly raise the need to destroy capitalism and to take power. This explains their failure to understand the highly political and subversive nature of the councils that they had produced in their struggle. Nevertheless, what was so courageously demonstrated by the revolt of the Hungarian workers and their organising themselves into councils, was the revolutionary nature of the proletariat. They reaffirmed the historic role of the proletariat as Tibor Szamuelly[7] [14] formulated it in 1919: “Our aim and our task is the destruction of capitalism”.
Jude
[1] [15] Former military chief of Hungary and dictator (regent for life) from 1920 to 1944.
[2] [16] Secretary general of the Communist Party of Hungary (KPU) and first minister after 1952.
[3] [17] A leader of the NKVD in Spain, Enrö Gerö in July 1937 organised the kidnap and assassination of Erwin Wolf, a close collaborator of Trotsky. He returned to Hungary in 1945 to continue his work as a Stalinist butcher in the position of General Secretary of the Hungarian Communist Party.
[4] [18] Russian word designating the same phenomenon of forcing work rates to the extreme.
[5] [19] Sandor Kopacsi, In the name of the working class.
[6] [20] On 13 June 1953, in framework of destalinisation, Nagy replaced Matyas Rakosi as first minister. Despite advocating the idea of a “national and human socialism”, the struggle for power re-emerged inside the party and it was the Stalinist group of his predecessor Rakosi which prevailed. Imry Nagy was relieved of his functions on 14 April 1955 by the leadership of the Hungarian Communist Party and was some months later excluded from the party.
[7] [21] A leading figure in the Hungarian workers movement, Tibor Szamuelly was the ardent proponent for the creation of a Unitary Communist Party regrouping Marxists and Anarchists, which finally saw the light of day in November 1918. Its programme was the dictatorship of the proletariat. As a passionate defender of the revolution in Hungary he was executed by counter-revolutionary forces in August 1919.
Our organisation has undertaken a series of articles on the marxist concept of the decadence of a mode of production, and more particularly of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production. This series is demanded by the need to reaffirm and develop the basic marxist analysis of the evolution of human societies, which is the basis for understanding the possibility and necessity of communism. This is the only analysis which makes it possible to offer a framework which can integrate into a coherent whole all the phenomena in the life of capitalism since the First World War. This series was also made necessary by the criticisms, evasions, and even open abandonment of this analytical framework by different revolutionary groups and elements.
The series began in International Review nº118 with an initial article showing the central place accorded to the theory of decadence in the work of the founders of marxism. After that, given that the confrontation of divergences within the revolutionary milieu – with a view to clarifying them – is a priority for us, we wrote two polemical articles (International Review nº119 and nº 120) which reacted vigorously against the thinly-veiled abandonment of this fundamental Marxist concept by the IBRP.[1] [24] Finally, we continued our series by examining the central place this concept occupied in the organisations of the workers’ movement from Marx’s day to the Third International (IR nº121) as well as in the political positions of the latter at its first two Congresses (IR nº123). Before continuing in a future issue with the discussion on the decadence of capitalism that was held at the Third Congress of the Communist International, we are again undertaking a polemic with the IBRP on the article "The economic role of war in the decadent phase of capitalism" written by the CWO and published in Revolutionary Perspectives nº 37 (November 2005).[2] [25]
In this article the CWO tries to show that there is an economic rationality to war in the sense that the prosperity which follows it is “the economic effect of war is to [devalue capital and] increase profit rates” and that “world wars have become essential for capitalism’s survival since the start of the 20th century and that they have replaced decennial crises of the 19th century”. In order to do this, it bases its analysis of the crisis of capitalism solely on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall which Marx uncovered. In the same article the CWO accuses us of abandoning the materialist method by invoking our refusal to attribute an economic rationality to wars in the decadence of capitalism as well as in our analysis of the present phase of capitalist decomposition.
In our response we propose to consider the following five themes:
1. We will show that the IBRP has a very partial understanding of Marx’s analysis of the dynamic and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. We have already amply criticised this approach inherited from Paul Mattick (1904-81),[3] [26] an approach which makes the CWO incapable of going to the roots of the decadence of capitalism, its crises, and in particular the numerous wars which are one of the most significant expressions of the bankruptcy of the system. We intend to deepen this question by showing the basic divergence between the CWO’s analysis and that of Marx, and by bringing out the latter’s views more explicitly.
2. We will show that there is no mechanical causal link between the economic crisis and war even if the latter is indeed in the last instance an expression of the bankruptcy and of the aggravation of the system’s economic contradictions. We will see that the prosperity that followed the Second World War was not the result of the destruction which took place during the war. We will explain why it is quite false to assimilate the wars of decadence with the ten-year cycle of crises in the 19th century and finally show how the real economic mechanism of war is 180° removed from the speculative meanderings of the CWO
3. We will examine how this theory of the economic function of war for the survival of capitalism – as presented by the CWO – has no tradition in the workers’ movement. It actually has its roots in the economistic analyses of the councilist Paul Mattick in his book Marx and Keynes (1969). Even if it’s true that a part of the Italian left was not devoid of ambiguities on this question, it never analysed the role of war in the way the CWO does, i.e. as a veritable fountain of youth that allows the rate of profit to regenerate itself thanks to the destruction of war![4] [27]
4. We will theoretically and empirically refute any idea of the rationality of war in the period of the decadence of capitalism. Here it is clear that, since the beginning of the 80s we have re-forged the link with the whole tradition of the workers’ movement which, as we shall see, has always refused to attribute an economic function to wars in the decadence of capitalism.
5. Finally, we will show that the method of analysis which is at the basis of the idea of the economic necessity of war for the survival of capitalism derives from a vulgar materialism which completely evacuates the dimension of class struggle from any understanding of social evolution. This bastardised version of historical materialism prevents the CWO from understanding the origins of the phase of decomposition of a mode of production as Marx developed the idea.
In conclusion, it will appear clearly that while inter-imperialist war has occupied a central place in the workers’ movement, it is not because of any “economic role in the survival of capitalism” as the IBRP claims but because it marked the opening of the period of decadence for the capitalist mode of production; because it issued a challenge to the workers’ movement, posing a question which has always been at the root of its most important splits – the question of proletarian internationalism; because, owing to the misery it engendered, it led to the outbreak of the first world wide revolutionary wave (1917-23); because it marked a political test for all the communist groups who rejected Stalinism at the time of the Second World War; because imperialist wars represent an immense destruction of the whole patrimony of humanity (its productive forces, its historical and cultural wealth, etc), and notably of its main component: the working class and its avant-garde. In short, if war has been such an important question for the workers’ movement, it was not essentially for any economic reason but above all for social, political and imperialist reasons.
[1] [28] The CWO is, with Battaglia Comunista (BC) one of the two co-founders of the IBRP (International Bureau for the Revolutionary party). Given that they defend the same position regarding the analysis of war, our article will refer to and criticise both organisations.
[2] [29] To get a better idea of these differences, we refer the reader to our articles in the following issues of the IR: IR nº 12: ‘Some answers from the ICC to the CWO’; IR nº 13 ‘Marxism and crisis theory’; IR nº 16 ‘Economic theories’; IR nº 19 "On imperialism"; IR nº 22 "Theories of crisis"; IR nº 82 ‘The IBRP’s conception of decadence and the question of war’’; IR nº 83 "The nature of imperialist war: reply to the IBRP"; IR nº 84 "Theories of the historic crisis of capitalism: response to the IBRP"; ‘IR nº 121 "The descent into the inferno’"
[3] [30] A militant of the Spartacist youth movement from the age of 14, he was the delegate to the to the workers’ councils of the Siemens factories in Berlin during the revolutionary period. In 1920, he left the Communist Party (KPD) and joined the KAPD (the Communist Workers Party of Germany). In 1926 he emigrated to the USA with other comrades, He participated in the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World – see our article in IR nº 124) and later joined a small council communist group which published Living Marxism (1938-41) and New Essays (1942-43), of which he was the editor. He published a number of works, some of which have been published in several languages.
[4] [31] “The devaluation of capital during war and its outright destruction creates a situation for the surviving capital where the mass of profit available is at the disposal of a much diminished constant capital. Hence, the profitability of the remaining capital is increased… It is estimated that during the First World War 35% of the accumulated wealth of mankind was destroyed or squandered in four years…. It was on the basis of this devaluation of capital and cheapening of labour power that rates of profit were increased and it was on this that the recovery period up to 1929 was based…. The organic composition of US capital was reduced by 35% during the war and only regained the level of 1940 at the start of the 1960’s. This was largely achieved by devaluation of constant capital… It was this increase in the rate of profit in the post-war period which allowed a new phase of accumulation to start.. The general recovery was based on the increased profit rates brought about by the economic effects of the war. We argue that world wars have become essential for capitalism’s survival since the start of the 20th century” Revolutionary Perspectives nº 37.
Inspired by the theories developed by the councilist Paul Mattick, the CWO[1] [34] defends a very mono-causal and partial view of the dynamic of capitalism, basing itself exclusively on the law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit as developed by Marx in Capital. In their view, this law is at the root both of economic crises, the advent of decadence and the numerous wars seen throughout the world. Following Marx, we also consider that this law plays an essential role in the dynamic of capitalism, but as he himself underlined, it only intervenes as one of the “two acts of the capitalist process of production”. Marx always showed very clearly that, to complete the cycle of accumulation, capitalism must not only be able to produce sufficient profit – this is “ but the first act of the capitalist process of production” (and it is at this stage that the falling rate of profit reveals its full importance) – it also has to sell all the commodities it produces. This sale constitutes what Marx calls “the second act of the process”. This is fundamental in that this sale on the market is the indispensable condition for realizing, in the form of surplus-value to be re-invested, the entirety of the labour crystallized in the commodity during the course of production. Not only did Marx constantly stress the imperious necessity to pass through these two acts since, as he put it, if one of the two was not present, the whole cycle of accumulation remains incomplete; he also gives us the key to the relations between these two acts. Marx always insisted on the fact that, though closely linked, the act of production is “independent” of the act of selling. He even pointed out that these two acts “are not identical”, not only in time and place, but also “logically”. In other words, Marx taught us that production does not automatically create its own market, contrary to the fables of bourgeois political economy; or, again, that “the extension of production does not necessarily correspond to the growth of the market”. Why? Simply because production and the market are determined differently: the extraction of surplus labour (the first act of production) “is only limited by the productive power of society” (Marx), whereas the realization of this surplus labour on the market (the second act, selling) is essentially limited by “the consumer power of society. But this last-named is not determined either by the absolute productive power, or by the absolute consumer power, but by the consumer power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum”. As a result , Marx argues, “The market must, therefore, be continually extended”. He even goes on to say that that this “internal contradiction”, resulting from the immediate process of production, “ seeks to resolve itself through expansion of the outlying field of production”.
Thus, when Marx in his conclusion to his chapter on the law of the falling rate of profit summarises his overall understanding of the movement and contradiction of the capitalist process of production, he talks of a play in two acts[2] [35].
The first act represents the movement of “acquiring surplus value”: “With the development of the process, which expresses itself in a drop in the rate of profit, the mass of surplus-value thus produced swells to immense dimensions”. In the second act “The entire mass of commodities, i.e. , the total product, including the portion which replaces the constant and variable capital, and that representing surplus-value, must be sold. If this is not done, or done only in part, or only at prices below the prices of production, the labourer has been indeed exploited, but his exploitation is not realised as such for the capitalist”. Marx also makes a precision about the relations between these two acts of production and sale: “The conditions of direct exploitation, and those of realising it, are not identical”.
The conception of the CWO/IBRP is very different. It reduces the capitalist process of production to the first act (“With the development of the process, which expresses itself in a drop in the rate of profit, the mass of surplus-value thus produced swells to immense dimensions”). Nowhere in its article does the CWO invoke the necessity for the second act, the need for the entire mass of commodities to be sold. And for good reason: in line with Paul Mattick, the IBRP claims that production itself engenders its own market[3] [36]. For the IBRP, this second act only poses a problem if there is an insufficient amount of surplus value to be accumulated as a result of the fall in the rate of profit. The crisis of overproduction is determined exclusively by difficulties encountered in the first act of production. But we have already seen that, for Marx, these two acts of production are not identical, that they are logically separate “Since market and production are two independent factors- that the expansion of ones does not correspond with the expansion of the other” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter headed "Ricardo’s theory of accumulation and a critique of it", Sub-section13, p 524). This means that production does not automatically create its own market or, to put it another way, that the market is not fundamentally determined by the conditions of production but by “the consumer power of society. But this last-named is not determined either by the absolute productive power, or by the absolute consumer power, but by the consumer power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits” (See footnote 6 for reference).
This position of the CWO/IBRP is more than a century and half old. It’s the vision developed by bourgeois economists like Ricardo, Mill and Say, to whom Marx replied quite clearly on a number of occasions: “Those economists who, like Ricardo, conceived production as directly identical with the self-realisation of capital -and hence were heedless of the barriers of consumption or of the existing barriers of circulation itself, to the extent that it must represent counter-values at all points, having in view only the development of the forces of production (...) Mill...(copied from the dull Say): supply and demand are allegedly identical, and should therefore necessarily correspond. Supply , namely, is allegedly a demand measured by its own amount. Here a great confusion...” (Karl Marx, Grundrisse, The Pelican Marx Library, 1973, p 410) . What is the basis of Marx’s response to this “great confusion” of bourgeois economics, repeated by the CWO/IBRP?
First of all, Marx fully agrees with these economists in saying that “Production indeed itself creates demand, in that it employs more workers in the same branch of business, and creates new branches of business, where new capitalists again employ new workers and at the same time alternatively become market for the old”; but he immediately added, approving a comment by Malthus, “the demand created by the productive labourer himself can never be an adequate demand, because it does not go to the full extent of what he produces. If it did, there would be no profit, consequently no motive to employ him. The very existence of a profit upon any commodity presupposes a demand exterior to that of the labourer who has produced it” (Marx, Grundrisse, The Pelican Marx Library, 1973, p 410). Marx here is only expressing what he said earlier about the limits to society’s consumer power being “based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits”.
But how exactly does Marx explain this last point? Like all previous modes of production based on exploitation, capitalism revolves around a conflict between antagonistic classes over the appropriation of surplus labour. Consequently, the immanent tendency of capitalism consists, for the ruling class, of constantly trying to restrict the consumption of the producers in order to be able to appropriate the maximum of surplus value: “Every capitalist knows this about his worker that he does not relate to him as producer to consumer, and (he therefore) wishes to restrict his consumption, i.e. his ability to exchange, his wages, as much as possible” (Grundrisse, Section two: "The circulation of capital, demand by the workers themselves", p 420)
This immanent and permanent tendency for capitalism to try to restrict the consumer power of the exploited is just another illustration of the contradiction between the social and the private, i.e. the contradiction between the increasingly social dimension of production and its private appropriation. From the private point of view of each capitalist taken individually, wages appear as a cost to be minimised just like the other costs of production; but from the social point of view of the functioning of capitalism taken as a whole, the mass of wages appears as a market in which each capitalist finds an outlet for his production. Marx continues his explanation for this in the same passage (the emphases are his) “ Of course he (the capitalist) would like the workers of other capitalist to be the greatest consumers possible of his own commodity” (...) But this is just how the illusion arises -- true for the individual capitalist as distinct from all the others -- that apart from his workers the whole remaining working class confronts him as consumer and participant in exchange, as money-spender, and not as worker. It is forgotten that, as Malthus says, ‘the very existence of a profit upon any commodity pre-supposes a demand exterior to that of the labourer who has produced it’, and hence the demand of the labourer himself can never be an adequate demand. Since one production sets the other into motion and hence creates consumers for itself in the alien capital’s workers, it seems to each individual capital that the demand of the working class posited by production itself is an ‘adequate demand’. On one side, this demand which production itself posits drives it forward, and must drive it forward beyond the proportion in which it would have to produce with regard to the workers; on the other side, if the demand exterior to the demand of the labourer himself disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs”(Grundrisse, Section two: "The circulation of capital, demand by the workers themselves" p 420).
It is therefore the pursuit of the private interests of each capitalist – spurred on by the class conflict for the appropriation of a maximum of surplus labour – that pushes each one to minimise the wages of his own workers in order to appropriate a maximum of surplus value; but in doing so, this immanent tendency of the system to compress wages gives rise to the social basis for the limits of capitalism since its result is to restrict society’s capacity to consume. This ‘social/private’ contradiction for reducing the consuming power of the mass of society to a minimum is what Marx calls “antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits”. Or, in other words, “the more productiveness develops, the more it finds itself at variance with the narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest”.
Having examined the essential difference between Marx’s analysis and the CWO’s, and having seen how Marx already replied to similar arguments well over a century ago, we now have to examine how Marx really analysed the dynamic and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production.
Each mode of production in the history of humanity – such as the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and capitalist – has been characterized by a specific social relation of production: tribute, slavery, serfdom, wage labour. It is this social relation of production which determines the specific link between those who own the means of production and the producers, around a class conflict whose substance is the appropriation of surplus labour. It is these social relations which are at the heart of the dynamic and the contradictions of each mode of production.[4] [37] In capitalism, the specific relation which links the workers to the means of production is wage labour: “Thus capital presupposes wage labour; wage labour presupposes capital. They reciprocally condition the existence of each other; they reciprocally bring forth each other” (Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, 1991, page 80). It is this social relation of production which both imprints the dynamic of capitalism, since it constitutes the sphere for the extraction of surplus value (the first act of the capitalist process of production) and at the same time contains insurmountable contradictions, since the conflict for the appropriation of this surplus value tends to restrict society’s capacity to consume (this is the second act of capitalist production, sale): “The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses, in the face of the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute consumption capacity of society set a limit to them” (Marx, Capital, Vol 3, Chapter 30: "Money capital and real capital: 1", p 615) . It is from these difficulties both within and between the two acts of the capitalist process of production which engenders “an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -the epidemic of overproduction (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, "Bourgeois and proletarians", Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol.6, page 490). This is why Marx constantly repeated that “In the crises of the world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, "Ricardo’s theory of accumulation and a critique of it", sub-section 8, p 500).
Wage labour is a dynamic relation in the sense that, in order to survive, the system, spurred on by the tendency of the rate of profit to fall and by competition, must constantly push the exploitation of wage labour to its limits, extend the field of application of the law of value, constantly accumulate and extend its solvent markets:
“With the development of capitalist production and the resultant reduction in prices, there must be an increase in the quantity of goods, in the number of articles that must be sold. That is to say a constant expansion of the market becomes a necessity for capitalist production” (Marx, Capital Vol 3, "The Results of the immediate process of production, Penguin books", page 967)
“In world market crises, all the contradictions of bourgeois production erupt collectively; in particular crises (particular in their content and in extent) the eruptions are only sporadical, isolated and one-sided.
Over-production is specifically conditioned by the general law of the production of capital: to produce to the limit set by the productive forces, that is to say, to exploit the maximum amount of labour with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay; and this is carried out through continuous expansion of reproduction and accumulation, and therefore constant reconversion of revenue into capital, while on the other hand, the mass of the producers remain tied to the average level of needs, and must remain tied to it according to the nature of capitalist production” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Book 2, "Ricardo’s theory of accumulation and a critique of it", sub-section 14, page 534-35). And, within this dynamic, the law of the falling rate of profit occupies a central place in that it pushes each capitalist to compensate for the fall in the rate of profit in each of its commodities through mass production in order to compensate and even increase its total quantity of profit. Each capitalist thus faces the necessity to realize an ever-growing quantity of commodities: “This phenomenon arising from the nature of the capitalist mode of production, that the price of an individual commoditiy or a given portion of commodities falls with the growing productivity of labour, while the number of commodities rises; that the amount of profit on the individual commodity and the rate of profit on the sum of commodities falls, but the mass of profit on the total sum of commodities rises (...) In actual fact, the fall in commodity prices and the rise in the mass of profit on the increased mass of cheapened commodities is simply another expression of the law of the falling profit rate in the context of a simultaneously rising mass of profit” (Marx, Capital, Vol 3, Part 3, Chapter 13, p 338).
But wage labour is also a contradictory relation in that, while production on this basis assumes an increasingly social character and spreads across the whole world, the surplus product is still privately appropriated. By basing himself on this "social-private" ontradiction Marx demonstrates that in a context where "Over-production arises precisely from the fact that the mass of the people can never consume more than the average quantity of necessaries, that their consumption therefore does not grow correspondingly with the productivity of labour"
"He (Ricardo) overlooks the fact that the commodity has to be converted into money. The demand of the workers does not suffice, since profit arises precisely from the fact that the demand of the workers is smaller than the value of their product, and that it [profit] is all the greater the smaller, relatively, is this demand. The demand of the capitalists among themselves is equally insufficient" (Theories of Surplus Value, Book 2, chapter 16, "Ricardo’s Explanation for the Fall in the Rate of Profit and Its Connection with His Theory of Rent").
“If it is said, finally, that the capitalists only have to exchange their commodities among themselves and consume them, then the whole character of capitalist production is forgotten, and it is forgotten that that what is involved is the valorization of capital, not its consumption” (Marx, Capital, Vol 3, Part 3, chapter 15, 3 ‘Surplus capital alongside surplus population’, p 366).
In the ascendant phase of capitalism, in a context where, as Marx said, the gains in productivity, although spectacular for the time, still remained limited and where private appropriation confiscated the essential of the latter since “consumption... does not grow correspondingly with the productivity of labour", the generalisation of wage labour, on the “narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest”, inevitably restricted the outlets with regard to the relatively huge needs of the enlarged reproduction of capital, obliging the system to constantly find buyers not only within but, more and more, outside the sphere of capital and labour. “.. the more capitalist production develops the more it is forced to produce on a scale which has nothing to do with immediate demand but depends on a constant expansion of the world market” (...) The mere relationship of wage-labourer and capitalist implies;
1. that the majority of the producers (the workers) are non-consumers (non-buyers) of a very large part of their product, namely, of the means of production and the raw material.
2. that the majority of the producers, the workers, can consume an equivalent for their product only so long as they produce more than this equivalent, that is, so long as they produce surplus-value or surplus product. They must always be overproducers, produce over and above their needs, in order to be able to be consumers or buyers within the limits of their needs (...)
Over-production is specifically conditioned by the general law of the production of capital: to produce to the limit set by the productive forces, that is to say, to exploit the maximum amount of labour with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Vol 2, Lawrence & Wishart, 1969, pages 468, 520, 534)
In this context, Marx clearly demonstrated the inevitability of crises of overproduction through the relative restriction of demand - the consequence, on the one hand, of the necessity for each capitalist to increase production in order to increase the mass of surplus value to compensate for the fall in the rate of profit, and, on the other hand, of the recurrent obstacle encountered by capital: the outbreak of the crisis through the relative shrinking of the market needed as an outlet for this production, which takes place long before any insufficiency of surplus value engendered by the tendency for the rate of profit to fall: “in the course of reproduction and accumulation, small improvements are continuously building up, which eventually alter the whole level of production. There is a piling up of improvements, a cumulative development of productive powers.> requires a constantly expanding market and that production expands more rapidly than the market, then one would merely have used different terms to express the phenomenon which has to be explained—concrete terms instead of abstract terms. The market expands more slowly than production; or in the cycle through which capital passes during its reproduction—a cycle in which it is not simply reproduced but reproduced on an extended scale, in which it describes not a circle but a spiral—there comes a moment at which the market manifests itself as too narrow for production. This occurs at the end of the cycle. But it merely means: the market is glutted. Over-production is manifest. If the expansion of the market had kept pace with the expansion of production there would be no glut of the market, no over-production.
However, the mere admission that the market must expand with production, is, on the other hand, again an admission of the possibility of over-production, for the market is limited externally in the geographical sense, the internal market is limited as compared with a market that is both internal and external, the latter in turn is limited as compared with the world market, which however is, in turn, limited at each moment of time, [though] in itself capable of expansion. The admission that the market must expand if there is to be no over-production, is therefore also an admission that there can be over-production. For it is then possible—since market and production are two independent factors—that the expansion of one does not correspond with the expansion of the other; that the limits of the market are not extended rapidly enough for production, or that new markets— new extensions of the market—may be rapidly outpaced by production, so that the expanded market becomes just as much a barrier as the narrower market was formerly” (ibid, p 524-525)
Although it is central in explaining the development of the recurring crises of overproduction throughout the life of capitalism, the contradictory dimension of wage labour, which tends to constantly reduce the solvent market in relation to the growing needs of accumulation, is obviously not the only factor analysed by Marx in the appearance of these crises.[5] [38] There is also the imbalance in the rhythm of accumulation between the two main sectors of production (means of consumption and means of production), the different speed of turnover in the various branches of production, the falling rate of profit, etc. Marx wrote a lot about these elements but we can’t go into his arguments in the framework of this article. Nevertheless we need to point out that, among all these other factors contributing to the outbreak of crises of overproduction, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall indeed occupies a central place – Marx in fact saw it as key o understanding the decennial cycles of the first two thirds of the 19th century:[6] [39] when the dynamic towards rising profits is inversed, it engenders a depressive spiral which slows down accumulation and the reciprocal demand between the different branches of production; consequently it leads to the laying-off of workers and the compression of wages etc. All these phenomena come together to create a general glut of commodities.
The crisis of overproduction thus often appears both as a crisis in the profitability of capital (the falling rate of profit) and of distribution (the lack of solvent markets). This dual nature of the crisis is connected to the fact that each capitalist taken individually searches to reduce wages as much as he can (without any social concern for global outlets) and, at the same time, tries to increase productivity to the maximum in the face of competition (which eventually affects the rate of profit: the crisis of valorisation). The private and conflict-ridden nature of capitalism prevents any medium or long-term regulation that would allow it to balance out its contradictory tendencies: overinvestment (over-accumulation) and the relative lack of outlets return to periodically block the accumulation of capital and reduce its rate of growth.
However, Marx demonstrated that the tendency for the rate of profit to fall was not at all the result of a repetitive schema, determined in some atemporal and algebraic way. It had to be analysed and understood in its specificities each time it manifested itself since, with the three factors that determined it (wages, productivity of labour and productivity of capital) several scenarios are possible, above all when the combination of these three factors can, in turn, be reduced by counter-tendencies which vary noticeably in the course of time: availability of a large domestic market; colonialism; investment in countries or sectors with a lower organic composition of capital[7] [40]; increase in female labour or immigrant labour etc.
In order to function properly, capitalism has to both produce at a profit and sell the commodities so produced. According to Marx these two requirements, in the real conditions of capitalism, are eminently contradictory. They cannot be made compatible in the medium and long term because competition, private appropriation and the conflict over the appropriation of surplus labour are a social barrier to capitalism being able to regulate these contradictions in any durable way. It is the fundamental social relation of production under capitalism – wage labour – which determines this.
Why do we think it necessary to make this precision, which could appear somewhat technical and complicated to someone who is not used to handling these economic concepts and their reciprocal relations? Because it enables us to demonstrate the fundamental divergences between Marx’s view and that of the CWO, while at the same time preventing any potential for false polemics.
Yes, with Marx, we do consider that the dynamic towards the fall in the rate of profit also serves to engender crises of overproduction, but here again the CWO’s approach is very different from Marx’s:
1. When it completely ignores the contradictory dimension of wage labour – something which Marx underlined again and again – which is the first and main basis of the crises of overproduction, since it results in the permanent tendency to restrict the consumer power of the wage labourers and thus the solvent markets needed for the realisation of a growing mass of commodities.
2. When instead of seeing this social contradiction which resides in the wage labour relation, it makes the fall in the rate of profit the exclusive mechanism of the crises of overproduction and even the alpha and omega of all the economic contradictions of capitalism, including its decadence and all imperialist wars.
3. Finally, when it makes the dimension of solvent markets strictly dependent on the expansion or contraction of production, which in turn is determined solely by the evolution of the rate of profit; whereas, to use Marx’s own terms, the two acts of the process of production, production and sale, are not identical, are independent, and are not logically connected. The best proof of the profoundly erroneous nature of the CWO’s vision, which we will explain at greater length in another article, is the fact that for more than a quarter of a century the rate of profit has been clearly on the rise, and is equivalent to the levels it reached during the "thirty glorious years" that followed the Second World War…whereas the rates of growth in productivity, of investment, of accumulation and thus of growth have been declining or stagnating![8] [41] This paradox is only comprehensible when you understand that the crisis is the consequence of the relative insufficiency of solvent markets, resulting from the massive contraction of the mass of wages – a contraction which in turn results from the drive to re-establish the rate of profit.
How does capitalism overcome its immanent tendency to restrict its solvent markets? How does it seek to resolve this contradiction, which is internal to its mode of operation? Marx’s response is very clear and it is identical throughout his work:
“The market must, therefore, be continually extended, so that its interrelations and the conditions regulating them assume more and more the form of a natural law working independently of the producer, and become ever more uncontrollable. This internal contradiction seeks to resolve itself through expansion of the outlying field of production”( Capital, quoted above)
“this demand which production itself posits drives it forward, and must drive it forward beyond the proportion in which it would have to produce with regard to the workers; on the other side, if the demand exterior to the demand of the labourer himself disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs” (Grundrisse, quoted above).
This understanding of Marx is precisely what Rosa Luxemburg took up in her book The Accumulation of Capital. In a way, this great revolutionary prolonged Marx’s developments by writing the chapter on the world market which is one of those that Marx was unable to complete.[9] [42] The entirety of Rosa’s work is traversed by this notion of Marx that “this demand which production itself posits drives it forward, and must drive it forward beyond the proportion in which it would have to produce with regard to the workers; on the other side, if the demand exterior to the demand of the labourer himself disappears or shrinks up, then the collapse occurs”. She drew out this idea by showing that, since the totality of the surplus value of global social capital needs, if it is to be realised, a constant extension of markets both internal and external, capitalism was dependent on the continual conquest of solvent markets both at national and international level: “By this process capital prepares its own destruction in two ways. As it approaches the point where humanity only consists of capitalists and proletarians, further accumulation will become impossible. At the same time the absolute and undivided rule of capital aggravates class struggle throughout the world and the international economic and political anarchy to such an extent that, long before the last consequences of economic development, it must lead to the rebellion of the international proletariat against the existence of the rule of capital…Modern imperialism.. is only the last chapter of its historical process of expansion: it is the period of universally sharpened world competition between the capitalist states for the last remaining non-capitalist areas on earth” (Luxemburg, Anti-Critique).
Rosa concretised this idea and contextualised it in the living reality of capitalism’s historical pathway, and this in three areas:
1. She masterfully describes the concrete progression of capitalism through its permanent tendency to “expand the outlying field of production”, explaining the birth and development of capitalism within the commodity economy that came from the ruins of feudalism up until its domination of the whole world market.
2. She grasped the contradictions characteristic of the imperialist epoch, this “international phenomenon which Marx did not see: the imperialist development of these past 25 years…this upsurge inaugurated, as we know, a new period of effervescence for the European states: their unprecedented expansion towards the remaining non-capitalist areas and countries of the world. From the 1880s onwards, we witnessed a new and particularly violent impetus towards colonial conquest” (Junius Pamphlet).
3. Finally, as well as analysing the inseparable historic link between capitalist relations of production and imperialism, showing that the system could not live without expanding, without being imperialist in essence, Rosa Luxemburg also demonstrated at what moment and in what manner the capitalist system entered its phase of decadence.
Once again, Rosa Luxemburg merely took up and developed an idea repeated many times by Marx since the Communist Manifesto: “The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market” (Marx to Engels, 8 October 1858). Taking up Marx’s intuition about the moment capitalism would enter into decline, and virtually in the same terms, Luxemburg clearly drew out the dynamic and the moment: “we now have behind us the, so to speak, previous youthful crises which followed these periodic developments. On the other hand, we still have not progressed to that degree of development and exhaustion of the world market which would produce the fatal, periodic collision of the forces of production with the limits of the market, which is the actual capitalist crisis of old age…if the world market has now more or less filled out, and can no longer be enlarged by sudden extensions; and if, at the same time, the productivity of labour strides relentlessly forward, then in more or less time the periodic conflict of the forces of production with the limits of exchange will begin, and will repeat itself more sharply and more stormily”. Social Reform or Revolution.
Since that point, the relative exhaustion – that is, in relation to the needs of accumulation – of these markets would precipitate the system into its decadent phase. Rosa responded to this question from the very start of the 1914-18 war, considering that the world inter-imperialist conflict had opened an era in which capitalism would be a permanent barrier to the development of the productive forces: “the necessity for socialism is fully justified as soon as the rule of the bourgeois class ceases to bear with it any historic progress and becomes a barrier and a danger to the further evolution of society. This is precisely what the present war has revealed with regard to the capitalist order” (Junius Pamphlet). The system’s entry into decadence was thus characterised not by the disappearance of the extra-capitalist markets (Marx’s “demand exterior to the labourer”) but by their insufficiency with regard to the needs for enlarged accumulation. In other words, the mass of surplus value realised in the extra-capitalist markets had become insufficient to recuperate the necessary fraction of the surplus value produced by capitalism and destined to be re-invested. A fraction of total capital could find no outlet on the world market, signaling that overproduction, which had been episodic in the ascendant phase, was now becoming a permanent obstacle to capitalism in its decadent phase. This idea of Luxemburg’s had already been put forward in an explicit manner by Engels in a letter he wrote to FK Wischnewtsky in February 1886: “For if there are three countries (say England, America and Germany) competing on comparatively equal terms for the possession of the Weltmarkt, there is no chance but chronic overproduction, one of the three being capable of supplying the whole quantity required”.
Enlarged accumulation has thus slowed down but not stopped. The economic history of capitalism since 1914 is the history of the development of palliatives to this process of strangulation; and the inefficacity of these palliatives has been shown, among other things, by the great crisis of the 1930s, the Second World War and these last 35 years of crisis.
This total identity between Marx and Rosa Luxemburg in their analysis of the contradictions of capitalism render completely absurd the unfounded accusations – propagated by Stalinism and leftism and unfortunately taken up by the IBRP – which tries to oppose the two and claim that (a) Marx’s explanation for the crises resides in the falling rate of profit whereas Rosa’s resided in the saturation of markets (b) that Marx identified the contradictions of capitalism within production whereas Luxemburg situated them in the sphere of realization; or (c) that for Marx the contradiction was "internal" to capitalism (production) whereas for Luxemburg it was "external" (the market). None of this makes any sense once you understand that it is capitalism’s own internal and contradictory laws which tend to restrict the ultimate social demand and engender the recurring crises of overproduction. This is precisely what Marx and Luxemburg were saying.
Pushed by the necessity to extort a maximum of surplus labour, capitalism subjects the whole world to the dictatorship of wage labour. In doing so, it sets up a formidable contradiction which, by restricting the consumer power of society in relation to en ever-growing production of commodities, engenders a phenomenon unknown in all previous human history, the crises of overproduction: “In the crises of the world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed”.
Marx linked the crises of overproduction to the barriers imposed by the wage relation to the growth of the ultimate consuming power of society, and more specifically of the wage labourers. More precisely, Marx located this contradiction between, on the one hand, the tendency towards “the absolute development of the productive forces”, and thus to the unlimited growth of the social production in value and in volume; and, on the other hand, the limits to ultimate growth of society’s consumer power. It is this contradiction which he refers to in Theories of Surplus Value as the contradiction between production and consumption[10] [43]: “In world market crises, all the contradictions of bourgeois production erupt collectively; in particular crises (particular in their content and in extent) the eruptions are only sporadical, isolated and one-sided.
Over-production is specifically conditioned by the general law of the production of capital: to produce to the limit set by the productive forces, that is to say, to exploit the maximum amount of labour with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay” (Vol.2, p 534-535)
In this article we have seen that, while the falling rate of profit indeed plays a role in the emergence of crises of overproduction, it is neither their exclusive nor even their main cause. We will see in another article that its is also not sufficient for explaining the great stages in the evolution of the capitalist system, nor its entry into decadence, nor its tendency to engender increasingly widespread and murderous wars that have put the very existence of humanity in danger.
Engels, who was very well acquainted with the economic analyses of Marx, not least because he spent years working on the manuscripts of Volumes II and III, was quite clear about this. When in the preface to the English edition of Volume I of Capital (1886) he underlined the historic impasse of capitalism, he referred not to the fall in the rate of profit but to the contradiction which Marx continually referred to: the contradiction between the “absolute development of the productive forces” and the “limits to the ultimate consumer power of society”: “While the productive power increases in a geometric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. The decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, over-production and crisis, ever recurrent from 1825 to 1867, seems indeed to have run its course; but only to land us in the slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression” And this “slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression” to which he referred was none other than the warning signal of the system’s entry into decadence, an entry into decadence which would be marked by “chronic overproduction” as Engels said in the same year in the letter to Wischnewtsky. We can now understand why it was indeed the analyses of Rosa Luxemburg which were in line with those of Marx and Engels and not those of the IBRP.
C Mcl
[1] [44] See the article in Revolutionary Perspectives nº 37
[2] [45] “The creation of this surplus-value makes up the direct process of production, which, as we have said, has no other limits but those mentioned above. As soon as all the surplus-labour it was possible to squeeze out has been embodied in commodities, surplus-value has been produced. But this production of surplus-value completes but the first act of the capitalist process of production — the direct production process. Capital has absorbed so and so much unpaid labour. With the development of the process, which expresses itself in a drop in the rate of profit, the mass of surplus-value thus produced swells to immense dimensions. Now comes the second act of the process. The entire mass of commodities, i.e. , the total product, including the portion which replaces the constant and variable capital, and that representing surplus-value, must be sold. If this is not done, or done only in part, or only at prices below the prices of production, the labourer has been indeed exploited, but his exploitation is not realised as such for the capitalist, and this can be bound up with a total or partial failure to realise the surplus-value pressed out of him, indeed even with the partial or total loss of the capital. The conditions of direct exploitation, and those of realising it, are not identical. They diverge not only in place and time, but also logically. The first are only limited by the productive power of society, the latter by the proportional relation of the various branches of production and the consumer power of society. But this last-named is not determined either by the absolute productive power, or by the absolute consumer power, but by the consumer power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution, which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits. It is furthermore restricted by the tendency to accumulate, the drive to expand capital and produce surplus-value on an extended scale. This is law for capitalist production, imposed by incessant revolutions in the methods of production themselves, by the depreciation of existing capital always bound up with them, by the general competitive struggle and the need to improve production and expand its scale merely as a means of self-preservation and under penalty of ruin. The market must, therefore, be continually extended, so that its interrelations and the conditions regulating them assume more and more the form of a natural law working independently of the producer, and become ever more uncontrollable. This internal contradiction seeks to resolve itself through expansion of the outlying field of production. But the more productiveness develops, the more it finds itself at variance with the narrow basis on which the conditions of consumption rest. It is no contradiction at all on this self-contradictory basis that there should be an excess of capital simultaneously with a growing surplus of population. For while a combination of these two would, indeed, increase the mass of produced surplus-value, it would at the same time intensify the contradiction between the conditions under which this surplus-value is produced and those under which it is realised” (Capital Vol III, section III, "Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law").
[3] [46]“This contradiction between the production of surplus value and its realisation appears as an overproduction of goods, and this as a cause of the saturation of markets, which in its turn interferes with the system of production, so making the system as a whole incapable of counter-acting the fall in the rate of profit. In fact the process is the reverse. While capitalism is a productive-distributive unity, what happens on the market is nothing but what happens within the relations of production and cannot be otherwise. It is the economic cycle and the process of valorisation which makes the market ‘solvent’ or ‘insolvent’. One can only explain the ‘crisis’ of the market from the starting point of the contradictory laws which regulate the process of accumulation” (Text by Battaglia for the First Conference of the Communist Left, 1977).
[4] [47] “In production, men enter into relation not only with nature. They produce only by co-operating in a certain way and mutually exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations with one another and only within these social connections (...) the relations of production in their totality constitute what are called the social relations, society, and, specifically, a society at a definite stage of historical development, a society with a particular, distinctive character. Ancient society, feudal society, bourgeois society are such totalities of production relations, each of which at the same time denotes a special stage of development in the history of mankind” ( Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, p 78-9)
[5] [48] In its article, the CWO gives us a quote from Marx which seems to indicate that his analysis of the crisis is based entirely on the falling rate of profit: “These contradictions... lead to explosions, crises in which momentary suspension of all labour and annihilation of the greater part of the capital, violently lead it back to the point where it is enabled to go on fully employing its reproductive powers without committing suicide. Yet these regularly recurring catastrophes lead to their repetition on a higher scale and finally to its final overthrow" (Marx, Grundrisse, p 750). If the CWO had taken the trouble to cite the whole passage, they would have seen that, a few lines earlier, Marx talks about the necessity for the “extreme development of the market”, since he explains that "This decline in the rate of profit is identical in meaning (1) with the productive power already produced, and the foundation formed by it for new production...(2) with the decline of the part of capital already produced which must be exchanged for immediate labour...(3)... the dimensions of capital generally, including the proportion of it which is not fixed capital; hence intercourse on a magnificant scale, immense sum of exchange operations, large size of market and all-sideness of simultaneous labour; means of communication etc., presence of the necessary consumption fund to undertake this gigantic process" (ibid p 749). This is what the CWO never talks about and Marx talks about all the time: the “extreme development of the market”.
[6] [49] “To the same extent as the value and durability of the fixed capital applied develops with the development of the capitalist mode of production, so also does the life of industry an industrial capital in each particular investment develop, extending to several years, say an average of ten years (...) The cycle of related turnovers, extending over a number of years, within which capital is confined by its fixed component, is one of the material foundations of the periodic cycle (in the original French version the word crises is used, as it is in the German original) in which business passes through successive periods of stagnation, moderate activity, over-excitement and crisis” (Marx, Capital, Vol 2, Part 2, Chapter: "The overall turnover of the capital advanced", p 264) “But only after mechanical industry struck root so deeply that it exerted a preponderant influence on the whole of national production; only after foreign trade began to predominate over internal trade, thanks to mechanical industry; only after the world market had successively annexed extensive areas of the New World, Asia and Australia; and finally, only after a sufficient number of industrial nations had entered the arena -only after all this had happened can one date the repeated self-perpetuating cycles, whose successive phases embrace years, and always culminate in a general crisis. which is the end of one cycle and the starting-point of another. Until now the duration of these cycles has been ten or eleven years, but there is no reason to consider duration as constant. On the contrary, we ought to conclude, on the basis of the laws of capitalist production as have just expounded them, that the duration is variable, and that the length of the cycles will gradually diminish” (Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, "The general law of capitalist accumulation", Penguin Classics, 1990, footnote p 786).
[7] [50] Such as the tertiary sector or new industrial branches
[8] [51] For a more developed argument on this point, both on the theoretical and statistical level, the reader can refer to our article on the crisis in IR 121.
[9] [52] "I examine the system of bourgeois economy in the following order: capital, landed property, wage-labour; the State, foreign trade, world market…The entire material lies before me in the form of monographs, which were written not for publication but for self-clarification at widely separated periods; their remoulding into an integrated whole according to the plan I have indicated will depend upon circumstances”. ("Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy"). These are the opening lines of the Preface. Unfortunately, circumstance decided otherwise and did not give Marx the chance to compete his original plan.
[10] [53] Marx wrote a whole section of Theories of Surplus Value (book II, chapter 17, section 14) on this question. The title of this section could hardly be more explicit: "The Contradiction Between the Impetuous Development of the Productive Powers and the Limitations of Consumption Leads to Overproduction. The Theory of the Impossibility of General Over-production Is Essentially Apologetic in Tendency".
Having summarised the first two volumes in this series, we can now return to the chronological thread. In the course of the second volume we already touched on the phase of counter-revolution, particularly the efforts of revolutionaries to understand the class nature of Stalinist Russia in the 1920s and 30s. In the article "The Russian enigma and the Italian communist left" in International Review nº106 (as in our pamphlet The Italian Communist Left) we argued that it was the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, around the review Bilan (Balance Sheet) which best understood the tasks of the revolutionary minority in a phase of defeat, and which developed the most fruitful method for understanding how the revolution had been lost. And now that our principal focus is the way that revolutionaries discussed the problems of the period of transition during the depth of the counter-revolution, our starting point is again the Italian Fraction.
Bilan began publication in 1933 – a year which, for the Italian left in exile, brought confirmation that the counter-revolution had triumphed and the course was open to a second imperialist war. Hitler had come to power in Germany with the connivance of the democratic state, in a context in which the Communist International had proved its total inability to defend the class interests of the proletariat. 1934 added further proof of Bilan’s diagnosis of the period: the crushing of the Vienna workers, the French CP’s endorsement of the rearmament of France, and the USSR’s acceptance into the “den of thieves” at the League of Nations.
It was in this bleak atmosphere that Bilan set about undertaking one of the main tasks of the hour: to understand how the Soviet state had in less than two decades been transformed from an instrument of the world revolution into a central bastion of the counter-revolution; and at the same time to begin a discussion within the workers’ movement about the lessons of this experience for the revolution of the future. As with all the theoretical journeys of the Italian Fraction, this task was approached with the utmost prudence and seriousness. The questions at issue were broached in particular in a long series by Vercesi,[1] [55] "Parti-Etat-Internationale" (PEI), which was to run into a dozen articles over the next three years. Rather than being fixated on the immediate situation and looking for immediate answers, the aim of the series was to place the question in the broadest possible historical context, and to integrate into its premises the most important and relevant contributions from the past workers’ movement. The initial articles in the series thus review the classic marxist doctrine of the nature of social classes and their political instruments; the rise of the state in earlier epochs of human history; and the relationship between the International and its component parties; similarly, in order to investigate the evolution of the Soviet state it also looked into the essential features of the democratic state and the fascist state.
Equally typical of Bilan’s approach was the insistence on the need for a debate within the workers’ movement about the problems it was investigating. It did not claim to be providing definitive answers to these problems and understood that the contribution of other currents situating themselves on a proletarian terrain would be a vital element in the process of clarification. The last paragraph of the entire series expressed this hope with characteristic modesty and seriousness:
“We have arrived at the end of our effort with a full awareness of our inferiority in the face of the scale of the problem before us. We nevertheless dare to say that there is a firm coherence between all the theoretical and political considerations which we have traced in the different chapters. Perhaps this coherence will represent a favourable condition for the establishment of an international polemic which, taking our study as a point of departure, or studies by other communist currents, will finally arrive at provoking an exchange of views, a closely-argued polemic, an attempt to elaborate the programme of the dictatorship of the proletariat of tomorrow. Such an effort will of course not be able to equal the gigantic sacrifices which the proletariat of all countries has made, nor can it be compared to the grandiose tasks of the working class in the future; but still, it would represent a step in this direction. A necessary step which, if we don’t make it, would make us pay heavily tomorrow, since it would render us incapable of providing the workers with a revolutionary theory that will arm them for victory over the enemy” (Bilan nº 26, p879).
This approach – in such radical contrast to the attitude of being "alone in the world" displayed by most of the direct descendants of the Italian left today – was concretised in a public exchange of views between the Italian left on the one hand and the Dutch left on the other. This largely took place through the intermediary of A Hennaut of the Belgian group Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes. In Bilan nº 19,20, 21 and 22, Hennaut wrote a summary of the Dutch left’s most important contribution to the problem of the communist transformation of society: The Basic Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, by Jan Appel and Henk Canne-Meier. We will return to this aspect of the debate in another article. Hennaut also wrote a critique of Vercesi’s series, in particular the chapters on the Soviet state, in Bilan nº 33 and 34. Vercesi in turn replied to this critique in Bilan nº 35. Furthermore, the series of articles by Mitchell, "Problems of the Period of Transition", in Bilan nº 28,31,35,37 and 38 was also in large part a polemic with the views of those whom Bilan referred to as “the Dutch internationalists”.
We will shortly be re-publishing Mitchell’s articles (and translating them for the first time into English and other languages). For the moment we lack the resources to re-publish Vercesi’s series and the contributions by Hennaut. But we think that it is certainly worthwhile in this present article to review the principal arguments about the lessons of the Russian experience developed in the Parti-Etat-Internationale series, while in a future article we will return to Hennaut’s critique and Vercesi’s response to it.
For Bilan, the key issue was to explain how an organ which had arisen out of an authentic proletarian revolution, which had been constructed to defend that revolution and thus to serve as an instrument of the world proletariat, had come to act as a focal point of the counter-revolution. This was true both in Russia, where the "Soviet" state oversaw the ferocious exploitation of the proletariat through a bloated bureaucratic machinery, and internationally, where it was actively sabotaging the international interests of the working class in favour of the national interests of Russia. This was the case, for example, in China where, through its domination of the Comintern, the Russian state encouraged the Chinese CP to deliver the insurrectionary workers of Shanghai over to the Kuomintang executioners. It was equally the case within the Communist parties, where the GPU had succeeded in silencing or driving out all those who expressed the least criticism of Moscow’s line, and above all those who remained loyal to the internationalist principles of October 1917.
In approaching this question, Bilan was anxious to avoid what it saw as symmetrical errors within the proletarian camp of the day: that of the Trotskyists, who in their zeal to hold on to the tradition of October, refused to put into question the notion of defending the USSR despite its counter-revolutionary role on a world scale; and that of the German/Dutch left, which had come to characterise the USSR as a bourgeois state - which by the 1930s was certainly correct - but in doing so had also tended to deny the proletarian character of the October revolution.
For Bilan it was of the utmost importance to define October 1917 as a proletarian revolution. This problem, they insisted, could only be posed from a global and historical starting point. The question was not whether this or that country taken on its own was "ripe" for socialist revolution, but whether capitalism as a world system had entered into fundamental, irreversible conflict with the productive forces it had set in motion: in sum, whether or not world capitalism had entered its epoch of decline. Mitchell’s series of articles was to pose this problem with particular clarity, but the basic approach can already be found in Vercesi’s PEI, in particular in Bilan nº 19 and 21 where Vercesi attacks the Stalinist notion that socialism was possible in Russia because of the "law of uneven development": in other words, that Russia could be socialist "on its own" precisely because it was already a semi-autarchic, peasant economy. But at the same time the series rejected the arguments of the Dutch/German left communists, who, echoing the old Menshevik arguments, even if with a different intent, used the same premises to argue that Russia was far too backward to have proceded towards the real socialisation of the economy. Thus the revolution failed because, as Hennaut argued in "Nature and Evolution of the Russian Revolution", Russia was simply not developed enough for socialism. In Hennaut’s terms, “the revolution was made by the proletariat, but it was not a proletarian revolution” (Bilan nº 34, p1124).
For Bilan, by contrast, "uneven development" was simply an aspect of the way the capitalist world economy had evolved. It did not alter the fact that no country taken on its own could be considered ripe for socialism because socialism could only be built on a world scale once world capital had reached a certain degree of ripeness.
As Bilan was arguing in other articles written during this period, once capitalism is treated as a global unity, it becomes evident that the system cannot be progressive in some parts and decadent in others. Capitalism had been a step forward for mankind at a certain stage; but once that stage had been left behind, it became universally senile. World War One and the October revolution had demonstrated this in practice. This led Bilan to reject any support for national liberation struggles or "bourgeois" revolutions in the least developed regions. For the Fraction, the events in China 1927 provided decisive proof that the bourgeoisie everywhere was a counter-revolutionary force. For the same reasons, and in opposition to the theses of the German/Dutch left, Bilan argued that the October revolution could not have a bourgeois or a dual character. It could only be the starting point for the world proletarian revolution.
Having laid out this fundamental starting point, the central problem was then this: how and why did the Soviet state, an instrument that had originally been in the hands of a genuine revolution by the proletariat, escape its control and turn against it? And in responding to this question, the Italian left developed a number of vital insights into the nature and function of the transitional state.
Here the series PEI went deep into history and to Engels’ work in particular to remind us that for marxism, the state is a “scourge” inherited from class society. Throughout the series, we are told that the state, even the "proletarian" state that arises after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, contains the inherent danger of becoming the focal point for the forces of conservation and even counter-revolution.
“From the theoretical point of view, the new instrument which the proletariat possesses after its revolutionary victory, the proletarian state, differs profoundly from workers’ organs of resistance such as the unions, friendly societies and cooperatives, and from its political organism: the class party. But this difference operates not because the state possesses organic factors which are superior to those of the other organs, but on the contrary because the state, despite its appearance of much greater material strength, possesses much less possibilities for action from the political point of view; it is a thousand times more vulnerable to the enemy than the other workers’ organs. The fact is that the state draws its greater material power from objective factors which correspond perfectly to the interests of exploiting classes but which can have no relationship with the revolutionary function of the proletariat, which will have provisional recourse to the dictatorship and will use it to accentuate the process of the withering away of the state through an expansion of production which will make it possible to extirpate the very roots of class divisions” (Bilan nº 18, p 612).
Or again: “While it is true that the trade unions, from their foundation, threatened to become the instruments of opportunist currents, this is all the more true for the state, whose very nature is to hold back the interests of the working masses in order to safeguard a regime of class exploitation; or, after the victory of the proletariat, to threaten to give rise to social stratifications which are ever more opposed to the liberating mission of the proletariat…Considering – following Engels – the state as a scourge which the proletariat inherits, we retain an almost instinctive distrust towards it” (Bilan nº 26, pp 873-4).
This was certainly one of Bilan’s most important contributions to marxist theory. It represented a step forward from the text which had, hitherto, stood as the best synthesis and elaboration of marxist theory on this question, Lenin’s State and Revolution, written in the heat of the revolution in 1917.[2] [56] The latter had been absolutely indispensable in reaffirming the marxist doctrine of the state against the social democratic distortions that had come to dominate the workers’ movement by the beginning of the 20th century, in particular reminding the proletariat that Marx and Engels had stood for the destruction of the bourgeois state, not its capture, and its replacement with a new form of state, the "Commune state". But Bilan had at its disposal the experience of the defeat of the Russian revolution, which had emphasised how even the Commune state contained fundamental weaknesses which the revolutionary class would ignore at its peril. Above all, Bilan warned against the working class merging its own class organs – whether the party, or the unitary organs which regroup the class as a whole – into the state machine.
In the concluding article in the series, Vercesi notes that in the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin on the post-revolutionary state, the relationship between party and state is not dealt with at all; the working class had thus been thrown into a revolution without this fundamental issue having been previously clarified by direct experience:
“Dictatorship of the state: this is how we can sum up the way the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat was really posed at the time of the victory of the Russian revolution. It is undeniable that the central thesis coming out of the Russian revolution, taken as a whole, was that of the dictatorship of the workers’ state. The problem of the function of the party was basically falsified by the fact that its intimate liaison with the state led step by step to a radical inversion of roles, with the party becoming a cog of the state machine, which provided it with the repressive organs that allowed the triumph of Centrism. The confusion between these two notions, party and state, was all the more prejudicial in that there is no possibility of reconciling these two organs, that there is an irreconcilable opposition between the nature, function and objectives of the state and those of the party. The adjective proletarian doesn’t change the nature of the state which remains an organ of economic and political constraint, whereas the party is the organ whose role par excellence is to arrive at the emancipation of the workers not through constraint but through political education” (Bilan nº 26, p 871-2).
The article goes on to argue that the working class would not seize power in ideal conditions, but in a situation where its majority still very much remained the prey of the dominant ideology; hence the role of the communist party would be as fundamental as ever after the political overthrow of the ruling class. These same conditions would also engender a state machine, but while the “workers have a primordial interest in the existence and development of the class party”, the state remained an instrument which was “not all in conformity with the pursuit and realisation of its historic goals”.
Another aspect of this fundamental contrast between party and state is that while the state in a proletarian bastion tends to identify with the national interests of the existing economy, the party is organically linked to the international needs of the working class. And although the PEI series, as the title suggests, does make a distinction between the International and its component national parties, the whole dynamic of the Italian left since Bordiga had been to see the party as a unified world party from the beginning. Their solution to the tendency for the national state to impose its narrow interests on the party - which had led to the very rapid degeneration of the CI into an instrument of Russian national interests - was to confer control of the state on the International rather than on the national party which happened to be present in the country where the workers had taken power.
However, this way of thinking, although motivated by a thorough-going internationalism, was wrongly conceived and was connected to a major flaw in Bilan’s position. The Fraction warned against any fusion between the party and the state; it rejected the identity between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the transitional state. But it still defended the notion of the “dictatorship of the communist party”, even if the definitions it offered remain somewhat obscure: “the dictatorship of the party signifies, for us, that after the foundation of the state, the proletariat needs to set up a bastion (which will complement the one set up at the economic level) through which the whole ideological and political movement of the new proletarian society will take place” (Bilan nº 25, p843); “the dictatorship of the communist party can only mean the clear affirmation of an effort, a historic attempt which the party of the working class will make” (Bilan nº26, p874).
The notion of the dictatorship of the party was in part based on Bilan’s very correct critique of the concept of democracy, which we will return to at greater length in another article. Following Bordiga’s line of thought in his 1922 essay "The democratic principle", Bilan clearly understood that the revolution could not be a formally democratic process, and that very often it was the initiative of a minority which drew the majority into combat against the capitalist state. It was equally true, as Vercesi forcefully argues in PEI, (cf Bilan nº 26, pp875-877) that the working class had to make the revolution as it is and not in some ideal state. This meant that the true participation of the masses in the exercise of power was something the masses themselves would have to learn through experience.
But Bilan’s polemics on this point were far from clear. Correctly criticising Rosa Luxemburg for arguing that the Bolsheviks should not have called for the suppression of the Constituent Assembly, Vercesi appears to draw the conclusion that the use of the elective principle is by definition an expression of bourgeois parliamentarism, drawing no clear distinction between bourgeois representation and the soviet method of elected and revocable delegates, which is different not only in form but also in content. The party should thus “proclaim its candidature to represent the whole of the working class in the complicated course of its evolution in order to work towards – under the direction of the International – the final goal of the world revolution” (Bilan nº 26, p874). But this notion was surely in complete contrast to the Fraction’s insistence that the party had to avoid being caught up in the state machinery; that it could not impose itself on the proletariat and certainly could not use violence against the workers: “The dictatorship of the party cannot become, through some kind of logical schema, the imposition on the working class of solutions decreed by the party; above all it cannot mean that the party can rely on the repressive organs of the state to extinguish all discordant voices” (ibid). No less contradictory was Bilan’s idea that there could only be one party, because at the same time it was a convinced advocate of the freedom of fractions to operate within the party. This necessarily implied the possibility of more than one separate group acting on a proletarian terrain during the revolution, regardless of whether such groups called themselves parties.
The fact is that Bilan was already aware of the contradictions of its position, but tended to see these as simply reflecting the contradictory nature of the transition period itself: “The very idea of the transition period does not make it possible to arrive at totally finished notions and we have to admit that the contradictions exist at the very bases of the experience that the proletariat is going to go through, reflected in the constitution of the workers’ state” (Bilan nº 26, p875). This is not wrong in itself, since to a large extent the problems of the transition period remain open, unresolved questions for the revolutionary movement. But the question of the party dictatorship is not one of these open questions. The Russian revolution has demonstrated that it cannot be a reality unless the party resorts to the very things that Bilan warns against: the use of the state machine against the proletariat, and the fusion of the party with the state machine, which is injurious not only to the unitary organ of the class but to the party itself. Nevertheless, it is clear that this process of reflection by Bilan, for all its limitations, certainly marked an important advance from the position of the Bolsheviks and the CI, which, certainly after 1920, tended to deny that there was a problem in the party fusing with the "workers state" (despite important insights from Lenin and others). The argument that the needs of the state and the needs of the party were antagonistic provided the essential breakthrough; it established the premises for further clarifications, for example by the Belgian left, which in 1938 was already writing that the party was “not a completed, immutable, untouchable organism; it does not have an irrevocable mandate from the class, nor any permanent right to express the final interests of the class” (Communisme nº 18). This was particularly the case with the French left after the war, which was able to make a real synthesis between the method of the Italian left and the most advanced insights of the German and Dutch left. Thus the Gauche Communiste de France was finally able to bury the notion of the party ruling "on behalf" of the proletariat; the idea that the party should exert power was a hangover from the period of bourgeois parliaments and had no place in a soviet system based on revocable delegates.
In any case, it is already explicitly affirmed in PEI that for Bilan the vigilance and programmatic clarity of the party was not enough; the class also needed its unitary organs of self-defence faced with the conservative weight of the state machine. To a certain extent, Bilan here was still within the framework of Lenin’s critique of Trotsky’s position at the 10th Congress of the Russian party in 1921: the proletariat would have to maintain independent trade unions to defend its immediate economic interests even against the demands of the transitional state. Although Bilan had already begun to criticise the absorption of the trade unions into capitalism (especially a minority around Stefanini), they were still seen as workers’ organs and there clearly was an idea that they could be given new lease of life by the revolution[3] [57]. Other organs of the class actually created by the evolution in Russia were only dealt with cursorily. The factory committees tended to be identified with the anarcho-syndicalist deviations associated with them in the early days of their evolution, although PEI recognise the need for them to remain as organs of class struggle rather than of economic management. The most important weakness was in failing to understand all the implications of Lenin’s crucial observation that the soviets were the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat:
“As for the soviets, we don’t hesitate to affirm, for the considerations already given on the subject of the democratic mechanism, that while they have an enormous importance in the first phase of the revolution, that of the civil war to overthrow the capitalist regime, later on they will lose their primal importance, since the proletariat cannot find in them the organs that can accomplish its mission for the triumph of the world revolution (this task falls to the party and the proletarian International), nor the task of defending its immediate interests (this can only be realised through the trade unions, whose nature must not be falsified by making them into channels of the state). In the second phase of the revolution, the soviets could nevertheless represent an element for controlling the action of the party which has every interest in the masses regrouped in these institutions exerting an active surveillance over it” (Bilan nº 26, p878).
Nevertheless the basic premise was clear, and this provided the foundations for future theoretical advances by the communist left: the working class could not abandon its independent organs because of the existence of a state that was labelled proletarian. In case of a conflict, the duty of communists was to be with the class; hence the radical position they already defended on the question of the Kronstadt rising, totally at odds with Trotsky who continued to defend his role in the crushing of Kronstadt even in the 1930s:
“The conflicts in Ukraine with Makhno, as well as the Kronstadt uprising, while they ended in victory for the Bolsheviks, were far from representing the best moments of soviet policy. In both cases, we saw the first expressions of this superimposition of the army over the masses, of one of the characteristics of what Marx called the ‘parasitic’ state in The Civil War in France. The approach which holds that it is enough to determine the political objectives of an adverse group in order to justify the policy applied towards it (you are an anarchist and thus I crush you in the name of communism) is only valid to the extent that the party manages to understand the reasons for movements which could be oriented towards counter-revolutionary solutions by the manoeuvres which the enemy will not fail to use. Once you have established the social motivations which push strata of workers and peasants into action, it is necessary to give a response to this problem in a manner that allows the proletariat to penetrate the state organism all the more profoundly. The first frontal victories obtained by the Bolsheviks (Makhno, Kronstadt) over groups acting within the proletariat were realised at the expense of the proletarian essence of the state organisation. Assailed by a thousand dangers, the Bolsheviks believed that it was possible to proceed to the crushing of these movements and to consider them as proletarian victories because they were led by anarchists or because the bourgeoisie would make use of them in its struggle against the proletarian state. We don’t want to say here that the attitude the Bolsheviks should have taken was necessarily opposed to the one they did take, since the factual elements are lacking, but we do want to note that they show a tendency which was to show itself openly later on – the dissociation between the masses and the state, which was more and more becoming subjected to laws which took it away from its revolutionary function”.
In a later text, Vercesi pushed this argument further, saying that “it would have been better to have lost Kronstadt than to have kept it from the geographical point of view, since substantially this victory could only have one result: that of altering the very bases, the substance of the action carried out by the proletariat” ("The question of the state", Octobre, 1938). In other words, there was now an explicit recognition that the suppression of Kronstadt was a disastrous error.
In retrospect, it may seem hard to understand Bilan’s view that even in 1934-6 the USSR was still a proletarian state. In the article in IR nº 106, we explained that this was partly the result of Bilan’s insistence on the need for a methodical and cautious approach to the question: in understanding the defeat of the revolution, it was essential not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, as the German/Dutch left had done (a path also followed by the group Reveil Communiste which had begun life as part of the Italian left). But there were other theoretical bases for this error. In the most immediate sense, Bilan remained wedded to Trotsky’s mistaken view that the state in the USSR maintained its proletarian character because the private ownership of the means of production had not been restored; the bureaucracy, therefore, could not be characterised as a class. The difference with the Trotskyists being that on the one hand Bilan did not deny that the workers in the USSR were still subject to capitalist exploitation; they merely saw the degenerated Soviet state as an instrument of world capital rather than the organ of a new Russian capitalist class. And because this state played a counter-revolutionary role on the world arena, where it acted as part of the global imperialist chess-game, they saw straight away that defending the USSR could only lead to an abandonment of internationalism.
There are more historical roots to the error as well. These can be traced by going back to the first articles in the PEI series, where there is an overemphasis on the state as the organ of a class, rather as if the state began life as the organic secretion of a ruling class. This misses out on Engels’ view that the state was originally the spontaneous emanation of a class divided situation, which then became the state of the economically dominant class. The destruction of the state by the October revolution had in a sense re-created the conditions of the first period of the state in history: once again a state emerged spontaneously out of the class contradictions of society. But this time there was no new economically dominant class for the state to become identified with. On the contrary, the new Soviet state had to be used by an exploited class whose historic interests were fundamentally antagonistic to it – hence the inaccuracy of describing even a properly functioning transitional state as proletarian in nature. Failing to see this tied Bilan to the notion of the proletarian state even when their arguments more and more showed that the proletariat’s authentic organs could not identify with the transitional state, that there was a difference in quality in the proletariat’s relation to the state as compared to its relationship with the party or its unitary organs.
Bilan’s idea of the "proletarian economy" supplied further theoretical support to the idea of the proletarian state. As we have seen, Bilan insisted on the need to “reject any possibility of a socialist victory outside the victory of the revolution in other countries”; but it went on to say “we should talk more modestly not of a socialist economy but of a proletarian economy”. (Bilan nº 25, p841). This is wrong for the same reasons as the notion of the proletarian state. As an exploited class the proletariat could not have an economy of its own. As we have seen, this notion also made it harder for Bilan to see the emergence of state capitalism in the USSR and break with Trotsky’s view that the elimination of private capitalists conferred a proletarian character on the state which had expropriated them.
Nevertheless, PEI does make a careful distinction between state property and socialism and warns that the socialisation of the economy could in no way be a guarantee against the degeneration of the revolution:
“In the economic domain, we have explained at length that the socialisation of the means of production is not a sufficient condition to safeguard the proletariat’s victory. We have also explained why it is necessary to revise the central thesis of the IVth Congress of the International which, after considering the state industries as ‘socialist’ and all the others as ‘non-socialist’, arrived at this conclusion: the condition for the victory of socialism resides in the growing extension of the ‘socialist sectors’ at the expense of the economic formations of the ‘private sector’. The Russian experience is there to show that at the end of a socialisation which has monopolised the whole Soviet economy, we see not an extension of the class consciousness of the proletariat and of its role, but the conclusion of a process of degeneration leading the Soviet state to integrate itself into world capitalism” (Bilan nº 26, p872).
Here again, as we also showed in our article in IR nº 106, other insights by Bilan about capitalism in the rest of the world were certainly heading in the direction of a deeper understanding of the notion of state capitalism (for example the Plan de Man introduced by the Belgian state). In the same vein, the article from the PEI that deals with the fascist state argued that, in the epoch of capitalist decline, there was a general tendency for the state to absorb all expression of the working class. Such insights would also allow Bilan’s heirs in the communist left to recognise state capitalism as a universal tendency in capitalist decadence, and thus to understand that the form it had taken in the USSR, even though it had its own unique characteristics, was by no means different in essence from the forms it took elsewhere.
Bilan’s awareness of the conflict between the needs of the state and the international needs of the proletariat was also concretised in the way they dealt with the question of the relationship between an isolated proletarian power and the external capitalist world. There was no rigid utopianism in their approach. Lenin’s position on Brest Litovsk was supported, especially against Bukharin’s idea of spreading the revolution through ‘revolutionary war’. The experience of the Red Army’s advance into Poland in 1920 had convinced it that the military victory of the proletarian state over a capitalist state could not be equated with the real advance of the world revolution. By the same token, and unlike the German left, the Fraction did not reject in principle the provisional resort to an NEP-type economic policy as long as it was guided by general proletarian principles: thus, the possibility and even probability of trade between the proletarian power and the capitalist world was accepted. But a fundamental distinction was made between these inevitable concessions and the betrayal – usually in secret – of fundamental principles, as exemplified in the Rapallo treaty where Russian arms were used to quash the revolution in Germany.
“The solution which the Bolsheviks came to at Brest did not imply an alteration of the internal character of the Soviet state in its relations with capitalism and the world proletariat. But in 1921, at the time of the introduction of the NEP, and, in 1922, with the Treaty of Rapallo, there had been a profound change in the position occupied by the proletarian state in the class struggle on a world scale. Between 1918 and 1921 the revolutionary wave that burst upon the entire world made its appearance and was then reabsorbed; in the new situation the proletarian state encountered enormous difficulties, and the moment came when – no longer able to rely on the natural support of revolutionary movements in other countries – it had either to accept a struggle in extremely unfavourable circumstances or avoid this struggle and, as a result, accept compromises that would gradually and inevitably lead it along a path that would first adulterate and then destroy its proletarian function, culminating in the present situation where the proletarian state has become part of world capitalism’s apparatus of domination” (Bilan nº 18, p611).
Here the Fraction was highly critical of some of Lenin’s views which contributed towards this involution -in particular the idea of temporary and tactical "alliances" between the proletarian power and one set of imperialists against other imperialist powers: “The directives exposed by Lenin, where he considered it possible for the Russian state to play off the imperialist brigands against each other, and even to accept the support of one imperialist constellation in order to defend the frontiers of the Soviet state from the threat of another capitalist group, testifies - in our opinion – to the gigantic difficulties encountered by the Bolsheviks in establishing the policy of the Russian state, given the lack of any prior experience that could have armed them to lead the struggle against world capitalism and for the triumph of the world revolution” (Bilan nº 18, p609).
We have seen that Bilan opposed the idea of trying to work out whether each country taken separately was "ripe" for communism, since this question could only be posed on a world scale. They thus categorically rejected any notion of overcoming capitalist relations of production in the confines of a single country – an error to which the Dutch/German left was constantly prone. “The error which in our opinion the Dutch left communists and with them comrade Hennaut make is that they have taken a basically sterile direction, because it is basic to marxism that the foundations of a communist economy only present themselves on the world terrain and can never be realised inside the frontiers of a proletarian state. The latter can intervene in the economic domain to change the process of production, but in no way can it place this process definitively on communist foundations, because the conditions for realising such an economy only exist on the world scale… We will not move towards the realisation of the supreme goal by making the workers believe that after their victory over the bourgeoisie they could directly manage the economy in a single country. Until the victory of the world revolution the conditions for this don’t exist, and to take things in the direction which will allow the maturation of these conditions, you have to begin by recognising that it is impossible to obtain definitive results in a single country” (Bilan nº 21, p717).
This did not mean that they were indifferent to the question of economic measures to be taken in a proletarian bastion. As with the question of the state, they approached this question from the standpoint of the concrete needs of the working class.
If communists were to stand with their class, then the economic programme they defended in a transitional regime also had to put proletarian interests above those of the "general" (ie national) interests defended by the state. Hence the total rejection of all the hymns to Soviet economic growth which were rife not only among the Stalinists but also the Trotskyists. For Bilan, despite the existence of a "socialised economy", this was still the production of surplus value, still capitalist exploitation, although as we have seen they tended to see the Russian state bureaucracy as the servants of "world capital" rather than as the representatives of a specifically Russian ruling class in a new form.
Against the subordination of proletarian living standards to the development of heavy industry and an economy geared to war, they called for the logic of accumulation to be reversed by focusing on the production of consumer goods. We will look at this problem in more detail when we study Mitchell’s text, which concentrates much more on the economic questions of the transition period. But again the basic principle is sound: the worst thing communists can do in a revolution is to present the immediate situation as the ideal goal, which was the mistake made by many during the period of "War Communism". Exploitation and the law of value cannot be abolished overnight and any claim to the contrary would be a new cover for capitalism. But concrete measures could be taken which would put the immediate needs of the workers at the forefront. And this was a further reason why workers needed to be able to defend their immediate economic interests, against the state if necessary. Progress would not be measured by the vastness of the workers’ sacrifices, as in Stakhanovist Russia, but in the real amelioration of workers’ living conditions, which includes not only a greater number of consumer goods but also the time to rest and to take part in political life.
This is how Vercesi poses the problem in Bilan nº 21, (p719-20):
“While the proletariat can’t immediately institute a communist society after the victory against the bourgeoisie, while the law of value continues to subsist (and it could not be otherwise), there is nevertheless an essential condition to fulfil if the state is to be oriented not towards its incorporation into the rest of the capitalist world, but in the opposite direction, towards the victory of the world proletariat. Against the formula which represents the key to the bourgeois economy and which provides the rate of surplus value, s over v, ie the relationship between the totality of unpaid labour and paid labour, it is necessary to defend this other formula which does not contain any limits to the satisfaction of the needs of the producers and through which both surplus value and the very payment of labour will disappear. But if the bourgeoisie bases its bible on the necessity for a continuous growth of surplus value in order to convert it into capital in the ‘common interests of all classes’ (sic), the proletariat must work for a constant diminution of unpaid labour, which will inevitably lead to a rhythm of accumulation that is much slower than in comparison to the capitalist economy.
"As far as Russia is concerned, it is notorious that the rule instituted has been precisely the one of proceeding towards an intense accumulation in order to defend the state, which is presented as threatened at all times by an intervention of the capitalist states. The state has to be armed with a powerful heavy industry in order to give it the best possibility of serving the world revolution. Unpaid labour thus receives a revolutionary consecration. Furthermore, in the very structure of the Russian economy, the growth of socialist positions as against the private sector is supposed to be expressed through an ever-growing intensification of accumulation. But as Marx has proved, accumulation is founded on the rate of exploitation of the working class, and it is through unpaid labour that the economic, political and military power of Russia has been constructed. But because the same mechanisms of capitalist accumulation have continued to operate, the gigantic economic results have only been obtained through the gradual conversion of the Russian state, which has finally joined the other states on a path which is leading inevitably to the precipice of war. The proletarian state, if it is to be conserved for the working class, must therefore make the rate of accumulation depend not on the rate of wages, but on what Marx called the ‘productive forces of society’ and be converted into a direct amelioration of workers’ conditions, into an immediate increase in wages. Proletarian management thus implies the diminution of absolute surplus value and the almost total conversion of relative surplus value into wages paid to the workers”.
Some of the terms used by Vercesi here are open to question – is it still appropriate to talk about "wages" even while recognising that the fundamental roots of the wage system cannot disappear immediately, for example? This question will be taken up in further articles. But the essential thing for the Italian left was the principle that enabled them to resist the near-overwhelming tide of the counter-revolution in the 1930s and 40s: the necessity to analyse every question from the simple starting point of defending the needs of the international working class, even when to do so seemed to fly in the face of the "great victories" which Stalinism and democracy claimed for the proletariat. For the victories of "socialist construction" in the 30s, no less than the triumphs of democracy over fascism in the decade that followed, were for the proletariat, the worst kinds of defeat.
CDW
[1] [58] Vercesi, real name Ottorino Perrone, was one of the founding members of the Fraction and without doubt one of its most important theoreticians. For a brief biographical sketch, see The Italian Communist Left p52-3.
[2] [59] See "Lenin’s State and Revolution: a striking validation of marxism", in International Review nº 91
[3] [60] The position on the unions defended in PEI showed the strengths and limits of Bilan’s position at the time.
“What happened before the war, and what is happening now with the trade unions, has been verified for the Soviet state. The trade union, despite its proletarian nature, faced a choice between a class policy which would have put it in constant and progressive opposition to the capitalist state, and a policy of appealing to the workers that they should improve their lot by the gradual conquest of ‘points of support’ (reforms) within the capitalist state. The overt passage of the trade unions, in 1914, to the other side of the barricade, proved that the reformist policy led precisely to the opposite of what it claimed: it was the state which progressively took hold of the unions, to the point where they became instruments for the unleashing of imperialist war. It’s the same now for the workers’ state, faced with the world capitalist system. Once again, two paths: one a policy of winning on its territory, and externally, in connection with the Communist International, more and more advanced positions in the struggle for the overthrow of international capitalism; or the opposite policy, consisting of calling on the proletariat of Russia and the rest of the world to support the Russian state’s progressive penetration into the world capitalist system, which will inevitably lead the workers state to throw in its lot with capitalism when its logic leads to imperialist war” (Bilan 7, p238).
The method is perfectly correct: proletarian organs that join in the war campaigns of the bourgeoisie “pass to the other side of the barricades”. But then they cease to maintain a proletarian character and become integrated into the capitalist state. This was the correct conclusion drawn by Steffanini and others.
For more than two years, the ICC has held an internal debate on the question of morality and proletarian ethics. This debate took place on the basis of an orientation text large extracts of which we publish below. If we have opened such a theoretical debate it is essentially because our organisation had been confronted internally at the time of its crisis in 2001 with particularly destructive behaviour totally foreign to the class that is to build communism. This behaviour has been crystallised in thuggish methods used by some elements who gave birth to the so called "internal fraction" of the ICC (FICCI):[1] theft, blackmail, lies, campaigns of slander, informing, moral harassement and death threats against our comrades. The necessity to arm the organisation on the question of proletarian morality, which has preoccupied the workers’ movement since its origins, thus flows from a concrete problem which also threatens the proletarian political milieu. We have always affirmed, notably in our statutes, that the question of militant behaviour is an entirely political question. But until now, the ICC has not been able to carry out a more profound reflection on this question by linking it to that of proletarian morality and ethics. To understand the origins the goals and characteristics of the ethics of the working class the ICC has based itself on the evolution of morality in the history of humanity by reappropriating the theoretical acquistions of marxism which are supported by the advances of human civilisation particularly in the field of science and philosophy. This orientation text did not have the objective of providing a final theoretical elaboration but to trace several lines of reflection to allow the organisation to deepen a certain number of fundamental questions (such as the origin and nature of morality in human history, the difference between bourgeois morality and proletarian morality, the degeneration of the values and ethics of capitalism in the period of decomposition, etc). To the extent that this internal debate is not yet finished we will only publish here extracts of the orientation text which seem to us the most accessible to the reader. Because it is an internal text the ideas are extremely condensed and refer to complex theoretical concepts and we are aware that certain passages may prove difficult. Nevertheless certain aspects of our debate have matured to the point where we judge it useful to bring extracts of this orientation text to the outside in order that the working class and the proletarian political milieu may participate in the reflection started by the ICC.
From the outset, the question the political behaviour of militants and thus of proletarian morality played a central role in the life of the ICC. Our vision of this question finds its living concretisation in our statutes (adopted in 1982).[2]
We have always insisted that the statutes are not a set of rules defining what is and what is not allowed, but an orientation for our attitude and our conduct, comprising a coherent set of moral values (particularly concerning the relations between militants and toward the organisation). This is why we require a profound agreement with these values from whoever wants to become a member of the organisation.
But the statutes, as an integral part of our platform, do not solely regulate who can become member of the ICC, and under which conditions. They condition the framework and the spirit of the militant life of the organisation and each of its members.
The significance which the ICC has always attached to these principles of conduct is illustrated by the fact that it never failed to defend these principles, even at the price of risking organisational crises. In so doing, the ICC places itself consciously and unswervingly in the tradition of struggle of Marx and Engels in the First International, of Bolshevism and the Italian Fraction of the communist left. In so doing, it has been able to overcome a series of crises and to maintain fundamental class principles of behaviour.
However, the concept of a proletarian morality and ethics was upheld more implicitly than explicitly; put into practise in an emprical fashion more than theoretically generalised. In view of the massive reservations of the new generation of revolutionaries after 1968 towards any concept of morality, generally considered as being necessarily reactionary, the attitude developed by the organisation was that it was more important to find acceptance for the attitudes and mode of behaviour of the working class, than to hold this very general debate at a moment for which it was not yet ripe.
Questions of morality were not the only areas where the ICC proceeded in this manner. In the early days of the organisation there existed similar reservations on the necessity of centralisation, or of the intervention of revolutionaries and the leading role of the organisation in the development of class consciousness, the need to struggle against democratism, or the recognition of the actuality of the combat against opportunism and centrism.
And indeed, the course of our major debates and crises reveals that the organisation was always able, not only to raise its theoretical level, but to clarify those questions which at the outset had remained unclear. And precisely regarding organisational questions, the ICC never failed to respond to a challenge with a deepening and broadening of its theoretical understanding of the issues posed.
The ICC has already analysed its recent crises, as well as the underlying tendency towards the loss of the acquisitions of the workers’ movement, as manifestations of the entry of capitalism into a new and terminal stage, that of its decomposition. As such, the clarification of this crucial issue is a necessity of the historical period as such, and concerns the working class as a whole.
“Morality is the result of historic development, it is the product of evolution. It has its origins in the social instincts of the human race, in the material necessity of social life. Given that the ideals of social democracy are one and all directed towards a higher order of social life, they must necessarily be moral ideals.”[3]
Because of the inability of the two major classes of society, bourgeoisie and proletariat, to impose their solution to the crisis, capitalism has entered its terminal phase of decomposition, characterised by the gradual dissolution, not only of social values, but of society itself.
Today, in face of the “each for himself” of capitalist decomposition, and the corrosion of all moral values, it will be impossible for revolutionary organisations – and more generally the emerging, new generation of militants – to prevail without a clarity on moral and ethical issues. Not only the conscious development of workers struggles, but also a specific theoretical struggle on these questions, towards the re-assimilation of the work of the marxist movement, has become a matter of life or death. This struggle is indispensable, not only for the proletarian resistance to decomposition and the ambient amoralism, but in order to reconquer proletarian self confidence in the future of humanity via its own historical project.
The particular form which the counter-revolution took in the USSR – that of Stalinism, presenting itself as the fulfilment rather than the grave digger of the October Revolution – already undermined confidence in the proletariat and its communist alternative. Despite the ending of the counter-revolution in 1968, the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in 1989 – ushering in the historic phase of decomposition - has once again shaken the proletariat's confidence in itself as the agent of the liberation of the whole of humanity.
The weakening of self confidence, of class identity and of the vision of a proletarian alternative to capitalism, under the first shock waves of decomposition, have modified the conditions under which the question of ethics is posed. In fact, the set backs of the working class have damaged its confidence, not only in a communist perspective, but in society as a whole.
For class conscious workers, during the phase of capitalist ascendancy, and even more so during the first revolutionary wave, the assertion that the fundamentally “evil” character of humanity explains the problems of contemporary society, provoked nothing but scorn and contempt. As opposed to this, the assumption of the impossibility of fundamentally improving society and developing higher forms of human solidarity, has today become a given of the historic situation. Nowadays, deep rooted doubts about the moral qualities of our species afflict not only the ruling or the intermediate classes, but menace the proletariat itself, including its revolutionary minorities. This lack of confidence in the possibility of a more collective and responsible approach to human community is not only the result of the propaganda of the dominant class. Historic evolution itself has led to this crisis of confidence in the future of humanity.
We are living in a period marked by:
Popular opinion sees confirmed the judgement of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) that man is a wolf to man. Man is seen as basically destructive, predatory, egoistic, irredeemably irrational, and in his social behaviour, lower than many animal species. For petty bourgeois ecologism, for instance, cultural development is viewed as a “mistake” or a “dead end”. Humanity itself is seen as a cancer growth of history, upon which nature will – and even ought – to take “revenge”.
Of course, capitalist decomposition has not created these problems, but enormously accentuated already existing ones.
In recent centuries, the generalisation of commodity production under capitalism has progressively dissolved the relations of solidarity at the basis of society, so that even their memoryrisks disappearing from collective consciousness.
The phase of decline of social formations has always been characterised by the dissolution of established moral values, and – as long as an historic alternative has not yet begun to assert itself – by a loss of confidence in the future.
The barbarism and inhumanity of capitalist decadence is unprecedented. It is not easy, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and in face of permanent, generalised destruction, to maintain confidence in the possibility of moral progress.
Capitalism has also wrecked the previous, rudimentary equilibrium between man and the rest of nature, thus undermining the longer term basis of society.
To these hallmarks of the historic evolution of capitalism, we must add the accumulation of the effects of a more general phenomenon of the ascent of humanity within the context of class society. This is the unevenness of the development of the different capacities of humanity; more specifically the gap between moral and social, and technological evolution. “Natural science is rightly considered to be the field in which human thinking, in a continuous series of triumphs, has developed its logical forms of conception most powerfully...On the reverse, as a counter proof, at the other extreme stands the large field of human actions and relationships in which the use of tools does not play an immediate role, and works only in the dim distance as the deepest unknown and invisible phenomena. There thought and action are determined mostly by passion and impulse, by arbitrariness and improvidence, by tradition and belief; there no methodical logic leads to a certainty of knowledge (...) The contrast appearing here, with perfection on the one hand and imperfection on the other, means that man controls the forces of nature, or is going to do so in ever greater measure, but that he does not yet control the forces of will and passion which are in him. Where he has stood still, perhaps even fallen behind, is in the manifest lack of control over his own 'nature' (Tilney). This is, clearly, why society is still so much behind science. Potentially man has mastery over nature. But he does not yet possess mastery over his own nature.”[4]
After 1968, the elementary force of the workers' struggle was a powerful counter-weight to the growing scepticism of capitalist society. At the same time, an insufficiently profound assimilation of Marxism led to the common assumption, within the new generation of revolutionaries, that there is no place for moral or ethical questions within socialist theory.
This attitude was first and foremost the product of the break in organic continuity caused by the counter revolution which followed the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. Until then, the ethical values of the workers' movement had always been passed on from one generation to the next. The assimilation of these values was thus favoured by the fact that they were part of a living, collective, organised practise. The counter-revolution wiped out, to a large extent, the knowledge of these acquisitions, just as it almost completely wiped out the revolutionary minorities which embodied them.
Moreover Stalinism, as the purest political product of that counter-revolution, perverted these lessons by maintaining the vocabulary of the workers' movement, while giving the concepts a new, bourgeois meaning. Just as it discredited the very word communism by attributing this title to the state capitalist counter-revolution in the USSR, so it made whole generations of revolutionaries turn away in disgust at the very concept of proletarian morality. Just as it declared the imperialist occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to be the manifestation of “proletarian internationalism”, so also did it present the vile practise of intimidation, denunciation and terrorisation of proletarians – the state “ethics” of decadent capitalist totalitarianism – as the last word in “proletarian morality”
This in turn reinforced the impression that morality, by its very nature, is an inherently reactionary affair of the ruling, exploiting classes. And of course it is true that, throughout the history of class society, the ruling morality has always been the morality of the ruling class. This is true to such an extent that morality and the state, but also morality and religion, have almost become synonymous in popular opinion. The moral feelings of society at large have always been used by the exploiters, by the state and by religion to sanctify and perpetuate the existing state of affairs. And in reality, the main role which morality has played during this period of history has indeed been that of conserving the status quo, of getting exploited classes to bow to their oppression.
The attitude of moralising, through which the ruling classes have always endeavoured to break the resistance of the labouring classes via the instillation of a guilty conscience, is one of the great scourges of humanity. It is also one of the most subtle and effective weapons of securing class domination.
Marxism has always combated the morality of the ruling classes, just as it has combated the philistine moralising of the petty bourgeoisie. Against the hypocrisy of the moral apologists of capitalism, Marxism has always insisted in particular that the critique of political economy must be based on scientific knowledge, not on ethical judgement.
All of this notwithstanding, its perversion at the hands of Stalinism is no reason to abandon the conception of proletarian morality, any more than it would justify abandoning the conception of communism. Marxism has shown that the moral history of humanity is not only the history of the morality of the ruling class. It has demonstrated that exploited classes have ethical values of their own, and that these values have played a revolutionary role in the progress of humanity. It has proven that morality is not identical either with the function of exploitation, the state or of religion, and that the future – if there is to be a future – belongs to a morality beyond exploitation, the state and religion.
“People will gradually become accustomed to the observance of elementary rules of living together – rules known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all codes of behaviour – to their observance without force, without compulsion, without subordination, without that special apparatus for compulsion which is called the state.” [5]
Marxism has revealed that the proletariat is called upon precisely to help free morality, and thus humanity, from the scourge of the guilty conscience and the thirst for vengeance and punishment.
Moreover, in banning petty bourgeois moralising from the critique of political economy, Marxism has been able to scientifically demonstrate the role of moral factors in the proletarian class struggle. It thus uncovered, for instance, that the determination of the value of labour power – as opposed to that of any other commodity – contains a moral element: the courage, determination, solidarity, self-dignity of the workers.
The resistance to the conception of proletarian morality also expressed the weight of petty bourgeois and democratic ideology – the abhorrence of principles of behaviour, as of all principles, as so many fetters on individual “freedom”. This weakness exaggerated the immaturity of this generation precisely as regards human and organisational behaviour, and its failure to develop anew strong traditions of proletarian solidarity.
Morality is an indispensable guide of behaviour in the world of human culture. It identifies the principles and rules which regulate the living together of the members of society. Solidarity, sensitivity, generosity, support for the needy, honesty, friendliness and politeness, modesty, solidarity between generations, are treasures which belong to the heritage of humanity. They are qualities, without which society becomes impossible. This is why human beings have always recognised their value, just as indifference towards others, brutality, greed, envy, arrogance and vanity, dishonesty and infidelity have always provoked disapproval and indignation.
As such, morality fulfils the function of favouring the social as opposed to the anti-social impulses in humanity, in the interests of the maintenance of community. It canalises psychic energy in the interest of the whole. The way in which this energy is channelled varies according to the mode of production, the social constellation etc. The fact of the harnessing of these forces is as old as society itself.
Within society, as a result of the constant repetition of characteristic situations and conflicts, on the basis of living experience, norms of behaviour and evaluation are crystallised, corresponding to a given mode of life. This process is part of what Marx in Capital calls the relative emancipation from arbitrariness and mere chance, through the establishment of order.
Morality has an imperative character. It is an appropriation of the social world through judgements about “good” and “evil”, about what is and what is not acceptable. This form of approaching reality instrumentalises specific psychic mechanisms, such as conscience and the feeling of responsibility. These mechanisms influence decision making and general behaviour, and often determine them. The demands of morality contain a knowledge about society – a knowledge which has been absorbed and assimilated at the emotional level. Like all means of the appropriation and transformation of reality, it has a collective character. Via imagination, intuition, and evaluation, it allows the subject to enter the mental and emotional world of other human beings. It is thus a source of human solidarity, and a means of mutual spiritual enrichment and development. It cannot evolve without social interaction, without the passing on of acquisitions and experience between the members of society, from society to the individual, and from one generation to the next.
A specificity of morality is that it appropriates reality with the measuring scale of what should be. Its approach is teleological rather than causal. The collision between what is, and what ought to be, is characteristic of moral activity, making it an active and vital factor.
Marxism has never denied the necessity or the importance of the contribution of the non-theoretical and non scientific factors in the ascent of humanity. On the contrary, it has always understood their necessity, and even their relative independence. This is why it has been able to examine the interconnection between them in history, and to recognise their complementarity.
In primitive society, but also under class rule, morality develops in a spontaneous manner. Long before the development of the capacity to codify moral values, or to reflect on them, modes of behaviour and their evaluation existed. Each society, each class or social group (even each profession, as Engels pointed out) and each individual possesses its own pattern of comportment. As Hegel remarked, a series of acts by a subject is the subject itself.
Morality is much more than the sum of rules and customs of behaviour. It is an essential part of the coloration of human relationships in any given society. It reflects, and is an active factor, both of how man sees himself, and how he reaches understanding with his fellow man.
Moral evaluations are necessary not only in response to everyday problems, but as part of a planful activity consciously directed towards a goal. They not only guide singular decisions, but the orientation of a whole life or a whole historical epoch.
Although the intuitive, the instinctive and the unconscious are essential aspects of the moral world, with the ascent of humanity the role of consciousness also grows in this sphere. Moral questions touch the very depths of human existence. A moral orientation is the product of social needs, but also of the way of thinking of a given society or group. It demands an evaluation of the value of human life, the relation of the individual to society, a definition of one's own place in the world, one's own responsibilities and ideals. But here, the evaluation takes place, not so much in a contemplative manner, but in the form of questions of conduct. The ethical orientation thus makes its specific – practical, evaluative, imperative – contribution towards giving human life its meaning. The unfolding of the universe is a process which exists beyond and independently of any goal or objective “meaning”. But humanity is that part of nature which sets itself goals, and fights for their realisation.
In his “Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” Engels uncovers the roots of morality in social-economic relationships and class interests. But he also shows their regulating role, not only in the reproduction of the existing social structures, but also in the emergence of new relations. Morality can either hamper or accelerate historical progress. Morality frequently reflects, earlier than philosophy or science, hidden changes under the surface of society.
The class character of a given morality should not blind us to the fact that each moral system contains general human elements, which contribute to the preservation of society at a given stage of its development. As Engels points out in Anti-Dühring, proletarian morality contains many more elements of general human value, because it represents the future against the morality of the bourgeoisie. Engels insists on the existence of moral progress in history. Through the efforts, from generation to generation, to better master human existence, and through the struggles of historic classes, the wealth of moral experience of society has increased. Although the ethical ascent of man is anything but linear, progress in this realm can be measured in the necessity and possibility of solving ever more complex human problems. This reveals the potential for growing richness of the inner and social world of the personality, which, as Trotsky pointed out, is one of the most important yardsticks of progress.
Another fundamental characteristic of the moral realm is that, while expressing the needs of society as a whole, its existence is inseparable from the very personal and intimate life of the individual, from the inner world of the conscience and the personality. Any approach which underestimates the subjective factor, necessarily remains abstract and passive. It is the intimate and profound identification of the personality with moral values, which, amongst other things distinguishes man from the animals, and gives them their social, transformative power. Here, what is socially necessary becomes the inner voice of conscience, linking the emotions with the current of social progress. The moral ripening of the subject arms it against prejudice and fanaticism, increasing its possibilities of reacting consciously and creatively in the face of ethical conflicts, and of carrying moral responsibility.
It is also necessary to underline that, although morality finds a biological basis in social instincts, its evolution is inseparable from participation in human culture. The ascent of humanity depends not only on the development of thought, but also on the education and refining of the emotions. Tolstoy was thus correct to underline the role of art, broadly understood, alongside that of science, in human progress.
“Just as, thanks to the human capacity of understanding thoughts expressed in words, each human being can get to know everything which the whole of humanity has achieved for him in the realm of thinking...in exactly the same way, thanks to the human capacity, through art, of being touched by the feelings of others, he can gain access to the emotions of his contemporaries, to what other human beings, thousands of years beforehand, have felt, and it becomes possible for him to express his own feelings to others. Were human beings not to possess the capacity to absorb all thoughts passed on, through words, from those who have lived before them, and to communicate their own thoughts to others, they would be like wild animals or a Kaspar Hauser. Were it not for that other human capacity of being affected by art, human beings would most certainly, to an even greater extent, be savages, and above all much more estranged from each other and more hostile.”[6]
Ethics is the theoretical comprehension of morality, with the goal of better understanding its role, and of improving and systematising its contents and its field of action. Although it is a theoretical discipline, its goal has always been practical. An ethics which does not contribute to improving comportment in real life, is by its own definition worthless. Ethics has appeared and developed as a kind of philosophical science, not only for historical reasons, but because morality is not a precise object, but a relationship permeating the whole of human life and consciousness. From classical Greek philosophy to Spinoza and Kant, ethics has always been seen as an essential challenge, which has been met by the best minds of humanity.
Notwithstanding the multitude of different approaches and answers given, a common goal which characterises ethics is the answering of the question; how to achieve a maximum of happiness for the greatest number of people? Ethics has always been a weapon of struggle, in particular of the class struggle.
The confrontation with illness and death, with conflicts of interest, or with disappointment and emotional suffering, have often been powerful stimulants to the study of ethics. But whereas morality, however rudimentary its manifestations, is an age old condition of human existence, ethics is a much more recent phenomenon. The need to consciously orient one's behaviour and one's life, is the product of the progressively more complicated nature of social life. In primitive society, the sense of the activity of its members was directly dictated by the bitterest poverty, and the dullness and repetitiveness of life. Individual freedom of choice does not yet exist. It is in the context of the growing contradiction between public and private life, between individualisation and the needs of society, that a theoretical reflection on conduct and its principles begins. This reflection is inseparable from the appearance of a critical attitude towards society, and the will to change it in a planful manner. Thus, if the break up of primitive society into classes is the precondition for such an attitude, its appearance – like that of philosophy in general - is stimulated in particular by the development of commodity production, as in ancient Greece.
Not only the appearance, but also the evolution of ethics depends essentially on the progress of the material, in particular the economic basis of society. With class society, moral demands and customs necessarily change, since each social formation depends on a morality corresponding to its needs. This in turn confronts ethics with new questions, new contradictions which are the stimulus of progress. When the existing morals enter into contradiction with historic development, they become the source of the most terrible suffering, increasingly requiring physical and psychic violence for their enforcement, and leading to generalised disorientation, rampant hypocrisy, but also self-flagellation. Such phases pose a particular challenge to ethics, and the latter has the potential to formulate new principles which only in a later phase will grip and orient the masses.
But despite this dependence, the development of ethics is far from being a passive, mechanical reflection of the economic situation. It possesses an internal dynamic of its own. This is already illustrated by the evolution of the early Greek materialism, which made contributions to ethics which still belong to the priceless theoretical heritage of humanity. This includes the identification of the pursuit of happiness as a central concern of ethics. It includes the recognition that the “demystified” material reality behind the call of morality for “moderation” is that this happiness depends on the achievement of harmony within the individual or social organism, and a dynamic equilibrium within the polarity of the different human needs and their gratification. Already, Heraclitus made out the central issue of ethics: the relationship between individual and society, between what individuals really do and what they ought to do in the general interest. But this “natural” philosophy was unable to give a materialist explanation for the origins of morality, and in particular of the conscience. Moreover, its one sided emphasis on causality, to the detriment of the “teleological” side of human existence (planful activity towards a conscious goal), prevented it from being able to give satisfying answers to some of the most profound problems of ethics.
Therefore, not only the objective social evolution, but this lack of solutions to the theoretical questions posed, paved the way for philosophical idealism. The focus of the latter, and with it the new religious creed of monotheism, was no longer the explanation of nature, but the exploration of ethical, spiritual life. This culminated in the splitting of the personality into a heavenly (morality) and a material (bodily) part: half angel and half animal. A vision which corresponded perfectly with the consolidation of the power of an idle ruling class.
It was not until the revolutionary materialism of the ascendant bourgeoisie of Western Europe, that the triumph of ethical idealism could be seriously challenged. The new materialism postulated that the natural impulses of man contain the germ of all that is good, making the old order and the state of society the source of all evil. Not only the theoretical weapons of the bourgeois revolution, but utopian socialism emerged from this school of thought (Fourier from French materialism, Owen from Bentham’s system of "utility").
But this materialism was unable to explain where morality comes from. Morals cannot be explained “naturally” because human nature already includes morality. Nor could this revolutionary theory explain its own origin. If man, at the moment of birth, is nothing but a white page, a tabula rasa, as this materialism claims, and is solely formed by the existing social order, where do the revolutionary ideas come from, and what is the origin of moral indignation - this indispensable preconditions for a new and better society? The fact that it declared war on the pessimism of idealism - which denies the possibility of historical ethical progress, and demoralises by imposing unfulfillable moral demands - is its lasting contribution. But despite its apparently boundless optimism, this all too mechanical and metaphysical materialism delivered but a flimsy basis for a real confidence in humanity. In the end, in this world view, the “enlightener” himself appears as the only source of the ethical perfection of society.
The fact that bourgeois materialism failed in its effort to explain the origins of morality solely on the basis of experience, (and not only the backwardness of Germany or the provinciality of Königsberg), contributed to Kant falling back on ethical idealism to explain the phenomenon of conscience. By declaring the “moral law within us” to be a “thing in itself”, existing a priori, outside of time and space, Kant was really declaring that we cannot know the origins of morality.
And indeed, despite all the invaluable contributions which humanity has made, constituting, so to speak, the pieces of a still unresolved puzzle, it was only the proletariat, through Marxist theory, which has been able to give a satisfying and coherent answer to this question.
For Marxism, the origin of morality lies in the entirely social, collective nature of humanity. This morality is the product, not only of profound social instincts, but of the dependence of the species on planful, common labour and the increasingly complex productive apparatus this entails. The basis and heart of morality is the awareness of the necessity of solidarity in response to the insufficiency of the individual, to the dependence on society. This solidarity is the common denominator of everything positive and lasting which has been brought forth in the course of the history of morality. As such, it is both the yardstick of moral progress and the expression of the continuity of this history - in spite of all the breaks and set-backs.
This history is characterised by the awareness that the chances of survival are all the greater, the more unified society or the social class is, the firmer its cohesion, the greater the harmony of its parts. But it is not only a question of survival. Ever deeper forms of collectivity are the precondition for the development of the personality and for the fullest development of the potentiality of society and its members. It is only through relating to others that human beings can discover their own humanity. The practical pursuit of the collective interest is the means of the moral uplifting of the members of society. The richest life is that which is most anchored in society, with the most involvement in the lives of others.
The reason why only the proletariat could answer the question of the origin and essence of morality, is because the understanding of the communist perspective of humanity is the key to grasp the history of morals. The proletariat is the first class in history which is united through a true socialisation of production – the material basis of a qualitatively superior level of human solidarity.
Marxism thus understands that man is not, in fact, a tabula rasa at birth, but brings a series of social needs with him “into the world” – for instance the need of tenderness and affection without which the new born baby cannot properly develop, and may not even survive.
But man is also a born fighter. History shows that mankind does not generally resign itself in face of difficulties. The struggle of humanity can base itself on a series of instincts which it inherited from the animal kingdom: those of self preservation, sexual reproduction, the maternal and parental protection instincts, and which in the framework of society develop into emotional sympathy with fellow man. These qualities are not mere additions to the personality, but are profoundly anchored in it, providing the richest sources of happiness and satisfaction with life. If it is true that they are the products of society, it is no less true that these qualities in turn make society possible.
Mankind can also mobilise reserves of aggressivity without which it cannot defend itself against a hostile environment.
But the bases of the combativity of humanity are much more profound than this, being above all anchored in culture. Humanity is the only part of nature which through the labour process constantly transforms itself. This means that consciousness has become the main instrument of its struggle for survival. Each time it achieves a goal, it has altered its environment, thus requiring the setting of new and higher goals. These demand in turn the further development of its social nature.
Marxism has uncovered the causes of morality and of social improvement – the questions the old materialism were unable to answer – because it has discovered the laws of motion of human history, overcoming the metaphysical standpoint. In so doing, it has demonstrated the relativity – but also the relative validity – of the different moral systems in history. It has revealed their dependence on the development of the productive forces, and – from a certain stage – of the class struggle. In so doing, it has laid the theoretical basis for the practical overcoming of what has been one of the greatest scourges of humanity to date: the fanatical, dogmatic tyranny of each moral system.
By showing that history has a meaning, and forms a coherent whole, Marxism has overturned the false choice between the moral pessimism of idealism, and the shallow optimism of bourgeois materialism. By demonstrating the existence of moral progress, it has widened the basis of the proletariat's confidence in the future.
Despite the noble simplicity of the communitarian principles of primitive society, its virtues were tied to the blind pursuit of unquestionable rituals and superstitions, and were never the result of a conscious choice. Characteristic was the local character of these morals: the stranger embodied evil. It was only with the emergence of class society that (in Europe at the apogee of slave-based society) human beings could possess a moral value independent of blood relations. This acquisition was the product of culture, and of the revolts of the slaves and other downtrodden layers. It is important to note that the struggles of exploited classes, even when they contained no revolutionary perspective, have enriched the moral heritage of humanity, through the cultivation of a spirit of rebellion and indignation, the conquest of a respect for human labour, and the advancement of the idea of the dignity of each human being. The moral wealth of society is never just the result of the immediate economic, social and cultural constellation, but the accumulated product of history. Nor should we forget that individualisation has not only brought loneliness, but has also led to the discovery and investigation of the deepest layers of the inner being, and prepared the ground for the emergence of individual responsabilisation. Just as the experience and suffering of a long and difficult life contribute to the maturation of those who remain unbroken by it, so too will the inferno of class society contribute to the growing ethical nobility of humanity – on the condition that this society can be overcome.
It should be added that historical materialism has dissolved the old opposition between instinct and consciousness, and between causality and teleology, which marred the progress of ethics. The objective laws of historical development are themselves manifestations of human activity. They only appear as exterior forces, because the goals men set depend on the circumstances which the past has bequeathed to the present. Considered dynamically, in the flow from the past to the future, humanity is at once the result and the cause of change. In this sense, morality and ethics are at once the products and active factors of history.
By revealing the true nature of morality, Marxism in turn is able to influence its course, sharpening it as a weapon of the proletarian class struggle.
Proletarian morality develops in combat against the dominant values, not in isolation from them. The growing unbearability of the ruling values, itself becomes one of the main motors of the development of the opposing, revolutionary morality, and of its capacity to grip the masses.
The kernel of the morality of bourgeois society is contained in the generalisation of commodity production. This determines its essentially democratic character, which played a highly progressive role in the dissolution of feudalism, but which increasingly reveals its irrational side with the decline of the capitalist system.
Capitalism subjects the whole of society, including labour power itself, to the quantification of exchange value. The value of human beings and their productive activity no longer lies in their concrete human qualities and their unique contribution to the collectivity, but can only be measured quantitively, in comparison to others and to an abstract average - which confronts society as an independent, blind force. By thus pitting man as competitor against man, obliging him to constantly compare himself with others, capitalism corrodes the human solidarity at the basis of society. By abstracting from the real qualities of living human beings, including their moral qualities, it undermines the very basis of morality. By replacing the question “what can I contribute to the community” by the question “what is my own value within the community” (wealth, power, prestige), it questions the very possibility of community.
The tendency of bourgeois society is to erode the moral acquisitions of humanity accumulated over thousands of years, from the simple traditions of hospitality and the respect of others in everyday life, to the elementary reflex to help those in need.
With its entry into its terminal phase of decomposition, this inherent tendency of capitalism tends to become dominant. The irrational nature of this tendency – in the long term incompatible with the preservation of society – is revealed in the necessity for the bourgeoisie itself, in the interests of profitable production, to have scientists investigate and develop strategies against “mobbing”, to employ pedagogues who teach schoolchildren how to deal with conflicts, and to make the increasingly rare quality of being able to work in a group, the most important qualification demanded of new employees in many companies today.
Specific to capitalism is exploitation on the basis of the "freedom" and juristic "equality" of the exploited. Hence the essentially hypocritical character of its morality. But this specificity also alters the role which violence plays within society.
As opposed to what its apologists claim, capitalism employs not less, but much more brute force than any other mode of exploitation. But because the enforcement of the process of exploitation itself is now based on an economic relationship, rather than physical constraint, there results a qualitative leap in the employment of indirect, moral, psychic violence. Slandering, character assassination, scapegoating, the social isolation of others, the systematic demolition of human dignity and self confidence, have become everyday instruments of social control and competitive struggle. More than that: they have become the manifestation of democratic freedom, the moral ideal of bourgeois society. And the more the bourgeoisie can rely on this indirect violence, and on the sway of its morality, against the proletariat, the stronger its position is.
The struggle of the proletariat for communism constitutes by far the summit of society's moral evolution to date. This implies that the working class inherits the accumulated products of culture, developing them at a qualitatively higher level, thus saving them from liquidation by capitalist decomposition. One of the main goals of the communist revolution is the victory of the social feelings and qualities over the anti-social impulses. As Engels argued in Anti-Dühring, a really human morality, beyond class contradictions, will only become possible in a society where not only the class contradiction itself, but the very recollection of it, has disappeared in the practice of daily life.
The proletariat absorbs into its own movement ancient rules of community, as well as the acquisitions of more recent and complicated manifestations of moral culture. These include such elementary rules as the forbidding of theft, which for the workers' movement is not only a golden rule of solidarity and mutual confidence, but a irreplaceable barrier against the alien moral influence of the bourgeoisie and the lumpen proletariat.
The workers' movement lives also from the development of social life, the concern for the lives of others, the protection of the very young, the very old, and the needy. Although love of humanity is not solely restricted to the proletariat, as Lenin said, this working class re-appropriation is necessarily a critical one, striving to overcome the rawness, pettiness and provincialism of non-proletarian exploited classes and layers.
But the emergence of the working class as the carrier of moral progress, is a perfect illustration of the dialectical nature of social development. Through the radical separation of the producers from the means of production, and their radical subordination to the laws of the market, capitalism for the first time created a class of society radically alienated from its own humanity. The genesis of the modern class of wage labourers, is thus a history of the dissolution of social community and its acquisitions - the uprooting, the vagabondage and criminalisation of millions of men, women and children. Placed outside the sphere of society itself, they were condemned to an unprecedented process of brutalisation and moral degradation. Initially, the workers' districts in the industrialised regions were breeding grounds of ignorance, crime, prostitution, alcoholism, indifference and hopelessness.
Yet already, in his study of the working class in England, Engels was able to note that the class conscious proletarians constituted the most lovable, the most noble, the most human sector of society. And later, in drawing a balance sheet of the Paris Commune, Marx contrasted the heroism, spirit of self sacrifice and passion for its Herculean task of the fighting, labouring, thinking Paris, with the parasitical, sceptical and egoistic Paris of the bourgeoisie.
This transformation of the proletariat from the loss to the conquest of its own humanity, is the expression of its specific class nature. Capitalism has given birth to the first class in history which can only affirm its humanity, and express its identity and class interest, through the unfolding of solidarity. As never before, solidarity has become the weapon of class struggle, and the specific means through which the appropriation, the defence and the higher development of human culture and morality by an exploited class becomes possible. As Marx declared in 1872: “Citizens! Let us recall the fundamental principle of the International: solidarity. Only when we have placed this life giving principle on a safe foundation among the workers of all countries, will we be able to achieve that great final goal we have set ourselves. The transformation must take place in solidarity, that is what the example of the Paris Commune teaches us.” [7]
This solidarity is the result of the class struggle. Without the constant combat between the factory owners and the workers, Marx tells us, “the working class of Great Britain and the whole of Europe would be an oppressed, weak charactered, used up, meek mass, whose emancipation through its own strength would be every bit as impossible as that of the slaves of ancient Greece and Rome.” [8]
And Marx adds: “In order to correctly appreciate the value of strikes and coalitions, we must not allow ourselves to be deceived by the apparent insignificance of their economic results, but above all keep in mind their moral and political consequences.”
This solidarity goes hand in hand with the workers' moral indignation at their own degradation. This indignation is a precondition not only of the working class' combat and self respect, but also of the flourishing of its consciousness. After defining factory labour as a means of making the workers stupid, Engels concludes that if the workers were “not only able to save their sanity, but even to develop and sharpen their understanding more than others”, it was only through their indignation at their fate and at the bourgeoisie.[9]
The freeing of the proletariat from the paternal prison of feudalism enables it to develop the political, global dimension of these “moral results”, and thus to take to heart its responsibility towards society as a whole. In his book about the working class in England, Engels recalls how in France politics, and in Britain economics had liberated the workers from their “apathy towards general human interests” an apathy rendering them “spiritually dead”.
For the working class, its solidarity is not one instrument among others, to be employed when the need arises. It is the essence of the struggle and daily existence of the class. This is why the organisation and centralisation of its combat is the living manifestation of this solidarity.
The moral ascent of the workers' movement is inseparable from the formulation of its historic goal. In the course of his study of the utopian socialists, Marx recognised the ethical influence of communist ideas, through which “our conscience is forged”. And in her “Socialism and the Churches” Rosa Luxemburg recalled how crime rates in industrial districts of Warsaw plummeted as soon as the workers became socialists.
Characteristic of moral progress is the enlarging of the radius of application of social virtues and impulses, until the whole of humanity is encompassed. By far the highest expression of human solidarity, of the ethical progress of society to date, is proletarian internationalism. This principle is the indispensable means of the liberation of the working class, laying the basis for the future human community. The centrality of this principle, and the fact that only the working class can defend it, underlines the importance of the moral autonomy of the proletariat from all other classes and layers of society. It is indispensable for the class conscious workers to free themselves from the thinking and feelings of the population at large, in order to oppose their own morality to that of the bourgeoisie.
Its position, at the heart of the proletarian struggle, permits a new understanding of the importance of solidarity in human society at large. It is not only an indispensable means to achieve the goal of communism, but also the essence of that goal. Similarly, the goal of the workers' movement, in fighting capitalism, is not only to overcome exploitation and material want, but also loneliness and social indifference.
Revolutions always imply the moral renewal of society. They cannot take place and be victorious unless, already beforehand, the masses are seized by new values and ideas which galvanise their fighting spirit, their courage and determination. The superiority of the moral values of the proletariat constitutes one of the principal elements of its ability to draw other, non-exploiting strata behind it. Although it is impossible to achieve a communist morality inside class society, the principles of the working class announce the future, and help to clear its path. Through the combat itself, the class brings its behaviour and values increasingly in line with its own needs and goals, thus achieving a new human dignity.
The goal of the proletariat is not an ethical ideal, but the liberation of the already existing elements of the new society. It has no need of moral illusions, and detests hypocrisy. Its interest is to strip morality of all illusions and prejudices. As the first class in society with a scientific understanding of society, it achieves a new quality of the other central concern of traditional morality – truthfulness. As with solidarity, this uprightness takes on a new and deeper meaning. In the face of capitalism, which cannot exist without lies and deception, and which distorts social reality - making the relation between people appear as one between objects - the goal of the proletariat is to uncover the truth as the indispensable means of its own liberation. This is why Marxism has never tried to play down the importance of the obstacles in the path of victory, or to shy away from recognising a defeat. The hardest test of uprightness is to be truthful to oneself. This goes for classes as well as individuals. Of course, this quest for understanding ones own reality can be painful, and should not be understood in an absolute sense. But ideology and self deception directly contradict the interests of the working class.
In fact, Marxism is the inheritor of the best of the scientific ethics of humanity, placing the search for truth at the centre of its preoccupations. For the proletariat, the struggle for clarity is of the highest value. The attitude of avoiding and of sabotaging debate and clarification is anathema to it, since such an approach always opens the door wide for the penetration of alien ideology and comportment.
In addition to absorbing the ethical acquisitions and developing them to a higher level, the struggle for communism confronts the working class with new questions and new dimensions of ethical action. For instance, the struggle for power directly poses the issue of the relationship between the interests of the proletariat and that of humanity as a whole, which at the present stage of history correspond to each other, without however being identical. Faced with the choice between socialism and barbarism, the working class must consciously assume responsibility for the survival of humanity as a whole. In September-October 1917, in the face of the ripeness for insurrection, and the danger that the failure of the revolution to spread would lead to terrible suffering for the Russian and the world proletariat, Lenin insisted that the risk had to be taken, because the fate of civilisation itself was at stake. Similarly, the economic politics of transformation after the conquest of power, confront the class with the need of consciously developing a new relationship between man and the rest of nature, which can no longer be that of a “victor towards a conquered land” (Anti-Dühring).
ICC
1. For an idea of the behaviour of the FICCI elements, see our articles "Death threats against the militants of the ICC", "Informers banned from ICC public meetings", "The police methods of the FICCI", respectively in nos.354, 358 and 330 of Révolution Internationale.
2. This vision is developed in the text "The question of the functioning of the organisation" in International Review n°109.
3. Josef Dietzgen, "The religion of Social Democracy - Sermons", 1870, Chapter V
4. Pannekoek, Anthropogenesis: A study of the origin of man, 1953
5. Lenin, State and revolution, 1917
6. Tolstoy: What is Art? 1897 (Chap. 5). In an article puiblished in Neue Zeit about this essay, Rosa Luxemburg declared that, in formulating such views, Tolstoy was much more of a socialist and an historical materialist than most of what appeared in the party press.
7. Marx: "Speech about The Hague Congress of the International Workers Association". 1872.
8. Marx: "The Russian Policy towards England – The Workers Movement in England". 1853.
9. Engels: Condition of the Working Class in England. 1845. Chapter: "The different branches of work. The Factory worker in the narrow sense. (Slavery. Factory Rules)".
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/editorial#_ftn1
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/editorial#_ftn2
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/editorial#_ftnref1
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/editorial#_ftnref2
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/108_machiavel.htm
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/58/palestine
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftn1
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftn2
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftn3
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftn4
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftn5
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftn6
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftn7
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftnref1
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftnref2
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftnref3
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftnref4
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftnref5
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftnref6
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/hungary-1956#_ftnref7
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/hungary
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1956-hungary
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war-introduction#_ftn1
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war-introduction#_ftn2
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war-introduction#_ftn3
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war-introduction#_ftn4
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war-introduction#_ftnref1
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war-introduction#_ftnref2
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war-introduction#_ftnref3
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war-introduction#_ftnref4
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/war
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftn1
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftn2
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftn3
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftn4
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftn5
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftn6
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftn7
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftn8
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftn9
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftn10
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftnref1
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftnref2
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftnref3
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftnref4
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftnref5
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftnref6
[50] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftnref7
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftnref8
[52] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftnref9
[53] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/war#_ftnref10
[54] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-workers-organisation
[55] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/vercesi-period-of-transition#_ftn1
[56] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/vercesi-period-of-transition#_ftn2
[57] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/vercesi-period-of-transition#_ftn3
[58] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/vercesi-period-of-transition#_ftnref1
[59] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/vercesi-period-of-transition#_ftnref2
[60] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/vercesi-period-of-transition#_ftnref3
[61] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/395/communism-agenda-history
[62] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[63] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
[64] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/368/ethics