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" [2] .
[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 [3] 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 [4] ", 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 [5] ).
[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 [6]" 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 [7] ", 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 [8] and here [9] .
[5] On the international conferences see our article "International Conferences of the Communist Left (1976-80): lessons of an experience for the proletarian milieu [10] " 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 [11] ".
[8] "Resolution on the international situation [12] " 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 [13] and International Review 114 [14].
[16] See "Confidence and solidarity in the struggle of the proletariat" in International Review no. 111 [15] and no. 112 [16] , and "Marxism and ethics" in International Review no. 127 [17] and no. 128 [18] .
[17] This contribution can be found on the EKS' site [19] and on the Libcom discussion forum [20] .
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. [23]
[2]. Marx. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [24] , Collected Works, Vol. 11.
[3]. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy [25] , Collected Works, Vol. 6.
[4]. Capital, Vol.1, Chapter 1, section 3 [26] .
[5]. Engels AntiDuhring, Chapter III, "Socialism", part IV, "Distribution" [27] . 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 [30]
[2]. See the articles in this series on the IWW in International Review n°124 & 125. [31]
[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 [32] .
[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 [30] .
[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 [33] , 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 [34] 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.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/123_30years
[3] https://pt.internationalism.org/
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/292_brazil_forums.html
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/297_ricongress
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/content/2042/report-conference-korea-october-2006
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2006-north-korea-nuclear-bomb
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/295_eks_basicpositions
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/content/1772/may-day-day-international-working-class
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/122_conferences
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/122_16congress
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/130/int-sit-resn
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/110_conference.html
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/114_congress.html
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/111_OT_ConfSol_pt1
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200301/1893/orientation-text-2001-confidence-and-solidarity-proletarian-struggle
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/marxism-and-ethics
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/128/marxism-and-ethics-pt2
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/forum
[20] https://libcom.org/forums/organise/situation-turkey
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[23] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/p1.htm
[24] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
[25] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/hist-mat/pov-phil/ch02.htm
[26] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S3
[27] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch26.htm
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/395/communism-agenda-history
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/375/period-transition
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/129/CNT-1914-1919
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/series/271
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/118_syndicalism_i.html
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/content/1266/international-review-no6-august-1976
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/340/russia-1905
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/271/revolutionary-syndicalism
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/revolutionary-syndicalism