The relevance of Bilan's method
Following the electoral successes of extreme right parties in France, Belgium, Germany and Austria, or during the violent pogroms carried out by more or less manipulated extreme right-wing gangs against immigrants and refugees in the one-time East Germany, the "democratic" bourgeoisie's propaganda, with the left and leftist parties in the forefront, have once again been brandishing the specter of the "fascist danger".
It is the same tune as at every outrage by the racist and xenophobic scum of the far right. The "forces of democracy", no matter what their political hue, are all unanimous in their condemnation. Everybody loudly condemns the far right's "popular" success at the polls, deplores the population's passivity, which is gladly depicted as sympathy for the thugs' disgusting behavior. The democratic state can then dress up its own repression as the guarantor of "freedom", the only force capable of halting the racist scourge, and or preventing a return to the horrors of fascism. All this is part of the propaganda of the ruling class, which today is calling for the defense of capitalist "democracy", in continuity with the ideological campaigns vaunting the "triumph of capitalism and the end of communism".
These "anti-fascist" campaigns are in fact largely based on two lies: the first claims that the institutions of bourgeois democracy and the political forces that defend it are in some way ramparts against "totalitarian dictatorship", while the second pretends that the emergence of fascist regimes is a real prospect in Western Europe today.
Against these lies, the lucidity of the revolutionaries of the 1930s allows to understand better the reality of today's historic course, as we can see from the article by Bilan, extracts of which are reproduced here.
This article was written almost sixty years ago, in the midst of the Nazi victory in Germany and one year before the arrival of the Popular Front in power in France. Its analysis of the attitude of the "democratic forces" to the rise of fascism in Germany, and of the historic preconditions for the triumph of such regimes, is still completely valid in the struggle against the supporters of "anti-fascism".
The Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party, forced into exile (especially in France) by Mussolini's fascist regime, defended against the entire "workers' movement" of the day, the proletariat's independent struggle for the defense of its interests and its revolutionary perspective: the fight against capitalism in its entirety.
Against those who urge the workers to support the bourgeoisie's democratic forces to prevent an upsurge of fascism, Bilan demonstrated how in reality the "democratic" institutions and political forces, far from serving as a rampart against fascism in Germany, in fact prepared its arrival:
" ... there is a perfect, organic continuity in the process that leads from Weimar to Hitler". Bilan made it clear that the Hitler regime was not an aberration, but a form of capitalism made both possible and necessary by historic conditions: " ... fascism has thus been built on the dual foundation of proletarian defeats and the imperious demands of an economy driven to the wall by a profound economic crisis" .
Fascism in Germany, like the "emergency powers democracy" in France, expressed the acceleration during the 1930's of state control ("disciplinisation", as Bilan called it) over the whole of capitalist social and economic life, confronted with an unprecedented economic crisis which· sharpened inter-imperialist antagonisms. But the fact that this tendency was concretely expressed in fascism, rather than in "emergency powers democracy", was determined by the balance of forces between the main classes in society: the bourgeoisie and the working class. For Bilan, the establishment of fascism was based on the previous defeat of the proletariat, both physically and ideologically. Fascism's task in Germany and Italy was to finish off the crushing of the proletariat already begun by the "social-democracy".
Those who prattle today about 'the imminent threat of fascism, apart from the fact that they are copying the anti-proletarian policies of the "anti-fascists" of the 1930's, "forget" this historical condition highlighted by Bilan. Today's generations of workers, especially in Western Europe, have neither been defeated physically, nor subdued ideologically. In these conditions, the bourgeoisie cannot do without the weapons of "democratic order". Official propaganda waves the fascist scarecrow, the better to tie the exploited class to the established order, and its "democratic" capitalist dictatorship.
In this text, Bilan still speaks of the USSR as a "workers' state", and of the Communist Parties as "centrist". It was not until World War II that the Italian Left adopted a final analysis of the capitalist nature of the USSR and the Stalinist parties. Nonetheless, this did not prevent these revolutionaries, by the 1930's, from denouncing the Stalinists, vigorously and without hesitation, as forces "working for the consolidation of the capitalist world as a whole", and as "an element in the fascist victory". Bilan was working in the midst of the rout of the proletariat's revolutionary struggle, and right at the beginning of an enormous theoretical task, of analyzing critically the greatest revolutionary experience in history: the Russian revolution. It was still full of confusions linked to revolutionaries' enormous devotion to this unique experience, but it was nonetheless a precious and irreplaceable moment in revolutionary political clarification. It was a crucial stage, whose method remains entirely valid today: the method of analyzing reality without any concessions, from the historic and worldwide viewpoint of the proletarian struggle.
ICC
The crushing defeat of the German proletariat and the rise of fascism
Bilan no. 16, March 1935
Only through the critical analysis of post-war events, of revolutionary victories and defeats, will we be able to a historical vision of the present period, a vision global enough to embrace all the fundamental phenomena that it expresses. While it is true to say that the Russian revolution lies at the centre of our critique, we must immediately add that Germany is the most important link in the chain that today is strangling the world proletariat.
In Russia, the structural weakness of capitalism, and the consciousness of the Russian proletariat represented by the Bolsheviks, prevented an immediate concentration of the world bourgeoisie's forces around one threatened sector. In Germany, by contrast, all the events since the war reveal this intervention, made easier by the strength of its democratic traditions and the speed with which the proletariat became aware of its tasks.
The events in Germany (from the crushing of the Spartakists to the arrival of fascism) already contain a critique of October 1917. They demonstrate capitalism's response to positions which were often less developed than those which made possible the Bolsheviks' victory. This is why a serious analysis of Germany should begin with an examination of the theses of the 3rd and 4th Congresses of the Communist International; these contain elements which, rather than going beyond the Russian revolution, are determined by their opposition to the ferocious assault by bourgeois forces against the world revolution. These Congresses put forward positions for the defense of the proletariat grouped around the Soviet state, when in fact the destruction of the capitalist world required a constantly growing offensive of workers in all countries, and at the same time an ideological advance by their international organization. The events of 1923 in Germany were stifled precisely thanks to these positions, which were directly against the workers' revolutionary efforts. These events were in themselves the most striking disavowal of the Congresses.
Germany has clearly proven the inadequacy of the ideological heritage bequeathed by the Bolsheviks; it is not just their efforts that were inadequate, but those of communists all over the world, and especially in Germany. So, when and where has any historical critique been made of the Spartakists ideological and political struggle? In our opinion, apart from a few stale repetitions of Lenin's general appreciations, nothing has been done. It is thought enough to castigate "Luxemburgism", and to denounce the crimes of Noske and Scheidemann, but there is not a trace of any serious analysis. And yet, if 1917 contains a categorical negation of bourgeois democracy, 1919 does so on a far more advanced level. While the Bolsheviks proved that the proletarian party can be a victorious guide only if it rejects, during its formation, any dilution by opportunist currents, the events of 1923 have proved that the fusion of the Spartakists with the Independents [ie, the USPD: translator's note] at Halle only injected greater confusion into the Communist Party [the KPD] before the decisive battle.
To sum up, instead of raising the level of the proletarian struggle above that of October, and of rejecting still more profoundly the forms of capitalist domination and any compromise with the forces of the enemy in preparation for an imminent revolutionary assault, lowering the proletariat's positions beneath those which had ensured the triumph of the Russian workers could only make the regroupment of the capitalist forces easier. In this sense, comrade Bordiga's position against parliamentarism at the 2nd Congress was an attempt to push forward the attacking positions of the world proletariat, while Lenin's position was an attempt to use in a revolutionary way a historically outmoded position in a situation which did not yet contain all the elements for an attack. Events proved Bordiga right, not on this point, but on a critical appreciation of the German events of 1919, which aimed to enlarge the proletariat's destructive effort before new battles which were to decide the fate of the proletarian state and the world revolution.
In this article, we will try to examine the evolution of the German proletariat's class positions, in order to highlight the principals which can complete the contributions of the Bolsheviks, criticize the latter's mechanical application to new situations, and contribute to a general critique of events since the war.
oOo
In Article 165 of the Weimar Republic's constitution, we find the following passage: "Workers and employees collaborate [in the workers' councils] on an equal footing with the employers, in the regulation of questions relating to wages and working conditions, and to the general economic development of the productive forces". We could not better characterize a period where the German bourgeoisie had understood that not only did it have to widen its political organization to the most extreme democracy, even to the point of recognizing the "Rate" [workers' councils], it also had to give the workers the illusion of economic power. From 1919 to 1923, the proletariat felt that it was the dominant political force in the Reich. Since the war, the trades unions incorporated into the state apparatus had become pillars supporting the whole capitalist edifice, and the only elements capable of directing the proletariat's efforts towards the reconstruction of the German economy and a stable apparatus of capitalist domination. The bourgeois democracy demanded by the social-democracy proved here to be the only means of preventing the development of the workers' struggle towards revolution, spurring it instead towards a political power that was in reality led by the bourgeoisie with the support of the trades unions, and aimed at setting industry back on its feet. This period saw the blooming of the "the world's first social legislation": labor contracts, the enterprise cells which sometimes tended to oppose the reformist trades unions, or even concentrate the workers' revolutionary efforts as for example in the Ruhr during 1921-22. In Germany, reconstruction carried out in the midst of such an upsurge of workers' liberties and rights led, as we now know, to the inflation of 1923, where there appeared at the same time the difficulty for a defeated and terribly impoverished capitalism to set its productive apparatus in motion again, and the reaction of a proletariat seeing its real wages, its "kolossal" social legislation, and its apparent political power, all reduced to nothing. If the German proletariat was beaten in 1923, despite the "workers' governments" of Saxony and Thuringia, despite an influential Communist Party, that was not yet gangrened by opportunism and moreover was still led by veteran Spartakists, and despite the favorable conditions created by the difficult position of German imperialism, then the reasons for this defeat must be sought in Moscow, in the theses of the 3rd and 4th Congresses, which were accepted by the Spartakists, but which far from completing the 1919 "Spartakus Program" did not come up to the same level as the latter. Despite occasional ambiguities, Rosa Luxemburg's speech contains a ferocious negation of capitalism's democratic forces, a real economic and political perspective and not just vague "workers governments" and united fronts with counter-revolutionary parties.
In our opinion, the defeat of 1923 is the revenge of events for the stagnation of communism's critical thought; it was prepared to apply theories mechanically, refusing to extract from real life new programmatic rules, while world capitalism, by occupying the Ruhr at the same time came objectively to the aid of the German bourgeoisie by determining a wave of nationalism capable of channeling, or at least obscuring the consciousness of the workers, and even of the leaders of the Communist Party.
Once this dangerous moment had been passed, German capitalism benefited at last from the financial help of countries like the USA, which were now convinced that any danger revolutionary had for the moment disappeared. There followed an unprecedented movement of industrial and financial concentration and centralization, on the basis of a frantic rationalization, while Stresemann headed a series of socialist or "socialistic" governments. The social-democracy supported this structural consolidation of a capitalism which was trying, by imposing a tighter discipline on the workers, to gather the strength to confront its Versailles opponents, and distracted the workers with the myths of economic democracy, the preservation of national industry, the advantages of negotiating with fewer bosses, and the first steps to socialism that this represented.
During 1925-26, until the first symptoms of the world crisis appeared, the organization of the German economy grew apace. We might almost say that German capitalism, which had been able to stand against the entire world thanks to its industrial strength and the militarization of a fabulously powerful economic apparatus, continued, once the post-war social upheaval was over, with the ultra-centralized economic organization indispensable in the phase of inter-imperialist war, and that it did so thanks to a continued organization of a war economy, under the pressure of the difficulties in the world economy as a whole. Already, 1926 saw the formation of the great Konzerns: the Stahlwerein, IG Farben-industrie, the Siemens electricity Konzern, the Allgemeine Electrizitat Gesellschaft whose formation was made easier by inflation and the resulting rise in industrial shares.
Even before the war, Germany's economic organization - the Cartels, the Konzerns, the fusion of financial and industrial capital - had reached a very high level. But from 1926 onwards, the movement accelerated and Konzerns like Thyssen, the Rheinelbe-Union, Phoenix, Rheinische Stahlwerke, came together to form the Stahwerein which controlled the coal industry and all its subsidiary products, as well as everything to do with the steel industry. The Thomas smelters requiring iron ore (which Germany had lost with the Lorraine and Upper Silesia) were replaced by Siemens-Martin smelters capable of using scrap iron.
These Konzerns soon gained a tight control over the entire German economy, and set themselves up as a dam, against which the proletariat's strength was broken. Their development was accelerated by the investment of American capital and partly by orders from Russia. But from this moment on, the proletariat, which in 1923 had lost any illusions in its real political power, was drawn into a decisive struggle. The social-democracy supported German capitalism, demonstrated that the Konzerns were socialism in embryonic form, and advocated conciliatory labor contracts as the road towards economic democracy. The CP underwent its "Bolshevization", which led to the idea of "social fascism" and was to coincide with the five year plans in Russia, but which led it to play a role similar - though not identical - to that of the social-democracy.
Nonetheless, it was during this epoch of rationalization, and of the formation of the gigantic Konzerns, that there appeared in Germany the economic bases and the social necessity for the arrival of fascism in 1933. The increased concentration of masses of proletarians as a result of the tendencies of capitalism, a costly social legislation offered as bait to avoid dangerous revolutionary movements, permanent unemployment unsettling social relations, heavy cost abroad (Reparations), all demanded continued attacks on wages already forced down by inflation. Above all, what brought on the domination of fascism was the threat from the proletariat after the war, and which it still represented. Thanks to the social-democracy, capitalism had managed to survive this threat, but it still needed a political structure which corresponded to the discipline required on the economic terrain. Just as the unification of the Reich was preceded by the industrial concentration and centralization of 1865-70, so the revival of fascism was preceded by a highly imperialist reorganization of the German economy, which was necessary to save the whole ruling class from the effects of Versailles. When people today talk about fascist economic interventionism, about "its" managed economy, "its" autarchy, they deform reality. Fascism is merely the social structure which proved necessary to capitalism at the end of a whole social and economic evolution. German capitalism could hardly bring fascism to power in 1919, in its then lamentable state of decomposition, especially faced with the proletarian menace. This is why the Kapp putsch was fully conscious of its own weakness, which made it withdraw during the factory occupations, and put its fate in the hands of the socialists, only to react quickly once the storm was past, and bring in the fascist regime.
In short, all the fascist economic "innovations" are nothing but an accentuation of the increase in economic discipline and of the links between the state and the great Konzerns (the nomination of commissars to various branches of industry): a consecration of the war economy.
Democracy cannot be the banner of capitalist domination in an economy shattered by war, shaken by the proletariat, and whose centralization is a position of resistance in preparation for a new slaughter, a way of transposing onto the world level its own internal contrasts; this is all the more true in that democracy supposes a certain mobility in economic and political relationships, which although it revolves around the maintenance of class privileges nonetheless gives every class a feeling that it can raise itself up. In the German economy's post-war development, the Konzerns link to the state, and requiring of the latter that it repay the concessions which had been wrung out of them by the struggle of the working class, removed any possibility of democracy's survival, since the perspective was no longer one of juicy colonial exploitation, but of a bitter struggle against the Versailles treaty and its reparations rather than for a right to a place in the world market. This path was one of a brutal and violent struggle against the proletariat, and here, as well as from the economic viewpoint. German capital showed the way which other countries were to take by other means. It is obvious that without the aid of world capital, German capitalism would never have been able to carry out its objectives. For the workers to be crushed, it was necessary to remove all the American labels preventing the exclusive exploitation of the workers by the German bourgeoisie; consent to moratoria on debt repayments; and in the end, abandon the payment of Reparations. It was also necessary that the Soviet state intervene, abandoning the German workers for its five year plans, and confusing their struggle, to become in the end an element of the fascist victory.
An examination of the situation from March 1923 to March 1933 allows us to understand that there is a perfect, organic continuity in the process that leads from Weimar to Hitler. The defeat of the workers came in the midst of the full flowering of the Weimar "socialistic" bourgeois democracy, and allowed capitalism to reconstitute its forces. And so, little by little the vice was tightened. Soon it was Hindendurg, in 1925, who became the defender of the Constitution, and as capitalism rebuilt its armor, so democracy became more and more restricted. Although it might widen in moment of social tension, even to the point of allowing socialist coalition governments (H. Muller), the more socialists and centrists increased the workers' confusion, the more it tended to disappear (the Bruning government and its rule by decree), to give way, in the end to a fascism which encountered no resistance from the working class. No opposition appeared between democracy's finest flower - Weimar - and fascism: one made it possible to crush the threat of revolution, dispersed the proletariat and befuddled its consciousness; the other, once the job was done, finished it off as capitalism's iron heel, bringing about the rigid unity of capitalist society on the basis of a complete suffocation of any proletarian threat.
We are not going to imitate all the scribblers and pedants who try to "correct" history with hindsight, and try to find an explanation of some formula or other. It is obvious that the German proletariat could not conquer unless it could liberate the Communist International (through its left fractions) from the disintegrating influence of centrism, and regroup around slogans which rejected any form of democracy or "proletarian nationalism", in defense of its own interests and conquests. From this point of view, the position of "social-fascism" did not go beyond the democratic swamp, since it did not explain the unfolding of events but only confused them, although it was an explanation of the trade union split carried out in the name of RUO[1]. No struggle for a united democratic front could save the proletariat, only a struggle that rejected it; but such a struggle was bound to be dissipated once it was attached to a proletarian state working for the consolidation of the capitalist world as a whole.
If today we can speak of the "nazification" of "democratic" capitalist states with "emergency powers", then it would have been correct to use this description of capitalist evolution in Germany, if by that we mean the gradual contraction of democracy until it got to March 1933. Democracy played a vital part in this historic course, and disappeared under the blows of fascism when it proved impossible to stifle the fermentation of the masses without another mass movement. Germany, more than Italy, already shows us a legal transition from Von Papen to Schleicher, and from the latter to Hitler, all under the aegis of the defender of the Weimar constitution, Hinderburg. But, as in Italy, the fermentation of the masses required other masses to demolish the workers' organizations and decimate the workers' movement. It is possible that the development of the situation in our countries still marks a certain progression relative to these experiences, and that the "emergency powers democracies", which do not confront proletariats which have carried out large-scale revolutionary assaults, and which moreover enjoy a privileged (colonial) situation relative to Germany and Italy, may succeed both in disciplining the economy and stifling the proletariat without being forced to sweep away entirely the traditional democratic forces, which will moreover make an appreciable effort to adapt (the CGT plan in France, the de Man plan in Belgium).
Fascism cannot be explained either as a distinct class under capitalism, nor as an emanation of the exasperated middle class. It is the form of domination that capitalism adopts when it is no longer able, through democracy, to rally all the classes in society around the defense of its own privileges. It does not bring it with it a new form of social organization, but a superstructure appropriate to a highly developed economy compelled to destroy the proletariat politically in order to annihilate any correspondence between the ever-sharper contrasts rending capitalism apart, and the workers' revolutionary consciousness. Statisticians may talk about the substantial number of petty-bourgeois in Germany (five million, including state employees), to try to represent fascism as "their" movement. The fact remains that the petty bourgeoisie is caught in a situation where it is crushed by the productive forces and thereby made to understand its own impotence. With social antagonisms polarized around the two main classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, the petty bourgeoisie cannot even waver from one to the other, but instinctively gravitates towards whichever class guarantees his hierarchical position in the social scale. Rather than standing up to capitalism, the petty bourgeois, whether he be a starched-collar employee or shopkeeper, is naturally drawn to the social armor which he thinks solid enough to maintain "law and order", and respect for his own dignity, in opposition to workers' struggles without any perspective, and which only confuse the situation. But if the proletariat stands up and goes on the attack, the petty bourgeois can only keep his head down and accept the inevitable. To present fascism as the movement of the petty bourgeoisie is therefore to deny historical reality, by hiding its real breeding ground. Fascism channels all the contrasts that endanger capitalism, towards its consolidation. It contains the petty bourgeois' desire for calm, the exasperation of the starving unemployed, the blind hatred of the disoriented worker, and above all the capitalist's determination to eliminate any element that might disturb a militarized economy, and to reduce to the minimum the cost of maintaining a permanent army of unemployed.
In Germany, fascism has thus been built on the dual foundation of proletarian defeats and the imperious demands of an economy driven to the wall by a profound economic crisis. It grew especially under Bruning, while the workers' proved incapable of defending their wages from ferocious attacks, and the unemployed their dole from the blows of government decrees. The Nazis build their own cells in the factories and the construction sites, and did not even hesitate to make use of strikes for economic demands, convinced that these would not go too far thanks to the socialists and centrists; and just as the proletariat was half defeated, in November 1932 when Von Papen had just dismissed the socialist government of Prussia and was about to call elections, there broke out the public transport strike in Berlin, led by Nazis and communists. This strike divided the Berlin proletariat, because the communists proved incapable of expelling the fascists and widening the strike to make it a signal for revolutionary struggle. The disintegration of the German proletariat was accompanied on the by a development of fascism, turning the workers own weapons against them, and on the other by economic measures in favor of capitalism. (We should remember here that it was Von Papen who adopted the measures of support of industries which took on the unemployed, giving them the right to lower wages).
In short, Hitler's victory in 1933 did not need any violence: it was brought to fruition by the socialists and centrists, a normal result of the outmoded democratic form. Violence was only useful after the arrival of the fascists in power, not in response to a proletarian attack, but to prevent it forever. Disintegrated and dispersed by force, the proletariat was to become an active element in the consolidation of a society oriented towards war. This is why the fascists could not simply tolerate the class antagonisms, even though they were led by traitors, but on the contrary had to wipe out the slightest trace of the class struggle, in order to pulverize the workers and transform them into the blind instruments of German capitalism's imperialist ambitions.
We can consider 1933 as marking the phase of systematic fascist domination. The trade unions were wiped out, and replaced with the enterprise councils controlled by the government. In January 1934, this work was given the final juridical seal of approval: the Labor Charter, which regulates wages, forbids strikes, institutionalizes the omnipotence of the bosses and Nazi commissars, and completes the fusion of the centralized economy with the state.
In fact, whereas Italian capitalism took several years to give birth to its "corporatist state", the more developed German capitalism did so more rapidly. The backward state of the Italian economy, in comparison with the Reich, made it difficult to build a social structure capable of repressing automatically any workers' resistance: by contrast, Germany's economy is of a much higher type, and it was able immediately to discipline the social relations closely linked to the branches of production controlled by the state commissars.
In these conditions, the German proletariat - like the Italian - no longer has an independent existence. To recover its class consciousness, it will have to wait until new situations rip apart the straitjacket that capitalism has forced on it. In the meantime, this is certainly not the moment to sound off about utopian possibilities of carrying out illegal mass work in the fascist countries, which has already delivered many heroic comrades into the hands of the executioners of Rome and Berlin. We must consider the old organizations which claim to be proletarian dissolved by the grip of capitalism, and go on to a theoretical work of historical analysis. This is the precondition for the reconstruction of new organisms which will be able to lead the proletariat towards victory, through the living critique of the past.
[1] The Revolutionary Union Organization was part of the Comintern
In the previous article in this series, we saw how, in order to define the ultimate goals of the communist social transformation, Marx in his early work examined the problem of alienated labor. In particular, we concluded that, for Marx, capitalist wage labor was both the highest expression of man's estrangement from his real powers and capacities, and the premise for the supersession of this alienation, for the emergence of a truly human society. In this chapter we intend to look at the actual contours of a fully developed communist society as traced by Marx in his early writings, a picture given more depth, but never renounced in the work of the mature Marx.
Having examined the various facets of man's alienation, the next task Marx took up in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts was to criticize the crude and inadequate conceptions of communism which predominated in the proletarian movement of his time. As we showed in the first article in this series, Marx rejected the conceptions inherited from Babeuf and still propagated by the followers of Blanqui because they tended to present communism as a general leveling-down, as a negation of culture in which "the category of worker is not abolished but extended to all men" (EPM, 'Private property and communism'). In this conception, all were to become wage laborers under the domination of a collective capital, of "the community as universal capitalist" (ibid). Marx's rejection of such conceptions was already an anticipation of the arguments used by latter-day revolutionaries to demonstrate the capitalist nature of the so-called 'Communist' regimes of the ex -eastern bloc (even if the latter were the monstrous offspring of a bourgeois counter-revolution rather than expressions of an immature working class movement).
Marx also criticized more "democratic", more sophisticated versions of communism, such as those put forward by Considerant and others, because they were "still of a political nature", ie, they did not propose a radical alteration in social relations, and were thus "still held captive and contaminated by private property" (ibid).
Against these restrictive or deformed definitions, Marx was anxious to show that communism was not the general reduction of all men to an uncultured philistinism, but the elevation of humanity to its highest creative capacities. This communism, as Marx announced in a passage often quoted but seldom analyzed, set itself the most exalted goals:
"Communism is the positive supersession of private property as human self-estrangement, and hence the true appropriation of the human essence through and for man; it is the complete restoration of man to himself as a social, ie human, being, a restoration which has become conscious and which takes place within the entire wealth of previous periods of development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature, and between man and man, the true resolution of the conflict between existence and being, between objectification and self-affirmation, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution to the riddle of history and knows itself to be the solution" (EPM, ibid).
Crude communism had grasped, correctly enough, that the cultural realizations of previous societies had been posited on the exploitation of man by man. But in doing so, it wrongly rejected these achievements. Marx's communism, on the contrary, sought to appropriate, to bring to their real fruition, all the previous cultural and, if we may use the term, spiritual strivings of humanity, freeing them of the distortions with which they had inevitably been encrusted in class society. By turning these achievements into the common property of all mankind, it would fuse them into a higher and more universal synthesis. It was a profoundly dialectical vision, which, even before Marx had developed a clear understanding of the communal forms of society which had preceded the formation of class divisions, recognized that historical evolution, particularly in its final, capitalist phase, had robbed and deprived man of his original, 'natural' social connections. But what Marx aimed at was not a simple return to a lost primitive simplicity, but the conscious attainment of man's social being, an accession to a higher level which integrated all the advances contained in the movement of history.
By the same token, this communism, rather than merely generalizing the alienation imposed on the proletariat by capitalist social relations, saw itself as the "positive supersession" of the multiple contradictions and alienations that have hitherto plagued mankind.
As we saw in the previous chapter, Marx's critique of alienated labor had various aspects:
Marx's first definitions of communism approached these aspects of alienation from different angles, but always with the concern to show that communism provided a concrete and positive solution to these ills. In the concluding passage of his 'Excerpts from James Mill's Elements of Political Economy', a commentary written in the same period as the EPM, Marx explains why the replacement of capitalist wage labor, which produces for profit alone, by associated labor producing for human need, provides the basis for going beyond the alienations enumerated above:
"In the framework of private property labor is the alienation of life since I work in order to live, in order to procure for myself the means of life. My labor is not life ... In the framework of private property my individuality has been alienated to the point where I loathe this activity, it is torture for me. It is in fact no more than the appearance of activity and for that reason it is only a forced labor imposed on me not through an inner necessity but through an external arbitrary need." Against this, Marx asks us to "suppose that we had produced as human beings. In that event each of us would have doubly affirmed himself and his neighbor in his production. (1) In my production I would have objectified the specific character of my individuality and for that reason I would both have enjoyed the expression of my own individual life during my activity and also, in contemplating the object, I would experience an individual pleasure, I would experience my personality as an objectively sensuously perceptible power beyond all shadow of doubt. (2) In your use or enjoyment of my product I would have the immediate satisfaction and knowledge that in my labor I had gratified a human need, ie, that I had objectified human nature and hence had procured an object corresponding to the needs of another human being. (3) I would have acted for you as the mediator between you and the species, thus I would be acknowledged by you as the complement of your own being, as an essential part of yourself. I would thus know myself to be confirmed both in your thoughts and your love. (4) In the individual expression of my own life, I would have brought about the immediate expression of your life, and so in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realized my authentic nature, my human, communal nature.
Our productions would be as many mirrors from which our natures would shine forth.
My labor would be the free expression and hence the enjoyment of life ... ".
Thus, for Marx, human beings would only be producing in a human way when each individual was able to find genuine fulfillment in his work: the fulfillment that comes from the active enjoyment of the productive act; from producing objects which not only have a real use for other human beings but which are also worthy of contemplation in themselves, because they have been produced, to use a phrase from the EPM "according to the laws of beauty"; from working in common, and to a common end, with one's fellow human beings.
Here it becomes clear that for Marx, production for need, which is one of the defining characteristics of communism, is far more than the simple negation of capitalist commodity production, production for profit. From its beginning, the accumulation of wealth as capital has meant the accumulation of poverty for the exploited; in the epoch of moribund capitalism, this is doubly so, and today it is more obvious than ever that the abolition of commodity production is a precondition for the very survival of humanity. But for Marx, production for need was never a mere minimum, a purely quantitative satisfaction of the elementary needs for food, shelter etc. Production for need was also the reflection of man's need to produce - for the act of production as delightful and sensual activity, as the celebration of mankind's essential communality. This is a position that Marx never altered. As the 'mature' Marx put it in the Critique of the Gotha Program (1874) for example, when he talks about "a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but itself life's prime want; after the productive forces, have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly .... "
" ... after labor has become not only a means of life but itself life's prime want ... ". Such affirmations are crucial in replying to a typical argument of bourgeois ideology - that if the incentive of monetary gain is removed, there is simply no motive for the individual, or society as a whole, to produce anything. Again, a fundamental element of the reply is to point to the fact that without the abolition of wage labor, the simple survival of the proletariat, of humanity itself, will be untenable. But this remains a purely negative argument unless communists insist that in the future society the main motive for work is that it will have become "life's main want", "the enjoyment of life" - the central core of human activity and the fulfillment of man's most essential desires.
Notice how Marx, in the latter citation, begins his description of the higher phase of communist society by envisaging the abolition of the "enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and with it also the antithesis between mental and physical labor". This is a constant theme in Marx's denunciation of capitalist wage labor. In the first volume of Capital, for example, he spends page after page fulminating against the way that work in the factories of the bourgeoisie reduced the worker to a mere fragment of himself; the way that it turned men into bodies without heads and others into heads without bodies; the way that specialization had degraded labor to the repetition of the most mechanical and mind-numbing actions. But this polemic against the division of labor is there in the early work also, and it is clear from this point on that, with Marx, there could be no talk of overcoming the alienation implicit in the wage system unless there was a profound reversal of the existing division of labor. A famous passage from The German Ideology deals with this point:
" ... the division of labor offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labor comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic" (from Part One, Feuerbach: section headed 'Private property and communism').
This wonderful picture of daily life in a highly evolved communist society does of course employ a certain poetic license, but it conveys the essential point: given the development of the productive forces that capitalism itself has brought about, there is absolutely no need for any human being to spend the best part of their lives in the confines of a single kind of activity - above all in the kind of activity that only gives expression to a tiny fraction of that individual's real capacities. By the same token, we are talking about the abolition of the ancient division between the tiny minority of individuals privileged to live by really creative and rewarding work, and a vast majority condemned to experience labor as the alienation of life:
"The exclusive concentration of artistic talent in particular individuals, and its suppression in the broad mass which is bound up with this, is a consequence of the division of labor with a communist organization of society, there disappears the subordination of the artist to local and national narrowness, which arises entirely from the division of labor, and also the subordination of the artist to some definite art, thanks to which he is exclusively a painter, sculptor, etc, the very name of his activity adequately expressing the narrowness of his professional development and his dependence on the division of labor. In a communist society there are no painters but at most people who engage in painting among other activities" (German Ideology, part three, section headed' Artistic talent').
The heroic image of bourgeois society in its youthful dawn is that of the Renaissance Man - individuals like Da Vinci who combined the talents of artist, scientist and philosopher. But such men could only be exceptional examples, extraordinary geniuses, in a society whose art and science was sustained by the backbreaking toil of the vast majority. Marx's vision of communism is that of an entire society of 'Renaissance Men'[2]
For that breed of 'socialist' whose function is to reduce socialism to a mild cosmetic change within the existing system of exploitation, such visions can never be a real anticipation of humanity's future. To the supporter of 'realistic' socialism (ie state capitalism a la social democracy, Stalinism or Trotskyism), they are indeed nothing but visions, unrealizable utopian dreams. But for those who are convinced that communism is both a necessity and a possibility, the sheer audacity of Marx's conception of communism, its adamant refusal to put up with the mediocre and the second rate, can only be an inspiration and a stimulus to carry on the unrelenting struggle against capitalist society. And the fact is that Marx's descriptions of the ultimate goals of communism are daring in the extreme, far more so than the 'realists' usually suspect, for they not only look forward to the profound objective changes involved in the communist transformation (production for use, abolition of the division of labour, etc); they also delve into the subjective changes that communism will bring about, positing a dramatic alteration in man's very perception and sense experience.
Here again Marx's method is to begin with the real, concrete problem posed by capitalism and point to the resolution contained in the existing contradictions of society. In this case, he describes the way that the reign of private property restricts man's capacity for real sensuous enjoyment. In the first place, this restriction is a consequence of simple material poverty, which dulls the senses, reduces all the basic functions of life to their animal level, and prevents human beings from realizing their real creative powers:
"Sense which is a prisoner of crude practical need has only a restricted sense. For a man who is starving the human form of food does not exist, only its abstract form exists; it could just as well be present in its crudest form, and it would be hard to say how this way of eating differs from that of animals. The man who is burdened with worries and needs has no sense for the finest of plays .... " (EPM, 'Private property and communism').
By contrast, "the senses of social man are different from those of non-social man. Only through the objectively unfolded wealth of human nature can the wealth of subjective human sensitivity - a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form, in short senses capable of human gratification - be either cultivated or created ... the society that is fully developed produces man in all the richness of his being, the rich man who is profoundly and abundantly endowed with all the senses, as its constant reality" (ibid).
But it is not only quantifiable material deprivation that restricts the free play of the senses. It is something more deeply entrenched by the society of private property, the society of alienation. It is the "stupidity" induced by this society, which convinces us that nothing is 'really real' until we own it:
"Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it etc, in short when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only as means of life, and the life they serve is the life of private property, labor and capitalization. Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses - the sense of having" (ibid).
And, once again, in contrast to this: " ... the positive supersession of private property, ie the sensuous appropriation of the human essence and human life, of objective man and of human works by and for man, should not be understood only in the sense of direct, one-sided consumption, of possession, of having. Man appropriates his integral essence in an integral way, as a total man. All his human relations to the world - seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling, thinking, contemplating, sensing, wanting, acting, loving - in short all the organs of his individuality, like the organs which are directly communal in form, are in their objective approach or in their approach to the object the appropriation of that object ... The supersession of private property is therefore the complete emancipation of all human senses and attributes; but it is this emancipation precisely because these senses and attributes helve become human, subjectively as well as objectively. The eye has become a human eye, just as its object has become a social, human object, made by man for man. The senses have therefore become theoreticians in their immediate praxis. They relate to the thing for its own sake, but the thing itself is an objective human relation to itself and to man and vice versa. Need or enjoyment 'helve therefore lost their egoistic nature, and nature has lost its mere utility in the sense that its use has become human use" (ibid).
Interpreting these passages in all their depth and complexity would take a book in itself. But what is clear straight away is that, for Marx, the replacement of alienated labor by a really human form of production would lead to a fundamental modification in man's state of consciousness. The liberation of the species from the crippling costs of the struggle against scarcity, the transcendence of the anxiety and craving bound up with the rule of private property, release man's senses from their prison and enable him to see, hear, and feel in a new way. It is difficult to discuss such forms of consciousness, because they are not 'merely' rational: i.e., they have not regressed to a point prior to the development of reason - they have gone beyond rational thought as it has hitherto been conceived as a separate and isolated activity, attaining a condition in which "Man is affirmed in the objective world not only in thought but with all the senses" (ibid).
One way of understanding such inner transformations is to refer to the state of inspiration that lies at the heart of any great work of art[3]. In his inspired state, the painter or poet, dancer or singer, is granted. a glimpse of a world transfigured, a world of resplendent color and sound, a world of heightened significance which makes our 'normal' state of perception seem partial, blinkered and even unreal - rightly so, when we recall that 'normality' is precisely the normality of alienation. Of all the poets, perhaps William Blake has succeeded best in conveying the distinction between the 'normal' state, in which "man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern", and the inspired state which, in Blake's messianic but in many ways very materialist perspective, "will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment" and by cleansing the "doors of perception". If humanity could only accomplish this, "everything would appear to man as it is, infinite" (from 'The marriage of heaven and hell').
The analogy with the artist is by no means fortuitous. When he was writing the EPM, Marx's most valued friend was the poet Heine, or that all his life Marx was a passionate devotee of the works of Homer, Shakespeare, Balzac and other great writers. For him, such figures, with their unbounded creativity, served as enduring models of humanity's true potential. As we have seen, Marx's goal was a society where such levels of creativity would be a 'normal' human attribute; it follows therefore that the heightened state of sense perception described in the EPM would increasingly become social humanity's 'normal' state of consciousness.
Later on in Marx's work, the analogy for creative activity is less with the artist than with the scientist, but the essential remains: liberation from drudgery, the overcoming of the separation between work and free time, produces a new human subject:
"It goes without saying ... that labor time cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy ... Free time - which is both idle time and time for higher activity - has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and at the same time, practice, experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. For both, in so far as labor requires practical use of the hands and free bodily movement, as in agriculture, at the same time exercise" (Grundrisse, The chapter on Capital; section headed 'Real saving - economy = saving of labor time = development of productive force. Suspension of the contradiction between free time and labor time').
The awakening of the senses by free human activity also entails the overturning of the individual's relationship with the social and natural world around him. This is the problem Marx is referring to when he argues that communism will resolve the contradictions "between man and nature ... between objectification and self-affirmation ... between individual and species". As we saw in the chapter on alienation, Hegel, in his examination of the relationship between subject and object in human consciousness, recognized that man's unique capacity to see himself as a separate subject was experienced as an alienation: the 'other', the objective world, both human and natural, appeared to him as hostile and alien. But Hegel's error was to see this as an absolute rather than a historical product; as a result he could see no way round it except in the rarified spheres of philosophical speculation. For Marx, on the other hand, man's labor had created the subject-object distinction, the separation between man and nature, individual and species. But labor hitherto had been "man's coming to being within alienation" (EPM, 'Critique of the Hegelian philosophy'). And that is why, up until now, the distinction between subject and object had also been experienced as an alienation. This process, as we have seen, had reached its most advanced point with the lonely, atomized ego of capitalist society; but capitalism had also established the basis for the practical resolution of this estrangement. In the free, creative activity of communism, Marx saw the basis for a state of being in which man sees nature as human and himself as natural; a state in which the subject has achieved a conscious unity with the object: .
" ... it is only when objective reality universally becomes for man in society the reality of man's essential powers, becomes human reality, and thus the reality of his own essential powers, that all objects become for him the objectification of himself, objects that confirm and realize his individuality, his objects, ie he himself becomes the object" (EPM, 'Private property and communism').
In his comments on the EPM, Bordiga was particularly insistent on this point: the resolution of the enigmas of history was only possible "once we have left behind the millennia-old deception of the lone individual facing the natural world, stupidly called 'external' by the philosophers. External to what? External to the 'I', this supreme deficiency,' but we can no longer say external to the human species, because the species man is internal to nature, part of the physical world." And he goes on to say that "in this powerful text, object and subject becomes, like man and nature, one and the same thing. We can even say that everything becomes object: man as a subject 'against nature' disappears, along with the illusion of a separate ego." ('Tables immuables de la theorie communiste de parti', in Bordiga et Ie passion du communisme. edited by J Camatte, 1972).
Hitherto, the intentional cultivation of states (or rather stages, since we are not talking about anything final here) of consciousness which go beyond the perception of the isolated ego has been largely restricted to the mystical traditions. For example, in Zen Buddhism, accounts of the experience of Satori, which expresses an attempt to go beyond the split between subject and object into a vaster unity, bear a certain resemblance to the mode of being that Bordiga, following Marx, is attempting to describe. But while communist humanity will perhaps find elements that can be reappropriated from these traditions, it is not correct to deduce from these passages in Marx and Bordiga that communism should be described as the "mystical society" or to posit a "communist mysticism", as in certain texts on the question of nature that have been published recently by the Bordigist group II Partito Comunista[4]. Inevitably, the teachings of all the mystical traditions were more or less - bound up with various religious and ideological misconceptions resulting from - immature historical conditions, whereas communism will be able to take the 'rational kernel' from these traditions and incorporate them into a real science of man. With equal inevitability, the insights and techniques of the mystical traditions were almost by definition limited to an elite of privileged individuals, whereas in communism there will be no secrets to be hidden from the vulgar masses. And as a result, the expansion of awareness that will be achieved by the collective humanity of the future will be incomparably greater than the individual flashes of illumination attained within the horizons of class society.
These are the furthest reaches of Marx's vision of the future of humanity; a vision that stretched even beyond communism, since at one point Marx says that communism is "the necessary form and dynamic principle of the immediate future," but is "not as such the goal of human development" (EPM, 'private property and communism'). Communism, even its fully developed form, is really only the beginning of human society.
But having ascended to these Olympian heights, it is necessary to come back to the solid ground; or rather, to recall that these soaring branches are firmly rooted in the soil of Earth.
We have already provided several arguments against the charge that Marx's various 'pictures' of communist society are purely speculative and utopian schemas: first by showing that even his earliest writings as a communist are based on a very thorough and scientific diagnosis of man's estrangement, and most particularly of the form taken by this estrangement under the reign of capital. The cure, therefore, flows logically from this diagnosis: communism must provide the positive supersession of all the various manifestations of man's alienation.
Secondly, we saw how these initial descriptions of a humanity that had been restored to health were always based on real glimpses of a world transformed, authentic moments of inspiration and illumination that can and do occur to flesh and blood human beings even within the boundaries of alienation.
But what was still little developed in the EPM was the conception of historical materialism: the examination of the successive economic and social transformations which were laying the material foundations of the future communist society. In his more mature work, therefore, Marx was to expend a considerable part of his energies studying the underlying operations of the capitalist system and contrasting them with the modes of production that had preceded the bourgeois epoch. In particular, having uncovered the contradictions inherent in the extraction and realization of surplus value, Marx was able to explain that whereas all previous class societies had perished because they could not produce enough, capitalism was the first to be threatened with destruction because it 'overproduced'. But it was precisely this inherent tendency towards overproduction that signified that capitalism was laying the bases for a society of material abundance, a society which was capable of freeing the immense productive forces developed by capital of the fetters imposed by the latter once it had reached its period of historical decline; a society capable of developing the productive forces for the concrete needs of man rather than the abstract and inhuman needs of capital,
In the Grundrisse, Marx examined this problem with specific reference to the question of surplus labor time, observing that capitalism is, "despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labor time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone's time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other to convert it into surplus labor. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labor is interrupted, because no surplus labor can be realized by capital. The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labor, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labor. Once they have done so - and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence - the, on one side, necessary labor time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labor time, but rather disposable time".
We will return to this question in subsequent articles, particularly when we come to examine the economics of the period of transition. The point we want to make here is this: no matter how radical and far-reaching were Marx's portraits of humanity's future, they were based on a sober assessment of the real possibilities contained in the existing system of production. More than this: the emergence of a world which measured wealth in terms of "disposable time" rather than labor time was not just a possibility; it was a burning necessity if mankind was to find a path out of the devastating contradictions of capitalism. These later theoretical developments thus show themselves to be in perfect continuity with the first audacious descriptions of the communist society: they demonstrated quite plainly that the "positive supersession" of alienation described in such depth and with such passion in Marx's early works was not one choice among many for humanity's future, but the only future.
In the next article in this series, we will follow the steps taken by Marx and Engels after the early texts outlining the
ultimate goals of the communist movement: the assumption of the political struggle which was the inevitable precondition for the social and economic transformations they envisaged. We will therefore look at how communism became an explicitly political program before, during and after the great social upheavals of 1848. CDW
[1] The French word for labor, 'travail', derives from the Latin 'trepalium' , an instrument of torture ...
[2] The terminology used here is inevitably sexually biased, because the history of the division of labor is also the history of the oppression of women and of their effective exclusion from so many spheres of social and political activity. From his earliest works, Marx insisted that "it is possible to judge from this relationship (ie, the relationship between man and woman) the entire level of development of mankind. It follows from the character of this relationship how far man as a species being, as man, has become himself and grasped himself... " (EPM, 'Private property and communism'). It was thus evident for Marx that the communist abolition of the division of labor was also the abolition of all the restrictive rules imposed on men and women. Marxism has therefore never required the advice of the so-called 'women's liberation movement', whose claim to fame was that it alone saw that 'traditional' (ie, Stalinist and leftist) visions of revolution were too limited to narrow political and economic ends and so 'missed out' the need for a radical transformation in relations between the sexes. For Marx, it was evident from the very beginning that the communist revolution 'meant precisely a profound alteration in all aspects of human relationships.
[3] In his autobiography, recalling the heady days of the October insurrection, Trotsky points out that the revolutionary process is itself equivalent to a massive outburst of collective inspiration:
"Marxism considers itself the conscious expression of the unconscious historical process. But the 'unconscious' process. But the ‘unconscious' process in the historico-philosophical sense of the term - not the psychological - coincides with its conscious expression only at its highest point, when the masses, by sheer elemental pressure, break through the social routine and give victorious expression to the deeper needs of historical development. And at such moments the highest theoretical consciousness of the epoch merges with the immediate action of those oppressed masses who are furthest away from theory. The creative union of the conscious with the unconscious is what one usually calls 'inspiration'. Revolution is the inspired frenzy of history. Every real writer knows creative moments, when something stronger than himself is guiding his hand; every real orator experiences moments when someone stronger than the self of his everyday existence speaks through him. This is 'inspiration '. It derives from the highest creative effort of all one's forces. The unconscious rises from its deep wells and bends the conscious mind to its will, merging with it in some greater synthesis.
The utmost spiritual rigor likewise infuses at all times personal activity connected with the movement of the masses. This was true for the leaders in the October days. The hidden strength of the organism, its most deeply rooted instincts, its power of scent Inherited from animal forebears - all these rose and broke through the psychic routine to join forces with the higher historico-philosophical abstractions in the service of the revolution. Both these processes, affecting the individual and the masses, were based on the union of the conscious with the unconscious the union of instinct - the mainspring of the will- with the higher theories of thought.
Outwardly it did not look very imposing men went about tired, hungry and unwashed, with inflamed eyes and unshaven beards. And afterwards none of them could recall much about those most critical days and hours" (Trotsky, My Life, an attempt at an autobiography, chapter 29, 'In power').
This passage is also noteworthy because, in continuity with Marx's writings about the emancipation of the senses, it raises the question of the relationship between marxism and psychoanalysis. In the view of the present writer both Marx's conception of alienation and his notion of sensual human need were confirmed, from a different starting point, by the discoveries of Freud. Just as Marx saw man's alienation as an accumulative process reaching its final culmination in capitalism, so Freud describes the process of repression reaching its point of paroxysm in present-day civilization for sensual enjoyment - the erotic connection to the world which we savor in early childhood but which is ‘progressively' repressed both in the history of the species and of the individual. Freud also understood that the ultimate source of this repression lay in the struggle against material scarcity. But whereas Freud, as an honest bourgeois thinker, one of the last to make a real contribution to the science of man, was unable to envisaged a society which had overcome scarcity and thus the necessity for repression, Marx's vision of the emancipation of the senses points to the restoration of the ‘infantile' erotic mode of being at a higher level. As Marx himself put it, "A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child's naiveté, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage?" (Grundrisse, last paragraph of the introduction)
[4] See in particular the report of the meeting of February 3-4 in Florence, Communist Left no. 3, and the article 'Nature and communist revolution' in Communist Left no. 5. We should not be surprised that the Bordigists cross the line into mysticism here: their whole notion of the invariant communist program is already strongly charged with it. We should also be aware that in some his formulations about the overcoming of the atomized ego, Bordiga strays towards the negation of the individual pure and simple, that Bordiga's view of communism, and also of the party which he saw as in some sense a prefiguration of it, often slid toward a totalitarian one. Marx however talked about communism resolving the contradiction between individual and species - not the abolition of the individual, but his realization within the collective, and the realization of the collective within each individual.
Through the "live" reports on the TV screens, the barbarism of today's world has become a day-to-day feature in hundreds of millions of sitting rooms. "Ethnic purification" camps and endless massacres in ex-Yugoslavia, at the heart of "civilized" Europe; murderous famines in Somalia; new air incursions by the big western powers over Iraq: war, death, terror - this is how the "world order" of capital presents itself at the end of this millennium. If the media convey to us such an intolerable image of capitalist society, it is obviously not aimed at inciting the only class which can do away with it, the proletariat, to become conscious of its historic responsibility and to engage in decisive struggles against this system. On the contrary, the aim of the "humanitarian" campaigns that surround these tragedies is to paralyze the working class, to make it believe that the powerful are really concerned about the catastrophic state of the world, that they are doing everything necessary, or at least everything possible, to make things better. The aim is also to hide the sordid imperialist interests which really motivate their actions and which are tearing them apart. It is to raise a smokescreen in front of their own responsibility in the barbarism going on today and to justify new escalations in this barbarism.
For over a year, what used to be called Yugoslavia has been drowned in fire and blood. Month after month, the list of martyred towns gets longer and longer: Vukovar, Osijek, Dubrovnik, Gorazde and now Sarajevo. New slaughter- houses open up before others have closed. There are already more than two million refugees on the roads. In the name of "ethnic purification", we have seen the proliferation of concentration camps both for soldiers and civilian prisoners. Here people are subjected to starvation, torture and summary executions. A few hundred kilometers from the big industrial concentrations of western Europe, the "new world order" announced by Bush and other "great democrats" when the Stalinist regimes of Europe fell apart, once again reveals its true face: one of massacres, terror, and ethnic persecution
The games of the great powers in Yugoslavia
The governments of the advanced countries and their tame media have continuously presented the barbarism being unleashed in ex-Yugoslavia as the result of the ancestral hatreds which have set the different populations of this region against each other. And it is true that, like the other countries formerly dominated by the Stalinist regimes, notably the ex- USSR, the iron grip in which these populations were held in no way got rid of the old antagonisms perpetuated by history. On the contrary, although a late development of capitalism in these regions did not allow them really to transcend the ancient divisions left by feudal society, the so-called "socialist" regimes did nothing but exacerbate these divisions. These divisions could only be overcome by an advanced capitalism, by a high level of industrialization, by a bourgeoisie that was strong both economically and politically, capable of unifying itself around the nation state. But the Stalinist regimes have had none of these characteristics. As revolutionaries have underlined for a long time[1], and as has been strikingly confirmed over the last few years, these regimes were at the front rank of the underdeveloped capitalist countries, with a particularly weak bourgeoisie which from the very beginning bore all the stigmata of capitalist decadence[2]. Born out of the counter- revolution and the imperialist war, this type of bourgeoisie based its power almost exclusively on terror and armed force. For some decades these instruments gave it an appearance of strength and could make it seem that it had done away with the old nationalist and ethnic divisions. But in reality, the image of monolithism was not backed up by any real unity in its ranks. In fact there was a permanent division between the various cliques which composed it, and only the iron hand of the party-state kept these divisions from blowing the whole thing to pieces. The immediate explosion of the USSR into as many republics as soon as the Stalinist regime had collapsed, the unchaining of a whole series of ethnic conflicts within these republics (Armenians against Azeris, Ossetians against Georgians, Chechene-Ingouchians against Russians etc) express . the fact that smothering these divisions has only exacerbated them. And today they are expressing themselves by the same means as they were contained: force of arms.
Having said all this, the collapse of the Stalinist regime in ex-Yugoslavia does not in itself explain the present situation in this part of the world. As we have shown, the collapse of these regimes was itself a manifestation of the final phase of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production, the phase of decomposition[3]. We cannot understand the barbarism and the chaos sweeping the world, the Balkans included, without taking account of this unprecedented historical situation represented by decomposition. The "new world order" can only be a chimera: capitalism has irreversibly plunged humanity into the greatest chaos in history, a chaos which can lead only to the destruction of humanity or the overthrow of capitalism.
However, the big imperialist powers are not standing with folded arms faced with the advance of decomposition. The Gulf war, prepared, provoked, and led by the USA, was an attempt by the world's major power to limit this chaos and the tendency towards "every man for himself" resulting from the collapse of the eastern bloc. To some extent, the USA attained its ends, in particular by further reinforcing its grip on a zone as important as the Middle East and by forcing the other great powers to follow it and even support it in the Gulf war. But this operation to "maintain order" very quickly revealed its limitations. In the Middle East itself, it helped to encourage the Kurdish nationalist uprising against the Iraqi state (and, after that, against the Turkish state), as well as facilitating the Shi'ite uprising in the south of Iraq. All over the planet, the "new world order" proved to be a mirage, especially with the beginning of the conflict in Yugoslavia during the summer of 91. And what the latter demonstrated was that the contribution of the great powers to this so-called "world order" not only had nothing positive about it, but simply served to aggravate chaos and antagonisms.
Such a statement is particularly obvious vis-a-vis Yugoslavia, where the current chaos flows directly from the action of the great powers. At the origin of the process which has led this region into the present conflict was the declaration of independence by Slovenia and Croatia in June 91. Now it is clear that these two republics would not have taken such a risk if they had not received the firm support (diplomatic, but also in weapons) of Austria and its big boss, Germany. In fact we can say that in its aim of opening up an outlet onto the Mediterranean, the German bourgeoisie took the initial responsibility of provoking the break-up of Yugoslavia, with all the consequences we can see today. But the bourgeoisies of the other powers did not remain passive. Thus, the violent response by Serbia to the independence of Slovenia, and above all of Croatia, where an important Serbian minority was living, from the start had the solid support of the USA and its closest European allies, in particular Great Britain. We have even seen France, which, in other respects has made an alliance with Germany to try to form a sort of condominium over Europe, lining up with the USA and Britain and supporting the "integrity of Yugoslavia", ie, Serbia and its policy of occupying Croatian regions peopled by Serbs. Here again it is clear that without this initial support, Serbia would have been much less ambitious in its military policy, both against Croatia last year, and against Bosnia-Herzegovina today. This is why the sudden "humanitarian" concern by the USA and other great powers about the atrocities committed by the Serbian authorities hardly hides the immense hypocrisy which lies behind it. In some ways, the French bourgeoisie takes the biscuit because while it has kept up its close relations with Serbia (a long-established alliance this) it has also done its best to appear as the champion of "humanitarian" action, with Mitterrand's trip to Sarajevo in June 92, just before the Serbian blockade of Sarajevo airport was lifted. it is obvious that this "gesture" by Serbia had already been secretly negotiated with France in order to allow these two countries to draw the maximum advantage from the situation: it allowed Serbia to delay the UN ultimatum while saving face, and gave a nice boost to French diplomacy in this region, enabling it to juggle between the policies of the USA and of Germany.
In fact, the failure of the recent London conference on ex-Yugoslavia, a failure demonstrated by the continuation of military confrontations, simply expresses the great powers' inability to come to an agreement when their interests are so antagonistic. While they have all been united in making grand declarations about "humanitarian" needs (you have to save face after all), and in condemning the Serbian "black sheep", it is clear that each one has its own "solution" to the confrontations in the Balkans.
On one side, the USA's strategy is to counter-balance Germany. For the world's leading power it is a question of trying to limit the extension of pro-German Croatia and, in particular, to preserve, as far as possible, the integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This strategy, which explains the sudden turn of US diplomacy against Serbia in the spring of 92, is aimed at depriving the Croatian ports of Dalmatia of their territories at the rear, which belong to Bosnia- Herzegovina. At the same time, supporting the latter country, which has a Muslim majority, can only benefit US policy towards the Muslim states in general. In particular, it aims to draw back into its orbit a Turkey which is more and more turning towards Germany.
On the other side, the German bourgeoisie has no interest in maintaining the territorial integrity of Bosnia-Herzegovina. On the contrary, it has an interest in its partition, with the Croats controlling the south of the country, as is already the case today, so that the Dalmatian ports have a rearguard territory wider than the narrow band that officially belongs to Croatia. Moreover, this is why there currently exists a complicity between yesterday's enemies, Serbia and Croatia, in favor of the dismemberment of Bosnia-Herzegovina. This obviously does not mean that Germany is now ready to line up behind Serbia, which remains the "hereditary enemy" of its Croatian ally. But at the same time, it can only look askance at all the "humanitarian" gesticulations, which it knows are primarily aimed at countering German interests in the region.
For its part, the French bourgeoisie is trying to play its own card, both against the perspective of increased American influence in the Balkans, and against German imperialism's policy of creating an outlet to the Mediterranean. Its opposition to the latter policy does not mean that the alliance between Germany and France is being called into question. It simply means that France is trying to maintain certain of the advantages which it has held onto for a long time (such as the presence of a Mediterranean fleet, something Germany does not have at the moment) so that its association with its powerful neighbor does not mean mere submission to it. In fact, leaving aside all the contortions around humanitarian themes, all the speeches denouncing Serbia, the French bourgeoisie is the latter's best western ally in its ambition to create its own sphere of influence in the Balkans.
In this context of rivalries between the great powers, there can be no "peaceful" solution for ex-Yugoslavia. The competition between these powers in the domain of "humanitarian" action is just the continuation of their imperialist competition. In this situation of unchained antagonisms between capitalist states, the world's leading power has tried to impose its Pax Americana by putting itself at the head of the threats and the embargo against Serbia. And indeed the USA, with its war planes based on the aircraft-carriers of the. 6th Fleet, is the only power capable of dealing decisive blows against Serbia's military potential and its militias. But at the same time, the US is not prepared to put its ground troops into a conventional war against Serbia. Here the terrain is very different from the one in Iraq which allowed the GIs to mark such a resounding victory a year and a half a go. Thanks to the contributions of all the imperialist sharks, this situation has become so inextricable that it could turn into a real quicksand for the world's major army, that is unless it were to unleash massacres on a scale far outweighing the ones presently going on. This is why, for the moment, even if a precisely targeted air strike cannot be ruled out, the USA's repeated threats against Serbia have not been put into practice. Up till now they have served essentially to force the hand of the USA's recalcitrant allies within the framework of the UN, in order to make them vote for sanctions against Serbia (this applies in particular to France). They have also had the merit, from .the American point of view, of showing up the total impotence of "European Unity" faced with a conflict that is taking place within its own area of competence, and thus to dissuade the states who might be dreaming of using the structures of "Europe" to move towards the constitution of a new imperialist bloc rivaling the USA. In particular, the USA's attitude has had the effect of widening fissures within the Franco-German alliance. Finally, the menacing stance of the US is also a call to order to two important countries in the region - Italy and Turkey[4], who are being tempted to make a rapprochement with the German imperialist pole to the detriment of their alliance with the USA.
However, while the policy of American imperialism towards the Yugoslav question has managed to attain some of its objectives, it is mainly been by sharpening the difficulties of its rivals, and not by a massive and incontestable display of American supremacy. Now this is precisely what the USA has been looking for in the skies over Iraq.
In Iraq as elsewhere, the USA reasserts its role as the world's gendarme
You would have to be particularly naive, or completely sold on the bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns, to believe in the "humanitarian" purposes of the present "Allied" intervention in Iraq. Had the American bourgeoisie and its accomplices been the slightest bit interested in the fate of the populations of Iraq, they would not have begun by giving their solid support to the Iraqi regime when it was making war on Iran and at the same time gassing the Kurds. In particular, they would not have unleashed a bloody war in January 1991, whose first victims were the civilians and conscripted troops - a war that the Bush administration had deliberately provoked, first by encouraging Saddam Hussein, prior to 2 August, to get his hands on Kuwait and then by not leaving him any means of retreat[5]. In the same way, you would have to look very hard to find anything humanitarian in the way the USA ended the Gulf war - leaving intact the Republican Guard, Saddam Hussein's elite troops, who proceeded to drown in blood the Kurdish and Shi' ite populations which US propaganda had encouraged to rise up all through the war. The cynicism of this policy has been openly admitted by one of the most eminent bourgeois specialists on military questions:
"It was a deliberate decision by President Bush to allow Saddam Hussein to proceed to crush the rebellions which, in the eyes of the American administration, contained the risk of a Lebanisation of Iraq. A coup d'état against Saddam was desired, but not the break-up of the country. " (F Heisbourg, director of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, in an interview with Le Monde, 17 January 1992).
In reality, the humanitarian dimension of the "air exclusion zone" in southern Iraq is of the same order as the operation carried out by the "Coalition" in spring 1991 in the north of the country. For several months, after the end of the war, the Kurds were left to be massacred by the Republican Guard; then, when the massacre was well advanced, in the name of "humanitarian intervention" they set up an "air exclusion zone" while at the same time launching an international charity campaign on behalf of the Kurds. At the time, it was done in order to give a justification for the Gulf war by showing what a swine Saddam was. The message that was aimed at those who did not approve of the war and its massacres was as follows: "there wasn't "too much" war, but "not enough"; we should have continued the offensive until Saddam was removed from power". A few months after this very highly publicized operation, the "humanitarians" left the Kurds to shiver in their tents through the winter. As for the Shi'ites, at this time they did not benefit from the solicitude of the professional tear-shedders and still less from any armed protection. It would seem that they were being kept in reserve (ie, Saddam was allowed to go on massacring and repressing them) so that an "interest" in their sad lot could be displayed at a later date. And now the moment has arrived.
It arrived with the perspective of presidential elections in the US. Although certain fractions of the American bourgeoisie are in favor of a change which could give a fillip to the democratic mystification[6], Bush and his team still have the confidence of the majority of the ruling class. Through the Gulf war in particular, Bush and Co. have proved themselves to be ardent defenders of the national capital and the imperialist interests of the USA. However, the opinion polls indicate that Bush is not assured of re-election. So a nice sharp bit of action would revive patriotic sentiments and rally wide layers of the American population around the President, as it did during the Gulf war. However, the electoral context alone does not explain the present actions of the American bourgeoisie in the Middle East. The elections might determine the precise moment chosen for such an action, but the underlying reasons for it go well beyond such domestic contingencies.
In fact, the USA's new military engagement in Iraq is part of a general offensive by this power aimed at reasserting its supremacy in the world imperialist arena. The Gulf war already corresponded to this objective and it did serve to hold back the tendency towards "every man for himself" among the USA's former partners in the western bloc. When the threat from the east disappeared with the collapse of the Russian bloc, countries like Japan, Germany and France began to spread their wings, but the Desert Storm operation forced them to make an act of allegiance to the American gendarme. The first two had to make important financial contributions and the third was "invited" along with a whole series of other not very enthusiastic countries (such as Italy, Spain, and Belgium) to participate in the military operations. However, the events of the last year, and particularly the German bourgeoisie's assertion of its imperialist interests in Yugoslavia, showed the limits of the impact of the Gulf war. Other events confirmed the USA's inability to impose its own imperialist interests in a definitive or long-lasting manner. Thus, in the Middle East, even a country like France, which had been ejected from the region at the time of the Gulf war (losing its Iraqi client and being pushed out of Lebanon, as Syria, with US permission, took control of the country), is attempting a come-back in the Lebanon (cf the recent interview between Mitterrand and the Lebanese prime minister, and the return to the country of the pro-French former president Amine Gemayel). In fact, in the Middle East there is no lack of bourgeois factions (like the PLO for example) interested in lightening the weight of US supremacy, which was made all the heavier by the Gulf war. This is why the USA is regularly and repeatedly forced to reassert its leadership in the way it does most clearly - through force of arms.
Today, with the creation of an "air exclusion zone" in south Iraq, the USA is reminding the states of the region, but also and above' all the other big powers, who is boss. At the same time it is dragging in a country like France, whose participation in the Gulf war was far from enthusiastic, and which has not shown much enthusiasm for the latest action either - it has only sent over a few reconnaissance planes. Nevertheless, France has been forced to submit to US policy here. And of course, beyond France there stands Germany, France's main ally and the USA's biggest potential rival. It is above all Germany that this call to order is addressed to.
The offensive being waged by the world's leading power to bring its "allies" to heel is not restricted to the Balkans and Iraq. It is also aimed at other "hot spots" like Afghanistan and Somalia.
In the former, the bloody offensive by the Hezbollah led by Hekmatyar for the control of Kabul is resolutely supported by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, i.e. two close allies of the USA. Thus in the last resort it is the USA which is behind the attempt to get rid of the current strong man in Kabul, the "moderate" Massoud. And this can easily be understood when you remember that the latter is the chief of a coalition made up of Farsi-speaking Tadjiks (supported by Iran whose relations with France are getting warmer) and Turkish-speaking Uzbeks (supported by Turkey which is close to Germany).[7]
Similarly, the sudden "humanitarian" enthusiasm for Somalia in reality conceals imperialist antagonisms of the same kind. The Horn of Africa is a strategic region of the first importance. For the USA, it is a priority to have complete control over this region and to chase out any potential rival. As it happens one of the main obstacles to this is French imperialism, which holds in Djibouti a military base of some importance. That is why there has been a real "humanitarian" race between France and the USA to "get help" to the Somali population (the aim in fact being to get to the driving seat in a country that has already been smashed to pieces). France won a point by being the first to arrive with "humanitarian aid" (sent precisely from Djibouti), but, since then, the USA, with all the means that it has at its disposal, has sent in its "aid" in far greater quantities. In Somalia, for the moment, the imperialist balance of forces is not being expressed in tons of bombs but in tons of cereals and medicines; even if tomorrow, when the situation has moved on, the Somalis will again be left to die like flies amid a general indifference.
Thus, it is in the name of "humanitarian" feelings, in the name of virtue, that the world cop is affirming its conception of the "new world order" on three continents. This does not of course prevent it from acting like a gangster, like all the other fractions of the bourgeoisie. In fact the American bourgeoisie has no hesitation in quietly using forms of action which the bourgeois class normally refers to as "organized crime" (in reality, the main "organized crime" is the kind carried out by all the capitalist states, whose crimes are more monstrous and more "organized" than those of any bandit). This is what we have seen recently in Italy with a series of bombings which, in the space of two months, cost the life of two anti-Mafia judges in Palermo and the chief of police in Catane. The "professionalism" of these bombings show, and this' was clear to everyone in Italy, that there was a state apparatus, or part of one, behind them. In particular, there is definite evidence showing the complicity of the secret services whose job was to ensure the judges' safety. These murders were brilliantly used by the present government, by the media and the unions to make workers put up with the unprecedented attacks being launched to improve the health of the Italian economy. The bourgeois campaigns associate the latter with the drive to "clean up" political life and the state ("to have a clean state, you have to pull in your belts"), at a time when there have been a whole series of corruption scandals. Having said this, because these bombings have also shown up its impotence, we can see that the present government is not directly behind them, even if certain elements in the state apparatus are implicated. What we are seeing here is some brutal settling of scores between different factions of the bourgeoisie and its state apparatus. And behind all this, it is clear that there are issues of foreign policy. In fact, the clique which has just been pushed out of the new government (Andreotti and Co.) was both the one closest to the Mafia (this was a matter of public notoriety) and also the one most involved in the alliance with the US.
Today it is not surprising that the Americans, in their effort to dissuade the Italian bourgeoisie from lining up with the Franco-German axis, are using one of the organizations which have already rendered them many services in the past: the Mafia. In 1943, the Sicilian Mafiosi had received orders from the famous Italian-American gangster, Lucky Luciano, then in prison, to facilitate the landing of US troops on the island. In exchange, Luciano was freed (even though he'd been sent down for 50 years) and returned to Italy to organize the traffic in cigarettes and drugs. Later on, the Mafia was regularly associated with the activities of the Gladio network (set up during the Cold War, with the complicity of the Italian secret service, by the CIA and NATO) and of the P2 Lodge (linked to American freemasonry), with the aim of combatting "Communist subversion" (i.e. activities favorable to the Russian bloc). The declarations of the Mafiosi who "repented" during the grand anti-Mafia trial of 1987, organized by Judge Falcone, clearly demonstrated the connivance between the Cosa Nostra and the P2 Lodge. This is why the recent bombings cannot just be connected to problems of internal politics but must be seen as part of the current offensive of the USA, which is using these methods to put pressure on Italy, which is of such prime strategic importance, not to break out of its "protection".
Thus, behind the grand phrases about the "rights of man", about "humanitarian" action, about peace and morality, what the bourgeoisie is asking us to preserve is the most unmitigated barbarism, the most advanced putrefaction of the whole of social life. The more virtuous its words, the more repulsive are its actions. This is the way of life of a class and a system condemned by history, a system which in its death agony threatens to drag the whole of humanity with it if the proletariat does not find the strength to overthrow it, if it allows itself to be pulled off its class terrain by all the fine speeches of the class that exploits it. And it can find this class terrain by waging a determined fight against the increasingly brutal attacks which are being imposed on it by a capitalism confronted with an insoluble economic crisis. Because the proletariat has not suffered a decisive defeat, and despite the difficulties which the convulsions of the past three years have brought to its combativity and its consciousness, the future remains open to gigantic class confrontations. Confrontations in which the revolutionary class must develop the strength, the solidarity and the consciousness it will need to carry through its historical mission: the abolition of capitalist exploitation and of all forms of exploitation. FM 13.9.92
[1] See in particular the article "Eastern Europe: the weapons of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat" in International Review 34 (third quarter 1983).
[2] An important factor in the overcoming of the old ethnic cleavages is obviously the development of a modem, concentrated proletariat, educated for the needs of capitalist production; a proletariat which has an experience of struggle and class solidarity and which has broken away from the old prejudices left by feudal society, in particular religious prejudices which are so often the soil for the growth of ethnic hatred. It is clear that in the economically backward countries, there is little chance of such a proletariat developing. However, in this part of the world, the weakness of economic development is not the main factor behind the political weakness of the working class and its vulnerability to nationalism. For example, the proletariat of Czechoslovakia is much closer, from the point of view of its economic and social development, to that of Western Europe than to the proletariat of ex-Yugoslavia. This does not prevent it accepting, or even supporting, the nationalism which has led to the partition of this country into two republics (it's true that in Slovakia, the less developed part of the country, nationalism is stronger). In fact, the enormous political backwardness of the working class in the countries that were under a Stalinist regime for several decades comes essentially from the workers' almost visceral rejection of the central themes of the class struggle, because of the way they were abused by these regimes. If the "socialist revolution" means the ferocious tyranny of party-state bureaucrats, then down with the socialist revolution! If "class solidarity" means bowing down to these bureaucrats and putting up with their privileges, then sold them and every man for himself! If "proletarian internationalism" is synonymous with the intervention of Russian tanks, then death to internationalism and long live nationalism!
[3] On our analysis of the phase of decomposition, see in particular International Review 62, ‘Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism'.
[4] The strategic importance of these two countries for the US is obvious: Turkey, with the Bosphorus, controls communication between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean; Italy, thanks to Sicily, controls the passage between the east and the west of the Mediterranean. Also, the 6th Fleet is based in Naples.
[5]On this point, see the articles and resolutions in the International Review nos. 63-67.
[6] As we showed in our press at the time, the arrival of the Republicans to the head of the state in 1981 corresponded to a global strategy of the most powerful bourgeoisies (particularly in Britain and Germany, but also in a number of other countries), aiming at putting the left parties in opposition. This strategy sought to allow the latter to be in a better position to keep control over the working class at a time when it was developing significant struggles against the growing economic attacks demanded by the crisis. The retreat in the world wide class struggle that followed the collapse of the eastern bloc and the campaigns that accompanied it temporarily put this need to keep the parties of the left in opposition on a back burner. This is why having a Democratic president for a period of four years, before the working class has fully rediscovered the path of struggle, has found favor in certain sectors of the bourgeoisie. In this sense, a possible victory by the Democratic candidate in November 92 should not be considered as a loss of control by the bourgeoisie over its political game, as was the case for example with election of Mitterrand in France in 1981.
[7] The present offensive by Russia aimed at maintaining control over Tadjikstan is obviously not unconnected to this situation: for several months, the loyalty to the US of Yeltsin's Russia has been shown to be very solid.
Summer 1992 has brought with it an avalanche of announcements and disturbing occurrences, which paint a particularly black picture of the international economic situation. The bourgeoisie has promised time and time again, and in a variety of forms, that the recovery of economic growth is on the horizon. They clutch at the smallest indices that are apparently positive in order to justify their optimism. But facts are stubborn; they promptly step forward to set the record straight. Evidently the recovery is somewhat scatterbrained; it has managed to miss every appointment it has been given. As early as the summer of 1991, one year ago now, President Bush and his team felt confident enough to announce the end of the recession: in autumn 1991 American production fell and the illusion was swept away. Then in spring 1992, their hand forced by the electoral campaign, they played out the same scene again: once more reality sprang forward to sound the death knell of such a hope. After two years of playing the same old refrain about the recovery while the economic situation internationally continues to worsen, it has all begun to wear a bit thin. Summer 1992 has proved deadly for any illusions in the recovery.
A deadly summer for illusions in the recovery
It is not just that growth has failed to take off again, but that production has actually experienced another collapse. Following a disastrous year in 1991, the American bourgeoisie declared victory at the end of the third quarter of 1992 when growth rose to an annual rate of 2.7 %. They were a bit premature in doing this and were rapidly forced to change their tune when a pathetic 1.4 % growth was registered for the second quarter, which promised negative figures for the end of the year. Nor is it only the USA, which is after all the foremost economic power in the world, which is unable to re-launch its economy. It is now the turn of Germany and Japan, which up till now have been presented as real capitalist success stories, to be pulled down into the mire of recession. In West Germany, GDP dropped 0.5% in the second quarter of 1992; from June 1991 to June 1992, industrial production fell by 5.7%. In Japan, from July 1991 to July 1992, steel production fell by 11.5 % and production of motor vehicles by 7.2%. The situation is the same in every industrialized country; since the middle of 1990 Britain, for example, has been experiencing its longest recession since the war. There no longer exists on the entire geographic map of capitalism, a single haven of prosperity, a single "model" of a healthy national capital. Its inability to turn up any example of a place where things are going well shows that the ruling class has no solution.
The fact that the heart of the world economy has plummeted into recession weakens the whole system, and growing tensions are tearing at the very fabric of capitalist economic organization. Instability is gaining the upper hand over the financial and monetary system. This summer the stock exchanges, the banks and the dollar - classic symbols of capitalism - have been caught right in the eye of the storm.
The Kabuto-Cho, the Tokyo stock exchange, which overtook Wall Street in importance at its pinnacle in 1989, reached a low point in August, when the Nikkei, its main index of value, fell by 69 % relative to its glory days, returning to its 1986 levels. Its years of speculation are over and hundreds of millions of dollars have evaporated. Following in its footsteps, the stock exchanges of London, Frankfurt and Paris have lost 10 % to 20 % since the beginning of the year. The banks and insurance companies which fed speculation in the 1980s are having to carry the can: profits are in free fall, losses are accumulating and bankruptcies are proliferating throughout the world. Lloyds, which is of such repute and which handles the world's shipping insurance, is on the brink of bankruptcy. The downward movement of King dollar accelerated over the summer and reached its lowest level in relation to the Deutschmark since the latter was created in 1945, thereby shaking the equilibrium of the international money markets. King dollar and speculation on the stock-exchange - symbols of the strength and triumph of capitalism, according to the euphoric propaganda of the 1980s - have become instead symbols of its bankruptcy.
The most savage attacks since the Second World War
But the ever-deepening crisis is more than the abstract economic indices and dramatic episodes in the life of capitalist institutions which fill the pages of the newspapers. It is lived every day by the exploited who suffer increasing pauperization under the repeated blows of austerity programs.
Over the last few months the increase in redundancies, and therefore of unemployment, at the heart of the industrialized world has accelerated brutally. Unemployment in the OECD countries grew by 7.6% in 1991 to reach 28 million and, according to the forecasts, it is set to overtake 30 million in 1992. It is increasing in every country. In Germany in July 1992, it reached 6 % in the west and 14.6 % in the east, from 5.6% and 13.8% respectively the previous month. In France companies have laid off 26,000 workers in the first quarter, 43,000 in July 1992. In Britain, 300,000 job losses were announced at the end of the year in the construction industry alone. In Italy 100,000 jobs must go in industry in the months to come. In the EEC the official number of people living below the "poverty line" is 53 million; in Spain it is nearly a .quarter of the population; in Italy it is 9 million people or 13.5 % of the population. In the USA 14.2 % of the population is in this situation, 35.7 million people. The average income of American families fell by 5 % in three years!
Traditionally the bourgeoisies of the developed countries take advantage of the summer months, the classic period of demobilization for the working class, to institute their austerity programs. Summer 1992 has been no exception to the rule: in fact it has served as an opportunity for an unprecedented wave of attacks against the living conditions of the exploited. In Italy the wage indexation has been abandoned with the agreement of the unions. Wages in the private sector have been frozen and taxes increased massively; inflation has reached 5.7 %. In Spain, taxes have gone up by 2 % per month and were backdated to the beginning of January. Consequently, wages for September will be cut by 20%! In France unemployment benefit has been reduced, while national insurance contributions for workers who still have jobs have been increased. In Britain and Belgium new austerity packages have brought a reduction in social benefits and an increase in the cost of medical care, etc. This list is by no means exhaustive.
Every aspect of the living conditions of the working class in the developed countries is under the most savage attack since the end of the Second World War.
Recovery is impossible
The ruling class has been waiting for nearly three years for the recovery but has seen no sign of it. Doubt is creeping in and they are getting increasingly worried as the economy slides downhill: a social crisis must inevitably follow. The bourgeois believe that they can exorcise the fear that grips them by constantly asserting that the recovery is around the corner that the recession is like the night that turns into day and that finally, inevitably, the sun of economic growth will appear over the horizon. In other words, they assure us, nothing is out of the ordinary, we must be patient and accept the necessary sacrifices.
It is not the first time since the end of the 60s, when the crisis opened up, that the world economy has experienced periods of open recession. In 1967, in 1970-71, in 1974-75, in 1981-82 the world economy underwent turbulent falls in production. Each time policies for recovery managed to stimulate growth again, each time the economy seemed to emerge from the mire. The bourgeoisie depends upon this optimistic view of things to make us believe that growth will inevitably recover, that it is all part of the normal cycle of the economy. But this is an illusion. The return to growth in the 80s did not reach the whole of the world economy. The economies of the "third world" never reversed the fall in production that they experienced at the beginning of the 80s; they never came out of recession. Meanwhile the countries of the "second world", the ex-eastern bloc, became gradually weaker and their economies finally collapsed at the end of the 80s. The famous recovery of the Reagan period during the 80s was therefore partial, limited and essentially reserved for the countries of the "first world", the most industrialized ones. What we must especially bear in mind is that these successive recoveries were produced by artificial economic policies which constituted so many tricks and distortions of the sacred "law of the market" that the "liberal" economists have turned into an ideological dogma.
The ruling class is confronted with a crisis of overproduction and the solvent market is too narrow to absorb the over-abundance of goods produced. In order to face up to this contradiction, to sell its products and extend the boundaries of the market, the ruling class has essentially had recourse to a flight into credit. During the 70s, the underdeveloped countries in the peripheries were given more than $1,000 billion of credit, which they used mainly to buy goods produced in the industrialized countries, thus allowing the latter to increase their growth. However by the end of the 70s the most debt-ridden countries in the peripheries were unable to pay their debts: this sounded the death knell for this policy. The periphery of the capitalist world has definitively sunk into the mire. This forced the bourgeoisie to find another solution. The USA, under the Reagan administration, became the outlet for the world's excess production by creating a mass of debt which made that of the under-developed countries look like a trifle. At the end of 1991 the US debt reached the astronomical figure of $10,481 billion internally and $650 billion with other countries. Such a policy was only possible because the USA was the foremost imperialist power in the world and was, at that time, leader of a bloc comprising the principal economic powers. It therefore took advantage of its position to cheat the laws of the market and bend them to its needs by imposing an iron discipline upon its allies. But this policy has its limits. When it was time to pay the bill, the USA, just like the under-developed countries a dozen years before, was found to be insolvent.
So prescribing the credit medicine to cure the ailing capitalist economy comes up against objective limits. This is why the open recession that has been developing at the heart of the most industrialized countries for more than two years now is qualitatively different from previous recessionary periods. The economic stratagems that made recovery possible previously have been proved ineffective.
For the 22nd consecutive time this summer, the Federal Bank of America has lowered the base rate at which it lends to other banks. It has therefore been reduced from 10 % to 3 % since spring 1989. This rate is now less than the rate of inflation. In other words, the real rate of interest is zero or even in negative figures; the state is lending at a loss! However this policy of easy credit has not produced any result either in the USA or in Japan, where the central bank rate is also down to 3%.
The banks that have been so open handed with their loans over the years are confronted with more and more unpaid debts; company bankruptcies proliferate, leaving debts to the tune of billions of dollars. The collapse of speculation on the stock exchange and in construction worsens the situation further for bank balances that are already veering into the red. Losses pile up, bankruptcies in the banking sector proliferate and the coffers are bled dry. In short, the banks can lend no more. Recovery by means of credit is no longer possible - which means, quite simply, that recovery is impossible.
The sole hope for the ruling class is to slow down the decline and limit the damage
The lowering of the discount rate on the dollar or the yen at first served to restore the profit margins of the American and Japanese banks, as they borrowed from the state at this low rate but offered a lending rate to individuals and companies that was somewhat higher. By this means they managed to avoid a too-dramatic increase in the number of bank failures and a catastrophic collapse of the international banking system. But this policy too has its limits. The rate can hardly go down any further. The state is forced more and more to intervene directly to come to the aid of the banks, which have always managed to seem independent from the state. By seeming to be so they have served as a "liberal" cover for state capitalism in a situation where, in fact, the state maintains a very tight control over the credit supply. In the USA, the federal budget has to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to support banks threatened with bankruptcy, and in Japan the state has just bought back the housing stock of the banks most under threat in order to keep them afloat. In fact this is a nationalization of sorts. It is very different from the pseudo-liberal cant of "less state control" which they have drummed into us over the years. More and more the state is forced to intervene openly to save the banks from the bailiffs. A recent example of this is the recovery program set up in Japan: the government has decided to break into its reserves and release $85.4 billion to support the private sector, which is in a very shaky state. But this policy of recovery on the basis of internal consumption is bound to have at the most no more than temporary success. Just as all Germany's expenditure on re-unification has done no more than slow down, and very temporarily at that, the recession in Europe.
The ruling class is attempting to limit the damage and slow down the plunge into disaster. In a situation in which the markets are tight, as are their diminishing assets, the lack of credit, the search for competitivity through more and more draconian austerity programs in order to increase exports, has become the refrain of every state -. The world market is tom apart by commercial war were anything goes, where each state uses every means at its disposal to ensure its outlets. The policy of the USA illustrates this tendency particularly well; its fist brought down hard on the table at the GATT negotiations; the creation of a privileged and protected market with Mexico and Canada, who have been persuaded as much through coercion as incentives; the artificial lowering of the dollar to give a shot in the arm to exports. However, this out-and-out commercial war can only aggravate the situation further and destabilize the world market even more. Moreover, this progression towards destabilization has been further aggravated by the disappearance of the eastern bloc. Without it, the discipline that the USA used to impose upon its erstwhile imperialist partners, who are at the same time its main economic rivals, has been shot to pieces. The tendency is towards everyone for himself. The dollar's recent adventures are a good illustration of this reality. The American policy of keeping the dollar low has reached the limit imposed by the German policy of high interest rates because, faced with the risk that inflation will explode in the wake of re-unification, Germany is playing its own card. The result is that the Mark has attracted an enormous amount of speculation internationally against the American currency, and in the general rush, the central banks have had immense difficulty maintaining sufficient stability to prevent an uncontrollable collapse of the dollar. The whole of the international monetary system is tottering. The Finnish mark has had to free itself from the European Monetary System, while the Italian lira and the English pound are in turmoil and are having great difficulty staying in. This warning shot is a clear indication of the turbulence to come. Occurrences in the economy during the summer of 1992 show that the perspective is certainly not towards the recovery of world growth. It is rather towards an accelerated plunge into recession, towards the brutal collapse of the whole economic and financial apparatus of capitalism world-wide.
Disaster at the heart of the industrialized world
It is indicative of the seriousness of the crisis that it is now the great capitals at the industrialized heart of the system that is experiencing the full blast of the open recession. The economic collapse of the eastern countries brought about the demise of the Russian imperialist bloc. Contrary to all the propaganda put about at the time, this was not proof of the futility of communism, because the Stalinist regimes had nothing to do with communism. It was the death agony of an under-developed part of world capitalism. This bankruptcy of • capitalism in the east was a manifestation of the insurmountable contradictions which eat away at the capitalist economy, whatever form the latter takes. Ten years after the economic collapse of the under-developed countries of the periphery, the economic bankruptcy of the eastern countries heralded the worsening of the effects of the crisis at the heart of the world's most developed industrial nations. It is here that the bulk of world production is concentrated (more than 80% in the OECD countries), and it is here that the insurmountable contradictions of the capitalist economy are crystallized most acutely. The fact that the effects of the crisis have been creeping from the peripheries towards the center for more than twenty years shows that the most developed countries are less and less able to throw back its effects upon the economically weakest states. Like a boomerang, it has returned to ravage the epicenter where it originates. This development of the crisis shows the future that lies in store -for capitalism. Just as the countries of the ex-eastern bloc see taking shape the specter of economic disaster comparable with that of Africa and Latin America, the same horrifying future also threatens the rich industrialized countries.
The ruling class obviously cannot acknowledge that the development of the crisis is a journey towards disaster. It has to believe in the immortality of its own system. But this self-delusion is constrained by the urgent need to conceal, as much as it can, the reality of the crisis from the exploited of the whole world. The exploiting class must hide its impotence from itself and from those it exploits, under pain of revealing to the whole world that its historic mission was finished long ago and that the continuance of its power can only lead the whole of humanity into a barbarism that is even more terrible. For all workers the wretched reality of the effects of the crisis, effects that they feel to their very core, is a powerful stimulus to reflect and understand the situation more clearly. The stab of misery which becomes more agonizing every day can only impel the proletariat to show its discontent more openly, to express its combativity through struggles for the defense of its living conditions. This is why a constant theme of the bourgeoisie's propaganda, for the twenty odd years that the crisis has been developing, has been to conceal the fact that this crisis is insoluble within the framework of the capitalist economy.
But reality is ever-present and it sweeps away illusions and eats away at lies. History exposes those who thought that Reaganomics had enabled them to definitively bring the crisis to heel. It exposes those who have made shameless use of the collapse of the Russian imperialist bloc to declaim about the futility of the marxist critique of capitalism, and to pretend that this system is the only viable one, the only path humanity can take. The ever more disastrous bankruptcy of capitalism raises, and will continue to raise all the more urgently, the need for the working class to put forward its own solution: the communist revolution.
JJ, 14.9.92
The struggle of the working class and the communist revolution are notions that many today reject as outmoded, disproved by historical experience. The collapse of the state capitalist regimes in the USSR and the whole former eastern bloc into the whirlpool of the world economic crisis has provided all the detractors of the Russian revolution of 1917 with an opportunity to reinforce all the old lies which have been poured out for decades about this historic event. Among these lies is the one that presents the seizure of power by the proletariat in Russia as a vulgar coup d'etat, the manipulation of the backward masses of Tsarist Russia by the Bolshevik party. We have already devoted a number of texts to the nature of the revolution and of the capitalist counter-revolution in Russia[1]. In this series, which we are beginning with this article, we want to go over and deepen the fundamental aspects of this experience of the proletariat and its revolutionary organisations. In this issue, we deal first with the fact that the Russian revolution of 1917 was above all the collective work of the proletariat in the international framework of a wave of revolts by the working class against the war and the capitalist system, an experience which, for all its limits, remains rich with lessons that can help us understand the capacity of the working class to take us own destiny into its hands, in subsequent articles, we will go back over the role of the Bolshevik party in 1917, then look at the defeat of the revolution and the triumph of the capitalist counter-revolution in Russia itself.
"The Russian revolution of 1917 was above all a magnificent action by the exploited masses in order to try to destroy the bourgeois order, which reduced them to the state of beasts of burden of an economic machine and cannon fodder for the wars between the capitalist powers. An action where millions of proletarians, bringing behind them all the other exploited layers of society, managed to tear down their atomisation by consciously unifying, by giving themselves the means to act collectively as a single force. An action to make them masters of their own destinies, to begin the construction of another society, a society without exploitation, without wars, without classes, without nations, without poverty: a communist society" (International Review n°51: ‘70 years ago, the Russian Revolution')
In 1914 the governments, kings, politicians, the military, as agents of a social system which had entered its decadent period, led the world into the cataclysm of the First World War. The slaughter of 20 million people; levels of destruction never seen until then; destabilisation, penury and starvation on the home front; death, savage military discipline and untold suffering at the military front; all of Europe drowned in a sea of chaos, barbarism, the devastation of industries, buildings, monuments ...
The international proletariat, after it had stopped being dragged along by the patriotic poison and democratic falsehoods of the different governments, supported by the treason of the majority of the Social Democratic parties and the unions, began to react against this military barbarity. From the end of 1915, strikes, revolts against hunger, demonstrations against the war, exploded in Russia, Germany, Austria, and elsewhere. At the front, mutinies, collective desertions, fraternisation between the soldiers of both gangs took place, above all in the Russian and German armies... The internationalists were at the head of this movement - the Bolsheviks, the Spartakists, the whole left of the 2nd International. From the outbreak of the war in August 1914, they unhesitatingly denounced it as imperialist robbery, as a manifestation of the debacle of world capitalism, as the signal for the proletariat to complete its historic mission: the international socialist revolution.
At the vanguard of this international movement, which would end the war and open up the possibility of the world revolution, were the Russian workers, who from the end of 1915 engaged in economic strikes which were severely repressed. Nevertheless, the movement grew: the 9th of January 1916 - the anniversary of the first revolution in 1905 - was commemorated by the workers with massive strikes. New strikes broke out all through the year, accompanied by meetings, discussions, the raising of demands and clashes with the police: "By the end of 1916 prices are rising by leaps and bounds. To the inflation and the breakdown in transport, there is added the actual lack of goods. The population's level of consumption has been cut in half The curve of the workers' movement rises sharply. In October the struggle enters its decisive phase, uniting all forms of discontent into one. Petrograd draws back from the February leap. A wave of meetings runs through the factories. The topics: food supplies, high cost of living, war, government. Bolshevik leaflets are distributed; political strikes begin; improvised demonstrations occur at factory gates; cases of fraternisation between certain factories and the soldiers are observed; a stormy protest strike flares up over the trial of the revolutionary sailors of the Baltic fleet ... The workers all felt that no retreat was possible. In every factory an active nucleus was forming, oftenest around the Bolsheviks. Strikes and meetings went on continuously throughout the first two weeks of February. On the 8th, at the Putilov factory, the police received ‘a hail of slag and old iron'... On the 19th, a mass of people gathered around the food shops, especially women, all demanding bread. A day later bakeries were sacked in several parts of the city. These were the heat lightening of the revolution, coming in a few days" (Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol 1, ‘The Proletariat and the Peasantry', pages 56, 57, 58. Sphere Books edition, 1967).
These were the successive stages of a social process which today many workers see as being utopian, the workers' transformation from an atomised, apathetic, divided mass, into a united class which acted as one man and therefore was able to launch a revolutionary combat, as was shown by the five days from the 22nd to the 27th of February 1917: "The workers came to the factories in the morning; instead of
going to work they hold meetings; then begin processions towards the centre. New districts and new groups of the population are drawn into the movement. The slogan ‘bread' is crowded out or obscured by Louder slogans of ‘down with the autocracy', ‘down with the war' ... Continuous demonstrations on the Nevsky prospect ... the masses will no longer retreat, they resist with optimistic brilliance, they stay on the street even after murderous volleys ... ‘don't shoot your brothers and sisters!' cry the workers. And not only that: ‘Come with us!' Thus in the streets and squares, by the bridges, at the barrack-gates, is waged a ceaseless struggle -
now dramatic, now unnoticeable - but always a desperate struggle, for the heart of the soldier... The workers will not surrender or retreat; under fire they are still holding their own. And with them their women - wives, mothers, sisters, sweethearts. Yes, this is the very hour they had so often whispered about: ‘if only we could all get together?'" (Trotsky, op. cit, Vol 1, ‘Five days', pages 110, 117, 129).
The ruling classes could not believe it: they thought that it was a question of a revolt which would disappear once it had been taught a good lesson. When the terrorist actions of the small elite corps sent by the colonels of the gendarmerie ended in a noisy fiasco, the deep roots of the movement were made very clear: "The revolution seems defenceless to these colonels, because it's still terrifically chaotic ... But that is an error of vision, It is only seeming chaos. Beneath it is proceeding an irresistible crystallization of the masses around new axes" (Trotsky: idem, page 136).
Once the first chains had been broken, the workers did not want to go back, and in order to go forward on firm ground they took up again the experience of 1905 by creating Soviets, unitary organizations of the whole class in struggle. However, the Soviets were immediately grabbed hold of by the Menshevik and Social Revolutionary parties, old workers' parties which had gone over to the bourgeois camp through their participation in the war and which were now serving to form the Provisional Government of ‘great personalities' such as Miliukov, Rodiazno, Kerensky ...
This government's first obsession was to convince the workers that they should "return to normality", "abandon their dreams" and transform themselves into a submissive, passive, atomised mass, which the bourgeoisie needed in order to carry on business and the war. The workers would have none of it. They wanted to live and develop the new politics, which they all exercised, uniting in a tight knot the
struggle for immediate interests with the struggle for the general interests of the whole of humanity. So, against the insistence of the bourgeoisie and social traitors that "the task is to work and not to demand, because now we have political
freedom", the workers demanded the 8 hour day in order to have "freedom" to meet, discuss, read, to be part of "a wave of strikes which recommenced after the fall of absolutism. In each factory or workshop, without waiting for agreements signed by their superiors, they presented demands about wages and the working day. The conflicts deepened day by day and created an atmosphere of struggle" (Ana Penkratova Los Consejos de Fabrica en Ia Rusia de 1917, ‘Los comites de Fabrica obra de la Revolucion')
On the 18th of April, Miliukov, a Kadet minister in the Provisional Government, published a note reaffirming Russia's commitment to its allies in the continuation of the war. This was a real provocation. The workers and soldiers responded immediately: there were spontaneous demonstrations; mass assemblies were held in the working class districts, in the barracks and factories: "The commotion which had overflowed the city, however, did not recede to its banks. Crowds gathered, meetings assembled, they wrangled at street corners, the crowds in the tramway divided into partisans and opponents of Miliukov... The commotion was not limited to Petrograd. In Moscow workers abandoned their machines and the soldiers left their barracks; they took over the streets with their tumultuous protests" (Trotsky: idem, ‘The April Days', p 321). On the 20th of April a gigantic demonstration forced the resignation of Miliukov and the bourgeoisie had to draw back from its war plans.
May saw frantic organizational activity. There were fewer demonstrations and strikes, but this did not express a reflux in the movement: quite the contrary, it marked an advance and development, because the working class was concentrating on its mass self-organization, an aspect of its struggle which had been little developed until then. The Soviets spread to the furthest corners of Russia, while around them grew up a multitude of mass organs: factory committees, peasants' committees, neighbourhood Soviets, soldiers' committees. Through these the masses regrouped, discussed, thought, decided. Through contact with these organs, the most backward workers woke up: "The servants used to being treated like animals and paid next to nothing were getting independent. A pair of shoes cost more than a hundred rubles, and as wages averaged about thirty-five rubles a month the servants refused to stand in queues and wear out their shoes... The izvozchiki (cab-drivers) had a union; they were also represented in the Petrograd Soviet. The waiters and hotel servants were organised, and refused tips" (John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, page 39).
The workers and soldiers began to tire of the never-ending promises of the Provisional Government and its Menshevik and SR supporters, promises which were shown to be empty by growing unemployment and hunger. They could see that in front of the questions of the war and the peasants all they were being offered was pompous speeches. They were becoming fed up with bourgeois politics and began to glimpse the ultimate consequences of their own politics: the demand of ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS was transformed into an aspiration for wide masses of workers[2].
June was a month of intense political agitation that drew together all that had previously taken place and which culminated in armed demonstrations by the workers and soldiers of Petrograd on the 4th and 5th of July. "The factories moved into the front rank Moreover, those plants had been drawn in to the movement which yesterday stood aside. Where the leaders wavered or resisted, younger workers had compelled the member-on-duty of the factory committee to blow the whistle as a signal to stop work ... All factories struck and held meetings. They elected leaders for the demonstrations and delegates to present their demands. From Kronstadt, from New Peterhoff, from Krasnoe Selo, from the Krasnaia Gorka fort, from all the near-by centres, by land and sea, soldiers and sailors were marching with music, with weapons, and, worst of all, with Bolshevik standards" (Trotsky: op cit, Vol 2, ‘The "July Days": Culmination and Rout', page 44).
However, the July days ended up being a bitter fiasco for the workers. The situation was not yet ripe for the taking of power since the soldiers did not fully identify with the workers; the peasants were full of illusions about the Social
Revolutionaries and the movement in the provinces was backward compared to the capital.
In the following two months - August and September - spurred on by the bitterness of defeat and the violent force of the bourgeoisie's repression, the workers began to resolve these obstacles practically. Not through a preconceived plan but as the product of an "ocean of initiatives", of struggles, and discussions in the Soviets which materialized the coming to consciousness of the movement. Thus, the actions of the workers and soldiers became fully fused: "a phenomenon of osmosis appeared, especially in Petrograd. When the agitation united the workers' quarter of Vyborg and the regiments stationed in the capital, a fermentation took place between them. The workers and soldiers regularly went into the street to express their feelings. The street belonged to them. No force, no power, could at those moments stop them from agitating for their demands or singing their revolutionary hymns at the top of their lungs" (G. Soria, Los 300 dias de la Revolucion Rusia, Chapter IV, ‘Un era de crisis').
After the defeat of July, the bourgeoisie finally thought that they could finish with this nightmare. Therefore, they organized a military coup, dividing the task up between Kerenski's ‘democratic' bloc and the openly reactionary bloc of Kornilov - commander-in-chief of the army. The latter brought in the Cossack and Caucasian regiments who still appeared to be loyal to the bourgeois order and tried to launch them against Petrograd.
However, the attempt was a resounding failure. The massive hand of the workers and soldiers, firmly organized by the Committee for the Defence of the Revolution - which under the control of the Petrograd Soviet would be transformed into the Revolutionary Military Committee, the organ of the insurrection in October - made Kornilov's troops surrender or stay immobilized - or else, as happened in the majority of cases, they deserted and united with the workers and soldiers.
"The conspiracy was conducted by those circles who were not accustomed to know how to do anything without the lower ranks, without labour forces, without cannon-fodder, without orderlies, servants, clerks, chauffeurs, messengers, cooks, laundresses, switchmen, telegraphers, stablemen, cab drivers. But all these little human bolts and links, unnoticeable, innumerable, necessary, were for the Soviet and against Kornilov. The revolution was omnipresent. It penetrated everywhere, coiling itself around the conspiracy. It had everywhere its eyes, its ears, its hands. The ideal of military education is that the soldier should act when unseen by the officer exactly as before his eyes. But the Russian soldiers and sailors of 1917, without carrying out official orders even before the eyes of the commanders, would eagerly catch on the fly the commands of the revolution, or still oftener fulfil them on their own initiative before they arrived .... For them [the masses] it was not a case of defending the government but of defending the revolution. So much the more resolute was their struggle. The resistance of the rebels grew out of the very road beds, out of the stones, out of the air. The railroad workers of the Luga stations stubbornly refused to move the troop trains. The Cossack echelons also found themselves immediately surrounded by armed soldiers from the Luga garrison, 20,000 strong. There was no military encounter, but there was something far more dangerous: contact, social exchange, interpenetration." (Trotsky: Vol 2, ‘The Bourgeoisie Measures Strength with the Democracy', pages 222 and 229-230).
The bourgeoisie sees workers' revolutions as acts of collective madness, a spontaneous chaos that finishes spontaneously. Bourgeois ideology cannot admit that the exploited can act on their own initiative. Collective action, solidarity, conscious action by the majority of workers, such notions bourgeois thought considers to be unnatural (since what is "natural" for the bourgeoisie is the war of each against all and the manipulation of the great mass of humanity by a small elite).
"In all past revolutions those who fought on the barricades were workers, apprentices, in part students, and the soldiers come over to their side. But afterwards the solid bourgeoisie, having cautiously watched the barricades through their windows, gathered up the power. But the February revolution of 1917 was distinguished from former revolutions by the incomparably higher social character and political level of the revolutionary class ... and the consequent formation at the very moment of victory of a new organ of revolutionary power, the Soviet, based upon the armed strength of the masses" (Trotsky: vol 1, ‘The Paradox of the February Revolution', page 162 - 163)
This totally new nature of the October revolution corresponds to the nature of the proletariat, an exploited and revolutionary class at the same time, which can only liberate itself if it is capable of acting in a collective and conscious way.
The Russian revolution was not the mere passive product of dreadful objective conditions. It was also the product of a collective development of consciousness. The drawing of lessons, the reflections, slogans, and memories were part of a continuum of proletarian experience which connected up with the Paris Commune of 1871, the revolution of 1905, the battle of the Communist League, of the First and Second Internationals, of the Zimmerwald Left, of the Bolsheviks ... Clearly it was a response to the war, to hunger and the barbaric agony of Tsarism, but it was a conscious response, guided by the historical and global continuity of the proletarian movement.
This was concretely manifested in the enormous experience the Russian workers had gained from the great struggles of 1888, 1902, the 1905 Revolution and the battles of 1912 - 1914. At the same time this process had given birth to the Bolshevik party on the left-wing of the 2nd International. "It was necessary that there should be not masses in abstract, but masses of Petrograd workers and Russian workers in general, who had passed through the revolution of 1905, through the Moscow Insurrection of December 1905 ... It was necessary that throughout this mass should be scattered workers who had thought over the perspectives of the revolution, meditated hundreds of times about the question of the army" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol 1, ‘Who Led the February Insurrection?' pages 152 - 153).
More than 70 years before the 1917 revolution, Marx and Engels had written that "a revolution ... is necessary therefore, not only because the ruling class can be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew" (Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, chapter 1, ‘Feuerbach'). The Russian revolution fully confirms this position: the movement brought with it the materials for the self-education of the masses: "A revolution teaches and teaches fast. In that lies its strength. Every week brings something new to the masses. Every two months creates an epoch. At the end of February, the insurrection. At the end of April, a demonstration of armed workers and soldiers in Petrograd. At the beginning of July, a new assault, far broader in scope and under more resolute slogans. At the end of August, Kornilov's attempt at an overthrow beaten off by the masses. At the end of October, conquest of power by the Bolsheviks. Under the these events, so striking in their rhythm, molecular processes were taking place, welding the heterogeneous parts of the working class into one political whole" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol 1, ‘Shifts in the Masses', page 390).
"All Russia was learning to read, and reading politics, economics, history - because the people wanted to know ... The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, in the first six months, went out every day tons, carloads, trainloads of literature, saturating the land. Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand drinks water ... Then the Talk, beside which Carlyle's ‘flood of French speech' was a mere trickle. Lectures, debates, speeches - in theatres, circuses, school-houses, clubs, Soviet meeting-rooms, Union headquarters, barracks ... meetings in the trenches at the front, in village squares, factories ... What a marvelous sight to Putilovsky (the Putilov Factory) pour out its forty thousand to listen to Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever they had to say as long as they could talk! For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street corner was a public tribune. In railway trains, street-cars, always the spurting of impromptu debates, everywhere ... At every meeting, attempts to limit the time of speakers were voted down, and every man free to express the thought that was in him" (John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, pages 39 - 40).
The "democratic" bourgeoisie talks a lot about "freedom of expression", but experience tells us that all this means is manipulation, theatre and brainwashing: the authentic freedom of expression is that which the proletariat conquers for itself through its revolutionary action: "In each factory, in each guild, in each company, in each tavern, in the military hospital, at the transfer stations, even in the depopulated villages, the molecular work of revolutionary thought was in progress. Everywhere were to be found the interpreters of events, chiefly from among the workers, from whom one inquired ‘What's the news?' and from whom one awaited needed words... Their class instinct was refined by a political criterion, and though they did not think all their ideas through to the end, nevertheless their thought ceaselessly and stubbornly worked its way in a single direction. Elements of experience, criticism, initiative, self-sacrifice, seeped down through the mass and created, unwittingly to a superficial glance but no less decisively, an inner mechanics of the revolutionary movement as conscious process" (Trotsky, op cit, vol 1 ‘Who Led the February Revolution?', page 153).
This reflection, this coming to consciousness laid bare "all the material and moral injustice inflicted on the workers, the inhuman exploitation, the miserable wages, the systems of refined punishments and the offences to its human dignity by the capitalists and the bosses this network of ruinous and disgraceful conditions in which it traps them, this hell which represents the daily destiny of the proletariat under the yoke of capitalism" (Rosa Luxemburg, ‘In the Revolutionary Hour').
For the same reason, the Russian revolution presented a permanent, inseparable unity between the political and economic struggle: "After every foaming wave of political action a fructifying deposit remains behind from which a thousand shoots of economic struggle shoot forth. And conversely. The workers' condition of ceaseless economic struggle with the capitalists keeps their fighting energy alive in every political interval, it forms, so to speak, the permanent fresh reservoir of the strength of the proletarian classes, from which the political fight ever renews its strength and at the same time leads the indefatigable economic sappers of the proletariat at all times, now here and now there, to isolated sharp conflicts, out of which political conflicts on a large scale unexpectedly explode" (Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions).
This development of consciousness led the workers in June-July to the conviction that they should not waste and disperse their energies in a thousand partial economic conflicts, but instead should concentrate their energy on the revolutionary political struggle. This did not mean rejecting the struggle for immediate demands; on the contrary, it meant taking up their political consequences: "The soldiers and workers considered that all other questions - that of wages, of the price of bread, and of whether it is necessary to die at the front for nobody knew what - depended on the question who was to rule the country in the future, the bourgeoisie or their own Soviet" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol 2, ‘The July Days: Preparation and Beginning', page 26).
This development of consciousness within the working masses culminated with the October insurrection, whose atmosphere Trotsky has so admirably described: "The masses felt a need to stand close together. Each wanted to test himself through the others, and all tensely and attentively kept observing how one and the same thought would develop in their various minds with its different shades and features. Unnumbered crowds of people stood about the circuses and other big buildings where the most popular Bolshevik would address them with the latest arguments and the latest appeals ... But incomparably more effective in that last period before the insurrection was the molecular agitation carried out by the nameless workers, sailors, soldiers, winning converts one by one, breaking down the last doubts, overcoming the last hesitations. Those months of feverish political life had created innumerable cadres in the lower ranks, had educated hundreds and thousand of rough diamonds, who were accustomed to look on politics from below and not above ... The mass would no longer endure in its midst the wavering, the dubious, the neutral. It was striving to get hold of everybody, to attract, to convince, to conquer. The factories joined with the regiments in sending delegates to the front. The trenches got into contact with the workers and peasants near-by in the rear. In the towns along the front there was an endless series of meetings, conferences, consultations in which the soldiers and sailors would bring their activity into accord with that of the worker and peasants" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol 3 ‘Withdrawal from the Pre-Parliament and Struggle for the Soviet Congress', pages 73, 74-75).
"At the same time that the official society, all that many-storied superstructure of ruling classes, layers, groups, parties and cliques, lived from day to day by inertia and automatism, nourishing themselves with the relics of worn-out ideas, deaf to the inexorable demands of evolution, flattering themselves with phantoms and foreseeing nothing - at the same time, in the working masses there was taking place an independent and deep process of growth, not only of hatred for the rulers, but of critical understanding of their impotence, an accumulation of experience and creative consciousness which the revolutionary insurrection and its victory only completed" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol 1, ‘Who Led the February Revolution?', page 154).
While bourgeois politics are carried out by that small minority of society constituted by the ruling class, the politics of the proletariat do not pursue any particular benefit but that of the whole of humanity: "The proletariat can no longer emancipate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it [the bourgeoisie] without at the same time freeing the whole of society from exploitation" (Engels, 1883 Preface to The Communist Manifesto).
The revolutionary struggle of the proletariat constitutes the only hope of liberation for all the exploited masses. As the Russian revolution showed, the workers were able to win over the soldiers (in their great majority peasants in uniform) and of the peasant population to its cause. The proletariat thus confirmed that the socialist revolution was not only a response to its own interests but was the only way to end the war and, in general, to capitalist relations of exploitation and oppression.
The desire of workers to give a perspective to the other oppressed classes was skilfully manipulated by the Mensheviks and SRs, who in the name of the alliance with the peasants and soldiers tried to make the proletariat renounce its autonomous class struggle and the socialist revolution. This thinking appears, at first glance, to be very "logical": if we want to win over other classes it is necessary to bend our demands, in order to find the lowers common denominator around which we can all unite.
However: "The lower middle classes, the small manufacturer, the shop keeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative, nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history" (Marx and Engels: The Communist Manifesto).
Therefore, in an inter-classist alliance, the proletariat has everything to lose. In such a situation, the proletariat will not win over the other oppressed classes but will push them into the arms of capital and decisively weaken its owns unity and consciousness. It will not put forward its own demands but dilute and negate them; it will not advance on the road towards socialism, but get bogged down and drowned in a swamp of decadent capitalism. In fact, it does not help the petit-bourgeois and peasant layers but contributes to them being sacrificed on the altar of capital, because "popular" demands are the disguise the bourgeoisie uses to pass off the contraband of its own interests. The "people" do not represent the interests of the "working classes", but the exploiting, national, imperialist interests of the whole bourgeoisie: "the union of Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries meant not a co-operation of proletariat with peasants, but a coalition of those parties which had broken with the proletariat and the peasants respectively, for the sake of a bloc with the possessing classes" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol 1, ‘The Executive Committee', page 218).
If the proletariat wants to win the non-exploiting layers to its own cause it must steadfastly affirm its own demands, its own being, its class autonomy. It must win the other non-exploiting layers by showing that "if by chance they are revolutionary they are so only in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their own present, but their future interests, they desert their own stand-point to place themselves at that of the proletariat" (The Communist Manifesto).
The Russian proletariat, by centring its struggle on putting an end to the imperialist war; by putting forward a perspective for the solution of the agrarian problem[3]; by creating the Soviets as the organisation of all the exploited; and, above all, by posing the alternative of a new society faced with the bankruptcy and chaos of capitalist society, was able to become the vanguard of all the exploited classes. It knew how to give them a perspective around which they could unite and struggle.
The proletariat's affirmation of its autonomy did not separate it from the other oppressed layers; on the contrary, it allowed it to separate them from the bourgeois state. In response to the impact on the soldiers and the peasants of the Russian bourgeoisie's campaign about the "egotism" of the workers' demand for the 8-hour day, "The workers understood the manoeuvre and skilfully warded it off. For this it was only necessary to tell the truth - to cite the figures of war profits, to show the soldiers the factories and shops with the road of machines, the hell fires of the furnaces, their perpetual front where victims where innumerable. On the initiative of the workers there began regular visits by troops of the garrison to the factories, and especially to those working on munitions. The soldiers looked and listened. The workers demonstrated and explained. These visits would end in triumphant fraternization" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol 1, ‘The Executive Committee', page 235).
"The army was incurably sick. It was still capable of speaking its word in the revolution, but so far as making war was concerned, it did not exist" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol 1, ‘The Army and the War', page 250). The army's "incurable illness" was the product of the working class' autonomous struggle. Likewise, faced with the agrarian problem, which decadent capitalist is not only incapable of resolving, but unceasingly aggravates, the proletariat responded resolutely: "every day, legions of agitators, delegations from the factory committees, from the soviets left the industrial cities, in order to animate the struggle, in order to organize the agricultural workers and poor peasants. The soviets and factory committees adopted numerous resolutions declaring their solidarity with the peasants and proposing concrete measures for the solution of the agrarian problem; the Petrograd conference of factory and shop committees devoted their attention to the agrarian question, and ... drew up a manifesto to the peasants. The proletariat feels itself to be not only a special class, but also the leader of the people" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol 3, ‘Withdrawal from the Pre-Parliament and Struggle for the Soviet Congress', page 77).
Bourgeois politics sees the majority as a mass to be manipulated in order to give a democratic façade to powers they have given to the state. Workers politics express the free and conscious work of the great majority for their own interests.
"The soviets, councils of deputies or delegations of the workers' assemblies appeared spontaneously for the first time in the great strike of the masses that took place in Russia in 1905. They were the direct emanation of thousands of workers' assemblies, in the factories and neighbourhoods, which multiplied everywhere, in the greatest explosion of workers' life that had been seen in history up until then. As if taking up the struggle where the Paris Commune had left off, the workers in practice generalized the form of organization which the Communards had intended: sovereign assemblies, centralized through elected and revocable delegates" (Revolution Internationale, organ of the ICC in France, no 190, ‘The proletariat will have to impose its dictatorship in order to lead humanity to its emancipation').
From the workers' overthrow of the Tsar in February, Soviets of workers' deputies were rapidly formed in Petrograd, Moscow, Karkov, Helsingfors, in all the industrial cities. They were joined by soldiers' delegations and, later on, those of the peasants. Around the Soviets the proletariat and exploited masses formed a network of struggle organizations, based on assemblies, on free discussion and decisions taken by all the exploited: neighbourhood soviets, factory committees, soliders' committees, peasants committees ... "the network of workers' councils and soldiers locals throughout Russia formed the spinal column of the revolution. With their support the revolution spread like a creeper throughout the country, their very existence posed an enormous difficulty to all the attempts of reaction" (D. Anweiler, The Soviets in Russia, Chapter 3, part 3).
Bourgeois "democracy" reduces the "participation" of the masses to the casting of a vote once every four or five years for a man who will do what is necessary for the bourgeoisie; opposed to this, the soviets constitute the permanent and direct participation of the mass of workers who in gigantic assemblies discuss and decide on all the questions of society. The delegates are elected and revocable at all times and participate in congress with definite mandates.
Bourgeois "democracy" conceives of "participation" in terms of the sham of the free individual who decides only through the ballot box. Thus, it is the consecration of atomization, individualism, all against all, the masking of class divisions, which benefit the minority and exploiting class. The soviets, by contrast, are based on collective discussion and decisions, in which each can feel the strength and force of the whole, developing all their capacities while at the same time reinforcing the collective. The soviets arise from the autonomous organization of the working class in order, from this platform, to struggle for the abolition of classes.
The workers, soldiers and peasants saw the soviets as their organization: "Not only the workers and soldiers of the enormous garrisons in the rear, but all the many coloured small people of the towns - mechanics, street peddlers, petty officials, cab-drivers, janitors, servants of all kinds - alien to the Provisional Government and its bureaux, were seeking a closer and more accessible authority. In continually increasing numbers, peasants' delegates were appearing at the Tauride Palace. The masses poured into the Soviet as though into the triumphal gates of the revolution. All that remained outside the boundaries of the Soviet seemed to fall away from the revolution, seemed somehow to belong to another world. And so it was in reality. Beyond the boundaries of the Soviet remained the world of the property owner, in which all colours mingled now in one grayish-pink defensive tint" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol 1, ‘The New Power', page 192).
Nothing could happen in the whole of Russia without the Soviets: the delegation of the Baltic and Black Sea fleets declared on the 16th of March that they would only obey the orders of the Provisional Government which were in accord with the decisions of the soviets. The 1720th Regiment was even more explicit: "The army and population should only submit to the decisions of the Soviet. Orders of the government which contravene the decisions of the Soviet are not to be carried out". The great capitalist and minister of the Provisional Government, Guchkov, declared that "unfortunately, the government does not yet have effective power: the troops, railways, post, telegraph are all in the hands of the soviet, which can show that government only exists in so far as the soviet permits it to exist".
The working class, as the class that aspires to the conscious and revolutionary transformation of the world, needs an organ that permits it to express all its tendencies, all its thinking, all its capacities; an extremely dynamic organ which in each moment synthesizes the evolution and advance of the masses; an organ that does not fall into conservatism and bureaucratism; which permits it to reject and combat all attempts to confiscate the direct power of the majority. An organ of work, where things are rapidly and agilely decided on, although at the same time in a collective and conscious manner; an organ whose form allows it feel a part of its work: "They [the Soviets] would not accommodate themselves to any theory of the division of power, but kept interfering in the administration of the army, in economic conflicts, in questions of food and transport, even in the courts of justice. The Soviets under pressure from the workers decreed the eight-hour day, removed reactionary executives, ousted the more intolerable commissars of the Provisional Government, conducted searches and arrests, suppressed hostile newspapers" (Trotsky, op cit, Vol 1, ‘The First Coalition', page 335).
We have seen how the working class was capable of uniting itself, of expressing all its creative energy, of acting in an organized and collective way and finally, of raising itself up before society as the revolutionary class whose mission is to install a new society, without classes and without the state. But in order to do this the working class had to destroy the power of the enemy class: the bourgeois state, embodied by the Provisional Government. It had to impose its own power: the power of the soviets.
In the second part of this article we will examine how the class dealt with the sabotage carried out from inside the soviets by the old socialist parties which had passed to the bourgeoisie - the Mensheviks and the SRs; how it renewed the soviets from top to bottom in order to adapt them for the taking of power; and the role that the Bolshevik party played and the way that this culminated in the October insurrection.
Adalen 21.7.92
[1] In continuity with the contributions of the currents of the Communist Left which preceded us (Bilan and Internationalisme) we have published on the October Revolution and the causes of its degeneration the pamphlet "October 1917. the beginning of the world revolution", the articles ‘The degeneration of the Russian Revolution' and ‘The lessons of Kronstadt' in International Review no. 3, ‘The Left Communists in Russia; (International Review nos. 9 and 10); ‘In defence of the proletarian nature of the October Revolution' (International Review nos. 12 and 13); ‘Party and Councils' (no.17); ‘Russia 1917 and Spain 1936' (no.25); the polemic ‘Lenin as Philosopher' (international Review nos. 25 to 31) etc. Likewise, we have denounced from the beginning the Stalinist regimes and made clear their capitalist nature; see International Review nos. 11, 12, 23, 34 ... and especially the ‘Theses on the Economic and Political Crisis in the Countries of the East.' (International Review no. 60) and ‘The Russian Experience' (International Review no. 61).
[2] Two months before, in April, when Lenin formulated this slogan in his famous Theses, it was rejected, including by many inside the Bolshevik Party, as a utopian abstraction ...
[3] We have no space in the framework of this article to discuss whether the solution the Bolsheviks and the Soviets finally gave to the agrarian question - the division of the land - was the correct one. Experience, as Rosa Luxemburg rightly said, demonstrated that it was not. But this should not detract from the essential point: that the proletariat and the Bolsheviks seriously posed the necessity for a solution based on the power of the proletariat and the battle for the socialist revolution.
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