The dramatic situation of a Middle East that has been plunged into chaos reveals the profound cynicism and duplicity of the bourgeoisie in all countries. Each one of them pretends that it wants to bring peace, justice and democracy to the populations who have been subjected to daily horrors and massacres for years. But their fine speeches are just a mask for the defence of sordid imperialist interests and a justification for military and diplomatic interventions which are the main cause behind today's worsening conflicts. The cynicism and hypocrisy of it all have been confirmed in particular by the hurried execution of Saddam Hussein, which is just one illustration of the bloody settling of scores between rival bourgeois factions.
The judgement and execution of Saddam Hussein were spontaneously hailed by Bush as a "victory for democracy". There's some truth in this: the bourgeoisie has so often justified its crimes in the name of democracy. We have already devoted an article to the subject in this Review (International Review n°66, 1991, "The massacres and crimes of the great democracies"). With boundless cynicism, Bush also announced on 5 November 2006, when he was in Nebraska in the middle of an election campaign, that the death sentence handed out to Saddam was "a justification for the sacrifices willingly accepted by the US forces" since March 2003 in Iraq. So for Bush the hide of a murderer is worth the more than 3000 young Americans killed in Iraq (that's more than the victims of the destruction of the Twin Towers), most of them in the flower of their youth. And the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead since the beginning of the American intervention count for nothing at all. In fact, since the US occupation began, there have been more than 600,000 deaths and the Iraqi government is no longer counting so as not to "undermine morale".
The USA had every interest in ensuring that the execution of Saddam took place before the next round of trials. The reason for this is they would have brought up far too many compromising facts. It has been deemed necessary to obscure all memory of the total support given by the US and the Western powers to Saddam's policies between 1979 and 1990, and in particular during the war between Iraq and Iran between 1980 and 1988.
One of the main accusations against Saddam was the deadly use of chemical weapons against 5000 Kurds in Halabjah in 1988. This massacre was part of a war which cost 1,200,000 dead and twice as many wounded, and throughout which "the Butcher of Baghdad" was supported by the US and most of the Western powers. Having been taken by the Iranians, the town was then re-taken by the Iraqis who decided to carry out an operation of repression against the Kurdish population. The massacre was only the most spectacular in a campaign of extermination baptised "Al Anfal" ("war booty"), which claimed 180,000 Iraqi Kurdish victims between 1987 and 1988.
Saddam began this war by attacking Iran with the full support of the Western powers. After the emergence of a Shi'ite Islamic republic in Iran in 1979, with Ayatollah Khomeini denouncing the US as the "Great Satan", and after US president Carter's failure to overturn the regime, Saddam Hussein took on the role regional cop for the US and the Western bloc by declaring war on Iran and weakening it through 8 years of war. The Iranian counter-attack would have resulted in victory for Tehran if Iraq had not been given US military support. In 1987, the Western bloc led by the US mobilised a formidable armada in the waters of the Gulf, deploying more than 250 war-ships from nearly all the major Western countries, with 35,000 men on board and equipped with the most sophisticated war-planes. Under the guise of "humanitarian intervention", this force destroyed an oil platform and several of the Iranian navy's most effective ships. It was thanks to this support that Saddam was able to sign a peace agreement which allowed Iraq to keep its pre-war borders.
Saddam originally came to power with the support of the CIA, executing his Shi'ite and Kurdish rivals but also other Sunni chiefs within the Baath party, who were falsely accused of conspiring against him. He was courted and honoured as a great statesman for years, being recognised for example as a "great friend of France" (and of Chirac and Chevènement in particular). The fact that he distinguished himself throughout his political career by bloody executions and massacres of all kinds (hangings, beheadings, torturing opponents, use of chemical weapons, slaughter of the Shi'ite and Kurdish populations) never bothered any bourgeois politician until it was "discovered" on the eve of the Gulf War that Saddam was a bloody and frightful tyrant.1 We should also remember that Saddam was lured into a trap when he believed that he had been given the green light by Washington to invade Kuwait in the summer of 1990, thus providing the US with a pretext to mount a gigantic military mobilisation against him. Thus the US set up the first Gulf War of January 1991 and from now on Saddam Hussein would be deemed public enemy number one. The Desert Storm campaign, presented by the official propaganda as a "clean war", a kind of video war game, actually cost 500,000 lives in 42 days, with 106,000 air raids dropping 100,000 tons of bombs, experimenting with the whole gamut of murderous weapons (napalm, cluster bombs, depression bombs...). Its essential aim was to make a demonstration of the crushing military superiority of the US and to force its former allies, now becoming potentially dangerous imperialist rivals, to take part in the war under US command at a moment when the old bloc alliances were falling apart.
With the same degree of Machiavellianism, the US and its "allies" were soon involved in further machinations. Having called upon the Kurds in the North and the Shi'ites in the South to rise up against the Saddam regime, they left him with the elite troops he needed to drown these rebellions in blood, since they had every interest in keeping Iraq together. The Kurdish population in particular was subjected to the most atrocious massacres.
The hired hacks of European media, even joined by Sarkozy the hitherto pro-American French presidential hopeful, are now hypocritically denouncing the "poor choice", the "mistake", the "botched job" of Saddam's hurried execution. It is true that the circumstances of the execution will further exacerbate hatred between the religious groupings. It may have pleased the more fanatical Shi'ite groupings but certainly not the Sunnis, while the fact that it took place at the beginning of Eid, a very important festival in Islam, shocked most Muslims. What's more, Saddam Hussein may now be seen by generations who have not lived under his iron heel as a martyr.
But none of the bourgeoisies had a choice in the matter because they had the same interest as the Bush administration in seeing this execution rushed through in order to hide and erase the memory of their complicity in the atrocities of the past and their responsibility in the spiral of barbarism going on today. The situation in the Middle East is reaching the heights of absurdity, but it is only a symbol of the total impasse the system has reached everywhere.2
Recent developments in the conflict between Israel and the various Palestinian factions, who have also been at each others' throats, have reached the height of absurdity. What is striking is the way that the different bourgeoisies involved have been pushed by the force of circumstances to take decisions which are altogether contradictory and irrational, even from the standpoint of their short-term strategic interests.
When Ehud Olmert offered his hand to the president of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas, along with a few concessions to the Palestinians such as the withdrawal of a number of roadblocks and the promise to unfreeze $100 million in "humanitarian aid", the media immediately began talking about the revival of the peace process. Mahmoud Abbas has certainly tried to cash in on these offers in his competition with Hamas, since the aim of these pseudo-concessions was to show that his policy of cooperation with Israel could bring advantages.
But it was Ehud Olmert himself who largely sabotaged any common approach with the president of the Palestinian Authority when he was compelled by the pressure from the ultra-conservative factions in his government to renew the policy of implanting Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and to step up the destruction of Palestinian houses in Jerusalem.
The accords between Israel and Fatah resulted in Israel authorising Egypt to deliver arms to Fatah in order to give it an advantage in its struggle against Hamas. However, the umpteenth Sharm-el-Sheikh summit between Israel and Egypt was totally overshadowed by the Israeli army's new military operation in Ramallah on the West Bank and by the renewed air-raids in the Gaza Strip in response to sporadic rocket fire. So the message about wanting to revive peace talks was drowned out and Israel's intentions made to look very contradictory.
Another paradox is that at the moment that Olmert and Abbas met, and just before the Israel-Egypt summit, Israel announced that it possesses nuclear weapons and made open threats about using them. Although this warning was directed essentially against Iran, which is trying to attain the same status, it goes out indirectly to all Israel's neighbours. How were the latter to start negotiations with such a belligerent and dangerous power?
Furthermore, this declaration can only push Iran to move further in the same direction and legitimate its ambitions to becoming a gendarme and a protector of the region, resorting to the same logic of "deterrence" as all the great powers.
But it is not just the Zionist state which is acting in this way - it looks as if each protagonist is becoming increasingly incapable of acting for the best defence of its strategic interests.
Abbas for example has taken the risk of unleashing a test of strength with the militias of Hamas and has poured oil on the fire by announcing his aim of holding elections in Gaza. This could only be seen by Hamas, which was "democratically" elected only last January, as a real provocation. But this test of strength, which has also taken the form of bloody street-fighting, was the only way that the Palestinian Authority could try to break out of the Israeli blockade and the blocking of international aid in force since Hamas came to power. Not only has the blockade been a disaster for the local population, which has been unable to go to work outside the areas boxed in by the Israeli army and police, it has also provoked the strike by 170,000 Palestinian civil servants in Gaza and the West Bank who have not been paid any wages for months (especially in vital sectors like health and education). The anger of the civil servants, which extends into the ranks of the police and the army, has been exploited both by Hamas and by Fatah as a means to recruit people for their respective militias, each one blaming the situation on the other, while young kids between 10 and 15 are being enrolled en masse as cannon fodder in this murderous conflict.
Hamas meanwhile has been trying to take advantage of the confusion by negotiating directly with Israel for an exchange of prisoners, proposing to swap the Israeli corporal captured in June for some of its own activists.
The bloody chaos that has come out of a year's explosive co-habitation between the elected Hamas government and the president of the Palestinian Authority remains the only prospect. Given this suicidal policy, there should be no illusions about the truce agreed at the end of the year between the Fatah and Hamas militias. It will certainly be punctuated by murderous confrontations: car bombs, street battles, kidnapping, all of it sowing terror and death among the already impoverished population of the Gaza strip. And to cap it all, the Israeli raids on the West Bank or the brutal searches by the Israeli army and police mean that children and school students are regularly being killed in the crossfire, while the Israeli proletariat, already bled white by the war effort, is subjected to revenge operations by Hamas on the one hand and Hezbollah on the other.
At the same time, the situation in South Lebanon, where UN forces have been deployed, is far from being secure. Instability has increased since the assassination of the Christian leader Pierre Gemayel. There has been a major demonstration of force by Hezbollah and other Shi'ite militias, as well as by the Christian faction led by General Aoun who has provisionally rallied to Syria, besieging the presidential palace in Beirut for several days, while at the same time armed Sunni groups were threatening the Lebanese parliament and its Shi'ite president Nabil Berri. Tension between the rival factions is reaching a peak. As for the UN mission - disarming Hezbollah - no one takes that seriously.
In Afghanistan, the deployment of 32,000 troops under NATO's international forces and of 8500 Americans has proved ineffective. The struggle against al Qaida and the Taliban, who have carried out at least a hundred attacks in the south of the country, is getting inexorably bogged down. The balance sheet of this guerrilla war is 4,000 dead for 2006 alone. Pakistan, which in principal is the USA's ally, still serves as a base for al Qaida and the Taliban.
Each state, each faction is pushed headlong into military adventurism, regardless of the defeats they suffer.
The most revealing impasse is the one facing the world's strongest power. The policy of the American bourgeoisie is caught up in all sorts of contradictions. The report by James Baker, former adviser to Bush senior and appointed by the federal government, concluded that the war in Iraq has been a failure and advocated a change of policy: opening diplomatic relations with Syria and Iran and gradually withdrawing the 144,000 troops stuck in Iraq. And what happened? Bush junior was forced to renew part of his administration, notably by replacing Rumsfeld with Robert Gates as Defence Secretary; a number of people were made scapegoats for the Iraq fiasco and have been got rid of, notably two major commanding officers of the occupation forces in Iraq. But above all Bush has announced a new "surge" of US troops to Iraq: 21,500 reinforcements, for an army already heavily dependent on reservists, are to be sent to "secure" Baghdad. The shift in the majority in both houses of Congress, now dominated by the Democrats, has changed nothing: any disengagement or refusal to release new military credits for the war in Iraq will be seen as an admission of weakness by the US and the Democrats don't want to assume responsibility for this. The whole American bourgeoisie, like all the other bourgeois cliques or states, is caught in the infernal machine of militarism, where every new attempt to defend its imperialist interests against its rivals only ends up making matters worse.
Terrible atrocities are commonplace on the African continent today. After decades of slaughter in Zaire and Rwanda, after the confrontation between cliques in the Ivory Coast, further exacerbated by rivalries between the great powers, other regions are being bathed in blood and fire.
In Sudan, the "rebellion" against the pro-Islamist government in Khartoum is today split up into a myriad of different factions, all fighting among themselves, manipulated by this or that power in an increasingly unstable game of alliances. In the last three years, the Darfur region in the west of Sudan has seen 400,000 deaths and more than a million and half refugees; hundreds of villages have been destroyed and the former inhabitants pushed into immense camps in the desert, dying of hunger, thirst and disease, regularly suffering the attacks of various armed gangs or of the Sudanese government forces. The flight of rebel forces has led to the conflict being exported to other regions, notably the Central African Republic and Chad. This has in turn compelled France to get more and more involved militarily in order to preserve its remaining hunting grounds in Africa, in particular by taking an active part in the battles launched against the Sudanese government from Chad.
Since the overthrow of the former dictator Siyad Barre in 1990, which accompanied the fall of his protector, the USSR, Somalia has been in state of chaos, torn apart by a non-stop war between innumerable clans, mafia gangs of killers and pillagers ready to sell their services to the highest bidder, imposing a reign of terror and desolation across the whole country. The Western powers, which descended on this country between 1992 and 1995, have had to fight a losing battle in the face of this chaos and decomposition: the spectacular landing of the US marines ended in a pathetic fiasco in 1994, leaving the way open to total anarchy. The settling of scores between these gangs of assassins has left 500,000 dead since 1991. The Union of Islamic Courts, which is one of these gangs hiding under a veneer of Sharia law and "radical" Islam, finally grabbed hold of the capital Mogadishu in May 2006 with a few thousand armed men. The transitional government exiled to Baidoa then called on its powerful neighbour, Ethiopia, to save the day.3 The Ethiopian army, with the overt support of the US, bombarded the capital, forcing the Islamic troops to flee within a few hours, most of them going to the south of the country. Mogadishu is a frightful ruin whose population has been reduced to living hand to mouth. A new provisional government supported from a discreet distance by the Ethiopian army has been set up but its appeal to the population to hand in its weapons has had no result. After the clear victory of Ethiopia, the truce could only be provisional and precarious because the Islamic "rebels" are in the process of re-arming, in particular through the porous southern border with Kenya. But the rebels may get support from elsewhere, such as Sudan, Eritrea - Ethiopia's traditional rival - and Yemen. This uncertain situation is worrying for the US given that the Horn of Africa, with the military base in Djibouti and Somalia's position on the route to the Middle East and Asia, is one of the most strategic zones in the world. This is what prompted the US to intervene directly on 8 January, bombing the south of the country where the rebels have taken refuge; the White House claimed that they are being directly manipulated by Al Qaida. Neither the US, nor France, nor any other great power can play a stabilising role or act as a barrier to the spread of military barbarism in Africa or any other part of the world, whatever government is in power. On the contrary, their imperialist interests are pushing them to step up the death and destruction in an increasingly uncontrolled manner.
The plunging of a growing part of humanity into this kind of barbarism and chaos is the only future that capitalism can offer. Imperialist war is today mobilising the wealth of science, technology and human labour not to improve humanity's well-being, but to destroy these riches, to accumulate ruins and corpses. Imperialist war, which is undermining the heritage of centuries of human history and threatens to engulf and overwhelm the whole of humanity, is an expression of a profoundly aberrant social system whose survival has become an insane disaster for human society.
More than ever, the only possible hope lies in the overthrow of capitalism, in the establishment of social relations freed from the contradictions which are strangling society, by the only class that can bring humanity a future: the working class.
Wim 10.1.07
1 Another of the region's tyrants, Hafez-el-Assad of Syria, has since his death been dubbed a great statesman in reward for rallying to the Western camp during the period of the blocs, despite a career that was just as bloody as Saddam's.
2 Certain bourgeois writers are quite capable of seeing the unbearable accumulation of barbarism in the world today: "Barbarism follows barbarism to give birth to more barbarism. A video circulates on the internet, the latest contribution to the festival of unspeakable images, from the beheadings carried out by Zarkawi to the humiliated bodies piled up by GI's at Abu Ghraib (...) The terrible secret services of the former tyrant are succeeded by the Interior Ministry's death squads dominated by the pro-Iranian Badr Brigades (...) Whether in the name of Bin Ladenist terrorism, the struggle against the Americans, or the Shi'ite power, the murders directed against the Iraqi civilians have this in common: they are carried out under the law of individual impulse. Scoundrels of all kinds are springing up in the ruins of Iraq. Lying is the norm; the police practise kidnapping and banditry; men of God decapitate and eviscerate; the Shi'ite does to the Sunni what he himself has suffered" (the French weekly Marianne, 6.1.07). But all this is put down to "individual impulses" and in the end to "human nature". What such writers cannot understand is that this barbarism is a historical product of the capitalist system; and that there exists a historic class capable of bringing it to an end: the proletariat.
3 Ethiopia, also a former bastion of the USSR, has become a US stronghold in the region since the fall of Mengistu in 1991.
In continuity with the series on revolutionary syndicalism which we began in International Review n°118 [2] , the article below is the first in a series of articles on the experience of the Spanish CNT.
Today, a new generation of workers are gradually getting involved in the class struggle against capitalism. This confrontation raises a great many questions, one of the most frequent of which is the union question. It is no secret that the workers remain suspicious of the official unions, and the idea of a "revolutionary unionism" continues to hold a certain attraction; the idea, that is, of organising outside the state structure with the aim of unifying the immediate struggle and also the revolutionary struggle.
By examining the experience of the French CGT and the IWW in North America we have shown that this idea is unrealistic and utopian but the example of the CNT shows is even more striking, as we will now see. From the beginning of the 20th century history has repeatedly shown by experience that syndicalism and revolution are contradictory terms that cannot possibly be united.1
Today, the CNT and anarchism are seen as inseparable. Anarchism, which played a minor part in the great workers' movements of the 19th and 20th centuries,2 presents the CNT as the proof that its ideology is able to build an extensive mass organisation that can play a decisive role in the workers' struggles, as did the Spanish CNT from 1919 to 1936.
However it was not anarchism that created the CNT because at its inception it had a revolutionary syndicalist orientation, although this does not mean that anarchism was completely absent from its foundation or that it did not leave its mark on the development of the organisation.3
As we have already shown in other articles in this series - we will not go back over this here - revolutionary syndicalism is an attempt to respond to new conditions: capitalism was no longer at its zenith and was gradually entering its decadent phase, which was clearly demonstrated by the immense slaughter of the First World War. Confronted with this reality, larger and larger sectors of the working class became aware of the rampant opportunism of the socialist parties - corrupted by parliamentary cretinism and reformism - as well as the bureaucratisation and conservatism of the unions. There were two kinds of reaction to this; on the one hand a revolutionary tendency within the socialist parties (the left formed by those groups whose best known militants were Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Pannekoek, etc) and on the other hand revolutionary syndicalism.
These general historic conditions are equally valid for Spain although they were also marked by the backwardness and the specific conditions of Spanish capitalism. Two of these particularities had a decisive, negative weight on the proletariat of the period.
The first contradiction was the obvious absence of any real economic unity among the various zones of the Iberian peninsula. This produced localist and regionalist dispersion which gave rise to a series of uprisings within the various regions, the most important of which was the republican cantonal insurrection of 1873. Because of its federalist positions anarchism proved a suitable representative of these archaic historic conditions: the autonomy of each region or zone, which declared itself sovereign and only accepted the fragile and random union of the "solidarity pact". As Peirats4 says in his work, The CNT in the Spanish revolution, "this programme, that of Bakunin's Alliance, suited the temperament of the Spanish underprivileged very well. The federal vision introduced by the Bakuninists was like rain upon damp soil because it resurrected memories of local rights, of village charters and the free municipalities of the Middle Ages" (page 3, volume 1).5
Given the general backwardness and the explosive differences in economic development of the various regions, the bourgeois state, although constitutional in form, in fact depended on the brute force of the army to ensure social cohesion. It unleashed periodic repression mainly against the proletariat and, to a lesser extent, against the middle classes in the towns. Not only the workers and the peasants, but also wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie, felt completely excluded from a state that was liberal in theory but violently repressive and authoritarian in practice and which was controlled by bosses who ignored the parliamentary system and its policies. This gave rise to a visceral apoliticism that was expressed in anarchism but which was also very strong within the working class. These general conditions resulted in the weakness of the Marxist tradition in Spain on the one hand and the strong influence of anarchism on the other. The group around Pablo Inglesias6 remained faithful to the Marxist current in the IWA and formed the Socialist Party in 1881.7 However the organisation was always extremely weak politically, to the point that Munis8 said that many of its leaders had never read anything by Marx: "The most fundamental and important works of theory had not been translated. And the few that had been published (the Communist Manifesto, Anti-Dühring, Misery of Philosophy, Utopian and Scientific Socialism) were read more by bourgeois intellectuals than by the socialists" (Signposts to Defeat, Promise of Victory, p59).9 This is why the party moved so rapidly towards opportunism and was one of the most right wing parties of the whole Second International.
As regards the anarchist tendency, it would take a detailed study to understand all its various currents and the many positions contained within it. We would also have to distinguish the majority of militants sincerely committed to the proletarian cause and those who passed themselves off as their leaders. In general, the latter, apart from a few honest ones, betrayed at every step those "principles" that they ostensibly defended. We need do no more than recall the shameful actions of Bakunin's followers in Spain at the time of the cantonal insurrection of 1873, which Engels denounced so brilliantly in his pamphlet, The Bakuninists at work: "The same people who rejected the Hague resolution on the political attitude of the working class and who trampled under foot the Rules of the [International Working Men's] Association, thus bringing division, conflict and confusion into the Spanish Section of the International; the same people who had the effrontery to depict us to the workers as ambitious place-hunters, who, under the pretext of establishing the rule of the working class, sought to establish their own rule; the same people who call themselves autonomists, anarchist revolutionaries, etc., have on this occasion flung themselves into politics, bourgeois politics of the worst kind. They have worked, not to give political power to the working class -- on the contrary this idea is repugnant to them -- but to help to power a bourgeois faction of adventurers, ambitious men and place-hunters who call themselves Intransigent (irreconcilable) Republicans."10
After this episode and in the context of the international reflux of struggles that followed the defeat of the Paris Commune, the Spanish bourgeoisie unleashed a violent repression which lasted many years. In the face of state terror and its own ideological confusion, the anarchist current had only two inalienable certainties: federalism and apoliticism. These certainties aside, it constantly came up against a dilemma: should it carry forward an open struggle in order to create a mass organisation? Or should it carry out minority and clandestine actions on the basis of the anarchist slogan "the propaganda of the deed"? This dilemma plunged the movement into complete paralysis. In Andalusia this oscillating sometimes took the form of a "general strike" in the form of local, isolated uprisings which were easily crushed by the Guardia Civil and were followed by brutal repression. At other times it was expressed in "exemplary actions" (setting fire to crops, plundering farms, etc) which the government exploited to unleash new waves of repression.11
The CNT was born in Barcelona, the main industrial concentration in Spain, on the basis of the historic conditions which existed internationally during the early decades of the 20th century. As we have shown elsewhere,12 the workers' struggle was tending to develop into the revolutionary mass strike, the most advanced example of which was to be seen in the 1905 Russian Revolution.
In Spain also, the change in historical period was expressed in new forms of workers' struggle. Two episodes, which we will describe briefly, illustrate this tendency: the 1902 strike in Barcelona and the Tragic Week of 1909, which also took place in Barcelona.
The former started in December 1901 with the engineering workers demanding the 9-hour day. When they were confronted with repression and the outright refusal of the bosses, the solidarity of the Barcelona proletariat spilled onto the streets. They arose massively and spontaneously at the end of January 1902 without the least encouragement from any union or political organisations. For several days, mass meetings united workers of all trades. However, as there was no echo in the rest of the country, the strike got progressively weaker. There were various factors that contributed to this situation. On the one hand the open sabotage of the Socialist Party, which even went so far as to block the solidarity funds from the British trade unions. On the other hand, there was the passivity of the anarchist societies.13 At the same time the Workers' Federation of the Spanish Region, which had been newly formed (1900) on an "apolitical" basis,14 was also absent and defended this by saying that "the metal workers of Barcelona have never belonged to any political or social grouping and were not disposed to collective action"15 This experience shook the existing workers' organisations profoundly because it did not follow the traditional "schema" of the struggle: it was neither a general strike according to the anarchist conception nor actions intended to put pressure on employers within a strictly trade and economic framework, in accordance with the vision of the Socialists.
The Tragic Week of 1909 came about as a massive popular reaction against the embarkation of troops for Morocco.16 In this movement too we see expressed active class solidarity, the extension of the struggles and the demonstrators taking
possession of the streets. All of this was done on the immediate initiative of the workers without any previous planning or calls from the political organisations. The economic struggle and the political struggle were united. There were two aspects; firstly there was the solidarity of all sectors of workers with the strikers in the textile industry, the most important in Catalonia. Secondly, the refusal of imperialist war was expressed by the mobilisation against the embarkation of soldiers for the war in Morocco. Under the destructive influence of bourgeois republicanism, led by the famous demagogue Lerroux,17 the movement degenerated into violent and sterile actions, the most spectacular of which were the setting fire to churches and convents. The government made use of all this to unleash another wave of repression, which took a particularly barbaric and sadistic form.
This was the situation in 1907 which saw the birth of Workers' Solidarity (which would become the CNT three years later). Workers' Solidarity united five tendencies that were present in the workers' milieu:
The predominant concern was to form a single, unitary organisation which would weld together the entire class for struggle.
During this period, the theories of French revolutionary socialism were widely circulated. Anselmo Lorenzo, a prominent Spanish anarchist , had translated the The Union by Emile Pouget in 1904; José Prat translated and distributed other works, those by Pouget, Pelloutier and Pataud19 for example. In his own work The Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat (1908), Prat summarised revolutionary syndicalism by saying that it "in no way accepts the present order; it suffers it in the hope that union power can destroy it. By means of increasingly generalised strikes it gradually revolutionises the working class and moves towards the general strike. It snatches from the bourgeois bosses all the immediate improvements that are positive but its aim is the complete transformation of the present society into a socialist society. Through its action as a political agent it brings about economic and socialist revolution."
Workers' Solidarity had intended to hold its Congress at the end of September 1909 in Barcelona. However the congress could not take place because of the events of the Tragic Week and the repression that followed it. The First Congress of the CNT was therefore put off until 1910.
This organisation, that has been presented ever since as the model of anarcho-syndicalism, was in fact founded on the basis of revolutionary syndicalist positions: "there was not the slightest reference to anarchism, either as an aim or a basis for action or in terms of principles, etc. Moreover during the Congress the discussions, the resolutions and the Manifestos of the Confederation made not the slightest allusion to the theme of anarchism in a way that would suggest that there was a preponderant weight of this political current or at least that it had a certain influence on the new Confederation. It came across as a completely neutral organ, if the exclusive practice of revolutionary syndicalism can be understood in this way. It was apolitical in the sense that it did not participate in the game of politics or in the process of the government of society. However it was political in the sense that it proposed to replace the present system of social government by a different system based on its own union organisation." (A. Bar, The CNT in the red years).20
Nevertheless, it would of course be wrong to think that the CNT was not influenced by anarchist positions. This can be seen in the three pillars of revolutionary syndicalism that we have examined in the previous articles in this series that analysed the experience of the French CGT and the American IWW: apoliticism, direct action and centralism.
Apoliticism
As we have seen in our previous articles, revolutionary syndicalism claims above all to be "sufficient unto itself": the union should provide the working class with its unitary organ of struggle, the means of organising future society, and even the framework for its theory, although the latter was generally under-estimated. Political organisations were often considered not so much as dangerous as useless. In France, this current nonetheless produced theoretical thinking and writing, thanks to which, for example, its positions reached Spain. But in Spain itself, revolutionary syndicalism remained entirely "practical"; it produced practically no theoretical work and its most important documents were the resolutions adopted at the Congress, in which the level of discussion was very limited. "Spanish revolutionary syndicalism was faithful to one of the basic principles of syndicalism: to be a means of action, a practice and not just a theory. For this reason, contrary to what happened in France, it is very unusual to find theoretical works from Spanish revolutionary syndicalism... The clearest declarations of revolutionary syndicalism are in fact the documents of the organisations, the manifestoes and agreements of Workers' Solidarity as well as of the CNT." (A. Bar, ibid)
It is remarkable that the Congress did not devote a single session to the international situation or to the problem of war. It is even more significant that there was no discussion around the recent events during the Tragic Week which encapsulated a multitude of burning issues (war, direct solidarity in the struggle, the extremely negative role of Lerroux's republicanism).21 From this we can draw the conclusion that there was a reluctance to analyse the conditions of the class struggle and the historic period, difficulty in carrying out theoretical reflection and consequently in drawing the lessons of the experience of the struggle. Instead there was a whole session devoted to a confused and interminable debate on how to interpret the phrase "the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves". This ended up with the declaration that only manual workers could carry out this struggle and that intellectual workers must be kept to one side and accepted only as "collaborators".
Direct action
This was considered by the majority of workers to be the main difference in practice between the new organisation, the CNT, and the socialist UGT. In fact we can say that this was the very basis of the constitution of the CNT as a national union (no longer restricted to Catalonia). "The initiative to transform Workers' Solidarity into a Spanish Confederation did not come from the Confederation itself but from numerous entities outside Catalonia. The latter were motivated by the desire to unite with the societies which had not belonged to the General Workers' Union up to then and were interested in the means offered by the direct struggle" (José Negre, quoted by A. Bar in the work quoted above).
Many regroupments of workers in other regions of Spain had had enough of the reformist cretinism of the UGT, of its bureaucratic rigidity and its "quietism" - as many critical socialists recognised. So they greeted with enthusiasm the new workers' union which advocated direct mass struggle and a revolutionary perspective, even if this remained pretty vague. However there is one misunderstanding that ought to be cleared up: direct action is not the same thing as the mass strike. Struggles that break out without the workers having been called out but as a result of a subterranean maturation; general assemblies in which the workers reflect and decide together; massive street demonstrations; the organisation taken in hand directly by the workers without waiting for directives from the leaders: these characterise the workers' struggle in the historic period of capitalist decadence. But they have nothing whatever to do with direct action, by which groups constituted spontaneously by affinity carry out minority actions of "expropriation" or of "propaganda by the deed". The methods of the mass strike spring from the collective and independent action of the workers whereas the methods of direct action depend on the "sovereign will" of small groups of individuals. Enormous confusion has been caused by the amalgamation of "direct action" and the new methods of struggle developed by the class such as in 1905 in Russia or those of Barcelona in 1902 and 1909, that we have mentioned above.This confusion has dogged the CNT throughout its history.
This confusion was expressed in sterile debate between those for and those against the "general strike". The members of the PSOE were against the general strike, seeing in it the abstract and voluntarist attitude of anarchism which throws itself into this or that struggle in order to "transform it arbitrarily into revolution". They were no more capable than their colleagues in Europe's other socialist parties of understanding that the change in historic conditions meant that the Revolution was no longer a distant ideal, it had become the main axis around which must be united all efforts as regards the struggle and class consciousness.22 Rejecting the anarchists' "sublime, great and majestic Revolution", they remained equally ignorant of the concrete changes in the historic situation.
On the other hand, the revolutionary syndicalists wanted sincerely to take the struggle in hand, to develop assemblies and massive struggles but they dressed this up in the old clothes of the general strike, completely dependent on the unions. Although the theses of "direct action" and the "general strike" seemed very radical they were of necessity limited to the economic terrain and so took the form of a more or less radical union economism. It did not express the depth of the struggle, on the contrary it expressed its limitations: "The Confederation and the sections integrated into it must always fight on a purely economic terrain, that is on the terrain of direct action" (CNT Statutes).
Centralism
A large part of the discussion at the Congress was devoted to the organisational question: how should a national union be structured? The rejection of centralisation and extreme federalism meant that the anarchist position prevailed on this point. So in the early period of its existence (up until the 1919 congress) the CNT adopted a structure that was completely anachronistic, formed of a juxtaposition of trade based societies on the one hand and of local federations on the other.
The events in Russia in 1905 proved that the unity of the working class was a revolutionary social force which organised in a centralised fashion. The Petersburg soviet regrouped workers regardless of sector or category and was also open to the intervention of revolutionary groups. Unfortunately the CNT passed motions that went in quite the opposite direction.
On the one hand, influenced by federalism, in response to the extreme misery and hateful brutality of the capitalist regime local groups threw themselves periodically into insurrections that resulted in the declaration of libertarian communism in one locality. These met with brutal repression from bourgeois forces. In the five years preceding the First World War, this happened frequently in Andalucia and also in regions such as Valencia, where agriculture was more developed. One well-known example is the movement that broke out in 1912 in Cullera, a wealthy farming and industrial centre: a movement of day labourers took over the local council building and declared "libertarian communism" in the region. Completely isolated, they were brutally suppressed by the armed forces and the Guardia Civil together.
On the other hand whole groupsof workers were embroiled in corporatism.23 The method of the latter is to model the workers' organisation on the myriad of subdivisions and complexity of the capitalist organisation of production . The effect of this is to develop among the workers a narrow mindedness of the "every man is master in his own house" type. For corporatism, unity is not the unity of all workers, irrespective of trade, industry, or company, in a single and unique collective but the formation of a "pact for solidarity and mutual defence" between independent and sovereign parts of the working class. This vision is expressed in the rules adopted by the Congress which went so far as to accept the existence of two distinct societies for the same trade in the same locality.
One highly significant theme ran through the 1910 Congress. The very day that it began the workers of Sabadell (an industrial area near Barcelona) were engaged in a generalised strike in solidarity with their comrades of Seydoux, who had suffered several disciplinary sackings. The strikers sent delegates to the Congress to ask that it call for a general strike in solidarity. The Congress showed great enthusiasm and sympathy. However it adopted a resolution based on outworn union ideas that were increasingly being overtaken by the fresh wind of the mass workers' struggle: "We propose to the Congress that it adopt as a measure of solidarity with the strikers of Sabadell that all delegates here present encourage their respective entities to perform their solemn duty. That is, that they carry out the decisions of the delegate assemblies of Workers' Solidarity of Barcelona by materially aiding the strikers." This confused and hesitant motion was a real cold shower for the workers of Sabadell and they ended up by going back to work completely defeated.
This episode symbolises the contradiction which was to mark the evolution of the CNT in the period to come. It held the heart of an impetuous proletarian life beating within it, one that wanted to respond to the increasingly explosive situation within which capitalism was locked. However, by the way it responded, revolutionary syndicalism, was shown to be increasingly inadequate and counterproductive and would, in the end, be a hindrance rather than a help.
We will examine this question in the next article, in which we will analyse the action of the CNT in the difficult period of 1914-1923: the CNT faced with war and revolution.
RR and CMir (15th June 2006)
1 CGT - Confédération Générale du Travail, CNT - Confederación Nacional del Trabajo, IWW - International Workers of the World.
2 Its influence was very limited during the Paris Commune and its presence was insignificant in 1905 and 1917 in Russia, as it was in Germany 1918-23.
3 The preface to a book on the proceedings of the Constituent Congress of the CNT (Editorial Anagramme 1976) acknowledges that the CNT "was neither anarcho-collectivist nor anarcho-communist and not even completely revolutionary syndicalist but was rather apolitical and federalist."
4 Among anarchist historians Peirats is one of the best known and is widely recognised for his rigour. The work referred to is considered to be a point of reference in the Spanish anarchist milieu.
5 On the next page, Peirats develops the following idea: "in contrast to the unitary spirit, which is the reflection of a unified landscape - that of the meseta - the borders of the peninsula , with their mountain chains, their valleys and plains form a circle of compartments which house an infinite variety of peoples, languages and traditions. Every zone or nook of this uneven landscape is a sovereign entity, jealous of its institutions, proud of its freedom. This is the birthplace of Spanish federalism. This geographic configuration was always a seedbed of abutting autonomous zones, some of which were separatist, a retort to the absolutism of the East (...) Between separatism and absolutism, federalism lost its way. The latter is based on the free and voluntary connection of all the autonomous units; from individuals to natural regions or those with affinitary links and including free districts. The warm welcome that was accorded in Spain to certain ideological influences coming from abroad by no means contradicts the existence of a home grown federalism that was scarcely mitigated by centuries of extortion. It rather confirms it. (...) The Bakuninist ambassadors sowed their federalist seed - libertarianism - among the Spanish working class" (ibid, p18). Through associated labour at an international level, the working class represents the conscious unification - freely undertaken - of the whole of humanity. This is radically opposed to federalism which is an ideology that reflects dispersion, the fragmentation of the petty bourgeoisie and of the archaic modes of production that preceded capitalism.
6 Pablo Iglesias (1850-1925) founder and leader of the PSOE until his death.
7 IWA - International Workingmen's Association (the First International), PSOE - Partido Socialista Obrero Español.
8 Spanish revolutionary (1911-1989). He came from Trotsky's Left Opposition but broke with it when it capitulated by participating in the Second World War, and continued to defend class positions against the Trotskyists. Founder of the group FOR (Fomento Obrero Revolucionario). See our article in the International Review n°58, "In memory of Munis, a militant of the working class".
9 See our commentary on this book in our Spanish language brochure: "1936: Franco and the Republic massacre the workers"
10 See Archive of Marxist authors: 'The Bakuninists at Work [3]'.
11 In 1882-1883, the state unleashed ferocious repression against day labourers and anarchists under the pretext that it was fighting against a society that organised such attacks; La Mano Negra. The existence of this society has never been proved.
12 See our series on the 1905 revolution beginning in the International Review n°120.
13 The openly anarchist historian, Francisco Olaya Morales makes the following statement in his book History of the Spanish Workers' Movement (1900-1936): "at the end of December, the strike committee contacted some anarchist societies but they refused to join the committee on the grounds that it had transgressed the rule of direct action" (sic) (page 54).
14 We will come back to this experience latter.
15 See Olaya's book referred to in a previous note, p54.
16 Spanish capital was engaged in a costly war in Morocco in defence of its imperialist interests (to take possession of a number of colonial zones by picking up the remains left by the big powers). This war made it necessary to send a continuous supply of troops, so sacrificing a large number of workers and peasants. Many young men knew that being sent to Morocco meant, not only that they would have to suffer the misery of life in the barracks, but also that they would die or be invalids for the rest of their lives.
17 A dubious individual and an adventurer, founder of the radical party, which was important in Spanish politics until the 1930s.
18 Unlike the French experience (see the articles from this series in International Review n°118 and 120), or that of the IWW in the USA (see n°124 and 125 of the Review), in Spain no revolutionary syndicalist tendency found a clear expression in written works or even in articles. It was made up of trades unions which had broken from the Socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), and some anarchists like José Prat (of whom more later) who were more open to the different tendencies existing in the workers' movement.
19 Theoreticians of French revolutionary syndicalism. See the articles in this series previously referred to.
20 When the anarchist historian, Francisco Olaya Morales, talks about the period of the CNT's founding in his book History of the Spanish Workers' Movement (1900-1936), he says clearly (p277 onwards) that the socialists participated in the founding and in the early life of the CNT. He quotes José Prat, an anarchist author although independent (mentioned above) who was in favour of this participation.
21 There was only a brief mention in passing about the painful problem of the number of prisoners.
22 This is the problem that Rosa Luxemburg clarified in this period, when she examined the huge mass strike of 1905: "On the other hand, the incessant economic war waged by the workers against capital keeps combative energy on the alert even in times of political calm. It constitutes a sort of permanent reservoir of energy from which the political struggle continually draws fresh forces. At the same time the tireless work of chipping away for reforms unleashes here or there sharp conflicts from which political struggles suddenly burst forth. In brief, the economic struggle provides a continuity, it is the thread that ties together the various political knots; the political struggle is a periodic fertilisation that prepares the soil for the economic struggles. Cause and effect succeed one another and alternate constantly. So, in a period of mass strike, the economic factor and the political factor, far from being completely distinct or even mutually exclusive, as the schema of the pedants affirms, represent two complementary aspects of the proletarian class struggle in Russia." (Mass strike, party and unions)
23 The following example illustrates the weight of corporatism. In 1915 the Federation Committee of Reus, an industrial zone near Tarragona - dominated by the socialists - signed an agreement with the bosses behind the backs of the striking workers which resulted in the defeat of the latter. The petitions that the workers circulated, asking that the Committee campaign for a general solidarity strike, were buried. The Committee, which was dominated by men, was suspicious of the demands of the women and gave preference to the interests of the sector - the engineering workers - that the majority of them came from. They did so to the detriment of the basic interests of the working class as a whole, which lay in expressing an indispensable solidarity with the female comrades in struggle.
In the first part of his article, we saw that, contrary to what is often asserted, it is not the mechanism of the tendency towards the fall in the rate of profit which is at the heart of Marx's analysis of the economic contradictions of the capitalist system, but the fetter that the wage labour relationship places upon the ultimate demand of society: "The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses, in the face of the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute consumption capacity of society set a limit to them" (Marx, Capital, Vol 3, Chapter 30: "Money capital and real capital: 1", p615). [1] This is the consequence of the subordination of the world to the dictatorship of wage labour, which enables the bourgeoisie to appropriate a maximum of surplus labour. But as Marx explains, the frenetic production of commodities engendered by the exploitation of the workers gives rise to a piling up of products which grows more rapidly than the solvent demand of society as a whole: "When considering the production process we saw that the whole aim of capitalist production is appropriation of the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour ... in short, large-scale production, i.e., mass production. It is thus in the nature of capitalist production, to produce without regard to the limits of the market." [2] This contradiction periodically provokes a phenomenon hitherto unknown in the whole history of humanity: the crises of overproduction: "an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production."[3] "The immense but intermittent elasticity of the factory system, combined with its dependency on the universal market, necessarily gives birth to feverish production, followed by a glut on the markets, whose contraction then leads to paralysis. The life of industry is thus transformed into a series of periods of average activity, prosperity, overproduction, crisis, and stagnation".[4]
More precisely, Marx situates this contradiction between the tendency towards the frenetic development of the productive forces and the limitations to the growth of society's ultimate consuming power given the relative impoverishment of the wage labourers: "To each capitalist, the total mass of all workers, with the exception of his own workers, appear not as workers, but as consumers, possessors of exchange values (wages), money, which they exchange for his commodity."[5] Now, following Marx, "the consumer power of society is not determined either by the absolute productive power, or by the absolute consumer power, but by the consumer power based on antagonistic conditions of distribution,[6] which reduce the consumption of the bulk of society to a minimum varying within more or less narrow limits."[7] It thus follows that "Over-production is specifically conditioned by the general law of the production of capital: to produce to the limit set by the productive forces, that is to say, to exploit the maximum amount of labour with the given amount of capital, without any consideration for the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay"[8] This is the heart of the marxist analysis of the economic contradictions of capitalism: the system must ceaselessly increase production while consumption cannot, within the present class structure, follow an identical rhythm.
In the first part of our article, we also saw that, in its internal mechanism, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall could well run alongside the emergence of crises of overproduction. Indeed, this idea appears in many places in Marx's work, for example in the chapter of Capital on the internal contradictions of the law of the falling rate of profit: "Over-production of capital is never anything more than overproduction of means of production (...) a fall in the intensity of exploitation below a certain point, however, calls forth disturbances, and stoppages in the capitalist production process, crises, and destruction of capital."[9] However, for Marx it was neither the exclusive nor even the main cause of the contradictions of capitalism. Furthermore, in the Preface to the 1886 English edition of Book 1 of Capital, when Engels is summarising Marx's conception, he does not refer to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall but to the contradiction which Marx constantly underlined between "the absolute development of the productive forces" and "the limitations on the growth of society's ultimate consuming power": "While the productive power increases in a geometric, the extension of markets proceeds at best in an arithmetic ratio. The decennial cycle of stagnation, prosperity, over-production and crisis, ever recurrent from 1825 to 1867, seems indeed to have run its course; but only to land us in the slough of despond of a permanent and chronic depression".[10]
Thus, as we will show, and as will be clear to anyone who approaches this question in a serious and honest way, the CWO[11] defends, on the question of the fundamental causes of the economic crises of capitalism and of the decadence of this mode of production, a different analysis from the one defended in their day by Marx and Engels. They have every right to do so, and even the responsibility to do so if they consider it necessary. Whatever the depth and value of his contribution to the theory of the proletariat, Marx was not infallible and his writings should not be seen as sacred texts. The writings of Marx must also be subjected to a critique by the marxist method. This is the approach that Rosa Luxemburg adopts in The Accumulation of Capital (1913) when she brings to light the contradictions in Volume II of Capital with regard to the schemas of enlarged reproduction. This said, when you put a part of Marx's work into question, political and scientific honesty demands that you openly and explicitly take responsibility for such an approach. This is exactly what Rosa Luxemburg did in her book and it was this which provoked such hostility among the "orthodox marxists" who were so scandalised by anyone putting Marx's writings into question. Unfortunately this is not what the CWO does when it moves away from Marx's analysis while claiming to remain loyal to it, and at the same time accusing the ICC of distancing itself from materialism and thus from marxism. For our part, if we take up Marx's analyses here, it is because we consider them to be correct and because they take into account the reality of capitalism.
Thus, having examined this question on the theoretical level in the first part of this article, we are going to show how empirical reality totally invalidates the theory of those who make the evolution of the rate of profit the alpha and omega of the explanation of crises, wars and decadence. To do this, we will continue to base ourselves on the critique of Paul Mattick's analysis adopted by the IBRP, which argues that on the eve of World War I the economic crisis had reached such proportions that it could no longer be resolved through the classic means of devalorising fixed capital (i.e. bankruptcies) as it had during the 19th century, but now demanded the physical destruction that comes with war: "Under 19th century conditions it was relatively easy to overcome over-accumulation by means of crises that more or less affected all capital entities on an international scale. But at the turn of the century a point had been reached where the destruction of capital through crisis and competition was no longer sufficient to change the total capital structure towards a greater profitability. The business cycle as an instrument of accumulation had apparently come to an end; or rather, the business cycle became a cycle of world wars. Although this situation may be explained politically it was also a consequence of the capitalist accumulation process (...) The resumption of the accumulation process in the wake of a ‘strictly' economic crisis increases the general scale of production. War, too, results in the revival and increase of economic activity. In either case capital emerges more concentrated and more centralised. And this both in spite and because of the destruction of capital." (Paul Mattick as quoted in the article in Revolutionary Perspectives n°37).[12]
This is the IBRP's analysis of capitalism's entry into its phase of decadence. On this basis, the latter accuses us of idealism because we do not advance a clearly economic analysis to explain every phenomenon in society and decadence in particular: "In the materialist concept of history the social process as a whole is determined by the economic process. The contradictions of material life determine the ideological life. The ICC is asserting, in the most casual way, that an entire period of capitalism's history has ended and another has opened up. Such a major change could not occur without a fundamental change in the capitalist infrastructure. The ICC must either support its assertions with an analysis from the sphere of production or admit that they are pure conjecture." (Revolutionary Perspectives n°37). This is what we are now going to discuss.
In the belief that it is making good use of the marxist method, the IBRP has found, in the councilist Paul Mattick, the "material bases" for the opening up of capitalism's period of decadence. Unfortunately for the IBRP, if the marxist method - historical and dialectical materialism - could be summed up as looking for an economic explanation for every single phenomenon in capitalism, then, as Engels said, "the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree."[13]. What the IBRP quite simply forgets here is that marxism is not just a materialist method of analysis but also a historical and dialectical one. So what does history tell us about a mode of production's entry into decadence on the economic level?
History tells us that no period of decadence has begun with an economic crisis! There is nothing surprising in this because a system at its apogee is in its period of greatest prosperity. The first manifestations of decadence can therefore only appear in a very weak manner at this level; they appear above all in other areas and on other levels. Thus, for example, before plunging into endless crises on the material level, Roman decadence first of all expressed itself in the halting of its geographical expansion in the second century AD, by the first military defeats at the edges of the Roman empire during the third century, as well as by the first simultaneous outbreak of slave revolts all over the colonies. Similarly, before getting stuck in economic crises, famines, plague and the Hundred Years War, the first signs of the decadence of the feudal mode of production appeared in the end of the land clearances for new estates in the last third of the 13th century.
In both these cases, economic crises as products of blockages in the substructure only developed well after the entry into decadence. The passage from ascendance to decadence of a mode of production on the economic level can be compared to the changing of the tides: at its highest point, the sea seems to be at its most powerful and its retreat is almost imperceptible. But when contradictions in the economic underpinnings begin to gnaw away at society at a deep level, it is the superstructural manifestations which appear first.
The same goes for capitalism: before appearing on the economic and quantitative level, decadence found expression as a qualitative phenomenon at the social, political and ideological level, through the exacerbation of conflicts within the ruling class, leading to the First World War, by the state taking control of the economy for the needs of war, through the betrayal of social democracy and the passing of the unions into the camp of capital, through the eruption of a proletariat that demonstrated its capacity to overthrow the domination of the bourgeoisie and through the introduction of the first measures aimed at the social containment of the working class.
It is thus quite logical and fully coherent with historical materialism that capitalism's entry into decadence did not express itself first of all through an economic crisis. The events which took place at this point did not yet fully express all the characteristics of its phase of decadence; they were an exacerbation of the dynamics that belonged to its ascendant period, in a context which was in the process of profound modification. It was only later on, when the blockages at the substructural level had done their work, that the economic crises now began to fully unfold. The causes of decadence and of the First World War are not to be found in a certain rate of profit or an economic crisis that was nowhere to be seen in 1913 (see below) but in a totality of economic and political causes, as explained in International Review n°67.[14] The prosperity of capitalism during the Belle Epoque was fully recognised by the revolutionary movement at the time of the Communist International (1919-28). At its First Congress, in the Report on the World Situation written by Trotsky, the CI noted that "the two decades preceding the war were a period of particularly powerful capitalist growth".
This theoretical and empirical observation drawn from the evolution of past modes of production is fully confirmed by capitalism. Whether we examine the rate of growth, the rate of profit, or other economic parameters, there is no confirmation of the theory of Mattick and the IBRP, according to which capitalism's entry into its phase of decadence and the outbreak of the First World War was the product of an economic crisis following a fall in the rate of profit, necessitating a massive devalorisation of capital through the destruction caused by war.
The growth-rate of GNP, measured in volume by inhabitant (thus with inflation deducted) was on the rise throughout the ascendant period of capitalism, reaching a culminating point on the eve of 1914. All the figures we publish below show that the period leading up to the First World War was the most prosperous in the whole history of capitalism up to that point. This observation remains constant regardless of what indicators we use:
Growth in Gross World Product per inhabitant |
|
1800-1830 |
0,1 |
1830-1870 |
0,4 |
1870-1880 |
0,5 |
1880-1890 |
0,8 |
1890-1900 |
1,2 |
1900-1913 |
1,5 |
Source : Paul Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes de l'histoire économique, 1994, éditions la découverte, p.21. |
The same is true if we examine the evolution of the rate of profit, which is the variable taken into account by all those who make this question the key to understanding all the economic laws of capitalism. The graphs for the USA and France which we reproduce below also show that there is no confirmation of the theory of Mattick and the IBRP. In France, neither the level, nor the evolution of the rate of profit can in any way explain the outbreak of the First World War since the rate had been on the rise since 1896 and had been rising even more sharply from 1910 on! Nor can the rate of profit explain the USA's entry into the 1914-18 war: oscillating around 15% since 1895, it was on the rise after 1914 and reached 16% at the time the US entered the war in March-April 1917! Neither the level, nor the rate of profit on the eve of the First World War are able to explain the outbreak of the war or capitalism's entry into its phase of decadence.
|
Production industrielle mondiale |
Commerce mondial |
1786-1820 |
2,48 |
0,88 |
1820-1840 |
2,92 |
2,81 |
1840-1870 |
3,28 |
5,07 |
1870-1894 |
3,27 |
3,10 |
1894-1913 |
4,65 |
3,74 |
Source : W.W. Rostow, The world economy, history and prospect, 1978, University of Texas Press. |
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the first perceptible economic signs of a turning point between ascendance and decadence did begin to emerge at this time: not at the level of the evolution of the rate of profit as Mattick and the IBRP wrongly claim, but at the level of a lack of final demand, with the appearance of the premises of a saturation of markets relative to the needs of accumulation on a world scale, as had been predicted by Engels and Rosa Luxemburg (see the first part of this article). This was also noted by the same report by the Third International cited above, which goes on to say "Having tested out the world market through their trusts, cartels and consortiums, the rulers of the world' destiny took into account that this mad growth of capitalism must run up against the limits of the world market's capacity". Thus, in the USA, after a vigorous growth over 20 years (1890-1910), during which the index of industrial activity multiplied by 2.5, the latter began to stagnate between 1910 and 1914 and only picked up in 1915 thanks to the export of military equipment to Europe. Not only did the American economy lose its dynamism on the eve of 1914, but Europe also experienced certain conjunctural difficulties linked to the limitations of world demand, and tried, more and more vainly, to turn towards external markets: "But, under the influence of the crisis that was developing in Europe, the following year (1912) saw a reversal of the conjuncture (in the USA)....Germany then went through a period of accelerated expansion. In 1913 industrial production was 32% above the 1908 level... With the internal market being incapable of absorbing such a level of production, industry turned towards external markets, with exports rising by 60% as against 41% for imports... the turn-around took place at the beginning of 1913... unemployment began to develop in 1914. The depression was mild and short-lived: a temporary recovery began in the spring of 1914. The crisis, having begun in Germany, then spread to the UK... the repercussions of the German crisis were felt in France in August 1913...In the US, it was not until the beginning of 1915 that production began to develop under the influence of war demand" (all these figures, as well as this passage, are taken from the Les crises économiques, PUF no.1295, 1993, p42-48).
These conjunctural difficulties developing on the eve of 1914 were so many precursors of what would become a permanent economic difficulty for decadent capitalism: a structural lack of solvent markets. However, it has to be said that the First World War broke out in a general climate of prosperity and not of crisis, i.e., of a continuation of the Belle Epoque: "The last years of the pre-war period, like the years 1900-1910, were particularly good ones for the three great powers who participated in the war (France, Germany and Britain). From the point of view of economic growth, the years 1909 to 1913 without doubt represented the four best years in their history. Apart from France where the year 1913 was marked by a slow-down in growth, this year was one of the best years of the century, with an annual growth rate of 4.5% in Germany, 3.4% in Britain, with France at a mere 0.6%. The bad results in France can be entirely explained by the 3.1% fall in agricultural production."[15]The war thus broke out before the beginning of a real economic crisis, almost as if the latter had been anticipated; indeed this was noted in the above-cited report from the First CI Congress: "...they tried to find a way out of this situation by a surgical method. The sanguinary crisis of the World War was intended to supersede an indefinitely long period of economic depression". This is why all the revolutionaries of the time, from Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg via Trotsky and Pannekoek, while pointing to the economic factor among the causes of the outbreak of the First World War, did not describe it as an economic crisis or a fall in the rate of profit but as the exacerbation of the previous imperialist tendencies: the continuation of the imperialist scramble to grab the remaining non-capitalist territories of the globe[16] or the dividing up of the markets and no longer the conquest of new ones.[17]
Alongside these "economic" observations, all these illustrious revolutionaries wrote at length about a series of other factors in the political, social and inter-imperialist domains. Thus, for example, Lenin insisted on the hegemonic dimension of imperialism and its consequences in the decadent phase of capitalism "(1) the fact that the world is already partitioned obliges those contemplating a redivision to reach out for every kind of territory, and (2) an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between several great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony. (Belgium is particularly important for Germany as a base for operations against Britain; Britain needs Baghdad as a base for operations against Germany, etc.)". This new characteristic of imperialism underlined by Lenin is essential to understand because it meant that "the conquest of territories" in the course of inter-imperialist conflicts in decadence has less and less economic rationality but rather takes on an increasingly strategic dimension: "Belgium is particularly important for Germany as a base for operations against Britain; Britain needs Baghdad as a base for operations against Germany, etc."[18]
So while we can indeed see the first signs of economic difficulty on the eve of 1914, these remained very limited, comparable to previous cyclical crises and not at all on the scale of the long crisis which was to begin in 1929 or as deep as the current crises; at the same time they appeared not at the level of a fall in the rate of profit but of a saturation of the markets, which was to prove the defining characteristic of the decadence of capitalism on the economic level as Rosa Luxemburg predicted: "the more numerous are the countries who have developed their own capitalist industry, and the more the need for the extension and the capacity of extension of production increases on the one hand, the less the capacity for the realisation of production increases in relation to the former. If we compare the bounds made by British industry in the years 1860-70, when Britain still dominated the world market, with its growth in the last two decades, since which time Germany and the United States of America have made considerable gains on the world market at Britain's expense, it becomes clear that growth has been much slower than before. The fate of British industry thus depends on German industry, North American industry, and in the end the industry of the world. At each stage of its development, capitalist production irresistibly approaches the epoch in which it will only be able to develop with increasing slowness and difficulty."[19]
From this short empirical examination, it is clear that the First World War did not break out in the wake of a fall in the rate of profit, nor of an economic crisis as Mattick and the IBRP claim. It now remains to examine the complement to the thesis of the IBRP, i.e. to verify empirically whether the destruction resulting from war was the basis for a rediscovered ‘prosperity' in peacetime, thanks to a re-establishment of the rate of profit through the destruction caused by war.
Very well, the IBRP would no doubt respond, but if the outbreak of the First World War cannot be explained either by a fall in the rate of profit nor by an economic crisis that forced capitalism to devalorise on a massive scale, devalorisation still took place during the course of the war as a result of massive destruction; and it is this which is at the basis of the economic growth and of the rise in the rate of profit after the war: "It was on the basis of this devaluation of capital and cheapening of labour power that rates of profit were increased and it was on this that the recovery period up to 1929 was based." (Revolutionary Perspectives n°37).
What really happened? Was there in fact a "devalorisation of capital" and a "devalorisation of labour power" during the war, allowing for a "reestablishment" until 1929, a reestablishment that supposedly allowed a recovery of the rate of profit following the destruction caused by war? It is empirically very easy to refute this idea of the economic rationality of the First World War since "during the First World War 35% of the accumulated wealth of mankind was destroyed" (Revolutionary Perspectives n°37); far from having "laid the basis for periods of renewed accumulation of capital" (Revolutionary Perspectives n°37) this resulted on the contrary in a stagnation of world trade during the whole inter-war period as well as the worst economic performances in the whole history of capitalism.[20]
If we examine in a bit more detail the growth of GNP by inhabitant during this troubled inter-war period by taking the beginning of the period of capitalist decadence as a reference point (1913), the end of the First World War (1919), the year of the outbreak of the great crisis of the 1930s (1929) as well as the situation on the eve of the Second World War (1939), we can see the following evolution.
The very feeble growth during this whole period (in the order of plus or minus 1% only per year on average) shows that the destruction of war did not constitute a stimulant to economic activity in the way that Mattick and the IBRP claim. This table also shows that the situations were very divergent and that it was by no means the countries most involved in the war who came out best in the very short period of reconstruction and recovery between 1919 and 1929. War was certainly not good business for Britain, since it only exceeded its 1913 level by 4 points, nor for Germany with hardly 13 points! For the latter country, the strong growth during the years 1929-39 was based essentially on the arms expenditure that generalised during the 1930s, since the index of its industrial production, which was 100 in 1913 was only at 102 in 1929; whereas the proportion of military expenditure in its GNP, which was still only 0.9% in the years 1929-32, rose brutally after 1933 to 3.3% and went on growing, reaching 28% in 1938![21]
In conclusion, nothing, either theoretically, historically, and still less empirically, supports this idea of Mattick's, taken up by the IBRP, that war has such regenerative effects on the economy: "War ... results in the revival and increase of economic activity" (Revolutionary Perspectives n°37). If there is any truth in what the IBRP is saying, it is a truth proclaimed by all revolutionaries since 1914 - that the war was a catastrophe which had no precedent in human history. Not only on the economic level (more than third of the world's wealth was ruined) but also on the social level (ferocious exploitation of a labour force reduced to extreme poverty), the political level (with the treason of the great organisations of the proletariat forged so painfully over a half century of struggles - the Socialist parties and the trade unions) and on the human level (20 million soldiers killed or wounded and another 20 million dead from the Spanish flu epidemic after the war). Since nothing since then has attested to the economic rationality of war, the IBRP should reflect a bit more before attacking our view that war in the decadent phase of capitalism has become irrational "Instead of seeing war as serving an economic function for the survival of the capitalist system, it has been argued by some left communist groups, notably the Internationalist Communist Current (ICC), that wars serve no function for capitalism. Instead, wars are characterised as ‘irrational', without either short or long-term function in capitalist accumulation." (Revolutionary Perspectives n°37).
Instead of rushing to call us idealists, the IBRP would do better to take off its vulgar materialist spectacles and return to an analysis which is a bit more historical and dialectical, since a detailed examination of what the IBRP calls "the economic process" "material life", "the capitalist infrastructure", "the sphere of production" teaches us that there was no open crisis nor fall in the rate of profit before the First World War and no miraculous peacetime recovery on the basis of the destruction caused by war. We therefore invite the IBRP to verify its claims more seriously before enshrining as truth what turns out to be desire rather than reality, and before accusing others of idealism when it is itself not even capable of producing a "materialist analysis" able to give a coherent account of reality.
If the theory of Mattick and the IBRP is not at all verified with regard to the First World War, is it not attested by other periods? Is it possible to refute this theory in general? This is what we aim to examine next.
To approach this question, we will base ourselves on two curves indicating the rate of profit in the long term with regard to the USA on the one hand and France on the other. We would of course have liked to have presented this in relation to Germany, but, despite our research, we have only been able to trace its evolution in the period after 1945 and for a few dates prior to that. Unfortunately, the lack of homogeneity in the mode of calculating for these different dates makes it difficult to analyse the process of evolution. According to the data we do have, however, with a few variations, we can consider the curve for France to be characteristic of the general evolution of the old continent.[22]
Is the level and/or the evolution of the rate of profit able to explain wars?
As we have already shown, the graph of the evolution of the rate of profit in France indicates very clearly that it does not explain the outbreak of the First World War since the rate had been growing since 1896 and had been growing even more strongly after 1910! We can now see that the same thing goes for the Second World War, since on the eve of hostilities, the level of the rate of profit of the French economy was very high (double what it was during the period of prosperity between 1896 and the First World War!) and after a fall during the 1920s, it remained stable throughout the 30s.
Moreover, if the war could be explained by the level and/or tendency for the rate of profit to fall, then it becomes impossible to understand why the Third World War did not break out during the second half of the 1970s, since the rate of profit was definitely declining from 1965 on and reached levels much lower than in 1914 and 1940 - when according to the IBRP it reached thresholds that provoked the First and Second World Wars!
As for the USA, the falling rate of profit cannot explain its entry into the First World War because it was on the rise some years before it joined the conflict. The same goes for the Second World War since the US rate of profit was recovering very vigorously during the decade preceding its entry into the war: in 1940 it got back to the level before the crisis and had reached an even higher level at the moment it entered the war.
In conclusion, contrary to the theory of Mattick and the IBRP, whether we are talking about the old continent or the new, neither the level nor the evolution of the rate of profit can explain the outbreak of the two world wars. Not only do we n see that the rate of profit was not declining on the eve of the world conflicts - for the most part it had been rising for a number of years! To say the least, this must put into question the theory of the economic rationality of war professed by the IBRP, since what rationality could there be for capitalism to go to war and undertake a massive destruction of its capital at a time when the rate of profit was soaring? Understand it if you can!
Does the level and/or the evolution of the rate of profit explain the post-war prosperity?
The dynamic towards a rising rate of profit preceded World War II, so much so that in 1940, i.e. before America entered the war, the USA had recovered the average level it had reached before the great crisis of 1929, a level which would also be the same as that of the Reconstruction boom after the Second World War. At the time it entered the war the level was even higher. From that point, neither the re-establishment of the rate of profit, nor the economic prosperity of the post-war period can be explained by the destructions caused by war. It had been the same for the previous war since the dynamic towards a recovery in the rate of profit had preceded America's engagement in the conflict, and there was no significant rise in the rate after the war. Once again, neither the level, nor the tendency of the rate of profit after the First World War can be explained by America's entry into the war.
As for France, its rate of profit did not significantly improve after the First World War because, after a tiny rise of 1% between 1920 and 1923, the rate fell by 2% during the course of the 20s and then stabilised during the 30s. Only the clearly higher rate of profit after the Second World War in comparison to the pre-war situation could give any credence - in this case, and only in this case - to the IBRP's hypothesis. We will see however in the next parts of this article that the post-war prosperity owes nothing to the destruction and other economic consequences of the war.
In conclusion, it has to be said that capital's return to profitability precedes the military conflicts and the destruction caused by the war! War and its destruction thus has little to do with the revival of the rate of profit. The idea that this destruction regenerated the rate of profit, which in turn allowed a return to prosperity after the war, are just as phantasmal as the rest of the IBRP's theory.
Can the level or evolution of the rate of profit explain the crises?
Can the level and/or the rate of profit explain the 1929 crash and the crisis of the 1930s? Contrary to what the IBRP argues, it cannot be the level of the rate of profit in the USA that explains the outbreak of the crisis since in 1929 it was higher than it had been during the two previous decades of economic growth. As for the orientation of the rate of profit, it is true that it was heading downwards just before the crisis of 1929 - both in the US and in France - but this was very limited both in intensity and in duration. Thus, in France, the fall in the rate of profit between 1973 and 1980 was much more dramatic than at the time of the crisis of 1929, without this producing consequences of the same breadth (a brutal deflation leading to a very pronounced fall in production). Although unfolding over a longer period, the same can be said for the USA, since the fall in the rate of profit between the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 80s was hardly any lower than during the crisis of 1929, without this engendering the same spectacular consequences. In both cases, the difference with the present crisis can be linked to the state capitalist measures used to artificially boost solvent demand, indicating that its the latter factor which is the decisive variable in explaining crises.
The evolution of the present crisis clearly shows that the theory of crisis based solely on the evolution of the rate of profit is totally unsatisfactory. The IBRP tells us that the cycle of accumulation gets blocked or stagnates when the rate of profit becomes too low and that it can only recover following the destructions of war, which permit the devalorisation and renewal of fixed capital: "The law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall means that at certain point the cycle of accumulation is arrested or stagnates. When this happens only a massive devaluation of existing capital values can start accumulation again. In the twentieth century the two world wars were the outcomes. Today we have had thirty plus years of stagnation and the system has only limped along through the massive accumulation of debt, both public and private."[23]
But then:
a) how can the IBRP explain that the crisis persists and gets worse when the rate of profit has been rising vigorously since the beginning of the 80s and has even returned to the levels it reached during the Reconstruction? (see the graph...);
b) how can the IBRP explain that, with an analagous level of profit during the 1960s, neither productivity, nor growth, nor accumulation recovered as its theory would predict;[24]
c) how can the IBRP explain that the rate of profit was able to revive fully when we are told that this can only happen through a "massive devaluation of existing capital values"? Since the Third World War has not taken place, where is the IBRP to find this "massive devaluation of existing capital" that can account for this revival in the rate of profit?
The IBRP has attempted to answer the third question: how to explain the current spectacular rise in the rate of profit without there having been a massive devaluation following destructions caused by war?
The IBRP puts forward two arguments. The first consists of taking up the arguments which we levelled at them in our polemic in International Review n°121, i.e. that the rate of profit can rise, not only following a massive devaluation of fixed capital but also with an increase in the rate of surplus value (or rate of exploitation).[25] Now, this has very clearly been the case since the drastic austerity that has hit the working class (freezing and reduction of wages, increasing rhythm and hours of labour, etc) and makes it possible to explain this revival in the rate of profit. The second argument by the IBRP consists of substituting the destruction/devaluations of a war that hasn't taken place with the twaddle of bourgeois propaganda about the so-called new technological revolution. It would seem that the latter has the same effect: diminishing the price of fixed capital following the gains in productivity brought about by this new technological revolution. This is doubly false because gains in productivity have been stagnating in all the developed countries, demonstrating that the so-called "new technological revolution" with which the IBRP constantly assaults our ears is nothing but a copy of the propaganda coming out of the bourgeois media.[26]
With the aid of these two arguments (the rise in the rate of profit thanks to austerity, and the diminution of the value of fixed capital thanks to the new technological revolution) the IBRP thinks that it has triumphantly explained the revival of the rate of profit. Very well, but the problem remains, and it has even shot itself in the foot by aggravating its own contradictions, since:
a) Now that the IBRP recognises that there has been a rise in the rate of profit,[27] how can it explain why a new cycle of accumulation has not begun, since all the conditions for it are present: "Thus, in the expression of the rate of profit, the numerator (s) is increased while the denominator (c+v) is decreased, and the rate of profit increased. It is on the basis of the increased rate of profit that a new cycle of accumulation can be started". The persistence of the crisis then becomes a mystery.
b) Following Mattick's theory, the IBRP claims that when the rate of profit rises on the basis of a reduction in the organic composition of capital and a rise in the rate of surplus value, the crisis is reabsorbed.[28]How can the IBRP explain how the crisis has continued to get worse even when the rate of profit has continued to rise since the 1980s?
c) The whole argument of the IBRP has been that "at the turn of the century a point had been reached where the destruction of capital through crisis and competition was no longer sufficient to change the total capital structure towards a greater profitability. The business cycle as an instrument of accumulation had apparently come to an end; or rather, the business cycle became a cycle of world wars". But now we have to say that with the new explanation the IBRP is offering us, capitalism has indeed been able to boost the rate of profit without resorting to a massive devalorisation of fixed capital through war. This was also the case in the USA after 1932, i.e. ten years before this country entered the war!
d) If capitalism is going through a new technological revolution enabling it to strongly reduce the cost of fixed capital without resorting to war, and if at the same time it has notably increased its rate of surplus value, what is the difference with the ascendant phase? How can the IBRP continue to argue that capitalism is senile, since it has succeeded in reviving its profit rate without resorting to the massive destruction caused by war, which according to the IBRP is the only way of re-launching the cycle of accumulation in the decadent epoch?
e) Finally, if capitalism is going through a new technological revolution and the IBRP recognises that the rate of profit has significantly increased, why does it continue to sing the same refrain, affirming that capitalism is in crisis because the rate of profit is so low? "The crisis at the start of the 1970s is a consequence of the law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall: it does not mean that capitalism stops making profits but it does mean that their average profit rates are so low" ("The Turner Plan: it's time to pension off capitalism", Revolutionary Perspectives n°38, March 2006). Again, understand it if you can! It is indeed very difficult to free yourself from a dogma and put it into question when its been your trade mark from the beginning!
All these contradictions and insoluble questions simply and purely invalidate the thesis of Mattick and the IBRP who claim that only the level and/or variation in the rate of profit can explain the crisis and its evolution. For our part, all these mysteries are obviously only comprehensible if you integrate the central thesis elaborated by Marx, i.e. "society's limited power of consumption" or the saturation of solvent markets (see the first part of this article). For us, the response is extremely clear - the rate of profit could only have increased following a rise in the rate of surplus value brought about by incessant attacks on the working class and not through a change in organic composition on the basis of an imaginary "new technological revolution". It is this lack of solvent markets which explains why today, despite the re-establishment of the rate of profit, accumulation, productivity and growth have not taken off again: "The ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses, in the face of the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as if only the absolute consumption capacity of society set a limit to them". This response is extremely simple and clear but it is incomprehensible to the IBRP.
This inability to understand and integrate the totality of Marx's analyses and to break away from this dogma of the crisis being caused uniquely by the falling rate of profit is one of the major obstacles to their understanding. We will examine this further in the next part of this article, by going to the roots of the divergences between Marx's analysis of crises and the pale, emasculated copy set up by the IBRP.
C Mcl.
[1] Marx, Capital, Volume III This analysis elaborated by Marx obviously has nothing to do with the underconsumptionist theory of crises, which he denounced elsewhere:"it is said that the working class receives too small a share of its own product, and that this evil could be remedied by giving it a greater share of this product, and therefore higher wages. But we need only remember that crises are always preceded precisely by a period of a general increae in wages, where the working class does indeed win a greater share of the fraction of annual capital destined for consumption. From the point of view of these knights of ‘simple' (!) common sense..." (Capital). As Marx said you would have to be very naïve to believe that the economic crisis could be resolved by an increase in wages since this could only take place to the detriment of profits and thus of productive investment.
[2] Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, part II, chapter XVII, ‘Ricardo's Theory of Accumulation and a Critique of it. The Contradiction Between the Impetuous Development of the Productive Powers and the Limitations of Consumption Leads to Over-production'.
[3] Communist Manifesto, "Bourgeois and proletarians"
[4] Marx, Capital.
[5] Marx, Grundrisse, "Chapter on Capital, Circulation Process of Capital"
[6] Marx is talking here about wage labour which is at the heart of this "antagonistic conditions of distribution" in which the class struggle regulates the division between the capitalists' tendency to extort a maximum of surplus labour and the resistance to this by the workers. It is this conflict which partly explains the natural tendency for capitalism to restrict as much as it can the amount devoted to wages in favour of the amount taken in profit, or, in other words, to increase the rate of surplus value: surplus value divided by wages can also be called the rate of exploitation: "the general tendency of capitalist production is not to elevate, but to reduce the average level of wages" (Marx, Wages, Prices and Profits).
[7] Marx, Capital, Volume III, Chapter 15
[8] Marx, Capital, Volume IV, Chapter 17, "Theories of Surplus Value"
[9] Capital, Vol III Part III, Chapter 15, "Exposition of the Internal Contradictions of the Law"
[10] Cited in the preface to the English edition of Volume I of Capital (1886)
[11] The CWO (Communist Workers Organisation) is, with Battaglia Comunista, one of the two pillars of the IBRP (International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party). We will use these initials throughout this text.
[12] Paul Mattick Marx and Keynes, Merlin, 1969 p 135.
[13] Engels, letter to J Bloch, 21 September 1890: "According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody [such as the IBRP - ed.] twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure - political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas - also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree....Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people [such as the IBRP - ed.] sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle via-a-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people [such as the IBRP - ed.] think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly".
[14] This analysis was clearly put forward by our organisation during its 9th Congress in 1991: "While it is clear that in the last instance imperialist war derives from the exacerbation of economic rivalries between nations, itself the result of the crisis of the capitalist mode of production, we must not make a mechanistic link between the different manifestations of the life of decadent capitalism. (...) This was already true for the First World War which did not break out as a direct result of the crisis. There was, in 1913, a certain aggravation of the economic situation but this was not especially greater than what had happened in 1900-1903 or 1907. In fact, the essential causes for the outbreak of World War I in August 1914 resided in:
a) the end of the dividing up of the world among the great capitalist powers. Here the Fashoda crisis of 1898 (where the two great colonial powers, Britain and France, found themselves face to face after conquering the bulk of Africa) was a sort of symbol of this and marked the end of the ascendant period of capitalism;
b) the completion of the military and diplomatic preparations constituting the alliances which were going to confront each other;
c) the demobilisation of the European proletariat from its class terrain faced with the threat of war (in contrast to the situation in 1912, when the Basle congress was held) and the dragooning of the class behind the flags of the bourgeoisie, made possible above all by the open treason of the majority of the leaders of social democracy, a point that was carefully verified by the main governments.
It was thus mainly political factors which, once capitalism had entered into decadence, had proved that it had reached an historic impasse, determined the actual moment for the war to break out" (pages 23 & 26)
[15] Paul Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes de l'histoire économique, Editions la Découverte, p193.
[16] "Modern imperialism is not the prelude to the expansion of capital, as in Bauer's model; on the contrary, it is only the last chapter of its historical process of expansion; it is the period of universally sharpened world competition between the capitalist states for the last remaining non-capitalist areas on earth" (Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital - an Anti-critique ‘Imperialism'); "this live, unhampered imperialism, (Germany) coming upon the world stage at a time when the world was practically divided up, with gigantic appetites, soon became an irresponsible factor of general unrest" (Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet, Chapter 3).
[17] "Thanks to her colonies, Great Britain has increased the length of ‘her' railways by 100,000 kilometres, four times as much as Germany. And yet, it is well known that the development of productive forces in Germany, and especially the development of the coal and iron industries, has been incomparably more rapid during this period than in Britain - not to speak of France and Russia. In 1892, Germany produced 4.9 million tons of pig-iron and Great Britain produced 6.8million tons; in 1912, Germany produced 17.6 million tons and Great Britain 9 million tons. Germany, therefore, had an overwhelming superiority over Britain in this respect. The question is: what means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on the one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for capitalism on the other? (...) 5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which ... the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed." (Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Complete Works Vol. 22, VII ‘Imperialism, as a special stage of capitalism' p266-267, p275-276)
[18] This takes us back to the polemic that we have had with the IBRP over the numerous wars in the Middle East. The IBRP argues that these conflicts have an economic rationality from the American point of view, since the latter aims to defend its oil rents, whereas we have opposed to this Lenin's thesis by showing that the ‘conquest of Iraqi territory' was done not so much for its own sake but to weaken Europe and sap its power and influence. The obvious fact that this conflict has been a bottomless pit for the USA, in which they will never get any serious income from oil because they are totally incapable of controlling the territory and would now like to get out of it, shows how correct Lenin's analytical framework is.
[19] Introduction a l'economie politique, edition 10/18, p 298-299
[20] For world trade: 0.12% between 1913-1938, or in other words 25 time less than between 1870-1893 (3.10%) and 30 times less than between 1893-1913 (3.74%) ( W W Rostow, 1978, The World Economy, History and Prospects, University of Texas Press). The world growth of GNP per inhabitant would only be 0.91% during the period 1913-50 as against 1.30% between 1870 and 1913 - i.e. 43% more; 2.93% between 1950 and 1973 - i.e. three times more - and 1.33% between 1973 and 1998, i.e. 43% more during this long period of crisis (Maddison Angus, L'Economie Mondiale, 2001, OECD)
[21] This was also partly the case for Japan, where the percentage was only 1.6% in 1933 to reach 9.9% in 1938. On the other hand it was not the case for the USA where the percentage was only 1.3% in 1938 (all theses figures are taken from Paul Bairoch, Victoires et deboires III, Folio, p 88-89)
[22] It would be most inappropriate for the IBRP to reply that its theory only applies to Germany, the country which declared war, since, on the one hand, it is up to the IBRP to provide us with the empirical proof, and, on the other hand, this would be in total contradiction with the whole argument of the IBRP which deals with the worldwide roots of the 1914-18 war and the entry of capitalism into decadence (also, it talks indifferently about Europe or the US in its article). Its argumentation - and this is quite logical - has never been located at the national level alone. Furthermore, even supposing that the rate of profit in Germany was falling on the eve of the First World War and rose afterwards, the problem would still remain, because how can we explain the entry of capitalism into its phase of decadence at the world level when the fall in the rate of profit can only be verified in one country?
[23] www.ibrp.org/english/aurora/10/make_poverty_history_make_capitalism_history [7]
[24] cf the graph for France as well as the one published in the International Review n°121 for all the G8 countries. Both show a similar evolution, i.e. a very clear divorce between a rising rate of profit and a fall in all other economic variables
[25] "the crisis itself however serves to re-establish the correct proportion between the elements of capital and allow reproduction to restart. It does this in two principal ways, the devaluation of constant capital and increasing the rate of surplus value or the ratio s/v"
[26] We can see that increases in productivity have remained at a very weak level by looking at the graph for France as well as the graph for the countries of the G8 (the eight most important economies in the world) published in International Review n°121. In reality, only the US has seen any kind of increase in productivity but explaining this conjunctural rise would take us outside the framework of this article.
[27] This recognition is in reality very partial - the IBRP just pays it lip service, when you consider that the rate of profit has been rising vigorously and continuously since the beginning of the 1980s, and that from then on it reached heights comparable with the 1960s.
[28] "In theory, according to Marx, a sufficient increase of surplus value will change a period of capital stagnation into one of expansion", Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes, p92, or again, "in the world at large and in each nation separately, there is overproduction only because the level of exploitation is insufficient. For this reason, overproduction is overcome by an increase in exploitation - provided, of course, that the increase is large enough to expand and extend capital and thereby increase the market demand" (ibid, p82). Unfortunately for Mattick, the configuration of capitalism since 1980 (but also between 1932 and the Second World War) delivers a striking refutation of his theories since despite a very strong increase in exploitation, there has not been a revival in the expansion of capital and of market demand.
In the previous issue of our Review [10] we began the publication of large extracts of an orientation text being discussed internally by our organisation on the subject of Marxism and Ethics. In the published extracts we wrote:
"We have always insisted that the statutes are not a set of rules defining what is and what is not allowed, but an orientation for our attitude and our conduct, comprising a coherent set of moral values (particularly concerning the relations between militants and toward the organisation). This is why we require a profound agreement with these values from whoever wants to become a member of the organisation.
"But the statutes, as an integral part of our platform, do not solely regulate who can become member of the ICC, und under which conditions. They condition the framework and the spirit of the militant life of the organisation and each of its members.
"The significance which the ICC has always attached to these principles of conduct is illustrated by the fact that it never failed to defend these principles, even at the price of risking organisational crises. In so doing, the ICC places itself consciously and unswervingly in the tradition of struggle of Marx and Engels in the First International, of Bolshevism and the Italian Fraction of the communist left. In so doing, it has been able to overcome a series of crises and to maintain fundamental class principles of comportment.
"However, the concept of a proletarian morality and ethics was upheld more implicitly than explicitly; put into practise in an emprical fashion more than theoretically generalised. In face of the massive reservations of the new generation of revolutionaries after 1968 towards any concept of morality, generally considered as being necessarily reactionary, the attitude developed by the organisation was that it was more important to find acceptance for the attitudes and mode of behaviour of the working class, than to hold this very general debate at a moment for which it was not yet ripe.
Questions of morality were not the only areas where the ICC proceeded in this manner. In the early days of the organisation there existed similar reservations towards the necessity of centralisation, the indispensability of the intervention of revolutionaries and the leading role of the organisation in the development of class consciousness, the need to struggle against democratism, or the recognition of the actuality of the combat against opportunism and centrism."
This first article of extracts treated the following themes:
In this issue we will continue the publication of extracts by recalling the struggles led by marxism against different forms and manifestations of bourgeois morality and on the necessary combat of the proletariat against the effects of the decomposition of capitalist society particularly in the perspective of reconquering the essental element of its struggle and of its historic perspective - solidarity.
At the end of the 19th century, the current around Bernstein, within the Second International, put forward that Marxism's claim to be a scientific approach excluded the role of ethics in the class struggle. Considering the claims of a scientific and an ethical approach to be mutually exclusive, this current advocated renouncing the former in order to gain the latter. It proposed the "completion" of Marxism through the ethics of Kant. Behind its will to morally condemn the greed of individual capitalists, appeared the determination of bourgeois reformism to bury the fundamental irreconcilability of capitalism and communism.
Far from excluding ethics, the scientific approach of Marxism introduces for the first time a really scientific dimension to social knowledge, and therefore to morality. It unravels the puzzle of history through understanding that the essential social relationship is that between living labour power and the dead means of production. Capitalism prepared the way for this discovery, just as it prepared the way for communism, by depersonalising the exploitation mechanism.
In reality, the call for a return to the ethics of Kant represented a theoretical regression far behind bourgeois materialism, which had already understood the social origins of "good and evil". Since then, each step forward in social knowledge has confirmed and deepened this understanding. This applies to progress not only in science, as in the case of psychoanalysis, but also to art. As Rosa Luxemburg wrote: "Hamlet, through his mother's crime, finds all the bonds of humanity untied and the world out of joint, as does Dostoyevsky when he faces the fact that one human being can murder another. He finds no rest, he feels the responsibility for this dreadfulness weighing upon him, as it does on every one of us. He must elucidate the soul of the murderer, must trace his misery, his afflictions, down to the most hidden fold of his heart. He suffers all his tortures and is blinded by the terrible understanding that the murderer himself is the most unhappy victim of society....Dostoyevsky´s novels are furious attacks on bourgeois society, in whose face he shouts: The real murderer, the murderer of the human soul, is you!" 1
This was also the point of view defended by the young proletarian dictatorship in Russia. It called upon the courts to be "entirely free from the spirit of revenge. They cannot take vengeance on people simply because they have lived in bourgeois society." 2
It is not least this understanding that we are all victims of our circumstances, which make Marxist Ethics the most advanced expression of moral progress to date. This approach does not abolish morality, as the bourgeoisie claim, or sweep aside individual responsibility, as petty bourgeois individualism would have it. But it represents a giant step forward in basing morality on understanding rather than guilt - the feeling of culpability which hampers moral progress by cutting off the inner personality from fellow man. It replaces the hatred of persons - this prime source of anti-social impulses - with indignation and revolt towards social relations and attitudes.
The reformist nostalgia for Kant, was in reality the expression of the erosion of the will to struggle. The idealist interpretation of morality, by denying its role of transforming social relationships, emotionally conciliates with the existing order. Although the highest ideal of humanity has always been inner peace, and harmony with the surrounding social and natural world, this can only be approached through constant struggle. The first condition of human happiness is the knowledge of doing what is necessary, of voluntarily serving a great cause.
Kant understood much better than bourgeois utilitarian theoreticians like Bentham3 the contradictory nature of bourgeois morality. In particular he understood that unbridled individualism, even in the positive form of the pursuit of personal happiness, can lead to the dissolution of society. The fact that, within capitalism, there cannot only be winners of the competitive struggle, renders inevitable the division between duty and inclination. Kant's insistence on the pre-eminence of duty corresponds to the recognition that the highest value of bourgeois society is not the individual, but the state, and in particular the nation. In bourgeois morality, patriotism is of much greater value than the love of humanity. In fact, behind the lack of indignation within the workers movement in face of reformism, already lurked the erosion of proletarian internationalism.
For Kant, a moral act motivated by sense of duty, is of greater ethical value than one carried out with enthusiasm, passion and pleasure. Here, ethical value is tied up with renunciation, the idealisation of self sacrifice by nationalist and state ideology. The proletariat rigorously rejects this inhuman cult of sacrifice for its own sake, which the bourgeoisie has inherited from religion. Although the joy of combat necessarily includes the readiness to put up with suffering, the workers movement has never made, of such necessary evil, a moral quality in itself. Indeed, even before Marxism, the best contributions to ethics have always pointed out the pathological and immoral consequences of such an approach. As opposed to what bourgeois ethics believe, self sacrifice does not sanctify an unworthy goal.
As Franz Mehring underlined, even Schopenhauer, by basing his ethics on compassion rather than duty, represented a decisive step forward in relation to Kant.4
Bourgeois morality, incapable of even imagining the overcoming of the contradiction between individual and society, between egoism and altruism, takes the side of the one against the other, or searches for a compromise between the two. It fails to understand that the individual itself has a social nature. Against idealist morals, marxism defends moral idealism as a pleasure giving activity, and as one of the most powerful assets of a rising against a decaying class.
Another attraction of the ethics of Kant for opportunism, was that its moral rigorism, its formulation of "categorical imperatives" promises a kind of codex with which all moral conflicts can automatically be solved. For Kant, the certainty that one is right is characteristic of moral activity. (...) Here again, the will to avoid struggle is expressed.
The dialectical character of morals is denied, where virtues and vices, in concrete life, are not always easily distinguishable. As Josef Dietzgen pointed out, reason cannot determine a course of action in advance, since each individual and each situation is unique and unprecedented. Complex moral problems have to be studied, in order to be understood and creatively resolved. This can sometimes require a particular investigation and even the establishment of a specific organ, as the workers movement has long understood.5
In reality, moral conflicts are an inevitable part of life - not only within class society. For instance, different ethical principles can enter into conflict with each other (...), or the different levels of the socialisation of man (responsibilities towards the class, the family, the equilibrium of the personality etc). This requires the readiness to live with momentary uncertainty, in order to permit a real examination, avoiding the temptation to silence ones own conscience; the capacity to question ones own prejudices; above all a rigorous, collective method of clarification.
In the struggle against Neo-Kantianism, Kautsky showed how the contribution of Darwin on the origins of conscience in biological, originally animal impulses, broke down the firmest stronghold of idealist morals. This invisible force, this barely audible voice, which only operates in the inner depths of the personality, has always been the crux of ethical controversy. Idealist ethics was right to insist that conscience cannot be explained through the fear of public opinion or of sanctions by the majority. On the contrary, conscience can oblige us to oppose public opinion and repression, or to regret our actions although they meet with universal approval "Thus its mysterious nature, this voice within us, connected to no external impulse, no visible interest; this demon or God, which from Socrates und Plato to Kant those theorists of ethics have felt within themselves who have refused to deduct ethics from egoism or out of the blue. Indeed a mysterious impulse, but no more mysterious than sexual love, maternal love, the instinct of self preservation, or the essence of the organism as such...The fact that the moral law is an animal instinct, on a par with the self preservation and the reproduction instinct, explains its force, its insistence, making us obey without thinking."6
These conclusions have been confirmed by science since then, for instance by Freud, who insisted that the most advanced and socialised animals possess a similar basic psychic apparatus as man, and can suffer comparable neuroses. But Freud has not only deepened our understanding of these questions. Because the approach of psychoanalysis is not alone investigative, but interventional, therapeutic, its shares with marxism a concern for the progressive development of man's moral apparatus.
Freud distinguishes between the impulses ("id"), the "ego" which gets to know the environment and secures existence (a kind of reality principle) and the "super-ego" containing the conscience, and assuring the belonging to the community. Although Freud sometimes polemically claims that the conscience is "nothing but social fear", his whole conception of how children internalise the morals of society makes clear, that this process depends on the emotional love attachment to the parents, and their being accepted as examples for emulation.7(...)
Freud also examines the interaction between conscious and unconscious factors of the conscience itself. The super-ego develops the capacity to reflect on itself. The ego for its part can and must be able to reflect on the reflections of the super ego. It is through this "double reflection" that a course of action becomes ones own conscious act.
This corresponds to the marxist vision that the moral apparatus of man is based on social impulses; that it consists of unconscious, semi-conscious and conscious components; that with the advance of humanity the role of the conscious factor grows, until, with the revolutionary proletariat, ethics, based on a scientific method, increasingly becomes the guide of moral behaviour; that within the conscience itself, moral progress is inseparable from the enforcement of consciousness at the expense of feelings of guilt.8 Man can increasingly assume responsibility, not only towards his own conscience, but also for the contents of his own moral values and convictions.
Despite its weaknesses, bourgeois materialism, particularly in its utilitarian form - with the concept that morality is the expression of real, objective interests, represented an enormous step forward in ethical theory. It prepared the way for an historical understanding of moral evolution. By revealing the relative and transitory nature of all moral systems, it dealt a heavy blow against the religious and idealist vision of an eternally unchanging, presumably God given codex.
As we have seen, the working class, from an early stage, already drew its own, socialist conclusions from this approach. Although early socialist theoreticians such as Robert Owen or William Thompson went far beyond the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham - which they used as a point of departure - the influence of the utilitarian approach remained strong within the workers movement, even after the emergence of Marxism. The early socialists revolutionised Bentham's theory, by applying his basic postulates to social classes rather than individuals, thus preparing the way for the understanding of the social and class nature of moral history. And the recognition that slave owners do not have the same set of values as merchants, or desert nomads the same morals as mountain shepherds, had already been dramatically confirmed by anthropology in the wake of colonial expansion. Marxism profited from this preparatory work, just as it profited from the studies of Morgan or Maurer in throwing light on the "genealogy of morals".9 But despite the progress it represented, this utilitarianism, even in its working class form, left a number of questions unresolved.
Firstly, if morality is nothing but the codification of material interest, morality itself becomes superfluous, disappearing as a social factor on its own account. The English materialist radical, Mandeville, had already claimed, on this basis, that morality is nothing but hypocrisy, to conceal the base interests of the ruling classes. Later, Nietzsche was to draw somewhat different conclusions from the same premise: that morality is the means of the weak multitude, to prevent the rule of the elite, so that the liberation of the latter requires the recognition that for them, all is allowed. But as Mehring pointed out, the alleged abolition of morality in Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil", is nothing but the establishment of a new morality - that of reactionary capitalism with its hate of the socialist proletariat - freeing itself from the fetters of petty bourgeois decency and big bourgeois respectability. 10 In particular, the identity of interest and morality implies, as Jesuitism already claimed, that the end sanctifies the means.11
Secondly, by postulating social classes as "collective individuals" merely pursuing their own interests, history appears as a meaningless squabble, the outcome of which may be important to the classes involved, but not to society as a whole. This represents a regression in relation to Hegel, who had already understood (although in a mystified form) not only the relativity of all morality, but also the progressive character of rising ethical systems in violating the established morality. (It was in this sense that Hegel declared: "One imagines oneself to be saying something great in saying: man is naturally good. But one forgets that one says something far greater in saying: man is naturally evil.")12
Thirdly, the utilitarian approach leads to a sterile rationalism which eliminates the social emotions from ethical life.
The negative consequences of these bourgeois, utilitarian leftovers, became apparent at the moment when the workers movement, with the First International, began to overcome the phase of the sect. The investigation into the plot of the Alliance against the International - in particular the commentaries of Marx and Engels on Bakunin's "revolutionary catechism" - reveal the "introduction of anarchy into morality" through a "Jesuitism" which "takes the immorality of the bourgeoisie to its conclusion.". The report commissioned by the 1872 Hague Congress underlines the following elements of Bakunin's outlook: the revolutionary has no personal interests, affairs, feelings or inclinations of his own; has broken, not only with the bourgeois order, but with the morals and customs of the entire civilised world; considers everything to be a virtue, which favours the triumph of the revolution, and everything a vice which hinders it; is always ready to sacrifice everything, including his own will and personality; suppresses all feelings of friendship, love or thankfulness; never hesitates in face of the necessity to liquidate any human being; knows no other set of values but the yardstick of utility.
Profoundly indignant at this approach, Marx and Engels declare it to be the morality of the gutter, the lumpenproletariat. As grotesque as it is infamous, more authoritarian than the most primitive communism, Bakunin makes of the revolution "a series of individual, and then mass murders" where "the only rule of conduct is exaggerated Jesuit morality."13
As we know, the workers movement as a whole did not profoundly assimilate the lessons of the struggle against Bakuninism. In his "Historical Materialism", Bukharin presents ethical norms merely as rules and regulations. Tactics replace morality. Even more confused is the attitude of Lukacs in face of the revolution. After originally presenting the proletariat as the realisation of the moral idealism of Kant and Fichte, Lukacs veers towards utilitarianism. In "What Does Revolutionary Action Mean?" (1919) he declares: "The rule of the whole over the parts signifies determined self sacrifice...Only he is a revolutionary, who is ready to do anything, in order to fulfil these interests."
But the enforcement of utilitarian morality after 1917 in the USSR was above all a reflection of the needs of the transitional state. In his "Morality and Class Norms" Preobrashensky presents the revolutionary organisation as a kind of modern monastic order. He even wants to submit sexual intercourse to the principle of eugenistic selection, in a world where the distinction between individual and society has been abolished, and where the emotions are subordinated to the findings of the natural sciences. Even Trotsky is not free of this influence, since in "Their Morality and Ours", in an unspoken defence of the crushing of Kronstadt, he basically defends the formulation that the end sanctifies the means.
It is certainly true that every social class tends to identify "good" and "virtue" with its own interests. Nonetheless, interest and morality are not identical. The influence of class on social values is extremely complex, incorporating the position of a given class in the production process and the class struggle, its traditions, its goals and expectations for the future, its share in culture, as well as how all of this manifests itself in the form of mode of life, emotions, intuitions and aspirations.
As opposed to the utilitarian confounding of interest and morality (or "duty" as he here formulates it), Dietzgen distinguishes the two. "Interest is more the concrete, present, graspable well being, whereas duty concerns the extended, general well being, projected into the future (...) Duty demands that we take into account not only the present, immediate, but also the distant, not only the bodily but also the spiritual welfare. Duty also concerns itself with the heart, with the social needs, the future, the peace of the soul, in a word with the greater whole, and demands of us that we renounce what is superfluous, in order to achieve and preserve what is necessary."14
In reaction to the idealist affirmation of the invariance of morality, social utilitarianism goes to the other extreme, insisting so one-sidedly on its transitory nature, that the existence of common values holding society together, and of ethical progress, is lost sight of. The continuity of the feeling of community is not, however, a metaphysical fiction.
This "overdone relativism" sees the individual classes and their combat, but "not the total social process, the inter-connection of the different episodes; thereby failing to distinguish the different stages of moral development as part of an inter-related process. It does not possess any general standard with which to assess different norms, not able to go beyond the immediate and temporary appearances. It does not bring together the different appearances to a unity by means of dialectical thinking."15
Concerning the relationship between end and means, the correct formulation of the problem is not that the end sanctifies the means, but that the goal influences the means, and the means influence the goal. Both sides of the contradiction mutually determine and condition each other. Moreover, both the goal and the means are but links in an historical chain, where each end is in turn a means to a further reaching goal. This is why methodological and ethical rigour must apply to a whole process, referring to the past and the future, and not only the immediate. Means which do not serve a given goal, only serve to deform it and deflect from it. The proletariat, for instance, cannot defeat the bourgeoisie by using the weapons of the latter. The morality of the proletariat orients itself both on social reality and on the social emotions. This is why it rejects both the dogmatic exclusion of violence, and the concept of the moral indifference to the means employed.
Parallel to a false understanding of the link between end and means, Preobrashensky also considers that the fate of the parts - and in particular the individual - is unimportant, and can be readily sacrificed in the interest of the whole. This however was not the attitude of Marx, who considered the Paris Commune to be premature, but still rallied in solidarity to it; or Eugen Levine and the young KPD, who entered the government of the failing Bavarian council republic - whose proclamation it had opposed - to organise its defence in order to minimise the number of proletarian victims. The one sided criteria of class utility leaves, in fact, room only for a very conditional class solidarity.
As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out in her polemic against Bernstein, the principle contradiction at the heart of the proletarian movement is that its daily struggle takes place inside capitalism, whereas its goal lies outside, and represents a fundamental break with that system. As a result, the use of violence and deception against the class enemy is necessary, and the appearance of class hatred and anti-social aggressions difficult to avoid. But the proletariat is not morally indifferent in face of such manifestations. Even while employing violence, it must never forget that - as Pannekoek said - its goal is to enlighten brains, not crush them. And as Bilan16 concluded from the Russian experience, it must avoid the use of violence wherever possible against non-exploiting layers, and exclude it altogether, on principle, within the ranks of the working class.. And even in the context of the civil war against the class enemy, it must be convinced of the need to counteract the rise of anti-social feelings such as vengeance, cruelty, destructiveness, since they lead to brutalisation, and dim the light of consciousness. Such feelings signal the intrusion of alien class influence. It was not for nothing that, after the October Revolution, Lenin considered that - second only to the extension of the world revolution - the priority should be the raising of the cultural level of the masses. We should also remember that it was the recognition of the cruelty and moral indifference of Stalin, which first enabled Lenin (in his testament) to identify the danger he represented.
The means employed by the proletariat must correspond, as much as possible, both with its goals, and with the social emotions corresponding to its class nature. It was not least in the name of these emotions that the December 14th 1918 programme of the KPD, while resolutely defending the need for class violence, rejected the use of terror.
"The proletarian revolution has no need of terror to achieve its goals, it hates and abhors the murder of human beings. It does not need these means of struggle because it fights institutions, not individuals, because it does not enter the arena with naive illusions, whose disappointment it would have to avenge."17 (Our emphasis).
As opposed to this, the elimination of the emotional side of morality by the mechanistic materialist utilitarianism approach, is typically bourgeois.. According to the latter approach, the use of lies and deception is morally superior, if it serves the achievement of a given goal. But the lies circulated by the Bolsheviks, in order to justify the repression of Kronstadt, not only eroded the confidence of the class in the party, but undermined the conviction of the Bolsheviks themselves. The vision that the end justifies the means, practically denies the ethical superiority of the proletarian revolution over the bourgeoisie. This forgets that, the more the concerns of a class correspond with the welfare of humanity, the more that class can draw on its moral strength.
The slogan, common in the world of business, that only success counts, regardless of the means employed, does not apply to the working class. The proletariat is the first revolutionary class whose final victory is prepared by a series of defeats. The invaluable lessons, but also the moral example of the great revolutionaries, and of the great workers struggles, are the preconditions of a future victory.
In the present historical period, the importance of ethical questions is greater than ever before. The characteristic tendency towards the dissolution of social ties and coherent thought necessarily has particularly negative effects on morality. Moreover, the ethical disorientation within society is itself a central component of the problem at the heart of the decomposition of the social tissue. The blockage which has resulted from the response of the bourgeoisie to the crisis of capitalism and the response of the proletariat, between world war and world revolution, is directly linked to the sphere of social ethics. The overcoming of the counter-revolution by a new and undefeated generation of the proletariat after 1968 expressed not least the historic discrediting of nationalism, above all in those countries where the strongest sectors of the world proletariat are to be found. But on the other hand, the massive workers struggles after 1968 have not, for the moment, been accompanied by a corresponding development of the political and theoretical dimension of the proletarian combat, in particular the explicit and conscious affirmation of the principle of proletarian internationalism. As a result, neither of the two major classes of contemporary society have been able, for the moment, to decisively advance their own specific class ideal of social community.
In general, the ruling morality of society is the morality of the ruling class. Precisely for this reason, each dominant morality, in order to serve the interests of the ruling class, must at the same time contain elements of general moral interest holding together society as a whole. One of these elements is the development of a perspective or ideal of social community. Such an ideal is an indispensable factor of the curbing of anti-social impulses.
As we have seen, nationalism is the specific ideal of bourgeois society. This corresponds to the fact that the nation state is the most developed unit which capitalism can achieve. When capitalism enters its decadent phase, the nation state definitively ceases being a vehicle of progress in history, becoming in fact the main instrument of social barbarism. But already, long before this happened, the gravedigger of capitalism, the working class - precisely because it is the bearer of a higher, internationalist ideal - was able to expose the deceitful nature of the national community. Although, in 1914, the workers initially forgot this lesson, the First World War was to reveal the reality of the main tendency, not only of bourgeois morality, but of the morality of all exploiting classes. This consists in the mobilisation of the most heroic and selfless social impulses of the exploited, labouring classes at the service of the narrowest and most sordid causes.
But notwithstanding its deceitful and increasingly barbaric character, the nation is the only ideal which the bourgeoisie can put forward in order to hold society together. This ideal alone corresponds to the contemporary reality of the state structure of bourgeois society. This is why all the other social ideals which come to the fore today - the family, the locality, the religious, cultural or ethnic community, the life style group or the gang - are really expressions of the dissolution of social life, of the putrification of class society.
But this is no less true of those moral responses which attempt to address society as a whole, but on the basis of inter-classism: humanitarianism, ecologism, "alternative globalisation". By postulating the improvement of the individual as the basis of the renewal of society, they constitute democratist expressions of the same basic individualist fragmentation of society. Needless to say, all of these ideologies admirably serve the ruling class in its struggle to block off the development of a proletarian, internationalist class alternative to capitalism.
Within the society of decomposition, we can identify certain features with direct implications at the level of social values.
Firstly, the lack of perspective tends to turn the focus of human comportment towards the present and the past. As we have seen, a central part of the rational kernel of morality is the defence of the long term interest against the weight of the immediate. The absence of a long term perspective thus favours desolidarisation between the individuals and groupings of contemporary society, but also between the generations. It results in the tendency toward the pogrom mentality: that is the destructive hatred of a scapegoat made responsible for the disappearance of an idealised better past. In the theatre of world politics, we can observe this tendency in the development of anti-semitism, anti-occidentalism or anti-islamism, in the multiplication of "ethnic cleansing", in the rise of political populism against immigrants, and of a ghetto mentality among the immigrants themselves. But this mentality tends to permeate social life as a whole, as the development of mobbing as a general phenomenon illustrates.
Secondly, the development of social fear tends to paralyse both social instincts and coherent reflection - the basic principles of human and above all class solidarity today. This fear is the result of social atomisation, giving each individual the feeling of being alone with his or her problems. This solitude colours the way the rest of society is seen, making the reaction of other human beings more unpredictable, and making them seem menacing and hostile. This fear - nourishing all the irrational currents of thought turned towards the past and the void - should thus be distinguished from that fear which results from the growing social insecurity brought forth by the economic crisis, which can become a powerful impulsion of class solidarity in reaction against it.
Thirdly, the lack of perspective and the dislocation of social links makes life appear to be devoid of meaning for numerous human beings. This atmosphere of nihilism is generally unbearable for humanity, since it contradicts the conscious and social essence of mankind. It thus gives rise to a series of closely inter-related phenomena, the most important of which are the development of a new religiousness, and of a fixation on death.
In societies mainly based on natural economy, religion is above all the expression of backwardness, of the ignorance of and fear of natural forces. Under capitalism, religion feeds mainly on social alienation - the fear of social forces which have become inexplicable and uncontrollable. In the epoch of capitalist decomposition, it is above all ambient nihilism which fuels religious longing. Whereas traditional religion, as reactionary as its role has mostly been, was still part of a communitarian world view, and whereas the modernised religion of the bourgeoisie represented the adoption of this traditional world view to the perspectives of capitalist society; the mysticism of capitalist decomposition nourishes itself from ambient nihilism. Whether in the form of the pure atomisation of esoteric soul searching, the famous "finding oneself" outside any social context, or in the form of the siege mentality of sects and of religious fundamentalism, offering the obliteration of the personality and the liquidation of individual responsibility, this tendency, while claiming to give an answer, is in reality but an extreme expression of this nihilism.
Moreover, it is this lack of perspective and dislocation of social ties which makes the biological fact of death seem to rob individual life of its meaning. The resulting morbidity (from which mysticism today to a considerable extent feeds) expresses itself both in a disproportional fear of death, and in a pathological longing for it. The former concretises itself for instance in the "hedonistic" mentality of the "fun society" (whose motto might be: "eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die"); the latter via cults such as satanism, end of the world sects, and the ever growing cult of violence, destruction and martyrdom (as in the case of suicide bombing).
Marxism, as the revolutionary, materialist outlook of the proletariat, has always been characterised by its profound attachment to the world and its passionate affirmation of the value of human life. At the same time, its dialectical standpoint has understood life and death, being and nothingness, as part of an inseparable unity. It has neither ignored death, nor has it overvalued its role within life. Mankind is part of nature. As such, blossoming growth, but also illness, decline and death, are as much a part of its existence as the setting sun or the fall of the autumn leaves. But man is a product, not only of nature, but of society. As the heir to the acquisitions of human culture, and the bearer of its future, the revolutionary proletariat attaches itself to the social sources of a real strength rooted in clarity of thought and fraternity, patience and humour, joy and affection, the real security of a well founded confidence.
For the working class, ethics is not something abstract, standing outside of its own struggle. Solidarity, the foundation of its class morality, is at the same time the first precondition of its very capacity to affirm itself as a class in struggle.
Today the proletariat is faced with the task of reconquering its class identity, which suffered such a set back after 1989. This task is inseparable from the struggle to reappropriate its traditions of solidarity.
Solidarity is not only a central component of the daily struggle of the working class, but carries the germ of the future society. Both aspects, relating to the present and future, mutually influence each other. The redeployment of class solidarity within the workers struggles is an essential aspect of the present dynamic of the class struggle and opening of the road toward a new revolutionary perspective. And such a perspective when it emerges will, in turn, be a powerful factor of the reinforcement of solidarity within the immediate struggles of the proletariat.
This perspective is thus decisive in the face of the problems with which capitalist decadence and decomposition confront the working class. For instance: the question of immigration. In ascendant capitalism the position of the workers' movement, in particular of the left, was that of the defence of open frontiers and the free movement of labour. This was part of the minimum programme of the working class. Today, the choice between open and closed frontiers is a false alternative, since only the abolition of all frontiers can resolve the issue. Under the conditions of decomposition, the issue of immigration tends to erode class solidarity, threatening even to infect workers with the pogrom mentality. In face of this situation, the perspective of a world wide community based on solidarity is the most effective factor in defence of the principle of proletarian internationalism.
Under the condition that the working class, through a long period of growing struggles and political reflection, can regain its class identity, the recognition of the reality of the undermining of social emotions, links and modes of behaviour by present day capitalism can itself become a factor pushing the proletariat to develop and consciously formulate its own class values. The indignation of the working class toward the behaviour provoked by decomposing capitalism, and the consciousness that only the proletarian struggle can produce an alternative, are central for the proletariat to reaffirm its revolutionary perspective.
The revolutionary organisation has an indispensable role to play in this process, not only through the propagation of these class principles, but also and above all by itself giving a living example of their application and defence.
Besides, the defence of proletarian morality is an indispensable instrument in the struggle against opportunism, and thus in the defence of the programme of the working class. More firmly than ever, revolutionaries must place themselves in the tradition of Marxism through an intransigent combat against alien class behaviour.
"Bolshevism created the type of the authentic revolutionist, who subordinates to historic goals irreconcilable with contemporary society the conditions of his personal existence, his ideas, and his moral judgements. The necessary distance from bourgeois ideology was kept up in the party by a vigilant irreconcilability, whose inspirer was Lenin. Lenin never tired of working with his lancet, cutting off those bonds which a petty bourgeois environment creates between the party and official social opinion. At the same time Lenin taught the party to create its own social opinion, resting upon the thoughts and feelings of the rising class. Thus by a process of selection and education, and in continual struggle, the Bolshevik party created not only a political but a moral medium of its own, independent of bourgeois social opinion and implacably opposed to it. Only this permitted the Bolsheviks to overcome the waverings in their own ranks and reveal in action that courageous determination without which the October victory would have been impossible."18
1 Luxemburg: The Spirit of Russian Literature (Introduction to Korolenko) 1919.
2 Bukharin and Preobrazhansky: The ABC of Communism. Commentary of the programme of the 8th Party Congress, 1919. Chapter IX. "Proletarian Justice". § 74. "Proletarian penal methods."
3 Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) was a British philosopher, jurist and reformer. He was the friend of Adam Smith and Jean-Baptiste Say, two major economists of the bourgeoisie of the time when the latter was still a revolutionary class. He influenced "classical" philosophers of the latter like John Stuart Mill, John Austin, Herbert Spencer, Henry Sidgwick and James Mill. He gave his support to the French Revolution of 1789 and made several propositions concerning the establishment of law, the judiciary, prisons, the political organisation of the state, and colonial policy ("Emancipate your Colonies") . The young French republic made him a citizen of honour on 23rd August 1792. His influence is to be found in the civil code (also known as the "Code Napoleon" which today still governs private law in France) The thought of Bentham began from the following principle: individuals only coneive their interests in relation to pain and pleasure. They try to maximise their happiness, expressed in the surplus of pleasure over pain. Each individual had to procede according to a hedonist logic. Each action has positive and negative effects over time with different degrees of intensity; thus the individual must realise those actions that gives him most pleasure. He gave the name Utilitarianism to this doctrine in 1781.
Bentham put forward a method "the calculation of happiness and pain" intended to scientifically determine - by using precise rules - the quantity of pleasure and pain generalated by our various actions. There are seven criteria:
Theoretically, the most moral action will be that which satisfies the greatest number of criterias.
4 Mehring: "Back to Schopenhauer!" Neue Zeit. 1908/09.
5 Thus most of the political organisations of the proletariat have had, beside organs of centralisation that deal with "current affairs" organs such as "control commissions" composed of experienced militants who have the greatest confidence of the comrades, and specifically charged with delicate questions touching on sensitive aspects of the comportment of militants within or outside the organisation.
6 Kautsky: Ethics and Historical Materialism. Chapter "The Ethics of Darwinism" (The social instincts)
7 Confirmed by the observation of Anna Freud that orphans released from concentration camps, while establishing a kind of rudimentary egalitarian solidarity among themselves, only accepted cultural and moral standards towards society as a whole, when they were re-grouped in smaller "family" units, each led by an adult respect person, towards which the children could develop affection and admiration.
8 Kautsky´s book on ethics is the first comprehensive marxist study of this question, and his main contribution to socialist theory. However, he overestimates the importance of the contribution of Darwin. As a result, he underestimates the specifically human factors of culture and consciousness, tending towards a static vision where different social formations more or less favour or hamper basically invariant social impulses.
9 See for instance Paul Lafargue: "Recherches sur l´origine de l´idee du bien et du juste." 1885, republished in the Neue Zeit 1899, 1900.
10 Mehring: On the Philosophy of Capitalism. 1891. We should add that Nietzsche is the theoretician of the behaviour of the declassed adventurer.
11 The vanguard of the counter-reformation against Protestantism, Jesuitism was characterised by the adaptation to the methods of the bourgeoisie in defence of the feudal church. It therefore, at a very early date, expressed the baseness of capitalist morality, long before the bourgeois class as a whole (which at that time still played a revolutionary role) had openly revealed the ugliest sides of its class rule. See for instance Mehring: German History from the Onset of the Middle Ages. 1910. Part 1, Chapter 6: "Jesuitism, Calvinism, Lutherism."
12 A remark in passing. Perhaps the most appropriate answer to the age old question, whether mankind is good or evil, can be given by paraphrasing what Marx and Engels in The Holy Family wrote in the chapter about Fleur de Marie from the novel of Eugene Sue "The Mysteries of Paris": humanity is neither good nor evil, it is human.
13 The Alliance of Socialist Democracy and International Workingmen's Association. 1873. Chapter VIII. "The Alliance in Russia". Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 23.
14 Dietzgen: The Nature of Human Brainwork. 1869
15 Henriete Roland Holst: Communisme en Moraal, 1925. Chapter V. "The 'meaning of life' and the task of the proletariat". Despite some important weaknesses, this book contains above all an excellent critique of utilitarian morality.
16 Review in French of the Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party (later, the Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left).
17 "What Does the Spartacus League Want?" (A slightly different English translation of this passage can be found in Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, Monthly Review Press 1971) Here, as in other writings of Rosa Luxemburg, we find a profound comprehension of the class psychology of the proletariat.
18 Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution. 1930, End of the Chapter "Lenin Summons to Insurrection".
In the previous article in this series [12] we began a study of the efforts of the Italian communist left to draw the lessons of the first international wave of proletarian revolutions and of the revolution in Russia in particular, and to understand how these lessons could be applied to the revolutionary transformations of the future. We noted the characteristic methods of the Italian Fraction in this work:
its intransigence in defending class principles, but also its openness to discussion with other internationalist currents. Both aspects were particularly relevant to the problem of the period of transition at that time, because the workers' movement was confronted with the monstrous claim that Stalin's USSR was on the verge of achieving "socialism", and because among the various internationalist groups there was a great deal of confusion about the nature of the economic developments taking place under the "Soviet" state;
its modesty and prudence, its insistence on sticking fast to the basic analytical framework of marxism - but also its willingness to question received wisdom and to search for new answers to new problems.
In International Review no. 127 we showed how these methods were concretised in a series of articles written by Vercesi under the heading "Parti, Etat, Internationale". In this issue, we begin the publication of another major series on the same basic theme: "Problems of the period of transition" written by Mitchell, who at the time the series began was a member of the Belgian group the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes but who subsequently helped to found the Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left, which split from the LCI on the question of the war in Spain, and with the Italian Fraction formed the International Communist Left. To our knowledge this is the first time this series has been published since the1930s and the first time it has been translated into other languages.
In the opening section of this article, Mitchell makes it clear that he is "in accordance with the whole framework and spirit of Bilan", rejecting any speculative approach to the problems of the transition period and affirming that "marxism is an experimental method and not a game of guesses and forecasts", since it bases its conclusions and its predictions on the real events of history and the authentic experience of the proletarian movement. He then goes on to outline the main axes of the series he proposes to write:
"a. the historic conditions in which the proletarian revolution arises;
b. the necessity of the proletarian state;
c. the social and economic categories which will inevitably survive in the transitional period;
d. finally, certain requirements for a proletarian management of the transitional state".
This outline was more or less followed in the ensuing articles, although the space devoted to the complex economic problems of the transitional period meant that the series eventually took up five articles in Bilan over the next few years. In particular, a lot of attention was given to the debate with the Dutch internationalist current and its approach to the economic transformation as developed in Basic Principles of Communist Production and Distribution by Jan Appel and Henk Canne-Meier, summarised in Bilan by the LCI militant A Hennaut.
In this first article, Mitchell takes up the historic conditions of the proletarian revolution. Briefly stated, he focuses on the following key questions and debates:
As we publish and review the series of articles by Mitchell, we will have occasion to point out some weaknesses and inconsistencies in his contribution, some minor, some more substantial, but passages like the one just quoted confirm that when it comes to the fundamentals, we, like Mitchell, are still working "in accordance with the whole framework and spirit of Bilan".
CDW
The title of this study should not lead anyone to the conclusion that we're going to start peering into the mists of the future or sketching out a solution to the many and complex tasks which will confront the proletariat when it has become the ruling class. Such a project would not be in accordance with the whole framework and spirit of Bilan. We will leave it to the "technicians" and the recipe-mongers or to the self-proclaimed "orthodox" marxists to indulge in such anticipations, to stroll down the byways of utopia, or to offer the workers formulae which have been emptied of any class content.
For us it can never be a question of inventing panaceas which are valid once and for all and which can be adapted to any historic situation. Marxism is an experimental method and not a game of guesses and forecasts. It has its roots in a historic reality, which is a moving, contradictory, process; it is nourished by past experience, tempered and corrected by the present, so that it can be enriched by further experience to come.
By synthesising the events of history, marxism has shown the true meaning of the state, laid bare of all idealist prejudices; it has developed the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat and affirmed the necessity of the transitional proletarian state. But although it is possible to define the class content of such a state, we are as yet still limited to a mere outline of its social forms. It has still not been possible to situate the principles for running a proletarian state on a solid basis, or to clearly draw the lines of demarcation between party and state. This immaturity inevitably weighed heavily on the character and evolution of the Soviet State.
But it is precisely the task of those marxists who have survived the shipwreck of the workers' movement to forge the theoretical weapons which will make the future proletarian state an instrument of the world revolution and not a cog in the wheels of world capitalism.
This contribution to that theoretical task will examine:
a) the historic conditions in which the proletarian revolution arises;
b) the necessity of the proletarian state;
c) the social and economic categories which will inevitably survive in the transitional period;
d) finally, certain requirements for a proletarian management of the transitional state.
The historical context of the proletarian revolution
It became axiomatic to say that capitalist society, overflowing with a productive capacity which it can longer make full use of, drowning in a flood of commodities which it can't sell, has become a historic anachronism. From this it is but a short step to conclude that the disappearance of capitalism must open up the reign of abundance.
In reality, capitalist accumulation has reached the extreme limits of its progressive evolution and the capitalist mode of production is nothing but a fetter on historical progress. This doesn't mean that capitalism is like a ripe fruit which the proletariat simply has to pluck in order to find true happiness; it simply means that the material conditions exist for constructing the base (and only the base) of socialism, for preparing the ground for a communist society.
Marx said that: "The very moment civilisation begins, production begins to be founded on the antagonism of orders, estates, classes, and finally on the antagonism of accumulated labour and actual labour. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law that civilisation has followed up to our days. Till now the productive forces have been developed by virtue of this system of class antagonism".2 In his Anti-Duhring Engels asserted that the existence of a society divided into classes: "was the necessary consequence of the deficient and restricted development of production in former times" and from this he deduced that "if, upon this showing, division into classes has a certain historical justification, it has this only for a given period, only under given social conditions. It was based upon the insufficiency of production. It will be swept away by the complete development of modern productive forces". 3
It is clear that the final stage of capitalist development does not correspond to "the complete development of modern productive forces" in the sense that all human needs can now be satisfied. But what we do have today is a situation in which the persistence of class antagonism not only stands in the way of any social development, but actually leads to the regression of society.
This is what Engels was getting at when he said that the: "abolition of classes...presupposes...the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of pro-
duction and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous, but economically, politically, intellectually a hindrance to development".4 And, when he added that capitalist society had reached this state and that we now had: "the possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialised production, an existence not only sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties" there can be no doubt that he was envisaging the possibility of moving towards the full satisfaction of needs and not saying that we already had the material means for immediately achieving this.
As Engels said, the liberation of the productive forces: "is the one precondition for an unbroken, constantly accelerating development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself".5 Consequently the period of transition (which can only unfold on a world scale and not within one state) is a political and economic phase which will inevitably be characterised by the inability of production to satisfy all individual needs, even when we take into account the prodigious levels which the productivity of labour has already achieved. The suppression of capitalist relations of production and of their antagonistic expression makes it possible to immediately begin providing for essential human needs (if we leave out the necessities of the class struggle which could temporarily reduce the level of production).
To go beyond this requires an incessant development of the productive forces. The realisation of the formula "to each according to their needs" will come at the end of a long process, which will go forwards not in a straight line but through a winding course of contradictions and conflicts, and in conjunction with the world-wide development of the class struggle.
The historic mission of the proletariat is, as Engels said, to lead humanity "from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom"; but the proletariat can only carry out this mission if it analyses the nature and limits of the historic conditions in which this act of liberation takes place, and applies this analysis to the whole of its political and economic activity. The proletariat cannot abstractly pose socialism against capitalism, as though they were two entirely independent epochs, as though socialism was not the historic prolongation of capitalism and fatally scarred by it, but something clean and new which springs form the virgin womb of the proletarian revolution.
It wasn't because of indifference or negligence that the founders of marxism didn't go into the details of the period of transition. But Marx and Engels were the antithesis, the living negation, of the utopians. They didn't try to construct abstract schema, to imagine things which could only be resolved scientifically.
And in 1918, Rosa Luxemburg, who made an immense theoretical contribution to marxism, still felt it necessary to point out that: "For from being a sum of ready made prescriptions which only have to be applied, the practical realisation of socialism as an economic, social and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future...(socialism) has as its prerequisite a number of measures of force against property, etc. The negative, the tearing down, can be decreed; the building up, the positive, cannot".6
In his preface to Capital Marx had already indicated that: "When a society has discovered the natural laws which regulate it own movement (and the final purpose of my book is to reveal the economic laws of motion of modern society), it can neither overleap the natural phases of evolution, nor shuffle them out of the world by decrees. But this much, at least, it can do; it can shorten and lesson the birth pangs."
A policy of proletarian management, therefore, can only envisage the general tendencies and orientation of economic development, while historic experience (of which the Russian revolution is a gigantic though incomplete example) can provide the proletariat with an understanding of the social forms suitable for the implementation of its economic programme. This programme will only have a socialist content if it follows a way which is diametrically opposed to capitalism - if it aims at a constant and progressive elevation of the living conditions of the masses, and not at holding them down or lowering them.
***
If we want to understand the revolution not as an isolated phenomenon but as a product of an historical development, we must relate it to the fundamental laws of history - to the dialectical movement generated by the class struggle, which is the living substance of historical events.
Marxism teaches us that the causes of revolutions are not to be found in philoso-
phy, but in the economy of a given society. The gradual changes that occur in the mode of production and exchange, spurred on by the class struggle, inevitably culminate in a revolutionary "catastrophe" which tears through the envelope of the existing social and productive relations.
In this respect the 20th century is for capitalist society what the 18th and 19th centuries were for feudal society - an epoch of violent revolutionary convulsions engulfing the whole of society.
In the epoch of bourgeois decadence, then, proletarian revolutions are the product of the historical maturity of society as a whole, links in a chain of events which, as history since 1914 has shown, can easily alternate with defeats of the proletariat and wars.
The victory of one proletariat, although the immediate result of particular circumstances, is definitely part of a whole: the world revolution. For this reason there can be no question of assigning an autonomous development to this revolution because of any social or geographical peculiarities.
Here we come up against the problem underlying the theoretical controversy which led Russian centrism (and subsequently the Communist International) to put forward the theory of "socialism in one country". We are referring to the interpretation of the unequal development which has been a constant factor in historical evolution.
Marx observed that economic life was in some ways analogous to biological processes. Once life has transcended a given period of development and gone from one stage to the next, it begins to obey other laws, even though it is still dependent on the fundamental laws which regulate all manifestations of life.
It's the same for each historical period, which has its own laws, even though history as a whole is regulated by the laws of dialectical evolution. For example, Marx denied that the law of population was the same in all times and all places. Each stage of development has its own particular law of population and Marx pointed this out when refuting the theory of Malthus.
In Capital, in which he dissected the mechanisms of the capitalist system, Marx didn't dwell on the many uneven aspects of its expansion, because for him: "What we are concerned with primarily is, not the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonisms which arise out of the natural laws of capitalist production, but these laws in themselves, the tendencies which work out with an iron necessity towards an inevitable goal. A country in which industrial development is more advanced than in other simply presents those others with a picture of their own future".7 From this passage we can see clearly that what has to be considered as the fundamental element is not the uneven development of the different countries which make up the capitalist system - as though there was some kind of law ensuring the historical necessity of uneven development - but rather the specific laws of capitalist production, which regulate the whole of society and which are themselves subordinated to the general laws of dialectical evolution.
The geographical milieu explains why the historical evolution and the specific laws of a society manifest themselves in varied and uneven forms of development, but it cannot explain the historical process itself. In other words, the geographical milieu is not the active factor in history.
Marx pointed out that while capitalist production is favoured by a moderate climate, this is merely a potential factor which can only be made use of in historical conditions which are independent of geographical conditions. "It by no means follows that the most fruitful soil is the most fitted for the growth of the capitalist mode of production. This mode is based on the dominion of man over Nature...It is not the tropics with their luxuriant vegetation, but the temperate zone, that is the mother country of capital. It is not the mere fertility of the soil but the differentiation of the soil, the variety of its natural products, the changes of the seasons, which form the physical basis for the social division of labour, and which, by changes in the natural surroundings, spur man on to the multiplication of his wants, his capacities, his means and modes of labour".8
The geographical milieu is thus not the primordial element which determines the way different countries will develop. If we locate this development in the sphere of geographical conditions, and not in the context of the general historical laws of a whole epoch, then we would have to come to the conclusion that each country has developed in an autonomous manner, independent of any historical context.
But history has only unfolded because of the intervention of men acting (with the exception of primitive communism) within a framework of antagonistic social relations, which have varied according to the historical epoch and which have imposed a particular form on the class struggle: slave against master, serf against landlord, bourgeois against feudal lord, proletariat against bourgeois.
Obviously this doesn't mean that various pre-capitalist social formations - Asiatic, slave, feudal - always succeed each other in a mechanical way and that their specific laws have a universal validity. Such a pattern of evolution was ruled out by the fact that these social formations were all based on modes of production which by nature were very progressive.
Each of these societies was unable to expand beyond a certain geographical radius (e.g. the Mediterranean basin in classical antiquity), while outside this radius other modes of production could exist, in a more or less evolved manner, and under the influence of various factors, of which the geographical factor was not the most essential.
But, with the arrival of capitalism, the whole course of history broadens out. Although capitalism inherited a historic situation characterised by considerable differences in development, it did not take it long to overcome these differences.
Dominated by the need to accumulate surplus value, capitalism appeared on the historical arena as the most powerful and progressive mode of production ever seen, the most expansive of all economic systems. But although it was characterised by a tendency to universalise its mode of production and although it partially succeeded in creating a world in its own image, it never completely destroyed all previous social formations. Rather it annexed them, sucked them dry, or pushed them aside.
We have already expressed our opinion (see "Crises and cycles") on the perspective of the advent of a pure and balanced capitalist society, which Marx is supposed to have put forward; we don't want to go back over this here, since the facts of history have eloquently refuted not Marx's pseudo-predictions, but the hypotheses of those who have used it to reinforce bourgeois ideology. We know that capitalism entered into its epoch of decomposition before being able to complete its historic mission because its internal contradictions developed faster than the system could expand. But capitalism was still the first system of production to give rise to a world economy, which is characterised not by homogeneity and balance, which would in any case be contrary to its nature, but by a strict interdependence of all its parts. It is this which, in the final analysis, subjugates the whole world to the laws of capital and to the yoke of the imperialist bourgeoisie.
The development of capitalist society, spurred on by competition, has produced this complex and remarkable worldwide division of labour which can and must be perfected and purified (this is the task of the proletariat) but which cannot be destroyed. It is not called into question at all by the phenomenon of economic nationalism, which, with the general crisis of capitalism, appears as a reactionary manifestation of the exacerbated contradiction between the universal character of the capitalist economy and this division into antagonist national states. In fact, this is further confirmed by the stifling atmosphere created by the existence of what might be called obsidian economies. Under the cover of an almost hermetically sealed protectionism, we are seeing a prolific growth of industries built up on the basis of enormous waste expenditure, the development of war economies which exact a heavy tribute from the living conditions of the masses. These are economically unviable, parasitic growths which will be eliminated in a socialist society.
A socialist society is obviously inconceivable without this global division of labour.
The interdependence and reciprocal subordination of the various spheres of production (which is today confined within the framework of bourgeois nations) is a historic necessity, and capitalism has taken this to the highest possible level, both from the economic and political point of view. The fact that, once this social structure appears on a world scale, it is shaken by a thousand contradictory forces, does not mean that it doesn't exist on this scale. It is based on a distribution of the productive forces and of natural resources which is the product of the whole historical development. It is not at all dependent on the desire of imperialist capitalism to counter-act the strict interdependence of all the regions of the world by retreating behind national frontiers. If capitalism is attempting this mad project today, it is because it is being driven by its own contradictions, but it can only do this by destroying the riches which concretise the surplus value produced by generations of workers, by precipitating a gigantic destruction of the productive forces into the holocaust of imperialist war.
The international proletariat cannot afford to ignore the laws of historical evolution. Once a section of the proletariat has made its revolution, the price of the theory of "socialism in one country" is the abandonment of the worldwide class struggle, and thus the defeat of that revolution.
***
The idea that uneven development is a historical law giving rise to the necessity of autonomous national development is a denial of the concept of society as a worldwide phenomenon.
As we have shown, uneven economic and political development, far from being an "absolute law of capitalism",9 is simply a sum of phenomena determined by the specific laws of the bourgeois system of production.
In its period of expansion, capitalism, through a tortuous and contradictory process, tended to even out inequalities of development, whereas now, in its regressive phase, the necessities of its evolution have led to a deepening of these inequalities: the advanced capitalisms suck the backward countries dry and destroy any possibility of their development.
The Communist International sees this retrograde and parasitical development, and concludes that "uneven development is augmented and accentuated even further in the imperialist epoch"; it thus puts forward its theory of "national socialism", by pointing out the impossibility of a world proletarian revolution as a simultaneous act, and confusing national socialism and a revolution which breaks out in a national framework.
In order to back up these arguments, it elaborates on certain of Lenin's writings, notably his article of 1915 "On the Slogan for the United States of Europe" (Against the Stream) where he said that "Uneven economic and political development is an unconditional law of capitalism. Hence it follows that the triumph of socialism is to begin with possible in a few, or even a single capitalist country."10
Trotsky has dealt quite adequately with these falsifications in The Third International After Lenin and we don't need to refute them again here.
But all the same, Trotsky, seeking to follow Marx and Lenin, thinks that it is possible to use the "law" of uneven development - which he also makes into an absolute law of capitalism - to explain both the inevitability of the revolution assuming a national form and also why it should first break out in the backward countries: "The uneven, sporadic development of capitalism gives the socialist revolution an uneven and sporadic character, but the advanced degree of mutual interdependence between all countries means that it is both politically and economically impossible to build socialism in one country"11 and again that: "the prediction that Russia, a historically backward country, could undergo a proletarian revolution before an advanced country like England, was based entirely on the law of uneven development."
First of all, although Marx recognised the necessity of national revolutions, he never invoked a law of uneven development, and he always made it clear that the necessity for national revolutions derived from the fact that society was divided into capitalist nations, which was simply the corollary of the fact that it was divided into classes.
The Communist Manifesto says that: "Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word."12 In the Critique of the Gotha Programme Marx goes on say: "It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organise itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle. In so far its class struggle is national, not in substance, but as the Communist Manifesto says ‘in form'."13
When the national struggle breaks out into a proletarian revolution, it shows that it is the product of the historical maturation of the social and economic contradictions of capitalist society as a whole. The dictatorship of the proletariat is a point of departure, not the final goal. It is an expression of the worldwide class struggle, and can only live by remaining part of that struggle. Only in the sense of this continuous revolutionary process can we talk about a "permanent" revolution.
Although Trotsky absolutely rejects the theory of "socialism in one country" and considers it to be reactionary, the fact that he bases his argument on the "law" of uneven development leads him to distort the significance of proletarian revolutions. This "law" is incorporated into his theory of permanent revolution which, according to him, consists of two basic theses: one based on a "correct" conception of the law of uneven development, the other on a precise understanding of the world economy.
If, during the imperialist epoch the various expressions of uneven development are the result not of the specific laws of capitalism (whose effects are intensified by the general crisis of decomposition) but of a historical law of uneven development which has the character of necessity, it is impossible to understand why the effects of this law should limit themselves to national revolutions which begin in the backward countries. Why shouldn't they also permit the development of autonomous economies, i.e. of "national socialism"?
By ascribing a preponderant importance to the geographical milieu (because this is what happens when you make uneven development into a law) rather than to the real historical factor - the class struggle - you are opening the door to a justification of a "socialism" based on the physical possibilities of independent development. As far as Russia is concerned, this means opening the door to centrism.
In vain Trotsky accuses Stalin of "making a fetish of the law of uneven development and declaring it as a sufficient condition for the build up of national socialism" because, beginning from the same theoretical premise, he must logically come to the same conclusions, unless he arbitrarily stops half way. Trotsky said of the Russian Revolution that: "it was the greatest of all expressions of the unevenness of historical development; the theory of the permanent revolution, which predicted the October cataclysm, was itself based on this law."
The backwardness of Russia can to a certain extent be used to explain why the revolution had to jump over the bourgeois phase, although the essential reason for this was that it took place in a period when the national bourgeoisie was incapable of carrying out its historic tasks. But the real significance of this backwardness was expressed on the political level, because the historic impotence of the Russian bourgeoisie was accompanied by an organic weakness which was aggravated by the pressures of imperialist conflict. In the chaos of the imperialist war, Russia was revealed as the weak link in the imperialist chain. The world revolution began in the place where conditions were favourable for the proletariat and the building of its class party.
***
To conclude the first part of this study, we would like to look at the theory of countries being "ripe" or "unripe" for socialism, a theory which is especially favoured by the "evolutionary socialists" but which has found some echo in the thought of the communists of the opposition when it comes to defining the character of the Russian Revolution or seeking the origins of its degeneration.
In his preface to the Critique of Political Economy Marx summed up his position on what it meant to say that a phase of social revolution had arrived at a level of maturity: "No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation."14 This means that the condition of maturity will always have its repercussions on the whole society regulated by the dominant mode of production. Moreover, the notion of maturity can only have a relative, not an absolute, meaning. A society is "ripe" to the extent that its social structure and juridical framework have become too narrow in relation to the material forces of production which it has developed.
At the beginning of this study we underlined the fact that although capitalism has powerfully developed the productive capacity of society, it has not succeeded in developing the conditions for an immediate passage to socialism. As Marx indicated, only the material conditions for resolving this problem exist "or are at least in the process of formation".
These restrictions apply even more strongly to each national unit in the world economy. All of them are historically ripe for socialism, but none of them are ripe in the sense of possessing all the material conditions needed for the building of an integral socialism. This is true whatever level of development they may have reached.
No nation on its own contains all the elements for a socialist society. The idea of national socialism is in diametrical opposition to the international nature of the imperialist economy, to the universal division of labour, and the global antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
It is a pure abstraction to see socialist society as a sum of complete socialist economies. The world-wide distribution of the productive forces (which is not an artificial product) makes it impossible both for the "advanced" countries and for the "backward" countries to complete the transition to socialism within their own borders. . The specific weight of each of the countries in the world economy is measured by the degree to which they are reciprocally dependent, not by how independent they might be. England, which is one of the most advanced sectors of capitalism, a country in which capitalism exists in an almost pure form, could not operate in isolation. Facts today show that, even when only partially cut off from the
world market, the productive forces begin to break down. This is the case with the cotton and coal industries in England. In the U.S.A, the automobile industry can only go into decline if it is limited to the home market, no matter how vast the latter is. An isolated proletarian Germany would soon see its industrial apparatus breaking down, even if it initiated a huge expansion of consumption.
It is thus an abstraction to pose the question of countries being "ripe" or "unripe" for socialism, because on these terms you would have to say that neither the advanced countries nor the backward countries were mature enough.
The problem has to be posed in the light of the historical maturation of social antagonisms, which in turn results from the sharpening conflicts between the productive forces and the relations of production. To limit the question to the material factors at hand would be to take up the position of the theoreticians of the Second International, of Kautsky and the German Socialists, who considered that because Russia was a backward economy dominated by a technically weak agrarian sector, it was not ripe for a proletarian revolution, but only for a bourgeois revolution. In this their conception was the same as that of the Russian Mensheviks. Otto Bauer declared that the proletarian state inevitably had to degenerate because of Russia's backwardness.
In the Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg remarked that, according to the conception of the social democrats, the Russian revolution ought to have stopped after the fall of the Tsarism. "According to this view, if the revolution has gone beyond that point and has set as its task the dictatorship of the proletariat, this is simply a mistake of the radical wing of the Russian labour movement, the Bolsheviks. And all difficulties which the revolution has met with in its further course, and all disorders it has suffered, are pictured as purely a result of this fateful error."
The question as to whether Russia was or was not ripe for the proletarian revolution can't be answered by looking at the material conditions of its economy, but at the balance of class forces, which had been dramatically transformed by the international situation. The essential condition was the existence of a concentrated proletariat - despite the fact that it was a tiny minority in relation to the huge mass of peasant producers - whose consciousness expressed itself through a class party powerfully armed with revolutionary ideology and experience. We agree with Rosa Luxemburg that: "The Russian proletariat has to be seen as the vanguard of the world proletariat, a vanguard whose movement is the expression of the development of social antagonisms on a world scale. What is happening in St Petersburg is the result of developments in Germany, England, and France. It is these developments which will decide the outcome of the Russian revolution, which can only achieve its goal if it is the prologue to the revolution of the European proletariat." Certain comrades of the communist opposition have however, based their appreciation of the Russian revolution on the criterion of economic "immaturity".
In his study "Classes in Soviet Russia", comrade Hennaut takes up this position. In his interpretation of those statements of Engels which we looked at earlier, Hennaut sees them as having a particular significance which can be applied to a given country, rather than as referring to a whole social order that has reached the historic limitations of its development. If this were the case, Engels would obviously be contradicting what Marx said in his preface to the Critique of Political Economy. But as we shall see, this is not the case. According to Hennaut, it is the economic factor and not the political factor which is most important when we are trying to establish whether or not a proletarian revolution is possible. He says: "if we apply them to the present period of human history, these considerations (of Engels) can only mean that the seizure of power by the proletariat, the maintenance and use of this power for socialist ends, is only conceivable where capitalism has already cleared the path for socialism, i.e. where it has given rise to a numerically strong proletariat which comprises, if not the majority, then a powerful minority of the population, and where it has created a developed industry which is able to stamp its seal on the further development of the whole economy." Further on, he stresses that: "In the final analysis it was the cultural and economic capacities of the country which determined the final outcome of the Russian revolution when it became clear that the proletariat outside Russia wasn't ready to make the revolution. The backward state of Russian society had to make all its negative sides felt." But perhaps comrade Hennaut might have added that, whether we like it or not, any proletarian revolution that tries to draw its "legitimacy" from the material conditions in one country will be drawn irresistibly into the trap of "national socialism".
We repeat that the fundamental condition for the life of the proletarian revolution is its ability to link up on a world scale, and this consideration must determine the internal and external policies of the proletarian state. This is because, although the revolution has to begin on a national scale, it cannot remain indefinitely at that level, however large and wealthy that nation might be. Unless it links up with other national revolutions and becomes a world revolution it will be asphyxiated and will degenerate. This is why we consider it an error to base one's arguments on the national conditions of one country.
On the basis of these political considerations we can arrive at an understanding of the "leap" the Russian revolution made over the various intermediary phases. The October revolution showed that in the epoch of imperialist decadence the proletariat cannot stop at the bourgeois phase of development, but must go beyond it by taking the place of a bourgeoisie incapable of carrying out its historic tasks. In order to attain this objective, the Bolsheviks did not spend their time drawing up an inventory of the productive forces at their disposal, but based their activity on an evaluation of the balance of class forces.
Again, this leap was not conditioned by economic factors, but by political ones, since the only way the Russian revolution could give rise to a material development of the economy was by linking up with the world revolution. The "immaturity" of the backward countries - which makes such "leaps" necessary - as well as the "maturity" of the advanced countries, must all be incorporated into the same process of the world-wide class struggle.
Lenin gave a clear answer to those who reproached the Bolsheviks for having taken power. "It would an irreparable error to say that, because there is an obvious imbalance between our economic strength and out political strength, we shouldn't have taken power! To argue in such a way you have to be blind, you have to forget that such a balance will never exist and can't exist in any process of social revolution, and that it is only through a whole number of experiences, each one of which will be incomplete and marred by a certain imbalance, that the triumph of socialism can be realised by the revolutionary co-operation of the workers of all countries."
No matter how "poor" a proletariat might be it does not have to wait for the "richer" proletariats to make its own revolution. The fact that such a revolution might encounter many more difficulties than would confront a stronger proletariat is undeniable, but history doesn't offer other alternatives.
The historic epoch of bourgeois revolutions led by the bourgeoisie is over. The survival of capitalism has become an obstacle to progress, and thus also to the development of the bourgeois revolution, since we are now faced with a saturated world market. Moreover, the bourgeoisie can no longer win the support of the working masses like it did in 1789; even as early as 1848, 1871, and 1905 in Russia, it was unable to do this.
The October revolution was a striking example of one of these apparent historical paradoxes; it showed a proletariat completing a short-lived bourgeois revolution but then compelled to realise its own objectives in order to avoid being strangled by imperialism.
The Russian bourgeoisie had been weakened from birth by western capital's domination of the economy. The price of keeping Tsarism going was that a considerable portion of the national revenue was soaked off by foreign capital, and this was an obstacle to the economic development of the Russian bourgeoisie.
1905 was an attempted bourgeois revolution marked by the absence of the bourgeoisie. A highly concentrated proletariat already appeared on the scene as an independent revolutionary force; this forced the politically impotent liberal bourgeoisie into the arms of the feudal autocracy. But the bourgeois revolution of 1905 couldn't end in a victory for the proletariat, because although it was a product of the convulsions caused by the Russo-Japanese war, it wasn't accompanied by a maturation of social antagonisms on an international scale. Thus Tsarism was able to receive financial and material aid from the whole European bourgeoisie.
As Rosa Luxemburg said, "The Revolution of 1905-1907 roused only a faint echo in Europe. Therefore, it had to remain a mere opening chapter. Continuation and conclusion were tied up with the further development of Europe".15 The revolution of 1917 arose in a more developed historical situation. In The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky Lenin traced its successive phases: "First, with the ‘whole' of the peasantry against the monarchy, against the landlords, against medievalism (and to that extent, the revolution remains bourgeois, bourgeois democratic). Then, with the poor peasants, with the semi-proletarians, with all the exploited against capitalism, including the rural rich, the kulaks, the profiteers, and to that extent the revolution becomes a socialist one. To attempt to raise an artificial Chinese Wall between the first and the second, to separate them by anything else than the degree of preparedness of the proletariat and the degree of its unity with the poor peasants, means monstrously to distort Marxism, to vulgarise it, to substitute liberalism in its place. It means smuggling in a reactionary defence of the bourgeoisie against the socialist proletariat by means
of quasi-scientific references to the progressive character of the bourgeoisie as compared with medievalism."16
The dictatorship of the proletariat was the instrument which made it possible first to complete the bourgeois revolution, then go beyond it. This is the explanation behind the Bolshevik slogan "land to the peasants", which - mistakenly, in our opinion - was opposed by Rosa Luxemburg.
With Lenin, we say that: "...the Bolsheviks...strictly differentiated between the bourgeois-democratic revolution, and the socialist revolution: by carrying the former to its end, they opened the door for the transition to this latter. This was the only policy that was revolutionary and Marxian".17
Mitchell
(Bilan no. 28, March-April 1936)
1 Collected Works, Vol.21.
2 The Poverty of Philosophy. Collected Works, Vol. 6.
3 Collected Works, Vol.25.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 The Russian Revolution
7 Preface to the first German edition of Capital.
8 Capital vol. 1, Part V, Chapter XVI "Absolute and relative surplus value".
9 Programme of the 6th Congress of the CI.
10 Collected Works, Vol. 21.
11 The Third International after Lenin.
12 Collected Works, Vol. 6.
13 Collected Works, Vol. 24.
14 Collected Works, Vol.29.
15 The Russian Revolution.
16 Collected Works, Vol. 28.
17 The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky.
Frederick Engels predicted more than a century ago that capitalist society would ultimately drag human society down into barbarism if left to its own devices. Indeed, the evolution of imperialist war over the last hundred years has provided more and more horrifying details of how this prediction would be realised. Today, the capitalist world increasingly offers another route to the apocalypse, complementary to that of imperialist war, through a “man- made” ecological meltdown that in the span of a few generations could make the earth as inhospitable to human life as Mars. Despite the recognition of this perspective by the defenders of the capitalist order, there is absolutely nothing effective they can do to stop it, because both imperialist war and climate catastrophe have been brought about by the unnatural perpetuation of their dying mode of production.
The bloody fiasco of the invasion in 2003 of Iraq by the US-led “coalition” marks a defining moment in the development of imperialist war towards the very destruction of society. Four years on, Iraq, instead of being liberated, has been turned into what bourgeois journalists euphemistically call a “broken society”, where the population, already butchered by the Gulf war of 1991, and then bled white by a decade of economic sanctions,[1] is subjected to suicide bombings, to daily pogroms by various “insurgents”, to assassination by death squads of the Interior Ministry or arbitrary elimination by the occupying forces. And the situation in Iraq is only the focal point of a process of militarised disintegration and chaos that is also to be found in Palestine, Somalia, Sudan, the Lebanon, Afghanistan and which constantly threatens to engulf new areas of the globe, not excluding the central capitalist metropoles as indicated by the spread of terrorist bombings to New York, Madrid, and London during the first decade of this century. Far from creating a new order in the Middle East, US military power has only brought a spreading militarised chaos.
In a sense none of this military carnage on a mass scale is new. The First World War of 1914-18 already took the first major step toward a barbaric “future”. The mutual slaughter of millions of young workers forced into the trenches by their respective imperialist masters, left in its wake a pandemic of “Spanish flu” that stole the lives of millions more, while the former European national powerhouses of capitalist industry were brought to their knees economically. After the failure of the 1917 October Revolution, and of the workers insurrections it inspired in the rest of the world in the 1920s, the way was open to a still more catastrophic episode of total warfare in the 2nd World War of 1939-45. Defenceless civilians of major cities were now a principal target of systematic mass killing from the air, and a multi-million genocide took place in the heart of European civilisation.
Then the “Cold War” from 1947-89 produced a whole series of equally destructive carnages, in Korea, in Vietnam, in Cambodia and throughout Africa, while a global nuclear holocaust between the USA and the USSR remained a continual threat.
What is new in the imperialist war of today is not yet its absolute levels of destruction, since recent military conflicts, while waged with far more deadly firepower than before, at least on the part of the US, have still to engulf the major concentrations of people in the heartlands of capitalism as happened in the 1st and 2nd World Wars. What is different is that the ending of human society altogether by such war now appears in a much more clear form. In 1918 Rosa Luxemburg likened the barbarism of the 1st World War to the decline of Ancient Rome and the Dark Ages that followed. Today even this dramatic comparison seems inadequate to express the endless horror that capitalist barbarism has in store for us. While for all the brutality and mayhem of the previous two world wars last century, they still gave way to long periods of relative stability, there was still a perspective - even if ultimately illusory - of reconstructing social order in the interests of the dominant imperialist powers. All the military flashpoints of the contemporary situation, by contrast, offer no perspective from the warring factions except a further descent into social fragmentation at all levels, a real decomposition of the social order, of chaos without end.
Most of the American bourgeoisie has been forced to recognise that it’s imperialist strategy of the unilateral imposition of its world hegemony, whether at the diplomatic, military or ideological level, has backfired. The report of the Iraq Study Group to the US Congress doesn’t hide this obvious fact. Instead of strengthening the prestige of US imperialism the occupation of Iraq has weakened it at almost all levels. But what do the severest critics of the Bush policy within the dominant class in the US propose as an alternative? Withdrawal is impossible without further weakening US hegemony and helping accelerate the gathering chaos. A division of Iraq along ethnic lines would also have the same effect. Some even propose a return to the policy of containment as practised in the cold war. But its clear there can be no return to the world order of the two imperialist blocs. So the fiasco in Iraq is far worse than the one in Vietnam, since unlike in the latter war, the US is now trying to contain the entire world and not just its rival bloc of the USSR.
As a result, despite the scathing criticism by the ISG and the control of the US Congress by the Democratic Party, President Bush has been allowed to increase troops in Iraq by at least another 20,000, and embark on a new policy of diplomatic and military threats toward Iran. Whatever alternative strategies are being considered by the American ruling class, it will be obliged sooner or latter to make another bloody proof of its superpower status with even more dire consequences for the world’s populations, which will accelerate still further the spread of barbarism.
All this is not the result of the ineptitude and arrogance of the Republican Bush administration and the neo-conservatives as the bourgeoisies of other imperialist powers keep telling us. A return to the United Nations and multi-lateralism is not an option for peace as they and assorted pacifists claim. The UN, as Washington understands very well, had become a forum since 1989 for the frustration of US wishes: a place where its less powerful rivals could delay, water down or even veto American policy in order to prevent their positions being further weakened. In presenting the US as the only purveyor of war and chaos, France, Germany, and others only reveal their full part in the present destructive logic of imperialism: where each power is only out for itself and must oppose itself to all the others.
Not surprisingly the regular marches to “Stop the War” in the metropoles of the main powers usually give vociferous support to the smaller imperialist gangsters in the middle East, like the insurgents in Iraq or Hezbolla in the Lebanon who are fighting the US. In so doing they reveal that imperialism is a relationship from which no nation can hold aloof, and that war is not just the result of the aggression of the biggest powers.
Still others claim, despite all the evidence, that the US adventure in Iraq is a “war for oil”, thus completely obscuring the danger posed by its overriding geo-strategic objectives. This is a considerable underestimation of the gravity of the present situation. In reality the impasse in which American imperialism finds itself in Iraq is only a manifestation of the global impasse in which capitalist society finds itself. George Bush Senior announced that the dissolution of the Russian bloc would open into a new era of peace and stability, a “New World order”. Rapidly, with the first Gulf War then the barbaric conflict in Yugoslavia, in the heart of Europe, reality proved the opposite. The 1990s were not those of a world order but of a growing military chaos. Ironically it has fallen to George Bush junior to lead a new decisive step into irreversible chaos.
At the same time as capitalism in decomposition unleashed an imperialist trend towards a more clearly perceivable barbarism, so it also speeded up an assault of such ferocity on the biosphere that an artificially created climatic holocaust could also wipe out human civilisation, and human life. It is clear from the consensus of the world’s climate scientists in the February 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that the theory that the over-warming of the planet by the accumulation of relatively high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is caused by the large scale burning of fossil fuels, is no longer merely a hypothesis but “very likely”. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere retains the sun’s heat reflected off the earth’s surface and radiates it in the surrounding air, leading to the “greenhouse effect”. This process of radiative forcing began to take significant effect from around 1750, at the beginning of the capitalist industrial revolution, and since then the rise in carbon dioxide emissions and the warming of the planet has increased. Since 1950 this dual increase has begun to accelerate in a steep upward curve, with new planetary temperature records established almost yearly in the past decade. The consequences of this anthropogenic warming of the planet have already started to appear on an alarming scale: changing weather patterns leading both to repeated droughts and widescale flooding, deadly heatwaves in Northern Europe and extreme climatic conditions of hugely destructive power, which in turn are already rapidly increasing famine and disease in the third world, and leading to the massive migration of populations from affected areas, and the ruination of whole cities like New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Capitalism of course can’t be blamed with starting the burning of fossil fuels or acting on the environment in other ways to produce unforeseen and dangerous consequences. Indeed this has been going on since the dawn of human civilisation:
“The people who, in Mesopotamia, Greece, Asia Minor and elsewhere, destroyed the forests to obtain cultivable land, never dreamed that by removing along with the forests the collecting centres and reservoirs of moisture they were laying the basis for the present forlorn state of those countries. When the Italians of the Alps used up the pine forests on the southern slopes, so carefully cherished on the northern slopes, they had no inkling that by doing so they were cutting at the roots of the dairy industry in their region; they had still less inkling that they were thereby depriving their mountain springs of water for the greater part of the year, and making it possible for them to pour still more furious torrents on the plains during the rainy seasons. Those who spread the potato in Europe were not aware that with these farinaceous tubers they were at the same time spreading scrofula. Thus at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature - but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly.”[2]
Capitalism is nevertheless responsible for enormously accelerating this process of environmental damage. Not by industrialisation per se, but as a result of capitalism’s overriding quest to maximise profits and its consequent disregard for human and ecological needs, except insofar as they coincide with the goal of wealth accumulation. Furthermore the capitalist mode of production has other characteristics which contribute to the wanton destruction of the environment: the intrinsic competitiveness between capitalists, especially between each nation state which, at least in the last analysis, prevents any real co-operation at the world level; and, linked to this, the tendency of capitalism toward overproduction in its unquenchable search for profit.
In decadent capitalism, in its period of permanent crisis, this tendency towards overproduction becomes chronic. This has been particularly clear since the end of the Second World War when the expansion of the capitalist economies has taken place artificially, partly through the policy of deficit financing, by a huge expansion of debt of all kinds in the economy. This has not led to the satisfaction of the needs of the mass of the working population who remain mired in poverty, but to enormous waste: to mountains of unsold goods, to the dumping of millions of tonnes of food, to planned obsolescence in the production of huge numbers of products from cars to computers that soon become scrap, to an enormous “parity of products” produced by innumerable competitors for the same market demand.
In addition, while the rate of technological change and sophistication increases in decadence, the resulting innovations, contrary to the situation in the ascendant period of capitalism, tend to be stimulated by certain sectors of the economy, particularly the military sector. Meanwhile at the level of the infrastructure: buildings, sanitation, energy production, transportation systems we see very few revolutionary developments on the scale that characterised the emergence of the capitalist economy. In the period of capitalist decomposition, the final phase of decadence, there is an acceleration of the opposite tendency, of the attempt to reduce the cost of maintaining even the ageing infrastructure in the search for immediate profits. This process is seen in caricatural form in the current expansion of production in China and India, where an industrial infrastructure is largely absent. Instead of giving a new lease of life for capitalism, it is leading to astronomical levels of pollution: the destruction of whole river systems, enormous blankets of smog that cover several countries, etc.
This long process of decay and decomposition of the capitalist mode of production may help to explain why there has been such a dramatic acceleration in carbon dioxide emissions and the warming of the planet in recent decades. It also helps to explain why, in the face of such entrenched economic and climatic developments, capitalism and its “policy makers” will be unable to reverse the catastrophic effect of global warming.
Both these apocalyptic scenarios, which can destroy human civilisation itself, are to some extent recognised and publicised by the spokesmen and media of the elites of all the capitalist nations. That they recommend innumerable remedies to avoid these outcomes doesn’t mean that any of them therefore provide a realistic alternative to the barbaric perspectives outlined. On the contrary. In front of the ecological disaster and imperialist barbarity that it has generated, capitalism is equally powerless.
The governments of the world have generously funded the research of the IPCC since 1990 through the UN and have had their media widely publicise its most stark recent findings.
In turn the bourgeoisie’s major political parties in all countries are turning various shades of green. But on closer inspection the eco-policies of these parties, however radical they might appear, have deliberately obscured the seriousness of the problem, because the only solution to it threatens the very system whose praises they sing. The common denominator of all these green campaigns is that they have the effect of preventing a development of revolutionary consciousness amongst a population rightly horrified at the perspective of global warming. The constant eco-message from the governments is that “saving the planet is everyone’s responsibility” when the vast majority is deprived of any political or economic power and control over production and consumption, over what and how things are produced. And the bourgeoisie, which does have power in these decisions, has even less intention than ever in satisfying human and ecological needs at the expense of profit.
Al Gore, who narrowly failed to become US Democratic president in 2000, has put himself at the head of an international campaign against carbon emissions with the film “An inconvenient truth” that won a Hollywood Oscar for its graphic treatment of the danger of the rise in world temperatures, melting of the polar ice caps, the raising of sea levels and all the resultant devastation. But the film is also an election platform for Al Gore himself. He isn’t the only senior politician to realise that the justified fear of the populations with the ecological crisis can be harnessed in the scramble for power that characterises the democratic game in the major capitalist countries. In France the contenders in the presidential election have all signed the “ecological pact” of journalist star Nicolas Hulot. In Britain all the major political parties have vied with each other to see who is the greenest of them all. The Stern Report, commissioned by Gordon Brown of New Labour, has been followed by further government initiatives to reduce carbon emissions. David Cameron, leader of the Tory opposition, cycles to the Houses of Parliament (while his entourage brings up the rear in a Mercedes).
One only has to look at the results of previous government policies to cut down carbon emissions to see the inability of the capitalist states to be effective in this regard. Instead of a stabilisation of greenhouse gas emissions at 1990s level by 2000, that the signatories to the Kyoto Protocol modestly committed themselves to in 1997, there was instead an increase of 10.1% in the major industrialised countries by the end of the century, and it is forecast that this pollution will have increased by 25.3% by 2010! (Deutche Umwelthilfe).
One only has to look at the complete negligence of the capitalist states towards calamities that have already occurred as a result of climate change to judge the sincerity of their endless good intentions.
There are those who, while recognising that the profit motive is a powerful disincentive to effective limitation of such pollution, believe that the problem can be solved by replacing liberal policies with state organised solutions. But it’s clear, above all at the international level, that the capitalist states, however organised internally, are unable to co-operate on this question because each one would have to make different economic sacrifices as a result. Capitalism is competition, and today, more than ever, is dominated by the rule of every man for himself.
The capitalist world is unable to unite in a common project as massive and costly as the complete transformation of industry and transport to drastically reduce the use of carbon burning energy. On the contrary the main concern of each capitalist nation is to try and use this problem to further its own sordid ambitions. As on the imperialist and military levels, so on the ecological level, capitalism is riven by insuperable national divisions, and so cannot answer in a meaningful way the most pressing needs of humanity.
But it would be quite wrong to take a resigned attitude and think human society must necessarily sink into oblivion as a result of these powerful tendencies - of imperialism and eco-destruction - towards barbarism. Fatalism in front of the fatuity of all the capitalist half-measures proposed to bring about peace and harmony with nature is just as mistaken as the naive belief in these cosmetic cures.
Capitalist society, as well as sacrificing everything to the pursuit of profit and competition has also, inadvertently, produced the elements for its destruction as a mode of exploitation. It has created the potential technological and cultural means for a unified and planned world system of production attuned to the needs of human beings and nature. It has produced a class, the proletariat, which has no need for national or competitive prejudices, and every interest in developing international solidarity. The working class has no interest in the rapacious desire for profit. In other words capitalism has laid the basis for a higher order of society, for its supercession by socialism. Capitalism has developed the means to destroy human society, but it has also created its own gravedigger, the working class, that can preserve human society and take it to a higher level.
Capitalism has given rise to a scientific culture that is able to identify and measure invisible gases like carbon dioxide both in the present atmosphere and in the atmosphere of 10,000 years ago. Scientists can identify the specific isotopes of carbon dioxide that result from the burning of fossil fuels. The scientific community has been able to test and verify the hypothesis of the “greenhouse effect”. Yet the time has long gone when capitalism as a social system was able to use the scientific method and its results for the benefit of human progress. The bulk of scientific investigation and discovery today is devoted to destruction; to the development of ever more sophisticated methods of mass death. Only a new order of society, a communist society, can put science at the service of humanity.
Despite the past 100 years of the decline and putrefaction of capitalism, and severe defeats for the working class, these building blocks for a new society are still intact.
The resurgence of the world proletariat since 1968 proves that. The development of its class struggle against the constant pressure on proletarian living standards over the ensuing decades prevented the barbaric outcome promised by the cold war: of an all-out confrontation between the imperialist blocs. Since 1989 however and the disappearance of the blocs, the defensive posture of the working class has been unable to prevent the succession of horrific local wars that threaten to spiral out of control, drawing in more and more parts of the planet. In this period, of capitalist decomposition, the proletariat no longer has time on its side, particularly as a pressing ecological catastrophe must now be added into the historic equation.
But we cannot say yet that the decline and decomposition of capitalism has reached the “point of no return” – the point at which its barbarism could never be reversed.
Since 2003 the working class has begun to re-enter the struggle with renewed vigour after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc brought about a temporary halt to the resurgence begun in 1968.
In these conditions of developing class confidence, the increasing dangers represented by imperialist war and ecological catastrophe instead of inducing feelings of impotence and fatalism, can lead to a greater political reflection on, and consciousness of, the stakes of the world situation, and on the necessity for a revolutionary overthrow of capitalist society. It is the responsibility of revolutionaries to participate actively in this coming to consciousness.
Como 3.4.07
[1]1. Infant mortality in Iraq rose from 40 per 1000 in 1990 to 102 per 1000 in 2005. The Times, March 26, 2007.
[2]. Frederick Engels: “The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man”. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 25.
We have recently had an exchange of correspondence with a reader in Quebec which has led us once again to present our view not only of “national liberation” struggles, a subject we have dealt with at some length in our publications, but also of “democratic demands” in general which we have not previously dealt with in a specific, developed text on our part. To the extent that the arguments we present here have a general import and respond to a real questioning within the working class, especially because of the influence of the parties of the left and far left, we thought it would be useful to publish large extracts from this correspondence.
In one of his first letters, our reader asked what the ICC thought about the Quebec national question.
Here is our first reply:
"As regards the Quebec national question, it's no different from all the other questions by movements for national independence for over a century now: these movements reinforce nationalist illusions and weaken the workers' struggle. We consider that any organisation which, in Quebec, supports the demand for the independence of the "Belle Province" helps, whether consciously or not, to weaken the Quebecois, Canadian and North American proletariat."
As regards the specific question of Quebec and the attitude to adopt towards the independence movement, you write in your message of January 1st: "Concerning Quebec, I understand your opposition to the independence of Quebec and to Quebec nationalism, but I don't believe that Canadian nationalism is more ‘progressive', far from it. I believe that we have to resolutely oppose all the campaigns for the defence of the Canadian state and for the maintenance of the ‘national unity' of Canada. Canada is an imperialist, oppressor state which has to be destroyed from top to bottom. I'm not saying that we should support the independence of Quebec and the native peoples, but we also have to reject any appeal to Canadian-English chauvinism, which is dominant within the Canadian state."
Clearly it is out of the question for communists to give the slightest support to Canadian-English chauvinism, or to any form of chauvinism. However, you talk about "Canadian-English chauvinism" and "Quebec nationalism". What is the significance of this difference in terminology? Do you think that Quebec nationalism is less pernicious for the working class than Canadian-English nationalism? This is certainly not our view. And to illustrate that, we can envisage a situation which is hypothetical but by no means absurd, in which there is a powerful movement of the working class in Quebec which does not at first spread to the Anglophone provinces. It is clear that the Canadian bourgeoisie (including in Quebec) will do all it can to prevent it spreading to these provinces and one of the best ways of doing that is for the workers of Quebec to mix up proletarian class demands with autonomist or separatist demands. In this way we can see that Quebec nationalism is the worst kind of poison for the proletariat in Quebec and Canada as a whole, probably more dangerous than Canadian-English nationalism, since it seems unlikely that a class movement of Anglophone workers would be inspired by opposition to Quebecois independence.
In a situation which has some similarities with that in Quebec, Lenin wrote about the question of Polish independence:[1]
"The situation is, indeed, bewildering, but there is a way out in which all participants would remain internationalists: the Russian and German Social democrats by demanding for Poland unconditional ‘freedom to secede'; the Polish Social democrats by working for the unity of the proletarian struggle in both small and big countries without putting forward the slogan of Polish independence for the given epoch or the given period."[2]
Thus, if we really wanted to be loyal to Lenin's position, communists would have to defend the independence of Quebec in the Anglophone provinces but reject such a position in Quebec itself...
For our part, we don't share Lenin's position: we think that we have to speak the same language to all workers no matter what their nationality or their language. This is what we do in Belgium for example where our paper Internationalisme publishes exactly the same articles in French and Flemish. This said, we do recognise that Lenin's position, even though mistaken, was inspired by a deep-seated internationalism, which is certainly not the case if you don't vigorously denounce nationalism and demands for independence in Quebec.
"I think that you have a profoundly mistaken view of the relationship between Quebec nationalism and Canadian-English chauvinism. The latter is DOMINANT within the Canadian state and nourishes anti-Quebec and anti-Francophone racism. The existence of this chauvinism and its deep roots in the Anglo-Canadian working class prevents any Pan-Canadian unity of the working class. It encourages the development of nationalist tendencies among the Quebecois workers. One of its aspects is the rejection of bilingualism, which in any case is more a myth than a reality in Canada. Most Francophones are obliged to speak English and most Anglophones don't speak or refuse to speak French.
"Contrary to what you say the workers' movement in English Canada is based on the defence of Canadian unity and the ‘integrity' of the Canadian state, to the detriment of the Quebecois and the First Nations. There will NEVER be working class unity in Canada as long as the oppression of national minorities and Anglo-Chauvinist racism lasts...
"It's one thing to reject Quebec nationalism and to consider that Quebecois independence is an impasse and even a deception for the working class, but to go from there to claiming that it is more ‘dangerous' than Anglophone chauvinism, which is quite similar to Protestant Orangeism in Northern Ireland, there is a huge gulf.
"The Canadian government does everything in its power to keep Quebec in the Confederation, including the threat not to recognise a positive result in the 1995 referendum and even to carve up an independent Quebec along ethnic lines, which amounts to calling for the partition of Quebec. Then there was the law on referendum clarity where the federal government gave itself the right to decide on the rules of the next referendum on sovereignty, whether at the level of the way the question was posed or the size of the majority needed to carry through with the independence of Quebec.
"Above all, don't tell me that Anglo-Canadian nationalism is less pernicious for the unity of the working class. I strongly invite you to educate yourselves more about the Quebec national question."
You have replied particularly vigorously to our suggestion that, in certain ways, Quebec nationalism could be "more dangerous than Canadian-English nationalism".
We don't contest the facts you put forward to support your critique of our position, in particular that "Canadian-English chauvinism...is DOMINANT within the Canadian state and nourishes anti-Quebec and anti-Francophone racism" and that it "encourages the development of nationalist tendencies among the Quebecois workers". We are also ready to accept that "Anglophone chauvinism is quite similar to Protestant Orangeism in Northern Ireland."
In fact, we are going to base our reply on this latter argument.
To begin with, we think that there is here a false interpretation of our analysis. When we write that Quebec nationalism may prove more dangerous for the working class than Anglophone nationalism, this in no way means that we see the latter as a kind of "lesser evil" or that it is less hateful than the former. In fact, it's true that, given that the Francophone population is subjected to a form of national oppression by the Canadian state, pro-independence demands can be presented as a sort of struggle against oppression. And it's true that the class struggle of the proletariat is also a struggle against oppression. And it's here that the greatest danger lies.
When the Anglophone workers enter into struggle, in particular against attacks launched by the federal government, there is not much chance that their fight could be portrayed as a demand for maintaining the national oppression of the Francophone workers because the latter would also be victims of the government attacks. Even if the Anglophone workers don't have a great deal of sympathy for the Francophones in normal times, it would be surprising if, during a conflict with their bourgeoisie, they were to treat the Francophones as scapegoats. History shows that when the workers enter into struggle (a real struggle and not a typical union action aimed at derailing and sabotaging workers' militancy), there is a strong tendency for them to express their solidarity with other workers with whom they share a common enemy.
Once again, we don't know the situation in Canada very well, but we have had many experiences of this kind in Europe. For example, despite all the nationalist campaigns aimed at the Flemish and Francophone workers in Belgium, despite the fact that the political parties and unions are organised on a communitarian basis, we have seen that when there are important struggles in this country the workers are not much bothered about their linguistic or geographical origins and that they actually gain a real satisfaction from finding themselves shoulder to shoulder with workers from other linguistic groups, even though in "normal" times they are constantly being set against each other. Another example was provided a year ago in one of the countries where nationalism has been a huge weight, Northern Ireland. In February 2006 the Catholic and Protestant postal workers came out on strike together and held demonstrations in both Catholic and Protestant areas against the common enemy.[3]
You write:
"There will NEVER be working class unity in Canada as long as the oppression of national minorities and Anglo-Chauvinist racism lasts..." You seem to be saying that this means that the rejection of their own chauvinism by the Anglophone workers is a sort of precondition they have to fulfil before they can engage in struggle against the Canadian bourgeoisie. In fact, all the historical examples give the lie to such a schema: it's during the course of the class combat, and not as a precondition for it, that workers are led to go beyond all the mystifications, including nationalist ones, that the bourgeoisie uses to maintain its grip on society.
In the final analysis, if we say that Quebec nationalism may prove to be more dangerous than Anglophone nationalism, it's precisely because there is a form of national oppression against the Francophone workers. When the latter enter into struggle against the federal state, they run the risk of being more receptive to arguments that present the class struggle and the struggle against national oppression as two complementary struggles.
This question is analogous to the question of democracy and fascism. They are two forms of class rule, two forms of class dictatorship. The latter is more brutal in the way it exercises this dictatorship, but this doesn't mean that communists have to choose the "lesser evil" between the two. In fact, the history of the Russian and German revolutions between 1917 and 1923 teaches us that the greatest danger for the working class was represented not by the openly reactionary parties but by the "social democrats", those who benefited from the workers having much more confidence in them.
Let us take one final example of the danger of the nationalism of oppressed nations: Poland.
The independence of Poland from Czarist oppression was one of the central demands of the 1st and 2nd Internationals. However, from the end of the 19th century on, Rosa Luxemburg and her Polish comrades began to question this demand, showing in particular that the socialists' demand for Polish independence ran the risk of weakening the proletariat of that country. In 1905, the proletariat in Poland was in the vanguard of the revolution against the Czarist regime. By contrast, in 1917 and afterwards, it didn't follow the same path. On the contrary: one of the most successful methods used by the British and French ruling classes to paralyse and undo the Polish proletariat was to give their support to Polish independence. The workers in Poland were then caught up in a nationalist whirlpool which made them turn away from the revolution unfolding on the other side of their eastern frontier, and in some cases even led them to enlist in the troops sent to fight against the revolution.
In the end, which nationalism proved to be the most dangerous? The odious "Great Russian" chauvinism which Lenin denounced, full of contempt for the Poles and other nationalities, but left behind by the Russian workers at the moment of the revolution, or the nationalism of the workers in the oppressed nation par excellence, Poland?
The answer is self-evident. But we should also mention the tragic consequences of the fact that the majority of Polish workers followed the sirens of nationalism after 1917. Their non-participation in the revolution, even their hostility towards it, prevented the Russian and German revolutions from joining up geographically. And if this junction had taken place, it is probable that the world revolution would have been victorious, sparing humanity from all the barbarism of the 20th century, which continues to this day.
"Concerning the national question, I can understand that you are opposed to national demands, but I don't think this should make you close your eyes to national oppression. For example in the 60s and 70s one of the main demands of the Quebecois workers was the right to speak French at work, since a large number of enterprises and shops, above all in the Montreal region, functioned solely in English. Much progress has been made at this level, but there is still much to do. In my opinion it is vital to support this kind of democratic demand. We can't say to the workers ‘wait until the coming of socialism to sort that out', even if capitalism is by its nature incapable of putting an end to national oppression...
"I don't think that this kind of (democratic) demand, while not being revolutionary, can undermine the unity of the proletariat. On the contrary! The right to work in your own language, even if it doesn't put an end to exploitation, is an indispensable right for the workers. In the 1960s, the Quebecois workers didn't even have the right to speak to foremen in French in certain companies in the Montreal region. Certain restaurants in the west of Montreal only had their menus in English and the big stores in this area only operated in English.
"As I mentioned in my message, the situation has improved a lot, but there is still progress to be made, especially in the small companies with less than 50 employees. At the all-Canada level, bilingualism is far from being a reality despite all the fine official speeches.
"Concerning the Quebec national question, you asked me why I use the term chauvinism for Canadian-English nationalism and I don't use it to describe Quebec nationalism. Generally the organisations of the left use the word chauvinism to describe Canadian-English nationalism, because it is the dominant nation within the Canadian state. This doesn't mean that Quebec nationalism is more ‘progressive' than its Canadian-English counter-part.
"The Canadian-English workers' movement already raised the banner of Canadian unity during the 1972 general strike in Quebec. The NDP (New Democratic Party) and the CTC (Canadian Labour Congress) denounced this strike for being ‘separatist' and ‘undermining Canadian unity'. In my view an internationalist position has to resolutely and without compromise oppose both bourgeois camps and both nationalisms (Canadian-English and Quebecois). Even if today a movement of the working class in English Canada has little chance of being based on the defence of the oppression of the Quebecois, Anglophone chauvinism is still present all over Canada and is prejudicial to the unity of the working class. Any defence of the Canadian state and its so-called ‘unity' is at least as reactionary as promoting the independence of Quebec."
We wrote a long reply to the comrade's various letters on this question of demands against linguistic oppression, which we will see in the sections that follow.
[1]. With a significant difference in scale: the oppression meted out to the different nationalities in the Russian empire cannot be compared to the attitude of the Ottawa government to the different nationalities in Canada.
[2]. "The discussion on self-determination summed up", July 1916, Collected Works, Vol. 22.
[3]. See https://en.internationalism.org/wr/292_solidarity.html [20].
Dear comrade,
With this letter, we want to continue our discussion on the national question, in particular the question of Quebec. The first thing we want to say is that we absolutely agree with you when you say:
"...we have to be clear that opposition to the Quebec independence movement has nothing to do with the defence of the Canadian imperialist state and that it completely rejects Canadian nationalism. The federal Canadian camp deserves no more support than the Quebec independence camp."
And also:
"...an internationalist position has to resolutely and without compromise oppose the two bourgeois camps and the two nationalisms (Canadian/English and Quebecois)."
Indeed, internationalism today means that you cannot give support to any national state. We have to be precise about the fact that we're talking about today because this wasn't always the case. In the 19th century, it was possible for internationalists to support not only certain struggles for national independence (classically, the struggle for Polish independence for example), but also certain nation states. Thus, during the different wars that took place in Europe in the mid-19th century, Marx and Engels often took the side of one or other camp when they considered that the victory of this nation or the defeat of another would serve to advance the bourgeoisie against feudal reaction (symbolised by Czarism). Similarly, in December 1864, in the name of the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association, Marx sent the US president Abraham Lincoln a message of congratulations on his re-election and of support for his opposition to the efforts of the southern states to secede (in this case, Marx and Engels vigorously opposed a demand for national independence!).
And here we come to the heart of the question of "democratic demands" that you raise:
"... in the 60s and 70s one of the main demands of the Quebec workers was the right to work in French...In my view it is indispensable to support this kind of democratic demand. We can't say to the workers ‘wait for the dawn of socialism to sort that out', even if capitalism is by its nature incapable of putting an end to national oppression". And again: "...I don't think that these kinds of demand, while not being revolutionary, can undermine the unity of the proletariat."
In order to be able to deal correctly with the specific case of "linguistic" demands (in particular the Canadian authorities' ostracism of French speakers), we have to go back to the general question of "democratic demands".
The formula is itself significant:
demand: this is something expressed (including by violent means) to an authority which is called on to grant it, whether willingly or under duress. It presupposes that the power of decision does not belong to those who express it, even if they can obviously "force the hand" of those who do hold this power through a favourable balance of forces (for example: a wage increase or the withdrawal of anti-working class measures obtained through a massive mobilisation of the workers that obliges the bosses to step back - which doesn't mean that they have been deprived of their decision-making power in the enterprise);
democracy: etymologically, "power of the people". It was Athens which invented "democracy" (which was very limited since slaves, foreigners and women were excluded) but it is the bourgeoisie which has "enthroned" it, so to speak.
The rise of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by the development of the different attributes of "democracy". This was obviously no accident but corresponded to the necessity for the bourgeois class to abolish the political, economic and social privileges of the nobility. For the latter, and in particular for its supreme representative, the King, power was essentially divine in origin. In the final analysis it was accountable only to the Almighty, even if, in France, for example, between 1302 and 1789 there were 21 meetings of the Estates General, representing the nobility, the clergy, and the "Third Estate", to give advice on financial matters or the mode of government. It was indeed during the last meeting of the Estates General that, under the pressure of peasant and urban revolts and the financial bankruptcy of the monarchy, the Third Estate launched the French revolution (notably by abolishing the privileges of the nobility and the clergy and limiting the power of the King). Following the example set by the English bourgeoisie a century and half earlier, the French bourgeoisie went on to establish its political power, which was hardly very "democratic" (especially of you think about the autocratic power of Napoleon the First, even though he was the heir of the revolution of 1789).
While it considered that the nobility should no longer be allowed to run things, the bourgeoisie only saw democracy in its own terms. Its slogan was "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and it declared that "men are born free and remain free and equal in their rights". However, although universal suffrage was written into the Constitution of 1793, this only became effective on 2nd March 1848, in the heat of the February revolution. And it was some time later that universal suffrage was established in other "advanced" countries: Germany 1871; Holland 1896; Austria 1906; Sweden 1909; Italy 1912; Belgium 1919...just after the very "democratic" England in 1918. In fact, in the majority of European countries, in the 19th century, universal suffrage was not the basis of bourgeois democracy: since the right to vote was determined by a certain level of taxation (in some cases, a high level of taxation gave one a right to multiple votes), the workers and other poor people, in other words the great majority of the population, were excluded from the electoral process. This is why universal suffrage was one of the main demands of the workers' movement during this period. This was notably the case in Britain where the world's first mass working class movement, Chartism, was formed around the question of universal suffrage. If the bourgeoisie opposed this demand for so long, it was obviously because it feared that the workers would use the vote to challenge its power within the state. This fear was particularly strong among the more archaic fractions of the bourgeoisie, especially those who were closest to the aristocracy (which, in a number of countries, had abandoned its economic privileges, such as exemption from taxes, but had conserved a strong position within the state, above all in the military and the diplomatic corps). This is why this period witnessed alliances between the working class and certain sectors of the bourgeoisie. This was for example the case in Paris in February 1848 when the revolution was supported by the workers, the artisans, the "liberal" bourgeoisie (for example the poet Lamartine) and even "legitimist" monarchists who saw King Louis-Philippe as a usurper. Having said this, the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat came rapidly to the surface with the "June Days" when, following the workers' uprising against the closure of the National Workshops, 1,500 of them were massacred and 15,000 deported to Algeria. In fact, it was at this point that some of the more dynamic sectors of the bourgeoisie understood that they could make use of universal suffrage against the archaic sectors that were standing in the way of economic progress. Furthermore, during the ensuing period, the French bourgeoisie became quite accustomed to a political system which combined a form of autocracy (Napoleon III) with universal suffrage, thanks in particular to the weight of a reactionary peasantry. It was in fact an assembly elected by universal suffrage dominated by deputies from the countryside (the "rurals") which decided on the repression of the Paris Commune of 1871 and gave full power to Thiers to direct the slaughter of 30,000 workers during the "bloody week" at the end of May.
Thus, two decades of universal suffrage in France were proof that the ruling class could definitely accommodate itself to this method of organising its institutions.
In the whole period that followed, Marx and Engels often warned against "parliamentary cretinism", and, drawing the lessons from the Commune, they underlined the necessity to destroy the bourgeois state. Nevertheless, along with the whole workers' movement with the exception of the anarchists, they continued to see universal suffrage as one of the main demands of the proletarian struggle.
And indeed, despite the dangers contained within it, support for this "democratic demand" was totally justified:
In connection with the demand for universal suffrage, the foundation stone of bourgeois democracy, the working class also fought for other rights such as freedom of the press and freedom of association. These were demands that the working class put forward at the same time as the progressive sectors of the bourgeoisie. For example, one of the first political texts by Marx dealt with the censorship exerted by the Prussian monarchy. As the editor both of the Rheinische Zeitung, (1842-43) which was still inspired by radical bourgeois ideas, and of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49) which was influenced by communism, Marx constantly denounced the official censorship. This in a sense epitomises the fact that at this time there was a convergence around democratic demands between the workers' movement and the bourgeoisie, which was still a revolutionary class trying to get rid of the vestiges of the feudal order.
As regards freedom of association, there was a similar convergence between the interests of the proletariat and those of the progressive bourgeoisie. Furthermore, freedom of association, like the freedom of the press, was one of the fundamental preconditions for the functioning of bourgeois democracy founded on universal suffrage, since political parties are an essential element in this mechanism. This said, what applied to freedom of association on the political level did not at all apply at the level of the workers organising themselves for the defence of their economic interests. Even the most revolutionary of bourgeoisies, the one which led the French revolution of 1789, was ferociously opposed to this right despite all its grand principles of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity". Thus, in a law promulgated on 14th June, workers' combinations were forbidden as "an affront to freedom and the Declaration of the Rights of Man", and it was not until the 1848 revolution that this law was amended (with many reservations, since the new formulation still denounced "attempts to restrict the free exercise of industry and the freedom to work"). In the end, it was not until 1884 that trade unions could be formed freely. As for that Motherland of Liberty, Britain, trade unions were not legally recognised there until June 1871 (and it has to be said that the union leaders, especially those who sat on the General Council of the IWA, had been opposed to the Paris Commune).
The national demands which took on a good deal of importance around the mid-19th century (they were at the heart of the 1848 revolutions across Europe) were an integral part of these "democratic demands", especially where there was a convergence between the old empires (Russian and Austrian) and the domination of the aristocracy. One of the basic reasons for the workers' movement supporting certain of these demands is that they weakened these empires and thus the feudal reaction, while opening the door to the formation of viable nation states. During this period, supporting the demand for national independence was a key issue for the working class. One of the best illustrations of this was the fact that the IWA was formed in 1864 by English and French workers at an assembly held in support of Polish independence. But the support given by the workers' movement didn't apply to all national demands. Marx and Engels condemned the national demands of the small Slav people (Serbs, Croats, Slovenians, Czechs, Moravians, Slovaks) because they were not in a position to set up a viable nation state and were an obstacle to modern capitalism, being caught up in the games of the Russian empire and holding back the development of the German bourgeoisie.[1]
[1]. See the 1849 article by Engels' "Democratic Pan-slavism" https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/02/15.htm [21].
The support the workers' movement gave to democratic demands was based essentially on a historic situation in which capitalism was still progressive. In this context, certain sectors of the bourgeoisie could still act in a "revolutionary" or "progressive" manner. But the situation changed radically at the beginning of the 20th century, above all with the First World War. From then on, all sectors of the bourgeoisie became reactionary because capitalism had completed its fundamental historic task of subjecting the whole planet to its economic laws and developing the productive forces of society on an unprecedented scale (starting with the most important productive force, the working class). The system was no longer a condition for human progress but an obstacle to it. As the Communist International put it in 1919, we had entered "the epoch of wars and revolutions". And if we look again at the main democratic demands mentioned above, we can see how they have ceased to be a terrain for the struggle of the proletariat.
Universal suffrage (which had not in fact been accorded in all the developed countries, as we saw above) became one of the principal means used by the bourgeoisie to preserve its domination. We can take two examples from the countries where the revolution went furthest: Russia and Germany.
In Russia, after the seizure of power by the soviets in October 1917, elections to a Constituent Assembly were organised on the basis of universal suffrage (the Bolsheviks had raised this demand before October in order to unmask the Provisional Government and the bourgeois parties who were against the election of a Constituent Assembly). These elections gave a majority to those parties, in particular the Socialist Revolutionaries, who had participated in the Provisional Government and served as a final rampart of bourgeois order. This Constituent Assembly raised great hopes in the ranks of the Russian and international bourgeoisie who saw it as a means to deprive the working class of its victory and return themselves to power. This is why at the first meeting of the Assembly, the Soviet power dissolved it.
A year later, in Germany, the war had, as in Russia, given birth to the revolution. At the beginning of November, workers' and soldiers' councils were formed throughout the country, but (as at the beginning of the Russian revolution) they were dominated by the majority social democrats, the same people who had participated in the imperialist war. These councils handed power over to a "Council of Peoples' Commissars" run by the SPD but also the "Independents" of the USPD who served as a left cover for the real bosses. All of a sudden, the SPD called for the election of a constituent assembly for 15 February 1919:
"He who wants bread, must want peace. He who wants peace, must want the Constituent, the freely elected representation of the whole German people. He who acts against the Constituent or who procrastinates about it, is depriving you of peace, freedom and bread, is robbing you of the first fruits of the victory of the revolution...such a person is a counter-revolutionary" (thus the Spartacists were "counter-revolutionaries". The Stalinists didn't invent anything new when a few years later they used the same term against those who had remained loyal to the revolution).
"Socialisation will take place and must take place... through the will of the labouring people who, fundamentally, want to abolish this economy animated by the search for profit by particular elements. But this will be a thousand times easier to impose if it is the Constituent which decrees it rather than being ordered by the dictatorship of some revolutionary committee."[1]
This was obviously a way of disarming the working class and leading it onto a terrain which was not its own, of emptying the workers' councils of any reason for existing (since they are presented as no more than a provisional institution until the next Constituent Assembly) and of preventing the councils from heading in a similar direction to that taken by the soviets in Russia, where the revolutionaries had gradually won a majority within them. At the same time as making grand "democratic" declarations to send the workers off to sleep, the socialists were getting together with the army HQ to plan the "cleaning out of the Bolsheviks", i.e. the bloody repression of insurgent workers and the liquidation of the revolutionaries. This is what they did in mid-January, following a provocation which pushed the workers of Berlin into a premature insurrection. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (accused of being counter-revolutionaries because they were opposed in advance to the Constituent Assembly), were murdered, along with hundreds of workers, on 15th January. On 19th January the anticipated elections to the Constituent Assembly were held. This was the triumph of universal suffrage...against the working class.
With regard to freedom of the press, in most European countries it was gradually won by the working class newspapers by the end of the 19th century. In Germany for example, the anti-Socialist laws which hindered the social democratic press (it had to be published in Switzerland) were lifted in 1890. However, although the workers' movement could express itself with almost complete freedom by the eve of the First World War, these gains were abolished overnight as soon as the war broke out. The only position that could be freely expressed in the papers was the one supporting national unity and the war effort. In the countries which participated in the war, revolutionaries had to publish and distribute their press illegally and clandestinely, as in Czarist Russia. This was true to such a point that Russia, after the February 1917 revolution, suddenly became "the freest country in the world". This sudden abolition of press freedom for the workers' movement, this overnight cancelling out of the gains of decades of struggle, undertaken not by the most archaic sectors of the ruling class but by the most "advanced" bourgeoisies, was one of the signs that a new period had begun, one in which there could no longer be the slightest common interest between the proletariat and any sector of the bourgeoisie. What was revealed by this assault on the workers' organisations' freedom of expression was not the great strength of the bourgeoisie but a great weakness, a weakness springing from the fact that the bourgeoisie's rule over society no longer corresponded to humanity's historic needs but was now the open and definitive antithesis of these needs.
Of course, after the First World War, freedom of the press was re-established for the former workers' organisations in the advanced countries. But this freedom of the press was no longer the result of struggles of the working class coinciding with the interests of the most dynamic sectors of the bourgeoisie, as had been the case during the course of the 19th century. On the contrary, it corresponded to the fact that the bourgeoisie had managed to gain the upper hand over the proletariat during the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. And one of the major elements in the victory of the bourgeoisie had been its ability to take over the old organisations of the workers' movement, the Socialist parties and the trade unions. These organisations obviously continued to present themselves as defenders of the working class and used an "anti-capitalist" language which obliged the ruling class to organise the freedom of the press in order to create the appearance of a "democratic debate". We should also remember that in the wake of the Russian revolution, the bourgeoisie set up a cordon sanitaire around it in the name of democracy, accusing it of killing freedom. However, it soon became clear that this love for democratic freedoms could easily be set aside even by the bourgeoisie's most modern factions and not just by its most archaic ones. This is what happened with the rise of fascism in the early 1920s in Italy and at the beginning of the 1930s in Germany. Contrary to the view of the Communist International, which was criticised by the Italian communist left, fascism in no way represented a kind of "feudal reaction" (even if it was supported by certain aristocrats who were all for law and order). On the contrary, it was a political orientation supported by the most modern sectors of the bourgeoisie, who saw it as a means for advancing the country's imperialist interests. This can be seen very clearly in the case of Germany where Hitler, even before he came to power, received massive support from the dominant and most modern sectors of industry, particular the steel industry (Krupp, Thyssen) and the chemical industry (BASF).
Concerning the question of "freedom of association", it is obviously connected to the question of freedom of the press and universal suffrage. In most of the advanced countries, the workers' organisations could meet where they liked. But again we have to point out that this "freedom" was the other side of the coin to the integration of the former workers' parties into the state apparatus.[2] Furthermore, after the First World War, now that these parties had shown how effective they could be in dealing with the working class, the bourgeoisie showed them much more confidence and put them in power in several European countries during the 1930s, as part of the policy of the "Popular Fronts". It turned not only to the Socialist parties but also to the "Communist" parties who had in their turn betrayed the proletariat. The latter indeed played the role of spearheads of the counter-revolution, especially in Spain where they distinguished themselves in the murder of the most militant workers. And in a number of other European countries they served as the recruiting sergeants for the Second World War and the main protagonists for the "Resistance", particularly in France and Italy. We should also note that the defence of internationalist and revolutionary ideas had become particularly difficult during this period. Thus Trotsky was denied political asylum in most countries of the world (which had become a "planet without visa" as he put it in his autobiography) and was along with his comrades subjected to permanent police surveillance and persecution. The difficulties facing revolutionaries were even greater at the end of the Second World War, when those who had remained loyal to internationalist principles were denounced - above all by the Stalinists - as "collaborators", persecuted and in some cases (such as Italy) murdered.
Again in relation to freedom of association, we should make a special mention of the trade unions. After the First World
War they also benefited from a good deal of solicitude on the part of the bourgeoisie. During the 1930s, they took part in the sabotage of struggles and above all in channelling workers' discontent towards support for the bourgeois parties who were leading the way in the preparations for imperialist war (support for Roosevelt in the USA, in Europe support for the Popular Fronts that were preparing to provide cannon-fodder in the name of anti-fascism). We should also note that it was not only the democratic sectors of the bourgeoisie that drew strength from the unions. Fascism also appealed to them once it had understood the need to keep control over the working class at the "rank and file" level. Obviously, in the fascist regimes, as in the Stalinist regimes, the unions' role as state organs and auxiliaries to the police was much clearer than in the democratic regimes. But even in the latter, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the unions overtly presented themselves as defenders of the national economy and played the role of police in the factories in order to incite the workers to make sacrifices in the name of reconstruction.
The "right" to participate in elections, which workers had fought for in the 19th century, became in the course of the 20th century an "electoral duty" orchestrated by vast media campaigns by the bourgeoisie (in some case, like Belgium, the vote has even become compulsory). In the same way, the "right" to belong to a union that workers once fought for became the obligation to join a union (in those sectors which practised the "closed-shop" system), or to go through the union to raise demands or go on strike.
One of the great strengths of the bourgeoisie in the 20th century, as shown during the First World War, was its ability to take the "democratic rights", which the working class had fought for so bitterly in the previous century, often at the cost of its own blood, and turn them against the class.
And this applies particularly to the "democratic demand" for national self-determination or the rights of oppressed national minorities. We saw earlier that this demand in itself was not at all proletarian, but could rightly be supported in specific cases by the working class and its vanguard. In contrast to what happened to the trade unions, "national" demands didn't acquire a bourgeois character when capitalism entered its phase of decadence, since they had been bourgeois from the start. But because the bourgeoisie had ceased to be a revolutionary or even a progressive class, these demands became totally reactionary and counter-revolutionary, a real poison for the proletariat.
There are plenty of examples. Thus, one of the main themes invoked by the European bourgeoisie to justify imperialist war in 1914 was the defence of oppressed nationalities. And since the war was fought between empires which inevitably oppressed various peoples, there was no lack of arguments: Alsace and Lorraine, against the wishes of its population, under the heel of the German Empire; southern Slavs dominated by the Austrian Empire; peoples of the Balkans oppressed by the Ottoman empire; Finland and the Baltic countries (without counting the dozens of nationalities in the Caucasus and central Asia) trapped in the "prison-house of nations" (as the Czarist Empire was called), etc. To this list of peoples oppressed by the main protagonists of the world war, we can obviously add the multitude of colonial populations in Africa, Asia and Oceania.
Similarly, we have already seen in our previous letter how the independence of Poland was to be a decisive weapon against the world revolution at the end of the First World War. We can add that the slogan "the right of peoples to self-determination" had no better defender at this time than the American president Woodrow Wilson. If the bourgeoisie that was about to take the leading role in the world showed such concern for oppressed peoples, it obviously wasn't out of "humanism" (whatever Wilson's personal feelings may have been) but because it had its own interests in mind. And that's not hard to understand: the majority of the world was still under the domination of the European powers who had won the war (or who had kept out of it, like Holland, Spain and Portugal), and the decolonisation of these areas would leave them open to a take-over by American imperialism (through less costly means than direct colonial administration), which was singularly lacking in colonies of its own.
One last word on this subject: although in the 19th century national emancipation had been associated with democratic demands against the feudal empires, the European nations who won their "independence" at the end of the First World War were for the most part led by fascist-type dictatorships. This was notably the case in Poland (with the Pilsudski regime) but also in the three Baltic countries and Hungary.
The Second World War, and the process which led up to it, also saw the extensive use of national demands. For example, it was in the name of the rights of the German minority in the Sudetenland that the Nazi regime took over part of Czechoslovakia in 1938 (the Munich accords). Similarly, it was in the name of Croatian independence that the Nazi armies invaded Yugoslavia in 1941, an operation supported by Hungary which came to the rescue of the "national rights" of the Hungarian minority of Voivodina.
In fact, what has happened all over the world since the First World War has totally confirmed the analysis originated by Rosa Luxemburg at the end of the 19th century: the demand for national independence has ceased to have the progressive role that it could once play in certain cases. Not only has it become a demand that is particularly harmful to the working class, but it is easily integrated into the imperialist designs of the different states and has served as a flag for the most reactionary and xenophobic bourgeois cliques.
[1]. SPD leaflet - see our series of articles on the German revolution in International Review n° 82.
[2]. In one of your messages you write that "the Canadian-English workers' movement has already raised the banner of Canadian unity during the general strike of 1972 in Quebec. The National Democratic Party and the Canadian Congress of Labour denounced this strike as ‘separatist' and ‘undermining Canadian unity'". In fact it's not the "Canadian-English workers' movement" which adopted this attitude but bourgeois parties with a workerist language and trade unions in the service of capital.
Having said this, are we to conclude that the working class today can still support "democratic demands"?
We have seen what has become of the "democratic demands" won by the workers' struggles of the 19th century:
universal suffrage has become one of the prime means of masking the dictatorship of capital behind the idea of the "sovereign people"; it's one of capital's favourite tools for sterilising and derailing the discontent and the hopes of the working class;
Today "democratic rights" and more generally "human rights" have become the major theme of most sectors of the bourgeoisie.
In was in the name of defending these "rights" that the Western bloc waged the Cold War for over 40 years against the Russian bloc. It was for the defence of "democratic rights" against "terrorist barbarism and Islamic fundamentalism" or the Saddam dictatorship that the US government launched the devastating wars in the Middle East. We will pass over many other examples, but it is also worth recalling that the defence of "democracy", before it was the flag of American imperialism and its allies after 1947, had already served as the theme for dragooning the workers into the biggest massacre in history, the Second World War. It is worth noting here that as long as it was an ally against Germany, the Stalinist regime, which could certainly vie with the fascists when it came to police terror and the massacre of whole populations (and in fact preceded them in this respect) didn't seem to bother the western governments in their crusade for democracy.
With regard to the parties of the left, i.e. the bourgeois parties who have more impact on the working class, the demand for "democratic rights" is in general an excellent way of drowning class demands and preventing the proletariat from affirming its class identity. What applies to "democratic demands" also applies to pacifism: faced with war, we regularly see mobilisations orchestrated by all sorts of political sectors from the extreme left to certain elements of the chauvinist right who consider that this or that war is not opportune for the interests of the nation (this is fairly common in France today where even the right is, in its majority, opposed to American policies). Behind the banner of "no to war" the workers, and above all their class interests, are completely drowned in a sea of democratic and pacifist consciences (when it's not out and out chauvinism: it's not at all rare to see bearded Muslims and veiled women taking part in the demonstrations against the war in the Middle East).
Since the First World War the position of revolutionaries towards pacifism has been to combat the petty bourgeois illusions it spreads. Revolutionaries have always been in the front line of denouncing imperialist war but this is never based on purely moral considerations. They have shown that it is capitalism as a whole which is responsible for wars, which are inevitable as long as the system survives, and that the only force in society which can really struggle against war is the working class, which has to preserve its class independence in the face of all the pacifist, humanist and democratic sermons.
The first thing to say here is that the workers' movement has never considered the persistence of native languages, and thus demands for them to persist, to be "progressive" or "democratic". In fact, one of the characteristics of the revolutionary bourgeoisie was that it carried through the unification of viable nations, which involved going beyond provincial or local particularities linked to the feudal period. The imposition of a single national language was in many cases one of the instruments of this national unification (in the same way as the unification of systems of weights and measures, for example). This unification of the language usually took place through force, repression, bloodbaths: in fact, the classic methods which capitalism used to spread its hold over the world. Throughout their lives, Marx and Engels obviously denounced the barbaric methods through which capitalism established its hegemony over the planet, whether during the phase of primitive accumulation (see the admirable pages in the last section of Volume One of Capital)[2] or during colonial conquests. At the same time, they always explained that, despite its barbarism, the bourgeoisie was the unconscious agent of historic progress by creating a world market, by liberating the productive forces of society, by generalising associated labour through the wage system, in short by preparing the material conditions for the coming of socialism.[3]
Much more than all the other social systems put together, capitalism has destroyed all the civilisations, cultures, and thus languages around it. There's no use deploring this or trying to return to the past: it's an accomplished and irreversible historical fact. You can't turn the wheel of history back. It's as if you tried to go back to artisan labour or the small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural production of the Middle Ages.[4]
This irresistible march of capitalism has selected a certain number of dominant languages, not on the basis of any linguistic superiority, but simply on the basis of the military and economic superiority of the peoples and states who use them. Some of these national languages have become international languages, spoken by the inhabitants of a number of countries. There are not that many of them: today, we're essentially talking about English, Spanish, French[5] and German. With regard to German, which is of great richness and rigour, and which was the language of many fundamental works of world culture (the philosophical works of Kant, Fichte, Hegel etc, the works of Freud, Einstein's theory of relativity and...the works of Marx) it is only used in Europe and it is already well past its heyday.
In fact, when it comes to real international languages used as a main language by more than a hundred million people, there is only Spanish, and of course English. The latter is today the real international language. This is the inevitable consequence of the fact that the two nations which have successively dominated capitalism were Britain and then America. Anyone who doesn't know English today is handicapped either when travelling or surfing the net, or doing serious scientific studies, especially in leading fields like IT. This is obviously not the case with French (which was in the past the international language of the European courts and of diplomacy, but evidently this didn't involve that many people).
To return to a remark you made in your messages: this is why, even if it is actively promoted by the Federal Canadian State, bilingualism will never be a reality in Canada. We have an edifying example of this in the case of Belgium. In Antwerp or Ghent, the Flemish workers often have a boss who speaks French. This has led many of them to feel that in refusing to speak French, they are in some way resisting the boss and the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, while it has never existed in an integral way for either of the two communities, bilingualism is much more common among the Flemish than the French-speaking Walloons. For several decades, Wallonia, the birthplace of Belgium's large-scale industry, has been losing the race at the economic level in relation to Flanders. One of the themes of the Flemish nationalists today is that this region, with its high rate of unemployment and its outdated industries, is a burden on Flanders. They tell the Flemish workers that they have to work and pay taxes to subsidise the Walloon workers: this is one of the themes of the extreme right independence party, Vlaams Belang.
The fact that the Flemish workers today are now much more often able to speak Flemish with their boss obviously doesn't change their exploited condition. This said, the population of Flanders is more and more bilingual, but the second language which is now developing is not French, which would allow a better communication with the Francophone population of the country, but English. This is also the case with the Francophone population. And the fact that, in their speeches, the King and the head of government express themselves in French and Flemish in a very equitable way doesn't change this.
We can take another example, that of Catalan.
Historically, Catalonia is the main industrial region of Spain and the most advanced on many levels: living standards, culture, and education for example. The working class of Catalonia has since the 19th century represented the most conscious and combative sector of the Spanish proletariat. In this region, the question of linguistic demands has been posed for a long time because the official language of all regions of Spain has been Castillian even though the current language, the language you speak with your family, your friends, in the street, is Catalan. This question has obviously been raised within the workers' movement. Among the anarcho-syndicalists who dominated it for a long time, this was often a thorny question since some of them, in the name of the "federalism" so beloved of the anarchists, were in favour of the pre-eminence of Catalan in the workers' press. Others argued, rightly enough, that while the boss of the enterprise may have been Catalan, many workers were not and spoke Castillian (a language also spoken by the Catalan workers). The use of Catalan was an excellent means for the boss to divide the workers.
During the Francoist period, where Catalan was not favoured in the media, or schools, and even less in the administration, using it seemed to a large part of the population of Catalonia a way of resisting the dictatorship. Far from weakening the use of Catalan, Franco's policies essentially had the opposite effect, to the point where immigrants from other regions were learning the language, as much as to be accepted by the natives[6] as to take part in this "resistance".
With the end of Francoism and the advent of "democracy" in Spain, the autonomist movement faded out. The regions, and especially the Catalan region, regained the prerogatives they had lost in the past. One of these prerogatives was to make Catalan the official language of the region, i.e. the administration could now only work in Catalan and this language was used exclusively in the schools, Castillian being taught only as a foreign language.
Parallel to this, in the universities of Catalonia, more and more courses were taught in Catalan, which obviously penalised students coming from other regions or from abroad (who may have learned Spanish because it is an international language but had not learned a regional language like Catalan). Result: while the Catalan universities had a good reputation, especially the University of Barcelona, and because of this attracted the best Spanish, European or South American students, the latter tended more and more to chose universities where they didn't run the risk of stubbing their foot on a language they didn't know. The process of opening up to Europe and the world, which Catalonia was so proud of, could only be undermined by Catalan being the hegemonic language, and in the ancestral rivalry between Barcelona and Madrid, the latter was threatening to gain a decisive advantage - not, as in the days of Franco, because of forced centralisation, but on the contrary because of the "democratic conquests" of Catalonia. This said, if the Catalan bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie have adopted a policy of shooting themselves in the foot, this is not a particular concern for internationalist revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the business of teaching only in Catalan does have much more serious consequences. The new generations of proletarians in Catalonia will have more difficulty communicating with their class brothers in the rest of the country and they will no longer have help from their parents in the international language of Spanish, even though they know it better than they know Catalan grammar.
Going back to the linguistic insults which existed in the past in Quebec and which you mention in your messages (and which do resemble the situation in Flanders a while back), they are typical of the behaviour of all bourgeoisies and are yet another means to affirm their strength in front of the workers, to show who's in charge. At the same time, it's an excellent way of dividing the workers between those who speak the language of the bosses (who are told that they are "privileged") and those who don't or who speak it badly. Finally, it's a way of channelling the discontent of the workers towards a terrain that is not theirs and which can only sap their class unity. Even if not all the bourgeoisie are intelligent enough to do all the necessary Machiavellian calculations, the existence of situations where, as well as their classical exploitation, workers also have to put up with added indignities, provides an excellent safety valve when the social pressure starts to build up. Rather than giving way on the essential questions, the bourgeoisie is ready to give way on issues that don't cost it anything, such as the language question. Here they are helped by the political forces - especially those of the left and far left - who have included linguistic demands in their programme and who present the satisfaction of these demands as a victory, even if other demands have not been satisfied (above all if these demands are considered to be the principal ones, as you note in your message of 18th February). In reality, while this problem of linguistic disadvantages for the workers has tended to diminish in Quebec, it's not only because of the policies of the nationalist parties. It's also a consequence of the workers' struggles which have developed all around the world, including Canada, since the end of the 1960s.
In the face of such a situation, what approach should revolutionaries adopt? It can only be to tell workers the truth, to say what we've said here. They must encourage workers' struggles for the defence of their living conditions and in doing this they don't simply talk about the revolution which will abolish all forms of oppression. But their role is also to warn the workers against all the traps being laid for them, all the manoeuvres aimed at sapping class solidarity; they must not be afraid of criticising demands when they consider that they do not contribute to the unity of the class.[7] Otherwise they will not play their role as revolutionaries:
"1. In the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality. 2. In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole."[8]
While waiting for your comments on this letter, please accept our best communist greetings,
For the ICC.[1]. In fact at first this demand was not at the top of the list: economic demands and the issue of repression took precedence. But it was the political "experts" inside the movement, the people coming out of the "democratic" milieu (Kuron, Modzelewski, Michnik, Geremek...) who insisted on this being the put at the top.
[2]. "This mode of production pre-supposes parcelling of the soil and scattering of the other means of production. As it excludes the concentration of these means of production, so also it excludes co-operation, division of labour within each separate process of production, the control over, and the productive application of the forces of Nature by society, and the free development of the social productive powers. It is compatible only with a system of production, and a society, moving within narrow and more or less primitive bounds. To perpetuate it would be, as Pecqueur rightly says, ‘to decree universal mediocrity'. At a certain stage of development, it brings forth the material agencies for its own dissolution. From that moment new forces and new passions spring up in the bosom of society; but the old social organization fetters them and keeps them down. It must be annihilated; it is annihilated. Its annihilation, the transformation of the individualized and scattered means of production into socially concentrated ones, of the pigmy property of the many into the huge property of the few, the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence, and from the means of labour, this fearful and painful expropriation of the mass of the people forms the prelude to the history of capital. It comprises a series of forcible methods, of which we have passed in review only those that have been epoch-making as methods of the primitive accumulation of capital" (Chapter 32, "Historical tendency of capitalist accumulation")
"Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world.
Tantae molis erat, to establish the ‘eternal laws of Nature' of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage-labourers, into ‘free labouring poor', that artificial product of modern society. If money, According to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" (Chapter 31, "Genesis of industrial capital").
[3]. "Now, sickening as it must be to human feeling to witness those myriads of industrious patriarchal and inoffensive social organizations disorganized and dissolved into their units, thrown into a sea of woes, and their individual members losing at the same time their ancient form of civilization, and their hereditary means of subsistence, we must not forget that these idyllic village-communities, inoffensive though they may appear, had always been the solid foundation of Oriental despotism, that they restrained the human mind within the smallest possible compass, making it the unresisting tool of superstition, enslaving it beneath traditional rules, depriving it of all grandeur and historical energies.... England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindustan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.
"Then, whatever bitterness the spectacle of the crumbling of an ancient world may have for our personal feelings, we have the right, in point of history, to exclaim with Goethe:
‘Should this torture then torment us
Since it brings us greater pleasure?
Were not through the rule of Timur
Souls devoured without measure?'"
[From Goethe's "An Suleika", Westöstlicher Diwan]
(Marx, "The British Rule in India", New York Daily Tribune, 25 June 1853)
[4]. This was in fact the dream of a certain number of rebellious elements after the May 68 events in France. Trying to escape capitalism and the alienation it engenders, they went off to found communes in the Ardeche, in villages deserted by their inhabitants, attempting to live by weaving and raising goats. For the most part this was a disaster: forced to produce at the lowest cost to sell their production, they lived in poverty, which often led to conflicts between the communards, to witch-hunts against "layabouts who live off the backs of others", and to the reappearance of petty chiefs concerned with doing things on the cheap. The most efficient of them were simply reintegrated into the commercial circuits of capitalism.
[5]. We should note that French was imposed by eliminating a number of local dialects, such as Breton, Picard, Occitan, Provencal, Catalan, and many others.
[6]. We should note that even in the Franco era, whenever you were lost in Barcelona, it was not well-regarded to ask the way in Castillian. Paradoxically, the person you asked for help understood the latter language much better if it was spoken with a strong French or English accent than with a Spanish one.
[7]. Revolutionaries must not hesitate to take up this fundamental idea of Marx: the oppression and the barbarism for which capitalism is responsible, and which has to be denounced, don't only have a negative side. They create the conditions for the future emancipation of the working class and even for the success of its present struggles. If they are obliged to learn English or to make progress in this language to find a job or simply to buy things, the Quebec workers will also draw advantage from it: it can help them communicate with their Anglophone class brothers in the same country and even in their great North American neighbour. It's not the job of revolutionaries to excuse the odious, xenophobic behaviour of the Anglophone bourgeoisie but to explain to the French workers that they have the possibility of turning these weapons of the bourgeoisie against them. The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, born in the area of Poland dominated by Russia, was forced to learn Russian. She never complained about it, on the contrary. It helped her to communicate with her comrades in Russia (for example Lenin with whom she had long discussions after the 1905 revolution, which allowed the two revolutionaries to get to know each other, to understand and appreciate each other). It was also an opportunity for her to know and appreciate Russian literature. In fact she translated certain works into German to make them accessible to German speakers.
[8]. Communist Manifesto.
In this issue of the International Review we are re-publishing the second article in the series “Problems of the Period of transition” by Mitchell, published in Bilan n° 31, in May-June 1936. Having laid out the general historical conditions of the proletarian revolution in the first article in the series (re-published in IR n°128 [22]), Mitchell traces the evolution of the marxist theory of the state, linking it closely to the most important moments in the struggle of the working class against capitalism – 1848, the Paris Commune, and the Russian revolution. Following in the footsteps of Lenin’s State and Revolution (1917), he shows how the proletariat progressively clarified its relationship to the state in the course of these fundamental experiences: from the general notion that the state, as an instrument for the oppression of one class by another, would necessarily disappear in communist society, to the more concrete steps in understanding how the proletariat would progress towards this outcome, by destroying the existing bourgeois state and erecting in its place a new form of state that was destined to wither away after a more or less long period of transition. However, Mitchell’s study takes us beyond the point reached by Lenin’s book by incorporating the crucial lessons learned through the October revolution and the terrible difficulties it faced as a result of its international isolation: above all, the necessity to avoid any identification between the proletariat, its specific class organs (defined by Mitchell as soviets, party, and trade unions) and the general apparatus of the transitional state, which by its nature as an “evil” inherited from the old society is inevitably more vulnerable to the danger of corruption and degeneration. From this standpoint, the Bolshevik party had been fundamentally mistaken both in identifying the proletarian dictatorship with the transitional state, and in allowing itself to be increasingly fused with the latter.
The product of an intense process of reflection and clarification, Mitchell’s text contains some of the weaknesses of the Italian/Belgian communist left in the 1930s as well as it strengths: thus, while arguing that the party should not be merged with the state, the text still holds that the task of the party is to exercise the proletarian dictatorship; or again, while beginning with the clear statement that the collectivisation of the means of production is not identical to socialism, at the end the article continues to defend the notion that the contemporary USSR, because the economy was “collectivised”, was not a capitalist state even though it accepts that the Russian proletariat was indeed subjected to capitalist exploitation. We have examined these contradictions at greater length in previous articles (see “The Russian enigma and the Italian communist left, 1933-1946” [23] , IR n° 106, and “The 1930s, debate on the period of transition” [12] in IR n° 127), but these weaknesses do not detract from the overall clarity of this text, which remains a fundamental contribution to the marxist theory of the state.
In our introductory study, we tried to show that there is not and cannot be a direct simultaneity between the historic maturity of the proletarian revolution and its material and cultural maturity. We are living in the epoch of proletarian revolution because social progress can now only take place after the disappearance of the very class antagonisms which, in what we might call the prehistory of the human race, have been the motor-force of all progress until now.
But the collective appropriation of the wealth developed by bourgeois society simply does away with the contradiction between the social form of the productive forces and their private appropriation. It is simply the “sine qua non” for the further development of society. In itself it doesn’t lead automatically to a higher stage of development. In itself it doesn’t contain all the constructive solutions of socialism, nor does it immediately wipe out all forms of social inequality.
The collectivisation of the means of production and exchange is not socialism - it is a point of departure, a fundamental precondition for socialism. It is still only a juridical solution to social contradictions and doesn’t eliminate all the material and spiritual deficiencies that the proletariat will inherit from capitalism. In a sense history will “surprise” the proletariat and force it to carry out its mission in an unprepared state which no amount of revolutionary idealism and dynamism can immediately transform into an ability to resolve all the formidable and complex problems the revolution will pose. Both before and after the conquest of power, the proletariat will have to make up for the historical immaturity of its consciousness by relying on its party, which will remain its guide and educator in the period of transition from capitalism to communism. At the same time the proletariat will only be able to overcome the temporary insufficiency of the productive forces bequeathed to it by capitalism by having recourse to a state, to an:
“…evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worse sides the victorious proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at once as much as possible until such time as a generation reared in new, free social conditions is able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap heap.”[1]
The necessity to “tolerate” a state during the transition period between capitalism and communism derives from the specific character of this period, which Marx defined in his Critique of the Gotha Programme:
“What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges” (our emphasis).[2]
Later on we will examine these birth marks when we analyse the economic and social categories which the proletariat will inherit from capitalism and which are going to have to “wither away” alongside the proletarian state.
It would obviously be a mistake to cover up the mortal danger which the survival of this instrument of servitude, this state, will pose to the proletarian revolution, even though it’s a workers’ state. But to conclude that the revolution is bound to degenerate simply because this state will exist would be to ignore the dialectic of history and to abandon the revolution itself.
Similarly, to delay the unleashing of the revolution until the masses have fully acquired the capacity to wield power would be to run away from the reality of the historical problem, to negate the necessity of the transitional state and of the party. This idea is the logical accompaniment to the notion of basing the revolution on the “maturity” of material conditions, which we examined in the first part of this study.
Later on we will consider the problem of the ability of the proletarian masses to run the state and the economy.
While the victorious proletariat will be forced by historical conditions to tolerate a state during a more or less prolonged period, it is important that it understands what kind of state this will be.
The marxist method allows us on the one hand to uncover the meaning of the state in class society, to define its nature; and, on the other hand, by analysing the revolutionary experiences of the proletariat last century, to determine what attitude the proletariat must have with regard to the bourgeois state.
Marx and above all Engels succeeded in ridding the idea of the state of all idealist excrescences. Laying bare the real nature of the state, they showed that it was nothing but an instrument of oppression in the hands of the ruling class of a given society; that its only function was to safeguard the economic and political privileges of this class: through coercion and violence, its role was to impose the juridical rules which corresponded to the forms of property and mode of production upon which these privileges were based. They also showed that the state was the expression of the domination of the majority of the population by a minority. The backbone of the state, the concrete expression of the fact that society was divided into classes, was its armed force and coercive organs, which were placed above and against the mass of the people, and which prevented the oppressed class from maintaining its own “spontaneous” forms of armed defence. The ruling class could never tolerate the existence of an armed force of the people alongside its own instruments of repression.
To take just one example from the history of bourgeois society: in France the revolution of February 1848 armed the workers “who were now a power in the state” (Engels). The bourgeoisie had but one concern: to disarm the workers. So it provoked them by liquidating the national workshops and crushed them during the June uprising. Again in France, after September 1870, a national guard mainly composed of workers was formed to defend the country.
“…almost at once the antagonism between the almost completely bourgeois government and the armed proletariat broke into open conflict…To arm Paris was to arm the revolution. Thiers…was compelled to realise that the supremacy of the propertied classes was in constant danger so long as the workers of Paris had arms in their hands. His first action was to attempt to disarm them.”[3]
Thus came March 18th and the Commune.
But once it had penetrated the “secret” of the bourgeois state (whether monarchical or republican, authoritarian or democratic) the proletariat still had to clarify its own policy towards this state. The experimental method of marxism gave it the means to do this.
At the time of the Communist Manifesto Marx clearly recognised the necessity for the proletariat to conquer political power, to organise itself as the ruling class, but he was less clear about the fact that the proletariat had to create its own state. He had already foreseen that all forms of state would disappear when classes had been abolished, but this remained a general and somewhat abstract formulation. The French experience of 1848-51 provided Marx with the historical evidence which allowed him more firmly to grasp the idea of the destruction of the bourgeois state, but it did not enable him to trace the contours of the proletarian state which would arise in its place. The proletariat had appeared on the scene as the first revolutionary class in history destined to annihilate the increasingly centralised police and bureaucratic machine, which all exploiting classes had used to crush the exploited masses. In his 18th Brumaire Marx stressed that up till now “all revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it.”[4] The centralised power goes back to the absolute monarchy; the rising bourgeoisie used it to struggle against feudalism; the French revolution simply rid it of its feudal vestiges, and the First Empire completed the formation of the modern state. A developed bourgeois society transformed the central power into a machine for oppressing the proletariat. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx explained why all previous revolutionary classes had conquered the state instead of destroying it: “the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built up, were generated in feudal society.”[5]
Having gradually conquered economic power, the bourgeoisie had no need to destroy a political organ in which it had already installed itself. It didn’t have to do away with the bureaucracy, the police, or the armed forces, but simply to subordinate these instruments of oppression to its own interests, because its political revolution was only a juridical replacement of one form of exploitation by another.
In contrast to this the proletariat is a class which expresses the interests of humanity rather than any particular interest; it cannot therefore embed itself in a state based on exploitation. “The proletarians…have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurance of, individual property.”[6]
Despite its limitations, the Paris Commune was the first historical response to the question of the difference between the proletarian state and the bourgeois state. The rule of the majority over a minority deprived of its privileges eliminated the need for a specialised bureaucratic and military machine in the service of particular interests. The proletariat replaced this machine with its own armament - to break the resistance of the bourgeoisie - and a political form which allowed it to progressively assume the task of managing society In this sense “the Commune…was no longer a state in the proper sense of the word” (Engels). Lenin stressed the fact that the Commune had “the gigantic achievement of replacing certain institutions by institutions in principle essentially different”.
Nevertheless, the proletarian state still has the essential character of all states. It is still an organ of coercion and, although it ensures the rule of the majority over a minority, it can still only express the temporary impossibility of doing away with bourgeois right. In Lenin’s phrase it is a bourgeois state without the bourgeoisie, and unless it is constantly subjected to the direct control of the proletariat and its party it will always tend to turn against the class.
***
The theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, already developed in the Manifesto but finding a historical elaboration in the Commune of 1871, juxtaposed the idea of the destruction of the bourgeois state with that of the withering away of the proletarian state. With Marx, the idea of the final disappearance of the state can be found in embryonic form in The Poverty of Philosophy; it was mainly developed by Engels in The Origins of the Family and Anti-Duhring, while later on Lenin commented on the problem brilliantly in his State and Revolution. The fundamental distinction between the destruction of the bourgeois state and the dying away of the proletarian state was rigorously drawn by Lenin and we don’t have to go into it here, especially because our previous considerations have dealt with any doubt about this question.
What we must keep in mind is that the hypothesis of the withering away of the state is bound to become the touchstone of the content of proletarian revolutions. We have already indicated that the revolution breaks out in a historical milieu which obliges the proletariat to tolerate the existence of a state. But this can only be: “a state in the process of withering away, that is, a state so constituted that it begins to wither away from the start and cannot but wither away” (Lenin).
The great achievement of marxism is to have shown irrefutably that the state has never been an autonomous factor in history, but is simply the product of a society divided into classes; the existence of classes preceded the state, and the latter will disappear when classes themselves disappear. After the dissolution of primitive communism the state has always existed in a more or less developed form, since it is inevitably superimposed on any form of exploitation of man by man; but at the same time it will inevitably die out at the end of a period of historical evolution which will make all oppression and constraint superfluous, since “bourgeois right” will have been eliminated and, in Saint-Simon’s phrase, “politics will be entirely reabsorbed into the economy”.
But marxist science has still not elaborated a solution to the problem of how exactly the state will wither away, a problem which is directly linked to the question of the relationship between the proletariat and “its” state.
The Commune was the first attempt to set up the dictatorship of the proletariat and was an experience of enormous importance, but it couldn’t avoid defeat and confusion, because, on the one hand, it took place in a period of historical immaturity; and, on the other hand, because it lacked the theoretical guide, the party. It can thus provide us only with a vague outline of the relationship between the state and the proletariat.
In 1875, in the Critique of the Gotha Progamme Marx was still posing the question: “…what transformation will the nature of the state undergo in communist society? [Marx is talking about the period of transition here - ed. Note] In other words, what social formation will remain in existence there that are analogous to the present functions of the state. This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word people with the word state” (our emphasis - ed. note).[7] For Marx, the Commune was: “a thoroughly expansive political form, while all previous forms of government had been emphatically repressive…it was… the political form at last discovered under which to work out the economic emancipation of labour.”[8]
The Commune simply provided a framework for solving the fundamental problem of the education of the masses, who had the task of progressively freeing themselves from the burden of the state and ensuring that the state would finally disappear with the creation of a classless society. In this sense, the Commune was a signpost on the road to emancipation. It showed that although the proletariat could not immediately do away with the system of delegation, it had to: “safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials, by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment”. And, for Marx: “Nothing could be more foreign to the spirit of the Commune than to supercede universal suffrage [in the election of deputies - ed. note] by hierarchic investiture.”[9]
The theoretical elaboration of the problem had to stay at this point. Forty years later, Lenin was unable to go any further in this sphere. In State and Revolution he was limited to a few summary and even banal formulae which emphasised the necessity to: “transform the functions of the state into functions of control and checking that are so simple that they can be carried out by the enormous majority of the population and little by little by the entire population.”[10]
Like Engels, he was limited to the assertion that the state would disappear in an era of real freedom, as would democracy, which would have lost all social meaning. As for the exact process whereby all the habits of servitude left over from capitalism would be eliminated, Lenin said that: “the question of the concrete way in which the state will die out remains an open one, since we don’t have the historical data that would allow us to settle it.”[11]
Thus the problem of the management of a proletarian state and economy in the interests of the international revolution remained unsolved. In October 1917, when the Russian proletariat embarked upon the most crucial of historical experiences, the class found that it lacked the political principles to define the relationship between the state and proletariat. The Bolsheviks inevitably suffered from the crushing weight of this theoretical deficiency.
Taking a step back and looking at the Russian experience, it seems probable that if the Bolsheviks and the International had been able to acquire a clear vision of this fundamental question, the reflux of the revolution in the West, despite being a considerable obstacle to the October revolution, would not have altered the latter’s internationalist character and provoked it to break with the world proletariat by straying into the impasse of “socialism in one country”.
But in the middle of the most terrible contingent difficulties, the Bolsheviks did not consider the Soviet state as “an evil inherited by the proletariat… whose worst sides the victorious proletariat…cannot avoid having to lop off as much as possible”, but as an organism which could be completely identified with the proletarian dictatorship, i.e. with the party.
The result of this important modification was that the foundation of the dictatorship of the proletariat was no longer to be the party, but the state; and through the ensuing reversal of roles the latter found itself in a course of development which led not to the withering away of the state but to the reinforcement of its coercive and repressive powers. Once an instrument of the world revolution, the proletarian state was inevitably converted into a weapon of the global counter-revolution.
Although Marx, Engels and above all Lenin had again and again emphasized the necessity to counter the state with a proletarian antidote capable of preventing its degeneration, the Russian revolution, far from assuring the maintenance and vitality of the class organs of the proletariat, sterilised them by incorporating them into the state; and thus the revolution devoured its own substance.
Even in Lenin’s thought, the idea of the “dictatorship of the state” began to predominate. At the end of 1918, in his polemic against Kautsky, (The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky[12]) he was unable to distinguish between two conflicting concepts: the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. He replied resoundingly to Kautsky on the definition of the dictatorship of the proletariat, on its basic class meaning (all power to the soviets), but he made a connection between the necessity to destroy the bourgeois state and crush the ruling class and the idea of transforming the proletariat’s organisations into state organs. It’s true, however, that this position wasn’t an absolute for Lenin, since he was referring to the period of civil war, of the overthrow of bourgeois rule, during which time the main function of the Soviets was to be instruments of oppression against the bourgeoisie and its state apparatus.
The enormous difficulty in finding the right answer to the question of the relationship between the state and the proletariat, a question which Lenin was unable to resolve, derives from this dual, contradictory necessity: the need, on the one hand, to retain the state, an organ of economic and political coercion controlled by the proletariat (and thus by the party), while at the same time ensuring a greater and greater participation of the masses in the running and administration of the proletarian social order, even though this participation can for a whole period only take place through state organs, which by their very nature tend to lead to corruption.
The experience of the Russian revolution shows just how difficult it is to produce a social climate which will allow the maximum development of the activity and culture of the masses.
The controversy about democracy and dictatorship centres round this problem, whose solution is crucial to the success of future proletarian revolutions. Here we should emphasize the fact that despite Lenin and Luxemburg’s differences about “proletarian democracy”, they showed a common pre-occupation - the desire to create the conditions for an incessant expansion of the capacities of the masses. But for Lenin the concept of democracy, even proletarian democracy, always implies the oppression of one class by another - whether it is the rule of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat, or the dictatorship of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie. And as we have said “democracy” will disappear with the abolition of classes and the state, i.e. when the concept of freedom becomes a reality.
Against Lenin’s idea of a “discriminatory” democracy, Luxemburg (in the Russian Revolution) defended the idea of “unlimited democracy”, which for her was a precondition for: “the unobstructed participation of the popular masses” in the dictatorship of the proletariat.[13] This could only be realised through the total exercise of “democratic” freedoms: unlimited freedom of the press, full political freedom, parliamentarism (even though later on, in the Spartacus programme, the future of parliamentarism was subordinated to the needs of the revolution).
Luxemburg’s overriding concern not to see the organs of the state machine getting in the way of the political life of the proletariat and its active participation in the tasks of the dictatorship prevented her from grasping the fundamental role of the party, since she ended up opposing the dictatorship of the class to the dictatorship of the party. However, she had the tremendous achievement of showing the difference in social context between the rule of the bourgeoisie and the rule of the proletariat, as Marx had done for the Commune: “the class rule of the bourgeoisie has no need for the political instruction and education of the mass of the people, or at least for no more than an extremely limited amount; but for the dictatorship of the proletariat, it is the vital element, the oxygen without which it cannot live.”[14]
In the programme of Spartacus, she dealt with the crucial problem of the education of the masses (which has to be solved by the party), saying that: “history is not going to make our revolution an easy matter like the bourgeois revolutions. In those revolutions it sufficed to overthrow that official power at the centre and to replace a dozen or so persons in authority. But we have to work from beneath.”[15]
Caught up in the contradictory process of the Russian revolution, Lenin nevertheless continued to emphasize the need to pose a proletarian “corrective”: organs of workers’ control, against the corrupting tendencies of the transitional state.
In his report to the Congress of Soviets in April 1918, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government”, he underlined the necessity to constantly supervise the functioning of the Soviets and the Soviet power:
“There is a petty-bourgeois tendency to transform the members of the Soviets into ‘parliamentarians’, or else into bureaucrats. We must combat this by drawing all members of the Soviets into the practical work of administration.”[16]
In order to achieve this Lenin said it was necessary:
“to draw the whole of the poor into the practical work of administration, and all steps that are taken in this direction -the more varied they are, the better - should be carefully recorded, studied, systematised, tested by wider experience and embodied in law. Our aim is to ensure that every toiler, having finished his eight hours’ ‘task’ in productive labour, shall perform state duties without pay; the transition to this is particularly difficult, but this transition alone can guarantee the final consolidation of socialism. Naturally, the novelty and difficulty of the change lead to an abundance of steps being taken, as it were, gropingly, to an abundance of mistakes, vacillation - without this, any marked progress is impossible. The reason why the present position seems peculiar to many of those who would like to be regarded as socialists is that they have been accustomed to contrasting capitalism with socialism abstractly, and that they profoundly put between the two the word ‘leap’.”[17]
The fact that in the same report Lenin was led to justify giving dictatorial powers to individuals was the expression not only of the grim contingent situation which gave rise to War Communism, but also of the contradiction between a necessary coercive regime imposed by the state machine, and the need to safeguard the proletarian dictatorship, to immerse the regime in the growing activity of the masses.
“The more resolutely we now have to stand for a ruthlessly firm government, for the dictatorship of individuals in definite processes of work, in definite aspects of purely executive functions, the more varied must be the forms and methods of control from below in order to counteract every shadow of a possibility of distorting the principles of Soviet government, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to weed out bureaucracy.”[18]
But three years of civil war and the vital necessity to restore economic life prevented the Bolsheviks from finding a clear political solution to the problem of the relationship between the proletariat and state organs. Not that they were unaware of the mortal dangers which threatened the whole development of the revolution. The programme of the 8th Congress of the Russian Party in March 1919 talked about the danger of a political rebirth of bureaucracy within the Soviet regime, despite the fact that the old Tsarist bureaucratic machinery had been destroyed from top to bottom. The 9th Congress in December 1920 also dealt with the question of bureaucracy. And at the 10th Congress, which saw the beginning of the NEP, Lenin discussed the question at great length and came to the following conclusion: that the economic roots of the Soviet bureaucracy were not implanted in the military and juridical apparatus as in the bourgeois state, but that they grew out of the services; that the bureaucracy had sprung out of the period of War Communism and expressed the “negative side” of this period. The price paid for the necessarily dictatorial centralisation of this period was the increasing authority of the functionaries. At the 11th Congress, after a year of the “New Economic Policy”, Lenin vigorously emphasised the historic contradiction involved in the proletariat being forced to take power and use it before being fully prepared ideologically and culturally:
“We have sufficient, quite sufficient political power, we also have sufficient economic resources at our command, but the vanguard of the working class which has been brought to the forefront to directly supervise, to determine the boundaries, to demarcate, to subordinate and not be subordinated itself, lacks sufficient ability for it. All that is needed here is ability, and that is what we do not have…Never before in history has there been [such] a situation.”[19]
Concerning the state capitalism that it was necessary to put up with, Lenin urged the party thus:
“You Communists, workers, you, the politically enlightened section of the proletariat, which undertook to administer the state, must be able to arrange it so that the state which you have taken into your hands, shall function the way you want it to. Well, we have lived through a year, the state is in our hands; but has it operated the New Economic Policy in the way we wanted this past year?…How did it operate? The machine refused to obey the hand that guided it. It was like a car that was going not in the direction the driver desired, but in the direction someone else desired…”[20]
By saying that the task was to “build communism with non-communist hands” Lenin was only restating one of the fundamental problems of the proletarian revolution. By pointing out that the party had to lead an economy managed by “others” in the direction that it wanted it to go, he was simply showing that the function of the party is not the same as that of the state machine.
The safeguard of the Russian revolution, the guarantee that it would stay on the tracks of the world revolution, was therefore not the absence of all bureaucracy - which is an inevitable excrescence of the transition period - but the vigilant presence of proletarian organs in which the educational activity of the party could be carried out, while the party itself retained a vision of its international tasks through the International. Because of a whole series of historical circumstances and because of a lack of indispensable theoretical and experimental equipment, the Bolsheviks were unable to resolve this basic problem. The crushing weight of contingent events led them to lose sight of the importance of retaining the Soviets and trade unions as organs which could be juxtaposed to the state, controlling it but not being incorporated into it.
The Russian experience doesn’t allow us to see the extent to which the Soviets could have been, in Lenin’s phrase, “the organisations of the workers and the exploited masses which will allow them to organise and govern the state themselves”; the extent to which they could have concentrated “the legislative, the executive, and, the judiciary” into themselves if centrism had not emasculated their revolutionary potential.
In any case, the Soviets appeared as the Russian form of the dictatorship of the proletariat rather than having an international validity. What makes them an acquisition from the experimental point of view is the fact that during the phase of the destruction of Tsarist society, the soviets were the backbone of the armed self-organisation which the Russian workers put in place of the bureaucratic and military machine and the autocracy, and then used against the reaction of the dispossessed classes.
As for the trade unions their function was altered in the process of the degeneration of the whole apparatus of the proletarian dictatorship. In his Infantile Disorder (early 1920) Lenin underlined the importance of the trade unions: “by means of which the Party is closely linked up with the class and with the masses, and by means of which, under the leadership of the Party, the dictatorship of the class is exercised.”
After the seizure of power: “the Party must more than ever and in a new way, not only in the old way, educate and guide the trade unions, at the same time bearing in mind that they are and will long remain an indispensable “school of Communism” and a preparatory school that trains the proletarians to exercise their dictatorship, an indispensable organisation of the workers for the gradual transfer of the management of the whole economic life of the country to the working class (and not to separate trades), and later to all the working people.”[21]
The question of the role of the trade unions really came into its own at the end of 1920. Trotsky, basing his position on his experience in the sphere of transportation, considered that the unions had to become state organs responsible for maintaining labour discipline and the organisation of production. He even went so far as to propose that the unions be done away with, claiming that, in a workers’ state, they simply duplicated the tasks of state organs!
The discussion gathered pace at the 10th Congress of the party in March 1921 under the pressure of immediate events (Kronstadt) Trotsky’s ideas were opposed both by the Workers’ Opposition led by Shliapnikov and Kollontai, who called for management of production by the unions, and by Lenin, who considered that the statification of the unions was premature and that since “the state is not a workers’ state, but a workers’ and peasants’ state with numerous bureaucratic deformations”, the unions had to defend the workers’ interests against such a state. But Lenin emphasised that his disagreement with Trotsky was not over a question of principle, but simply over contingent considerations.
The fact that Trotsky was defeated at this Congress did not mean that the confusion about the role of the unions under the proletarian dictatorship had been cleared up. In fact the theses of the 3rd Congress of the CI repeated this confusion, on the one hand saying that: “before, during, and after the seizure of power, the unions remain a broader, more massive, more general form of organisation than the party, and in relation to the latter, to some extent play the part of the circumference to the centre.”
And also that: “the communists and sympathising elements must form within the unions communist groupings entirely subordinated to the communist party as a whole.”
While on the other hand saying that: “after the seizure and strengthening of proletarian power, the activity of the trade unions will be concerned mainly with the tasks of economic organisation and they will dedicate nearly all their energy to the building of the economy on a socialist basis, thus becoming a truly practical school of communism.”
We know that, after this, the unions not only lost any control over the management of enterprises, but also became organs responsible for stimulating production and not for defending the interests of the workers. In “compensation” for this, trade union leaders were recruited into the administration of industry and the right to strike was maintained in theory. But in fact strikes broke out in opposition to the trade union leadership.
***
The clearest criterion which marxists can use to back up their affirmation that the Soviet state is a degenerated state, that it has lost any proletarian function and has become an instrument of world capitalism, is the historical evolution of the Russian state between 1917 and 1936. In this period the state, far from tending to wither away, has become stronger and stronger, a process which could only lead it to becoming an instrument of oppression and exploitation against the Russian workers. This is an entirely new historical phenomenon, the result of an unprecedented historical situation: the existence within capitalist society of a proletarian state based on the collectivisation of the means of production, but one in which we are seeing a social process determining a frenzied exploitation of labour power; and at the same time this exploitation cannot be ascribed to the domination of a class which has juridical ownership of the means of production. We do not think that this social “paradox” can be explained by saying there is a bureaucracy which has become a ruling class (from the standpoint of historical materialism, these two notions mutually exclude each other); it can only be seen as the expression of a policy which has delivered the Russian state into the hands of world capitalism, whose laws of evolution are driving it towards imperialist war. In the part of this study dedicated to the question of the management of the proletarian economy, we will come back to the concrete aspects of this essential characteristic of the degeneration of the Soviet state, which has meant that the Russian proletariat is at the mercy not of a national exploiting class but of the world capitalist class. Such a political and economic relationship obviously contains within it all the conditions for the restoration of capitalism in Russia in the turmoil of a new imperialist war, unless the Russian proletariat, with the aid of the international proletariat, manages to overthrow the forces which threaten to lead it into another massacre.
Bearing in mind what we have said about the historic conditions in which the proletarian state is born, it is clear that the withering away of this state cannot be seen as an autonomous process limited to the national framework, but only as a symptom of the development of the world revolution.
It became impossible for the Soviet state to begin withering away as soon as the party and the International stopped seeing the Russian revolution as a step towards the world revolution and assigned to it the task of building “socialism in one country”. This explains why the specific weight of the state organs and the exploitation of the Russian workers have increased with the development of industrialisation and the economy; why the “liquidation of classes” has led not to a weakening of the state, but to its reinforcement, as expressed by the re-establishment of the three forces which have always been the backbone of the bourgeois state: the bureaucracy, the police and the standing army.
This phenomenon in no way indicates the falsity of marxist theory, which bases the proletarian revolution on the collectivisation of the productive forces and on the necessity for a transitional state and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It is simply the bitter fruit of a historic situation which prevented the Bolsheviks and the International from imposing an internationalist policy on the state, and which on the contrary made them the servants of the state against the proletariat by leading them onto the path of national socialism. In the face of economic difficulties which confronted them, the Bolsheviks were unable to formulate a policy which would have immunised them from confusing the apparatus of repression (which should only have been used against the dispossessed classes) with the class organs of the proletariat, which should have exercised control over the administration of the economy. The disappearance of these organs obliged the proletarian state, in its efforts to carry out a national programme and keep the economic apparatus going, to use its repressive organs against the proletariat as well as against the bourgeoisie. The state, that “necessary evil”, turned against the workers, despite the fact that, while the “principle of authority” will have to be recognised during the transitional phase, bureaucratic coercion can never be justified.
The whole point was to try not to widen the gap between the political and cultural immaturity of the masses and the historic necessity for them to run society. The solution that was aimed at, however, tended to exacerbate this contradiction even further.
We are with Rosa Luxemburg in saying that in Russia the question of the life of the proletarian state and the building of socialism could only be posed and not answered. It is up to the marxist fractions today to draw from the Russian revolution the essential lessons which will allow the proletariat to resolve the problem of the world revolution and of the building of communism in the next revolutionary wave.
Mitchell (to be continued)
[1]. Engels, “Introduction to The Civil War in France”, 1891. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 27.
[2]. 1875. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24.
[3]. Engels, “Introduction to The Civil War in France”, 1891. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 27.
[4]. 1852. Collected Works, Vol. 11.
[5]. 1848, Collected Works, Vol. 6.
[6]. Manifesto. Ibid.
[7]. 1875. Marx, Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 24.
[8]. The Civil War in France, 1871, Collected Works, Vol. 22.
[9]. Ibid.
[10]. 1917, Lenin, Collected Works, Vol.25.
[11]. Ibid.
[12]. 1918. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 28.
[13]. In: Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder press 1970.
[14]. Ibid.
[15]. “Speech to the founding congress of the German Communist Party” in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks.
[16]. 1918. Collected Works, Vol.. 27.
[17]. Ibid.
[18]. Ibid.
[19]. “Political report of the Central Committee of the RCP (B)” , 1922. Collected Works, Vol. 33.
[20]. Ibid.
[21]. Left-wing communism: An infantile disorder, 1920. Collected Works, Vol. 31
The first 14 years of the 20th century, known as the Belle Époque, marked capitalism’s high-point. An atmosphere of optimism pervaded society as the economy endlessly prospered and inventions and scientific discoveries followed one upon the other. The workers’ movement was infected with this atmosphere, accentuating tendencies towards reformism and illusions about to the possibility of reaching socialism peacefully through a series of gradual conquests.[1]
The explosion of the First World War thus came as a brutal blow, a tremendous electric shock. The beautiful hopes of uninterrupted progress, which had dulled minds so much, were replaced by an awful nightmare: a war of unheard of brutality and destructiveness. Men fell like flies on the battlefronts, while at the rear there was rationing, the state of siege, the militarisation of labour. Boundless optimism gave way to paralysing pessimism.
Proletarian organisations were put to a dramatic test. Events unfolded at a vertiginous speed. In 1913 – despite the gathering storm clouds of imperialist tensions – everything appeared rosy. In 1914 the war exploded. In 1915 the first proletarian responses against the war began. 1917 produced the revolution in Russia. From the historical point of view, all this happened in an extremely short space of time. This was an enormous challenge to proletarian consciousness, which cannot respond to such events according to some ready-made recipe, but rather needs to go through a profound process of reflection and discussion. The test of war and revolution – the two decisive events in contemporary life – was posed in barely three years.
In the first article in this series [24] on the history of the CNT,[2] we highlighted the backwardness of Spanish capital and the contradictions that threatened it. When the war began Spain declared itself neutral and some sections of the national capital (above all in Catalonia) made some very lucrative deals selling all sorts of products to both sides. However, the world war hit the workers and the labouring masses in general very hard, above all through inflation. At the same time, the elementary sense of solidarity faced with the suffering affecting their brothers in other countries provoked a strong unease among the Spanish workers. All this demanded a response from the workers’ organisations.
However, the two great workers’ organisations that then existed – the PSOE[3] and the CNT – reacted in very different ways. The majority of the PSOE hastened their definitive integration into the capitalist state. The majority of the CNT by contrast adopted an internationalist and revolutionary position.
The PSOE had already begun to degenerate profoundly prior to the war;[4] it openly took the side of the Entente[5] gang (the Franco-British axis) and made the national interest its watchword.[6] With revolting cynicism, the report of the 10th Congress (October 1915) declared that “In relation to the European war, from the outset we have followed the stand of Iglesias[7] and of the circulars from the National Committee: the allied nations are defending democratic principles against the military crimes of German imperialism, and therefore, whilst not denying the capitalist origins of the war and the germ of imperialism and militarism that exists in all nations, we propose the defence of the allied countries”. Only a timid and confused minority put forward an internationalist position. Verdes Montenegro declared in a special vote that “the cause of the war is the ruling capitalist regime and not militarism nor the decisions of the crowned or uncrowned heads of various countries” and demanded that the Congress “call upon all the Socialist Parties of all those involved in the struggle to fulfil their duties towards the International”.
When the world war broke out, the CNT was legally dissolved. Nonetheless, workers’ societies in Barcelona maintained their tradition by publishing a manifesto against militarism in May 1914. Anselmo Lorenzo, a worker militant from the period of the First International and a founder of the CNT denounced – in an article published posthumously[8] – the treachery of German Social Democracy, the French CGT and the English trade unions for “having sacrificed their ideals on the altar of their respective fatherlands, denying the fundamental international nature of the social problem”.[9] The solution to war was not “a hegemony subscribed to by the victors and losers”, but the rebirth of the International: “animated by a rational optimism, the wage labourers who defend the tradition of the International Workingmen’s Association, with its historical and inviolable programme, present themselves as the saviours of human society”.
In November 1914, a manifesto signed by anarchist groups, unions and workers’ societies from all over Spain, developed the same ideas: denouncing the war and the two opposing gangs, defending the need for a peace without victors or vanquished which “could only be guaranteed by the social revolution”. In order to achieve this they called for the urgent constitution of an International.[10]
The unease and reflection faced with the problem of the war led the Ateneo Sindicalista de Ferrol[11] to make an appeal in February 1915 “for all the workers’ organisations of the world to organise an international congress” against the war. The organisers did not have the means to carry this out: the Spanish authorities immediately prohibited the Congress and made arrangements to arrest all the foreign delegates. The PSOE also launched a campaign against this initiative. However, the Congress did succeed in meeting, despite everything, on the 29th April 1915 with the participation of anarcho-syndicalists from Portugal, France and Brazil.[12]
At the second session, the discussion about the cause and nature of the war was very thin: making “all the peoples”[13] responsible for the war and including only a formal reference to the evils of the capitalist system. Everything centred on the question of “what to do?” At this level it posed “as the means for concluding the European war the calling of the revolutionary general strike”.
There was no real attempt to understand the causes of the war from the historical and international perspective, nor was there any effort to understand the situation of the world proletariat. It had total faith in the activist, voluntarist call for the “revolutionary general strike”. Despite its weaknesses the congress came to very concrete conclusions. It organised an energetic campaign against the war which was carried out through a multitude of meetings, demonstrations and manifestos; it called for the constitution of a Workers’ International “with the aim of organising all those who struggle against Capital and the State”; and, above all, it agreed to reconstitute the CNT, which was indeed reorganised in Catalonia by a nucleus of young participants at the Ferrol Congress who decided to renew publication of La Soli (Solidaridad Obrera – Workers’ Solidarity – the traditional organ of the Confederation). By the summer of 1915 the CNT already had 15,000 militants and from then on it grew spectacularly.
It is significant that the driving force behind the reconstitution of the CNT was opposition to the war. The central activity of the CNT in this period was the struggle against the war, which it linked to enthusiastic support for the economic struggles that proliferated from the end of 1915.
The CNT showed a clear will to discuss and a great openness to the positions of the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences, which it welcomed enthusiastically. It discussed and collaborated with the minority Socialist groups in Spain who opposed the war. There was a great effort of reflection in order to understand the causes of the war and the way to struggle against it. Contrary to the idealist view that “all the peoples are to blame” which had been expressed in Ferrol, the editors of La Soli were much clearer; showing the responsibility of capitalism and its governments, supporting the positions of the Zimmerwald Left (Lenin) and showing that “the allies of the capitalist class want peace to come from a military triumph; for us and all workers, the only thing that can put an end to the war is the uprising of the proletariat of the countries involved in the war.”[14]
An important and determined polemic took place within the CNT against positions in favour of participation in the war, which came from a part of the anarchist movement led by Kropotkin and Malato (authors of the famous Manifesto of the 16 where they declared their support for the Entente gang) and from a minority that supported these within the CNT itself. Soli and Tierra y Libertad clearly pronounced themselves against the Manifesto of 16 and systematically refuted its positions. The CNT openly broke with the French CGT, whose position they called “a devious orientation that did not respond to internationalist principles”.
In 1916, a La Soli editorial categorically reaffirmed the internationalist principle:
“What is the strength of internationalism? Karl Marx and Michael Bakunin showed us it in all its robustness. We defend it no matter what the consequences are,
and we understand that with the war the principles of internationalism have become the stimulus of the Social Revolution (...) We, the Spanish workers, have more in common with the workers of France, Germany, Russia, etc, than with our bourgeoisie. This is our enemy, for whom there can be no quarter; as for the proletariat of other countries, we defend identical interests and aspirations, they are our allies, our compatriots in the International that aims for the disappearance of the capitalist regime (...) We cannot have any solidarity with the state, nor with the defence of national integrity.”[15]
The revolution of February 1917, although it was seen as being of a bourgeois nature, was welcomed joyfully; “The Russian revolutionaries have not abandoned the interests of the proletariat which they represented by leaving them in the hands of the bourgeoisie, as the Socialists and Syndicalists of the Allied countries have done”. La Soli emphasised the importance of the “Soviet, that is, the workers’ and soldiers’ council” whose power opposed that of the bourgeoisie, represented by the Provisional Government, which “has been forced to give in [to the Soviet], to recognise its distinct personality, to accept its direct and effective participation... the only real power resides in the proletariat”[16]
The soviets were identified with the revolutionary unions: “The soviets in Russia today represent what in Spain are the workers’ federations, although their composition is more heterogeneous than the former since they are not class organisms, even though the majority of their members are workers and the so-called maximalists, anarchists, and pacifists that follow Lenin and Maxim Gorky have a preponderant influence in them.”[17] The identification of the soviets with revolutionary syndicalist unions had, as we will see in the next article, negative consequences; however, what is important is that they saw the Soviet form as the expression of the revolutionary force of the international proletariat. The 5th National Congress of Farm Workers,[18] held in May 1917, clearly laid out the perspective: “capitalism and the political state are heading towards ruin; the present war is causing revolutionary movements such as in Russia and others that will inevitably follow it, accelerating their downfall.”
The October revolution generated enormous enthusiasm. It was seen as a genuine triumph of the proletariat. Tierra y Libertad declared in its 7th November 1917 issue that “anarchist ideas have triumphed” and on the 21st November it wrote that the Bolshevik regime was “guided by the spirit of anarchist maximalism”. The arrival of Lenin’s book State and Revolution stimulated a very serious study, leading to the conclusion that this book “establishes a bridge for the integration of marxism and anarchism”. An editorial in La Soli declared that October was “the road to follow”: “The Russians have shown us the road to follow. The Russian people have triumphed: we need to learn from their action in order to be victorious in our turn, wrenching hold of what is denied us”.
As Buenacasa, a remarkable anarchist militant of the time, recalled in his work El movimiento obrero español 1886-1926:[19] “What anarchist in Spain scorned being called a Bolshevik?”. With the aim of drawing a balance sheet of one year of the revolution, Soli published on its front page nothing less than an article by Lenin, called “One year of the dictatorship of the proletariat. 1917-1918: the social and economic work of the Russian Soviets”; accompanied by a note by La Soli in which it defends the dictatorship of the proletariat, showing the importance of the transforming work “of every aspect of life carried out by the Russian workers, in the year that they have held power” and it also described the Bolsheviks as heroes “ sincere idealists, but at the same time practical men and realists, the least that we can hope for is that in Spain there is a transformation as profound as that in Russia: therefore it is necessary that the Spanish workers, manual and intellectual, follow the example of these Bolshevik heroes.”[20] It added in an opinion article that “Bolshevism represents the end of superstition, dogma, slavery, tyranny, crime, (...) Bolshevism, is the new life that we are yearning for, it is peace, harmony, justice, equality, it is the life that we want and that we will impose in the world.”[21]
Tierra y Libertad, in December 1917, even wrote that a revolution means violent confrontation, and requires “leaders and authority”.
Lest there be any doubt that this was the official position of the CNT, Bar’s book refers to a Manifesto published by the National Committee of the CNT on
the occasion of the end of the World War, titled Peace and revolution which has as its subtitle a slogan by Lenin “Only the proletariat should hold power” (12th November 1918). The Manifesto argues that the Russian Revolution had abolished private property, the exploitation of man by man and had established the laws of communism, freedom and justice.[22]
From the beginning of the revolution, the CNT realised that an international revolutionary wave was in progress and was in favour of the formation of an International that would lead the world revolution: “The First and Second Internationals have been broken by the treason of their most important representatives. It is necessary to form a Third, based exclusively on powerful organisations of the class, in order to put an end, through revolution, to the capitalist system and its loyal supporter the state”;[23] and in the Manifesto: “The workers’ International, and nobody else, has to have the final word, to fix the date for continuing the social war on all fronts against universal capitalism, a war which has already triumphed in Russia and which is spreading to the central empires, on all fronts and against capitalism. Spain’s turn will also come. Fatally for capitalism”.
Likewise, the CNT followed the revolutionary events in Germany with great interest: denouncing the Social Democratic leadership as “opportunists, centrists and nationalist socialists”, at the same time it welcomed the “maximalist ideology” of the Spartacists as “a projection of the triumph in Russia and whose example, as that of Russia, has to be followed in Spain”. The CNT’s Manifesto also referred to the German Revolution “Look at Russia, Look at Germany. We have to imitate these champions of the Proletarian Revolution”.
It is important to note the intense discussions at the 1919 congress of the CNT which discussed two separate reports, one on the Russian Revolution, and above all, one on participation in the Communist International (CI).
The first report affirmed “That the Russian Revolution, in principle, incarnates the ideal of revolutionary syndicalism. That it has abolished class and caste privilege, giving power to the proletariat, finally gaining it the happiness and well being to which it has a undeniable right, installing the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat in order to ensure the victory of the revolution...”. The Congress declared that the CNT “unconditionally, supports all of the necessary moral and material measures needed for its advance”.[24]
One of the members of the committee on the Russian Revolution declared emphatically; “The Russian Revolution embodies the ideal of revolutionary syndicalism, that is to give the proletariat power, all the elements of production and the socialisation of riches; I am in absolute agreement with the revolutionary action in Russia, which is more important than words. Once the proletariat has taken hold of power, everything it has decided will be carried out by its different unions and assemblies”. Another intervention: “I propose to demonstrate that the Russian Revolution, by adopting from the moment that it made the second revolution in October a complete reform of its socialist programme, is in accord with the ideals embodied in the Spanish CNT”.
In fact, as Bar says, “In relation to the Russian Revolution there was only one reaction; absolutely all the interventions were laudatory and expressed admiration for the revolutionary events in Russia... The great majority of the interventions were clearly favourable to the Russian revolution, highlighting the identity between the principles and ideals of the CNT and those embodied in that revolution; the report expressed itself in this sense”.
However, there was not the same unanimity on the adhesion to the Communist International. There were many who hesitated to see it as the prolongation of the Russian Revolution and an instrument for its international extension, and considered it a priori as an “authoritarian” body. The report on membership of the CI proposed the formation of a Syndicalist International and considered that the CI “although adopting methods of revolutionary struggle, pursues aims that are fundamentally opposed to the anti-authoritarian and de-centralising ideal in the life of the people proclaimed by the CNT”.
The congress was divided on membership of the CI. There were three fundamental tendencies:
The “pure” syndicalist one, which considered the CI a political organ and although not seeing it as hostile, preferred to organise a “revolutionary Syndicalist International”. Segui – a militant who had a real weight within the CNT at this time – did not oppose entry into the CI but saw this as a “tactical move”: “We support entry into the Third International because it will give greater authority to the Spanish CNT’s appeal to the syndicalist organisations of the world to construct the true, unique, and genuine workers’ International.”[25]
A second tendency, dedicated to full integration into the CI, was represented by Arlandis Buenacasa and Carbo who saw it as a product and emanation of the Russian Revolution.[26]
A third, more anarchist one that was in support of fraternal collaboration but which considered that the CI did not share anarchist principles.
The motion finally adopted by the Congress said:
“To the Congress:
The National Committee, summarising the ideas expressed by the different comrades who participated in the session of the 17th on the question of the Russian Revolution, proposes the following;
First: that the National Confederation of Labour declares itself a firm defender of the principles of the First International, upheld by Bakunin.
Second: that it declares its provisional adherence to the Third International, because of its revolutionary character, whilst it organises and holds in Spain an International Congress that will put in place the foundations for the true workers’ International”.[27]
This necessarily rapid survey of the reaction of the CNT faced with the First World War and the first international revolutionary wave demonstrates the deeply striking difference between the French anarcho-syndicalist CGT and Spanish CNT of that time. While the CGT sank in treason and support for the bourgeoisie’s war effort, the CNT worked for the internationalist struggle against the war and declared itself on the side of the Russian Revolution.
In part this difference is the result of the specific situation in Spain. The country was not directly involved in the war, and the CNT was therefore not directly confronted with the need to take position faced with invasion; likewise, the national tradition in Spain was clearly not as strong as in France, where even revolutionaries had a tendency to be obsessed by the traditions of the Great French Revolution of 1789.
One can compare the Spanish situation to that in Italy which was not implicated in the war in 1914 and where the majority of the Socialist party continued to defend class positions.
Similarly, and contrary to the French CGT, the CNT was not a well established legal union which risked losing its funds and apparatus due to the wartime state of emergency. Here one can make a parallel with the Bolsheviks in Russia, equally inured by years of clandestinity and repression.
The uncompromising internationalism of the CNT in 1914 is a glowing demonstration of its proletarian nature at that time. Likewise, faced with the Russian and German revolutions, it showed a capacity to learn from the revolutionary process and the practice of the working class itself in a way that appears astonishing today. Thus the CNT took a clear position in support of the revolution without trying to impose the organisational schemas of revolutionary syndicalism: the Russian revolution “embodied, in principle, the ideal of revolutionary syndicalism”; it recognised the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat and sided firmly and explicitly with the Bolsheviks. From this position, there is no doubt about its loyal collaboration and open-minded discussion with internationalist organisations, without any sectarian considerations. The militants of the CNT did not see the Russian revolution through the prism of distrust of “politics” and “authority”, but knew how to appreciate the collective struggle of the proletariat. They expressed this attitude with a critical spirit, without renouncing in any way their own convictions. The proletarian behaviour of the CNT in the period 1914-1919 constituted without a doubt one of the best expressions of the working class in Spain.
Nevertheless, one can distinguish certain specific weaknesses of the anarcho-syndicalist movement that were to weigh heavily on the later development of the CNT and its commitment to the revolution in Russia. It is necessary to underline that the CNT in 1914 found itself in essentially the same situation as Monatte, of the internationalist wing of the French CGT. Neither the anarcho-syndicalists nor the revolutionary syndicalists had succeeded in building an International within which a revolutionary left could appear, comparable to the left of the Social Democracy notably around Lenin and Luxembourg. The reference to the International Workingmen’s’ Association was an historic reference to a past period, which was no longer applicable to the new situation. In 1919, the only International that existed was the new Communist International. The discussion within the CNT on adhesion to the CI and, notably, the tendency that preferred a Syndicalist International which in 1919 did not exist (a Red Trade Union International was created in 1921 in an effort to compete with the unions that had supported the war), showed the danger of the anarchists’ rejection of everything that had to do with “politics”.
The CNT in the period 1914-1919, was clearly based on an internationalist terrain and open to the Communist International (actively pushed forward, as we have seen, by some remarkable anarchist militants and groups), Faced with the barbarity of the First World War which revealed the threat that capitalism posed to humanity, faced with the beginning of a proletarian response to this barbarity through the Russian Revolution, the CNT showed itself to be with the proletariat, with oppressed humanity, and with the struggle for the revolutionary transformation of the world.
The CNT’s attitude changed radically from the middle of the 1920’s. It was to witness a return towards syndicalism, apoliticism, the rejection of political action and a powerfully sectarian attitude faced with revolutionary marxism. Even worse, by the 1930s the CNT was no longer a resolutely internationalist and proletarian organisation as it had been in 1914. It had become an organisation that participated in the Catalan government and the Spanish Republic and, in this position, participated in the massacre of workers, notably during the events of May 1937.
How and why this change took place will be the object of the next article in this series.
RR and CMir (30th March 2007)
[1]. The resistance to this tide was expressed, on the one hand, by the revolutionary wing of Social Democracy and on the other, more partially, by revolutionary syndicalism and some tendencies within anarchism.
[2]. See International Review n° 128: “CNT; the birth of revolutionary syndicalism in Spain (1910-1913)” [24] .
[3]. Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party).
[4]. It is not the aim of this article to analyse the evolution of the PSOE. However, this Party – as we demonstrated in the previous article – was one of the most right-wing in the 2nd International. It followed a profoundly opportunist course which threw it into the arms of capital. The formation of the Republican-Socialist Alliance of 1910, an electoral pact that placed its leader Pablo Iglesias on the parliamentary stage, was one of the decisive moments in this process.
[5]. The Entente cordiale was the name commonly given to the alliance between Britain and France in the years leading up to World War I. It sprang from the series of partially secret diplomatic agreements signed on 8th April 1904 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entente_cordiale [25] ).
[6]. Fabra Ribas, a member of the PSOE critical of this direction, but still clearly a warmonger, lamented that Spanish capital did not participate in the war: “if the military and navel power of Spain had an effective value, it could contribute to the defeat of Kaiserism, and if the Spanish army and navy were truly national institutions, we would be fervent supporters of armed intervention on the side of the allies (from his book: Socialism and the European Conflict, published in Valencia, without a date but probably about 1914).
[7]. Pablo Iglesias, leader of the PSOE. See the previous article in this series.
[8]. He died on the 30th November 1914
[9]. This appeared in the annual Almanac of Tierra y Libertad (“Land and Freedom”) in January 1915. Tierra y Libertad was an anarchist review close to the CNT.
[10]. The convergence of this idea with that defended by Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg and other internationalist militants from the very beginning of the war is clear.
[11]. Syndicalist cultural circle of Ferrol. Ferrol is an industrial city in Galicia, based on shipyards and the navel arsenals, with an old and combative proletariat.
[12]. These were only able to participate in the first session because they were detained by the Spanish authorities and immediately expelled
[13]. “There should be an end to criticisms about the fact that the German socialists bear their share of the responsibility, or the French, or that Malato or Kropotkin are traitors to the International. Belligerents or neutrals, we all share responsibility for the conflict for having betrayed the principles of the International” (text for the convocation of the congress published in Tierra y Libertad, March 1915).
[14]. “Sobre la paz dos criterios” (“Two criteria concerning peace”), in Solidaridad Obrera June 1917.
[15]. Quoted by A Bar, page 433-4.
[16]. Cited in A Bar, La CNT en los anos rojos, (‘The CNT in the Red Years’) p 438. We have already quoted this well documented book in the previous article in this series.
[17]. Buenacasa in La Soli, November 1917.
[18]18. Closely linked to the CNT.
[19]. The Spanish workers’ movement published in Barcelona in 1928.
[20]. Soli, 24th November 1918.
[21]. J. Viadiu, “Bolsheviki! Bolsheviki!”, Soli 16th December 1918.
[22]. Bar, op.cit, p 445.
[23]. Soli, October 1918.
[24]. Bar, op cit, p 526.
[25]. Segui quoted in A. Bar page 531.
[26]. The delegation of the engineering union of Valencia declared “If there exists a clear and concrete affinity between the Third International and the Russian Revolution (and the CNT’s supports this), how can we be separate from the Third International?”.
[27]. The Confederal Committee. Madrid 17 December 1919. We can add that when in the summer of 1920 Kropotkin sent a “Message to the workers of Western Europe”, opposing the Russian Revolution and the Bolsheviks, Buenacasa, who was then editor of Solidaridad Obrera in Bilbao and the official spokesman for the CNT, denounced this “Message” and took the side of the Russian Revolution, the Bolsheviks and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The recovery of the international working class struggle continues. Time and again throughout its long history the working class has been informed by its employers and rulers that it no longer exists, that the struggle to defend its living conditions was an anachronism and that its ultimate goal of socialism and the overthrow of capitalism were quaint vestiges of the past. After 1989 and the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern Bloc, this antiquated message about proletarian non-existence was given a new lease of life, which helped to preserve a disorientation in workers' ranks for over a decade. Today the ideological fog is clearing again and the proletariat and its struggle are once more assuming a recognisable form.
In fact since 2003 things have started to change. In International Review n° 119, 4th Quarter 2004, the ICC published a resolution on the evolution of the class struggle that identified a turning point in the fortunes of the proletariat's fight, after significant strikes in France and Austria against attacks on pensions. Three years later this analysis seems to be increasingly affirmed. But before coming on to some of the more recent illustrations of our perspective, let us look at one of the key determinants of the development of the class struggle.
One of the explanations given in 2003 for the revival of the class struggle was a new viciousness in the level of the sacrifices imposed on the supposedly invisible working class.
"The recent period, mainly since the start of the 21st century, has once more brought to the fore the obvious fact of capitalism's economic crisis, after the illusions of the 1990s about the ‘resurgence', the ‘dragons', and the ‘new technological revolution'. At the same time, this new evolution of the capitalist crisis has led the ruling class to intensify the violence of its economic attacks against the working class, to generalise the attacks."[1]
In 2007, the acceleration and widening of the attacks on workers' standard of living has not lessened, but rather speeded up. Amongst the advanced capitalist countries the British experience is a telling and timely illustration of this fact, and of how the packaging of these attacks is losing its appeal to its recipients.
The era of Prime Minister Tony Blair's "New Labour" government has recently come to an end after beginning in the froth of capitalist optimism in 1997. "New" Labour, then announced, in line with the collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the bogus euphoria of the 90s, that it had broken with the traditions of "Old" Labour, it no longer spoke of "socialism" but of a "third way", it no longer talked about the working class but about the people, about inclusion and participation not division. Vast sums were spent on reinforcing this populist message. All levels of the state bureaucracy were to be democratised. Local parliaments were devolved to Scotland and Wales; a new mayorship was created for London. Above all cuts in workers living standards, particularly in the public sector, were presented as "reforms" and "modernisation". Even the victims of these reforms were now able to have a say in their implementation.
This repackaging of traditional forms of austerity could only enjoy a certain success while the economic crisis itself could be somewhat concealed. Today the contradictions are becoming too blatant. The Blair era, instead of achieving equality, has seen a further polarisation of wealth at one end of society and of poverty at the other. This doesn't just affect the poorest sections of the working class such as the young, the unemployed, and pensioners, who have been reduced to abject poverty, but also the slightly better off sectors who still have skilled jobs and access to credit. According to the accountants Ernst & Young, these sectors have lost 17% of their purchasing power in the past 4 years as a result of the inflation in household costs and other factors.
There are other causes beside the purely economic that are pushing the working class to reflect more deeply on its identity and purpose. Britain's foreign policy can no longer have any pretence to be "ethical" as New Labour claimed it would be in 1997, but, as the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures have shown, is based on typically sordid imperialist interests, disguised by now proven lies. Along with the expenses of imperialist adventures borne by the proletariat, another burden is being added: the effects of ecological deterioration are falling heaviest on this class of society.
The week of 25th to 29th June, during which Tony Blair was succeeded by the new prime minister Gordon Brown, was characteristic of the evolution of the situation: the war in Iraq claimed new lives among the British forces, 25,000 homes were ruined by floods following record rainfall throughout the country, and postal workers began a series of nationwide strikes for the first time in over a decade against falling real wages and threats of job cuts. These symptoms of the contradictions of class society were only partially obscured by a campaign of national unity and defence of the capitalist state launched by the latter in the aftermath of a botched terrorist campaign.
Gordon Brown has set the tone for the coming period: there will be less "spin", more "hard work" and more "duty".
The increasing size of the bill that the bourgeoisie presents to the workers for payment of the economic crisis is to be seen in other main capitalist countries albeit in a different form to that of the British "model".
In France, the clear mandate of the new president Nicolas Sarkozy is to drive home austerity attacks. Sacrifices will be demanded to fill the 2 billion Euro hole in the social security budget. A strategy, laughably called "flexisécurité", is intended to make it easier to increase working hours, pressurise wages, and lay off workers. New attacks on public services are also in the pipeline.
In the United States, the country which is boasting the best official growth rates of the advanced capitalist powers, there were 37 million people living below the poverty line in 2005, 5 million more than in 2001, when the economy was officially in recession.[2]
The housing boom, fuelled by low interest rates and easy mortgages has up till now helped to disguise the growing pauperisation of the American working class. But as interest rates have increased, mortgage defaults and house repossessions have mushroomed. The housing boom has now bust, the "sub-prime" mortgage market has collapsed and, at the same time, many illusions in workers' prosperity and security.
The pay of US workers fell 4% between 2001 and 2006.[3] The trade unions are brazenly assisting this reduction. For example the United Auto Workers Union recently agreed an almost 50% reduction of hourly wage rates, and a slashing of severance pay for 17,000 workers at the Delphi auto parts manufacturer in Detroit.[4] (At the beginning of the year a factory of the same company in Puerto Real, Cadiz in Spain was closed with 40,000 workers put onto the streets).
This isn't an American peculiarity. The ver.di union in Germany recently negotiated a 6% wage cut and a 4 hour increase in the working week for Telecom workers and had the nerve to announce it had achieved a worthy compromise!
In the automobile sector again, in the United States General Motors plans 30,000 redundancies, Ford 10,000; in Germany Volkswagen plans 10,000 new redundancies; in France 5,000 are projected at PSA.
ABN Amro, the foremost bank in Holland, and the British bank Barclays announced their fusion on 23rd April which will lead to the loss of 12,800 jobs while 10,800 will be sub contracted. Airbus will sack 10,000 employees, Alcatel-Lucent will let the same number of telecommunication workers go.
The international scale of the revival of class struggle is closely connected to the fact that the economic conditions faced by proletariat are fundamentally the same around the world. Thus the tendencies we have briefly described in the developed capitalist countries are replicated in different ways amongst the workers of the capitalist countries of the third world. Here we see a more brutal and murderous application of increasing austerity.
The expansion of the Chinese economy, far from representing a new opening for the capitalist system depends to a large degree on the increasing destitution of the Chinese working class, that is, reducing its living conditions below the level at which it can reproduce itself and continue to live as a proletariat. The recent scandal of the conditions in 8,000 brick kiln and small coal mine operations in Shanxi and Henan province is a case in point. These manufactures depended on the kidnapping of children to work as slaves in hellish conditions and they were only rescued if their parents could find and reach them. Its true that the Chinese state has now introduced labour laws to prevent such "abuses" of the system and to give migrant workers more protection. However it is likely that, as in the past, such laws will remain un-enforced. Underlying such abuses in any case is the logic of the world market: American companies lobbied strongly against even the mild conditions of the new labour laws. Multinational corporations: "argued that the rules would substantially increase labor costs and reduce flexibility, and some foreign businesses warned that they would have little choice but to move their operations out of China if the provisions were enacted unchanged."[5]
The situation is substantially the same for the working class in those third world countries that have not opened up to foreign capital in the same way as China. In Iran, for example President Ahmadinejad's economic watchword is "khodkafa'i" or "self sufficiency". This has not prevented Iran from suffering its worst economic crisis since the 1970s, which has led to a sharp fall in the standard of living of the working class that is now facing 30% unemployment and 18% inflation. Despite increased revenues from the rise in oil prices, petrol has recently been rationed in Iran, since refined oil products, as well as half the country's food has to be imported.
The stepping up and broadening of attacks on the working class throughout the world, is one of the essential reasons why the development of the class struggle in recent years has continued. We cannot here list all the struggles of the world working class that have occurred since 2003 - we have covered many of them in previous editions of the International Review. Instead we will refer to some of the latest ones.
In the first place we should stress that this cannot be a comprehensive survey, since the international class struggle is not officially recognised by bourgeois society or its media as a distinct and historic force to be widely understood and analysed and therefore publicised. On the contrary many of the struggles go unreported, or are completely distorted. Thus the extremely important struggle of the French students against the CPE in the spring of 2006 was at first ignored by the world's media and then only recognised as an addendum to the aimless violence of the French suburbs in the previous autumn. In other words the media attempted to bury the valuable lessons about workers' solidarity and self-organisation that this experience provided.
Typically the International Labour Organisation, generously funded by the United Nations, is not at all interested in the events of the international class struggle. Instead it proposes to alleviate the plight of the billions of victims of the rapacious capitalist system by legal defence of their individual human rights within the institutions of this same system.
However the official ostracism of the class struggle is a measure of its power and potential to overthrow capitalist society.
In the past year, approximately since the mass movement of the French students was ended by the withdrawal of the CPE by the French government, the class struggle in the major capitalist countries has continued to try and answer the accelerated pressure on wages and conditions of work. This has often taken place in sporadic actions, in many different countries and industries, while others have threatened to strike.
In Britain, in June 2006 a spontaneous walkout of Vauxhall car workers took place. In April this year 113,000 Northern Ireland civil servants staged a one day strike.
In Spain, 18th April, there was a demonstration of 40,000 workers from all the enterprises of the Bay of Cadiz, expressing their solidarity in struggle with their class brothers sacked at Delphi. On May 1st an even bigger movement mobilised workers from other provinces of Andalucia. Such a movement of solidarity has in reality been the result of the active search for support by the Delphi workers, of their families and notably their wives organised in a collective to win the widest possible solidarity.
At about the same time spontaneous walkouts, outside of union control, took place at Airbus plants in several European countries to protest the company's austerity plan. These often involved young workers, a new generation of proletarians who have played the most active part in these struggles. In Nantes and Saint-Nazaire in France there was a real will to develop active solidarity with the production workers of Toulouse who had stopped work.
In Germany there was a series of strikes over six weeks by 50,000 Telecom workers against the cuts referred to above. At the moment of writing German railway workers are on a strike over pay. There have been numerous wildcat strikes by Italian airport workers and others.
But its in the third world in the recent period that we have seen the continuation of a remarkable series of explosive and wide scale workers' struggles risking brutal and bloody repression.
In Chile a strike of copper miners hit one of the principal economic activities of the country. In Peru this spring an indefinite nation-wide strike of coal miners took place - the first in 20 years. In Argentina during May and June, Buenos Aires metro workers held general assemblies and organised a strike against a pay "deal" concocted by their own union. In September last year in Brazil, workers at various Volkswagen plants in Sao Paulo took action. On the 30th March this year 120 air traffic controllers, in reaction to the dangerous state of air travel in the country and the threat to imprison 16 of their number for striking, stopped work, paralysing 49 of the country's 67 airports. This action was particularly remarkable because this sector is mostly subject to military discipline. The workers nevertheless resisted the intense pressure of the state up to and including that of the calumnies of the supposed workers' friend - President Lula himself. For several weeks a strike movement affected the steel sector, the public sector, and universities - the most important class movement in this country since 1986.
In the Middle East, increasingly ravaged by imperialist war, class struggle has raised its head. Public sector strikes occurred in autumn last year in Palestine and in Israel over a similar question: unpaid salaries and pensions. A wave of strikes hit numerous sectors in Egypt at the beginning of the year. In cement factories, in poultry rearing, in mines, buses and railways, in the health sector and above all in the textile industry workers unleashed a series of illegal strikes against big cuts in real wages and the reduction of bonuses. The statements of the textile workers showed clearly their consciousness of belonging to one class fighting the same enemy and moreover the necessity for class solidarity against divisions between enterprises and those created by the unions.[6]
In Iran, according to the business newspaper the Wall Street Journal: "a series of strikes have continued in Tehran and at least 20 other major cities since last autumn. Last year, one major strike by transport workers in Tehran brought the city of 15 million to a standstill for several days. Right now tens of thousands of workers in industries as diverse as gas refining, paper and newsprint, automobile, and copper mining are on strike."[7]
At demonstrations on May Day, Iranian workers marched through several cities shouting "No to slave labour! Yes to freedom and dignity".
In Guinea, West Africa, a strike movement gripped the whole country during January and February this year against starvation wages and the inflation of food prices, alarming not just the regime of Lansana Conté but the bourgeoisie of the whole region. The bloody repression of this movement left over 100 dead.
We are not intending to present here an incipient revolution, nor a consciously international effort by the world's workers. These struggles are still mainly defensive in nature, and compared to the workers struggles from May 1968 in France to 1981 in Poland and beyond, appear less dramatic and more limited. The weight of long term unemployment and growing social decomposition are still a heavy weight on the development of class combativity and consciousness.
Nevertheless these events, which are global in nature, are indications of a weakening conviction of the world's workers in the catastrophic policies pursued by the ruling class at the economic, political and military levels.
Today, compared to previous decades, the stakes of the world situation are much greater, the scope of the attacks wider, the danger of the world situation vastly increased. The heroism of the workers today in challenging the might of the ruling class and the state is therefore all the more impressive, if quieter. The contemporary situation has posed a wider reflection by the workers than the purely economic and corporate. The global attack on pensions, for example, brings out the common interests of the different generations of workers, young and old. The need and search for solidarity has become a striking feature of many workers' struggles today.
The long term perspective of the politicisation of the workers' movement is reflected in the emergence of tiny but significant minorities on a global scale looking to understand and join the internationalist political traditions of the working class, and in a greater echo and success for the propaganda of the Communist Left.
The general strike of French workers in May 1968 brought to an end the long period of counter-revolution that followed the failure of the world revolution in the 1920s. It generated several waves of international proletarian struggle that finally came to an end in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Today a renewed assault on the capitalist system is on the horizon.
Como 5/7/7
[1]. International Review, n° 119, "Resolution on the evolution of the class struggle".
[2]2. New York Times, April 17 2007
[3]. The Economist, September 14 2006
[4]. International Herald Tribune, June 30/July 1 2007.
[5]. Ibid.
[6]. On this subject see World Revolution nº304.
[7]. Wall Street Journal, May 10, 2007
At the end of May, the ICC held its 17th International Congress. Because revolutionary organisations don't exist for their own sake but are expressions of the proletariat and active factors in its life, they have a duty to give an account to the whole of their class of the work done by their most essential organ - the congress. This is the aim of the present article, which is accompanied in this Review by the resolution on the international situation adopted by the congress.
All ICC congresses are obviously very important moments in the life of our organisation. However, the first thing that has to be said about the one we held in the spring is that it even more important than the ones before it, because it marked a very significant step in over thirty years of existence[1].
The main illustration of this fact is the presence at our congress of three groups from the international proletarian camp: OpOp[2] from Brazil, the SPA[3] from South Korea and the EKS[4] from Turkey. Another group was also invited to the congress, the Internasyonalismo group from the Philippines, but despite its strong wish to send a delegation, this proved impossible. However the group sent greetings to the congress and a took written position on the main reports submitted to it.
The presence of several groups from the proletarian milieu at an ICC congress is not a novelty. In the past, at the very beginnings of its existence, the ICC welcomed delegations from other groups. Thus, at its founding conference in January 1975 there were delegations from the Revolutionary Workers' Group in the USA, Pour Une Intervention Communiste in France and Revolutionary Perspectives in the UK. At its second congress in 1977 there was a delegation from the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista). At its third congress in 1979 there were comrades from the Communist Workers' Organisation (UK), the Nucleo Comunista Internazionalista and Il Leninista (Italy), as well as an individual comrade from Scandinavia. After this, unfortunately, this practice was not continued, for reasons independent of our will: the disappearance of certain groups, the evolution of others towards leftist positions (such as the NCI) and a sectarian approach by the groups (CWO and Battaglia) who had taken it on themselves to sabotage the international conferences of the groups of the communist left which were held at the end of the 70s[5]. As a result, it's been over a quarter of a century since we have been able to welcome other proletarian groups to one of our congresses. Just in itself, the presence of four[6] groups at our congress was therefore a very important event.
But the importance of this congress goes beyond the fact that it was able to renew a practise that had been characteristic of the ICC since its beginnings. What's more fundamental is the significance of the existence and attitude of these groups. They are part of a historical situation which we already identified at our previous congress: "A central concern of the 16th congress was to examine the revival in the struggles of the working class and the responsibilities this confers on our organisation, notably in response to the development of a new generation of elements moving towards a revolutionary political perspective".[7]
At the time of the collapse of the eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes in 1989,
"The deafening campaigns of the bourgeoisie about the ‘failure of communism', the ‘definitive victory of liberal democratic capitalism', ‘the end of the class struggle' and even of the working class itself, led to an important retreat by the proletariat, both at the level of its consciousness and its militancy. This retreat went deep and lasted more than 10 years. It marked a whole generation of workers, resulting in disarray and even demoralisation.... It was not until 2003, notably in the shape of the big mobilisations against attacks on pensions in France and Austria, that the proletariat really began to emerge from the retreat which had affected it since 1989. Since then, this tendency towards the revival of class struggles and the development of class consciousness has been further verified. Workers' struggles have affected most of the central countries, including the most important of them such as the USA (Boeing and New York transport in 2005) Germany (Daimler and Opel in 2004, hospital doctors in spring 2006, Deutsche Telekom in the spring of 2007), Britain (London Airport in August 2005) France (notably the movement of university and high school students against the CPE in spring 2006) but also a whole series of struggles in the periphery such as Dubai (building workers in spring 2006), Bangladesh (textile workers in spring 2006), Egypt (textile, transport and other workers in the spring of 2007)".[8]
"Today, as in 1968, [at the time of the historic resurgence of workers' struggles which put an end to four decades of counter-revolution] the recovery of class combats is accompanied by a deep reflection, and the appearance of new elements who are turning towards the positions of the communist left is just the tip of the iceberg."[9]
This why the presence of several groups from the proletarian milieu at the congress, the very open attitude towards discussion shown by these groups (which is a real break from the sectarian attitude of the "old" groups of the communist left) is not at all accidental: it is an integral part of the new stage in the development of the combat of the world proletariat against capitalism.
The work of the congress, in particular through the testimonies offered by different sections and by the invited groups, con-firmed the reality of this tendency, from Belgium to India, and from Brazil to Turkey and Korea, in the central countries as well as those in the periphery, both at the level of the immediate struggle and of the development of a process of reflection among elements heading towards the positions of the communist left. A tendency which has also taken the form of the integration of new militants into the organisation, including in countries where there haven't previously been any new integrations for several decades, and in the constitution of an ICC nucleus in Brazil. This is a very important event for us and will contribute significantly to the development of the political presence of our organisation in the most important country in Latin America - a country which has the biggest industrial concentrations in this region and some of the biggest internationally. The creation of our nucleus is the concretisation of work that the ICC began over 15 years ago. This work has intensified in recent years through the contacts we have made with different groups and elements, in particular the OpOp, which sent a delegation to the congress, but also in the state of Sao Paulo, where there is also a group in formation, influenced by the positions of the communist left. We have recently established regular political relations with this group, including joint public meetings. The collaboration with these groups is not at all in contradiction with our aim of developing the specific political presence of the ICC in Brazil. On the contrary, our permanent presence in this country will make it possible to strengthen the collaboration between our organisations, all the more so because between our nucleus and the OpOp there is already a long shared history, based on mutual respect and confidence.
Given the particular circumstances in which this congress was being held, the first point on the agenda was the question of the class struggle, while the second was the new revolutionary forces appearing or developing in the present period. We can't give an account in this short article of the discussions which took place: the resolution on the international situation (which is published elsewhere in this issue of International Review) provides a synthesis of its main elements. What we want to underline here are the new and particular features of the present development of the class struggle. It was shown in particular that the gravity of the crisis of capitalism, the violence of the attacks now being made on the class, and the dramatic stakes of the world situation in general, characterised by the drift towards military barbarism and the growing threat to the planetary environment, are all elements which will tend to politicise the workers' struggle. The situation is somewhat different from the one we saw in the wake of the historic resurgence of struggles in 1968, when the margin of manoeuvre still available to capital made it possible to maintain illusions that "tomorrow will be better than today". Today such an illusion is no longer possible: the new generations of workers, as well as the older ones, are more and more aware that "tomorrow will be worse than today". Because of this, even if such a perspective can be a factor leading to demoralisation and demobilisation, the struggles which the working class is being forced to wage against the attacks will more and more lead it to become aware that these struggles are a preparation for a much bigger struggle against a dying system. Even now, the struggles we have seen since 2003, "are more and more incorporating the question of solidarity. This is vitally important because it constitutes par excellence the antidote to the ‘every man for himself' attitude typical of social decomposition, and above all because it is at the heart of the world proletariat's capacity not only to develop its present struggles but also to overthrow capitalism".[10]
Even though the principal concern of the congress was the question of the class struggle, other aspects of the international situation were also dealt with. Thus it devoted a lot of time to the question of the economic crisis, examining in particular the present growth of certain "emerging" countries like China and India, which seems to contradict the analyses made by our organisation, and marxists in general, about the definitive bankruptcy of the capitalist mode of production. Following a very detailed report and an in-depth discussion, the congress concluded that:
"The exceptional rates of growth we are currently seeing in countries like India and China in no way prove that there is new life in the world economy, even if they have made a considerable contribution to the high rates of growth in the last period. At the root of this exceptional growth is, paradoxically, once again the crisis of capitalism.... Thus, far from representing a breath of air for the capitalist economy, the 'miracle' in China and a certain number of other third world countries is yet another embodiment of the decadence of capitalism. ...Thus, just as the ‘miracle' of the two figure growth of the Asian tigers and dragons came to a sorry end in 1997, the current Chinese miracle, even if it does not have identical origins and has far greater assets at its disposal, will sooner or later be confronted with the harsh reality of the historic impasse of the capitalist mode of production".[11]
We should note that, on the question of the economic crisis, the Congress echoes the debates currently taking place in our organisation about how to analyse the mechanisms which allowed capitalism to achieve spectacular rates of growth after the Second World War. The different analyses that presently exist within the ICC (all of which however reject the idea, defended by the IBRP or by the "Bordigist" groups, that war represents a "momentary solution" to the contradictions of capitalism) had an impact on the way we understand the present economic dynamism of certain "emerging" countries, notably China. And it is precisely because the congress paid particular attention to this latter phenomenon that the divergences within the organisation needed to be ex-pressed at the congress. Obviously, as we have done in the past, we will publish documents in the International Review that give an account of this debate as soon as it has reached a sufficient level of clarity.
Finally, the impact on the bourgeoisie of the dead-end reached by capitalist society and the resulting descent into decomposition was the object of two discussions: one on the consequences of this situation inside each country, the other on the evolution of imperialist antagonisms between states. These two aspects being closely connected, particularly to the extent that conflicts within national bourgeoisies can derive from different approaches towards imperialist conflicts (what alliances to make with other states, how to use military force, etc). On the first point, the congress showed how all the official speeches about "less state" simply mask a continual strengthening of the role of the state in society, given that the state is the only organ that can prevent society from succumbing to the tendency towards "every man for himself", which characterises the phase of the decomposition of capital-ism. There was a strong emphasis on the spectacular reinforcement of the police apparatus, including in the most "democratic" countries such as the USA and Britain. The strengthening of the police apparatus is officially motivated by the rise of terrorism (another phenomenon linked to decomposition but in which the most powerful bourgeoisies have also played a considerable role) but permits the ruling class to prepare for future confrontations with the proletariat. Concerning the question of imperialist confrontations, the congress pointed out the failure of the policies of the world's most powerful bourgeoisie, that of the USA, above all since its adventure in Iraq, and the fact that this reveals the general impasse faced by capitalism: "In fact, the arrival of the team of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Co. to the reins of the state was not the simple result of a monumental mistake in casting by the ruling class. While it has considerably worsened the situation of the US on the imperialist level, it was already the expression of the impasse facing the US given the growing weakening of its leadership and more generally given the development of the ‘every man for himself' in international relations which characterises the phase of decomposition".[12]
More generally, the Congress underlined that "the military chaos developing around the world, plunging vast regions into hell-ish desolation, notably in the Middle East but also and above all in Africa, is not the only manifestation of the historic impasse reached by capitalism, nor even the most dangerous for the human species. Today it has become clear that the maintenance of the capitalist system brings with it the threat of the destruction of the environment which made the rise of humanity possible".[13]
This part of the discussion concluded by affirming that "The alternative announced by Engels at the end of the 19th century, socialism or barbarism, has been a sinister reality throughout the 20th century. What the 21st century offers us as a perspective is quite simply socialism or the destruction of humanity. These are the real stakes facing the only force in society capable of over-throwing capitalism: the world working class."[14]
This perspective underlines all the more the decisive importance of the workers' struggles now developing on a world wide scale. It also emphasises the fundamental role of revolutionary organisations, and notably the ICC, in intervening in these struggles in order to develop an awareness of what's at stake in the world today.
Here the congress drew a very positive balance sheet of the intervention of our organisation in the class struggle and in re-sponse to the questions it raises. It underlined in particular the ICC's ability to mobilise its forces on an international scale (articles in the press, on the internet, public meetings, etc) to disseminate the lessons of one of the major episodes of the class struggle dur-ing the recent period: the combat of the student youth against the CPE in the spring of 2006 in France. It was noted that our web-site had seen a spectacular rise in audience during this period, a proof that revolutionaries not only have the responsibility but also the possibility to counteract the blackout that the bourgeois media systematically organises around proletarian movements.
The congress also drew a very positive balance sheet of our policy towards groups and elements working towards the defence of the positions of the communist left. During the last period, as we said at the beginning of this article, the ICC has integrated a number of new comrades following thorough-going discussions (as is always the case with our organisation which contrary to the practise of the leftists does not seek to recruit new members at any price). The ICC has also had an active participation in various internet forums, especially in the English language, which is the most important language on the world level. Our participation in forums where it is possible to put forward class positions has enabled a number of elements to get a better understanding of our views and our attitude to discussion, and to overcome a certain amount of the distrust that is kept up by the multitude of parasitic sects whose role is not to contribute to the development of consciousness in the working class but to sow suspicion towards the organisations which are indeed carrying out that role. But the most positive aspect of this policy has without doubt been our capacity to establish or strengthen links with other groups based on revolutionary positions, as illustrated by the participation of four of these groups in our congress. This has been the fruit of a considerable effort by the ICC, which has sent delegations to a number of countries (obviously to Brazil, Korea, Turkey and the Philippines but elsewhere as well).
The growing responsibility that falls on the ICC, at the level both of intervention in workers' struggles and of discussion with groups and elements situated on a class terrain, requires a strengthening of its organisational tissue. This was seriously affected at the beginning of 2000 by a crisis which exploded in the wake of our 14th Congress, and which resulted in the convocation of an extraordinary conference a year later, as well as being the subject of a good deal of reflection at our 15th Congress in 2003.[15] As this congress noted, and as the 16th Congress confirmed, the ICC has on the whole overcome the organisational weaknesses which lay behind this crisis. One of the most important elements in the ICC's ability to deal with these weaknesses was its insistence on examining these problems in a deep and attentive manner. In order to do this, in 2001 the ICC set up a special commission, distinct from its central organ, and like the central organ nominated by the congress, with the specific mandate of carrying out this work. This commission reported on its mandate, noting that alongside important signs of progress made by our organisation, a certain number of sections still bore the "scars" of past difficulties. This is the proof that the construction of an organisational tissue is never complete and demands a permanent effort on the part of the whole organisation and all its militants. This is why the congress, on the basis of this necessity and of the key role played by this commission in recent years, decided to give it a permanent character by inscribing it into the ICC's statutes. This is not at all an "innovation" by our organisation. In fact it corresponds to a tradition in the political organisations of the working class. Thus the German Social Democratic Party, which was the reference point of the Second International, formed a "Control Commission" with the same kind of attributes.
This said, one of the major elements in our organisation's capacity to overcome the crisis, and even to come out of it stronger than before, was its ability to look at its organisational difficulties in their historical and theoretical dimension. This process of reflection was in particular carried out around the various orientation texts, significant extracts of which have been published in the International Review.[16] The congress continued in this direction by devoting time to discussing an orientation text on the culture of debate, which had been circulated in the ICC several months previously, and which will eventually be published in the International Review. This question does not only concern the internal life of the organisation. The intervention of revolutionaries implies that they are capable of producing the most pertinent and profound analyses possible and that they can put forward these analyses effectively within the working class in order to contribute to the development of its consciousness. And this means that they have to be able to discuss these analyses in the most thorough way, learn how to present them to the class as a whole and towards elements searching for clarity, always with the concern to take into account the questions and concerns that preoccupy them. In fact, to the degree that the ICC is faced both within its own ranks and in the class as a whole with the emergence of a new generation of militants or elements who want to struggle for the overthrow of capitalism, it has to make all the necessary effort to re-appropriate fully and communicate to this generation one of the most precious elements in the experience of the workers' movement, intimately linked to the critical method of marxism: the culture of debate.
The presentation and the discussion of this question pointed out that in all the splits we have been through in the history of the ICC, a tendency towards monolithism played a fundamental role. As soon as divergences appeared, certain militants began to say that we could no longer work together, that the ICC had become or was about to become a bourgeois organisation etc, whereas these divergences could, for the most part, have been contained within a non-monolithic organisation. Indeed, the ICC has learned from the Italian communist left that even when divergences concern fundamental principles, the most profound collective clarification is necessary before any organisational separation takes place. In this sense, these splits were for the most part an extreme manifestation of the lack of a culture of debate and even of a monolithic vision. However, these problems were not eliminated by the departure of the militants. They were also the expression of a more general difficulty in the ICC on this question, since there were confusions in our own ranks which could end in a slide towards monolithism, confusions which tend to annihilate debate rather than develop it. And these confusions continue to exist. We should not exaggerate the scale of these problems. They are confusions, slidings which appear from time to time. But as history shows - the history of the ICC but also of the workers' movement - small slidings and confusions can become big and dangerous ones if you don't go to the roots of the problem.
In the history of the communist left, there are currents who have defended and theorised monolithism. The Bordigist current is a caricature of this. The ICC on the contrary is the heir to the tradition of the communist left of Italy and of France who were the most resolute adversaries of monolithism and who put into the practise the culture of debate in a very determined way.
The ICC was founded on this understanding and it is enshrined in its statutes. For this reason, it's clear that while problems still exist in practise on this question, in general no ICC militant is opposed to developing the notion of the culture of debate. Having said this, it is necessary to point to the persistence of a certain number of difficulties. The first of these is a tendency to pose each discussion in terms of a conflict between marxism and opportunism, between Bolshevism and Menshevism, and even between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. Such an approach only makes sense if we have the idea of an immutable communist programme. And here at least Bordigism is consistent: the "invariance" and the monolithism that it advocates go hand in hand. But if we accept that marxism is not a dogma, that truth is relative, that it is not fixed but constitutes a process, and thus that we will never stop learning because reality is permanently changing, then it is evident that the need to deepen, but also confusions and even errors are normal, even necessary steps towards arriving at class consciousness. What is decisive is the collective effort, active participation in the movement towards clarification.
It has to be said that this approach of seeing the presence of opportunism - i.e. the tendency towards bourgeois positions - in every debate can lead to a sort of banalisation of the danger of opportunism and to putting all debates at the same level. Experience shows us precisely that in the rare discussions where basic principles are put into question, it has often proved hard to see that this was the case: if everything is opportunism then in the end nothing is opportunism.
Another consequence of this approach of seeing opportunism and bourgeois ideology everywhere and in all debates is that it inhibits debate. Militants "no longer have the right" to have confusions, to express them, or to make mistakes because they are immediately seen, or see themselves, as potential traitors. Certain debates do indeed have the character of confrontations between bourgeois positions and proletarian positions. This is the expression of a crisis and of the danger of degeneration. But in the life of the proletariat this is not the general rule. If all debates are put at this level, you can end up with the idea that debate itself is the expression of a crisis.
Another problem which, again, exists more at the level of practice than in a theorised way, consists in the idea that the discussion has to convince others of the correct position as quickly as possible. It's an attitude which leads to impatience, to a tendency to monopolise discussion, and to seek to "crush the opposition" to some extent. Such an approach makes it difficult to listen to what others are saying. It's true that in general, in a society marked by individualism and competition, it is difficult to listen to others. But not listening leads to an attitude of closing off to the world, which is the very opposite of a revolutionary attitude. In this sense, it is necessary to understand that the most important thing about a debate is that it takes place, that it develops, that there is the widest possible participation and that a real clarification can emerge. In the end, the collective life of the proletariat, when it is capable of developing, will bring the clarification. The will to clarify is a characteristic of the proletariat as a class. Above all it demands truth and not falsification. This is why Rosa Luxemburg said that the first task of a revolutionary is to tell it like it is. Confused attitudes on these issues are not the rule in the ICC, but they do exist and can be dangerous, so they need to be overcome. In particular it is necessary to de-dramatise debates. Most of the discussions within the organisation, and many of the discussions we hold outside, are not confrontations between bourgeois and proletarian positions. They are discussions where, on the basis of shared positions and a common goal, we are aiming to deepen collectively, to move from confusion to clarity.
The capacity of revolutionary organisations to develop a real culture of debate is one of the major signs that they belong to the working class, of their capacity to remain alive and attuned to its needs. And such an approach is not limited to communist organisations: it belongs to the proletariat as a whole. It's through its own discussions, especially in its general assemblies, that the class develops the ability to draw lessons from its experience and to take its consciousness forward. Sectarianism and the refusal to discuss, which unfortunately characterise a certain number of organisations in the proletarian camp, are in no way a proof of their "intransigence" towards bourgeois ideology or confusion. On the contrary it is an expression of their fear of defending their own positions and in the final analysis of a lack of conviction in their validity.
This culture of debate informed all the work of the congress. And this was welcomed by the delegations of the invited groups, who also gave us the benefit of their own experience and thoughts.
Thus one of the comrades of the delegation from Korea expressed, "the striking impression made by the spirit of fraternity, of debate, of the relations of camaraderie which he had not been used to in his pervious experience and which he envied". Another comrade from this delegation expressed his conviction that, "the discussion on the culture of debate will be fruitful for the development of their own activity and that it was important that the ICC, as well as their own group, don't see themselves as being ‘alone in the world'."
For its part, the OpOp delegation, "expressed a very fraternal salute to the congress" and "its satisfaction in participating in such an important event". For the delegation, "this congress is not only an important event for the ICC but for the working class as a whole. We are learning a lot from the ICC. We have learned a lot over the past three years through the contacts we have had with it and the debates we have held together in Brazil. We already took part in a previous congress (of the French section, last year) and we saw how serious the ICC is about debate, its will to be open to debate, not to be afraid of debate and not to be afraid of confronting positions different from its own. On the contrary its aim is to stimulate debate and we want to thank the ICC for having shown us this approach. We also salute the way the ICC is looking at the question of the new generations, present and future. We are learning from this heritage that the ICC refers to and which has been transmitted to us by the workers' movement since its beginnings." At the same time the delegation expressed its conviction that, "the ICC has also learned alongside the OpOp", notably when its delegation participated alongside the OpOp in an intervention in a workers' assembly dominated by the unions.
The delegate from the EKS also underlined the importance of debate in the development of revolutionary positions in the class, notably for the new generations:
"To begin with I would like to underline the importance of the debates for the new generation. We have some young elements in our group and we have been politicised through debate. We have really learned through debate, especially among the young elements with whom we have come into contact.... I think that for the young generation debate will in the future be a very important aspect of its political development. We met a comrade who came from a very poor workers' neighbourhood in Istanbul and who was older than us. He told us that in the neighbourhood he came from workers always want to discuss. But the leftists who do political work in the workers' neighbourhoods always try to liquidate debate very quickly and get onto ‘practical things'. I think that the proletarian culture we are discussing here and which I have experienced in this congress is a negation of the leftist method of discussion seen as a competition. I would like to make a few comments on the debates between internationalist groups. First I think that it is evident that such debates have to be as constructive and fraternal as possible and that we always have to bear in mind that debates are a collective effort to arrive at political clarification among revolutionaries. It is absolutely not a competition or something which should create hostility or rivalry. This is the total negation of the collective effort to arrive at new conclusions, to reach the truth. It is also important that the debate between internationalist groups be as regular as possible be-cause this is a great aid to clarification for all those who are involved at the international level. I think that it is necessary for debate to be open to all the proletarian elements who are interested. I also think that it is significant for debates to be public for the revolutionary elements who are interested. Debate is not limited to those who are directly implicated. The debate itself, what is discussed, is a great aid for someone who simply reads. For example I remember that a while back I was very afraid of debating but very interested in reading. This idea of reading debates and their results is enormously helpful and it is very important for the debates that have taken place to be public for all those interested. This is a very effective way of developing theoretically and politically".
The very warm interventions made by the delegations of the invited groups had nothing to do with an attitude of flattery to-wards the ICC. Thus the comrades from Korea made a certain number of criticisms of the congress, in particular regretting that it didn't go back over the experience of our intervention in the movement against the CPE in France or that the analysis of the economic situation of China didn't take into account the social situation and the struggles of the working class there. All the ICC delegations paid particular attention to these criticisms, which will enable the organisation to be more aware of the concerns and expectations of other groups of the proletarian camp and stimulate our effort to deepen our analyses of a question as important as the situation in China. Obviously the elements and analyses which the other groups can bring to this question, especially the groups in the Far East, will be precious for our own work.
During the course of the congress the interventions of the invited groups were also important for our understanding of the world situation, notably when they provided precise elements with regard to the situation in their own countries. We can't in the context of this article reproduce in full the interventions by the delegations, elements of which will eventually figure in articles in our press. We will limit ourselves to bringing out their most striking elements. With regard to the class struggle, the EKS delegate insisted on the fact that after the defeat of the massive struggles of 1989, there is a today a revival of workers' struggles in Turkey, a wave of strikes with factory occupations, in response to an economic situation which is highly dramatic for the workers. Faced with this situation, the unions are not just sabotaging struggles as they do everywhere, but they are also trying to develop national-ism among the workers by waging a campaign about "secularist Turkey". The OpOp delegation pointed out that, given the link between the unions and the present government (since president Lula was the main union leader of the country), there is a tendency for struggles to go outside the official union framework, a "rebellion at the base" as the movement in the banks called itself in 2003. The new economic attacks that the Lula government is preparing will obviously push the working class to continue its struggles, even if the unions adopt a much more "critical" attitude towards Lula.
Another important contribution from the delegations from OpOp and the EKS concerned the imperialist policies of Turkey and Brazil. Thus OpOp provided elements enabling us to get a better understanding of the position taken up by the latter, which on the one hand is showing itself to be a loyal ally of US policy and its role of world cop (notably through its military presence in Timor and Haiti, where Brazil has command of the foreign forces), but which, on the other hand, is developing its own diplomacy, with bilateral agreements with Russia (from whom it has bought planes) India, and China (whose industrial products are in competition with Brazil's). Brazil is also developing regional imperialist policies, in which it is trying to impose conditions on countries like Bolivia and Paraguay. The EKS comrade made a very interesting intervention on the political life of the Turkish bourgeoisie (in particular the current struggle between the "Islamist" and "secularist" factions) and its imperialist ambitions. Again we can't re-produce this intervention in this article.[17] We simply want to underline the essential idea in the conclusion to this intervention: the risk that, in a region bordering zones where imperialist conflicts are violently raging, notably Iraq, the Turkish bourgeoisie will get involved in a dramatic military spiral, making the working class pay even more for the contradictions of capitalism.
The interventions of the delegations of the invited groups, alongside those of the delegations from the ICC sections, were an important contribution to the work of the whole congress, to its reflection on all the questions on the agenda, enabling it to, "synthesise the world situation" as the delegation from the SPA of Korea remarked. In fact, as we pointed out at the beginning of this article, one of the key things about this congress was the participation of the invited groups. This was one of the major elements in the success of the congress and was enthusiastically welcomed by all the delegations during the concluding session.
Two international meetings were held a few days apart in May: the G8 summit and the ICC Congress. The contrast between these two meetings is striking from the point of view of their circumstances, their goals and their way of functioning. On the one hand you had a meeting behind barbed wire, with an unprecedented employment of police and police repression, and where a series of declarations about the "sincerity of the debates", "peace" and the "future of humanity" were just a smokescreen to cover antagonisms between capitalist states, prepare new wars and preserve a system which has nothing to offer humanity. On the other hand you had a meeting of revolutionaries from 15 countries, combating all the smokescreens, all the false appearances, engaged in really fraternal debates in order to contribute to the only perspective that can save humanity: the united and international struggle of the working class aimed at overthrowing capitalism and installing communism.
We know that the road that leads to that goal is long and difficult, but the ICC is convinced that its 17th Congress was an important step along the way.
ICC, July 2007.
[1] On the history of the ICC, see International Review no. 123, "30 years of the ICC" [27] .
[2] OpOp: Oposicao Operaria, Workers Opposition. This is a group implanted in several cities in Brazil, formed at the beginning of the 1990s, in particular by elements breaking from the CUT union federation and the Workers' Party of Lula (the current President of the country) to take up proletarian positions, notably on the essential question of internationalism, but also on the union question (denunciation of these organs as instruments of the bourgeoisie) and parliament (denunciation of the "democratic" masquerade). It's a group which is active in workers' struggles (notably in the banking sector), and the ICC has been holding fraternal discussions with it for several years (our Portuguese language site [28] has published an account of our debate on historical materialism). Our two organisations have also organised several joint public meetings in Brazil (see in particular "ICC Public Meetings in Brazil: A strengthening of revolutionary positions in Latin America [29] ", World Revolution no. 292) and published a common statement on the social situation in this country. A delegation from OpOp previously took part in the 17th Congress of our section in France in spring 2006. See World Revolution no. 297 [30] ).
[3] SPA: Socialist Political Alliance. This is a group which has given itself the task of making the positions of the communist left known in Korea (in particular by translating some of its basic texts) and of animating discussions between groups and elements around these positions. The SPA organised an international conference to which the ICC, which has been discussing with this group for about a year, sent a delegation: see "Report on the conference in Korea, October 2006 [31]" in International Review no. 129. It should be noted that the participants at this conference, which took place just after the nuclear weapons tests by North Korea, adopted an "Internationalist declaration from Korea against the threat of war [32] ", World Revolution no. 299.
[4] EKS: Enternasyonalist Komunist Sol, Internationalist Communist Left, a group recently formed in Turkey, which situates itself resolutely on the positions of the communist left. We have published some statements by the EKS on our website here [33] and here [34] .
[5] On the international conferences see our article "International Conferences of the Communist Left (1976-80): lessons of an experience for the proletarian milieu [35] " in International Review no. 122. The sabotage of these conferences by the groups who were to form the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) didn't however prevent the ICC from inviting the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) to its 13th Congress in 1999. We felt that the gravity of imperialist conflicts at the heart of Europe (it was the moment when NATO was bombing Serbia) meant that revolutionary groups should set aside their squabbles and come together in the same place to examine the implications of the conflict and perhaps produce a common declaration. Unfortunately the IBRP turned down this invitation.
[6] Since Internasyonalismo was present politically even if its delegation could not be there in person.
[7] International Review no. 122, "16th Congress of the ICC [36] ".
[8] "Resolution on the international situation [37] " adopted at the 17th congress and published in this issue of International Review.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] See these articles in International Review 110 [38] and International Review 114 [39].
[16] See "Confidence and solidarity in the struggle of the proletariat" in International Review no. 111 [40] and no. 112 [41] , and "Marxism and ethics" in International Review no. 127 [10] and no. 128 [42] .
[17] This contribution can be found on the EKS' site [43] and on the Libcom discussion forum [44] .
1. One of the most important elements determining the life of capitalist society today is the fact that it has entered into its phase of decomposition. Since the end of the 1980s, the ICC has been demonstrating the causes and characteristics of this phase of decomposition. In particular, it has highlighted the following facts:
a) The phase of decomposition is an integral part of the decadence of the capitalist system, inaugurated by the First World War (as the great majority of revolutionaries of the time pointed out). In this respect, it conserves the main characteristics of capitalist decadence, to which it has brought new and unprecedented elements.
b) It constitutes the final phase of this decadence, in which it has not only accumulated all the most catastrophic traits of its previous phases, but in which we can see the whole social edifice rotting on its feet.
c) Practically all aspects of human society are affected by decomposition, particularly those which are decisive for the survival of humanity such as imperialist conflicts and the class struggle. In this sense, we intend to use the phase of decomposition as a starting point from which to examine the major aspects of the present moment in the international situation: the economic crisis of the capitalist system, the conflicts within the ruling class, especially those on the imperialist arena, and finally the struggle between the two major classes in society: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
2. Paradoxically, the economic situation of capitalism is the aspect of this society which is the least affected by decomposition. This is the case mainly because it is precisely the economic situation which, in the last instance, determines the other aspects of the life of this system, including those that relate to decomposition. Like the other modes of production which preceded it, the capitalist mode of production, having been through a period of ascendancy which culminated at the end of the 19th century, in turn entered into its period of decadence at the beginning of the 20th century. At the origin of this decadence, as with the other economic systems, lies the growing conflict between the development of the productive forces and the relations of production. Concretely, in the case of capitalism, whose development had been conditioned by the conquest of extra-capitalist markets, the First World War constituted the first significant manifestation of its decadence. With the end of the colonial and economic conquest of the world by the capitalist metropoles, the latter were forced to confront each other in the dispute for each others' markets. From then on, capitalism entered into a new period of its history, defined by the Communist International in 1919 as the epoch of wars and revolutions. The failure of the revolutionary wave which arose out of the First World War thus opened the door to the growing convulsions of capitalist society: the great depression of the 1930s and its result, a Second World War even bloodier and more barbaric than the first. The period which followed, described by certain bourgeois "experts" as the Thirty Glorious Years, saw capitalism giving the illusion of having overcome its mortal contradictions, an illusion even shared by currents who claimed to be for the communist revolution. In reality, this period of "prosperity" permitted by the conjunction of circumstantial elements and the development of measures to palliate the effects of the economic crisis once again gave way to the open crisis of the capitalist mode of production at the end of the 1960s, which accelerated powerfully in the middle of the 70s. This open crisis of the capitalist mode of production once again opened the door to the alternative already announced by the Communist International: world war, or the development of workers' struggles leading towards the overthrow of capitalism. World war, contrary to what certain groups of the communist left may think, in no way represents a "solution" to the crisis of capitalism, enabling it to "regenerate" itself and to renew a dynamic growth. It is the impasse faced by the system, the sharpening of tensions between national sectors of capitalism, which gives rise to an irreversible headlong flight at the military level, whose final outcome is world war. In effect, as a consequence of the aggravation of the economic convulsions of capitalism, there was a definite sharpening of imperialist tensions at the beginning of the 1970s. However, they were not able to culminate in a world war because of the historic resurgence of the working class from 1968 onwards, in reaction to the first effects of the crisis. At the same time, while it was capable of counter-acting the bourgeoisie's only possible perspective (if, indeed, it can be called a "perspective"), the working class, despite a level of militancy not seen for decades, was not able to put forward its own perspective, the communist revolution. It was precisely this situation, in which neither of the two classes decisive in the life of society was able to put forward its own perspective, a situation in which the ruling class was reduced to "managing" from day to day and from one blow to the next its system's plunge into insurmountable crisis, which was at the origin of capitalism's entry into its phase of decomposition.
3. One of the major manifestations of this absence of historical perspective is the development of the "every man for himself" tendency which affects society at all levels, from individuals to the state. However, at the level of the economic life of capitalism, we can't consider that there has been a major change in this domain since society entered its phase of decomposition. In fact, "every man for himself" and the "war of each against all" are congenital characteristics of the capitalist mode of production. Since it entered into its period of decadence, capitalism has had to temper these characteristics through the massive intervention of the state into the economy, put in place during the First World War and reactivated in the 1930s, notably through fascist or Keynesian policies. This intervention by the state was completed, in the wake of the Second World War, by the setting up of international organs such as the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD, and finally the European Economic Community (the ancestor of the present European Union) in order to prevent the system's economic contradictions leading to a general disaster, such as we saw with "Black Thursday" in 1929. Today, despite all the speeches about the triumph of liberalism and the free play of the market, the states have not renounced intervening in the economies of their respective countries, or the use of structures whose task is to regulate as far as possible the relations between them, even creating new ones such as the World Trade Organisation. This said, neither these policies, nor these organs, while they have allowed capitalism to significantly slow down the slide into crisis, have made it possible to overcome the crisis, despite all the sermons welcoming the "historic" levels of growth of the world economy and the extraordinary performance of the two Asian giants, India and above all China.
4. The basis for the rates of growth in global GNP in recent years, which have provoked the euphoria of the bourgeoisie and their intellectual lackeys, are not fundamentally new. They are the same as the ones that have made it possible to ensure that the saturation of markets, which was at the root of the open crisis at the end of the 60s, didn't completely stifle the world economy. They can be summed up as growing debt. At the present moment, the main "locomotive" of world growth is constituted by the enormous debts of the American economy, both at the level of its state budget and of its balance of trade. In reality, we are seeing a real forward flight which, far from bringing a definitive solution to the contradictions of capitalism, can only pave the way to even more painful tomorrows, in particular through a brutal slow-down in growth, of which we have had many examples in the past 30 years. Right now, the threat to the housing boom in the US, which has been one of the motors of the US economy, and which raises the danger of catastrophic bank failures, is causing considerable disquiet amongst the economists. This disquiet has been increased by the perspective of other failures, hitting the so-called "hedge funds" (speculative funds) following the collapse of Amaranth in October 2006. The threat is all the more serious because these organisms, whose reason for existence is to make strong short term profits by playing with variations in the rate of exchange or the price of raw materials, are in no way just outriders for the international finance system. In fact, it is the most "serious" financial institutions which have been putting a part of their assets into these hedge funds. What's more, the sums invested in these organisms are considerable, equalling the annual GNP of a country like France; and they act as a "lever" for even more considerable capital movements (nearly 700,000 billion dollars in 2002, or 20 times more than transactions in goods and services, i.e. "real" products). And none of this will be changed by the lamentations of the "alternative worldists" and other critics of the "financisation" of the economy. These political currents would like to see a cleaner and fairer capitalism that has turned its back on speculation. In reality, speculation is not at all the product of a "bad" type of capitalism which has forgotten its responsibility to invest in really productive sectors. As Marx already showed in the 19th century, speculation results from the fact that, when they face the perspective of a lack of sufficient outlets for productive investments, the holders of capital prefer to find short term profits in a huge lottery, which has today turned capitalism into a planetary casino. To want capitalism to renounce speculation in the present period is as realistic as wanting tigers to become vegetarians or dragons to stop breathing fire.
5. The exceptional rates of growth we are currently seeing in countries like India and China in no way prove that there is new life in the world economy, even if they have made a considerable contribution to the high rates of growth in the last period. At the root of this exceptional growth is, paradoxically, once again the crisis of capitalism. This growth derives its dynamic essentially from two factors: the export and investment of capital coming from the most developed countries. If the trade networks in the latter are more and more geared towards distributing goods made in China, this is because they can sell them at much lower prices, which has become an absolute necessity at a time of growing saturation of the markets and thus of more and more exacerbated commercial competition; at the same time, this process makes it possible to reduce the cost of labour power in the most developed countries. The same logic lies behind the phenomenon of "outsourcing", the transfer of industrial activities by the big enterprises towards the countries of the third world, where labour power is incomparably cheaper than in the developed countries. It should also be noted that while the Chinese economy is benefiting from this "outsourcing" on its own territory, it tends in turn to do the same thing towards countries where wages are even lower, such as in Africa.
6. Behind the "double figure growth" in China, in particular its industry, is the frenzied exploitation of the working class which often endures living conditions comparable to those experienced by the English working class in the first half of the 19th century, as denounced by Engels in his remarkable work of 1844. In itself this is not a sign of the bankruptcy of capitalism because it was on the basis of such barbarous exploitation that this system launched its conquest of the globe. This said, there are fundamental differences between the growth of capitalism and the condition of the working class in the first capitalist countries in the 19th century and in China today:
Thus, far from representing a breath of air for the capitalist economy, the "miracle" in China and a certain number of other third world countries is yet another embodiment of the decadence of capitalism. Furthermore, the extreme dependence of the Chinese economy on its exports is a source of considerable vulnerability to any retraction of demand among its present clients, something which can hardly fail to happen seeing that the American economy is going to be obliged to do something about the colossal debts which currently allow it to play the role of locomotive for global demand. Thus, just as the "miracle" of the double figure growth of the Asian tigers and dragons came to a sorry end in 1997, the current Chinese miracle, even if it does not have identical origins and has far greater assets at its disposal, will sooner or later be confronted with the harsh reality of the historic impasse of the capitalist mode of production.
7. The economic life of bourgeois society can nowhere escape the laws of capitalist decadence, and for good reason: it's at this level first and foremost that decadence manifests itself. Nevertheless, for the same reason, the major expressions of decomposition have up till now spared the economic sphere. This can't be said about the political sphere of capitalist society, notably the area of antagonisms between sectors of the ruling class and above all the area of imperialist antagonisms. In fact, the first great expression of capitalism's entry into the phase of decomposition concerned precisely the area of imperialist conflicts: the collapse of the eastern imperialist bloc at the end of the 80s, which rapidly led to the disappearance of the western bloc. It's on the level of the political, diplomatic and military relations between states that we most clearly see the phenomenon of "each for themselves" which is such a major characteristic of the phase of decomposition. The system of blocs contained within it the danger of a third world war, which no doubt would have taken place if the world proletariat had not been an obstacle to it from the end of the 1960s. Nevertheless it represented a certain "organisation" of imperialist tensions, mainly through the discipline imposed within each bloc by the dominant power. The situation which opened up in 1989 is quite different. Certainly, the spectre of world war no longer haunts the planet, but at the same time, we have seen the unchaining of imperialist antagonisms and local wars directly implicating the great powers, in particular the most powerful of them all, the USA. The USA, which for decades has been the "world cop", has had to try to carry on and strengthen this role in the face of the "new world disorder" which came out of the end of the Cold War. But while it has certainly taken this role to heart, it hasn't at all been done with the aim of contributing to the stability of the planet but fundamentally to conserve its global leadership, which has been more and more put into question by the fact that there is no longer the cement which held each of the two imperialist blocs together - the threat from the rival bloc. In the definitive absence of the "Soviet threat", the only way the American power could impose its discipline was to rely on its main strength, its huge superiority at the military level. But in doing so, the imperialist policy of the USA has become one of the main factors in global instability. Since the beginning of the 1990s, there have been a number of examples of this: the first Gulf war, in 1991, aimed at tying together the fraying links between the former allies of the western bloc (and not at enforcing "respect for international law", supposedly flouted by the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which was just a pretext). Not long after, in Yugoslavia, the unity between the main allies of the old western bloc fell to pieces: Germany put the match to the fire by pushing Slovenia and Croatia to declare their independence; France and Britain re-ran the "Entente Cordiale" of the early 20th century by supporting the imperialist interests of Serbia while the USA presented itself as the guardian of the Bosnian Muslims.
8. The failure of the American bourgeoisie, throughout the 1990s, to impose its authority in any lasting sense, even after a series of military operations, led it to look for a new enemy of the "free world" and of "democracy", so that it could once again pull the world's powers into line, especially those which had been its allies: Islamic terrorism. The attacks of September 11 2001, which look more and more (including to more than a third of the US population and half the population of New York) as if they were wanted, if not actually prepared, by the American state apparatus, were to be the point of departure for this new crusade. Five years later, the failure of this policy is obvious. If the September 11 attacks allowed the US to draw countries like France and Germany into their intervention in Afghanistan, it didn't succeed in dragging them into its Iraqi adventure in 2003; in fact it even provoked the rise of a circumstantial alliance between these two countries and Russia against the intervention in Iraq. Later on, some of its main allies in the "coalition" which intervened in Iraq, such as Spain and Italy, quit the sinking ship. The US bourgeoisie failed to achieve any of its official objectives in Iraq: the elimination of "weapons of mass destruction", the establishment of peaceful "democracy"; stability and a return to peace throughout the region under the aegis of America; the retreat of terrorism; the adherence of the American population to the military interventions of its government.
The question of "weapons of mass destruction" was soon settled: it became clear that the only ones to be found in Iraq were the ones that had been brought in by the coalition. This quickly exposed the lies concocted by the Bush administration to sell the invasion of Iraq.
As for the retreat of terrorism, we can see that the invasion of Iraq has in no way clipped its wings but on the contrary has been a powerful factor in its development, both in Iraq itself and in other countries of the world, as we saw in Madrid in March 2004 and London in July 2005.
The establishment of a peaceful democracy in Iraq took the form of the setting up of a puppet government which couldn't maintain the least control over the country without the massive support of American troops - a control which is in any case limited to a few "security zones", leaving the rest of the country free for massacres between Shias and Sunnis and terrorist attacks which have claimed tens of thousands of victims since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
Stabilisation and peace in the Middle East has never seemed so far away: in the 50 year conflict between Israel and Palestine, the last few years have seen a continuous aggravation of the situation, made even more dramatic by the inter-Palestinian clashes between Hamas and Fatah and by the growing discredit of the Israeli government. The loss of authority in the region by the US giant, following its shattering defeat in Iraq, is clearly not separate from this downward slide and the failure of the "peace process" of which it was the main proponent.
This loss of authority is also partly responsible for the growing difficulties of the NATO forces in Afghanistan and the Karzai government's loss of control of the country in the face of the Taliban.
Furthermore, the increasing boldness of Iran over its preparations for obtaining nuclear weapons is a direct consequence of the US falling into a quagmire in Iraq, which for the moment prevents a similar massive use of troops elsewhere.
Finally, the attempt of the American bourgeoisie to bury once and for all the "Vietnam syndrome", i.e. the reticence of the American population to support its troops being sent off to the fields of battle, has had the opposite effect. Although in an initial period the emotion provoked by the September 11 attacks made it possible to massively strengthen nationalist sentiments within the American population, to boost the desire for national unity and the determination to wage the "war on terror", in recent years the rejection of the war and opposition to the sending of US troops abroad has returned in force.
Today in Iraq the US bourgeoisie is facing a real impasse. On the one hand, both from the strictly military standpoint and from the economic and political point of view, it doesn't have the means to recruit a force that would eventually allow it to "re-establish order". On the other hand, it can't simply withdraw from Iraq without openly admitting the total failure of its policies and opening the door to the dislocation of Iraq and an even greater destabilisation of the entire region.
9. Thus the balance sheet of the mandate of Bush junior is certainly one of the most disastrous in the whole history of the USA. The accession of the "Neo-Cons" to the head of the American state represents a real catastrophe for the American bourgeoisie. The question posed is the following: how was it possible for the world's leading bourgeoisie to call on this band of irresponsible and incompetent adventurers to take charge of the defence of its interests? What lies behind this blindness of the ruling class of the leading capitalist country? In fact, the arrival of the team of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Co. to the reins of the state was not the simple result of a monumental mistake in casting by the ruling class. While it has considerably worsened the situation of the US on the imperialist level, it was already the expression of the impasse facing the US given the growing weakening of its leadership and more generally given the development of the "every man for himself" in international relations which characterises the phase of decomposition.
The best proof of this is the fact that the most skilful and intelligent bourgeoisie in the world, the British bourgeoisie, has allowed itself to be dragged into the dead-end adventure in Iraq. Another example of this propensity for calamitous imperialist choices by the most "efficient" bourgeoisies, those who up till now have managed to make masterful use of their military power, is shown on a lesser scale by the catastrophic adventure of Israel in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, an offensive given the green light by the "strategists" in Washington. It aimed at weakening Hizbollah and managed the tour de force of actually strengthening it.
10. The military chaos developing around the world, plunging vast regions into hellish desolation, notably in the Middle East but also and above all in Africa, is not the only manifestation of the historic impasse reached by capitalism, nor even the most dangerous for the human species. Today it has become clear that the maintenance of the capitalist system brings with it the threat of the destruction of the environment which made the rise of humanity possible. The continued emission of greenhouse gases at their present level, with the resulting heating of the planet, announces the unleashing of unprecedented catastrophes (heat waves, storms, desertification, floods...) resulting in a whole procession of terrifying human disasters (famines, displacement of hundreds of millions of human beings, overpopulation of the areas less directly affected by climate change...). Confronted by the first visible effects of the degradation of the environment, the governments and leading circles of the bourgeoisie can no longer hide from the populations of the world the gravity of the situation and the catastrophic future it announces. From now on, the most powerful bourgeoisies and nearly all the political parties are painting themselves green and promising that they will take the necessary measures to spare humanity from the threatened disaster. But it's the same with the destruction of the environment as it is with the problem of war: all sectors of the bourgeoisie declare that they are against war, but since the system entered into decadence this class has been incapable of guaranteeing peace. And this is nothing to do with good or bad intentions (even if we can find the most sordid interests behind the sectors who push the hardest towards war). Even the most "pacifist" bourgeois leaders cannot escape the objective logic which will undermine all their "humanist" and "rational" pretensions. In the same way, the good intentions increasingly flagged up by the leaders of the bourgeoisie with regard to protecting the environment, even when they're not just aimed at winning election votes, count for nothing against the constraints of the capitalist economy. Effectively attacking the problem of greenhouse gas emissions requires a major overhaul of industrial production, of the production of energy, of transport, of habitation, and thus massive and prioritised investment in these sectors. This would mean putting into question major economic interests, both at the level of immense enterprises and at the level of states. Concretely, if a state were to take the measures needed to contribute effectively to solving these problems, it would immediately be ruthlessly punished in the face of competition on the world market. When it comes to the measures states would have to take to combat global warming, it's the same problem any bourgeois faces with regard to wage rises. They are all for such measures....when others take them. As long as the capitalist mode of production survives, humanity is doomed to suffer the mounting catastrophes which this dying system imposes on it, threatening its very survival.
Thus, as the ICC has shown for over 15 years, the decomposition of capitalism brings with it a major threat to humanity's existence. The alternative announced by Engels at the end of the 19th century, socialism or barbarism, has been a sinister reality throughout the 20th century. What the 21st century offers us as a perspective is quite simply socialism or the destruction of humanity. These are the real stakes facing the only force in society capable of overthrowing capitalism: the world working class.
11. The proletariat, as we have seen, has already been faced with these stakes for several decades, since it was its historical resurgence after 1968, putting an end to the most profound counter-revolution in its history, which prevented capitalism from bringing its own response to the open crisis of its economy: world war. For two decades, workers' struggles continued, with highs and lows, with advances and retreats, enabling the workers to gain a whole experience of struggle, notably about the sabotaging role of the trade unions. At the same time, the working class was subjected more and more to the weight of decomposition, which explains in particular why the rejection of classical trade unionism was often accompanied by a retreat into corporatism, which testified to the weight of the spirit of every man for himself within these struggles. It was in the end the decomposition of capitalism which dealt a decisive blow to this first series of proletarian struggles through its most spectacular manifestation to date, the collapse of the eastern bloc and the Stalinist regimes in 1989. The deafening campaigns of the bourgeoisie about the "failure of communism", the "definitive victory of liberal democratic capitalism", "the end of the class struggle" and even of the working class itself, led to an important retreat by the proletariat, both at the level of its consciousness and its militancy. This retreat went deep and lasted more than 10 years. It marked a whole generation of workers, resulting in disarray and even demoralisation. This disarray was provoked not only by the events that took place at the end of the 80s but also by those which resulted from them, such as the first Gulf war in 1991 and the war in former Yugoslavia. These events were a striking refutation of the euphoric declarations of George Bush senior, who had announced that with the end of the Cold War we would be entering a "new order" of peace and prosperity; but in a general context of disarray in the class, the latter was not able to profit from this and recover its class consciousness. On the contrary, these events aggravated the profound sense of powerlessness it was already suffering, further undermining its self-confidence and fighting spirit.
During the course of the 1990s, the working class did not totally renounce the struggle. The continuation of capitalist attacks obliged it to wage struggles of resistance, but these struggles had neither the breadth, nor the consciousness, nor the capacity to confront the unions, which had marked the struggles of the previous period. It was not until 2003, notably in the shape of the big mobilisations against attacks on pensions in France and Austria, that the proletariat really began to emerge from the retreat which had affected it since 1989. Since then, this tendency towards the revival of class struggles and the development of class consciousness has been further verified. Workers' struggles have affected most of the central countries, including the most important of them such as the USA (Boeing and New York transport in 2005) Germany (Daimler and Opel in 2004, hospital doctors in spring 2006, Deutsche Telekom in the spring of 2007), Britain (London airport in August 2005) France (notably the movement of university and high school students against the CPE in spring 2006) as well as in a number of countries in the periphery, such as Dubai (building workers in spring 2006), Bangladesh (textile workers in spring 2006) and Egypt (textile, transport and other workers in the spring of 2007).
12. Engels wrote that the working class wages its struggles on three levels: economic, political and theoretical. By comparing the differences on these three levels between the wave of struggles that began in 1968 and the one which began in 2003 we can draw out the perspective posed by the latter.
The wave of struggles which began in 1968 had a considerable political importance: in particular, it signified the end of the period of counter-revolution. At the same time, it gave rise to a very important theoretical reflection since it made possible the reappearance of the left communist current, of which the formation of the ICC in 1975 was the most important expression. The combats of May 1968 in France, the "hot autumn" in Italy in 1969, because of the political preoccupations they expressed, gave rise to the idea that we were heading towards a significant politicisation of the international working class during the struggles that were to follow. But this potential was not realised. The class identity which developed within the proletariat during the course of these struggles was much more that of an economic category than of a political force within society. In particular, the fact that it was its own struggles that were preventing the bourgeoisie from moving towards a third world war passed completely unnoticed by the class (including the great majority of the revolutionary groups). At the same time, the emergence of the mass strike in Poland in 1980, while to this day it represented the highest expression (since the end of the revolutionary period that followed the First World War) of the organisational capacities of the proletariat, demonstrated a considerable political weakness. The only "politicisation" it was capable of achieving was its adherence to bourgeois democratic themes and even to nationalism.
The reason for this lies in a number of factors which the ICC has already analysed:
13. The situation in which the new wave of class combats is developing today is very different:
These conditions result in a whole series of differences between the present wave of struggles and the one that ended in 1989.
Thus, even if they are a response to economic attacks which are in many ways far more serious and generalised than the ones which provoked the spectacular and massive upsurges of the first wave, the present struggles have not reached, at least in the central countries of capitalism, the same massive character. There are two essential reasons for this:
However, this last aspect of the situation is not just a factor in making the workers hesitate about entering into massive struggles. It also bears with it the possibility of a profound development of consciousness about the definitive bankruptcy of capitalism, which is a precondition for understanding the need to overthrow it. To a certain extent, even if it's in a very confused way, the scale of what's at stake in the class struggle, which is nothing less than the communist revolution, is what is making the working class hesitate to launch itself into such struggles.
Thus, even if the economic struggles of the class are for the moment less massive than during the first wave, they contain, at least implicitly, a much more important political dimension. And this political dimension has already taken an explicit form, as shown by the fact that they are more and more incorporating the question of solidarity. This is vitally important because it constitutes par excellence the antidote to the "every man for himself" attitude typical of social decomposition, and above all because it is at the heart of the world proletariat's capacity not only to develop its present struggles but also to overthrow capitalism:
14. This question of solidarity was at the heart of the movement against the CPE in France in the spring of 2006 which, while it mainly involved the university and high school students, was clearly situated on a class terrain:
15. This movement was also exemplary with regard to the capacity of the class to take charge of its own struggles through assemblies and strike committees responsible to them (a capacity we also saw in the struggle of the metal workers of Vigo in Spain in the spring of 2006, where a whole number of plants came together to hold daily assemblies in the street). This was mainly made possible by the fact that the trade unions are extremely weak in the student milieu and were not able to play their traditional role of sabotaging the struggle, a role they will continue playing up until the revolution. An illustration of the anti-working class role which the unions continue to play is the fact that the massive struggles which we have seen up till now have mainly affected the countries of the third world, where the unions are very weak (as in Bangladesh) or totally identified as state organs (as in Egypt).
16. The movement against the CPE, which took place in the same country as the first and most spectacular combat of the historic resurgence of the proletariat, the generalised strike of May 1968, also provides us with other lessons about the differences between the present wave of struggles and the previous one:
17. This last question comes back to the third aspect of the proletarian struggle which Engels noted: the theoretical struggle, the development of reflection within the class on the general perspectives of its combat and the development of elements and organisations which are products and active factors in this effort. Today, as in 1968, the recovery of class combats is accompanied by a deep reflection, and the appearance of new elements who are turning towards the positions of the communist left is just the tip of the iceberg. In this sense there are notable differences between the present process of reflection and that which unfolded after 1968. The reflection which began at that time followed massive and spectacular struggles, while the present process has not waited for the working class to conduct struggles of that magnitude before beginning. This is one of the consequences of the difference in the conditions which face the proletariat today in relation to those at the end of the 1960s.
One of the characteristics of the wave of struggles which opened in 1968 is that, due to its breadth, it showed the possibility of proletarian revolution, a possibility which had disappeared from their minds due to the depth of the counter-revolution and the illusions in the "prosperity" of capitalism following the Second World War. Today it is not the possibility of revolution which is the main food for the process of reflection but, in view of the catastrophic perspectives which capitalism has in store for us, its necessity. In fact, if it is less rapid and less immediately visible than in the 1970s, this process is much more profound and will not be affected by the moments of retreat in workers struggles.
In fact the enthusiasm expressed for the idea of revolution in 1968 and the years following, due to the bases which determined it, favoured the recruitment of the great majority of the elements who adhered to it by leftist groups. Only a very small minority of these elements, those who were less marked by the radical petty bourgeois ideology and immediatism emanating from the student movement, succeeded in moving towards left communist positions and becoming militants of proletarian organisations. The difficulties that the movement of the working class necessarily faced, especially following the different counter-offensives of the ruling class and in a context in which there was still the weight of illusions in a possibility for capitalism to improve the situation, favoured a significant return of the reformist ideology promoted by the "radical" left groups to the left of an official Stalinism which was more and more discredited. Today, especially following the historic collapse of Stalinism, the leftist currents tend, more and more, to take the place vacated by the latter. This tendency for these currents to become "official" participants in the game of bourgeois politics tends to provoke a reaction among their most sincere militants who start on a search for authentic class positions. Because of this, the effort of reflection within the working class is not only shown by the emergence of very young elements who turn to the communist left straight away but also by older elements who have had an experience within the organisations of the extreme left of the bourgeoisie. In itself this is a very positive phenomenon bringing the promise that the revolutionary energies which will necessarily arise as the class develops its struggles will not be sucked in and sterilised so easily and in the same numbers that they were in the 1970s, and that they will join the organisations of the communist left in much greater numbers.
It is the responsibility of revolutionary organisations, and the ICC in particular, to be an active part in the process of reflection that is already going on within the class, not only by intervening actively in the struggles when they start to develop but also in stimulating the development of the groups and elements who are seeking to join the struggle.
ICC, May 2007.
In the last two issues of the International Review, we published the previous articles in the series on the problems of the period of transition, written by Mitchell and published in the theoretical review of the Italian Communist Left, Bilan, in the 1930s. These two articles established the historic framework for the advent of the proletarian revolution - the "ripeness" of capitalism on a world scale, and not in a particular country or region - and then went on to examine the principal political lessons to be drawn from the isolation and degeneration of the revolution in Russia, paying particular attention to the relationship between the proletariat and the transitional state. The next two articles in Mitchell's series go on to consider the problem of the economic content of the proletarian revolution.
The article published below, which originally appeared in Bilan n° 34 (August-September 1934), is presented as a polemic with another internationalist current active at the time, the Dutch GIK, whose "Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution" had been published in 1930 and was summarised in French in Bilan by Hennaut of the Belgian group Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes. It was typical of the spirit of Bilan, its commitment to the principal of debate between revolutionaries, that it should publish this summary and initiate a discussion with the "Council Communist" tendency represented by the GIK. The article makes a number of criticisms of the GIK's approach to the transitional period but never loses sight of the fact that this was a debate within the proletarian camp.
In future, we will publish a more in-depth article that takes position on this debate. But for the moment we want to stress, as we have done many times before, that while we are not always in agreement with all the terms and conclusions put forward by Bilan, we entirely endorse its essential method: the insistence on referring to the contributions of our forebears in the revolutionary movement; the constant effort to re-examine these contributions in the light of the class struggle, in particular the gigantic experience bequeathed by the Russian revolution; and the rejection of all easy and simplistic solutions to the unprecedented problems that will be posed by the communist transformation of society. In this article in particular, there is a clear demarcation from any false radicalism that assumes that the law of value, and in general the whole heritage of bourgeois society, can be abolished by decree on the day after the seizure of power by the working class.
Marxism always bases its analyses and perspectives on dialectical materialism and not on idealistic aspirations. Marx said that "even when a society has got upon the right track for the discovery of the natural laws of its movement - and it is the ultimate aim of this work, to lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society - it can neither clear by bold leaps, nor remove by legal enactments, the obstacles offered by the successive phases of its normal development. But it can shorten and lessen the birth-pangs".[1] In the same way, the proletariat, having taken society through a "leap" as a result of its political revolution, cannot help but put up with the natural laws of evolution, while at the same time doing all it can to speed up the process of social transformation. If it is to achieve its historic goals, the proletariat has to ensure that the intermediate, "hybrid" social forms which arise in the phase between capitalism and communism wither away; but it cannot abolish them by decree. The suppression of private property - even if it's a radical step - does not ipso facto get rid of bourgeois ideology or bourgeois right: "The traditions of the dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living".[2]
In this part of our study we will be looking at some length at certain economic categories (labour-value, money, wages), which the proletarian economy will inherit from capitalism without the benefit of an inventory. This is important because there has been a tendency (we're thinking in particular of the Dutch internationalists, whose arguments we will be examining) to make these categories the agencies of the decomposition of the Russian revolution, when in fact the degeneration of the revolution occurred not so much at the economic but at the political level.
To begin with, what is an economic category?
Marx responds: "Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production ...The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with the material productivity, produce also principles, ideas, and categories, in conformity with their social relations.
"Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products".[3]
We might be tempted to deduce from this definition that a new mode of production (or the establishment of its foundations) automatically brings with it the new social relations and the corresponding categories: thus, the collective appropriation of the productive forces would immediately eliminate capitalist relations and the categories which are their expression. From the social point of view, this would imply the immediate disappearance of classes. But Marx made it clear in the same passage that that within society "there is a continual movement of growth in the productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas"; in other words, there is an interpenetration of two social processes; one, the diminution of the relations and categories belonging to the declining system of production, and secondly, the growth of relations and categories engendered by the new system. The dialectical movement imprinted on the evolution of societies is unchanging (even if this would take on different forms in a fully-formed communist society).
There's all the more reason for the whole process to be especially turbulent and powerful during a period of transition between two types of society.
Certain economic categories, which will have survived the revolutionary "catastrophe", will thus only disappear along with the class relations which have given rise to them, i.e. with classes themselves, when the communist phase of proletarian society has opened up. In the transitional phase, their vitality will be in inverse proportion to the specific weight of the "socialised" sectors of the proletarian economy, but above all in relation to the rhythm of development of the world revolution.
The fundamental category to consider is labour value, because it is the foundation of all the other capitalist categories.
We are not well endowed with marxist writings on the "future" of economic categories in the transitional period. We only have a few dispersed passages by Engels in Anti-Duhring and by Marx in Capital. From Marx too we have the Critique of the Gotha Programme, in which every mention of the questions we are examining here takes on considerable importance, but which can only be grasped in their full import by relating them to the theory of value itself.
Value possesses this strange characteristic that, while finding its source in the activity of a physical force - labour - it has no material reality in itself. Before analysing the substance of value, Marx, in his Preface to Capital, takes care to warn us about this: "The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has for more than 2,000 years sought in vain to get to the bottom of it all, whilst on the other hand, to the successful analysis of much more composite and complex forms, there has been at least an approximation. Why? Because the body, as an organic whole, is more easy of study than are the cells of that body. In the analysis of economic forms, moreover, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of use. The force of abstraction must replace both".
And in the course of this analysis of value, Marx adds that "the value of commodities is the very opposite of the coarse materiality of their substance, not an atom of matter enters into its composition. Turn and examine a single commodity, by itself, as we will, yet in so far as it remains an object of value, it seems impossible to grasp it. If, however, we bear in mind that the value of commodities has a purely social reality, and that they acquire this reality only in so far as they are expressions or embodiments of one identical social substance, viz., human labour, it follows as a matter of course, that value can only manifest itself in the social relation of commodity to commodity".[4]
Moreover, as regards the substance of value, i.e. human labour, Marx always implies that the value of a product expresses a certain quantity of simple labour, when it affirms its social reality. The reduction of compound labour to simple labour is a fact that is being constantly realised "Skilled labour counts only as simple labour intensified, or rather, as multiplied simple labour, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labour. Experience shows that this reduction is constantly being made. A commodity may be the product of the most skilled labour, but its value, by equating it to the product of simple unskilled labour, represents a definite quantity of the latter labour alone". But we also have to understand how this reduction takes place. But Marx was a man of science and he limited himself to replying: "The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be fixed by custom".
This was a phenomenon which Marx noted but which he could not explain, because the state of his knowledge about value did not permit it. What we do know is that in the production of commodities, the market is the crucible in which you can find all individual acts of labour, all the qualities of labour, in which we see the crystallisation of average labour reduced to simple labour: "society does not form value from the accidental lack of skill of an individual, it recognises as general human labour only labour of a normal average degree of skill at the particular time...Individual labour contains general human labour only in so far as it is socially necessary".[5]
At all the historical stages of social development, it has been necessary for men to know with more or less precision the sum of labour expended in the production of the productive forces and the objects of consumption. Up till now, this evaluation has always taken empirical and anarchic forms; with capitalist production, and under the pressure of the fundamental contradiction of the system, the anarchic form has reached its extreme limits, but what is important to underline once again is that the measure of social labour is not established directly, in an absolute, mathematical manner, but relatively, via a relationship that is established on the market, with the aid of money: the quantity of social labour contained in an object is not really expressed in hours of labour, but in another commodity which, on the market, empirically appears to enclose the same quantity of social labour. In any case, the number of hours of social and simple labour required as an average for the production of an object remains unknown. Furthermore, Engels remarked that "the political economy of commodity production is by no means the only science which has to deal with factors known only relatively". And he drew a parallel with the natural sciences which use molecular calculations in physics and atomic calculations in chemistry: "Hence, just as commodity production and its economics obtain a relative expression for the unknown quantities of labour contained in the various commodities, by comparing these commodities on the basis of their relative labour content, so chemistry obtains a relative expression for the magnitude of the atomic weights unknown to it by comparing the various elements on the basis of their atomic weights, expressing the atomic weight of one element in multiples or fractions of the other (sulphur, oxygen, hydrogen). And just as commodity production elevates gold to the level of the absolute commodity, the general equivalent of all other commodities, the measure of all values, so chemistry promotes hydrogen to the rank of the chemical money commodity, by fixing its atomic weight at 1 and reducing the atomic weights of all other elements to hydrogen, expressing them in multiples of its atomic weight".[6] If we consider the essential characteristic of the transitional period, i.e. that it still expresses a certain economic deficiency which demands a greater development of the productivity of labour, we can easily deduce that there will still be a need to calculate the amount of labour consumed, not only with regard to a rational repartition of social labour, which is necessary in any society, but above all because there is a need for a regulator of social activities and relations.
The central question is this: under what forms will labour time be measured? Will the value form subsist?
The answer is all the more difficult in that our teachers didn't completely develop their thinking on this matter and that it can itself appear rather contradictory.
In Anti-Duhring, Engels begins by saying that "From the moment when society enters into possession of the means of production and uses them in direct association for production, the labour of each individual, however varied its specifically useful character may be, becomes at the start and directly social labour. The quantity of social labour contained in a product need not then be established in a roundabout way; daily experience shows in a direct way how much of it is required on the average. Society can simply calculate how many hours of labour are contained in a steam-engine, a bushel of wheat of the last harvest, or a hundred square yards of cloth of a certain quality. It could therefore never occur to it still to express the quantities of labour put into the products, quantities which it will then know directly and in their absolute amounts, in a third product, in a measure which, besides, is only relative, fluctuating, inadequate, though formerly unavoidable for lack of a better one, rather than express them in their natural, adequate and absolute measure, time".[7] And Engels adds, supported by his affirmation about the possibilities of calculating in a direct and absolute manner, that "just as little as it would occur to chemical science still to express atomic weight in a roundabout way, relatively, by means of the hydrogen atom, if it were able to express them absolutely, in their adequate measure, namely in actual weights, in billionths or quadrillionths of a gram. Hence, on the assumptions we made above, society will not assign values to products".[8] But the problem here is knowing precisely whether the political act of collectivisation, even if this is a radical step, provides the proletariat with a new, absolute law for calculating labour time, which can immediately replace the law of value. No positive data authorise such a hypothesis, which is still excluded by the fact that the reduction of compound labour to simple labour (which is the real unit of measure) remains unexplained, and that as a result the elaboration of a scientific method for calculating labour time, which is a necessary function of this process of reduction, is impossible. Probably the conditions for the emergence of such a law will only come together when it is no longer of any use: i.e. when production can answer all needs and when, as a result, society will no longer need to calculate labour: the administration of things will only require a simple register of what has been produced. In the economic domain we can thus see an analogy with political life, when democracy will be superfluous at the moment that it has been fully realised.
Engels, in a complementary note to the expose cited above, implicitly accepts value when he says that "the balancing of useful effects and expenditure of labour on making decisions concerning production was all that would be left, in a communist society, of the politico-economic concept of value". We can complete this correction by Engels with what Marx says in Capital: "After the suppression of the capitalist mode of production, the determination of value, if social production is to be maintained, will still be of prime importance, because it will be more than ever necessary to regulate labour time, as well as the repartition of social labour between the different sectors of production, and to keep account of it".[9]
The conclusion which can be drawn from an understanding of what the proletariat faces when it overthrows capitalism is that the law of value will continue to exist in the transitional period, even though it will go through profound changes in nature and progressively disappear.
How and in what forms will this law exert itself? Once again, we have to start off with what exists in bourgeois economy where the reality of the value materialised in commodities only becomes manifest in exchange. We know that this reality of value is purely social, that it is expressed only in the relation that commodities have between each other and in these relations alone. It's in exchange that the products of labour are manifested as values, which is a social existence distinct from their material existence as use values. A commodity expresses its value by the fact that it can be exchanged against another commodity, that it can pose itself as an exchange value, but it can only do it in this manner. However, while value manifests itself in the exchange relation, it's not exchange which engenders value. This exists independently of exchange.
In the transitional phase, we can only talk about exchange value and not some kind of absolute, natural value, an idea which Engels rails against sarcastically in his polemic with Duhring: "To seek to abolish the capitalist form of production by establishing ‘true value' is therefore tantamount to attempting to abolish Catholicism by establishing the ‘true' Pope, or to set up a society in which at last the producers control their product, by consistently carrying into life an economic category which is the most comprehensive expression of the enslavement of the producers by their own product".[10]
Exchange on the basis of value, in the proletarian economy, will be an inevitable fact for a more or less long period; but it is no less true that it has to be reduced and must tend to disappear the more the proletarian power succeeds in subordinating production to social needs and not the producers to production as in capitalism. Obviously, "no society will be able to master its own products for long, or retain control over the social effects of its system of production, without first getting rid of exchange between individuals".[11] But exchange can't be suppressed simply as a result of human will; it can only happen through a whole dialectical process. This is how Marx approaches the question in Critique of the Gotha Programme: "Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labour no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labour".[12] Marx obviously situates this evolution in a developed communist society and not "just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges" (ibid).
Collective appropriation on a more or less large scale makes it possible to transform the nature of economic relations to a degree corresponding to the specific weight of the collective sector in relation to the capitalist sector, but the bourgeois form of these relations remains, because the proletariat does not have other ready-made forms to replace them with and because it cannot abstract itself from a world economy which continues to evolve on a capitalist basis.
With regard to the tax in kind instituted by the NEP, Lenin said that "The tax in kind is one of the forms of transition from that peculiar War Communism, which was forced on us by extreme want, ruin and war, to regular socialist exchange of products. The latter, in its turn, is one of the forms of transition from socialism, with the peculiar features due to the predominantly small-peasant population, to communism".[13] And in his report on the NEP at the 4th Congress of the Communist International, Trotsky argued that in the transitional phase economic relations had to be regulated through the market and through money.
The practise of the Russian revolution in this respect confirms the theory: the survival of value and the market simply translates the impossibility for the proletarian state to immediately coordinate all aspects of production and social life and thus to immediately suppress "bourgeois right". But the evolution of the economy can only be oriented towards socialism if the proletarian dictatorship more and more extends its control over the market to the point of totally subordinating it to the socialist plan, i.e. to the point of abolishing it. Consequently, if the law of value, instead of developing the way it did by going from simple commodity production to capitalist production must go through the reverse process of regression and extinction which leads from the "mixed" economy to full communism.
We are not going to deal at length with the category of money or currency, since it is only a developed form of value. If we admit that value still exists, then we will have to admit that some kind of money will also exist, even if has lost its character as "abstract wealth" capable of appropriating any kind of wealth. The proletariat will annihilate the bourgeois power of money on the one hand through the collectivisation of the essential bases of wealth and of the land, which will become inalienable, and on the other hand through a class policy involving measures such as rationing, price controls etc. Thus money will effectively, if not formally, lose its function as a measure of value through a progressive alteration of the law of value; in reality it will only retain its function as an instrument of circulation and payment.
The Dutch internationalists in their essay on the development of the communist society (Foundations of Communist Production and Distribution, a resume of which by comrade Hennaut was published in Bilan n°s 18, 20 and 22) have been inspired more by an idealist train of thought than by historical materialism. Thus their analysis of the transitional period (which they don't distinguish with sufficient clarity from the communist phase) proceeds from an anti-dialectical appreciation of the social content of this period.
Certainly the Dutch comrades begin from a correct premise when they establish the marxist distinction between the period of transition and full communism. For them as well it is only in the first phase that the measure of labour time is valid.[14] But they begin to leave the solid ground of historical reality when they put forward an abstract method for the calculation of labour time. The truth is that they don't respond as marxists to the essential question: how, in the transitional phase, and through what social mechanisms will the costs of production be determined on the basis of labour time? Rather they avoid the question through their somewhat simplistic arithmetical demonstrations. They say that the unit of measurement for the quantity of labour needed for producing an object is: the average hour of social labour. But they don't offer any solution here: they simply assert what constitutes the foundation of the law of value by transposing the marxist formula: the socially necessary labour time. However, they do propose a solution: "Each enterprise calculates how much labour time is incorporated into its production " (p 56), but without indicating by what mathematical procedure the individual labour of each producer becomes social labour, or how we get compound or qualified labour from simple labour, which as we have seen is the common measure of human labour. Marx describes the social and economic process through which this reduction takes place under capitalist commodity production; for the Dutch comrades, you need only the revolution and the collectivisation of the means of production to bring in a law of "accounting" which arises from who knows where and about whose functioning we remain ignorant. For them, however, such a substitution is easily explained: since the revolution abolishes the private social relation of production, it simultaneously abolishes exchange, which is a function of private property (p 52).
"In the marxist sense, the suppression of the market is nothing other than the result of new relations of right" (p 109). They note however that "the suppression of the market must be interpreted in the sense that while the market appears to survive under communism, its social content as regards circulation is entirely different: the circulation of products on the basis of labour time is the basis of new social relations" (p 110). But if the market survives (even if its form and basis are different) it can only function on the basis of value. This is what the Dutch internationalists don't seem to see, "subjugated", as they are, to their formulation about "labour time", which in substance is nothing but value itself. Furthermore, for them it is not excluded that in "communism" we will still talk about "value"; but they refrain from drawing out the significance of this with regards to the mechanism of the social relations that result from maintaining labour time as a unit of measurement. Instead they conclude that since the content of value will have changed, all we need to do is replace the term value with the term production time. But this obviously doesn't change the economic reality at all; it's the same thing when they say that there is no longer any exchange of products, but only the passage of products (p 53-54). Equally: "instead of the function of money, we will have the registering of the movement of products, social accounting on the basis of the average social labour time" (p 55).
We will see how their misapprehension of historical reality leads the Dutch internationalists to other erroneous conclusions, when we examine the problem of the remuneration of work.
Mitchell (to be continued)
[1]. Preface to Capital, Vol. 1. [47]
[2]. Marx. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [48] , Collected Works, Vol. 11.
[3]. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy [49] , Collected Works, Vol. 6.
[4]. Capital, Vol.1, Chapter 1, section 3 [50] .
[5]. Engels AntiDuhring, Chapter III, "Socialism", part IV, "Distribution" [51] . Collected Works, Vol.25.
[6]. Ibid.
[7]. Ibid.
[8]. Ibid.
[9]. Our translation from the French
[10]. Anti-Duhring, ibid.
[11]. Engels, Origins of the Family. Our translation from the French.
[12]. Collected Works, Vol. 24.
[13]. "The tax in kind", 1921. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 32.
[14]. In this respect, we need to point to a lapse in comrade Hennaut's resume, when he says the following: "And contrary to what some people imagine, this method of accounting applies not only to communist society that has reached a very high level of development, but to any communist society - thus, from the moment that the workers expropriate the capitalists - whatever level it has reached" (Bilan p 657). [Footnote in original].
In the second article of this series[1] we showed how the CNT had given the best of itself in 1914-1919 faced with the decisive test of war and revolution. But at the same time we had insisted that this evolution had not allowed it to overcome the contradiction at the root of revolutionary syndicalism, its effort to reconcile two mutually exclusive terms: syndicalism and revolution.
In 1914 the great majority of unions had sided with capital and had actively participated in the mobilisation of the workers for the terrible slaughter of the First World War. This treason was confirmed during the proletarian revolutionary movement that exploded in 1917 when, once again, the unions took the side of capital. This was especially clear in Germany where, together with the Social Democratic Party, they helped to preserve the capitalist state faced with the workers' uprisings of 1918-23.
The CNT, alongside the IWW,[2] was one of the very few union organisations to maintain its loyalty to the proletariat at that time. Nevertheless, in the period we are going to look at, it is clear that the syndicalist component dominated the actions of the organisation and put an end to the revolutionary tendency that existed within it.
The unions were not created by the revolutionary struggle. On the contrary "they struggle on the terrain of the bourgeois political order, of law and the liberal state. In order to be able to develop, there has to be no obstacle to the right of coalition, a strictly applied equality of rights. Its political ideal, as unions, is not the socialist order but the freedom and equality of the bourgeois state".[3]
As we have shown in this series,[4] revolutionary syndicalism tried to escape from this contradiction by assigning itself a dual task: on the one hand, the specifically union task of trying to improve the conditions of the working class within capitalism; on the other, the struggle for the social revolution. Capitalism's entry into its decadent period revealed that the unions are incompatible with the second task and that they could only hope to survive by placing themselves within the framework of the bourgeois state and its "freedom and equality" - which undermined and made impossible the first task. The full reality of this in the case of the CNT began to emerge with the episode of the general strike of August 1917.
In Spain there was an enormous social discontent due to the horrific conditions of exploitation and brutal repression, together
with galloping inflation that devalued the already low wages even further. At the political level the old Restoration regime[5] was in terminal crisis: the formation of "juntas" in the army, the rebellious attitude of the most significant representatives of the Catalan bourgeoisie etc were provoking increasing convulsions.
The Spanish Socialist Party, the PSOE - the great majority of which maintained a pro-Entente position[6] - believed that this situation provided the "opportunity" to carry out the "bourgeois democratic revolution", even though the historical conditions had already made this impossible. It tried to use the enormous discontent within the working class as a lever to bring down the Restoration regime and to pull together a double alliance: one part was to be composed of the bourgeoisie encompassing the republicans, the reformists in the existing regime as well as the Catalan bourgeoisie; on the proletarian side the aim was to draw in the CNT.
On March 27th 1917, the UGT (in the name of the PSOE) held a meeting with the CNT (represented by Seguí, Pastaña and Lacort) at which they agreed on a manifesto that, in ambiguous and equivocal formulations, proposed a very moderate "reform" of the bourgeois state. The tenor of this document is clearly seen in this nationalist passage and in its proposal for an all-out defence of the bourgeois state: "those who gain most benefit from public expenses are the first to opt out of their duties as citizens; those who profit from the war are not using their profits to increase the national wealth nor are they using a part of their profits to the benefit of the state".[7] The manifesto proposed the preparation of a general strike "with the aim of obliging the ruling classes to make fundamental changes to the system which would guarantee the people minimally decent living conditions and their ability to carry out their emancipatory activities". In other words, this was a call for "reforms" of the bourgeois state in order to have "minimally decent" standards (isn't this what capitalism guarantees in general terms in its "normal" functioning?!) and, as something "revolutionary", to allow for "emancipatory activities"!
Despite the numerous criticisms that they received, the CNT leaders continued to put forward their support for the "movement". Largo Caballero and other leaders of the UGT went to Barcelona in order to convince the most recalcitrant militants of the CNT. These doubts were overcome with the promise of "action". Despite the "general strike" being based on clearly bourgeois objectives, the schema of revolutionary syndicalism asserted that it would allow the unleashing of a "revolutionary dynamic".[8]
In this situation of increasing social agitation, with frequent strikes, and with the stimulus of news from Russia, a railway and tram workers' strike exploded in Valencia on 20th July and soon spread to the whole of the province with massive solidarity amongst the whole working class. The bosses gave in on 24th July but imposed a provocative condition: the sacking of 36 strikers. The UGT rail union announced a general strike for August 10th in the sector if the workers were sacked. The government, informed that a national general strike was being prepared, forced the railway company into an intransigent posture, in order to provoke the movement before it was mature.
On August 10th a general strike was declared on the railways and a call issued for a national general strike from the 13th. This was organised by a committee composed of members of the leaderships of the PSOE and UGT. The manifesto calling for the strike was disgraceful. Having tried to implicate the CNT: "the time has come to put into practice, without any vacillation, the propositions announced by the UGT and CNT's representatives, in the manifesto written last march", it ended with the following call: "Citizens, we are not tools of disorder, as the government impudently calls us. We accept the mission of making sacrifices for the good of all, for the salvation of the Spanish people, and we call on you to support us. Long live Spain!".[9]
The strike call had a mixed reception in different sectors and regions, and was notoriously disorganised: the politicians who called for struggle could not be seen for dust - they fled to France - or completely disassociated themselves from it, as was the case with the Catalan politician Cambó (about whom we will have more to say later). The government mobilised the army throughout Spain and declared a state of siege. The soldiery was given a free hand to carry out their usual excesses.[10] The repression was brutal: mass arrests, summary justice...some 2,000 CNT militants were imprisoned.
The August "general strike" was very bloody for the workers and caused demoralisation and a retreat amongst parts of the class who did not raise their heads for more than a decade. Here we see the outcome of classical revolutionary syndicalist thought - the general strike. The majority of the CNT militants distrusted the aims of the bourgeoisie that called the strike but they dreamt that the "general strike" could be the occasion for "unleashing the revolution". They assumed that - according to this abstract and arbitrary schema - it would cause a kind of "revolutionary gymnastics" that would rouse the masses. Reality brutally dispelled these speculations. The Spanish workers had been powerfully mobilised since the winter of the 1915, as much at the level of their immediate struggles as of the development of their consciousness (as we have already seen in the second article in this series, the Russian revolution generated great enthusiasm). The general strike put a brake on this dynamic: the famous joint UGT-CNT manifesto of March 1917 had turned workers into spectators, generating illusions about bourgeois "reforms" and "revolutionary" military juntas, as well as in the good offices of the Socialist and UGT leaderships.
In 1919, the world revolutionary wave which had begun in Russia, Germany, Austria and Hungry, was at its high point. The Russian revolution had generated enormous enthusiasm which had stimulated the struggle of the proletariat in Spain. However this enthusiasm was expressed in various ways. The movements were strong in Catalonia but hardly had an echo in the rest of Spain.[11] The "Canadiense"[12] strike was the culminating point of this process in Spain. It began as an attempt by the CNT to impose its presence on a Catalan boss; this business was deliberately chosen because of the impact it had on the industrial fabric of Barcelona. In January 1919, faced with the boss's decision
to cut the wages of certain categories of employees, a number of workers demonstrated outside the firm and eight of them were sacked. The strike began in February and lasted 44 days. Faced with the management's intransigence, encouraged by the authorities,[13] the strike spread to the whole of the city of Barcelona and took on a magnitude never seen before in Spain. It was an authentic mass strike as recognised by Rosa Luxemburg in the 1905 movement in Russia: in a few days the workers in all the enterprises and proletarian centres of the great Catalan conurbation were united in struggle, without it being prepared beforehand, in a totally unanimous way, as if a common will dominated everyone. When businesses tried to publish a communiqué threatening the workers, the printers' union imposed "red censorship" and stopped its publication.
Despite militarisation, despite the fact that nearly 3,000 were imprisoned in the Castle of Montjuich, despite the declaration of a state of war, the workers continued their struggle. The CNT locals were closed but the workers organised their own spontaneous assemblies. As the unionist Pestaña recognised "How can you organise a strike if the unions are closed and the individuals who compose them are persecuted by the police? (...) we see that the real sovereignty resides in the people; we had no more than consultative power; executive power was rooted in the assembles of the union delegates of the Barcelona unions, who met despite the state of war and daily persecution, and each day they issued resolutions to be followed and each day they ordered that this sector or those workers must stop work the following day".[14]
The leaders of the Catalan CNT - who all belonged to the syndicalist tendency - wanted to end the strike when the central government, lead by Romanones,[15] turned 180 degrees and sent his personal secretary to negotiate an agreement which conceded the main demands. Many workers distrusted this agreement and, in particular, they understood that it contained no guarantees about the freedom of their numerous imprisoned comrades. Confused, although stimulated by the news from Russia and other countries, they wanted to continue the struggle towards a revolutionary offensive. On 19th March, at the Teatro de Bosque, the assembly rejected the agreement. Faced with this, the union leaders called a meeting for the following day in the Plaza de las Arenas, which drew 25,000 workers. Seguí (the undoubted leader of the unionist tendency in the CNT, known as the best political orator of the time) after speaking for an hour posed the alternative of accepting the agreement or of going to Montjuich to free those in prison, thus unleashing the revolution. Similar "maximalist" thinking completely disorientated the workers who accepted the need to return to work.
The fears of many workers were confirmed. The authorities refused to free the prisoners and there was widespread indignation. On 24th March a new massive general strike broke out, disobeying the union's official policy, which paralysed the whole of Barcelona. Nevertheless, the majority of workers were confused. There was no clear revolutionary perspective. The proletariat in the rest of Spain was not on the move. In these conditions, despite the combativity and heroism of the workers in Barcelona, who had gone for months without pay, what maintained this strike was activism and the pressure of the CNT action groups, which regrouped old militants and young radicals.
The workers finally returned to work very demoralised. The bosses took full advantage of this in order to impose a generalised lock out that brought workers' families to the edge of starvation. The unionist tendency had no idea how to reply to this. The proposal by Buenacase (a radical anarchist militant) to occupy the factories was rejected.
The La Canadiense strike - the culminating moment of the world revolutionary wave in Spain - allows us to draw three lessons.
Firstly, the struggle remained trapped within Barcelona and took the form of an "industrial" conflict. Here we clearly see the weight of syndicalism which stopped the struggle extending on a territorial scale and taking on the political and social dimension that is clearly needed in a confrontation with the bourgeois state.[16] Unions are corporatist organs that do not express an alternative to capitalist society but are located within its economic framework. Despite the La Canadiense strike having a real tendency towards politicisation, this was never really expressed and it was never seen by Spanish society as a class struggle that put the whole system into question.
Secondly, assemblies and workers' councils are the unitary organs of the class whilst unions are organs that cannot overcome sectoral divisions, which are the basic units of capitalist production. In the La Canadiense struggle there were attempts at direct assemblies of workers that could overcome the sectoral structure of the union, but the union had the power to make decisions and to weaken and disperse the assemblies.[17]
Thirdly, the workers' councils arise as a social power that more or less consciously challenges the capitalist state. They are seen as such by the whole of society and particularly by the non-exploiting strata, who tend to address them as offering a solution to their problems. On the other hand, the union organisation is rightly seen as a corporatist organ limited to "questions of production". In the end other workers and other oppressed classes see them as something alien to them, as organs which don't directly concern them. This was very clear in the La Canadiense strike which did not integrate into a strong, unitary movement the social agitation of the Andalusian peasants that was then at its peak (the famous Bolshevik three years, 1917-20). Despite both these movements being inspired by the Russian revolution and the real sympathy that existed between the protagonists, they tended to go in a parallel direction without even a minimal effort at unification.[18]
The concretisation of this third lesson was the work of sabotage carried out by the unionist tendency within the CNT, which in practise was covered up by the Confederation's leadership (Seguí and Pastaña).[19] When the struggle was at its height, the leadership got the CNT to accept the formation of a mixed commission alongside the bosses, charged with ‘equitably' resolving labour conflicts. In fact it was no more than a kind of fire brigade devoted to isolating and demobilising the focal points of struggle. Against direct contacts and collective action by the workers, the mixed Commission stood for paralysis and the isolation of each struggle. In his book, The History of Spanish Anarcho-syndicalism (2006), Gomez Casa recognises that "the workers showed their revulsion for the Commission which ended up being dissolved. It had deepened the divorce between the workers' representatives and the workers, provoking a certain demoralisation which weakened workers' unity".
The trade unionist tendency, which had initially shown a sincere sympathy for the Russian revolution[20] still dominated the CNT and became a factor in its bureaucratisation: "It seems evident that on the eve of the repression of 1919 something like a syndicalist bureaucracy had begun to develop despite the obstacles to this posed by the CNTist attitude and tradition, in particular because there were no paid union agents in the union federations or the committees...this evolution of anarchist spontaneity and amateurism towards trade union bureaucracy and professionalism was, in normal conditions, the almost inevitable route followed by mass workers' organisations - including those which had been rooted in the Catalan milieu - and North of the Pyrenees the French CGT had gone in the same direction".[21]
Buenacasa noted that "syndicalism, now guided by people who had thrown over anarchist principles, who called themselves Sir and Madam... who held consultations and signed accords in the government offices and in the ministries, who drove around in cars and travelled in sleeper-trains...evolved rapidly towards the European and North American form which permitted leaders to become official persons".[22]
The unionist tendency made use of the apoliticism of anarchist ideology and revolutionary syndicalism to engage in a thinly veiled support for the policies of the bourgeoisie. It declared itself "apolitical" towards the Russian revolution, towards the struggle for the world revolution and towards any attempt to develop internationalist proletarian politics. However, we have already seen how in August 1917 it had not at all looked askance at efforts to reform the bourgeois state alongside the Spanish Socialist Party. It also made no secret of its support for the "national liberation" of Catalonia. At the end of 1919, at a big conference in Madrid, Seguí affirmed that "We the workers have nothing to lose from an independent Catalonia and much to gain from it. We have no fear of the independence of Catalonia...I assure you, friends from Madrid, that a Catalonia freed from the Spanish state would be a Catalonia of all the peoples of the Hispanic peninsula". [23]
At the Saragossa Congress of 1922, the unionist tendency defended the famous "political" resolution which opened the door to the CNT participating in Spanish political life (i.e. its integration into bourgeois politics) and the bourgeois press understood this when it rejoiced over the decision.[24] The resolution in question, however, was written in a very skilful way so that it would not encounter resistance from the majority. Two passages from the resolution are particularly significant.
In the first it is affirmed in a rhetorical way that the CNT is "an eminently revolutionary organism which frankly and explicitly rejects parliamentary action and collaboration with political parties". But this was just the sugar coating on the bitter pill which defended the necessity for participation in the capitalist state in the framework of the national capital, via a formulation that was deliberately difficult to understand: "The mission [of the CNT] is to conquer its rights of control and of judgement of all the values of solution to national life and, to this end, its duty is to carry out decisive action through joint action derived from the manifestations of strength at the disposal of the CNT" [25]. Expressions like "the values of solution to national life" were just a code for leading the combative militants of the CNT into supporting its integration into the capitalist state.
The other passage is more explicit. It says clearly that the political intervention the CNT stands for consists in "raising political consciousness to a higher level; making sure that injustices are made good; making sure that freedoms that have been conquered are respected and demanding an amnesty".[26] This could hardly express more clearly the will to accept the framework of the democratic state with its whole panoply of "rights", "freedoms", "justice" etc!
There was strong resistance to the unionist tendency by two tendencies, the anarchists on the one hand and the partisans of joining the Communist International on the other. Without diminishing the merits of these two tendencies, it has to be said that they were unable to discuss with each other or even to collaborate against the unionist tendency. They both suffered from profound theoretical weaknesses. The pro-Bolshevik tendency which formed the Revolutionary Syndicalist Committees (CSR), similar to those which had been animated by Monatte in the French CGT in 1917, went no further than calling for a return to the pre-war CNT without trying to understand the new conditions, marked by the decline of capitalism and the revolutionary eruption of the proletariat. As for the anarchist tendency, it based everything on action, which is why it was able to react well in moments of struggle or against the more obvious positions of the unionist tendency but was incapable of carrying out a debate or developing a methodical strategy for the struggle.
The decisive element in its weakness was however its unconditional adhesion to trade unionism, arguing tooth and nail that the unions continued to be a valuable weapon of struggle for the proletariat.
The pro-Bolshevik tendency was affected by the degeneration of the CI, which at its Second Congress adopted its theses on the trade unions and which at its Third Congress called for work in reactionary trade unions. It then formed the Red Trade Union International and proposed that the CNT should join it. These orientations only strengthened the unionist tendency within the CNT and frightened the anarchist tendency which more and more took refuge in "direct" action.
The unionist tendency argued quite rightly that on questions of trade union practise and coherence, it was much more competent that the CSR and the Red Trade Union International, which were putting forward totally unrealistic demands and methods in a situation of increasing reflux. In particular it criticised them for their "politicisation", by which they referred to the opportunist politicisation advocated by the degenerating CI: the united front, the workers' government, the trade union united front, etc.
The few discussions that did take place revolved around themes which only served to increase the confusion: politicisation based on frontism versus anarchist apoliticism, adhesion to the Red Trade Union International or the formation of a revolutionary syndicalist "International".[27] These two questions resolutely turned their back on the realities of the period: in the turbulent period of 1914-22, it could be seen that the trade unions had performed the triple role of recruiting sergeants for the war (1914-18), of butchers of the revolution and saboteurs of the workers' struggle. The German communist left had engaged in an intense reflection on the role of the unions, which permitted Bergmann[28] to say at the Third Congress of the CI that, "the bourgeoisie governs by combining the sword and the lie. The army is the sword of the state and the unions are the organs of the lie". But none of this had any repercussions in the CNT, where even its most consistent tendencies remained prisoners of the trade unionist conception.
After the retreat of the movement around the "Canadiense" strike at the end of 1919, the Spanish bourgeoisie, with its Catalonian fraction at the forefront, unleashed a pitiless attack on the militants of the CNT. Gangs of "pistoleros" were organised, paid by the bosses and coordinated by the Prefecture and the military governor of the region. They tracked down syndicalists and assassinated them in pure mafia style. There were up to 30 deaths a day. Many others were put in prison and the Civil Guard re-established the barbaric practise of the "chain of prisoners": convicted syndicalists were marched for miles to detention centres. Many died on the way, victims of exhaustion, beatings, or just shot like rabbits. The terrible practise of the "law of flight" was given a sinister fame by the Spanish bourgeoisie: prisoners were released in a street or by the roadside then gunned down for trying to "escape".
The organisers of this barbarism was the Catalonian bourgeoisie, so "modern" and "democratic", who had always reproached their aristocratic Castillian colleagues for being brutal and lacking in manners. But the Catalonian bourgeoisie had seen the proletarian threat and wanted total revenge. Thus their principal leader, Cambó, whom we have already mentioned, was the main protagonist of the pistoleros. The military governor, Martinez Anido, linked to the old Castillian aristocracy, and the "progressive" Catalonian bourgeoisie were entirely reconciled to persecuting working class militants. This was a real symbol of the new situation: there were no longer progressive or reactionary factions of the bourgeoisie. All were complicit in the reactionary defence of an obsolete and decadent social order.
The killing went on until 1923, the date of the coup d'Etat by General Primo de Rivera, who established a dictatorship with the undisguised support of the PSOE and the UGT. In an ambience of demobilisation on the part of the workers, the CNT got itself into a terrible spiral: it replied to the pistoleros by organising self-defence squads which responded blow for blow by assassinating selected politicians, cardinals and bosses. This dynamic rapidly degenerated into an endless series of deaths which further discouraged and demoralised the workers. Furthermore, drawn onto a terrain where it would inevitably be weaker, the CNT suffered a haemorrhage of militants, murdered, imprisoned, invalided, on the run...even more of them withdrew from activity in demoralisation and confusion. In its latter days the self-defence corps of the CNT was infiltrated by all sorts of dubious and marginal elements whose activity was murder as a thing in itself and who undermined the CNT's prestige and isolated it politically.
The CNT was again hit by a terrible repression in 1923. But its second disappearance didn't have the same characteristics as the first:
in 1911-15, syndicalism could still, in certain specific situations, play a positive role for the working class, even if this possibility was diminishing daily; but by 1923 syndicalism had definitively lost any ability to contribute to the workers' struggle;
in 1911-15, the disappearance of the organisation didn't mean the disappearance of reflection and the search for class positions (which allowed it to be reconstituted in 1915 on the basis of struggle against the imperialist war and sympathy for the world revolution); in 1923, it led to the strengthening of two tendencies, syndicalist and anarchist, which could no longer bring anything to the struggle or to proletarian consciousness;
in 1911-15, the unitary and open spirit had not disappeared, allowing anarchists, revolutionary syndicalists and socialists to co-exist in the same organisation; in 1923, all the marxist tendencies either left by themselves or were excluded, leaving only strongly sectarian anarchist and syndicalist tendencies who were trapped in extreme apoliticism.
As we will see in a future article, the reconstitution of the CNT at the end of the 1920s was carried out on a totally different basis from the one that had underlain its birth in 1910 and its first reconstitution in 1915.
RR and C Mir, 19.6.07
[1]. In International Review n° 129 [52]
[2]. See the articles in this series on the IWW in International Review n°124 & 125. [53]
[3]. Pannekoek, "The divergent tactics in the workers movement", 1909.
[4]. See in particular the first article of the series in International Review n° 118 [2] .
[5]. The Restoration regime (1874-1923): a "liberal" monarchic system adopted by the Spanish bourgeoisie, based on a collection of dynastic parties that excluded not only the workers and peasants but also important parts of the petty bourgeoisie and even of the bourgeoisie itself.
[6]. See the second article of this series, in International Review n° 129 [52] .
[7]. This quote is taken from the book: The History of the workers' movement in Spain (Vol. 2, p. 100) by Tuñón de Lara.
[8]. As Victor Serge (a Russian militant with an anarchist orientation who however collaborated with the Bolsheviks) recalled, at this time in Barcelona, "the national committee of the CNT did not pose any fundamental questions. It entered into battle without perspective, not evaluating the consequences of its actions".
[9]. Cited in The History of the workers' movement in Spain by Tuñón de Lara, p. 107.
[10]. Previously we said that the military juntas that were supposedly very "critical" of the regime (although in reality, contrary to the progressive role that they played in the past, as Marx in his writings of Spain for the New York Daily Tribune judged them to have done in the first half of the 19th century, these "juntas" only asked for "more sausages"). The PSOE spread the illusion amongst the working class that the "revolutionary" military could be on their side. In Sabadell, a large industrial concentration in Catalonia, the Vergara regiment commanded by the leader of the juntas - Coronal Márquez - carried out a savage repression leading to 32 deaths (according to official figures).
[11]. "However, while the bourgeoisie via the army was able to recompose parts of its dispersed economy and to maintain the centralisation of the most varied regions as far as their level of development was concerned, the proletariat, on the contrary, under the impulse of the class contradictions, tended to be localised in the sectors in which these contradictions were most violently expressed. The proletariat in Catalonia was thrown onto the social arena not as the result of the modification of the whole of the Spanish economy, but due to the development of Catalonia. The same phenomenon developed in other regions, including the agrarian regions" (Bilan n° 36 [54] , November 1936, "The lessons of the events in Spain").
[12]. Ebro Power and Irrigation was a British Canadian firm popularly known as "La Canadiense". It supplied electricity to firms and housing in Barcelona.
[13]. At the beginning the firm was ready to negotiate and it was the civil governor González who put pressure on it not to and who sent the police to the factory.
[14]. Pestaña's intervention at a conference in Madrid, October 1919, on the La Canadiense strike, taken from: Treyectoria sindicalista, A Pestaña, ed Giner, Madrid, 1974, p. 383.
[15]. Count Romanones (1863-1950), member of the Liberal Party, was Prime Minister several times.
[16]. This is the difference between what Rosa Luxemburg called the "mass strike" arising out of the experience of the 1905 Russian Revolution and the union methods of struggle. See our series on 1905 [55] in International Review n°s 120, 122, 123 and 125.
[17]. It is important to understand that, even with the best will in the world - as was then the case- the union tended to hijack and undermine the workers' initiative and their capacity to think and take decisions. The first phase of the strike was ended, as we have seen. not by a general assembly where all could participate and come to collective decisions, but by a meeting in the Plaza de Toros where the great leaders talked endlessly, stirring up the masses' emotions and bringing about a frame of mind where it was not possible to come to a collective decision. This was left to the union leaders.
[18]. The fundamentally dispersed character of the peasant movement in Andalusia has been counter-posed to the proletarian character of the struggle in Barcelona. At this level it is important to see the differences with Russia. There the peasant agitation had a generalised form and was consciously and loyally united with the struggle of the proletariat (despite having its own rhythm and putting forward its own demands, some of which were in contradiction with the revolutionary struggle). The peasants were powerfully politicised (many of them had been soldiers at the front) and tended to form peasants' and soldiers' councils; the Bolsheviks had a small but important presence within them. The situation in Spain was very different; the peasants' discontent remained confined to Andalusia and did not go beyond the sum of local struggles; the peasants and day labours did not pose questions about power or the general situation, but concentrated on agrarian reform; the links with the CNT were more to do with sympathy and familial relations than based on political influence.
[19]. We've already talked about Seguí (1890-1923). He was the undoubted leader of the CNT between 1917 and 1923. He was a partisan of union with the UGT, which led him not towards "moderation" but to an out and out trade unionist position. He was assassinated by a gang from the "Free Trade Union" which we will talk about later. Pastaña (1886-1937) ended up splitting from the CNT in 1932 to form a "Syndicalist Party" inspired by British Labourism.
[20]. Seguí for example voted for joining the Third International at the famous Congress of the Comedy - from the name of the theatre where it took place - in December 1919. It was as much growing disappointment at the degeneration of the Russian revolution and the Communist International as the need to take trade unionism to its logical conclusion which led this tendency to eventually reject the Russian revolution in the name of apoliticism.
[21]. Meaker, The Revolutionary left in Spain, 1974.
[22]. Ibid.
[23]. Juan Gomez Casa, The History of Spanish Anarcho-syndicalism.
[24]. This resolution clearly announced what would be the policy of the CNT after 1930: tacit support for political change in favour of the Spanish Republic, selective abstention, support for the Popular Front in 1936, etc.
[25]. Olaya, History of the workers' movement in Spain.
[26]. Ibid.
[27]. The Berlin Conference of 1922 resuscitated the International Workers Association and claimed to provide an anarchist coherence to revolutionary syndicalism. We will examine this question in a future article.
[28]. Representative of the KAPD at the Third Congress of the Communist International in 1921.
Over the summer of 2007, capitalism confirmed its tendency to sink into ever more frequent catastrophes: the quagmire of imperialist war as exemplified by the civilian bloodbath in Iraq; the devastation of climate change induced by the rampant profit motive; and a further lurch into economic crisis promising the greater impoverishment of the mass of the world's population. Conversely, the working class, the only force capable of saving human society, is becoming increasingly disaffected with the rotting capitalist system. But its to the economic crisis that we must turn here, given recent dramatic events, beginning in the housing industry in the United States, that have shaken international finance and the entire world economic system.
The trigger for the crisis was the fall in house prices in America, along with the slump in house construction and large scale defaults on mortgages by those who couldn't afford the escalating interest rates of the latter, now famous as "sub-prime" or risky loans. From here shock waves travelled through the entire world financial system. In August, investment funds and entire investment banks, whose assets included billions of dollars worth of these sub-prime loans either collapsed or had to be rescued. Thus two "hedge funds" of the US investment bank Bear Sterns crashed costing investors $1bn. The German bank IKD had to be bailed out and two investment funds of the French bank BNP Paribas failed. The shares of mortgage lenders and other banks declined sharply leading to steep falls on all of the world's major stock exchanges, wiping out billions of dollars worth of "accumulated labour". In order to stem the fall in confidence and the reluctance of banks to extend credit the central banks - the US Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) and the Eurobank - intervened by making available still more billions in cheaper loans. This money was not intended of course for the hundreds of thousands of people who were being made homeless by the "sub-prime" fiasco, nor the tens of thousands of workers made redundant by the crisis in the construction industry but for the credit markets themselves. Those financial institutions who had squandered enormous sums of cash were being rewarded by more gambling money. But this by no means ended the crisis. In England it was to develop as a farce.
The Bank of England criticised the other central banks in September for bailing out the risky and imprudent investors who had set the crisis off, recommending a more tight-fisted policy which would punish the wrong doers and prevent a reoccurrence of the same speculative problems. But then the Chairman of the bank, Mervyn King took an abrupt change of course. The bank was to rescue the fifth largest mortgage provider in the UK, Northern Rock. The "business model" of the latter was to rely on borrowing from the credit markets and then re-lend the money to homebuyers at a higher rate of interest. When the credit markets began to crumble, so did Northern Rock.
After the announcement of the rescue, long queues of depositors began to form outside the branches of the bank to withdraw their money - and took out £2bn in 3 days. It was the first run of this type on an English bank in 140 years. To prevent the risk of contagion the government had to step in again to give a 100% guarantee to the depositors of Northern Rock and savers in other threatened banks.[1] Then finally the "Old Lady of Threadneedle Street" was obliged, like the other central banks it had recently criticised, to inject huge quantities of money into the creaking banking system. Result: the credibility of the headquarters of the London financial centre - now representing a quarter of the British economy - was in ruins.
The next act of the drama, which is still continuing as we write, concerns the effect of the financial crisis on the wider economy. The first cut in interest rates by the Fed in five years, in order to make credit more available, has not, for the moment, been a success. It has not brought a halt to the continuing collapse of the housing market in the US nor the prospective one in up to 40 other countries where a similar speculative bubble has developed. Nor has it arrested the wider credit squeeze and its inevitable effect on investment and consumer spending as a whole. Instead it has led to the rapid fall of the dollar: to its lowest level against other currencies since President Nixon devalued the currency in 1971, and to the record rise of the Euro and of raw materials like oil and gold.
These are all indications of both a fall in growth, or even an open recession in the world economy, and an increase in inflation in the period to come.
In a word, the previous 6 years of world economic growth, built on mortgage and credit card debt and the gigantic foreign and budget debts of the United States, is coming to an end.
Such are the facts of the current economic situation. The question is whether the approaching open recession, which everyone agrees is likely, is part of the inevitable up and down pattern of the capitalist economy which is fundamentally sound, or whether it is a sign of a process of inner disintegration and breakdown integral to capitalism that will be punctuated by more and more violent convulsions.
To answer this question it is first necessary to deal with the idea that the development of speculation and the resulting credit crisis is in some way an aberration, or a departure from the healthy functioning of the system, which could be corrected by state control or better regulation. In other words is the present crisis a result of financiers holding the economy hostage?
The development of the banking system, the stock market and other credit mechanisms have been integral to the development of capitalism since the 18th century. They have been necessary for the amassing and centralising of money capital in order to permit the levels of investment required for vast industrial expansion that was outside the scope of the richest individual capitalist. The idea of the industrial entrepreneur acquiring his capital by saving or by risking his own money is a pure fiction. The bourgeoisie requires access to the sort of sums of capital that have already been concentrated in the credit markets. In the stock markets the ruling class is not betting with their own individual fortunes but with monetised social wealth.
Credit, and lots of it, has thus played an important part in immensely accelerating the growth of the productive forces in comparison with previous epochs and in the constitution of the world market.
On the other hand given the inherent tendencies of capitalist production, credit has also been a tremendous accelerator of overproduction, of overvaluing the capacity of the market to absorb products and has thus been a catalyst of speculative bubbles with the consequent crises and drying up of credit. Side by side with facilitating these social catastrophes the stock markets and the banking system have encouraged all the individual vices of greed and duplicity that are typical of an exploiting class living off the labour of others; vices that we see flourishing today in insider trading, fictitious payments, outrageous "bonuses" that amount to huge fortunes, "golden parachutes", accountancy fraud, plain theft etc.
The speculation, the risky loans, the swindles, the subsequent stock market crashes and the disappearance of huge quantities of surplus value are therefore an intrinsic feature of the anarchy of capitalist production.
Speculation is, in the last analysis, a consequence not the cause of capitalist crises. And if today, it seems that speculative activity in the financial sector dominates the whole economy, it is because over the past 40 years capitalist overproduction has increasingly lapsed into a continuing crisis, where world markets are saturated with goods, investment in production is less profitable and therefore money capital's inevitable recourse is to gamble in what has become a "casino economy".[2]
Therefore there is no possibility of a capitalism without its financial excesses, which are an intrinsic part of capitalism's tendency to produce as if the market had no limits, of the inability of even Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Fed, to know "if the market is overvalued".
The recent slump in the housing market in the US and in other countries is an illustration of the real relationship between over production and the credit squeeze.
The characteristics of the crisis in the housing market are reminiscent of descriptions of the capitalist crises that Karl Marx described in the Communist Manifesto in 1848:
"In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over production. ...there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce."
So today we don't see homelessness as a result of a shortage of homes but paradoxically because there are too many of them, there is a veritable glut of empty houses. The construction industry has been working flat out over the past five years. But at the same time the purchasing power of American workers has fallen, as American capitalism attempts to increase its profitability. A gap opened up between the number of new homes being thrown onto the market and the ability to pay for them by those who needed them. Hence the risky - i.e. sub-prime - loans to seduce new buyers who could hardly afford them to square the circle. Eventually the market crashed. Now, as more and more homeowners are evicted as a result of foreclosure on the crippling interest rates on these loans, the housing market will be further flooded - in the US some 3 million people are expected to lose their roofs as a result of defaulting on sub-prime mortgages. This human misery is anticipated in other countries where the housing bubble has either burst, or is about to. The surge in the construction industry and in mortgage lending over the past decade, then, far from reducing homelessness has put decent housing effectively out of reach for the mass of the population, or put homeowners in precarious state.[3]
Evidently what concerns the leaders of the capitalist system - its hedge fund managers, its treasury ministers, its central bankers, etc - in the current crisis are not the human tragedies created by the sub-prime debacle, the dashed aspirations to a slightly better life (except insofar as they might lead to questioning the insanity of this mode of production) but their inability as consumers to pay the inflated prices of houses and usurious rates of interest on the loans.
The sub-prime fiasco epitomises therefore the crisis of capitalism, its chronic tendency in the drive for profit to overproduce in relation to the solvent demand, its inability despite the phenomenal material, technological and labour resources at its command to satisfy the most basic human needs. [4]
However absurdly wasteful and anachronistic the capitalist system appears in the light of the recent crisis, the bourgeoisie still tries to reassure itself and the rest of the population that at least it won't be as bad as 1929.
The 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression continues to haunt the bourgeoisie, as the media coverage of the recent crisis testifies. Editorials, in depth articles, historical analogies, have tried to convince us that the present financial crisis won't lead to the same catastrophe, that 1929 was a unique event that turned into a disaster by wrong decision making.
The bourgeoisie's "experts" foster the illusion that the present financial crisis is rather a repeat of the relatively limited - in time and place - financial crashes of the 19th century. In reality today's situation has more in common with 1929 than this earlier period of capitalism's ascendancy, sharing many of the common characteristics of the catastrophic financial and economic crises of the decadence of capitalism, of the period opened up by the First World War; of the inner disintegration of the capitalist mode of production, of a period of wars and revolutions.
The economic crises of the capitalist ascendancy and the speculative activity that often accompanied them and preceded them were the heartbeats of a healthy system and gave way to new capitalist expansion throughout the world, through the construction of railways over entire continents, massive technological breakthroughs, the conquest of colonial markets, the conversion of artisans and peasants into armies of wage labourers, etc.
The 1929 New York stock market crash, which announced the first major crisis of capitalism's decay, put all the speculative crises of the 19th century in the shade. During the "roaring twenties" the value of shares in the New York Stock Exchange, the biggest in the world, had increased five fold. World capitalism had failed to recover from the catastrophe of the First World War, and in the now richest capitalist country the bourgeoisie sought an outlet in stock market speculation.
But on Black Thursday, October 24th 1929, a precipitous decline took place. Panic selling continued on Black Tuesday of the following week. And the stock market kept on crashing until 1932, by which time stocks had lost 89% of their peak value in 1929. They returned to levels not seen since the 19th century. The 1929 peak in share value was not reached again until 1954!
Meanwhile the US banking system, which had lent money to buy the stocks, itself collapsed. This catastrophe heralded the great depression of the thirties; the deepest crisis capitalism has ever experienced. American GDP was effectively halved. 13 million workers became unemployed with no relief to speak of. A third of the population sank into abject poverty. The effects were echoed around the world.
But there was no economic rebound as there had been after the crises of the 19th century. Production only began to resume when it had been harnessed to arms production in preparation for a new re-division of the world market in the imperialist bloodbath of World War 2. In other words when the unemployed had been transformed into cannon fodder.
The thirties depression appeared to be the result of 1929, but in reality the Wall Street Crash only precipitated the crisis, a crisis of the chronic overproduction of capitalism in its decadent phase, the essential identity of the thirties with today's crisis which began in 1968.
The bourgeoisie in the 1950s and 60s smugly claimed to have solved the problem of crises and consigned them to a historical curiosity through such palliatives as state intervention in the economy both at the national and international level, with deficit financing and progressive taxation. To its consternation the worldwide crisis of overproduction reappeared in 1968.
Over the past 40 years this crisis has lurched from low point to another, from one open recession to one more damaging, from one false Eldorado to another. The form of the crisis since 1968 hasn't taken the same abrupt nature as the crash of 1929.
In 1929 the financial experts of the bourgeoisie took measures that only allowed the financial crisis to take its course. The measures were not errors but methods that had worked in previous crashes of the system, like in the panic of 1907 but weren't sufficient in the new period. The state refused to intervene. Interest rates were increased, the money supply was allowed to shrink, tightening the credit squeeze and further shattering confidence in the banking and credit system. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill imposed import barriers that accelerated the downturn in world trade and consequently worsened the depression.
In the last 40 years the bourgeoisie has understood to use state mechanisms to reduce interest rates and inject liquidity into the banking system in the face of financial crises. It has been able to phase-in the crisis, but at the price of overloading the capitalist system with mountains of debt. A more gradual decline has been achieved than in the thirties but nevertheless the palliatives are wearing out, and the financial system is increasingly fragile.
The phenomenal growth of debt in the world economy during the recent decade is exemplified in the extraordinary growth, within the credit markets of the now famous "hedge funds". The estimated assets of these funds have risen from $491bn in 2000 to $1,745bn in 2007.[5] Their complicated financial transactions, mostly secret and unregulated, use debt as a tradable security in the search for short term gain. The hedge funds are judged to have spread bad debt throughout the financial system, accelerating and rapidly extending the present financial crisis.
Keynesianism - deficit financing by the state to maintain full employment - evaporated in the galloping inflation of the 1970s and the recessions of 1975 and 1981. Reaganomics and Thatcherism - restoring profits by cutting the social wage, cutting taxes and allowing unprofitable industries to collapse with mass unemployment - expired in the stock market crash of 1987, the Savings and Loans scandal, and the recession of 1991. The Asian Dragons, saddled with huge debts, ran out of puff in 1997. The dot com revolution, the "new" economy, turned out to have no visible means of support, and the boom in its shares bust in 1999. The housing booms and credit card debt explosion of the past five years, and the use of the gigantic US foreign debt to provide demand for the world economy and the "miracle" expansion of the Chinese economy - this too has now been put in question.
We can't predict exactly how the world economy will continue to decline but increasing convulsions and even greater austerity are inevitable.
Karl Marx in the third volume of Capital, argued that the credit system developed by capitalism revealed in embryo a new mode of production within the old. By enlarging and socialising wealth, taking it out of the hands of individual members of the bourgeoisie, capitalism had paved the way for a society where production could be centralised and controlled by the producers themselves and bourgeois ownership could be done away with as a historical anachronism:
"The credit system hence accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the creation of the world market which it is the historical task of the capitalist mode of production to bring to a certain level of development, as material foundations for the new form of production. At the same time, credit accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these the elements of dissolution of the old mode of production."[6]
For a century now conditions have been ripe for the abolition of capitalist exploitation. In the absence of a radical proletarian response, the contradictions of this moribund system, the economic crisis in particular, have only become more acute. While today credit continues to play a role in the evolution of these contradictions, it's not that of conquering the world market, since capitalism has long established its social relations throughout the planet. The massive indebtedness of all states has allowed the system to avoid brutal collapse despite the virtual impossibility of further expansion of the world market. But there is a price. After functioning for decades as a means of attenuating the conflict between the development of the productive forces and the obsolete social relations of capitalism, the headlong flight into debt is beginning to "accelerate the violent outbreaks of this contradiction" and to shake the social edifice as never before. However, taken in themselves, such convulsions are not a threat to the division of society into classes. They become so only when they help to move the proletariat.
Now, as revolutionaries have always asserted, it's the crisis which is going to accelerate the process of coming to consciousness about the impasse of the present world that is already under way. It is the crisis, which, in time, will precipitate numerous sectors of the working class in increasingly massive numbers into struggle. The challenge of these future experiences will be the capacity of the working class to defend and affirm itself against all the forces of the bourgeoisie, to gain confidence in its own forces and to progressively become conscious that it is the only social force capable of overthrowing capitalism.
Como
29.10.07
[1]. According to the British business magazine The Economist, this guarantee was actually a bluff.
[2]. "And none of this will be changed by the lamentations of the ‘alternative worldists' and other critics of the ‘financisation' of the economy. These political currents would like to see a cleaner and fairer capitalism that has turned its back on speculation. In reality, speculation is not at all the product of a ‘bad' type of capitalism which has forgotten its responsibility to invest in really productive sectors. As Marx already showed in the 19th century, speculation results from the fact that, when they face the perspective of a lack of sufficient outlets for productive investments, the holders of capital prefer to find short term profits in a huge lottery, which has today turned capitalism into a planetary casino. To want capitalism to renounce speculation in the present period is as realistic as wanting tigers to become vegetarians or dragons to stop breathing fire." Point 4, "Resolution on the International Situation" adopted by the 17th Congress of the ICC, International Review nº130.
[3]3. Benjamin Bernanke, Chairman of the US Fed, referred to mortgage arrears as "delinquencies": in other words crimes or misdemeanours against Mammon. Accordingly the "criminals" have been punished by still higher interest rates!
4. We can't here go into the state of homelessness in the world as a whole. According to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 1 billion people on the planet are considered to be without adequate housing while 100 million have no home at all.
[5]. www.mcclatchydc.com [56].
[6]. Part 5, Chapter 27: "The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production"
Ninety years ago one of the most important events in the entire history of humanity took place.
While the first world war ravaged most of the advanced countries, destroyed entire generations and devoured centuries of civilisation's progress, the Russian proletariat gave a dramatic new life to the hopes of tens of thousands of human beings who were oppressed by exploitation and barbarous war.
The imperialist butchery marked the fact that the capitalist system had had its day, that it had ceased to provide the conditions for the development of civilisation as it had done in the past against the feudal system. On the contrary, it had become the main hindrance to any further development of civilisation and had become a threat to it. The revolution of October 1917 demonstrated that the proletariat was the class able to overthrow capitalist domination and able to take control of managing the planet in order to move towards a society free of exploitation and war.
Every sector of the dominant class and its political apparatus will celebrate this anniversary in its own way and in accordance with the tendency to which it belongs.
Some will try to ensure that it is mentioned as little as possible by resorting to "scoops" on every "dramatic" subject under the sun, such as the drama of little Maddie McCann, the rugby world cup or the future of the monarchy in Spain.
Others will talk about it but only to repeat once more what has been asserted ad nauseam since the collapse of the USSR and its bloc: that Stalinism is the legitimate child of the revolution, any attempt by the exploited to free themselves of their chains can only lead to terror and mass murder.
Others however will eulogise the workers' insurrection of 1917 and praise Lenin and the Bolsheviks who led it. However they will end up agreeing that today the revolution is either unnecessary or else impossible.
It is up to revolutionaries to combat all the lies that the defenders of the capitalist order disseminate unceasingly in order to divert the working class from its revolutionary perspective. This is why we are publishing the two articles below.
The main aim of the first one is to show that the revolution is not just a pious wish, that it is not only necessary but also possible and realisable.
The second takes up one of the biggest lies in history: the idea that the society that existed in the USSR was a "socialist" society because it had abolished individual ownership of the means of production. This is a lie that was shared by all those parties that had an interest in doing so; the classical sectors of the "democratic" bourgeoisie as well as Stalinism, it was also supported by Trotskyism, a political current that nevertheless presents itself as "revolutionary", "communist" and "anti-Stalinist".
This article first appeared in 1946 in the review Internationalisme which was produced by the French Communist Left group, the ancestor of the ICC and it was re-produced in International Review n° 61 in Spring 1990. It is not easy to read and that is why we have written the introduction published here.[1] We have added several notes to the 1946 article where it makes reference to events or organisations that are not generally known among the new generations that are now, 60 years later, embarking upon communist reflection. Obviously the ICC has devoted many other texts to an event as important as the 1917 revolution and we hope that the two articles published here will encourage our readers to look at these texts.[2]
[1]. This presentation is signed MC, i.e our comrade who died at the end of that year. It's the last article he wrote for our Review but it expresses the vigour of his thought, which he held onto till the end. The fact that this comrade had been the main animator the GCF, had himself lived through the 1917 revolution in Russia, in his home town of Kichinev, gives this document a particular value at a time when we are commemorating the 90th anniversary of this revolution (On MC, see our article "Marc" in International Review n° 65 and 66).
[2]. See in particular our pamphlet October 1917, start of the world revolution, and the articles published in International Review n° 12,13, 51, 71, 72, 89, 90 and 91.
In our discussions, especially with young people, we often hear variations of the following: "It's true that things are very bad, there's more and more poverty and war, our conditions are getting worse, that the future of the planet is under threat. Something has to be done, but what? A revolution? That's utopian, it's impossible".
That's the big difference between May 68 and now. In 1968, the idea of revolution was all around even though the economic crisis had only just begun to bite. Today, it's much more evident that capitalism is bankrupt but there is much more scepticism about the possibility of changing the world. Words like "communism" and "class struggle" sound like the dream of another age. Even to talk about the working class and the bourgeoisie seems out of date.
But history does provide an answer to these doubts. 90 years ago, the working class supplied the proof that it is possible to change the world. The revolution of October 1917 in Russia, to this day the greatest action the exploited masses have ever undertaken, showed that the revolution was not only necessary but also possible.
The ruling class continues to spew out a flood of lies on this subject. Works like The end of an illusion or The Black Book of Communism do little more than repeat the propaganda that was already circulating at the time: the revolution was no more than a "putsch" by the Bolsheviks; Lenin was an agent of German imperialism, etc. The bourgeoisie can only see workers' revolutions as acts of collective madness; a lapse into chaos doomed to end horribly.[1] Bourgeois ideology cannot admit that the exploited can act for their own interests. The collective and conscious action of the working majority is a notion that bourgeois thought rejects as an unnatural utopia.
However, whatever our exploiters might think, the reality is that in 1917 the working class was able to rise up collectively and consciously against this inhuman system. It showed that the workers are not dumb beasts, good only for working and obeying. On the contrary, these revolutionary events revealed the enormous and often unsuspected capacities of the proletariat, freeing a torrent of creative energy and a prodigious dynamic of collective mental transformation. John Reed summed up the intense ebullience of proletarian life during the year 1917: "All Russia was learning to read, and reading - politics, economics, history - because the people wanted to know.... The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land... Then the Talk... Meetings in the trenches at the front, in village squares, factories...What a marvellous sight to see: Putilovsky Zavod (the Putilov factory) pour out in its forty thousand to listen to Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever they had to say, as long as they would talk! For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In railway carriages, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere.... At every meeting, attempts to limit the time of speakers voted down, and every man free to express the thought that was in him".[2]
Bourgeois democracy talks a lot about "freedom of expression" when experience tells us that for the ruling class it's all manipulation, theatre, brainwashing. Real freedom of expression is conquered by the working masses in their revolutionary action.
"In every factory, in each guild, in each company, in each tavern, in the military hospital, at the transfer station, even in the depopulated villages, the molecular work of revolutionary thought was in progress. Everywhere were to be found the interpreters of events, chiefly from among the workers, from whom one inquired, ‘what's the news?' and from whom one awaited the needed words...Elements of experience, criticism, initiative, self-sacrifice, seeped down through the mass and created, invisibly to a superficial glance but no less decisively, an inner mechanics of the revolutionary movement as a conscious process".[3]
This capacity of the working class to enter into struggle collectively and consciously was no sudden miracle; it was the fruit of numerous struggles and of a long process of subterranean reflection. Marx often compared the working class to an old mole slowly burrowing away under the earth only to emerge suddenly and unexpectedly into the clear light of day. Through the insurrection of October 1917 we saw the imprint of the experiences of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian revolution of 1905, of the political battles fought by the Communist League, the First and Second Internationals, the Zimmerwald, the German Spartacists and the Bolshevik party in Russia. The Russian revolution was certainly a response to the war, to hunger and the barbarism of dying Tsarism, but it was also and above all a conscious response, guided by the historic and worldwide continuity of the proletarian movement. Concretely, the Russian workers, prior to the victorious insurrection, had lived through the great struggles of 1898, 1902, the 1905 revolution and the battles of 1912-14:
"It was necessary to reckon not on a vague mass, but with the mass of the workers of Petrograd and the workers of Russia in general who had lived through the experience of the 1905 revolution, the insurrection in Moscow in the December of that year; and it was necessary that, within that mass, there were workers who had reflected on the experience of 1905, who had assimilated the perspective of the revolution, who had focused dozens of times on the question of the army".[4]
Thus October 1917 was the culminating point of a long process in the development of consciousness, culminating, on the eve of the insurrection, in a profoundly fraternal atmosphere in the workers' ranks. This ambience is perceptible and almost palpable in these lines from Trotsky: "The masses felt a need to stand close together. Each wanted to test himself through others, and all tensely and attentively kept observing how one and the same thought would develop in their various minds with its different shades and features.... Those months of feverish political life had created innumerable cadres in the lower ranks, had educated hundreds and thousands of rough diamonds...The mass would no longer endure in its midst the wavering, the dubious, the neutral. It was striving to get hold of everybody, to attract, to convince, to conquer. The factories joined with the regiments in sending delegates to the front. The trenches got into connection with the workers and peasants near by in the rear. In the towns along the front there was an endless series of meetings, conferences, consultations in which the soldiers and sailors would bring their activity into accord with that of the workers and peasants."[5]
Thanks to this ferment of debate, the workers were able to win over the soldiers and the peasants to their cause. The 1917 revolution expressed the very being of the proletariat, a class which is both exploited and revolutionary and which can only free itself if it acts in a conscious and collective manner. The revolutionary struggle of the proletariat is the only hope for the liberation of all the exploited and oppressed masses. Bourgeois politics is always organised to benefit a minority in society. Proletarian politics, on the other hand, don't aim to satisfy a particular interest but the interests of humanity as a whole: "the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) cannot liberate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie) without at the same time liberating, once and for all, the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and the class struggle."[6]
This huge outpouring of discussion, this thirst for collective reflection and action was materialised very concretely in the soviets (workers' councils), which allowed the workers to organise themselves and fight as a united class.
Following the call of the Petrograd soviet, the day of 22 October sealed the insurrection. Meetings and assemblies were held in all neighbourhoods and factories, and they were massively in agreement: "Down with Kerensky!",[7] "All power to the Soviets!" It was not just the Bolsheviks, but the whole proletariat of Petrograd which decided on and carried out the insurrection. It was a gigantic action in which industrial workers, white-collar workers, soldiers, women, children, even many Cossacks, participated openly.
"The insurrection was so to speak organised for a fixed date: 25 October. It was not fixed by a secret meeting, but openly and publicly, and the triumphant revolution took place precisely on 25 October (6 November in the Russian calendar) as had been foreseen in advance. Universal history has seen a great number of revolts and revolutions, but we would look in vain for another insurrection by an oppressed class which took place on a set date and publicly and which was carried out victoriously on the day announced. In this sense the November revolution was unique and incomparable".[8]
Throughout Russia, far beyond Petrograd, a huge number of soviets called for the seizure of power or took it themselves, marking the victory of the insurrection. The Bolshevik party knew very well that the revolution could not be carried out just by the party or by the Petrograd workers alone; it was a task for the whole proletariat. The events proved that Lenin and Trotsky were right to have said that the soviets, as soon as they appeared in the mass strikes of 1905, were "the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat". In 1917, this unitary organisation of the fighting proletariat, based on the generalisation of sovereign assemblies and their centralisation through elected and revocable delegates, played an essential political role in the seizure of power, whereas the trade unions didn't play any role at all.
Alongside the soviets, another form of working class organisation played a fundamental, vital role in the victory of the insurrection: the Bolshevik party. While the soviets enabled the whole working class to struggle collectively, the party, representing the most determined and conscious fraction of the class, had the role of participating actively in the movement, of facilitating the widest and deepest possible development of consciousness in the class, and of formulating proposals that could provide a clear orientation for the activity of the class. The masses took power through the soviets, but the class party was no less indispensable. In July 1917, the intervention of the party was decisive in avoiding a definitive defeat for the whole movement.[9] In October 1917, it was again the party which guided the class towards the taking of power. On the other hand, the October revolution showed very clearly that the party must not and cannot replace the soviets: while the party has to play the role of political leadership both in the struggle for power and in the dictatorship of the proletariat, its task is not to take power itself. Proletarian political power cannot remain in the hands of a minority, however conscious and devoted it might be, but has to be exerted by the whole class through the only organism that can represent it as a whole: the soviets. At this level the Russian revolution was a painful experience since it ended up with the party little by little smothering the life of the workers' councils. But on this question, neither Lenin and the other Bolsheviks, nor the Spartacists in Germany were completely clear in 1917, nor could they have been. We must not forget that October 1917 was the proletariat's first experience of a successful insurrection on the scale of an entire country.
"The Russian revolution is only one of the contingents of the international socialist army, on the action of which the success and triumph of our revolution depends. This is a fact which none of us lose sight of...Aware of the isolation of its revolution, the Russian proletariat clearly realises that an essential condition and prime requisite for its victory is the united action of the workers of the whole world...".[10]
For the Bolsheviks it was clear that the Russian revolution was only the first act of the international revolution. The insurrection of October 1917 was in fact the most advanced outpost of a worldwide revolutionary wave, of a series of titanic struggles in which the proletariat came close to overthrowing capitalism. In 1917, it overturned bourgeois power in Russia. Between 1918 and 1923, it launched a series of battles in the central country of Europe, Germany. The revolutionary wave spread rapidly throughout the globe. Wherever a developed working class existed, the proletariat rose up against its exploiters: from Italy to Canada, from Hungary to China.
This proletarian upsurge was no accident. The feeling of belonging to the same class and being part of the same struggle corresponds to the very being of the proletariat. Whatever the country, the working class is subjected to the same ruling class and the same system of exploitation. This exploited class forms a chain across the continents, and each victory and defeat has profound implications for the whole chain. This is why since its origins communist theory has placed proletarian internationalism, the solidarity of all workers across the world, at the top of its principles: "Workers of all countries, unite" was the slogan of the Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels. This same Manifesto affirmed clearly that "the workers have no country". The proletarian revolution, which alone can put an end to capitalist exploitation and all forms of exploitation of man by man, can only take place on a world scale. This was already clearly expressed in Engels' Principles of Communism, written in 1847: "The communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilised countries... It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world, and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while greatly stepping up its pace...It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range".
The international dimension of the revolutionary wave of the years 1917-1923 proved that proletarian internationalism was not just a fine ideal and a great abstract principle but a real and tangible reality. In the face of the bloody nationalism of the bourgeoisie and the barbarism of the First World War, the working class responded with its international solidarity. "There is no socialism outside the international solidarity of the proletariat" - this was the lucid message of the leaflets circulating in the factories of Germany during the war, based on the words of Rosa Luxemburg in her pamphlet The crisis of German social democracy. The victory of the October insurrection, then the threat of the revolution spreading to Germany, forced the bourgeoisie to put an end to the first world butchery. The ruling class was obliged to set aside the imperialist antagonisms that had torn it apart for four years in order to mount a united front in the face of the revolutionary wave.
The revolutionary wave of the last century was the highest point so far reached by humanity. Against nationalism and war, against the exploitation and misery of the capitalist world, the proletariat was able to open up another perspective, that of internationalism and the solidarity of all the oppressed masses. The wave that began in October 1917 was proof of the power of the working class. For the first time, an exploited class had the courage and the capacity to take power from the hands of the exploiters and to launch the world proletarian revolution. Even though the revolution would soon be defeated, in Berlin, in Budapest, in Turin, even if the Russian and world proletariat had to pay a terrible price for this defeat (the horrors of the Stalinist counter-revolution, a second world war and all the barbarism we have seen since), the bourgeoisie has still not been able to completely erase these exalted events and their lessons from the memory of the working class. The scale of the falsifications of the bourgeoisie about October 1917 is proportionate to the fear that it provoked in its ranks. The memory of October 1917 is there to remind the proletariat that the destiny of humanity is in its hands and that it is capable of accomplishing this grandiose task. More than ever, the international revolution is the future of the class struggle!
Pascale, September 2007.
[1]. The cartoon film Anastasia by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, which presents the Russian revolution as a coup by Rasputin, as a kind of demonic curse on the Russian people, is a gross caricature of this approach but still very revealing.
[2].Ten days that shook the world, Chapter 1.
[3]3. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, "Who led the February insurrection?"
[4]. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, "The paradox of the February revolution".
[5]. History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 3, "Withdrawal from the pre-parliament and struggle for the Soviet Congress".
[6]. Engels, 1883 preface to the Communist Manifesto.
[7]. The head of the provisional government formed after the February revolution.
[8]. Trotsky The November Revolution, 1919.
[9]. See "Russia, July 1917: Facing the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie, the vital role of the Bolshevik party [59]" on our website.
[10]. Lenin, "Report delivered at a Moscow Gubernia Conference of Factory Committees, 23 July 1918", Collected Works, Vol. 27.
The article we reproduce below was published by the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) in n° 10 of their magazine Internationalisme, which came out in May 1946. Internationalisme saw itself as the continuation of Bilan and Octobre, published by the International Communist Left before the outbreak of the Second World War. The GCF had its origins in this current and maintained its general orientations. But Internationalisme wasn't just a continuation of Bilan: it also went beyond it.
The Russian question was at the centre of the preoccupations and discussions of the proletarian political milieu at the beginning of the 1930s, and these debates became more and more intense during the war and in its aftermath. Broadly speaking, there were four different analyses in these debates:
1) Those who denied any proletarian character to the revolution of October 1917 and to the Bolshevik Party and who saw the Russian revolution as no more than a bourgeois revolution. The main defenders of this analysis were the groups of the councilist movement, in particular Pannekoek and the Dutch Left.
2) At the opposite extreme, we find Trotsky's Left Opposition for whom, despite all the counter-revolutionary policies of Stalinism, Russia still retained the fundamental acquisitions of the October proletarian revolution: expropriation of the bourgeoisie, a statified and planned economy, monopoly of foreign trade. Consequently, the regime in Russia was a degenerated workers' state and had to be defended each time it entered into armed conflict with other powers: the duty of the Russian and international proletariat was to defend it unconditionally.
3) A third "anti-defencist" position was based on the analysis that the regime and the state in Russia were "neither capitalist nor working class", but a "bureaucratic collectivist regime". This analysis saw itself as a complement to the Marxist alternative: capitalist barbarism or proletarian revolution for a socialist society, adding a third way, that of a new society not foreseen by Marxism: a bureaucratic anti-capitalist society.[1] This third current had its adepts in the ranks of Trotskyism before and during the war, and in 1948 some of these broke with Trotskyism to give birth to the Socialisme ou Barbarie group under the leadership of Chaulieu/Castoriadis.[2]
4) The Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left fought energetically against this aberrant theory of a "third alternative" claiming to bring a "correction", an "innovation" to marxism. But since it itself hadn't developed an adequate analysis of the real evolution of decadent capitalism, it preferred in the meantime to stand on the solid ground of the classic formula: capitalism = private property; limitation of private property = a move towards socialism. Applied to the Russian regime this gave rise to the following position: persistence of a degenerated workers' state with a counter-revolutionary policy, non-defence of Russia in case of war.
This hybrid, contradictory formula, which opened the door to all sorts of dangerous confusions, had already provoked criticisms within the Italian Fraction on the eve of the war, but these criticisms were somewhat eclipsed by a much more urgent question - the perspective of the outbreak of generalised imperialist war, which was denied by the leadership of the Fraction (the Vercesi tendency[3]).
The discussion on the class nature of Stalinist Russia was taken up again, during the war, by the Italian Fraction that had been reconstituted in the south of France in 1940 (this had been done without the Vercesi tendency which denied any possibility of the existence of a revolutionary organisation, with its theory of the social disappearance of the proletariat during this war). This discussion quickly led to the categorical rejection of all the ambiguities and sophistries contained in the notion of the degenerated workers' state defended by the Fraction before the war. Instead the Stalinist state was analysed as a product of state capitalism.[4]
But after 1945 it was above all the GCF, which, in its review Internationalisme, deepened and widened the notion of state capitalism in Russia, integrating it into an overall conception of the general tendencies of capitalism in its period of decadence.
The article we're republishing here was one of many texts by Internationalisme devoted to the problem of state capitalism. The article by no means exhausts the question on its own, but in publishing it, leaving aside its undeniable interest, we want to show the continuity and development of thought and theory in the international left communist movement that we come from.
Internationalisme put a definite end to the "mystery" of the Stalinist state in Russia by showing that it was part of a general, historic tendency towards state capitalism. It also pointed out that the specificities of Russian state capitalism, which far from expressing a "transition from the formal domination to the real domination of capital" as our dissidents in the EFICC[5] stupidly claim, have their source in the triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution after the October revolution had annihilated the old bourgeois class.
But Internationalisme didn't have time to push its analysis of state capitalism further, particularly the question of the objective limits of this tendency. Even though it did write that "The economic tendency towards state capitalism, although it can't be completed in a total socialisation and collectivisation inside capitalist society, nevertheless remains a very real tendency",[6] it wasn't able to develop an analysis of the reasons why this tendency couldn't be completed. It's up to the ICC to approach this problem in the framework drawn up by Internationalisme.
We have to show that state capitalism, far from resolving the insurmountable contradictions of the period of decadence, in fact only brings new contradictions, new factors that end up aggravating the situation of world capitalism. One of these factors is the creation of a swollen mass of parasitic strata, a growing loss of any sense of responsibility by these state agents who, paradoxically, have the job of directing, orienting and managing the economy.
The recent collapse of the Stalinist bloc, the multiplication of scandals about the corruption that reigns in the state apparatus all over the world is a confirmation of this "parasitisation", if we may so speak, of the whole ruling class. It's absolutely necessary to pursue this work of researching into and exposing the tendency towards the parasitism and irresponsibility of all high functionaries, a tendency accelerated under the regime of state capitalism.
MC (1990)
Internationalisme no 10,
Gauche Communist de France, 1946
There's no doubt any more: the first experience of the proletarian revolution, both in its positive acquisitions, and even more in the negative lessons that can be drawn from it, is today at the base of the whole modern workers' movement. As long as the balance sheet of this experience hasn't been made, as long as its lessons haven't been brought to light and assimilated, the working class and the revolutionary vanguard will be condemned to running on the spot.
Even if we imagine the impossible, i.e. that the proletariat comes to power through a combination of miraculously favourable circumstances, it wouldn't be able to hold out in these conditions. In a very short while it would lose control of the revolution, and would soon be shunted back towards capitalism.
Revolutionaries can't be satisfied simply with taking a position on the Russia of today. The problem of the defence or non-defence of Russia has long ceased to be a debate within the camp of the vanguard.
The imperialist war of 1939-45, in which Russia showed itself, before the eyes of the whole world, to be one of the most bloody and rapacious of the imperialist powers, has once and for all revealed those who defend Russia, in whatever form they present themselves, as agencies, political arms of the Russian imperialist state within the proletariat, just as the 1914-18 war revealed that the Socialist parties had definitively become integrated into the national capitalist state.
We don't intend to go back over this question in this study. Neither will we be looking at the nature of the Russian state, which the opportunist tendency within the international communist left still tries to portray as "proletarian with a counter-revolutionary function", as a "degenerated workers' state". We think that we've finished with this subtle sophistry which claims that there is an opposition between the proletarian nature and the counter-revolutionary function of the Russian state, and which, without making any analysis or explanation of Russia's evolution, leads directly to the reinforcement of Stalinism, of the Russian capitalist state and of international capitalism. We also note that since our study of and polemic against this conception, which appeared in no 6 of the Internal Bulletin of the Italian Fraction in June 1944, the defenders of this theory haven't dared to reply openly. The communist left of Belgium has made it known officially that it rejects this conception. The Internationalist Communist Party of Italy doesn't yet seem to have taken a position. And while we don't find an open, methodical defence of this erroneous conception, neither do we find an explicit rejection of it. Which explains why, in the ICP's publications, we see constantly the term "degenerated workers' state" when they are in fact referring to the Russian capitalist state.
It's obvious that this isn't just a matter of terminology, but one of the persistence of an incorrect analysis of Russian society, of a lack of theoretical precision, something we also find in relation to other political and programmatic questions.
The aim of our study is exclusively concerned with drawing out the fundamental lessons of the Russian experience. We don't intend to write a history of the events which unfolded in Russia, however important they were. Such a task is beyond our capacities at present. We only want to look at that part of the Russian experience which goes beyond the context of a particular historical situation and contains lessons valid for all countries and for the whole social revolution to come. In this way we hope to make our contribution to a study of fundamental questions whose solution can only come through the efforts of all the revolutionary groups in the framework of an international discussion.
The Marxist concept of the private ownership of the means of production as a fundamental element of capitalist production, and thus of capitalist society, seemed to imply the validity of another formula: the disappearance of the private possession of the means of production would be equivalent to the disappearance of capitalist society. Thus throughout Marxist literature we find that the disappearance of the private ownership of the means of production is presented as synonymous with socialism. But the development of capitalism, or more precisely, of capitalism in its decadent phase, displays a more or less accentuated, but nevertheless generalised tendency towards the limitation of the private ownership of the means of production - towards their nationalisation.
But nationalisations are not socialism and we won't spend any time here demonstrating this. What interests us here is the tendency itself, and its class nature.
If you consider that the private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental basis of capitalist society, any recognition that there's a tendency towards limiting this kind of ownership leads to an insurmountable contradiction: capitalism is beginning to abolish itself, to undermine the very basis of its existence.
It would be a waste of time to juggle with words and speculate on the inherent contradictions of the capitalist regime.
When one talks, for example, about the mortal contradiction of capitalism, i.e. that in order to develop its production, capitalism needs to conquer new markets, but that in the act of acquiring these new markets it incorporates them into its system of production and so destroys the market without which it cannot live, one is talking about a real contradiction, arising out of the objective development of capitalist production, independent of its will, and presenting an insoluble problem for it. It's the same thing when one refers to imperialist war and the war economy, in which capitalism, through its internal contradictions, produces its own self-destruction.
The same applies to all the objective contradictions of capitalist evolution.
But it's a different thing with the private ownership of the means of production: it's impossible to see what forces are obliging capitalism deliberately and consciously to take on a structure which would alter its very nature and essence.
In other words, in proclaiming that the private ownership of the means of production is the nature of capitalism, you are at the same time proclaiming that capitalism can't exist without private ownership. By the same token, you are saying that any change towards limiting this private ownership means a limitation of capitalism, a change in a direction opposed to capitalism, an anti-capitalist direction. The question of the scale of this limitation isn't the issue here. To get lost in quantitative calculations, or to try to demonstrate that the scale involved is negligible, is simply to avoid the question. In any case it would be wrong: you only have to refer to the breadth of this tendency in the totalitarian countries and in Russia, where it involves the entire means of production, to be convinced of this. What's at issue here isn't the scale of the tendency, but its very nature.
If the tendency towards the liquidation of private ownership really meant a tendency towards anti-capitalism, you would arrive at the following stupefying conclusion: seeing that this tendency operates under the direction of the state, the capitalist state would then be the agent of its own destruction.
And indeed, all the "socialist" partisans of nationalisations, of the command economy, all the makers of "plans" who, if they're not consciously trying to strengthen capitalism, are nevertheless reformers in the service of capitalism, like the groups Abondance, CETES, etc, end up with this theory of the anti-capitalist capitalist state.
The Trotskyists, who don't reason very well, are obviously in favour of these limitations, since for them anything opposed to the alleged nature of capitalism must necessarily be proletarian. They may be a bit sceptical, but they think it would be criminal to neglect the least opportunity. For them, nationalisations are a weakening of capitalist private property. If, unlike the Stalinists and the Socialists, they don't actually say that they are a slice of socialism inside the regime of capitalism, they are convinced that they are "progressive". In their cunning way, they hope to get the capitalist state to do a job which would otherwise have to be done by the proletariat after the revolution. "It means that there'll be less for us to do" they say, rubbing their hands in the conviction that they've outsmarted the capitalist state.
But "that's reformism," exclaims the left communist of the Vercesi type. And, as a good "Marxist", he gets down not to explaining the problem, but to denying it, trying for example to prove that nationalisations don't exist, can't exist, that they're nothing but inventions, demagogic lies of the reformists.
Why this indignation, this persistent denial, which at first sight seems rather surprising? Because the point of departure is the same as that of the reformists, and on it rests the whole theory of the proletarian nature of Russian society.
And since they have the same criterion for appreciating the class nature of the economy, to recognise such a tendency in the capitalist countries could only mean recognising that capitalism is evolving into socialism.
It's not so much that this position clings to the "Marxist" formula about private property, but rather that it's fixated on the formula in reverse, on its caricature, i.e. that the absence of private ownership of the means of production is the criterion for the proletarian nature of the Russian state. This is why it's led to deny the tendency towards, the possibility of, limiting the private ownership of the means of production within capitalism. Rather than observing the real and objective development of capitalism and its tendency towards state capitalism, and thus rectifying his position on the nature of the Russian state, Vercesi prefers to hold onto the formula and save his theory of the proletarian nature of Russia, and too bad for reality. And since the contradiction between the formula and reality is insurmountable, reality is simply denied, and the game is complete!
A third tendency tries to find the solution in the negation of Marxism. "This doctrine", it says, "was true as long as it was being applied to capitalist society, but what Marx didn't foresee, and what ‘goes beyond' Marxism, is the emergence of a new class which is gradually, and to some extent peacefully (!) taking over economic and political power in society at the expense both of capitalism and of the proletariat." This new (?) class is, for some, the bureaucracy, for others, the technocracy, and for yet others, the "synarchy".
Let's leave all these speculations aside and get back to the main issue. It's an undeniable fact that there is a tendency towards limiting the private ownership of the means of production, and that this is accentuating each day in all countries. This tendency is concretised in the general formation of a statified capitalism, managing the main branches of production and the economic life of the country. State capitalism isn't the speciality of one bourgeois faction or of a particular ideological school. We've seen it installed in democratic America and Hitler's Germany, in "Labour" Britain and "Soviet" Russia.
We can't in the limits of this study go into an in-depth analysis of state capitalism, of the historic causes and conditions determining this form. We will simply say that state capitalism is the form corresponding to the decadent phase of capitalism, just as monopoly capitalism corresponded to its phase of full development. Another remark. A characteristic trait of state capitalism seems to be that it develops in a more accentuated manner in direct ratio to the effects of the permanent economic crisis in the various capitalist countries.
But state capitalism is not at all a negation of capitalism, still less does it represent a gradual transformation into socialism as the reformists of various schools claim.
The fear of falling into reformism by recognising the tendency towards state capitalism resides in the mistaken notion of the nature of capitalism. This isn't defined by the private ownership of the means of production, which is just one form of capitalism, characteristic of a given period, the period of liberal capitalism. What defines the nature of capitalism is the separation of the producer from the means of production.
Capitalism is the separation between past labour, accumulated in the hands of an exploiting, directing class, and the living labour of another class. It matters little how the possessing class distributes its wealth among itself. Under capitalism, this distribution is constantly being altered through economic competition or military violence. However important it may be to study the way this distribution is carried out, this isn't what we're looking at here.
Whatever changes may take place in the relations between different layers of the capitalist class, looking at the social system of class relations as a whole, the relationship between the possessing class and the producer class remains capitalist.
The surplus value extracted from the workers in the production process may be distributed in different ways, the parts going to finance, commercial, or industrial capital may be more or less large, but this changes nothing about the nature of the surplus value itself. For capitalist production to take place, it's a matter of complete indifference whether there's individual or collective ownership of the means of production. What determines the capitalist character of production is the existence of capital, i.e. of labour accumulated in the hands of one class that commands the living labour of others in order to produce surplus value. The transfer of capital from individual, private hands into state hands doesn't signify a change in the nature of capitalism towards non-capitalism, but is simply a concentration of capital ensuring a more rational and efficient exploitation of labour power.
What has been shown up as false here isn't the Marxist conception, but simply a restricted understanding of it, a narrow and formal interpretation of it. What gives a capitalist character to production isn't the private ownership of the means of production. Private property and the private ownership of the means of production also existed in slavery and in feudal society. What makes production capitalist production is the separation of the means of production from the producers, their transformation into a means of buying and commanding living labour power with the aim of making it produce surplus value, or in other words the transformation of the means of production from a simple tool in the production process into something which exists as capital.
The form in which capital exists, whether individual or concentrated (trust, monopoly, state) doesn't undermine its existence any more than the scale of the surplus value produced, or the forms the latter takes (profit, land rent). Forms are simply manifestations of the substance and can only express it in various ways.
In the epoch of liberal capitalism, the form in which capital existed was essentially that of private, individual capitalism. Thus Marxists could without any great inconvenience use a formula that basically represented the form as a way of expressing and representing the content.
When it came to propaganda among the masses, this actually had the advantage of making it possible to translate a somewhat abstract idea into a living, concrete image that could more easily be grasped.
"Private possession of the means of production = capitalism" and "getting rid of private possession = socialism" were striking formulae, but they were only partially true.
The inconvenience only arose when the form tended to change. The habit of representing the content through the form, which at a given moment did correspond to each other, was turned into a false identification, and led to the error of replacing the content with the form. We find this error taking place very clearly in the Russian revolution.
Socialism requires a very high level of the development of the productive forces, which is only conceivable in the wake of a considerable concentration and centralisation of the forces of production.
This concentration will involve the dispossession of private owners of the means of production. But this dispossession, whether at national or international level, this concentration of the forces of production after the triumph of the proletarian revolution, is only a condition for the movement towards socialism, but in itself it's not socialism at all.
The most far-reaching expropriation may lead to the disappearance of the capitalists as individuals benefiting from surplus value, but it doesn't in itself make the production of surplus value, i.e. capitalism itself, disappear.
This assertion may at first sight appear paradoxical, but a closer examination of the Russian experience will prove its validity. For socialism to exist, or even a move towards socialism, it's not enough for expropriation to take place: what's essential is that the means of production cease to exist as capital. In other words, the capitalist principle of production has to be overturned.
The capitalist principle of accumulated labour commanding living labour with a view to producing surplus value must be replaced by the principle of living labour commanding accumulated labour with a view to producing consumer goods to satisfy the needs of society's members.
It's in this principle alone, that socialism resides.
The mistake of the Russian revolution and of the Bolshevik Party was to have put the accent on the condition, on expropriation, which in itself isn't socialism or a factor that pushes the economy in a socialist direction, and to have neglected or relegated to second place the basic principle of a socialist economy.
There's nothing more instructive in this matter than reading the numerous speeches and writings by Lenin on the necessity for a growing development of industry and production in Soviet Russia. For Lenin the development of industry was identical to the development of socialism. He used openly and more or less indifferently the terms state capitalism and state socialism, without really distinguishing them. Formulations like "socialism = soviets plus electrification" expressed the stammerings and confusions of the leaders of the October revolution in this domain.
It is very characteristic that Lenin's attention was fixed on the private sector and on small peasant property, which according to him were the source of the danger of the Russian economy evolving towards capitalism. In so doing he completely neglected the much more decisive and concrete danger coming from state industry.
History has clearly shown that Lenin was wrong on this point. The liquidation of small peasant property could and did involve a strengthening not of a socialist sector, but of a state sector whose development meant the reinforcement of state capitalism.
There's no doubt that the difficulties the Russian revolution ran into because of its isolation, and because of the backward state of its economy, would have been gradually attenuated by the development of the world revolution. It's only on the international scale that there can be a socialist development of society and of each country. It remains the case that even on an international scale, the fundamental problem resides not in expropriation, but in the basic principle of production.
Not only in the backward countries, but even where capitalism has reached its highest state of development, private property will subsist for a certain period and in certain sectors of production, and it will only be completely absorbed slowly and gradually.
However the danger of a return to capitalism will not come mainly from this sector, because a society in evolution towards socialism will not be able to return towards a primitive stage of capitalism, one which capitalism itself has left behind.
The real danger of a return to capitalism will come essentially from the statified sector: All the more so because here capitalism attains an impersonal, almost ethereal form. Statification can serve to camouflage, for a considerable period, a process opposed to socialism.
The proletariat will only overcome this danger to the extent that it rejects the identification between expropriation and socialism, to the extent that it is able to distinguish statification with a "socialist" adjective from the actual socialist principle of production.
The Russian experience teaches us and reminds us that it's not the capitalists who make capitalism, but the reverse: it's capitalism which engenders capitalists. Capitalists can't live outside of capitalism but the reverse isn't true.
The capitalist principle of production can continue to exist after the juridical, even the material disappearance of capitalists as the beneficiaries of surplus value. In this case, surplus value, just as under private capitalism, is reinvested in the production process in order to extract a greater mass of surplus value.
Before long, the existence of surplus value gives rise to men who form the class that appropriates surplus value. The function creates the organ. Whether they are parasites, bureaucrats, or technicians who participate in production, whether surplus value is redistributed in a direct manner, or indirectly through the intervention of the state, in the form of high salaries or various types of privileges (as is the case in Russia), this changes nothing about the fact that we're dealing with the rise of a new capitalist class.
The central element in capitalist production is the difference between the value of labour power, determined by necessary labour time, and that labour power which reproduces more than its own value. This is expressed in the difference between the labour time necessary for the worker to reproduce his own subsistence, and for which he's paid, and the extra labour time for which he isn't paid and which constitutes the surplus value taken by the capitalist. The distinction between socialist production and capitalist production lies in the relationship between paid labour time and unpaid labour time.
Every society needs an economic reserve fund in order to ensure the continuation and enlargement of production. This fund is drawn from an indispensable amount of surplus labour. At the same time a quantity of surplus labour is required to meet the needs of the unproductive members of society.
Capitalist society is tending to destroy the enormous mass of accumulated labour drawn from the ferocious exploitation of the proletariat. In the aftermath of the revolution, the victorious proletariat will be faced with ruins and with a catastrophic economic situation, inherited from capitalist society. It will have to reconstruct an economic reserve fund.
This means that, at the beginning, the amount of surplus labour the proletariat has to perform will be as great as it was under capitalism. Thus the socialist economic principle will not, in its immediate application, be able to be measured quantitatively in the relation between paid and unpaid labour. Only the trajectory, the tendency towards altering this relationship can serve as an indication of which way the economy is going, as a barometer of the class nature of production.
The proletariat and its class party will thus have to be extremely vigilant. The greatest industrial conquests (even where the part going to the workers is greater in absolute terms, but less in relative terms) can easily involve a return to the capitalist principle of production.
All the subtle arguments about private capitalism disappearing through the nationalisation of the means of production can't hide this reality.
Refusing to be misled by this sophistry, which aims at perpetuating the exploitation of the workers, the proletariat and its party will immediately have to embark upon an implacable struggle to halt any tendency towards a return to capitalism, and to impose by all the means available an economic policy that leads in the direction of socialism.
In conclusion, we will cite the following passage from Marx to illustrate and summarise our thinking: "The great difference between the capitalist principle of production and the socialist principle is this: with the first the workers confront the means of production as capital, and can only set it to work to increase the surplus product and the surplus value in the interests of their exploiters. With the second, instead of being occupied by these means of production, they use them to produce wealth in their own interests."
Internationalisme 1946
[1]. Among the first to hold this theory, we should mention Albert Treint, who in 1932 published two documents with the overall title of The Russian Enigma, and who, on this position, broke with the group known as the Groupe de Bagnolet. Albert Treint, a former general secretary of the PCF, and a former leader of the left opposition group L'Unite Leniniste in 1927, and of Redressement Communiste from 1928 to 1931, went through an evolution after breaking with the Groupe de Bagnolet which, like so many others, took him to the Socialist Party in 1935, and into the Resistance during the war. In 1945, he was not only reintegrated into the army with a rank of captain, but also became the commandant of a battalion occupying Germany.
[2]. It should be noted that the councilists of the Dutch left, and Pannekoek in particular, agreed with the broad lines of this brilliant analysis of a third alternative (see the correspondence between Chaulieu and Pannekoek in Socialisme ou Barbarie).
[3]. Up until the Second World World War Vercesi was the main animator of the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy, which was formed in 1927 in the Paris suburb of Pantin, and which took the name Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in 1935. His contribution to the political and theoretical development of the Fraction was considerable, as can be seen from numerous articles he wrote for the Fraction's review Bilan. However, in 1938, he started to develop a theory of the "war economy as a solution to the crisis of capitalism", which had the disastrous consequence of denying the threat of world war. When the latter broke out, the Fraction was completely paralysed and Vercesi then theorised the necessity for its dissolution on the grounds of the "social non-existence of the proletariat during the war". This did not stop a certain number of members of the Fraction, one of whom was our comrade MC, from reconstituting the Fraction in the south of France. Vercesi himself reappeared at the end of the war when he animated an anti-fascist coalition in Bruxelles, publishing L'Italia di domani (Tomorrow's Italy), whose name sums up its programme. This was prior to joining the Partito Comunista Internazionalista which had been formed in the north of Italy in 1943 around Onarato Damen. This group was reconstituted in 1945 with the arrival of other elements and groups (the elements around Bordiga in the south, the people who had broken with the Italian Fraction in 1936 on the question of the war in Spain, etc) and continues to exist as the Italian branch of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. The PCInt publishes the paper Battaglia Comunista and the review Prometeo while its British counterpart, the Communist Workers Organisation, publishes Revolutionary Perspectives.
[4]. In 1945, with the ad hoc constitution of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy, the precipitous dissolution of the Fraction, the arrival of Bordiga with his theories of the "invariance" of marxism, of the "double revolution", of "support for national liberation", of the distinction between "geographical areas", of proclaiming US imperialism to be "enemy number one", this new party went through a clear regression on the question of the class nature of the Stalinist regime, involving a denial of the notion of decadence and of its political expression: state capitalism.
[5]. EFICC (External Fraction of the ICC): this was a split from our organisation in 1985 which argued that the ICC was in the process of "betraying" its own platform and which put itself forward as its real defender. Since then this group, which publishes Internationalist Perspectives, has followed a trajectory towards councilism while abandoning any reference to the ICC's platform; in particular, it has called into question one of its essential axes, the analysis of the decadence of capitalism.
[6]. Internationalisme n° 9.
The "culture of debate" is not a new question either for the workers' movement or for the ICC. Nevertheless, the evolution of history has obliged our organisation - from the turn of the new century on - to return to this question and examine it more closely. There were two main developments which obliged us to do so, the first one being the appearance of a new generation of revolutionaries and the second, the internal crisis we suffered at the beginning of this century.
It was first and foremost the contact with a new generation of revolutionaries that obliged the ICC to more consciously cultivate its openness towards the outside and its capacity for political dialogue.
Each generation forms a link in the chain of human history. Each one is confronted with three fundamental tasks: to receive the collective heritage from the previous generation; to enrich this heritage on the basis of its own experience; to pass it on so that the next generation can achieve more that it was able to.
These tasks, far from being easy, represent a particular challenge. This also goes for the workers movement. The older generation has its experience to offer. But it also bears the wounds and traumas of its struggles, has had to learn to face up to defeats, disappointments, and the realisation that the construction of lasting acquisitions of collective struggle often requires more than one lifetime.[1] It needs the energy and élan of the following generation, but also its new questions and its capacity to see the world with new eyes.
But as much as the generations need each other, their capacity to forge the necessary unity is not automatically given. The more society distances itself from traditional natural economy, the more incessantly and rapidly capitalism "revolutionises" the productive forces and the whole of society, the more the experience of one generation differs from the next. Capitalism, the system of competition par excellence, also pits the generations against each other in the struggle of each against all.
It was with this framework in mind that our organisation began to prepare itself for the task of forging this link. But more than this preparation, it was the actual experience of meeting this new generation which gave the issue of the culture of debate an additional significance in our eyes. We encountered a generation which itself attaches a far greater importance to this question than that of the "1968" generation. The first major indication of this change at the level of the working class as a whole was the mass movement of the students and pupils in France against the "precarisation" of employment in the spring of 2006. Here, the emphasis on the freest and broadest possible debate, in particular within the general assemblies, was very striking. As opposed to this, the student movement, which developed in the late sixties, had often been marked by its incapacity for political dialogue. This difference is first and foremost the expression of the fact that the student milieu today is much more strongly proletarianised than it was 40 years before. Intense, wide scale debate has always been a principle hallmark of mass proletarian movements, and also characterised the workers assemblies of 1968 in France or 1969 in Italy. But also in 2006 there was the openness of youth in struggle towards the older generations, its eagerness to learn from their experience. This was very different from the attitude of the student movement in Germany in the late 1960s (which was perhaps the most caricatural expression of the mood at that time). One of its slogans was: those over 30 to the concentration camps! Hand in hand with this notion went a practise of shouting each other down, of violently breaking up "rival" meetings etc. Here lay, at the psychological level, one of the roots of the development of terrorism as a form of protest not only in Germany, but also in Italy. The break in continuity between the generations of the working class was one of the roots of this problem, since the relations between the generations is a privileged ground, from an early age on, of the forging of the capacity for dialogue. The militants of 1968 saw the generation of their parents either as having "sold themselves" to capitalism or (as in Germany or Italy) as a generation of fascists and war criminals. For the workers who had borne the horrible exploitation of the post 1945 phase in the hope that their children would live better than themselves, it was a bitter disappointment to hear their children accuse them of being "parasites" living from the "exploitation of the third world". But there is also no doubt that the parent generation of that time had to a large extent lost, or itself failed to learn, the capacity for dialogue. This generation was savagely scarred by World War II and the Cold War, by the Fascist, Stalinist and Social Democratic counter-revolution.
As opposed to this, 2006 in France announced something new and extremely fruitful.[2] Already some years beforehand, this concern of the new generation had been announced by the revolutionary minorities of the working class. These minorities, from the moment they took to the stage of political life, were armed with their own critique of sectarianism and the refusal to debate. Among the first demands they raised were that debate should not be seen as a luxury but as an imperious necessity; that those who engage in it should take each other seriously and learn to listen to each other; that arguments are the arms of this combat and not brute force or the appeal to moral or theoretical "authorities". With regard to the proletarian internationalist camp, these comrades in general (and quite rightly) criticised (and were profoundly shocked by) the lack of fraternal debate between the existing groups. They were quick to reject the idea that Marxism is a dogma, which the new generation ought to uncritically adopt.[3]
For our part, we were surprised by the reaction of this new generation to the ICC itself. The new comrades who came to our public meetings, the contacts from all over the world who began to correspond with us, the different political groups and circles with whom we debated - they repeatedly told us that they had recognised the proletarian nature of the ICC as much on account of our behaviour, in particular the way we debate, as through our programmatic positions.
Where does this profound concern of the new generation with this question come from? We think it results from the depth of the historic crisis of capitalism, which today is much graver and more dangerous than after 1968. This demands the most radical possible critique of capitalism, going to the deepest roots of problems. One of the most corrosive effects of bourgeois individualism is the way it destroys the capacity to discuss, and in particular to listen to and learn from each other. Dialogue is replaced by rhetoric; the winner is the one who can make the most noise (as in bourgeois elections). The culture of debate, thanks to human language, is the main way to develop consciousness as the primary weapon for the class that bears humanity's future. For the proletariat it is the sole means for overcoming its isolation and impatience and for directing itself toward the unification of its struggles.
Another aspect of this concern today is the struggle to overcome the nightmare of Stalinism. Many of the militants striving towards internationalist positions today are coming directly from a leftist milieu and are influenced by the latter. This milieu presents a caricature of decadent bourgeois ideology and behaviour in a socialist garb. These militants were brought up politically to believe that exchange of arguments is equivalent to "bourgeois liberalism", that a "good communist" is someone who shuts his mouth and switches off his mind and emotions. The comrades who today are determined to shake off the effects of this moribund product of the counter-revolution increasingly understand that this requires the rejection not only of its positions but also its mentality. In so doing, they are contributing to the re-establishment of a tradition of the workers movement which threatened to die out when the counter-revolution created a rupture in its organic continuity.[4]
The second major impulse for the ICC to return to the question of a culture of debate was our own internal crisis at the beginning of the new century, characterised by the most malignant behaviour we had ever witnessed within our ranks. For the first time ever, the ICC had to exclude not one but several of its members.[5] At the beginning of this crisis there were difficulties and differences of opinion about the question of centralisation in our section in France. There is no reason why divergences of this kind, in themselves, should be the cause of an organisational crisis. Nor were they its cause. What caused the crisis was the refusal to discuss, and in particular the attempt to isolate and denigrate; i.e. to personally attack those with whom one disagrees.
In the aftermath of this crisis, the organisation pledged itself to go to the deepest roots of the whole history of our crises and splits. We have already published contributions on certain of these aspects.[6] One of the conclusions we came to was that a tendency towards monolithism had played a major role in all the split-offs that we suffered. As soon as divergences appeared, certain members began to assert that they could no longer work with the others, that the ICC was becoming a Stalinist organisation or was in the process of degenerating. These crises broke out in relation to divergences which, for the most part, could be perfectly contained within a non-monolithic organisation, and in all cases should be discussed and clarified before any separation takes place.
The repeated appearance of monolithic approaches is surprising in an organisation which specifically bases itself on the traditions of the Italian Fraction, which always defended that, whenever there are divergences concerning fundamental principles, the most profound and collective clarification must precede any organisational separation.
The ICC is the only current of the Communist Left today which places itself specifically in the organisational tradition of the Italian Fraction (Bilan) and the French Communist Left (GCF). As opposed to the groups which came out of the PCInt founded in Italy towards the end of World War II, the Italian Fraction recognised the profoundly proletarian character of the other international currents of the Communist Left which emerged in reaction to the Stalinist counter-revolution, in particular the German and Dutch Left. Far from dismissing these currents as "anarcho-spontaneist" or "syndicalist", it learnt all it could from them. In fact, the main critique it levelled against what became the "councilist" current was its sectarianism expressed through the rejection of the contributions of the Second International and in particular of Bolshevism.[7] In this way, the Italian Fraction maintained, in the teeth of the counter-revolution, the Marxist understanding that class-consciousness develops collectively, and that no party or tradition can claim a monopoly of it. From this it follows that consciousness cannot be developed without fraternal, public, international debate.[8]
But this fundamental understanding, although part of the basic heritage of the ICC, is not easy to realise in practise. The culture of debate can only be developed against the stream of bourgeois society. Since the spontaneous tendency within capitalism is not the clarification of ideas but violence, manipulation and the winning of majorities (best exemplified in the electoral circus of bourgeois democracy), the infiltration of this influence within proletarian organisations always contains the germs of crisis and degeneration. The history of the Bolshevik Party illustrates this perfectly. As long as the party was the spearhead of the revolution, the most lively, often controversial debate was one of its main characteristics. As opposed to this, the banning of real fractions (after the Kronstadt massacre of 1921) was a paramount sign and active factor of its degeneration. Similarly, the practise of "peaceful co-existence" (i.e. the non debate) of conflicting positions, which already characterised the foundation process of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, or the theorisation of the virtues of monolithism by Bordiga and his supporters, can only be understood in the context of the historic defeat of the proletariat in the mid 20th century.
If revolutionary organisations are to fulfil their fundamental role of the development and spreading of class-consciousness, the cultivation of collective, international, fraternal and public discussion is absolutely essential. It is true that this requires a high level of political maturity (and also, in a more general way, of human maturity). The history of the ICC is one illustration of the fact that this cannot be gained overnight, but is itself the product of a historical development. Today, the new generation has an essential role to play in this ripening process.
The capacity to debate has been a major characteristic of the workers movement. But it was not an invention of that movement. Here, as in other fundamental areas, the struggle for socialism was capable of assimilating the best acquisitions of humanity, adapting them to its own needs. In so doing, it transformed these qualities by raising them to a higher level.
Fundamentally, the culture of debate is an expression of the eminently social nature of mankind. In particular, it is an emanation of the specifically human use of language. The use of language as a means of exchange of information is something which humanity shares with many animals. What distinguishes mankind from the rest of nature at this level is the capacity to cultivate and exchange argumentation (linked to the development of logic and science), and to get to know each other (the cultivation of empathy, linked among other things to the development of art).
Consequently this quality is not new. In fact it preceded class society and certainly played a decisive role in the ascent of humanity. Engels for instance refers to the role of the general assemblies of the Greeks of the Homeric phase, of the early Germanic tribes or of the Iroquois of North America, specifically praising the culture of debate of the latter.[9] Unfortunately, despite the pioneering work of the likes of Lewis Henry Morgan in the 19th century, and those who have followed him, we are insufficiently informed of the early, but most certainly decisive developments in this area.
But what we do know is that philosophy and the beginnings of scientific thought begin to flourish in history where mythology and naïve realism - this ancient, contradictory, inseparable couple - are put in question. Both of them are prisoners of the incapacity to more profoundly understand immediate experience. The thoughts which early man made about his practical experience were religious in nature. "Since very early times, when human beings, still quite ignorant about the construction of their own bodies, and animated by dreams, arrived at the idea that their thinking and feeling would not be an activity of their bodies, but of a separate soul living in this body and leaving it at death - since these times they had to ponder about the relation of this soul to the outer world. If it separated from the body with death, there was no reason to imagine it having a particular death of its own; thus arose the conception of immortality, which at this stage of development appeared not at all as a consolation, but as destiny, and often enough, as with the Greeks, as a real misfortune." [10]
It was in the framework of naïve realism that the first steps in a very slow development of culture and the productive forces took place. Magical thought, while containing a degree in particular of psychological wisdom, had above all the task of explaining the inexplicable, and thus limiting fear. Both made important contributions to the advance of mankind. The assumption that naïve realism has a particular affinity to materialist philosophy, or that the latter developed directly out of the former, is unfounded.
"It is an old postulate of dialectics, which has passed into popular consciousness, that extremes touch. We will hardly go wrong in searching for the most extreme grade of phantasmagoria, credulity and superstition, not in that scientific direction which, as in the German natural philosophy, tries to force the objective world into the framework of its subjective thinking, but rather in the opposite direction, that which, insisting on mere experience, treats thought with sovereign contempt, and which has really gone the furthest in its thoughtlessness. This school rules in England."[11]
Religion, as Engels indicated, emerged not only out of a magic world view, but also out of naïve realism. Its first, often daring, generalisations about the world are necessarily given an authoritative character.
The first farming communities soon understood their dependence on rain, for instance, but they were still far from understanding the conditions on which rainfall depended. The invention of a rain god is a creative self-assuring act, giving the impression that it is possible through bribes or devotion to influence the course of nature. Homo sapiens is the species which has banked on the development of consciousness to assure its survival. As such, it is confronted with a previously unheard of problem: the often paralysing fear of the unknown. The explanations of the unknown thus have to be put beyond all doubt. Out of this need emerges, as its most developed expression, the religions of revelation. The whole emotional basis of this world view is belief, not knowledge.
Naïve realism is but the other side of this same coin, a kind of elementary mental "division of labour". Whatever we cannot explain in an immediate practical sense necessarily enters the world of magic. Moreover, the practical understanding is itself embedded in a religious vision, originally that of animism. Here, the whole world is fetichised. Even the processes which human beings can consciously produce and reproduce appear to take place with the assistance of personalised forces existing independently of our will.
It is clear that in this world there is little room for debate in the modern sense of the term. Around two and a half thousand years ago, a new quality began to assert itself more strongly, directly challenging the twin sisters of religion and "common sense". It developed out of the old, traditional thinking in the sense that the latter was transformed into its opposite. Thus, the early dialectical thinking which preceded class society - expressed for instance in China in the idea of the polarity between yin and yang, between the male and female principles, became transformed into a critical thought based on the essential components of science, philosophy, materialism. But all of this was unthinkable without what we have called the culture of debate. The Greek word for dialectics actually means dialogue or debate.
What gave rise to this new approach? Very generally speaking, it was the enlargement of the world of social relations and knowledge. As Engels loved to repeat, common sense is a strong and healthy boy as long as it is at home in its own four walls, but experiences all kinds of mishaps as soon as it ventures into the big wide world. But the limits of religion in appeasing fear were also revealed. In fact, it had not conquered fear, but merely externalised it. Through this mechanism, humanity had attempted to cope with a terror that would otherwise have crushed it at a moment when it had no other means of self defence. But in doing so, it made of its own fear an additional force ruling over it.
"Explaining" what is still inexplicable means renouncing its real investigation. There thus arose the struggle between religion and science, between belief and knowledge, or, as Spinoza put it, between submission and investigation. Greek philosophy arose originally in opposition to religion. Thales, the first philosopher known to us, already broke out of the mystical world view. Anaximander, who followed him, demanded that nature be explained out of itself.
But Greek thought was no less a declaration of war against naïve realism. Heraclitus explained that the essence of things is not written on their foreheads. "Nature loves to conceal itself" he declared. Or as Marx put it: "But all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided."[12]
The new approach challenged at once belief, but also prejudice and tradition, which is the creed of everyday life (in German the two words for belief are related: "Glaube" - belief - and "Aberglaube" - superstition). To this were opposed theory and dialectics. "No matter how much all theoretical thinking may be disdained, you cannot connect two natural facts with each other, or understand their interconnection without theoretical thought."[13]
Increased social intercourse was of course linked to the development of the productive forces. There thus appeared, together with the problem - the inadequacy of the existing modes of thought - the means of its resolution. First and foremost an increase in self-confidence, in particular in the power of human thought. Science can only arise when there is a capacity and a readiness to accept the existence of doubt and uncertainty. As opposed to the authority of religion and of tradition, the truth of science is not absolute but relative. There thus arises not only the possibility, but also the necessity of exchange of opinions.
It is evident that the claim to the rule of knowledge can only be made where the forces of production (in the broadest cultural sense) have reached a certain stage of maturity. It cannot even be thought of without a corresponding development of the arts, of education, of literature, of the observation of nature, of language. And this goes hand in hand, at a certain stage in history, with the appearance of class society and a ruling layer freed from the burden of material production. But these developments did not automatically give rise to the new, independent approach. Neither the Egyptians nor the Babylonians, despite their progress in science, nor the Phoenicians, who first developed a modern alphabet, went as far in this development as the Greeks.
In Greece, it was the development of slavery that made possible the emergence of a class of free citizens alongside the priests. This delivered the material basis for the undermining of religion. (We can thus better understand the formulation of Engels in Anti-Dühring: without the slavery of antiquity no modern socialism). In India, where around the same time there is a development of philosophy, materialism (the so-called Lokayata) and the study of nature, this coincides with the formation and strengthening of a warrior aristocracy opposed to the Brahmin theocracy, partly based on agricultural slavery. As in Greece, where the struggle of Heraclitus against religion, immortality and the condemnation of bodily pleasures was directed against the prejudices both of the ruling tyrants and of the oppressed population, the new militant approach in India originated from an aristocracy. Buddhism and Jainism, appearing around the same time, were much more anchored in the toiling population, but remained in the religious framework - with their conception of the reincarnation of the soul typical of the caste society they wanted to oppose (also to be found in Egypt).
As opposed to this, in China, where there was a development of science and a kind of rudimentary materialism (for instance in the Logic of Mo'- Ti'), this was limited by the absence of a caste of ruling priests against which one could revolt. The country was ruled by a military bureaucracy formed in the struggle against the neighbouring "barbarians".[14]
In Greece there was an additional and in many ways decisive factor, which also played an important role in India: A more advanced development of commodity production. Greek philosophy began, not on the Greek mainland, but in the harbour colonies of Asia Minor. Commodity production involves the exchange not only of goods, but also of the experience contained in their production. It accelerates history, thus favouring the higher expressions of dialectical thinking. It makes possible a degree of individualisation without which an exchange of ideas at such a high level is difficult. And it begins to put an end to the isolation in which social evolution had previously taken place. The fundamental economic unit of all farming societies based on natural economy is village or at best regional autarchy. But the first exploiting societies based on a broader co-operation, often in the interests of irrigation, were still basically agricultural in character. As opposed to this, trade and seafaring opened Greek society to the world. It reproduced, but at a higher level, the attitude of conquest and discovery of the world which characterises nomadic societies. History shows that, from a certain stage of its development, the appearance of the phenomenon of public debate was inseparable from an international development (even
if concentrated in one area), and was in a sense "inter-nationalist" in character. Diogenes and the Cynics opposed the distinction between Hellenes and Barbarians, and declared themselves to be world citizens. Democritus was put on trial for having allegedly squandered a heritage, which he used to pay for educational trips to Egypt, Babylonia, Persia and India. He defended himself by reading out extracts of his writings, the fruits of his journeys - and was declared not guilty.
Debate arose in response to practical necessity. In Greece, it develops through the comparison of different sources of knowledge. Different ways of thinking, modes of investigation and their results, production methods, customs and traditions are compared with each other. They are found to contradict, to confirm or to complete each other. They enter into struggle with each other or support one another, or both. Absolute truths are rendered relative by comparison.
These debates are public. They take place at the harbours, in the market places (the forums), in the schools and academies. In written form, they fill the libraries and extend across the known world.
Socrates - this philosopher who spent his time debating at the market place - embodied the essence of this development. His main preoccupation - how to reach real knowledge of morality - is already an attack against religion and against prejudice, which assume that these questions are already answered. He declared that knowledge is the main precondition of correct ethics, and ignorance its principle enemy. It is thus the coming to consciousness, and not punishment, which enables moral progress, since most people cannot for long consciously go against the voice of their own conscience.
But Socrates went further, laying the theoretical basis for all science and all collective clarification: the recognition that the point of departure of knowledge is the setting aside of pre-judgement. This clears the way for what is essential: search (research). He was a fierce opponent of precipitated conclusions, of uncritical self-satisfied opinions, of arrogance and boasting. What he believed in was the "modesty of non-knowledge" and the passion flowing from a real knowledge based on deep insight and conviction. This is the point of departure of the Socratic Dialogue. Truth is the result of a collective search, consisting in the dialogue of all the pupils, where everybody is teacher and pupil at the same time. The philosopher is no longer a prophet announcing revelations, but a searcher for truth along with others. This brings with it a new conception of leadership: being the most determined in pushing forward clarification, without ever losing sight of its final goal. The parallel to the way the role of the Communists in the class struggle is defined in the Communist Manifesto is striking.
Socrates was a master of the stimulation and directing of discussions. He evolved public debate to the heights of an art or science. His pupil, Plato, developed the dialogue to an extent that has rarely been attained since.
In the introduction to Dialectics of Nature Engels speaks of three great periods of natural science in history to date, with the "genius of intuition" of the ancient Greeks, and the "highly significant, but sporadic" results of the Arabs as the predecessors of modern science which began with the Renaissance. What is striking about the "Arabic-Muslim cultural epoch" was the remarkable capacity to absorb and make a synthesis of the acquisitions of different antique cultures, and its openness to discussion. August Bebel quotes an eyewitness of the culture of public disputation in Baghdad. "Just imagine, at the first meeting there were not only representatives of all the existing Muslim sects, orthodox and heterodox, but also fire worshipers (Parser), Materialists, Atheists, Jews and Christians, in a word every kind of infidel. Each of these sects had their spokesmen who had to represent them. When one of these party leaders entered the hall, everybody stood up respectfully from their seat, and nobody would sit down until he had reached his place. When the hall was almost completely full, one of the infidels began to speak, saying: 'You all know the rules. The Muslims are not allowed to combat us with proofs taken from their holy books, or based on the speeches of their prophet, since we believe neither in your books nor in your prophets. Those present are only allowed to base themselves on arguments taken from human reason.' These words were greeted with generalised rejoicing."[15]
Bebel declares: "The difference between Islam and Christianity was the following: The Arabs collected, during their conquests, all the works which could serve their studies and which could instruct them about the peoples and countries their had conquered. The Christians destroyed during the spreading of their doctrine all such monuments of culture as works of the devil and as pagan horrors." And he concludes. "The Muslim-Arabic cultural epoch is the connecting link between the doomed Greek-Roman culture and the antique culture as a whole, and the European culture which has blossomed since the Renaissance. Without this intermediary, the latter could hardly have attained its present day heights. Christianity was hostile to this whole cultural development."[16]
One of the reasons for the blind fanaticism and sectarianism of Christianity was already identified by Heinrich Heine, and later confirmed by the workers movement: The more sacrifice and renunciation a culture demands, the more intolerable becomes the very thought that its principles could be put in question.
Concerning the Renaissance and the Reformation, which he called "the greatest progressive transformation which humanity had experienced", Engels underlines the role of the development not only of thought, but of emotions, personality, human potential, and combativity. It was a time "which required giants and which produced giants, giants in thought, passion and character, in versatility and learnedness. (...) The heroes of those times were not yet submitted to the yoke of the division of labour, the limiting, one-sided effects of which we so often find among their successors. But what was particularly characteristic was that almost all of them were in the midst of the movements of the time, part and parcel of the practical struggles, taking sides and struggling, sometimes with words, sometimes with a dagger, and sometimes with both."[17]
Reviewing the three "heroic" ages of the human mind, which, according to Engels, prepared the development of modern science, it is noticeable how limited they were in time and space. To begin with, they appear very late relative to the history of humanity as a whole. Even when we include the Indian or Chinese chapters, these phases were geographically restricted. Nor did they last very long (the Renaissance in Italy or the Reformation in Germany only a few decades). And the portions of the already extremely minoritarian, exploiting classes actually actively involved were minuscule.
In relation to this, two things seem astonishing. Firstly, that these moments of upsurge of science and public debate took place at all, and that their impact was so important and so lasting - despite all the breaks and dead ends. Secondly, the extent to which the proletariat - despite the break in the organic continuity of its movement in the middle of the 20th century, despite the impossibility of permanent mass organisation in capitalist decadence - has been able to maintain, and sometimes considerably enlarge, the scope of organised debate. The workers movement has kept alive this tradition, despite interruptions, for almost two centuries. And there have been moments - such as during the revolutionary movements in France, Germany or Russia - where this process has encompassed millions of human beings. Here, quantity becomes a new quality.
This quality is however not only the product of the fact that the proletariat, at least in the industrialised countries, comprises the majority of the population. We have already seen how modern science and theory, after its glorious beginning with the Renaissance, was marred and hampered in its development by the bourgeois division of labour. At the heart of this problem lies the separation of science from the producers to a degree not yet possible in the Arabic epoch or the Renaissance. This break "is completed in modern industry, which makes science a productive force distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital."[18]
The conclusion of this process Marx described in the first draft of his reply to Vera Sassulitsch: "This society is waging war against science, against the popular masses, and against the productive forces it creates."
Capitalism is the first economic system which cannot exist without the systematic application of science to production. It must limit the education of the proletariat in order to maintain its class rule. It must push forward the education of the proletariat in order to maintain its economic position. Today, the bourgeoisie becomes more and more an uncultivated and primitive class, whereas science and culture are in the hands either of proletarians, or of paid representatives of the bourgeoisie whose economic and social situation increasingly resembles that of the working class.
"The abolition of classes in society (...) presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually a hindrance to development. This point is now reached."[19]
The proletariat is the heir to the scientific traditions of humanity. Even more so than in the past, any future revolutionary proletarian struggle will necessarily lead to an unheard of flourishing of public debate, and the beginnings of the move towards the restoration of the unity of science and labour, the achievement of a global understanding more in keeping with the demands of the contemporary age.
The capacity of the proletariat to attain new heights was already proven with the development of Marxism, the first scientific approach concerning human society and its history. The proletariat alone was capable of assimilating the highest acquisition of bourgeois philosophical thought: the philosophy of Hegel. The two forms of dialectics known to Antiquity were the dialectics of change (Heraclitus) and the dialectics of interaction (Plato, Aristotle). Hegel alone combined these two forms, delivering the basis for a truly historical dialectics.
Hegel added a new dimension to the whole concept of debate by attacking, more profoundly than ever before, the rigid, metaphysical opposition of true and false. In the introduction to his Phenomenology of Mind he showed how the different and opposed phases of a process of development - such as the history of philosophy - constitute an organic unity, like the blossom and the fruit. Hegel explained that the failure to recognise this was linked to the tendency to concentrate on the contradiction and lose sight of the development. By placing this dialectic on its feet, Marxism was able to absorb the most progressive side of Hegel, the understanding of processes leading toward the future.
The proletariat is the first class which is at once revolutionary and exploited. As opposed to previous revolutionary classes, which were exploiters, its search for truth is not limited by any interest of self-preservation as a class. As opposed to previous exploited classes, which could only survive by consoling themselves with (in particular religious) illusions, its class interest demands the loss of illusions. As such, the proletariat is the first class whose natural tendency, as soon as it reflects, organises and struggles on its own terrain, is towards clarification.
This unique nature was forgotten by Bordigism when it invented its concept of invariance. Its point of departure is correct: the need to remain loyal to the basic principles of Marxism in the face of bourgeois ideology. But the conclusion that it is necessary to limit, or even abolish debate in order to maintain class positions, is a product of the counter-revolution. The bourgeoisie has understood much better that in order to draw the working class onto the terrain of capital, it is above all necessary to suppress and stifle its debates. Having at the onset attempted this above all through ferocious repression, it has since developed more effective weapons such as democracy and the sabotage of the left of capital. Opportunism has also long understood this. Since its essential characteristic is its incoherence, it has to hide itself, to flee open debate. The struggle against opportunism and the need of a culture of debate are not only not contradictory; they are indispensable to each other.
Such a culture does not at all exclude fierce political collisions of positions, on the contrary. But this does not mean that political debate is necessarily traumatic, leading to splits. The most edifying example of the "art" or "science" of debate in history is that of the Bolshevik Party between February and October 1917. Even in the context of massive incursions of alien ideology, these discussions were passionate, but extremely fraternal, and inspiring to all the participants. Above all, they made possible what Trotsky called the "re-arming" of the party, the re-adjustment of its policies to the changing demands of the revolutionary process, one of the preconditions for victory.
The "Bolshevik Dialogue" requires an understanding that not all debates have the same meaning. The polemic of Marx against Proudhon was of the demolishing kind, because its task was to dismiss to the rubbish bin of history what had become a fetter to the whole workers movement. As opposed to this, the young Marx, while engaging in titanic struggles against Hegel, and against utopian socialism, never for a moment lost his enormous respect for Hegel, Fourier, Saint Simon or Owen, whom he helped to enshrine for ever in our common heritage. And Engels was later to write that without Hegel, there would not have been Marxism, and without the utopians, no scientific socialism as we know it.
The gravest crises in the workers organisations, including the ICC, were for the most part caused, not by the existence of divergences as such, however fundamental, but by the avoidance and even the open sabotage of the process of clarification. Opportunism uses every possible means to this end. These include, not only the playing down of important divergences, but equally the exaggeration of secondary divergences, or the invention of non-existent ones. They also include personalisation and even denigration.
The dead weight, on the workers movement, of everyday common sense on the one hand, and of an uncritical, almost religious abiding to certain habits and traditions on the other, was linked by Lenin to what he called the circle spirit. He was profoundly correct about the submission of the process of the construction of the organisation and its political life to the "spontaneity" of everyday common sense and its consequences. "The spontaneous movement in the direction of the least resistance leads to the domination of bourgeois ideology, why? For the simple reason that the bourgeois ideology is much older than the socialist, is developed in a more many sided manner and commands incomparably more means."[20]
Characteristic of the circle mentality is the personalisation of debate, the reaction to political argumentation according, not to what is said, but to who says what. It goes without saying that this personalisation is an enormous hindrance to a fruitful collective discussion.
Already the Socratic Dialogue understood that the development of debate is a question not only of thought; it is an ethical question. Today, the quest for clarification serves the interests of the proletariat, whereas the sabotage of clarification harms it. In this sense, the working class could adopt the motto of the German enlightener Lessing, who said that there was one thing he loved more than the truth, that being the search for the truth.
The most powerful examples of a culture of debate as an essential element of mass proletarian movements are provided by the Russian Revolution.[21] The class party, far from opposing it, was itself the vanguard of this dynamic. The discussions within the Party in Russia in 1917 concerned questions such as the class nature of the revolution, whether or not to support the continuation of the imperialist war, and when and how to seize power. Yet throughout, the unity of the Party was maintained despite political crises in which the fate of the world revolution, and with it that of humanity, were at stake.
Yet the history of the proletarian class struggle, in particular that of the organised workers movement, teaches us that these levels of culture of debate are not always reached. We have already mentioned the repeated intrusions of monolithic approaches within the ICC. It is not surprising that these intrusions often gave rise to splits from the organisation. Within the framework of monolithism, there can be no other resolution of divergences than separation. However, the problem is not resolved by the splitting of those elements that embodied this approach in a caricatural manner. The possibility for such non-proletarian approaches to appear and reappear indicates the existence of more widespread weaknesses on this question within the organisation itself. These consist in often small and hardly perceptible confusions and misconceptions in the everyday life and discussions, but which can pave the way for more serious difficulties under certain circumstances. One of these is a tendency to pose each debate in terms of a confrontation between Marxism and opportunism, of the direct struggle against bourgeois ideology. One of the consequences of this is to inhibit debate, giving comrades the feeling that they no longer have the right to be mistaken or to express confusions. Another consequence is the "banalisation" of opportunism. If we see it everywhere, (crying "wolf" at the appearance of the least divergence) we will probably fail to recognise it when it really appears. Another is the problem of impatience in the debates, resulting in an inability to listen to other arguments and a tendency to want to monopolise discussions, to crush ones "opponents", to convince the others "at all costs".[22]
What all of these approaches have in common is the weight of petty bourgeois impatience, the lack of confidence in the living practise of collective clarification inside the proletariat. They express difficulties to accept that discussion and clarification is a process. Like all fundamental processes of social life, it has an inner rhythm and law of development of its own. Its unfolding corresponds to the movement from confusion towards clarity, involves mistakes and wrong turns and their correction. Such processes require time if they are to be really profound. They can be accelerated, but not short-circuited. The wider the participation in this process, the more participation from the whole class is encouraged and welcomed, the richer it will become.
In her polemic against Bernstein,[23] Rosa Luxemburg pointed out the fundamental contradiction of the workers struggle as a movement within capitalism, but striving towards a goal which lies beyond it. From this contradictory nature flow the two main dangers to this movement. The first of these is opportunism, that is the openness towards the fatal influence of the class enemy. The motto of this deviation from the path of the class struggle is: "the
movement is everything, the final goal is nothing". The second main danger is sectarianism, that is the lack of openness towards the influence of the life of one's own class, the proletariat. The motto of this deviation is: "the goal is everything, but the movement is nothing".
In the wake of the terrible counter-revolution, which followed the defeat of the World Revolution at the end of World War I, there developed within what remained of the revolutionary camp, the fatal misconception that it would be possible to combat opportunism by means of sectarianism. This approach, which leads only to sterility and fossilisation, fails to recognise that opportunism and sectarianism are two sides of the same coin, since both separate goal and movement. Without the full participation of revolutionary minorities in the real life and movement of their class, the goal of communism cannot be achieved.
ICC, September 2007.
[1]. Even such mature and theoretically clear young revolutionaries as Marx and Engels believed - at the time of the convulsions of 1848 - that the realisation of communism was more or less on the immediate agenda. A supposition which they soon had to correct.
[2]. See our "Theses on the Student Movement in France [60] ", International Review nº 125.
[3]. Within the proletarian camp this notion was theorised by "Bordigism".
[4]. The biographies and reminiscences of past revolutionaries are full of examples of their ability to discuss, and in particular to listen. Lenin was legendary in this respect, but he was not the only one. Just one example here, the memoirs of Fritz Sternberg about his "Conversations with Trotsky" (written in 1963). "In his conversations with me, Trotsky was extraordinarily polite. He almost never interrupted me, mostly only to ask me to explain or develop on a word or concept."
[5]. Read the article in nº 110 and 114 of the International Review: "Extraordinary conference of the ICC: The fight for the defence of organisational principles [38] " and "15th Congress of the ICC: reinforce the organisation faced with the stakes of the period [39] ".
[6]. See "Confidence and Solidarity in the Proletarian Struggle" and "Marxism and Ethics" in International Review n° 111 [40] , 112 [41] , 127 [10] and 128 [42] .
[7]. Consult our books on the Italian and the Dutch Communist Left.
[8]. The GCF was later to uphold this understanding after the dissolution of the Italian Fraction. See for instance its critique of the concept of the "brilliant leader" republished in International Review nº. 33 and that of the idea that discipline means militants of the organisation are simple order takers who don't have to discuss the political orientations of the organisation in International Review nº34
[9]. Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
[10]. Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach. Beginning of Chapter Two.
[11]. Engels: Dialectics of Nature. Beginning of the Chapter: "Natural research in the spiritual world".
[12]. Marx: Capital. Volume 3. Chapter 48, "The Trinitary Formula", beginning of part 3.
[13]. Engels: Dialectic of Nature.
[14]. On developments in Asia around 500 BC, see the lectures of August Thalheimer held at the Sun-Yat-Sen university in Moscow in 1927: Introduction to Dialectical Materialism: www.marxists.org/archive/thalheimer/works/diamat/index.htm [61]
[15]. August Bebel: Die Mohamedanisch-Arabische Kulturepoche (1889). Chapter VI. Scientific Development, Poetry.
[16]. Ibid.
[17]. Engels, Dialectics of Nature.
[18]. Capital Vol. 1. Chapter 12: "Division of Labour and Manufacture". Section 5: "The Capitalistic character of Manufacture".
[19]. Engels: Anti-Dühring. Part III : "Socialism" . Chapter II: "Theoretical".
[20]. Lenin: What Is To Be Done. Part II: "Spontaneity of the Masses and Consciousness of Social Democracy". End of Part b) "The Worship of Spontaneity". Rabotschaja Mysl.
[21]. See for instance Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution, or John Reed: Ten Days that Shook the World.
[22]. The report on the work of the 17th congress [62] of the ICC in International Review n° 130 develops further on these questions.
[23]. Rosa Luxemburg: Social Reform or Revolution?
With this article from Bilan n° 35 (September-October 1936), the theoretical publication of the Italian left communists, we continue our re-publication of the series of studies on the period of transition by Mitchell. The previous article in the series (International Review n° 130 [64]) began the discussion on the economic tasks of a proletarian dictatorship, responding to the efforts of the Dutch left communists of the GIK to outline the ‘fundamentals of communist production and distribution' in the light of the experience in Russia. The debate between these two currents of the communist left has to a large extent been buried by history, above all by the weight of the counter-revolution, and needs to be re-excavated as a new generation searches for answers about a real alternative to the capitalist system.
We will be returning in more depth to the issues raised by this debate. The article that follows focuses in particular on the problem of the repartition of the social product during the transition towards a fully communist society, a period in which it is not yet possible to universally apply the principle "to each according to his needs, from each according to his means". As we said in our introduction to the previous article, we do not share all of Mitchell's (and Bilan's) views on this question, for example their view that the USSR had in some sense eliminated capitalism by formally abolishing the private ownership of the means of production; and there is certainly a discussion to be had about whether the principal transitional economic measure advocated by Marx, the GIK and the Italian left - the system of labour time vouchers - is the most adequate basis for the development of communist social relations after the destruction of the capitalist state. But the article still conveys many of the best qualities of the Italian left:
- its insistence on basing its investigations on a critical re-examination of the marxist tradition, in particular Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme;
- its capacity to examine the problem of distribution in some theoretical depth, notably by invoking the problem of the law of value;
- its avoidance of all easy solutions to the immense tasks that will confront the proletariat once it takes control of society. It is particularly striking, for example, that where for the GIK the remuneration of work according to a calculation of the ‘hour of social labour' guaranteed a virtually automatic progression towards integral communism (when not being identified with communism itself), for Mitchell the persistence of such a system was proof that the proletariat had not yet freed itself from the law of value and in that sense represented a survival of wage labour. The difference may seem to be between that of a glass half empty and a glass half full, but it is nevertheless symptomatic of a very different approach to the reality of the proletarian revolution.
There has been a lot of chatter about "the product of social labour" and its "full" and "equitable" distribution, confused formulations which can easily be taken over by demagogues. But the essential question of the destination of the social product, i.e. of the sum of the activities of labour, is concentrated around two basic issues: how is the total product to be distributed? And how should the fraction of that product which enters immediately into individual consumption be distributed?
Obviously we know that there is no one response valid for all societies and the mode of distribution is conditioned by the mode of production. But we also know that there are certain fundamental rules which any social organisation has to keep to if it wants to survive: societies, like the men that make them up, are subject to the laws of preservation, which requires not just simple reproduction but enlarged reproduction. This is a truism that we have to remind ourselves of.
At the same time, as soon as an economy breaks through its natural, domestic framework and generalises into a commodity economy, it acquires a social character which, with the capitalist system, takes on an immense significance, through the conflict which irreducibly opposes it to the private character of the appropriation of wealth.
With the "socialised" production of capitalism, we are in the presence not of isolated individual products, but of social products, i.e, products which not only don't respond to the immediate use of the producers, but which are also the common result of their activity: "The thread, the cloth, the metal objects that come from the factory are from that point on the common product of numerous workers, through whose hands it has to pass in succession before it can be completed. No individual can say about it that I made that, this is my product."[1]
In other words, social production is the synthesis of individual activities and not simply their juxtaposition; consequently, "in society, the relation of the producer to the product after its completion is extrinsic, and the return of the product
to the subject depends on his relations to other individuals. The product does not immediately come into his possession. Its immediate appropriation, moreover, is not his aim, if he produces within society. Distribution, which on the basis of social laws determines the individual's share in the world of products, intervenes between the producer and the products, i.e., between production and consumption."[2]
This remains true in socialist society; and when we say that the producers must re-establish their domination over production, which capitalism has taken away from them, we are not talking about the overthrow of the natural course of social life, but of the relations of production and repartition.
In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx, in denouncing the reactionary utopianism of Lassalle's idea of "the products of labour", poses the question in these terms: "What are the ‘proceeds of labour'? The product of labour, or its value? And in the latter case, is it the total value of the product, or only that part of the value which labour has newly added to the value of the means of production consumed?" (our emphasis - Mitchell).
Marx indicates how in social production - which is dominated not by the individual producer but by the social producer - the concept of the "product of labour" differs essentially from the product of the independent worker: "Let us take, first of all, the words 'proceeds of labour' in the sense of the product of labour; then the co-operative proceeds of labour are the total social product.
"From this must now be deducted: First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up. Second, additional portion for expansion of production. Third, reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc".
This transforms the "full product of labour" into a partial product, i.e., that fraction of the objects of consumption which are distributed individually among the collective producers. In sum, this "partial product" not only does not include the part materialised in former labour provided by previous productive cycles, and which is absorbed by the replacement of the means of production that have been consumed; it also does not represent the entirety of the new labour added to social capital, since we have to take into account the deductions we have just mentioned. This boils down to saying that the "partial product" is equivalent to the net income of society, or the fraction of gross income which has to return to the individual consumption of the producer, but which bourgeois society does not integrally restore to him.
Here then is the response to the first question: "how is the total product distributed?" The simple conclusion is that surplus labour, i.e. the fraction of new or living labour required by the totality of collective needs, cannot be abolished in any kind of social system. But whereas under capitalism it is a barrier to the development of the individual, in a communist society it has to be the condition for the latter's all-round development. "In the capitalist as well as in the slave system, etc., it merely assumes an antagonistic form and is supplemented by complete idleness of a stratum of society."[3]
What in effect determines the rates of capitalist surplus labour are the necessities of the production of surplus value, which is the motor force of social production; the domination of exchange value over use value subordinates the needs of enlarged reproduction and of consumption to the needs of the accumulation of capital; the development of the productivity of labour results in an increase in the rate and the mass of surplus labour.
By contrast, socialist surplus labour has to be kept to the minimum required by the needs of the proletarian economy and to the necessities of the class struggle that continues on a national and international scale. In reality, fixing the rate of accumulation and the rate of administrative and unproductive costs (absorbed by the bureaucracy) will be located at the centre of the proletariat's concerns; but we will examine this aspect of the problem in a subsequent chapter.
We must now respond to the second question: "how is the partial product then distributed?" i.e. that fraction of the total product which immediately falls under individual consumption, and thus into the wage fund, since the capitalist form of the remuneration of labour persists during the transitional period.
Let's begin by saying that there is a conception among certain revolutionaries that has been adopted rather too easily: the idea that if collective appropriation is to mean anything, it must ipso facto result in the disappearance of wages and the installation of equal remuneration for all; the corollary to this is the idea that the inequality of wages presupposes the exploitation of labour power.
This conception, which we will find when we examine the arguments of the Dutch internationalists, proceeds on the one hand - we have to emphasise this again - from a denial of the contradictory movement of historical materialism, and on the other hand from a confusion between two different categories: labour and labour power; between the value of labour power, i.e. the quantity of labour needed to reproduce this labour power, and the total quantity of labour which this labour power can supply in a given time.
It is exact to say that to the political content of the dictatorship of the proletariat there has to correspond a new social content to the remuneration of labour, which can no longer be no more than the equivalent of the products strictly necessary for the reproduction of labour power. In other words, what constitutes the essence of capitalist exploitation, the opposition between the use value and the exchange value of this particular commodity we call labour power, disappears with the suppression of the private ownership of the means of production, and consequently the private use of labour power also disappears. Obviously the new utilisation of this labour power and of the mass of surplus labour which derives from it can indeed be turned away from their proletarian objectives (the Soviet experience demonstrates this), and in this way there can arise a mode of exploitation of a particular nature, which strictly speaking is not capitalist. But this is another story that we will come back to elsewhere. For the moment we don't have to remain at this proposition; the fact that in a proletarian economy the basic motive force is no longer the ceaselessly enlarged production of surplus value and of capital but the unlimited production of use values does not mean that the conditions are right for a levelling of "wages" that translates into equality in consumption. In fact, such an equality can exist neither at the beginning of the transitional period nor in the communist phase, which is based on the formula "to each according to his needs". In reality, formal equality can never exist, while communism will finally realise a real equality in natural inequality.
It remains however to explain why the differentiation of wages subsists in the transitional phase despite the fact that the wage, while preserving its bourgeois envelope, has lost its antagonistic content. The question is immediately posed: what will be the juridical norms of repartition prevailing in this period?
In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx responds: "Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby". When he notes that the mode of distribution of the objects of consumption can only be the reflection of the mode of repartition of the means of production and of the mode of production itself, for him this is only a schema which is realised gradually. Capitalism did not install its relations of distribution immediately; it did it by stages, on the accumulated ruins of the feudal system. The proletariat cannot also not immediately regulate distribution according to socialist norms. It has to do it by virtue of "rights", which can only be those of "a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges". But there is a major difference between the conditions for the development of capitalism and those for the development of socialism. The bourgeoisie, by developing its economic positions inside feudal society, was also constructing the bases for the future juridical superstructure of its system of production; and its political revolution codified these economic and juridical gains. The proletariat does not benefit from any similar evolution and cannot base itself on any economic privilege or any concrete embryo of "socialist right", because for a marxist there can be no question of seeing the "social conquests" of reformism as such a right. It has to thus temporarily apply bourgeois right, albeit in a limited way, to the mechanisms of distribution. This is what Marx meant when, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he talked about equal rights; and in turn, Lenin, in his State and Revolution, noted with his clear and powerful realism "the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains ‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois right'. Of course, bourgeois right in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law.
"It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois right, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!"
Marx, again in the Critique of the Gotha Programme analyses how and in relation to which principles bourgeois equal rights are applied: "The right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour".[4]
And the remuneration of labour is carried out in the following way: "Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made - exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour [our emphasis]. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour cost. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
"Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form".[5]
When Marx talks about a principle analogous to the one which regulates the exchange of commodities and of the individual quantum of labour, he undoubtedly meant simple labour, the substance of value, which means that all individual labour has to be reduced to a common measure in order to be compared, evaluated, and consequently remunerated through the application of "right that is proportional to the labour supplied". We have already noted that there is still no scientific way of reducing simple labour and, as a result, the law of value persists in this function, although only within certain limits determined by the new political and economic conditions. Marx also dispels any doubts about this when he analyses the measurement of labour:
"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only - for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society".
From this analysis, it emerges clearly that, on the one hand, the existence of bourgeois equal rights is indissolubly linked to the existence of value; and on the other hand, the mode of distribution hides a dual inequality: one, which is an expression of the diversity of "individual gifts", of "productive capacities", of "natural privileges"; and the other which, on the basis of equal labour, arises from differences of social condition (family, etc): "In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"[6]
But in the transitional phase, bourgeois right installs a de facto inequality which is inevitable because the first phase of communism "cannot yet provide justice and equality; differences, and unjust differences, in wealth will still persist, but the exploitation of man by man will have become impossible because it will be impossible to seize the means of production--the factories, machines, land, etc.--and make them private property. In smashing Lassalle's petty-bourgeois, vague phrases about ‘equality' and ‘justice' in general, Marx shows the course of development of communist society, which is compelled to abolish at first only the ‘injustice' of the means of production seized by individuals, and which is unable at once to eliminate the other injustice, which consists in the distribution of consumer goods ‘according to the amount of labour performed' (and not according to needs)."[7]
The exchange of equal quantities of labour, although in fact translating into inequality in distribution, does not at all imply exploitation, since the foundation and form of the exchange have been modified and the political conditions which determined this change continue to exist, ie the real maintenance of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It would thus be absurd to invoke marxist theory to argue that the degeneration of this dictatorship results in a kind of exploitation. On the contrary, the thesis that the differentiation of wages, the demarcation between qualified labour and unqualified labour, simple and compound labour, are sure signs of degeneration within the proletarian state and indications of the existence of an exploiting class, this thesis has to be categorically rejected, on the one hand because it implies that this degeneration is inevitable, and on the other hand because it can in no way serve to explain the evolution of the Russian revolution.
We have already made it clear that the Dutch internationalists, in their attempt to analyse the problems of the period of transition, are inspired much more by their desires than by historical reality. Their abstract schema, in which as people who are perfectly consistent with their principles, they exclude the law of value, the market and money, must logically entail an "ideal" distribution of products as well. This is because for them "The proletarian revolution collectivises the means of production and thus opens the way to communist life; the dynamic laws of individual consumption must absolutely and necessarily be linked together because they are indissolubly linked to the laws of production. This link is made ‘by itself' though the passage to communist production" ( p72 of their work).
The Dutch comrades thus consider that the new relation of production, thanks to collectivisation, automatically determines a new right over the products "This right will be expressed through equal conditions for individual consumption which resides solely in an equal measure of consumption. Just as the hour of individual labour is the measure of individual labour, it is at the same time the measure of individual consumption. In this way consumption is socially regulated and is cast in the right direction. The passage to the social revolution is nothing else than the application of the measure of the average hour of social labour to the whole of economic life. It serves as a measure for production and also as a right of the producers over the social product" (p 25).
But once again, this affirmation can only become a positive one if we draw out its concrete significance, which is to say that when you talk about labour time and the measurement of labour, you are talking about value. This is what the Dutch comrades leave out and this leads them to adopt a false judgment of the Russian revolution, and above all to severely curtail the scope of their research into the underlying causes of the reactionary evolution of the USSR. They don't seek the explanation for the latter in the subsoil of the national and international class struggle (one of the negative characteristics of their study is that they more or less remove any consideration of political problems), but in the economic mechanism, as when they say: "When the Russians restored production on the basis of value, they proclaimed there and then the expropriation of the workers, their separation from the means of production, ensuring that there would be no relationship between the growth of the mass of products and the workers' share in this mass" (p 19).
For them maintaining value was the equivalent of maintaining the exploitation of labour power, but we think we have shown, on the basis of marxist theory, that value can subsist without its antagonistic content, i.e. without the remuneration of the value of labour power.
But apart from this, the Dutch internationalists falsify the significance of Marx's words about the repartition of products. When they say that the worker receives from the process of distribution a pro rata of the quantity of labour he has given, they only discover one aspect of the dual inequality which we have underlined, and it is the one which results from the social situation of the worker (p 81); but they don't dwell on the other aspect, which expresses the fact that the workers, in the same amount of labour time, provide different quantities of simple labour (simple labour which is the common measure exerted through the play of value), thus giving rise to unequal repartition. They prefer to stick with their demand for the suppression of inequality in wages, which remains hanging in mid air because the suppression of capitalist wage labour does not immediately result in the disappearance of the differences in the remuneration of labour.
Comrade Hennaut comes up with a similar solution to the problem of distribution in the period of transition, a solution which he also draws from a mistaken, because incomplete, interpretation of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme. In Bilan, p 747, he said: "the inequality which still exists in the first phase of socialism results not from an unequal remuneration being applied to various kinds of labour: the simple work of the labourer or the compound work of the engineer, with all the stages in between. No, all these types of labour are of equal worth, only their duration and intensity has to be measured; inequality results from the fact that men who have different capacities and needs are carrying out the same tasks with the same resources". And Hennaut inverses Marx's thinking when he locates inequality in the fact that "the part of the social profit remains equal - an equal amount of remuneration of course - for each individual, whereas their needs and the effort made to achieve the same remuneration are different"; whereas, as we have indicated, Marx saw inequality in the fact that individuals received unequal shares because they provided unequal shares of labour and this is the basis for the application of bourgeois equal rights.
A policy of equalisation of wages cannot be adopted in the transition phase, not only because it would be inapplicable, but because it would lead inevitably to the collapse of labour productivity.
If, during "war communism", the Bolsheviks applied the system of equal rations, independent of qualification and of the amount of labour provided, this was not an economic method capable of ensuring the systematic development of the economy; it was the regime of a people under siege and concentrating all its energies on the civil war.
If we begin from the general consideration that variations and differences in the qualification of labour (and its remuneration) are in inverse proposition to the technical level of production, we can understand why in the USSR after the NEP very large variations in wages between qualified and non-qualified workers[8] were the result of the greater importance of the individual qualification of the worker in comparison to the highly developed capitalist countries. In the latter, after the revolution, wage categories could be much more uniform than in the USSR, by the virtue of the law that the development of labour productivity tends to level out the qualities of labour. But marxists should not forget that the "enslaving subordination of individuals to the division of labour" can only disappear through a prodigious technical development placed at the service of the producers (to be continued).
Mitchell
[1]. Engels, Anti-Duhring.
[2]. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "Production, consumption, distribution, exchange".
[3]. Capital Vol 3 ch 48.
[4]. We have judged it useful to reproduce the full text of the Gotha Programme as regards distribution, because we see every part of it to be extremely important
[5]. Here Marx understands by ‘value of labour' the quantity of social labour furnished by the producer, since it goes without saying that since it is labour that creates value, that it forms its substance, there is no such thing as value in itself, as Engels remarked, otherwise we would be talking about a value of value, which would be like talking about the weight of weight or the temperature of heat.
[6]. Marx Critique of the Gotha programme.
[7]. Lenin, State and Revolution.
[8]. We are obviously not thinking here about the forms of "Stakhanovism" which are simply the monstrous product of centrism.
In this fourth article in the series on the CNT we will show how syndicalism weakened the revolutionary currents within the CNT (those with a Marxist orientation, which were in favour of joining the Third International, as well as those oriented towards anarchism). The CNT had been weakened by the workers' demoralisation after the defeat of the struggles of 1919-1920 and by the brutal repression carried out by armed bands paid by the bosses and co-ordinated by the military and administrative authorities.[1] In 1923 it was once more outlawed by the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, which systematically closed its offices and imprisoned the leading committees as soon as they were formed.
In spite of the constant persecution of its militants, the CNT maintained a certain activity. However, as we showed at the end of the third article in this series, this activity was oriented very differently from that in the period 1911-1915. At that time it focussed on supporting the struggles that arose and reflecting generally on the attacks that rained down on the working class and humanity (especially on the question of the imperialist war).[2] Now however it concentrated almost systematically on supporting any conspiracy hatched by bourgeois politicians against the Dictatorship. It played a decisive role in the formation of the Spanish Republic in 1931, which pretended to represent "liberties" and "rights", and to be a "Workers' Republic" (as it proclaimed itself) but which would massacre the workers' struggles ruthlessly.
The dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera was a result of various elements.
Firstly, the wearing out of the Restoration Regime that had dominated the Spanish state since 1876:[3] a system that saw the alternation of two parties (conservative and liberal) which represented the dominant part of the Spanish bourgeoisie. However, this system was unable to integrate important factions of the bourgeoisie, the regionalists in particular, and it marginalised the petty bourgeoisie (traditionally republican and anti-clerical). Moreover, the only language it knew in relation to the peasants and the workers was ferocious repression.
Secondly, once the war was over, Spanish capital saw the decline and disappearance of the easy profits it had made by selling all kinds of goods to both sides under the cover of its "neutrality". The crisis had returned in full force and unemployment, inflation and extreme misery hit hard.
Thirdly, the Spanish bourgeoisie got bogged down in the Moroccan colonial war which went from disaster to disaster (the best known was the massacre of Spanish soldiers at the hands of Moroccan guerrillas in 1921). The Spanish army was weakened by internal struggles, by the inability of the political administration to lead and by a monstrous bureaucracy (there was one general to every two sergeants and five soldiers). It needed reinforcing.
This was so in the case of the Italian Duce Mussolini, of General Horthy in Hungary, who came to power after the failed proletarian revolution in 1919, of General Pildsuki in Poland, and so on.
The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera was very well received by the Spanish bourgeoisie, especially in Catalonia[5] and in particular in was supported almost unconditionally by the PSOE[6] whose union, the UGT,[7] became a state union. Its leader, Largo Caballero, who was also a leader of the PSOE, was made a state councillor by the dictator.
In order to ensure its monopoly as a union, the UGT actively persecuted the CNT and many UGT members scabbed and denounced the CNT workers or those who were simply combative.
representative of the Catalan opposition and head of the revolutionary movement that was formed at the time."[11] From 1924 to 1926 there were several attempts to cross the French frontier and attempted military uprisings; these were co-ordinated with the CNT, which was to call for the general strike. In 1926 there was a farcical attempt to kidnap the Spanish monarch in Paris by radical anarchists (Durruti, Ascaso and Jover). On each occasion the CNT supplied militants, that is, it supplied canon fodder. The result was always the same: the dictatorship unleashed savage repression against the members of the CNT by condemning them to death, sending them to prison or by torturing them horribly.
How could the CNT support national sovereignty, the unity of the army and navy and the energetic maintenance of social order?
In a note, Peirats[16] describes direct action by the fact that "conflicts must be resolved by direct contact between the parties concerned: the issue of work with the bosses and that of public order with the authorities"[17] This conception no longer has anything to do with the original vision of the CNT, for which it meant the direct struggle of the masses outside of the framework imposed by the bourgeoisie. It had now become a question of direct negotiation between the unions and the bosses when there is a "labour conflict" and between unions and the authorities in the case of conflicts involving public order! The new direct action is no more than the liberal corporatist vision of direct agreements between bosses and unions. No bourgeois politician would object to this!
On the question of anti-parliamentarianism, during an intervention at the June 1931 Congress (we will come back to this later), Peiró explains how he sees things when describing his conversations with Colonel Macia: "he asked us what conditions would be made by the confederation for it to support the revolutionary movement whose aim was to establish a Federal Republic. The reply of the representatives of the Confederation: ‘it is of little importance to us what may happen after the revolution. What is important is the liberation of all our prisoners without exception and that collective and individual liberty is absolutely guaranteed'". The correct but insufficient concept of revolutionary syndicalism at the outset to "denounce parliament as a dishonest state mask", is now substituted by union neutrality which gives carte blanche to the "politicians" as long as they form a state that guarantees the freedom of union action.
This "alteration" of concepts so dear to revolutionary syndicalism and anarchism made it possible to approach a policy of integration into the bourgeois state. This was not an evil conspiracy on the part of "reformist leaders" but rather a necessity that syndicalism was powerless to ignore. It was obliged to adapt to state capitalism and so "its only interest" was juridical freedom and institutional needs. This was necessary for it to carry out its job of controlling the workers and submitting their demands to the needs of the national capital, as we will now see.
The Spanish bourgeoisie was, to say the least, ungrateful. From 1930 to 1931 the number of strikes increased through the whole country but the newly legalised CNT made no attempt to encourage or develop the potential strength of the movement. Contrary to what it had done previously, it did what it could to contribute to the political aim of the bourgeoisie to replace the dictatorship with the Republican façade. In this period it busied itself mobilising the workers as cannon fodder for all street agitation supporting the change that the majority of bourgeois politicians were calling for in the hope of becoming the "saviours of the situation". Francisco Olaya[25] gave eloquent testimony showing that this was the main orientation of the CNT.
When the elections that were to push through the proclamation of the Republic took place in April 1931, the leaders of the CNT decided (albeit coyly) in favour of voting, as Olaya acknowledges: "We voted for the first time in 8 years as if it were a right that we had won. The turn out was massive, even on the part of CNT militants, who were influenced by their hatred of the monarchy and sensible of the critical situation of thousands of social detainees."[29] In an article evaluating the elections Solidaridad Obrera stated that "the vote was for the armistice and the Republic, against the atrocities and injustices committed by the monarchy". This was another striking precedent which was to be manifested much more overtly during the famous elections of February 1936!
The argument of the lesser evil is a trap. In essence it means claiming not to renounce final aims while supporting in practice so-called "minimal aims", which are by no means minimum demands of the proletariat but rather the programme of the bourgeoisie. The "lesser evil" is no other than a demagogic means of pushing through the programme of the bourgeoisie in a crucial political situation while maintaining the illusion that one is really continuing to struggle for a "revolutionary future".
During the Extraordinary Congress, the CNT made an enormous effort to break into the framework of the capitalist system. Of course numerous criticisms were made and the debates were stormy but the work of the Congress went systematically in the direction of integration into the structures of capitalist production and the institutional framework of the bourgeois state.
This is why the Congress endorsed the policy of making a pact with bourgeois conspirators as Gomez Casas recognises euphemistically: "the report of the national committee was discussed with great fervour as the activity of the representative organ, particularly in referring to the past conspiracy, was somewhat different to the habitual orthodoxy of confederate militancy."[33] How quaint to say it was "somewhat different to the orthodoxy" when in fact it marked a radical change from the CNT's activity from 1910 to 1923!
If we analyse this amendment seriously we can see that it did not really change anything. The moderate rhetoric of the presentation was given a more radical language by invoking "principles", among which is included "a list of minimal demands". It means that the every day policy of the union conformed to the fact that - as Gomez Casas says - "anarcho-syndicalism, albeit implicitly, had given a degree of confidence to the timid and embryonic Republic."[37] This was a realisation of the aims of the liberal monarchist Sanchez Guerra, quoted above: for national sovereignty, for the dignity and unity of the national navy and army and above all, to energetically maintain public order. This maintaining of "public order" entailed the assassination of more that 500 workers and journalists between April and December 1931!
because the aim of the union in capitalism's decadent period is only to become a part of the wheels of state and of the national economy.
The period that we have just analysed shows a fundamental volte-face in the history of the CNT. It was the main supplier of cannon fodder in the bourgeois battles for the Republic. It adulterated the concepts of direct action and anti-parliamentarianism, it accepted the "lesser evil" logic and the principle of Republican "freedom", it turned the bourgeois programme into the "minimum programme" of the proletariat while turning its own "maximum programme" into a radical version of the needs of the bourgeois national economy.
However these evident changes were hard to swallow. This was true for the old militants who had lived through the period in which, in spite of its difficulties and contradictions, the CNT had been a workers' organisation. It was also true for the young elements that flocked towards it under the pressure of an unbearable situation and the profound disappointment rapidly produced in the working masses towards the Republic.
The resistance and opposition were continuous. The convulsions within the CNT were violent. The "moderates", those in favour of abandoning those that they called the "maximalist anarchists" and of a pure, tough syndicalism, split temporarily to form oppositional unions and were reintegrated in 1936. Angel Pestaña however, who was in favour of a Spanish form of "workerism", split definitively to form an ephemeral Syndicalist Party.
However the situation was very different from that of 1915 to 1919 when, as we showed in the second article of this series, the orientation of the majority of the militants was towards the development of a revolutionary consciousness. The resistance and opposition in this later period suffered from profound disorientation and were not up to offering a real perspective.
There are many reasons for this difference. The deepening of capitalist decadence and, more concretely, the development of the general tendency towards state capitalism, meant that unionism had lost all capacity to recuperate working class efforts and initiatives. The unions can exist only as organisations in the service of capital, whose function is to imprison and sterilise the energies of the working class. This reality inflicted itself like a blind and implacable force upon the militants of a union such as the CNT, in spite of their good will and undoubted desire to the contrary.
Secondly, the 30s was the period that saw the triumph of the counter-revolution whose spearheads were Stalinism and Nazism. Unlike the period 1915-19, when many anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists gravitated towards the Bolsheviks and the Spartacists, the workers' combativity and reflection no longer had the benefit of a similar political compass. What now predominated was the destruction of proletarian reflection by means of the infernal alternative between fascism and anti-fascism, which prepared the way for the imperialist war. The strikes and struggles were directed towards national unity and anti-fascism, as was to be seen in 1936 in Spain and France.
Thirdly, whereas in the period 1910-23 the CNT was open as an organisation and collaborated and discussed with various proletarian tendencies, it was now dominated ideologically by anarchism. In its anarcho-syndicalist variety it simply wrapped a pure, tough unionism in a torrent of grandiloquent radicalism and a frantic activism which did not favour proletarian reflection or initiative.
Finally, the domination of anarchism and its romantic vision of the revolution were encouraged by the Republic's policy of appropriating to itself the old tendency of the Spanish bourgeoisie to repress and persecute the CNT. This policy gave the CNT an aura of being a victim and of defending a "radical and intransigent heroism" which, in the context of the ideological disorientation of the international proletariat that we have just described, enabled it to integrate into its ranks the best elements of the Spanish proletariat.
In the period 1931-36, when there were enormous convulsions of Spanish capital, the CNT became a huge mass organisation regrouping the core of the living forces of the Spanish proletariat in spite of being persecuted. As we will see in the next article in this series, this enormous force was to contribute to the defeat of the proletariat, to dragging it into the imperialist war that bourgeois factions were already preparing in 1936-39.
RR - C. Mir (1st September 2007)
[1]. See the third article in this series in International Review n° 130, under the sub heading "The defeat of the movement and the second disappearance of the CNT."
[2]. See the second article in this series in the International Review n°129.
[3]. See the first article in this series in the International Review n°128.
[4]. Authoritarian regimes based on a single party were formed mainly in the weakest countries or those suffering most from insoluble contradictions - as in the case of Nazi Germany. On the other hand, in the stronger countries it developed more gradually, more or less respecting the democratic form.
[5]. Primo de Rivera was a conspirator who represented the small Andalusian lords; brutal and arrogant land owners who led an idle life of oriental luxury. However he also had very good relations with the Catalonian shop keepers and business men who were dynamic, active and progressive, supposedly the opposite of the small Andalusian lords.
[6]. Partido Socialista Obrero Español - Spanish Socialist Workers Party.
[7]. Union General de Trabajadores - General Workers Union
[8]. Juan Peiró was a CNT militant from its foundation although he did not hold a responsible position in the organisation until 1919. He was minister for industry during the Republic. He was shot by Franco's authorities in 1942.
[9]. Reference is made to this book with the dates of various editions in the second and third articles in this series (International Review n° 129 and 130).
[10]. He was secretary general of the CNT in the 70s.
[11]. p.177.
[12]. A military conspiracy supported by the CNT, which was to take place on St. John's night (24th June) but which failed because a number of military men backed out at the last minute.
[13]. Ibid, p.181.
[14]. Series of articles entitled "Delimiting the Camps", published in Workers' Social Action, 1929.
[15]. See the first article in the series on revolutionary syndicalism in International Review n°118.
[16]. Author of the book on the CNT in the Spanish Revolution, quoted in the first article in this series.
[17]. Ibid. p. 52,
[18]. In the book already quoted, Gomez Casas relates that General Berenguer sent Mola, the head of Security (he later became one of the most inflexible military putchists) to discuss with the CNT delegate, Pestaña. Gomez Casas notes that during these discussions "Pestaña acknowlwdged the the CNT was basically apolitical and independent on all parties. However the organisation was sympathetic to ‘the regime that was closest to its ideal'" (p. 185). These ambiguous words show that it already wanted to integrate itself into the capitalist state.
[19]. For a more detailed account of this period, see our book , 1936 Franco and the Republic massacre the workers (available in Spanish).
[20]. Ibid, p.52.
[21]. Liberal ideology vaunts " direct action" on the part of "social forces" without "state interference". This is no more than a deception of course because the bosses' organisations and the "workers'" union organisations are forces of the state which work strictly - and it cannot be otherwise - within the economic and legal framework of the state.
[22]. The American bourgeoisie used a similar policy of marginalisation and repression against the IWW (see the International Review n° 125). This is why these union organisations never attained the influence that the CNT had within the Spanish proletariat.
[23]. Editor's note : according to the bourgeoisie there are only two alternatives ; integration into the democratice framework of the bourgeois state or the "radical" path of terrorism and, as Gomez Casas says, the law of the talion. In fact the working class alternative is the autonomous international struggle on its own class terrain., an alternative that is opposed to the alienated alternatives of the bourgeois.
[24]. Ibid, p.164.
[25]. A very committed anarchist, less subtle than Gomez Casas. The following quotations (translated by us) are extracts from his book History of the Spanish Workers' Movement which we have quoted in previous articles.
[26]. The same political orientation was adopted in Madrid and elsewhere against meetings of monarchist circles which were increasingly isolated.
[27]. A Republican oppositional publication to which some of the CNT leaders contributed; leaders such as Peiró who signed the Manifesto of Republican Intelligence.
[28]. Olaya, History of the Spanish Workers' Movement, p.628, editors note.
[29]. Ibid, p. 646.
[30]. Ibid, p. 660).
[31]. Ibid.
[32]. Ibid, p.664.
[33]. Ibid, p.196.
[34]. The Republican parliament which was to adopt the new constitution declaring Spain to be a " Workers' Republic".
[35]. Gomez Casas, op.cit., p.202.
[36]. Ibid., p.203.
[37]. Ibid.
[38]. Ibid. p.200.
[39]. The delegate made reference to the version of marxism presented by the Stalinists and the Social-Democrats, for whom socialism is equivalent to economic and social state control.
[40]. Ibid., p.200.
[41]. Ibid., p.201.
[42]. Ibid., p.200.
[43]. Ibid., p.201
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[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/271/revolutionary-syndicalism
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1936-spain
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/revolutionary-syndicalism
[7] http://www.ibrp.org/english/aurora/10/make_poverty_history_make_capitalism_history
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-workers-organisation
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/marxism-and-ethics
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/368/ethics
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/vercesi-period-of-transition
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/395/communism-agenda-history
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/27/dictatorship-proletariat
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/375/period-transition
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/262/environment
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/readers-letters
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/canada
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/292_solidarity.html
[21] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/02/15.htm
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/128/bilan-period-of-transition
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[24] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/128/cnt-rev-syndicalism
[25] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entente_cordiale
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/123_30years
[28] https://pt.internationalism.org/
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[30] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/297_ricongress
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/content/2042/report-conference-korea-october-2006
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2006-north-korea-nuclear-bomb
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/295_eks_basicpositions
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/content/1772/may-day-day-international-working-class
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/122_conferences
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/122_16congress
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/130/int-sit-resn
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/110_conference.html
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[40] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/111_OT_ConfSol_pt1
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200301/1893/orientation-text-2001-confidence-and-solidarity-proletarian-struggle
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/128/marxism-and-ethics-pt2
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/forum
[44] https://libcom.org/forums/organise/situation-turkey
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[46] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[47] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm
[48] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
[49] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/pov-phil/ch02.htm
[50] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S3
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[53] https://en.internationalism.org/series/271
[54] https://en.internationalism.org/content/1266/international-review-no6-august-1976
[55] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/340/russia-1905
[56] http://www.mcclatchydc.com
[57] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[58] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[59] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/305/july-1917
[60] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students
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[62] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/130/17th-congress-summary
[63] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/orientation-texts
[64] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/129/commy-5-pot