We know now that the attack on New York has left more than 6,000 dead. Over and above the mere figure - appalling enough in itself - the destruction of the World Trade Centre marks a turning point in history whose full implications we cannot yet measure. It is the first attack on American territory since Pearl Harbour in 1941. The first bombardment of continental America in history. The first bomb attack on a major industrial country since World War II. It is a real act of war, as the media put it. And like all acts of war, it is an abominable crime visited on a defenceless civilian population. As always, the working class was the main victim of this act of war. The cleaners, secretaries, maintenance and office workers who constituted the vast majority of the dead were our people.
We deny any right to the hypocritical bourgeoisie and its hired media to weep over the murdered workers. The ruling capitalist class is already responsible for too many massacres: the awful slaughter of World War I; World War II, more terrible still, when for the first time the civilian population was the main target. Let us remember what the bourgeoisie has shown itself capable of: the bombing of London, Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the millions of dead in the concentration camps and the gulags.
Let us remember the hell visited on the civilian population and the routed Iraqi army during the Gulf War in 1991, and its hundreds of thousands of dead. Let us remember the daily bloodletting that is still going on in Chechnya, with the complicity of the Western democratic states. Let us remember the complicity of the Belgian, French, and US states in the Algerian civil war and the horrible pogroms in Rwanda.
And let us remember that the Afghan population, today living in terror of America's cruise missiles, has suffered twenty years of uninterrupted warfare which has left two million refugees in Iran, another two million in Pakistan, more than a million dead, and half the population dependent on food supplied by the UN and other NGOs.
These are just some examples among many of capitalism's filthy work, in the throes of an endless economic crisis and its own irremediable decadence. A capitalism at bay.
The attack on New York was not an "attack on civilisation". On the contrary, it was itself the expression of bourgeois "civilisation".
Now, with unspeakable hypocrisy, the ruling class of this rotting system stands before us, its hands still dripping with the blood of the workers and the wretched of the earth murdered by its bombs, and it dares to pretend to weep for the deaths for which it is responsible.
Today's campaigns against terrorism by the Western democracies are particularly hypocritical. Not only because the destruction visited on civilian populations by these democracies' state terror is a thousand times bloodier than the worst terrorist attack (the millions of dead in the wars in Korea and Vietnam, to mention only those). Not only because, on the pretext of fighting terrorism, these democracies are joining hands -amongst others - with Russia, whose acts of war against its own civilian population in Chechnya they have denounced a thousand times. Not only because they have never hesitated to use coups d'Etat and bloody military dictatorships to impose their interests (the US in Chile for example). They are hypocrites also because they have never denied themselves the right to use the terrorist weapon and to sacrifice civilian lives, if these methods could serve their interests of the moment. Let us remember just a few examples drawn from recent history:
During the 1980s, Russian aircraft shot down a Korean Air Lines Boeing in Soviet Union airspace; it emerged afterwards that the aircraft's deviation from its normal route had been arranged by US military intelligence, in order to study the USSR's reaction to an incursion over its territory.
During the Iran-Iraq war, the US shot down an Iranian civilian airliner over the Persian Gulf. It was a warning to the Iranian state not to try to spread the war to the Gulf emirates.
During its nuclear weapons tests on the Pacific island of Mururoa, the French secret service sent its agents to New Zealand to mine and sink the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior.
During the 1970s, a terrorist bomb in Bologna station which killed a hundred people, was at first attributed to the Red Brigades, before it was discovered that in fact it had been planted by the Italian secret police. The latter were inextricably tied to a mafia-style movement around the Gladio network set up by the US throughout Europe, and which was also suspected of a series of bloody attacks carried out in Belgium.
During the civil war in Nicaragua, the Reagan government delivered arms and money to the Contra guerrillas. The action was illegal, and had to be hidden from the US Congress. It was paid for by arms sold illegally to Iran, and by the proceeds of CIA drug trafficking.
The very democratic Israeli state - already responsible for the slaughter of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatila - is at this very moment conducting a campaign of assassination and terrorist attacks in Palestinian territory, against the leaders of Fatah, Hamas, and others.[1]
It is impossible to say with certainty today whether Ossama Bin Laden really is responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers, as the US state accuses him of being. But if the Bin Laden theory does turn out to be true, then this is really a case of a petty warlord escaping from the control of his former masters. Bin Laden is not just some fanatical terrorist overfed on Islam. On the contrary, his career began as a link in the chain of American imperialism during the war against the USSR in Afghanistan. Scion of one the richest families in Saudi Arabia, closely linked to the Saudi royal family, Bin Laden was recruited by the CIA in Istanbul in 1979. "War had just broken out in Afghanistan, and Istanbul was the conduit chosen by the Americans for passing volunteers through to the Afghan resistance. Bin Laden was first responsible for logistics, then became the financial intermediary for the arms trade, jointly financed by the US and Saudi Arabia to the tune of about $1.2 billion every year. In 1980, he arrived in Afghanistan where he remained almost until the departure of the Russians in 1989. He was responsible for sharing out the money among the different factions of the resistance: a key and eminently political role. At the time, he enjoyed complete support of both the Americans and the Saudi regime, through his friend Prince Turki bin Faisal, the king's brother and the head of the Saudi secret service, as well as of his family. He changed 'clean' to 'dirty' money, and then the reverse" (Le Monde, 15th September). According to the same paper, Bin Laden also set up a network of opium traders, together with his friend Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e-Islami and also supported by the Americans. Those who today are denouncing each other as "the great Satan" and "number one world terrorist" as if they were irreconcilable foes, are in reality the inseparable allies of yesterday.[2]
Revolutionaries and the working class need to go beyond the disgust we feel at the murders in New York, and the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie when it denounces them. We need to understand the reasons for the massacre, if we are not to remain mere spectators terrified by the event. Against the bourgeois media, which tells us that the fault lies with fundamentalism, "pariah states", or "fanatics", we reply that it is the entire capitalist system that is really responsible.
For us[3], the beginning of the last century was marked by the entry of capitalist society world-wide into its period of decadence. By the 1900s, capitalism had completed its historic mission: the integration of the entire planet into one world market; the elimination of old power structures (feudal, tribal, etc) has laid the basis for the construction of a truly human community for the first time in history. At the same time, the productive forces' arrival at this stage of development meant that capitalist relations of production became a barrier to their further development. Capitalism could no longer be a progressive system. It had become a straitjacket for society.
The decadence of a social form never opens a historic period of mere decline or stagnation. On the contrary, the conflict between productive forces and relations of production can only be a violent one. Historically, this is what happened during the decadence of the slave economy of the Roman Empire, marked by convulsions, foreign and civil wars, and barbarian invasions, until the rise of new, feudal relations of production allowed the blossoming of a new form of society. In the same way, the decadence of the feudal mode of production was marked by two centuries of destructive war, until the bourgeois revolutions (in particular in England in the 17th century, and in France in the 18th) demolished the power of the feudal lords and absolute monarchs, opening the period of domination by the capitalist bourgeoisie.
The capitalist mode of production is the most dynamic in human history, only surviving through a continuous overthrow of existing production techniques and - still more important - through a continual expansion of its field of action. Still less than any other mode of production, could capitalism's decadence be a period of peace. Materially, capitalism's entry into decadence was marked by two gigantic and opposing events: the First World War, and the 1917 workers' revolution in Russia.
With the war of 1914, the confrontation between great imperialist powers would no longer take the form of limited wars, or conflicts in far-off countries during the rush for colonies. Henceforth, imperialist conflicts would be world-wide, incredibly bloody and destructive.
With the revolution of October 1917, the Russian proletariat succeeded for the first time in history in overthrowing a capitalist state; the working class revealed its nature as a revolutionary class, capable of putting an end to the barbarity of war and opening the way towards the formation of a new society.
In its Manifesto, the Third International - created in 1919 with the precise aim of leading the proletariat on the road to world revolution - declared that the period opened up by the war was that of capitalist decadence, the "period of wars and revolutions" when - as Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto - the choice is posed between the victory of the revolution and "the common ruin of the contending classes". The revolutionaries of the Communist International believed that the choice lay between victory, or a descent into hell for all of human civilisation.
They certainly could not imagine the horrors of World War II, the concentration camps, the atomic bomb. Still less could they imagine the unprecedented historic situation we find ourselves in today.
Just as the war of 1914 marked capitalism's entry into its period of decadence, the collapse of the Russian bloc in 1989 marked its entry into a new phase of that decadence: the phase of capitalism's decomposition. The Third World War, under preparation since the end of the Second in 1945, has not happened. Since May 1968 in France, and the biggest strike in history, a succession of workers' struggles shook the main capitalist countries until the end of the 1980s, showing that the world proletariat, and above all the proletariat in the heartlands of the capitalist system, was not prepared to go to war as they did in 1914, or even as in 1939. But although the working class refused the war implicitly, it was unable to raise itself to an awareness of its real place in capitalist society, and of its role as capitalism's gravedigger. One of the most striking examples of this difficulty, is the inability of today's communist groups to be anything more than tiny, scattered groups, without any significant echo inside the working class.
The menace of world war between two imperialist blocs has disappeared, but the danger for humanity remains as great as ever. Capitalism's decomposition is not just another phase, to be succeeded by others. It is the final phase of decadence, which can only have one of two outcomes: either the victory of the proletarian revolution and the passage to a new form of human society, or an ever more rapid fall into the infinite barbarity already suffered by many underdeveloped countries, and which has just struck for the first time at the very heart of bourgeois society. This is what is at stake today.
The disappearance of the Russian bloc has not put an end to imperialist rivalry, far from it. On the contrary, it has allowed the open expression of the imperialist ambitions, not just of the old European great powers, but also of secondary regional powers, right down to the smallest countries and the most petty warlords.
In 1989, President Bush announced the end of the conflict with the "Evil Empire", promising us a new era of peace and prosperity. In 2001, the USA is struck to the heart for the first time in its history and Bush's son, president in his turn, is proposing a crusade of "good against evil" which will last until "the eradication of all terrorist groups with a world reach". On 16th September Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary of Defence, repeated that this will be "a long, far-reaching, and sustained effort", which will extend over "not just days or weeks, but years" (quoted in Le Monde, 18th September). We are thus faced with a war whose end not even the ruling class claims to see. Gone is the celebration of ten years of American "prosperity", its place taken by the "blood, sweat and tears" that Winston Churchill promised the British people in 1940.
The situation that we are facing today confirms word for word the resolution adopted by our 14th Congress[4] in the spring of this year: "the fragmentation of the old bloc structures and disciplines unleashed national rivalries on an unprecedented scale, resulting in an increasingly chaotic struggle of each against all from the world's greatest powers to the meanest local warlords (?) The wars characteristic of the present phase of capitalist decomposition are no less imperialist wars than the wars of previous phases of decadence, but they have become more widespread, more uncontrollable, and more difficult to bring to even a temporary close (?) [the capitalist states] are all caught up in a logic which escapes their control and which makes less and less sense even in capitalist terms, and this is precisely what makes the situation facing mankind so dangerous and unstable".
As of the time of writing, nobody - no state, no terrorist group - has admitted to the attacks. It is nonetheless evident that these demanded a lengthy preparation and significant material means. The debate among specialists remains open as to whether they could have been the sole work of a terrorist group, or whether the extent of the action required the involvement of some state's secret service. All the public declarations of the US authorities point at Ossama Bin Laden's Al Qaida organisation, but should we necessarily take these declarations at face value?[5]
Without any really concrete elements to hand, and with the limited confidence we can accord the bourgeois media, we are therefore obliged to follow the good old method of any detective worthy of the name, and look for a motive. Who profits from the crime?
Could another great power have organised the coup? Could a European state, or even Russia or China, its ambitions overshadowed by the US superpower, have tried to deal a blow at the heart of the United States and so discredit its superpower image in the world? At first sight, such a thesis seems to us unbelievable. The results have been all too predictable: a reassertion of the US' determination to strike militarily wherever they please on the planet, and of its ability to draw all the other powers in their wake, willy nilly.
Then there are the so-called "pariah states" such as Iraq, Iran, Libya etc. Here again, these seem to us unlikely culprits. Apart from the fact that these states are always less "pariahs" than we are led to believe (for example, the present Iranian government is rather favourable towards a rapprochement with the US), it is obvious that they would run an enormous risk if ever the crime were discovered. They would be threatened with complete military obliteration, for an advantage which seems highly uncertain.
In the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians accuse each other of terrorist involvement. We can eliminate straight away the Palestinian hypothesis: Arafat and his cronies know very well that only the US prevents Israel from wiping out their runt of a state, and for them the attack on New York has been an unmitigated disaster immediately discrediting in US eyes everything Arab. By the same reasoning, in reverse, we might consider the Israeli trail - an attack aimed at showing the world, and especially the US, that it is time to finish with the "terrorist" Arafat: Mossad[6] would certainly be capable of organising the crime, but it is difficult to imagine Mossad operating on this scale without the acquiescence of the United States.
Perhaps America's accusations are justified, and the attacks are the crime of a group somewhere in the enormous nebula of terrorist groups festering in the Middle East and around the world. In this case, it would be much more difficult to determine the motive, since these groups have no easily identifiable state interests. Moreover, even if the Al Qaida group turns out to be guilty, this does not necessarily clarify anything: the disintegration of the capitalist economy has for years been accompanied by the development of a huge parallel black economy based on drugs, prostitution, the arms trade and the smuggling of refugees. The austere Taliban regime has not - far from it - prevented Afghanistan from becoming the world's main supplier of opium and heroin. In Russia the entrepreneur Berezovsky, an intimate friend of the Yeltsin clique, has barely disguised his business links with the Chechen mafia. In Latin America, leftist guerrillas like the Colombian FARC finance their armies through the heroin trade. Everywhere, states manipulate these groups in their own interests. And this has been going on since at least the 1939-45 war, when the American army took the Mafia gangster Lucky Luciano out of prison to prepare the landing of Allied troops in Sicily. Nor is it to be excluded that certain secret services could act on their own initiative, independently of their governments.
Our last hypothesis might seem completely "crazy": that the American government, or a fraction within the CIA for example, might have, if not actually prepared the attacks at least have provoked them and let them come to fruition without intervening[7]. It is true that the damage done to the United State's credibility world-wide, and to the economy, seem so enormous that such a theory is barely imaginable.
Nonetheless, before putting it completely to one side, it is worth making a more detailed comparison with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour (a comparison which has frequently been made in the press), and to take a short historical detour.
On 8th December 1941, Japanese aircraft attacked the American base of Pearl Harbour, in Hawaii, where almost the entire US Pacific fleet was stationed. The attack took the military authorities of the base completely by surprise and caused massive damage: most of the ships at anchor were destroyed, along with more than half the aircraft, 4,500 American servicemen were killed; the Japanese lost only 30 aircraft. Before the attack, most of the US population were opposed to entering the war against the Axis powers, and the isolationist fraction of the American represented by the "America First Committee" had a powerful, if not a dominant influence. The "cowardly and hypocritical" Japanese attack silenced all reticence. President Roosevelt, who had been in favour of entering the war from the outset and had done everything possible to support the British war effort, declared: "We are forced to realise that modern war, conducted in the Nazi style, is a disgusting business. We did not want to enter the war. We are in it, and we will fight with all our strength". Henceforth, he was able to build an unfailing national unity around his policies.
After the war, the Republican Party[8] backed a far-reaching inquiry to find out why US forces had been taken so completely by surprise. From the inquiry, it emerged clearly that political authorities at the highest level had been responsible for the Japanese attack and its success. On the one hand, in the US-Japanese negotiations which were being conducted at the time of the attack, the US side had imposed unacceptable conditions on the Japanese, in particular an embargo on US oil exports on which the Japanese economy was largely dependent. On the other, although the authorities were well aware of Japanese military preparations (thanks to their possession of the Japanese military codes, and their interception of the radio messages of the Japanese high command), they never passed on this information to the commanders of the Pearl Harbour base. Roosevelt went so far as to disown Admiral Richardson, who had opposed the regroupment of the entire Pacific fleet in the same base. The only ships absent from the base were the three aircraft carriers normally stationed there, which had left port a few days earlier, and which were to prove by far the most important during the war. In fact, most serious historians today consider that the US government deliberately provoked the attack on Pearl Harbour in order to justify the US' entry into the war, and to rally the entire population and the other sectors of its own bourgeoisie behind the war effort.
It is difficult today to say who is responsible for the attack on New York and in particular whether it is a new version of the attack on Pearl Harbour. But what we can say without any doubt, is that the United States are the first to profit from it, demonstrating an impressive ability to take advantage of their own reversals.
The Economist explains it very succinctly: The coalition that America has assembled is extraordinary. An alliance that includes Russia, the NATO countries, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf states, with the tacit agreement of China and Iran, would have been inconceivable on 10th September.
For the first time in its history, NATO has invoked article 5 of the Atlantic Treaty, obliging all the member states to give assistance to any state attacked by a foreign power. Even more extraordinary, Russia's President Putin has agreed to let Russian bases be used for "humanitarian" operations (like the "humanitarian" bombing of Kosovo no doubt), and has even offered logistical help; Russia is no longer opposing the use of bases in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan for American military strikes on Afghanistan: US and British troops are already present on the ground, giving their aid to the Northern Alliance, the only Afghan opposition with forces still in the field.
Obviously none of this is disinterested. Russia intends to profit from the situation to silence any criticism of its bloody war in Chechnya, and to cut off supplies delivered to the rebels from Afghanistan (which the Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence is certainly involved in). Uzbekistan has welcomed American forces as a means to put pressure on its overbearing Russian neighbour.
As for the European states, their support for the US has been reluctant and each of them intends to preserve its freedom of action. For the moment, only the British bourgeoisie has demonstrated a total and military solidarity with the USA, with a force of 20,000 men already on exercises in the Persian Gulf (the biggest operation of its kind since the Falklands War) and the despatch of elite SAS units to Uzbekistan. Although the British bourgeoisie has distanced itself somewhat from the United States in recent years, with its support for the creation of a European rapid reaction force able to act independently of the Americans, and its naval co-operation with the French, its own history in the Middle East and its vital historic interests in the region oblige it today to line up behind the US. Like the others, Britain is playing its own game, but in this case the game demands a faithful co-operation with the Americans. As Lord Palmerston said in the 19th century: "We have neither eternal allies, nor permanent enemies. We have only eternal interests, which it is our duty to defend" (quoted in Kissinger, Diplomacy). This has not prevented Lord Robertson, the current NATO General Secretary, from insisting on the independence of each member state: "It is clear that there is a solemn moral obligation on each state to offer its assistance. That will depend both on what the state under attack decides is appropriate, and also on the way in which the member states consider that they can contribute to the operation" (Le Monde, 15th September). France is a good deal more equivocal: for the Defence Minister Alain Richard, NATO's principles "of mutual defence will be applied [but] each nation will do so with the means it judges appropriate"; while "military action may be one tool for dealing with the terrorist threat, there are others". "Solidarity does not mean blindness" adds Henri Emmanuelli, a leading figure in the governing French Socialist Party.[9] President Chirac took the opportunity of his visit to Washington to make it absolutely clear that "We can of course consider military action, but only insofar as we have decided jointly on the objectives and the methods of an action whose aim is to eliminate terrorism" (quotations drawn from Le Monde, 15th and 20th September).
There is nonetheless a difference between the situation today and that of the Gulf War in 1990-91. Eleven years ago, the Alliance brought together by the United States included the armed forces of several European and Arab states (Saudi Arabia and Syria in particular). Today by contrast, the US has indicated that it intends to act alone on the military level. This gives us some idea of how far both their diplomatic isolation and their distrust of their own "Allies" has increased since the last war. Of course, they will force the others to support them, in particular by making use of their intelligence services, but they will tolerate no hindrance to their own military action.
We can point out another way that the dominant fraction of the US bourgeoisie is taking advantage of the situation. There has always existed an "isolationist" fraction within the American bourgeoisie, which holds that the country is adequately protected by the oceans, and sufficiently wealthy, not to involve itself in the world's affairs. It was this fraction that resisted US entry into World War II, and which Roosevelt reduced to silence - as we have seen - following the attack on Pearl Harbour. It is clear that this fraction no longer has any influence: Congress has just voted an extra $40 billion for defence and the "anti-terrorist" struggle, of which $20 billion can be spent entirely at the President's discretion. In other words, this represents a formidable strengthening of the power of the Federal State.
The American police and secret services have been remarkably rapid in pointing the finger at the presumed guilty party: Ossama Bin Laden and his Taliban hosts.[10] And long before it has been able to line up the slightest concrete proof, the American state has already designated its target and declared its intentions: to do away with the Taliban state. At the time of writing (and we can obviously expect the situation to have evolved significantly before this Review comes off the press), the press has announced that five British and American aircraft carriers are in the region or on their way, that US aircraft are landing in Uzbekistan, and that an attack in planned in the next 48 hours. When we compare this with the six months of preparation before the attack on Iraq in 1991, we can only wonder if it was not planned in advance. At all events, it is obvious that the US bourgeoisie has decided to impose its order on Afghanistan. Equally obviously, this is not to conquer the economic wealth or the markets of this exhausted country. So, why Afghanistan?
While the country has never been of the slightest interest from the economic point of view, a glance at the map is enough to understand its strategic importance during the last two centuries. Since the creation of the Raj (the British Empire in India) and throughout the 19th century, Afghanistan was a flash-point for the confrontation between British and Russian imperialism, in what was called at the time "The Great Game". Britain viewed with suspicion Russian imperialism's advance into the emirates of Tashkent, Samarkand, and Bokhara, and still more so towards Britain's sphere of influence in Persia (present-day Iran). Not without reason, the British considered that the final aim of the Tsar's armies was the conquest of India, from which they drew enormous profits and a great prestige. This is why they twice sent expeditionary forces into Afghanistan (the first suffered a humiliating defeat, losing 16,000 men with only one survivor).
During the 20th century, the discovery of enormous oil reserves in the Middle East and the growing dependence on oil of the developed economies - and above all of their armies - still further increased the Middle East's strategic importance. After World War II, Afghanistan became the regional lynch-pin for the armed confrontation between the two great imperialist blocs: the US brought together Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan in CENTO (the Central Treaty Organisation), Iran was stuffed with US radar stations, and Turkey became one of the most heavily armed countries in the Middle East. Pakistan received US support as a counter-weight to an India that proved too drawn to Soviet seduction.
The Islamic "revolution" in Iran withdrew the country from the American line-up. In 1979, Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, in an attempt to profit from this moment of American weakness, was thus a dangerous threat for the whole strategic position of the US bloc not only in the Middle East, but throughout Southern Asia. Unable to attack the Russian positions directly (in part due to the spectacular resurgence of workers' struggles with the massive strikes in Poland), the US intervened by guerrilla proxy. From then on the US, with the Pakistani state and its ISI as henchmen, supported what was doubtless the world's most backward "liberation" movement with the world's most advanced weapons. And to stay in the game, the British secret service and the French DGSE hurried to give their own aid to Massoud's Northern Alliance.
On the eve of the 21st century, two new events increased still further Afghanistan's strategic importance. On the one hand, the break-up of the Russian empire and the appearance of shaky new states (the "five Stans" - Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan - Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan) whetted the imperialist appetites of the second-rate powers: Turkey tried to build alliances with the new Turkish-language states, while Pakistan played on the Taliban government to reinforce its influence and gain strategic depth in its undeclared war with India in Kashmir, not to mention Russia's attempts to re-impose their military presence in the region. On the other hand, the discovery of important new oil reserves around the Caspian sea, especially in Kazakhstan attracted the attention of the great Western oil companies.
We do not have the space here to try to unravel all the rivalries and inter-imperialist conflicts which have shaken the region since 1989.[11] But to get some idea of the powder-keg surrounding Afghanistan, we need only list a few of the current conflicts and rivalries:
The absurd geography left by the disintegration of the USSR has left the region's richest and most densely populated area - the Ferghana valley - divided between Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, in such a way that none of these countries possesses a direct road from their capital to their most populous region!
After a five year civil war, the Islamists of the United Tajik Opposition have entered the government; however, it is suspected that they have not abandoned their ties to the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (the largest guerrilla organisation), in particular the IMU has to pass through Tajikistan (and across its borders patrolled by Russian troops) in order to attack Uzbekistan from its bases in Afghanistan.
Uzbekistan is the only country to have refused the presence of Russian troops, and is therefore subject to all kinds of pressure from the Russians.
Pakistan has always supported the Taliban, including with the provision of 2,000 troops during the last offensive against the Northern Alliance. It hopes to gain "strategic depth" relative to Russia and India, and to continue profiting from the lucrative heroin trade, much of which passes through Pakistan and the sticky fingers of ISI generals.
China has its own problems with Uighur separatists in Xinjiang, but is also trying to extend its influence in the region through the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation, regrouping the "five Stans" (except Turkmenistan, officially recognised as neutral by the UN) and Russia. At the same time, China is trying to remain on good terms with the Taliban, and has just signed an industrial and commercial agreement with their government.
Obviously, the USA is not remaining on the side-lines. They already support the unsavoury Uzbek government: "The U.S. military is familiar with Uzbekistan's military and the air base outside Tashkent. U.S. troops have participated in military training exercises with Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz troops as part of the Centrazbat exercises held under NATO's Partnership for Peace Program. Several of those exercises took place at the Chirchik military base outside Tashkent. Uzbekistan has also been active in courting U.S. support since the country became independent in 1991, often at the expense of Uzbekistan's relations with Russia (?) During a visit to the region by then-secretary of state Madeleine Albright in 2000, the U.S. pledged several million dollars in military equipment to Uzbekistan, and U.S. special forces have trained Uzbek troops in counter-terrorism methods and mountain warfare" (www.eurasianet.org) [1].
The United States are thus intervening in a veritable powder keg, supposedly to bring with them "Enduring Freedom". Obviously, we cannot today foresee what will be the end result. By contrast, the history of the Gulf War shows us that ten years after the end of the war:
the region is not at peace, since the conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians, between Turks and Kurds, between governments and fundamentalist guerrillas are as bitter as ever, while British and American planes are still bombing Iraq on a daily basis;
American troops are based in the region for the long term, thanks to their new bases in Saudi Arabia, and this presence has itself become a source of instability (as witness the anti-American terrorist attack in Dharhan, to mention but one).
We can therefore say with certainty that the intervention being prepared in Afghanistan will bring neither peace, nor liberty, nor justice, nor stability, but only more war and misery to stoke the fires of resentment and despair in the populations - the same despair that gripped the kamikazes of 11th September.
Only days before the attack on New York, Hewlett-Packard announced its take-over of Compaq. The merger is intended to cut 14,500 jobs. This is only one example among many of the crisis which is deepening and preparing to strike the working class more and more heavily.
A few days after the attack, United Airlines, US Air, and Boeing announced tens of thousands of redundancies. Since then, their example as been followed by airlines and aircraft manufacturers throughout the world (Bombardier Aircraft, Air Canada, Scandinavian Airlines, British Airways, and Swissair just to mention the latest).
Better still, the ruling class has the gall to use the attack on the World Trade Centre as an explanation for the new crisis that is hammering the workers.[12] The explanation has an appearance of truth, since $6.6 trillion have gone up in smoke in the stock exchange crash that followed the 11th September. But in reality, the crisis was already there; the bosses were merely jumping on the opportunity. According to Leo Mullin, CEO of Delta Airlines, "even if Congress has approved an overall financial package for the industry, the extra liquidity has been calculated according to the loss of business due solely to the events of 11th September (?) In fact, demand is falling while running costs are increasing. Delta is therefore suffering from negative cash flow" (Le Monde).
The capitalist world is already in the grip of recession, which is of course expressed first and foremost by attacks on the working class. In the United States, between January and the end of August 2001, the number of unemployed has risen by more than one million. Giants like Motorola and Lucent, the Canadian Nortel, the French Alcatel, the Swedish Ericsson, have been laying off by the tens of thousands. In Japan, unemployment has risen from 2%, to 5% this year.[13] The startling rapidity of new announcements of job cuts (57,700 between 17th and 21st September in the US) show how the bosses have leapt on the pretext to put into operation redundancy plans that were already being prepared months ago.
Not only must the working class pay for the crisis, it must also pay for the war, and not only in the US where the bill already stands at $40 billion at least. All the European governments have agreed to increase their efforts to create a rapid reaction force which will give the European powers a capacity for independent action. In Germany, DM20 billion for restructuring the armed forces have still not found their way into the budget. Doubtless, room will soon be found for them. That bill too, the workers will have to pay.
The solidarity of national unity is decidedly a one-way street: from the workers, towards the ruling class! And the cynicism of the ruling class, which uses the workers' dead as a pretext for job cuts, knows no limits.
Today, as always, the working class is the first victim of war.
Victim first of all in its being, but above all victim in its consciousness. The working class is the only force capable of putting an end to this system that is responsible for the war; the ruling class uses the war to call, ever and again, for national unity. The unity of the exploited with their exploiters. The unity of those who are the first to suffer from capitalism with those who draw from it their pleasure and their privilege.
The first reaction of the proletarians of New York, one of the greatest working class cities on the planet, was not one of gung-ho chauvinism. First, there was the spontaneous reaction of solidarity towards the victims, as we saw in the queues to give blood, in the thousands of individual gestures of help and comfort. Then in the workers' districts, where the dead were mourned though they could not be buried, posters appeared with declarations: "Hate-free zone", "To live as one world is the only way to honour the dead", "War is not the answer". Obviously, such slogans are soaked in democratic and pacifist sentiment. Without a movement of struggle capable of giving rise to a powerful resistance to capitalism's attacks, and above all without a revolutionary movement able to make itself heard in the working class, this spontaneous solidarity can only be swept away in the immense wave of patriotism broadcast by the media since the attack. Those who try to refuse the logic of war risk being absorbed by pacifism, which always becomes the first warmonger when "the nation is in danger", as witness this individual declaration on the Willamette Week Online web site (www.wweek.com): [2] "When a nation is under attack, the first decision must be whether to surrender or to fight. I believe there is no middle ground here: You either fight or you don't fight, and doing nothing amounts to surrender". For the ecologists, "Today the nation is united: we do not want to appear to be in disagreement with the government" (Alan Mettrick, spokesman for the Natural Resources Defence Council, 530,000 members, quoted in Le Monde, 28th September).
"World peace cannot be preserved by utopian or frankly reactionary plans, such as international tribunals of capitalist diplomats, diplomatic conventions on 'disarmament' (...) etc. It will be impossible to eliminate, or even to hold back imperialism, as long as the capitalist classes exercise their uncontested class domination. The only means to resist them successfully, and to preserve world peace, is the international proletariat's capacity for political action and its revolutionary will to throw its weight into the balance".
This is what Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1915 ("Theses on the tasks of international Social-Democracy"), in the midst of one of the blackest periods humanity has ever known, when the proletarians of the most developed countries were slaughtering each other on the battlefields of imperialist war. Today too, the period is a terrible one, for workers and for those revolutionaries who keep flying the banner of the communist revolution, whatever the cost. But like Rosa Luxemburg, we are convinced that the alternative is socialism or barbarism, and that the world working class remains the only power able to resist barbarism and create socialism. With Rosa Luxemburg, we declare that the involvement of the workers in the war "is an assault, not on the bourgeois culture of the past, but on the socialist culture of the future, a lethal blow against that force which carries the future of humanity within itself and which alone can bear the precious treasures of the past into a better society. Here capitalism lays bear its death's head; here it betrays the fact that its historical rationale is used up; its continued domination is no longer reconcilable to the progress of humanity (...) The madness will cease and the bloody demons of hell will vanish only when workers (...) finally awake from their stupor, extend to each other a brotherly hand, and drown out the bestial chorus of imperialist war-mongers and the shrill cry of capitalist hyenas with labour's old and mighty battle cry: Proletarians of all lands, unite!" (Junius Pamphlet, 1915, published on www.marxists.org [3]).
Jens, 3/10/2001
1 We could add that all states maintain "dirty tricks" sections in their secret services; when they don't use their own assassins, they are always ready to pay for the services of an independent operator.
2 In fact, according to the revelations of Robert Gates (previously boss of the CIA), the US did not merely respond to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, but deliberately provoked it by aiding the anti-Soviet Afghan opposition of the day. Interviewed by Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998, Zbigniew Brzezinski (ex-security adviser to President Carter) replied: "This secret operation was a great idea. It's effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap, and you expect me to regret it? The day the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter words to the effect that: 'We now have the opportunity of giving Russia its Vietnam (?) What is more important in the eyes of world history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet empire?" (quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique, September 2001).
3 See our pamphlet on The Decadence of Capitalism.
4 Published in International Review n°106.
5 We can recall, for example, the trial of the Libyan secret service agents accused of perpetrating the Lockerbie bombing of a Pan Am airliner. Great Britain and the US have continued to insist that the Libyans be judged, even when the evidence suggested that Syria was responsible. But then at the time, the US was trying to win over the Syrians to support the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
6 The Israeli secret service.
7 We could also envisage the possibility that, in such a case, the CIA might not have been fully aware of the scale of what was being prepared.
8 Roosevelt was a Democrat.
9 Let us note in passing that the so-called French Communist Party has expressed no such reservations: on 13th September, the PCF national council observed two minutes silence to express its "solidarity with all the American people, to all the citizens of this great country, and to the leaders they have chosen". And what can we say about the headline of the Trotskyist paper Lutte Ouvrière: "You can't support wars all over the world without them coming back to hit you one day". Translation: "Assassinated American workers, it serves you right".
10 One cannot help wondering about this rapidity: a hired car discovered barely hours after the attack, with aviation manuals written in Arabic, when the pilots had been living for months, if not years, in the US and had completed their pilot's license there; the reported discovery in the ruins of the World Trade Centre of a passport belonging to one of the terrorists, which is supposed to have avoided destruction by the explosion of several hundred tons of kerosene?
11 In particular, we will not go into the constant conflicts over the construction of new oil pipelines to carry oil from the Caspian Sea to the developed countries. Russia is trying to impose a route through Chechnya and Russia to Novorossiisk on the Russian Black Sea coast, while the American government is promoting the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan route (ie Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey) which would completely sideline the Russians. We will simply note in passing that the US government has had to impose its choice against the will of the oil majors, who considered it too expensive and unprofitable.
12 Just as they did in 1974, when the crisis was supposed to be the fault of the rise in oil prices, the same explanation that was served up again in 1980. As for the crisis of 1990-93, it was supposed to be the fault of the Gulf War?
13 We should say that while this rate may seem relatively low compared to other developed countries, it shows the success of the Japanese state not so much in limiting unemployment as in fiddling the figures.
Since the report on the class struggle to the last Congress, there have been no immediate shifts in the overall situation facing the class. The proletariat has demonstrated, through various struggles, that its combativity remains intact and that its discontent is growing (eg transport workers in New York, 'general strike' in Norway, struggles in numerous sectors in France, postal workers in Britain, movements in peripheral countries like Brazil, China, etc). But the situation continues to be much more clearly defined by the difficulties facing the class - difficulties imposed by the conditions of decomposing capitalism but continually reinforced by the bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns about the 'end of the working class', the 'new economy', 'globalisation', and even 'anti-capitalism'. Within the proletarian political milieu, meanwhile, there remain fundamental disagreements about the balance of class forces, with certain groups using the ICC's 'idealist' view of the historic course as a reason for not participating in any joint initiative against the war in Kosovo. This is certainly one reason to focus this report not so much on the struggles of the recent period, but on trying to deepen our understanding of the concept of the historic course as it has developed in the workers' movement: if we are to answer these criticisms effectively, we must obviously go to the historical root of the misunderstandings that infect the proletarian milieu. Another reason is that one of the weaknesses in our own analyses of recent struggles has been a tendency towards immediatism, a tendency to concentrate on particular struggles as 'proof' of our position on the course, or on the difficulties of the struggle as a possible basis for calling our conceptions into question. What follows is very far from an exhaustive survey; it's main aim is to assist the organisation to acquaint itself more closely with the general method through which marxism has approached this question.
The concept of the "historic course", as developed above all by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, is derived from the historic alternative developed by the marxist movement in the 19th century: the alternative between socialism and barbarism. In other words, the capitalist mode of production contains within itself two contradictory tendencies and possibilities - the tendency towards self-destruction, and the tendency towards the world-wide association of labour and the emergence of a new and higher social order. It must be emphasised that for marxism, neither of these tendencies are imposed on capitalist society from the outside, as for example in the bourgeois theories which explain manifestations of barbarism like Nazism or Stalinism as alien intrusions on capitalist normality, or as in the various mystical and utopian visions of the advent of communist society. Both the possible outcomes of capital's historic trajectory are the logical culmination of its innermost life-processes. Barbarism, social collapse, and imperialist war derive from the remorseless competition which drives the system forward, from the divisions inherent in commodity production and the perpetual war of each against all; communism, from capital's necessity to unify and associate labour, thus creating its own gravedigger in the proletariat. Against all idealist errors which tried to separate the proletariat from communism, Marx defined the latter as the statement of its "real movement", and insisted that the workers "have no ideals to realise, but to set free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is pregnant" (The Civil War in France).
In the Communist Manifesto, there is a certain tendency to assume that this pregnancy would automatically result in a healthy birth - that the victory of the proletariat was inevitable. At the same time the Manifesto, in talking about previous class societies, shows that if no revolutionary outcome takes place, the result has been "the mutual ruin of the contending classes" - in short, barbarism. Although this alternative is not clearly announced for capitalism, it is the logical deduction flowing from the recognition that the proletarian revolution is anything but an automatic process, and requires the conscious self-organisation of the proletariat, the class whose mission is to create a society which for the first time allows humanity to become master of its fate. Hence the Manifesto focuses on the necessity for the proletarians to "constitute themselves into a class, and thus into a political party". Notwithstanding later clarifications about the distinction between the party and the class, the kernel of this statement remains profoundly true: the proletariat can only act as a revolutionary and self-conscious force if it confronts capitalism on the political level; and in doing so it cannot dispense with the necessity to form a political party.
Again, it was clearly understood that the "constitution of the proletarians into a class" armed with an explicit programme against capitalist society was not possible at any moment. First of all, the Manifesto stressed the need for the class to have gone through a long period of apprenticeship where it could take its struggle from its initial, 'primitive' forms (such as Luddism) to more organised and conscious ones (formation of trade unions and political parties). And despite the Manifesto's 'youthful' optimism about the potential for immediate revolution, the experience of 1848-52 demonstrated that periods of counter-revolution and defeat were also part of the proletariat's apprenticeship, and that in such periods the tactics and organisation of the proletarian movement would have to adapt accordingly. This was the whole meaning of the polemic between the marxist current and the Willich-Schapper tendency, which in Marx's words "has substituted an idealist conception for a materialist one. Instead of seeing the real situation as the motor force of the revolution, it sees only mere will" (Address to the General Council of the Communist League, September 1850). This approach was the basis for the decision to dissolve the Communist League and focus on the tasks of clarification and the defence of principles - the tasks of a fraction - rather than squander energies in grandiose revolutionary adventures. In its actual practise within the ascendant period of capitalism, the marxist vanguard showed that it was vain to attempt to found a really effective class party in periods of retreat and reaction: the pattern of forming parties during phases of rising class struggle, and recognising the inevitability of their demise in phases of defeat, was followed again with the First International and with the creation of the Second.
It is true that the writings of the marxists of this period, though containing many vital insights, do not amount to a coherent theory of the role of fraction in periods of retreat; as Bilan (the publication of the Italian Left during the 1930s) pointed out, this could not be possible until the notion of the party was itself elaborated theoretically, a task which could only be fully accomplished in the period of the direct struggle for power inaugurated by the decadence of the capitalist system (see our article on the fraction-party relationship in International Review n°61). Furthermore, the conditions of decadence further sharpened the contours of this question since, whereas in ascendancy, with its long-term struggle for reforms, political parties could retain a proletarian character without being entirely composed of revolutionaries, in decadence the class party could only be composed of revolutionary militants and as such could not long sustain itself as a communist party - that is to say, as an organ having the capacity to lead the revolutionary offensive - outside phases of open class struggle.
By the same token, the conditions of ascendant capitalism did not make it possible to fully evolve the concept that, depending on the global balance of class forces, capitalist society was moving either towards world war or revolutionary upheavals. World war was not 'required' by a capitalism that could still overcome its periodic economic crises through the expansion of the world market; and because the struggle for reforms had not yet been exhausted, the world revolution remained, for the working class, an overall perspective rather than a burning necessity. The historic alternative between socialism and barbarism could not yet be distilled into a more immediate choice between war and revolution.
Nevertheless, as early as 1887, the emergence of imperialism had enabled Engels to make a startlingly clear prediction about the precise form that capitalism's tendency towards barbarism was bound to take - devastating war at the very heart of the system: "No war is any longer possible for Prussia-Germany except a world war and a world war indeed of an extent and violence hitherto undreamt-of. Eight to ten millions of soldiers will massacre one another and in doing so devour the whole of Europe until they have stripped it barer than any storm of locusts has ever done. The devastation of the Thirty Years War compressed into three or four years, and spread over the whole Continent: famine, pestilence, general descent into barbarism, both of the armies and the mass of the people; hopeless confusion of our artificial system of trade, industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy, collapse of the old states and their traditional elite wisdom to such an extent that crowns will roll by dozens on the pavement and there will be nobody to pick them up; absolute impossibility of foreseeing how it will all end and who will come out of the struggle as victor; only one result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the final victory of the working class". (15 December 1887, Marx and Engels Collected Works Vol 26, p451). It is also noteworthy that Engels - basing himself no doubt on the very real experience of the Paris Commune a decade and a half earlier - foresaw that this European war would give birth to the proletarian revolution.
During the first decade of the 20th century, the growing threat of this war became an important preoccupation for the revolutionary wing of social democracy, those who were not fooled by the siren songs of 'perpetual progress', 'superimperialism' and other ideologies which had seized hold of large segments of the movement. At the congresses of the Second International, it was the left wing - Lenin and Luxemburg in particular - which insisted most strongly on the necessity for the International to take a clear position faced with the war-danger. The Stuttgart resolution of 1907 and the Basle resolution which reaffirmed its premises in 1912 were the fruit of their efforts. The former stipulates that "In the case of a threat of an outbreak of war, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries taking part, fortified by the unifying activity of the International Bureau, to do everything to prevent the outbreak of war by whatever means seem to them to be effective, which naturally differ with the intensification of the class war and of the general political situation.
Should war break out in spite of all this, it is their duty to intercede for its speedy end, and to strive with all their power to make use of the violent economic and political crisis brought about by the war to rouse the people, and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule". In sum, faced with imperialism's slide towards a catastrophic war, not only was the working class to oppose this slide, but, if the war came, to respond to it with revolutionary action. These resolutions were to serve as the basis for Lenin's slogan during the First World War: 'turn the imperialist war into a civil war'.
When reflecting on this period, it is important not to project backwards as far as the consciousness of both sides of the class divide was concerned. At this stage neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie could have grasped fully what world war really meant. In particular, it could not yet have been clear that since modern imperialist war was a total war and no longer a remote combat between professional armies, it could not be waged without the total mobilisation of the proletariat - both the workers in uniform and the workers on the home front. True the bourgeoisie had understood that it could not launch a war until it was sure that social democracy was rotten enough not to oppose it, but the revolutionary events of 1917-21, directly provoked by the war, taught it many lessons that it will never forget, above all concerning the need to thoroughly prepare the social and political ground before unleashing a major war, in other words, to complete the ideological and physical destruction of proletarian opposition.
Looking at the problem from the standpoint of the proletariat, what is clearly lacking in the Stuttgart resolution is an analysis of the balance of class forces - of the real strength of the proletariat, of its capacity to resist the slide towards war. In the resolution's view, war might be prevented by the action of the class, or it might be halted after it had begun. In fact, the resolution argues that the various anti-war statements and interventions made by the unions and social democratic parties of the day "testify to the growing strength of the proletariat and to its power to ensure peace through decisive intervention". This optimistic statement represented a real underestimation of the degree to which the social democracy and the unions had already been integrated into the system and so would prove to be worse than useless as instruments for an internationalist response. This was to leave the lefts in some disarray when the war broke out - as witness, Lenin's initial belief that German High Command had forged the issue of Vorwärts which called on workers to support the war; the isolation of the Internationale group in Germany, and so on. And there is no doubt that it was the creeping betrayal of the old workers' organisations, their gradual incorporation into capitalism, which really tipped the balance of forces against the working class and opened a course towards war, and this in spite of the very high levels of combativity which the workers had displayed in many countries in the decade before the war, and even immediately before it.
This latter fact has frequently given rise to the theory that the bourgeoisie unleashed the war as a preventative measure against the looming revolution - a theory which we think is based on a failure to distinguish between combativity and consciousness, and which downplays the enormous historical significance and effect of the betrayal of the organisations which the working class had laboured so hard to build. What is true, however, is that the manner of the bourgeoisie's first crucial victory over the workers - the 'Sacred Union' proclaimed by social democracy and the unions - proved insufficient to totally break the dynamic of the mass strike which had been maturing in the European, Russian and American working class over the preceding decade. The working class proved able to recover from the mainly ideological defeat of 1914 and launch its revolutionary response three years later. Thus the proletariat, through its own action. shifted the historic course: the tide was now flowing away from imperialist world conflict and towards the communist world revolution.
During the revolutionary years that followed. the practise of the bourgeoisie provided its own 'contribution' to deepening the problem of the historic course. It proved that, faced with an openly revolutionary challenge from the working class, the drive towards war takes second place to the need to regain control of the exploited masses. This was the case not only in the heat of the revolution itself, when the uprisings in Germany obliged the ruling class to call a halt to the war and unite against its mortal enemy, but also in the years that followed, because although inter-imperialist contrasts did not disappear (the conflict between France and Germany, for example) they were to a large extent placed on a back burner while the bourgeoisie struggled to solve the social question. This is the meaning, for example, of the support given to Hitler's programme of anti-working class terror by many factions of the world bourgeoisie whose imperialist interests could only have been threatened by a resurgent German militarism. The reconstruction period that followed the war - although limited in extent and depth compared to the one after 1945 - also served to temporarily postpone the problem of redividing the imperialist spoils as far as the ruling class was concerned.
For its part, the Communist International was granted very little time to clarify such questions, although from the outset it had made it clear that if the working class failed to respond to the revolutionary challenge made by the Russian workers, the path to another world war would be open. The manifesto of the CI's first congress (March 1919) warns that if the working class were to be taken in by the sermons of the opportunists, "capitalist development would celebrate its restoration in new, more concentrated and more monstrous forms on the bones of many generations, with the prospect of a new and inevitable world war. Fortunately for mankind this is no longer possible" During this period, the question of the balance of class forces was indeed crucial, but less with regard to the danger of war than to the immediate possibilities of revolution. The last sentence in the passage just cited provides material for reflection here: in the first, heady phases of the revolutionary wave, there was a definite tendency to see the victory of the world revolution as inevitable, and thus to imagine that a new world war was not really possible. This represented a definite underestimation of the gigantic task that the working class faces in creating a society based on social solidarity and the conscious mastery of the productive forces. And in addition to this general problem, applicable to any revolutionary movement of the class, the proletariat in the years 1914-21 found itself confronted by the sudden and brutal 'outbreak' of a new historical epoch which compelled it to rid itself very quickly of ingrained habits and methods of struggle and acquire 'overnight' the methods appropriate to this new period.
As the initial impetus of the revolutionary wave subsided, the somewhat simplistic optimism of the early years proved more and more inadequate, and it became increasingly urgent to draw out a sober and realistic assessment of the real balance of class forces. In the early 20s, there was a particularly sharp polemic between the CI and the German left on this point, a debate in which truth was not exclusively on either side. The CI was quicker to see the reality of the retreat in the revolution after 1921, and thus the necessity to consolidate the organisation and to build up the confidence of the working class through participating in its defensive struggles. But, pressured by the demands of the stranded Russian state and economy to find points of support outside Russia, the CI increasingly translated this perspective into the language of opportunism (United Front, fusion with centrist parties, etc). The German left firmly rejected these opportunist conclusions; but its revolutionary impatience and its theory of the death crisis of capitalism prevented it from seeing the distinction between the overall epoch of capitalist decline, which poses the necessity for revolution in general historic terms, and the different immediate phases within that epoch, phases which do not automatically present all the conditions for a revolutionary overthrow. The German left's failure to analyse the objective balance of class forces was coupled with a key weakness on the organisational front - its inability to understand the tasks of a fraction fighting against the degeneration of the old party. These weaknesses were to have fatal consequences for the very existence of the German left as an organised current.
It is here that the Italian left truly came into its own as an international pole of clarity. In the early 1920s, having lived through the experience of fascism, it was able to see that the proletariat was being pushed back by a determined bourgeois offensive. But this realisation led it neither towards sectarianism, since it continued to participate fully in the defensive struggles of the class, nor opportunism, since it made a very lucid critique of the danger of opportunism in the International, particularly through the latter's concessions to social democracy. Having already been schooled in the tasks of a fraction in its political combat within the Italian Socialist Party before the war, the Italian left also fully appreciated the necessity to fight within the existing organs of the class as long as they retained any proletarian character. By 1927-8, however, the left had recognised that the expulsion of the left opposition from the Bolshevik party, and of other left currents internationally, signified a qualitative deepening of the counter-revolution and demanded the formal constitution of an independent Left Fraction, even though the possibility of reconquering the Communist parties was left open.
The year 1933 was the next significant date for the Italian Left: not only because the first issue of Bilan came out in that year, but also because the triumph of Nazism in Germany convinced the Fraction that the course towards a second world war was now open. Bilan's grasp of the dynamic of the balance of class forces since 1917 was summarised in the logo it placed on its publications for some time: "Lenin 1917, Noske 1919, Hitler 1933": Lenin being the personification of proletarian revolution; Noske of the repression of the revolutionary wave by social democracy, Hitler of the completion of the bourgeois counter-revolution and the preparations for a new war. From the very beginning, therefore, Bilan's position on the historic course was one of its defining characteristics.
It is true that the editorial article of Bilan n°1, while recognising the profound defeat the working class has been through, appears somewhat hesitant as to the perspective facing the proletariat, leaving the door open to the possibility that the proletariat might be able to revive its struggle and thus prevent the outbreak of war through the development of the revolution (see The Italian Communist Left, p 71). This was perhaps partly the result of an unwillingness to rule out entirely the possibility of reversing the tide of counter-revolution. But over the next few years, all of Bilan's analyses of the international situation - whether of national struggles in the peripheries, the expansion of German power in Europe, the Popular Front in France, the integration of the USSR into the imperialist chess-game, or the so-called Spanish revolution - were founded on the sober recognition that the balance of forces had turned decisively against the proletariat and that the bourgeoisie was clearing the way towards another imperialist massacre. This evolution was expressed with stark clarity in a text in Bilan n°17: "To advocate the constitution of fractions in an epoch in which the crushing of the world proletariat is accompanied by a concretisation of the conditions for the unleashing of war, is the statement of a 'fatalism' which accepts the inevitability of war being unleashed and the impossibility of mobilising the proletariat against it being unleashed" ('Draft resolution on the problems of the left fraction').
The irreconcilable opposition between a course towards war and a course towards revolution was summed up in Bilan 16: "We have already said: war and revolution are two opposite expressions of the same situation, in that they mature out of the explosion of contradictions? but they are 'opposite expressions', which means that the unleashing of war results from political conditions which exclude the revolution. It is an anarchistic simplification that considers that since the moment has arrived when capitalism has to arm the workers, the conditions are already ripe for the proletariat to use these arms for the triumph of its revolutionary cause? The opposition between war and revolution reveals its full breadth when we consider that the political conditions which allow the war to be unleashed involve not only the disappearance of all the conditions that would permit the victory of the proletariat, but of any kind of revolutionary movement up to the least statement of the consciousness of the proletariat" ('Draft resolution on the international situation')
This methodological approach was in profound contrast to the position of Trotsky, who was by the far the better known 'representative' of the left opposition to Stalinism at that time (and ever since). Trotsky, it should be said, had also seen 1933 and the victory of Nazism as a turning point. As for Bilan, this event also marked the definitive betrayal of the Communist International; vis-à-vis the regime in the USSR. Trotsky, like Bilan, continued to refer to it as the workers' state, but from this period on he no longer felt that the Stalinist regime could be reformed, but had to be forcibly overthrown in a "political revolution". But behind these apparent similarities, fundamental differences remained and were to result in a final break between the Italian Fraction and the International Left Opposition. These differences were deeply connected to the Italian left's notion of the historic course and the task of a fraction within it. For Trotsky, the bankruptcy of the old party meant the immediate proclamation of a new party; Bilan rejected this as voluntarist and idealist, and insisted that the party, as the effective political leadership of the class, could not exist in moments of profound depression of the class movement. Trotsky's efforts to cobble together a mass organisation in such a period could only result in opportunism, exemplified by the left opposition's turn towards the left wing of social democracy from 1934 onwards. For Bilan, a real party of the proletariat could only be formed when the class was on a course towards open conflict with capitalism. But the task of preparing for such a modification in the situation, of laying the basis for the future party, could only be carried out by a fraction which defined as its primary task that of drawing the 'balance sheet' of' past victories and defeats.
With regard to the USSR, Bilan's overall view of the situation facing the proletariat led it to reject Trotsky's perspective of an attack by world capital on the workers' state - and hence the need for the proletariat to defend the USSR against such an attack. Instead it saw that in a period of reaction the inevitable tendency of an isolated proletarian state was to be drawn into the system of capitalist alliances preparing the ground for a new world war. Hence the rejection of any defence of the USSR as being incompatible with internationalism.
It is true that Trotsky's writings of the time do often contain vivid insights into the profoundly reactionary tendencies dominating the world situation. But what Trotsky lacked was a rigorous method, a real conception of the historic course. Thus, despite the triumph of reaction all along the line, and despite his own recognition of the approach of war, Trotsky constantly succumbed to a false optimism which saw fascism as the bourgeoisie's last card against the danger of revolution, and anti-fascism as in some sense a statement of the radicalisation of the masses; which held that "everything was possible" at the time of the strikes under the Popular Front in France in 1936, or which accepted at face value the notion that a proletarian revolution had got underway in Spain that same year. In sum, Trotsky's failure to grasp the real nature of the period sped Trotskyism's slide towards the counter-revolution, while Bilan's clarity on the same question enabled it to hold fast in the defence of class principles, even at the price of a terrible isolation.
Certainly this isolation took its toll on the Fraction itself; its clarity was not defended without major combats within its own ranks. First, against the positions of the minority on the war in Spain: the pressure to take part in the illusory "Spanish revolution" was immense and the minority succumbed to it with its decision to fight in the militias of the POUM. The intransigence of the majority was maintained in large part because it refused to treat the events in Spain in isolation and saw them as an statement of a world-wide balance of forces. Thus, when groups like the Union Communiste or the LCI (Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes, the Belgian Hennault group), whose positions were similar to those of the minority, accused Bilan of being unable to see a class movement if it was not being led by the party, and of seeing the party as a kind of deus ex machina without which the masses could achieve nothing, Bilan's response was that the lack of a party in Spain was the product of the defeats the proletariat had suffered internationally, and while expressing its total solidarity with the Spanish workers, insisted that this lack of programmatic clarity had led to their initial spontaneous reactions being dragged off their own terrain and onto the terrain of the bourgeoisie and of inter-imperialist war.
The Fraction's view of the events in Spain were verified by reality; but no sooner had this ordeal been passed than it was plunged into a second and even more damaging one - the adoption by Vercesi, one of the main theoreticians within the fraction, of a conception which put all the Fraction's previous analysis of the historic period into question - the theory of the war economy.
This theory was a result of a flight into immediatism. Witnessing the ability of capitalism to use the state and its preparations for war to partially re-absorb the mass unemployment that had characterised the first phase of the economic crisis of the 1930s, Vercesi and his followers concluded that capitalism had somehow gone through a profound alteration which had overcome its historic crisis of overproduction. Turning to the elementary marxist axiom that the principal contradiction in society is the one between the exploiting and the exploited class, Vercesi then made the leap into concluding that imperialist world war was no longer the response of capitalism to its internal economic contradictions, but an act of inter-imperialist solidarity aimed at massacring the revolutionary working class. Thus if war was approaching, it only meant that the proletarian revolution was becoming an ever greater threat to the ruling class. In fact, the main effect of the theory of the war economy during this period was to completely play down the danger of war. Local wars and selected massacres, it was argued, could do the same job for capitalism as a world war. The result was a complete failure to prepare for the impact that the war would inevitably have on the work of the organisation, and thus the almost total disintegration of the Fraction at the beginning of the war. And Vercesi's theorisations about the meaning of the war once it had broken out completed the rout: the war signified the "social disappearance of the proletariat" and made any organised militant activity useless. The proletariat could only return to the path of struggle following the outbreak of the "crisis of the war economy" (provoked not by the operation of the law of value but by the exhaustion of the material means to carry on with war production). The consequences of this aspect of the theory at the end of the war will be examined shortly, but their initial effect was to sow disarray and demoralisation within the ranks of the fraction.
In the period after 1938, when Bilan was replaced by Octobre in the expectation of new revolutionary assaults by the working class, the original analyses of Bilan were kept alive and developed by a minority which saw no reason to question the fact that war was imminent, that it would be a new inter-imperialist conflict for the division of the world, or that revolutionaries had to maintain their activity in adverse circumstances in order to keep the flame of internationalism alive. This work was carried on above all by the militants who revived the Italian Fraction after 1941 and who were instrumental in forming the French Fraction in the next few years of war.
Those who remained loyal to the work of Bilan also maintained its interpretation of how the course would change - in the fires of war itself. This view was solidly founded on the real experience of the class - in 1871, 1905 and 1917; and the events in Italy in 1943 seemed to confirm it. Here was an authentic class movement with a clear anti-war dimension, and it was not without an echo in the other defeated European axis power, Germany itself. When the Italian movement also produced a powerful impetus towards regroupment among the scattered proletarian forces in Italy itself, the French nucleus of the communist left, along with the Italian Fraction in exile and in Italy itself concluded that "the course towards the formation of the party is now open". But while a large number of militants took this to mean the immediate formation of the party, and on bases that were not well defined programmatically, the French Fraction (in particular comrade Marco (MC), who was a member of both the Italian and French Fractions) did not abandon its rigorous approach. Opposed to the dissolution of the Italian Fraction and the precipitous formation of the party, the French Fraction also insisted on examining the Italian situation in the light of the overall world situation, and refused to be carried along by the sentimental 'Italocentrism' which had gripped many of the comrades of the Italian Fraction. The group in France (which became the Gauche Communiste de France) was also the first to recognise that the course had not changed, that the bourgeoisie had drawn the necessary lessons from the experience of 1917 and had inflicted a further decisive defeat on the proletariat.
In the text 'The task of the hour - formation of the party or formation of cadres', published in the August 1946 issue of Internationalisme (republished in International Review n°32), there is a biting polemic against the inconsistencies of the other currents of the proletarian milieu of the day. The main substance of the polemic is aimed at showing that the decision to found the PCInt in Italy was based on an erroneous estimation of the historic period and had effectively led to an abandonment of the materialist conception of the fraction in favour of a voluntarist and idealist approach that owed a great deal to Trotskyism, for whom parties must be 'built' at all times without any reference to the real historical situation confronting the working class. But - probably because the PCInt itself, caught up in an activist stampede, did not really develop any coherent conception of the historic course - the article focuses on the analyses developed by other groups in the milieu, in particular the Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left which was organisationally linked to the PCInt. In the period before the war, the Belgian Fraction, led by Mitchell[1], had been the most vigorous opponents of Vercesi's theory of the war economy; the rump that was left after the war was now its most enthusiastic proponent. The theory contained the idea that the crisis of the war economy could really only break out after the war; therefore, "it is in the post-war period that the transformation of imperialist war into civil war is realised? The present situation is thus analysed as one of the 'transformation into civil war'. With this central analysis as a starting point, the situation in Italy is declared to be particularly advanced, thus justifying the immediate constitution of the party, while the disturbances in India, Indonesia and other colonies, whose reins are firmly held by the various competing imperialisms and by the local bourgeoisies, are seen as signs of the beginning of the anti-capitalist civil war". The catastrophic consequences of totally misreading the real historic balance of class forces was evident, leading the Belgian Fraction to see local inter-imperialist conflicts as expressions of a movement towards revolution.
It is also noteworthy that the Internationalisme article criticised an alternative theory of the course put forward by the RKD (Revolutionäre Kommunisten Deutschlands: a group which split from Trotskyism during the war to defend internationalist positions). For Internationalisme, the RKD "more cautiously, takes refuge in the theory of a double course, ie of a simultaneous and parallel development of a course towards revolution and a course towards imperialist war. The RKD has obviously not understood that the development of a course towards war is primarily conditioned by the weakening of the proletariat and of the danger of revolution".
Internationalisme, by contrast, was able to see very clearly that the bourgeoisie had drawn its lessons from the experience of 1917 and had taken brutal preventative measures against the danger of revolutionary uprisings provoked by the misery of war; it had thus inflicted a decisive defeat on the working class, centred in Germany: "WHEN CAPITALISM 'FINISHES'AN IMPERIALIST WORLD WAR WHICH HAS LASTED SIX YEARS WITHOUT ANY REVOLUTIONARY FLARE-UPS, THIS MEANS THE DEFEAT OIF THE PROLETARIAT, AND THAT WE ARE LIVING, NOT ON THE EVE OF GREAT REVOLUTIONARY STRUGGLES, BUT IN THE AFTERMATH OF A DEFEAT. This defeat took place in 1945, with the physical destruction of the revolutionary centre that was the German proletariat, and it was all the more decisive in that the world proletariat remained unaware of the defeat it had just undergone".
Thus Internationalisme emphatically rejected all voluntarist and activist schemes for founding a new party in such a period of defeat, and insisted that the task of the hour remained 'the formation of cadres' - in other words, the continuation of the work of the left fractions.
However, there was a serious weakness in the GCF's arguments - the conclusion, expressed in the above article, that "the course is open towards the third imperialist war?Under present conditions, we can see no force capable of stopping or modifying this course". A further theorisation of this position is contained in the article 'The evolution of capitalism and the new perspective', published in 1952 (Internationalisme no , reprinted in International Review n°21). This is a seminal text because it summarises the GCF's work towards understanding state capitalism as a universal tendency in decadent capitalism, and not simply as a phenomenon isolated to the Stalinist regimes. But its failing is that it does not make a sharp distinction between the integration of the old workers' organisations into state capitalism, and the integration of the proletariat itself: "The proletariat now finds itself associated to its own exploitation. It is thus mentally and politically integrated into capitalism". For Internationalisme, the permanent crisis of capitalism in the epoch of state capitalism would no longer take the forms of 'open crises' which ejected the workers from production, and thus pushed them to react against the system, but would instead reach its culminating point in war; and it was only in the war - which again, the GCF saw to be imminent - that the proletarian struggle could take on a revolutionary content. Otherwise the class "can only express itself as an economic category of capital". What Internationalisme failed to see was that the very mechanisms of state capitalism, operating in a period of reconstruction after the massive destruction of the war, would permit capitalism to enter a period of 'boom' in which inter-imperialist antagonisms, although still very acute, did not pose a new world war as an absolute necessity, and this despite the weakness of the proletariat.
Shortly after this text was written, the GCF's concern to maintain its cadres in the face of what it saw as the approaching world war (a conclusion that was far from irrational given the outbreak of the war in Korea) led to the 'exile' of its leading comrade, MC, in Venezuela, and to the rapid dissolution of the group. It thus paid a heavy price for this weakness in seeing the perspective with sufficient clarity. But the dissolution of the group also confirmed its diagnosis of the counter-revolutionary nature of the period. It is no accident that the PCInt went through its major split in the same year. The full story of this split has yet to be told to an international audience, but it seems that little clarity emerged from it. Stated very briefly, the split was between the tendency around Damen on the one hand, and the tendency inspired by Bordiga on the other. The Damen tendency was closer to the spirit of Bilan as far as its political positions were concerned - ie, it shared Bilan's willingness to put into question the positions of the Communist International in its early years (eg on unions, national liberation, party and state, etc). But it leaned heavily towards activism and lacked Bilan's theoretical rigour. This was particularly true of the question of the historic course and the conditions for the foundation of the party, since any return to Bilan's methodology would have led to the very foundations of the PCInt being called into question. This the Damen tendency, or more precisely the Battaglia Comunista group, has never been willing to do. Bordiga's current, by contrast, seems to have been more aware that period was one of reaction and that the PCInt's activist, recruitist approach had proven to be sterile. Unfortunately, Bordiga's theoretical work in the period after the split - while containing much of value at a general level - was almost totally cut off from the advances made by the Italian Fraction during the 30s. The political positions of his new 'party' were not an advance, but a regression towards the CI's weakest analyses, for example on the union and national questions. And its theory of the party and its relationship to the movement of history was based on semi-mystical speculations about 'invariance', and about the dialectic between the 'historic party' and the 'formal party'. In sum, with these starting points, neither of the groups that emerged from the split could add contribute anything of real value to the proletariat's understanding of the historic balance of forces, and this question has remained one of their principal weaknesses ever since. (To be continued)
Despite the mistakes it made in the 40s and 50s - in particular, the conclusion that a third world war was imminent - the GCF's fundamental loyalty to the method of the Italian left enabled its immediate successor, the Internacialismo group in Venezuela in the 60s, to recognise that both the post-war reconstruction boom and the long period of counter-revolution were drawing to a close. The ICC has had more than one occasion to quote the incisive words from Internacialismo no. 8 in January 1968, but it will do no harm to cite them again, since they are a fine example of the ability of marxism - without claiming prophetic powers - to be able to anticipate the general course of events:
"We are not prophets, nor can we claim to predict when and how events will unfold in the future. But of one thing are conscious and certain: the process in which capitalism is plunged today cannot be stopped? and it leads directly to the crisis. And we are equally certain that the inverse process of developing class combativity which we are witnessing today will lead the working class to a bloody and direct struggle for the destruction of the bourgeois state".
Here the Venezuelan group expresses its understanding that not only was a new economic crisis about to surface, but that it would rendezvous with a new and undefeated proletarian generation. The events of May 68 in France, and the ensuing international wave of struggles over the next four or five years, provided a striking confirmation of this diagnosis. Of course, a component of this diagnosis was the recognition that the crisis would sharpen imperialist tensions between the two military blocs which dominated the globe; but the enormous impetus of the first international wave of struggles showed that the proletariat would not be willing to be marched off to a new world holocaust. In sum, the course of history was flowing not towards world war, but towards massive class confrontations.
A direct consequence of the revival in the class struggle was the appearance of new proletarian political forces after a long period in which revolutionary ideas had more or less been buried from view. The events of May 68 and their aftermath engendered a plethora of new political groupings, marked by a great deal of confusion, but willing to learn and eager to reappropriate the real communist traditions of the working class. The insistence on the need for the "regroupment of revolutionaries" by Internacialismo and its offspring - Révolution Internationale in France and Internationalism in the US - summarised this aspect of the new perspective. These currents thus took the lead in pushing for debate, correspondence, and international conferences. This effort gained a real echo among the clearest of the new political groupings, who found it easiest to understand that a new period had opened up. This applied in particular to the groups who aligned themselves with the 'international tendency' formed by RI and Internationalism, but it also applied to a group like Revolutionary Perspectives, whose original platform clearly recognises the historic resurgence of the class movement:
"In parallel to the renewal of the crisis, a new period of international class struggle was opened in 1968 with the mass strikes in France, followed by the upheavals in Italy, Britain, Argentina, Poland etc. Today's generation of workers is unburdened by reformism, as after World War One, or by defeat, as in the 1930s, and allows us to have hope in its future, and in that of humanity. These struggles all show, to the discomfiture of modernist dilettantes, that the proletariat has not become integrated into capitalism despite fifty years of almost total defeats: with these struggles it revives the memory of its own past history and prepares itself for its ultimate task" (Revolutionary Perspectives n°1, old series, c.1974)
Unfortunately the 'established' groups of the Italian left, the ones who had succeeded in maintaining an organisational continuity throughout the post-war reconstruction, had done so at the cost of a process of sclerosis. Neither Battaglia Comunista (publication of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista) nor Programma Comunista published in Italy by the International Communist Party) attributed much significance to the revolts of the late 1960s and early 70s, seeing mainly the student/petty bourgeois features which were undoubtedly mixed up within them. For these groups - who had started out, let us recall, by seeing a course towards revolution in a period of profound defeat - the night of the counter-revolution had not lifted, and they saw little reason to emerge from the splendid isolation which had 'protected' them for so long. The Programma current actually did go through a period of considerable growth in the 1970s; but this was a building constructed on the sand of opportunism, particularly on the national question. The disastrous consequences of this kind of growth were to become apparent with the break up of the ICP in the early 80s. For its part, Battaglia for a long time hardly peered beyond the Italian borders; it took almost a decade before it was to launch its own appeal for international conferences of the communist left, and when it did so, its reasons were entirely unclear (the "social-democratisation of the Communist Parties").
The groups who went on to form the ICC were faced with a combat on two fronts in this period. On the one hand they had to argue against the scepticism of the existing groups of the communist left, who saw nothing new under the sun. On the other hand they also had to criticise the immediatism and impatience of many of the new groups, some of whom had been convinced that May 68 had raised the spectre of immediate revolution (this was especially the case with those influenced by the Situationist International, who saw no connection between the class struggle and the state of the capitalist economy, which was only just entering a new phase of open crisis). But just as the 'spirit of 68', the influence of student, councilist and anarchist prejudices had a considerable weight on the young ICC as regards its understanding of the tasks and the functioning of the revolutionary organisation, so these influences also expressed themselves in its conception of the new historic course. The absolutely necessary proclamation of a new historic course, of the proletarian revival, tended to go together with an underestimation of the immense difficulties which lay ahead of the international working class. This expressed itself in various ways:
a tendency to forget that the development of the class struggle is by nature an uneven process that must pass through advances and retreats, and thus to expect a more or less uninterrupted advance towards revolutionary struggles - a prospect implied to some extent in the passage from Internacionalismo quoted above;
the underestimation of the bourgeoisie's capacity to phase in the economic crisis, to use various state capitalist mechanisms to reduce the ferocity of its effects, particularly on the central proletarian concentrations;
the definition of the new course as a "course towards revolution", implying that the class revival would inevitably culminate in a revolutionary confrontation with capital;
linked to this was the focus - very strong throughout the milieu of the day - on the question of the transition period from capitalism to communism. This debate was by no means irrelevant, particularly because it was part of the new milieu's effort to reappropriate the lessons and traditions of the past movement. But the passions that it generated (leading, for example, to splits between different elements of the milieu) also expressed a certain naivete about the difficulty of even reaching a period when such questions as the form of the transitional state would be a burning issue for the working class.
Over the next decade, the ICC's analyses were refined and developed. It began the work of examining the bourgeoisie's mechanisms for 'controlling' the crisis, and thus of explaining why the crisis would inevitably be a long drawn out and uneven process; similarly, after the experiences of the refluxes in the mid-70s and early 80s, it was compelled to recognise more clearly that within the context of a generally upward historical curve of the class struggle, there would certainly be important moments of retreat. Furthermore, by 1983, the ICC had explicitly recognised that there was no automatism about the historic course; at its 5th congress it thus passed a resolution which criticised the term "course towards revolution":
"The existence of a course towards class confrontations means that the bourgeoisie does not have a free hand to unleash a new world butchery: first, it must confront and beat the working class. But this does not prejudge the outcome of this confrontation, in one way or the other. This is why it is preferable to talk about a 'course towards class confrontations' rather than a 'course towards revolution'"(Resolution on the international situation, published in International Review n°35).
Within the milieu, however, the difficulties and set-backs encountered by the proletariat had strengthened the sceptical and pessimistic views which had long been espoused by the 'Italian' groups. This was expressed in particular during the international conferences at the end of the 70s, when the Communist Workers' Organisation (the descendent of the Revolutionary Perspectives group) aligned itself with the views of Battaglia, rejecting the ICC's view that the class struggle constituted a barrier to world war. The CWO shifted in its explanations for why the war had not broken out; one minute attributing it to the fact that the crisis was not deep enough, the next minute to the idea that the blocs were not formed; more recently, to the rationality of the Russian bourgeoisie in recognising that it could not win a war. In short: anything but the class struggle!
There were also echoes of this pessimism about the class struggle within the ICC itself; the future GCI tendency[2], and in particular RC[3] who adopted similar views, went through a phase of being "more like Bilan than Bilan" and argued that we were in a course towards war.
By the end of the 70s, therefore, the ICC's first major text on the historic course, adopted at the 3rd Congress and published in International Review n°18, had to define our position against the empiricism and scepticism that was beginning to dominate the milieu.
The text crossed swords with all the confusions held within the milieu:
the idea, rooted in empiricism, that it is not possible for revolutionaries to make general predictions about the course of the class struggle. Against this notion, the text reaffirms the fact that its capacity to define a perspective for the future - and not only the general alternative between socialism and barbarism - is one of marxism's defining characteristics and always has been. More specifically, the text insists that marxists have always based their work on their ability to grasp the particular balance of class forces within a given period, as we saw again in the first part of this report. By the same token, the text shows that an inability to grasp the nature of the course had led past revolutionaries into serious errors;
an extension of this agnostic view of the historic course was the concept, defended in particular by the IBRP[4], of a "parallel" course towards war and revolution. We have already seen how the approach adopted by Bilan and the GCF excluded such a notion; the text of the Third Congress goes on to argue that such a concept is the result of losing sight of the marxist method itself:
"Other theories have also arisen more recently, according to which 'with the development of the crisis of capitalism, both terms of the contradiction are reinforced at the same time: war and revolution don't exclude each other mutually but advance in a simultaneous and parallel manner, without it being possible for us to know which one will reach its culminating point before the other'. The main error in this conception is that it totally neglects the factor of class struggle in the life of society, just as the conception developed by the Italian left [the theory of the war economy] was based on an overestimation of this factor. Beginning from the phrase in the Communist Manifesto which says that 'the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle', the Italian Left applied this mechanically to the analysis of imperialist war and saw imperialist war as a response to the class struggle; it failed to see that, on the contrary, imperialist war could only take place thanks to the absence or weakness of the class struggle. Although it was wrong, this conception began from correct premises; the mistake lay in the way these premises were applied. In contrast, the theory of a 'parallelism and simultaneity of the course towards war and the course towards revolution' plainly casts aside this basic marxist premise, because it holds that the two principal antagonistic classes in society can go on preparing their respective responses to the crisis - imperialist war for the one, revolution for the other - completely independently of each other, of the balance of forces between each other, of confrontations and clashes between each other. If it can't be applied to something which is going to determine the whole historic alternative for the life of society, the schema of the Communist Manifesto has no reason for existing and we can consign marxism to a museum alongside other outmoded productions of human imagination".
Finally, the text also takes up the arguments of those who talked openly of a course towards war - an argument which enjoyed a brief vogue but which has lost its punch since the collapse of one of the camps due to fight this war.
In many ways, the debate within the proletarian milieu about the historic course has not advanced very much since this text was written. In 1985, the ICC wrote a further critique of the concept of the parallel course which had been defended in a document emanating from the 5th Congress of Battaglia Comunista (International Review n°85 - 'The 80s are not the 30s'). In the 1990s, texts by the IBRP have reaffirmed both the 'agnostic' view which questions the capacity of marxists to make general predictions about the dynamic of capitalist society, and the closely linked notion of a parallel course. Thus in a polemic on the significance of May 68 in Revolutionary Perspectives n°12, the CWO quote an article in World Revolution n°216 which summarised a discussion that had taken place on this theme at one of our London forums. Our article points out that "the CWO's apparent rejection of the possibility of anticipating the overall course of events is also a rejection of the work carried out in this vital field by marxists throughout the history of the workers' movement". The CWO's response is extremely facetious: "If this is the case then the marxists have a poor record. Let us leave aside the usual (but irrelevant) example of Marx after the 1848 revolutions and look at the Italian left in the 1930s. Whilst they did some good work in trying to come to terms with the terrible defeat of the revolutionary wave after the First World War they basically theorised themselves out of existence just before the second imperialist slaughter". Let us 'leave aside' this unbelievably patronising attitude to the entire marxist movement: what is really striking here is the way the CWO fails to grasp that it was precisely because it abandoned its previous clarity on the historic course that a part of the Italian left "theorised itself out of existence" on the eve of the war, as we saw in the first part of this report.
As for the Bordigist groupings, it is hardly their style to take part in debates between the groups of the milieu, but in recent correspondence with a mutual contact in Australia of our two organisations, the Programma group rejected out of hand the possibility that the working class has been a barrier to world war, and their speculations about whether the economic crisis will end in war or revolution do not differ in substance from those of the IBRP.
If anything has changed in the positions put forward by the IBRP, it is in the virulence of their polemic against the ICC. Whereas in the past a pretext for breaking off discussions with the ICC was our "councilist" view of the party, in the recent period the reasons for rejecting any joint work with us have focussed much more sharply on our differences over the historic course. Our views on this question are seen as the main proof of our idealist method and our total divorce from reality; furthermore, according to the IBRP, it is the shipwreck of our historical perspectives, of our concept of the 'years of truth', which is the real cause of the recent crisis in the ICC, the whole debate on functioning being in essence a diversion from this central issue.
The impact of decomposition
Although the debate within the milieu has advanced little since the end of the 70s, reality certainly has. The entry of decadent capitalism into the phase of decomposition has profoundly modified the manner in which the question of the historic course has to be approached.
The IBRP has long admonished us for arguing that the 'years of truth' meant that the revolution would break out in the 80s. What did we actually say? In the original article 'The 80s, years of truth' (International Review n°20), we argued that, faced with a profound deepening of the crisis and an intensification of imperialist tensions concretised by the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the capitalist class would be more and more compelled to jettison the language of comfort and illusion, and use the 'language of truth', the call for blood, sweat and tears; and we committed ourselves to the following prediction: "In the decade beginning today, the historical alternative will be decided: either the proletariat will continue its offensive, continue to paralyse the murderous arm of capitalism in its death throes and gather its forces to destroy the system, or else it will let itself be trapped, worn out, demoralised by speeches and repression and then the way will be open for a new holocaust which risks the elimination of all human society".
There are certain ambiguities here, in particular the suggestion that the proletarian struggle is already on the offensive, a misformulation which springs from the tendency, already identified, to underestimate the difficulties facing the working class in moving from a defensive to an offensive struggle (in other words, to a political confrontation with the capitalist state). But despite this, the notion of the years of truth does contain a profound insight. The 80s were to prove a decisive decade, but not quite in the way that the text envisages. For what this decade witnessed was not the decisive advance of one major class over another, but the social stalemate which resulted in the process of decomposition assuming a central and defining role in social evolution. Thus, the decade began with the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, which provoked a real exacerbation of imperialist tensions; but this event was quickly followed by the mass strikes in Poland, which demonstrated very clearly the near-impossibility of the Russian bloc mobilising its forces for war. But the Polish struggle also highlighted the chronic political weaknesses of the working class. And although the Polish workers faced particular problems in politicising their struggle in a proletarian sense faced with the profound mystifications arising from Stalinism (and the reaction against it), the workers in the West, although making considerable advances in their struggles during the 80s, also proved unable to advance a clear political perspective. Their movement was thus 'overwhelmed' by the fall out from the collapse of Stalinism; more generally, the definitive onset of the phase of decomposition was to place tremendous difficulties in front of the class, reinforcing at almost every turn the retreat in consciousness that resulted from the events of 1989-91.
In sum, the onset of decomposition is a result of the historic course identified by the ICC since the 60s, since it is partly conditioned by the inability of the bourgeoisie to mobilise society for war. But it has also compelled us to raise the problem of the historic course in new and unforeseen ways:
first of all, the break up of the two imperialist blocs formed in 1945, and the dynamic of 'every man for himself' which it unleashed - both results and expressions of decomposition - became a new factor obstructing the possibility of world war. While exacerbating military tensions all over the world, this new dynamic has far outweighed the tendency towards the formation of new blocs. Without blocs, without a new centre of power capable of directly challenging US hegemony, a key precondition for unleashing a world war is absent;
at the same time, this development brings no solace whatever to the cause of communism, since it has created a situation in which the bases of a new society could be undermined without world war and thus without the necessity to mobilise the proletariat in favour of war. In the previous scenario, it would be world nuclear war that would have definitively compromised the possibility of communism, by destroying the planet or at least a major part of the world's productive forces, including the proletariat. The new scenario envisages the possibility of a slower but no less deadly slide into a state where the proletariat has been fragmented beyond repair and the natural and economic bases for transforming society equally ruined, through an accretion of local and regional military conflicts, ecological catastrophes and social collapse. Furthermore, whereas the proletariat can fight on its own terrain against the bourgeoisie's attempts to mobilise it for war, this is much more difficult as regards the effects of decomposition.
This is particularly clear with the 'ecological' aspect of decomposition: although capitalism's destruction of the natural environment has in itself become a real threat to the survival of humanity - one that was only partially glimpsed by the workers' movement right up until the last few decades - it is a process which the proletariat can do little to 'block' until it has assumed political power on a world scale. Struggles around issues of pollution on a class basis are possible, but they are not likely to be the main factor for stimulating the proletariat's resistance.
We can thus see that the decomposition of capitalism places the working class in a harder situation than before. In the previous situation, it would require a frontal defeat of the working class, a victory by the bourgeoisie in a class against class confrontation, before the conditions for a world war could be fully united. In the context of decomposition, the 'defeat' of the proletariat can be more gradual, more insidious, and far less easy to resist. And on top of this, the effects of decomposition, as we have analysed many times, have a profoundly negative effect on the proletariat's consciousness, on its sense of itself as a class, since in all their different aspects - the gang mentality, racism, criminality, drug addiction, etc - they serve to atomise the class, increase the divisions within its ranks, and dissolve it into the general social rat race.
Faced with this profoundly important alteration in the world situation, the response of the proletarian milieu has been totally inadequate. Although they can recognise the effects of decomposition, the groups of the milieu are unable either to see its roots - since they reject the notion of the stalemate between the classes - or its real dangers. Thus, the IBRP's dismissal of the ICC's theory of decomposition as no more than a description of "chaos" leads them in practise to look for the possibilities of capitalist stabilisation. This is apparent, for example, in their conception of "international capital" seeking peace in Northern Ireland in order to be able to peacefully enjoy the benefits of exploitation; but it is also apparent in their view that new blocs are in the process of formation around the existing poles of economic competition (USA, European Union, etc). Although this vision, with its refusal to make any long term 'predictions' can encompass the idea of imminent war, it is more often linked to a touching faith in the rationality of the bourgeoisie: since the new "blocs" are economic rather than military formations, and since we have now entered a new period of "globalisation", the door is at least half open to the notion that these blocs, acting in the interests of "international capital", could achieve a mutually beneficial stabilisation of the world for an indefinite future.
The rejection of the theory of decomposition can only result in an underestimation of the dangers facing the working class. It underestimates the level of barbarism and chaos that capitalism has already sunk into; it tends to downplay the threat that the proletariat can be progressively undermined by the disintegration of social life; and it fails to register clearly that humanity could be destroyed even without a third world war.
Where are we now?
The onset of the period of decomposition has thus altered the way in which we pose the question of the historic course. But it has not made it irrelevant, on the contrary. In fact it tends to focus even more sharply the central question: is it too late? Has the proletariat already been defeated? Is there any obstacle to the descent into total barbarism? As we have said, it is less easy to answer the question today than in a period when world war was still a more direct option for the bourgeoisie. Thus, Bilan for example was able to point not only to the bloody defeat of proletarian uprisings and the ensuing counter-revolutionary terror in the countries where the revolution rose the highest, but also to the subsequent ideological mobilisation for war, the 'positive' adherence of the working class to the war-banners of the ruling class (fascism, democracy, etc). In today's conditions, where capitalist decomposition can engulf the proletariat without a single frontal defeat, and without this kind of 'positive' mobilisation, the signs of irrecoverable defeat are by definition harder to discern. Nevertheless, the key to understanding the problem resides in the same place as it did in 1923, or, as we saw in the GCF's analysis, in 1945 - in the central concentrations of the world proletariat, and above all in Western Europe. Did these sectors of the world proletariat say their last word in the 1980s, (or as some would have it, in the 1970s), or do they retain sufficient reserves of combativity, and a sufficient potential for the development of class consciousness, to ensure that major class confrontations are still on the agenda of history?
In order to answer this question, it is necessary to establish a provisional balance sheet of the last decade - of the period since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the definitive onset of the phase of decomposition.
The problem here is that, since 1989, the 'pattern' of the class struggle has been different from what it was in the period after 1968. During that period, there were clearly identifiable waves of struggle, with their epicentre in the main capitalist centres even though the shock waves went out all across the globe. Furthermore, it was possible to analyse these movements and draw out the advances made in class consciousness within them - for example on the union question, or regarding their progress towards the mass strike.
Furthermore, it was not only the revolutionary minority that carried out this reflection. During the different waves of struggle it was evident that struggles in one country could be a direct stimulus for struggles in others (for example the connection between May 68 and Italy 69, between Poland in 1980 and subsequent movements in Italy, between the large movements in Belgium in the 80s and workers' reactions in nearby countries). At the same time workers could be seen to be drawing lessons from previous movements - for example, .in Britain, where the defeat of the miners' strike produced a reflection in the class about the need to avoid being trapped in long drawn out isolated strikes, or in France and Italy in 86 and 87, where attempts to organise outside the unions mutually reinforced each other.
The situation since 1989 has not been characterised by such easily observable advances in class consciousness. This is not to say that the movement in the 90s has been totally featureless. In the report on the class struggle to the 13th congress we drew out the principal phases the movement had been through:
the powerful impact of the collapse of the Eastern bloc, accentuated by the remorseless campaigns of the bourgeoisie about the death of communism. This historic event brought the third wave of struggles to a sudden halt and inaugurated a profound reflux both in consciousness and class militancy, the effects of which are still with us, particularly at the level of consciousness;
the tendency towards a revival of militancy after 1992, with the struggles in Italy, followed in 93 by those in Germany and Britain;
the grand manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie in France 1995, which provided the model for similar operations in Belgium and Germany. Here the ruling class felt confident enough to provoke widespread movements aimed at restoring the image of the unions. In this sense they were both a product of the disarray within the class, and of a recognition by the bourgeoisie that this disarray could not last forever, and that credible unions would be a vital instrument for controlling future outbreaks of class resistance;
the slow but real development of discontent and militancy within the working class faced with the deepening crisis was confirmed with added vigour after 1998, with the massive strikes in Denmark and Norway and a series of struggles in the USA, Britain and France, as well as peripheral countries like Korea China and Zimbabwe. This process has been further illustrated in the past year or so by the demonstrations of the transport workers in New York, the postal workers' struggles in Britain and France, and in particular by the important outburst of struggles in Belgium in the autumn of 2000, where we saw some real signs not only of general discontent, but also of discontent with the unions' 'leadership' of the struggle.
None of these movements, however, have had a scale or impact capable of providing a real riposte to the massive ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie about the end of the class struggle, or of helping workers around the world to rediscover confidence in themselves and in their own methods of struggle; nothing comparable to the events of May 68 or the mass strike in Poland, or even the sustained movements of the 1980s. Even the most important struggles seem to have very little echo within the rest of the class: the phenomenon of struggles in one country 'responding' to movements elsewhere appears to be almost non-existent. In this context it is difficult even for revolutionaries to see a clear pattern or definite signs of progress in the class struggle in the 90s. For the class in general, the fragmented and unconnected nature of the struggles does little, on the surface at least, to reinforce or rather restore the self-confidence of the proletariat, its awareness of itself as a distinct force in society, as an international class with the potential to challenge the existing order.
This tendency for a disoriented working class to lose sight of its specific class identity, and thus to feel essentially powerless in the face of an increasingly grave world situation, is the result of a number of interwoven factors. At the most basic level - and this is a factor which revolutionaries have always tended to underestimate, precisely because it is so basic - is the fundamental position of the working class as an exploited class suffering the entire weight of ruling class ideology. On top of this 'invariant' factor in the life of the working class, is the effect of the drama of the 20th century - the defeat of the revolutionary wave, the long night of the counter-revolution, and the near disappearance of the organised proletarian political movement during this period. These factors, by their very nature, remain extremely powerful during the phase of decomposition; in fact, if anything, they both reinforce, and are themselves reinforced by, its negative influence. This is especially clear with the anti-Communist campaigns: they derive historically from the experience of the Stalinist counter-revolution, which first established the great lie that Stalinism equals communism. But the collapse of Stalinism - a product of decomposition par excellence - is then used by the bourgeoisie to further drive home the message that there can be no alternative to capitalism, and that the class war is over.
However, in order to understand the particular difficulties facing the working class in this phase, it is necessary to focus on the more specific effects of decomposition on the class struggle. Without going into details, since we have written many other texts about this problem, we can say that these effects operate at two levels: the first being the real, material effects of the process of decomposition, the second being the manner in which the ruling class utilises these effects in order to accentuate the disorientation of the exploited class. Some examples:
the process of disintegration brought about by massive and sustained unemployment, especially among the young, by the break-up of traditionally militant working class concentrations in the heart of industry, all of which reinforces atomisation and competition amongst workers. This objective process, directly linked to the economic crisis, is then reinforced by the ideological campaigns about 'post industrial society' and the obsolescence of the proletariat. This latter process in particular has been described by various elements in the proletarian milieu or the swamp as the 'recomposition' of the proletariat; in fact, such terminology, like the similar tendency to see globalisation as a new stage in capitalist development, emanates from a serious underestimation of the dangers facing the class. The fragmentation of class identity that we have witnessed over the past decade in particular is not an advance in any sense, but a clear manifestation of decomposition which holds profound dangers for the working class.
the wars which proliferate on the peripheries of the system, and which have been moving closer to the heartlands of capital, are evidently a direct statement of the process of decomposition, and contain an immediate threat to the proletariat in the areas which they devastate, both because of the slaughter and destruction they bring in their wake, and because of the ideological poisoning of the workers mobilised for these conflicts: the situation in the Middle East bears ample witness to the latter in particular. But the ruling class in the main centres of capital also makes use of these conflicts - not only for furthering its imperialist interests but also for boosting its assaults on the consciousness of the central proletarian battalions, aggravating feelings of powerlessness, of dependence on the 'democratic' and 'humanitarian' state to solve the world's problems and so on.
Another important example is the process of 'gangsterisation' which has gathered pace enormously over the last decade. This process involves both the higher echelons of the ruling class - the Russian mafia being a caricature of a much wider phenomenon - and the lowest strata in society, including a considerable proportion of proletarian youth. This is true whether we look at countries like Sierra Leone, where gang rivalries are part of an inter-imperialist conflict, or at the inner cities of the more developed countries, where the street gang seems to offer the only 'community' and even the only source of livelihood for the most marginalised sectors of society. At the same time, the ruling class, as well as using these gangs to organise the 'illicit' side of its commerce (drugs, arms,etc) has not hesitated to package 'gangsta' ideology through music, film or fashion, cultivating it as a kind of false rebellion which obliterates any sense of belonging to a class by exalting the identity of the gang, whether the latter is defined in local, racial, religious or other terms.
Other examples could be given: the point is to emphasise the considerable range and impact of the forces currently acting as a counter-weight to the proletariat 'constituting itself into a class'. Nevertheless, against all these pressures, against all the forces claiming that the proletariat is dead and buried, revolutionaries must continue to affirm that the working class has not disappeared, that capitalism cannot exist without a proletariat, and that the proletariat cannot exist without struggling against capital. This is elementary for any communist. But the specificity of the ICC is that it is prepared to commit itself to an analysis of the course of history and the overall balance of forces between the classes. And here it must be affirmed that the world proletariat at the beginning of the 21st century, in spite of all the difficulties it faces, has not said its last word, still represents the only barrier to the full development of capitalist barbarism, and still has within itself the potential to unleash massive class confrontations at the core of the system.
This is not an abstract faith, nor an eternal truth; we do not shy away from the possibility that we might in the future have to revise our analysis and recognise that a fundamental shift in this balance has taken place to the detriment of the proletariat. Our arguments are based on a constant observation of the processes within bourgeois society, which have led us to conclude:
that despite the blows to its consciousness over the last decade, the working class still retains enormous reserves of combativity which have surfaced in a considerable number of movements during this period. This is of vital importance, because although combativity and consciousness are not to be confused, the development of open resistance to the attacks of capital is in today's conditions more than ever crucial in the proletariat rediscovering its identity as a class, which is a precondition for a more general evolution in class consciousness;
that a process of subterranean maturation has continued, and is demonstrated among other things by the emergence of "searching elements" all over the world, of a growing minority who are asking serious questions about the existing system and are looking for a revolutionary alternative. These elements are made up of a majority which gravitates towards the swamp, towards the various expressions of anarchism and so on. The recent growth of the "anti-capitalist" protests - although undoubtedly manipulated and exploited by the ruling class - also expresses a massive expansion of the swamp, that ever-shifting zone of transition between the politics of the bourgeoisie and the politics of the working class. But even more significant in the most recent period is the considerable expansion of the number of elements who are relating directly to the existing revolutionary groups, particularly to the ICC and the IBRP. This influx of elements who are going further than the vague questioning of the swamp and seeking a genuinely communist coherence is the 'tip of the iceberg', the statement of a deeper and more widespread process within the proletariat as a whole. Their arrival on the scene is bound to have a considerable effect on the existing proletarian milieu, altering its physiognomy and compelling it to break from long-established sectarian habits.
The continued existence of a proletarian menace can also be measured to some degree in a "negative" manner - by examining the policies and campaigns of the bourgeoisie. We can see this on various interconnected levels - ideological, economic, and military. On the ideological level, the campaign around "anti-capitalism" is a case in point. Earlier on in the decade the campaigns of the bourgeoisie were aimed at accentuating the disarray of a class which had been only recently struck by the collapse of the Eastern bloc, and their themes could be more openly bourgeois: the Dutroux campaign, for example, was entirely centred around the issue of democracy. The insistence on "anti-capitalism" today, by contrast, is an statement of the exhaustion of the mystification of the "triumph of capitalism", of capitalism's need to recuperate and distort the potential for a real questioning of capitalism within the working class. The fact that the anti-capitalist protests have only marginally mobilised workers as workers does not diminish their general ideological impact. The same could be said for the tactic of the left in government. Although much of the ideology of the left governments is inherited directly from the campaigns about the failure of socialism and the need for a new or third way into the future, these governments have to a large extent been put into place not simply to maintain the existing disorientation of the class, but as a precautionary measure, to prevent the working class from raising its head, from giving vent to all the discontent that has been building up in its ranks over the past decade.
On the economic level, we have argued elsewhere that the bourgeoisie of the major centres will continue to use every means at its disposal to keep its economy from collapsing, from 'adjusting' to its real level. The logic behind this is both economic and social. It is economic in the sense that the bourgeoisie must at all costs keep its economy grinding on and even maintain its own illusions about the prospect of expansion and prosperity. But it is also social in the sense that the ruling class still lives in fear that dramatic plunges in the economy will provoke massive reactions amongst the proletariat, which would then be able to see much more clearly the real bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production.
Perhaps most importantly, in all the major military conflicts involving the central imperialist powers this decade (Gulf conflicts, Balkans, Africa), we have witnessed the extreme caution of the ruling class, its reluctance to use anyone but professional soldiers in these operations, and even then, its hesitation to risk the lives of these soldiers for fear of provoking a reaction 'back home'.
It is certainly significant that, with the NATO bombing in Serbia, imperialist war took a new step back towards the heartlands of the system. But Serbia is not Western Europe. We see no evidence today that the working class of the major industrial countries is ready to march behind national banners, to enrol directly in major imperialist conflicts (and even within a country like Serbia, the limits of sacrifice have been seen, even if the massive discontent there has been diverted into a democratic carnival). Capitalism is still compelled to mask its imperialist divisions behind a façade of alliances for humanitarian intervention. Partly this reflects the inability of the secondary powers to openly challenge US domination, as we have seen; but it also expresses the fact that the system has no serious ideological basis for cementing new imperialist blocs - a fact totally ignored by the proletarian groups who essentially reduce such blocs to an economic function. Imperialist blocs are more military than economic in their function; but to operate at the military level, they also need to be ideological. For the moment it is impossible to see what ideological themes could be used to justify war between the main imperialist powers today - all of them espouse the same democratic ideology, and none can point the finger at an evil empire which represents the number one threat to this way of life: the anti-Americanism being encouraged in a country like France is a pale reflection of the previous ideologies of anti-fascism and anti-Communism. We have said that capitalism would still have to inflict a major and open defeat of the working class in the advanced countries before it could create the ideological conditions for mobilising them directly for world war. But there are strong grounds for arguing that this also applies to the more limited conflicts between the blocs-in-formation that would prepare the ground for a more generalised conflict. This is a real statement of the 'negative' weight of an undefeated proletariat on the evolution of capitalist society.
We have of course recognised that in the context of decomposition, the working class could be overwhelmed without such a frontal defeat and without a major war between the central powers. It could succumb to an advance of barbarism into the central countries, a process of social, economic and ecological collapse comparable to, but even more nightmarish than, what has already started to happen in countries like Rwanda and the Congo. But although more insidious, such a process could hardly be invisible, and we are still a long way from it - a fact again expressed 'negatively' in the recent campaigns about 'asylum seekers', which is to a large extent based on the recognition that western Europe and North America remain as oases of prosperity and stability in relation to those parts of Eastern Europe and the 'Third World' most directly affected by the horrors of decomposition.
It can therefore be said without hesitation that the undefeated character of the proletariat in the advanced countries remains a barrier to the full unleashing of barbarism in the centres of world capital.
Not only that: the development of the world economic crisis is slowly chipping away at the illusion that we are heading for a bright new future - a future founded on the 'new economy' where everyone is a stakeholder. This illusion will be further evaporated when the bourgeoisie is compelled to centralise and deepen its attack on working class living conditions in order to 'adjust' to the real state of its economy. Although we are still a long way from an openly political struggle against capitalism, we are unlikely to be very far away from a series of hard-fought and even wide-scale defensive struggles as the simmering discontent within the proletariat takes the form of outright combativity. And it is within these struggles that the seeds of a future politicisation can be sown. It goes without saying that the intervention of revolutionaries will be a key element in this process.
It is thus with a clear and sober recognition of the terrible difficulties and dangers facing our class that revolutionaries can continue to affirm with confidence: the course of history has not turned against us. The prospect of massive class confrontations remains ahead of us and will continue to determine our present and future activity.
December 2000
1 Mitchell died in 1945 as a result of his imprisonment in the Buchenwald concentration camp during the war.
2 This tendency left the ICC to form the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste, which preached a form of anarcho-Bordigism and itself broke up into a series of smaller mini-groups.
3 An ex-militant of the ICC.
4 International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, formed by Battaglia Comunista and the CWO (see www.ibrp.org [6]).
The terrorist attacks which killed more than 6,000 people in the United States on 11th September, like the new war which has followed them, are a new and tragic illustration of the barbarism into which capitalism is plunging. As we explain in the article in this Review, “New York and the world over: capitalism spreads death”, this barbarity is an expression of the fact that capitalism, which entered its period of decadence with the outbreak of World War I, has for more than a decade suffered a further aggravation of this decadence whose main characteristic is the decomposition of society. Our organisation has highlighted this new phase of capitalism’s decadence since the end of the 1980s (see our first article on the question, “The decomposition of capitalism”, in International Review n°57, 2nd quarter 1989). In 1990, just after the collapse of the Eastern bloc, we made our analysis more systematic in the “Theses” published in International Review n°62. This is the document that we are reprinting here. We believe that it is more current than ever. In particular, it provides a framework for understanding the growing use of terrorism in inter-state conflicts around the world, and the rise of despair, nihilism, and religious obscurantism so strikingly illustrated by the attacks on the World Trade Center. It also deals with the fact that the different expressions of decomposition today are an important obstacle to the development of working class consciousness. We can see this today, in the way that the bourgeoisie, especially in the US but in other countries as well, is using the emotion and the fear provoked by the attacks in New York to muzzle the working class in the name of “national unity”.
The workers’ resistance to the effects of the crisis is no longer enough: only the communist revolution can put an end to the threat of decomposition. Similarly, in the period to come, the proletariat cannot hope to profit from the weakening that decomposition provokes within the bourgeoisie itself. During this period, it must aim to resist the noxious effects of decomposition in its own ranks, counting only on its own strength and on its ability to struggle collectively and in solidarity to defend its interests as an exploited class (although revolutionary propaganda must constantly emphasize the dangers of social decomposition). Only in the revolutionary period, when the proletariat is on the offensive, when it has directly and openly taken up arms for its own historic perspective, will it be able to use certain effects of decomposition, in particular of bourgeois ideology and of the forces of capitalist power, for leverage, and turn them against capital.
17) Understanding the serious threat that the historical phenomenon of decomposition poses for the working class and for the whole of humanity should not lead the class, and especially its revolutionary minorities, to adopt a fatalist attitude. Today, the historical perspective remains completely open. Despite the blow that the Eastern bloc’s collapse has dealt to proletarian consciousness, the class has not suffered any major defeats on the terrain of its struggle. In this sense, its combativity remains virtually intact. Moreover, and this is the element which in the final analysis will determine the outcome of the world situation, the inexorable aggravation of the capitalist crisis constitutes the essential stimulant for the class’ struggle and development of consciousness, the precondition for its ability to resist the poison distilled by the social rot. For while there is no basis for the unification of the class in the partial struggles against the effects of decomposition, nonetheless its struggle against the direct effects of the crisis constitutes the basis for the development of its class strength and unity. This is the case because:
Links
[1] https://eurasianet.org
[2] https://www.wweek.com/homepage/
[3] http://www.marxists.org
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/911
[6] http://www.ibrp.org
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/329/historic-course
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/128/historic-course
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/32/decomposition