Over the summer of 2007, capitalism confirmed its tendency to sink into ever more frequent catastrophes: the quagmire of imperialist war as exemplified by the civilian bloodbath in Iraq; the devastation of climate change induced by the rampant profit motive; and a further lurch into economic crisis promising the greater impoverishment of the mass of the world's population. Conversely, the working class, the only force capable of saving human society, is becoming increasingly disaffected with the rotting capitalist system. But its to the economic crisis that we must turn here, given recent dramatic events, beginning in the housing industry in the United States, that have shaken international finance and the entire world economic system.
The trigger for the crisis was the fall in house prices in America, along with the slump in house construction and large scale defaults on mortgages by those who couldn't afford the escalating interest rates of the latter, now famous as "sub-prime" or risky loans. From here shock waves travelled through the entire world financial system. In August, investment funds and entire investment banks, whose assets included billions of dollars worth of these sub-prime loans either collapsed or had to be rescued. Thus two "hedge funds" of the US investment bank Bear Sterns crashed costing investors $1bn. The German bank IKD had to be bailed out and two investment funds of the French bank BNP Paribas failed. The shares of mortgage lenders and other banks declined sharply leading to steep falls on all of the world's major stock exchanges, wiping out billions of dollars worth of "accumulated labour". In order to stem the fall in confidence and the reluctance of banks to extend credit the central banks - the US Federal Reserve Bank (the Fed) and the Eurobank - intervened by making available still more billions in cheaper loans. This money was not intended of course for the hundreds of thousands of people who were being made homeless by the "sub-prime" fiasco, nor the tens of thousands of workers made redundant by the crisis in the construction industry but for the credit markets themselves. Those financial institutions who had squandered enormous sums of cash were being rewarded by more gambling money. But this by no means ended the crisis. In England it was to develop as a farce.
The Bank of England criticised the other central banks in September for bailing out the risky and imprudent investors who had set the crisis off, recommending a more tight-fisted policy which would punish the wrong doers and prevent a reoccurrence of the same speculative problems. But then the Chairman of the bank, Mervyn King took an abrupt change of course. The bank was to rescue the fifth largest mortgage provider in the UK, Northern Rock. The "business model" of the latter was to rely on borrowing from the credit markets and then re-lend the money to homebuyers at a higher rate of interest. When the credit markets began to crumble, so did Northern Rock.
After the announcement of the rescue, long queues of depositors began to form outside the branches of the bank to withdraw their money - and took out £2bn in 3 days. It was the first run of this type on an English bank in 140 years. To prevent the risk of contagion the government had to step in again to give a 100% guarantee to the depositors of Northern Rock and savers in other threatened banks.[1] Then finally the "Old Lady of Threadneedle Street" was obliged, like the other central banks it had recently criticised, to inject huge quantities of money into the creaking banking system. Result: the credibility of the headquarters of the London financial centre - now representing a quarter of the British economy - was in ruins.
The next act of the drama, which is still continuing as we write, concerns the effect of the financial crisis on the wider economy. The first cut in interest rates by the Fed in five years, in order to make credit more available, has not, for the moment, been a success. It has not brought a halt to the continuing collapse of the housing market in the US nor the prospective one in up to 40 other countries where a similar speculative bubble has developed. Nor has it arrested the wider credit squeeze and its inevitable effect on investment and consumer spending as a whole. Instead it has led to the rapid fall of the dollar: to its lowest level against other currencies since President Nixon devalued the currency in 1971, and to the record rise of the Euro and of raw materials like oil and gold.
These are all indications of both a fall in growth, or even an open recession in the world economy, and an increase in inflation in the period to come.
In a word, the previous 6 years of world economic growth, built on mortgage and credit card debt and the gigantic foreign and budget debts of the United States, is coming to an end.
Such are the facts of the current economic situation. The question is whether the approaching open recession, which everyone agrees is likely, is part of the inevitable up and down pattern of the capitalist economy which is fundamentally sound, or whether it is a sign of a process of inner disintegration and breakdown integral to capitalism that will be punctuated by more and more violent convulsions.
To answer this question it is first necessary to deal with the idea that the development of speculation and the resulting credit crisis is in some way an aberration, or a departure from the healthy functioning of the system, which could be corrected by state control or better regulation. In other words is the present crisis a result of financiers holding the economy hostage?
The development of the banking system, the stock market and other credit mechanisms have been integral to the development of capitalism since the 18th century. They have been necessary for the amassing and centralising of money capital in order to permit the levels of investment required for vast industrial expansion that was outside the scope of the richest individual capitalist. The idea of the industrial entrepreneur acquiring his capital by saving or by risking his own money is a pure fiction. The bourgeoisie requires access to the sort of sums of capital that have already been concentrated in the credit markets. In the stock markets the ruling class is not betting with their own individual fortunes but with monetised social wealth.
Credit, and lots of it, has thus played an important part in immensely accelerating the growth of the productive forces in comparison with previous epochs and in the constitution of the world market.
On the other hand given the inherent tendencies of capitalist production, credit has also been a tremendous accelerator of overproduction, of overvaluing the capacity of the market to absorb products and has thus been a catalyst of speculative bubbles with the consequent crises and drying up of credit. Side by side with facilitating these social catastrophes the stock markets and the banking system have encouraged all the individual vices of greed and duplicity that are typical of an exploiting class living off the labour of others; vices that we see flourishing today in insider trading, fictitious payments, outrageous "bonuses" that amount to huge fortunes, "golden parachutes", accountancy fraud, plain theft etc.
The speculation, the risky loans, the swindles, the subsequent stock market crashes and the disappearance of huge quantities of surplus value are therefore an intrinsic feature of the anarchy of capitalist production.
Speculation is, in the last analysis, a consequence not the cause of capitalist crises. And if today, it seems that speculative activity in the financial sector dominates the whole economy, it is because over the past 40 years capitalist overproduction has increasingly lapsed into a continuing crisis, where world markets are saturated with goods, investment in production is less profitable and therefore money capital's inevitable recourse is to gamble in what has become a "casino economy".[2]
Therefore there is no possibility of a capitalism without its financial excesses, which are an intrinsic part of capitalism's tendency to produce as if the market had no limits, of the inability of even Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Fed, to know "if the market is overvalued".
The recent slump in the housing market in the US and in other countries is an illustration of the real relationship between over production and the credit squeeze.
The characteristics of the crisis in the housing market are reminiscent of descriptions of the capitalist crises that Karl Marx described in the Communist Manifesto in 1848:
"In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over production. ...there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce."
So today we don't see homelessness as a result of a shortage of homes but paradoxically because there are too many of them, there is a veritable glut of empty houses. The construction industry has been working flat out over the past five years. But at the same time the purchasing power of American workers has fallen, as American capitalism attempts to increase its profitability. A gap opened up between the number of new homes being thrown onto the market and the ability to pay for them by those who needed them. Hence the risky - i.e. sub-prime - loans to seduce new buyers who could hardly afford them to square the circle. Eventually the market crashed. Now, as more and more homeowners are evicted as a result of foreclosure on the crippling interest rates on these loans, the housing market will be further flooded - in the US some 3 million people are expected to lose their roofs as a result of defaulting on sub-prime mortgages. This human misery is anticipated in other countries where the housing bubble has either burst, or is about to. The surge in the construction industry and in mortgage lending over the past decade, then, far from reducing homelessness has put decent housing effectively out of reach for the mass of the population, or put homeowners in precarious state.[3]
Evidently what concerns the leaders of the capitalist system - its hedge fund managers, its treasury ministers, its central bankers, etc - in the current crisis are not the human tragedies created by the sub-prime debacle, the dashed aspirations to a slightly better life (except insofar as they might lead to questioning the insanity of this mode of production) but their inability as consumers to pay the inflated prices of houses and usurious rates of interest on the loans.
The sub-prime fiasco epitomises therefore the crisis of capitalism, its chronic tendency in the drive for profit to overproduce in relation to the solvent demand, its inability despite the phenomenal material, technological and labour resources at its command to satisfy the most basic human needs. [4]
However absurdly wasteful and anachronistic the capitalist system appears in the light of the recent crisis, the bourgeoisie still tries to reassure itself and the rest of the population that at least it won't be as bad as 1929.
The 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression continues to haunt the bourgeoisie, as the media coverage of the recent crisis testifies. Editorials, in depth articles, historical analogies, have tried to convince us that the present financial crisis won't lead to the same catastrophe, that 1929 was a unique event that turned into a disaster by wrong decision making.
The bourgeoisie's "experts" foster the illusion that the present financial crisis is rather a repeat of the relatively limited - in time and place - financial crashes of the 19th century. In reality today's situation has more in common with 1929 than this earlier period of capitalism's ascendancy, sharing many of the common characteristics of the catastrophic financial and economic crises of the decadence of capitalism, of the period opened up by the First World War; of the inner disintegration of the capitalist mode of production, of a period of wars and revolutions.
The economic crises of the capitalist ascendancy and the speculative activity that often accompanied them and preceded them were the heartbeats of a healthy system and gave way to new capitalist expansion throughout the world, through the construction of railways over entire continents, massive technological breakthroughs, the conquest of colonial markets, the conversion of artisans and peasants into armies of wage labourers, etc.
The 1929 New York stock market crash, which announced the first major crisis of capitalism's decay, put all the speculative crises of the 19th century in the shade. During the "roaring twenties" the value of shares in the New York Stock Exchange, the biggest in the world, had increased five fold. World capitalism had failed to recover from the catastrophe of the First World War, and in the now richest capitalist country the bourgeoisie sought an outlet in stock market speculation.
But on Black Thursday, October 24th 1929, a precipitous decline took place. Panic selling continued on Black Tuesday of the following week. And the stock market kept on crashing until 1932, by which time stocks had lost 89% of their peak value in 1929. They returned to levels not seen since the 19th century. The 1929 peak in share value was not reached again until 1954!
Meanwhile the US banking system, which had lent money to buy the stocks, itself collapsed. This catastrophe heralded the great depression of the thirties; the deepest crisis capitalism has ever experienced. American GDP was effectively halved. 13 million workers became unemployed with no relief to speak of. A third of the population sank into abject poverty. The effects were echoed around the world.
But there was no economic rebound as there had been after the crises of the 19th century. Production only began to resume when it had been harnessed to arms production in preparation for a new re-division of the world market in the imperialist bloodbath of World War 2. In other words when the unemployed had been transformed into cannon fodder.
The thirties depression appeared to be the result of 1929, but in reality the Wall Street Crash only precipitated the crisis, a crisis of the chronic overproduction of capitalism in its decadent phase, the essential identity of the thirties with today's crisis which began in 1968.
The bourgeoisie in the 1950s and 60s smugly claimed to have solved the problem of crises and consigned them to a historical curiosity through such palliatives as state intervention in the economy both at the national and international level, with deficit financing and progressive taxation. To its consternation the worldwide crisis of overproduction reappeared in 1968.
Over the past 40 years this crisis has lurched from low point to another, from one open recession to one more damaging, from one false Eldorado to another. The form of the crisis since 1968 hasn't taken the same abrupt nature as the crash of 1929.
In 1929 the financial experts of the bourgeoisie took measures that only allowed the financial crisis to take its course. The measures were not errors but methods that had worked in previous crashes of the system, like in the panic of 1907 but weren't sufficient in the new period. The state refused to intervene. Interest rates were increased, the money supply was allowed to shrink, tightening the credit squeeze and further shattering confidence in the banking and credit system. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff bill imposed import barriers that accelerated the downturn in world trade and consequently worsened the depression.
In the last 40 years the bourgeoisie has understood to use state mechanisms to reduce interest rates and inject liquidity into the banking system in the face of financial crises. It has been able to phase-in the crisis, but at the price of overloading the capitalist system with mountains of debt. A more gradual decline has been achieved than in the thirties but nevertheless the palliatives are wearing out, and the financial system is increasingly fragile.
The phenomenal growth of debt in the world economy during the recent decade is exemplified in the extraordinary growth, within the credit markets of the now famous "hedge funds". The estimated assets of these funds have risen from $491bn in 2000 to $1,745bn in 2007.[5] Their complicated financial transactions, mostly secret and unregulated, use debt as a tradable security in the search for short term gain. The hedge funds are judged to have spread bad debt throughout the financial system, accelerating and rapidly extending the present financial crisis.
Keynesianism - deficit financing by the state to maintain full employment - evaporated in the galloping inflation of the 1970s and the recessions of 1975 and 1981. Reaganomics and Thatcherism - restoring profits by cutting the social wage, cutting taxes and allowing unprofitable industries to collapse with mass unemployment - expired in the stock market crash of 1987, the Savings and Loans scandal, and the recession of 1991. The Asian Dragons, saddled with huge debts, ran out of puff in 1997. The dot com revolution, the "new" economy, turned out to have no visible means of support, and the boom in its shares bust in 1999. The housing booms and credit card debt explosion of the past five years, and the use of the gigantic US foreign debt to provide demand for the world economy and the "miracle" expansion of the Chinese economy - this too has now been put in question.
We can't predict exactly how the world economy will continue to decline but increasing convulsions and even greater austerity are inevitable.
Karl Marx in the third volume of Capital, argued that the credit system developed by capitalism revealed in embryo a new mode of production within the old. By enlarging and socialising wealth, taking it out of the hands of individual members of the bourgeoisie, capitalism had paved the way for a society where production could be centralised and controlled by the producers themselves and bourgeois ownership could be done away with as a historical anachronism:
"The credit system hence accelerates the material development of the productive forces and the creation of the world market which it is the historical task of the capitalist mode of production to bring to a certain level of development, as material foundations for the new form of production. At the same time, credit accelerates the violent outbreaks of this contradiction, crises, and with these the elements of dissolution of the old mode of production."[6]
For a century now conditions have been ripe for the abolition of capitalist exploitation. In the absence of a radical proletarian response, the contradictions of this moribund system, the economic crisis in particular, have only become more acute. While today credit continues to play a role in the evolution of these contradictions, it's not that of conquering the world market, since capitalism has long established its social relations throughout the planet. The massive indebtedness of all states has allowed the system to avoid brutal collapse despite the virtual impossibility of further expansion of the world market. But there is a price. After functioning for decades as a means of attenuating the conflict between the development of the productive forces and the obsolete social relations of capitalism, the headlong flight into debt is beginning to "accelerate the violent outbreaks of this contradiction" and to shake the social edifice as never before. However, taken in themselves, such convulsions are not a threat to the division of society into classes. They become so only when they help to move the proletariat.
Now, as revolutionaries have always asserted, it's the crisis which is going to accelerate the process of coming to consciousness about the impasse of the present world that is already under way. It is the crisis, which, in time, will precipitate numerous sectors of the working class in increasingly massive numbers into struggle. The challenge of these future experiences will be the capacity of the working class to defend and affirm itself against all the forces of the bourgeoisie, to gain confidence in its own forces and to progressively become conscious that it is the only social force capable of overthrowing capitalism.
Como
29.10.07
[1]. According to the British business magazine The Economist, this guarantee was actually a bluff.
[2]. "And none of this will be changed by the lamentations of the ‘alternative worldists' and other critics of the ‘financisation' of the economy. These political currents would like to see a cleaner and fairer capitalism that has turned its back on speculation. In reality, speculation is not at all the product of a ‘bad' type of capitalism which has forgotten its responsibility to invest in really productive sectors. As Marx already showed in the 19th century, speculation results from the fact that, when they face the perspective of a lack of sufficient outlets for productive investments, the holders of capital prefer to find short term profits in a huge lottery, which has today turned capitalism into a planetary casino. To want capitalism to renounce speculation in the present period is as realistic as wanting tigers to become vegetarians or dragons to stop breathing fire." Point 4, "Resolution on the International Situation" adopted by the 17th Congress of the ICC, International Review nº130.
[3]3. Benjamin Bernanke, Chairman of the US Fed, referred to mortgage arrears as "delinquencies": in other words crimes or misdemeanours against Mammon. Accordingly the "criminals" have been punished by still higher interest rates!
4. We can't here go into the state of homelessness in the world as a whole. According to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 1 billion people on the planet are considered to be without adequate housing while 100 million have no home at all.
[5]. www.mcclatchydc.com [1].
[6]. Part 5, Chapter 27: "The Role of Credit in Capitalist Production"
Ninety years ago one of the most important events in the entire history of humanity took place.
While the first world war ravaged most of the advanced countries, destroyed entire generations and devoured centuries of civilisation's progress, the Russian proletariat gave a dramatic new life to the hopes of tens of thousands of human beings who were oppressed by exploitation and barbarous war.
The imperialist butchery marked the fact that the capitalist system had had its day, that it had ceased to provide the conditions for the development of civilisation as it had done in the past against the feudal system. On the contrary, it had become the main hindrance to any further development of civilisation and had become a threat to it. The revolution of October 1917 demonstrated that the proletariat was the class able to overthrow capitalist domination and able to take control of managing the planet in order to move towards a society free of exploitation and war.
Every sector of the dominant class and its political apparatus will celebrate this anniversary in its own way and in accordance with the tendency to which it belongs.
Some will try to ensure that it is mentioned as little as possible by resorting to "scoops" on every "dramatic" subject under the sun, such as the drama of little Maddie McCann, the rugby world cup or the future of the monarchy in Spain.
Others will talk about it but only to repeat once more what has been asserted ad nauseam since the collapse of the USSR and its bloc: that Stalinism is the legitimate child of the revolution, any attempt by the exploited to free themselves of their chains can only lead to terror and mass murder.
Others however will eulogise the workers' insurrection of 1917 and praise Lenin and the Bolsheviks who led it. However they will end up agreeing that today the revolution is either unnecessary or else impossible.
It is up to revolutionaries to combat all the lies that the defenders of the capitalist order disseminate unceasingly in order to divert the working class from its revolutionary perspective. This is why we are publishing the two articles below.
The main aim of the first one is to show that the revolution is not just a pious wish, that it is not only necessary but also possible and realisable.
The second takes up one of the biggest lies in history: the idea that the society that existed in the USSR was a "socialist" society because it had abolished individual ownership of the means of production. This is a lie that was shared by all those parties that had an interest in doing so; the classical sectors of the "democratic" bourgeoisie as well as Stalinism, it was also supported by Trotskyism, a political current that nevertheless presents itself as "revolutionary", "communist" and "anti-Stalinist".
This article first appeared in 1946 in the review Internationalisme which was produced by the French Communist Left group, the ancestor of the ICC and it was re-produced in International Review n° 61 in Spring 1990. It is not easy to read and that is why we have written the introduction published here.[1] We have added several notes to the 1946 article where it makes reference to events or organisations that are not generally known among the new generations that are now, 60 years later, embarking upon communist reflection. Obviously the ICC has devoted many other texts to an event as important as the 1917 revolution and we hope that the two articles published here will encourage our readers to look at these texts.[2]
[1]. This presentation is signed MC, i.e our comrade who died at the end of that year. It's the last article he wrote for our Review but it expresses the vigour of his thought, which he held onto till the end. The fact that this comrade had been the main animator the GCF, had himself lived through the 1917 revolution in Russia, in his home town of Kichinev, gives this document a particular value at a time when we are commemorating the 90th anniversary of this revolution (On MC, see our article "Marc" in International Review n° 65 and 66).
[2]. See in particular our pamphlet October 1917, start of the world revolution, and the articles published in International Review n° 12,13, 51, 71, 72, 89, 90 and 91.
In our discussions, especially with young people, we often hear variations of the following: "It's true that things are very bad, there's more and more poverty and war, our conditions are getting worse, that the future of the planet is under threat. Something has to be done, but what? A revolution? That's utopian, it's impossible".
That's the big difference between May 68 and now. In 1968, the idea of revolution was all around even though the economic crisis had only just begun to bite. Today, it's much more evident that capitalism is bankrupt but there is much more scepticism about the possibility of changing the world. Words like "communism" and "class struggle" sound like the dream of another age. Even to talk about the working class and the bourgeoisie seems out of date.
But history does provide an answer to these doubts. 90 years ago, the working class supplied the proof that it is possible to change the world. The revolution of October 1917 in Russia, to this day the greatest action the exploited masses have ever undertaken, showed that the revolution was not only necessary but also possible.
The ruling class continues to spew out a flood of lies on this subject. Works like The end of an illusion or The Black Book of Communism do little more than repeat the propaganda that was already circulating at the time: the revolution was no more than a "putsch" by the Bolsheviks; Lenin was an agent of German imperialism, etc. The bourgeoisie can only see workers' revolutions as acts of collective madness; a lapse into chaos doomed to end horribly.[1] Bourgeois ideology cannot admit that the exploited can act for their own interests. The collective and conscious action of the working majority is a notion that bourgeois thought rejects as an unnatural utopia.
However, whatever our exploiters might think, the reality is that in 1917 the working class was able to rise up collectively and consciously against this inhuman system. It showed that the workers are not dumb beasts, good only for working and obeying. On the contrary, these revolutionary events revealed the enormous and often unsuspected capacities of the proletariat, freeing a torrent of creative energy and a prodigious dynamic of collective mental transformation. John Reed summed up the intense ebullience of proletarian life during the year 1917: "All Russia was learning to read, and reading - politics, economics, history - because the people wanted to know.... The thirst for education, so long thwarted, burst with the Revolution into a frenzy of expression. From Smolny Institute alone, the first six months, tons, car-loads, train-loads of literature, saturating the land... Then the Talk... Meetings in the trenches at the front, in village squares, factories...What a marvellous sight to see: Putilovsky Zavod (the Putilov factory) pour out in its forty thousand to listen to Social Democrats, Socialist Revolutionaries, Anarchists, anybody, whatever they had to say, as long as they would talk! For months in Petrograd, and all over Russia, every street-corner was a public tribune. In railway carriages, street-cars, always the spurting up of impromptu debate, everywhere.... At every meeting, attempts to limit the time of speakers voted down, and every man free to express the thought that was in him".[2]
Bourgeois democracy talks a lot about "freedom of expression" when experience tells us that for the ruling class it's all manipulation, theatre, brainwashing. Real freedom of expression is conquered by the working masses in their revolutionary action.
"In every factory, in each guild, in each company, in each tavern, in the military hospital, at the transfer station, even in the depopulated villages, the molecular work of revolutionary thought was in progress. Everywhere were to be found the interpreters of events, chiefly from among the workers, from whom one inquired, ‘what's the news?' and from whom one awaited the needed words...Elements of experience, criticism, initiative, self-sacrifice, seeped down through the mass and created, invisibly to a superficial glance but no less decisively, an inner mechanics of the revolutionary movement as a conscious process".[3]
This capacity of the working class to enter into struggle collectively and consciously was no sudden miracle; it was the fruit of numerous struggles and of a long process of subterranean reflection. Marx often compared the working class to an old mole slowly burrowing away under the earth only to emerge suddenly and unexpectedly into the clear light of day. Through the insurrection of October 1917 we saw the imprint of the experiences of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Russian revolution of 1905, of the political battles fought by the Communist League, the First and Second Internationals, the Zimmerwald, the German Spartacists and the Bolshevik party in Russia. The Russian revolution was certainly a response to the war, to hunger and the barbarism of dying Tsarism, but it was also and above all a conscious response, guided by the historic and worldwide continuity of the proletarian movement. Concretely, the Russian workers, prior to the victorious insurrection, had lived through the great struggles of 1898, 1902, the 1905 revolution and the battles of 1912-14:
"It was necessary to reckon not on a vague mass, but with the mass of the workers of Petrograd and the workers of Russia in general who had lived through the experience of the 1905 revolution, the insurrection in Moscow in the December of that year; and it was necessary that, within that mass, there were workers who had reflected on the experience of 1905, who had assimilated the perspective of the revolution, who had focused dozens of times on the question of the army".[4]
Thus October 1917 was the culminating point of a long process in the development of consciousness, culminating, on the eve of the insurrection, in a profoundly fraternal atmosphere in the workers' ranks. This ambience is perceptible and almost palpable in these lines from Trotsky: "The masses felt a need to stand close together. Each wanted to test himself through others, and all tensely and attentively kept observing how one and the same thought would develop in their various minds with its different shades and features.... Those months of feverish political life had created innumerable cadres in the lower ranks, had educated hundreds and thousands of rough diamonds...The mass would no longer endure in its midst the wavering, the dubious, the neutral. It was striving to get hold of everybody, to attract, to convince, to conquer. The factories joined with the regiments in sending delegates to the front. The trenches got into connection with the workers and peasants near by in the rear. In the towns along the front there was an endless series of meetings, conferences, consultations in which the soldiers and sailors would bring their activity into accord with that of the workers and peasants."[5]
Thanks to this ferment of debate, the workers were able to win over the soldiers and the peasants to their cause. The 1917 revolution expressed the very being of the proletariat, a class which is both exploited and revolutionary and which can only free itself if it acts in a conscious and collective manner. The revolutionary struggle of the proletariat is the only hope for the liberation of all the exploited and oppressed masses. Bourgeois politics is always organised to benefit a minority in society. Proletarian politics, on the other hand, don't aim to satisfy a particular interest but the interests of humanity as a whole: "the exploited and oppressed class (the proletariat) cannot liberate itself from the class which exploits and oppresses it (the bourgeoisie) without at the same time liberating, once and for all, the whole of society from exploitation, oppression and the class struggle."[6]
This huge outpouring of discussion, this thirst for collective reflection and action was materialised very concretely in the soviets (workers' councils), which allowed the workers to organise themselves and fight as a united class.
Following the call of the Petrograd soviet, the day of 22 October sealed the insurrection. Meetings and assemblies were held in all neighbourhoods and factories, and they were massively in agreement: "Down with Kerensky!",[7] "All power to the Soviets!" It was not just the Bolsheviks, but the whole proletariat of Petrograd which decided on and carried out the insurrection. It was a gigantic action in which industrial workers, white-collar workers, soldiers, women, children, even many Cossacks, participated openly.
"The insurrection was so to speak organised for a fixed date: 25 October. It was not fixed by a secret meeting, but openly and publicly, and the triumphant revolution took place precisely on 25 October (6 November in the Russian calendar) as had been foreseen in advance. Universal history has seen a great number of revolts and revolutions, but we would look in vain for another insurrection by an oppressed class which took place on a set date and publicly and which was carried out victoriously on the day announced. In this sense the November revolution was unique and incomparable".[8]
Throughout Russia, far beyond Petrograd, a huge number of soviets called for the seizure of power or took it themselves, marking the victory of the insurrection. The Bolshevik party knew very well that the revolution could not be carried out just by the party or by the Petrograd workers alone; it was a task for the whole proletariat. The events proved that Lenin and Trotsky were right to have said that the soviets, as soon as they appeared in the mass strikes of 1905, were "the finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat". In 1917, this unitary organisation of the fighting proletariat, based on the generalisation of sovereign assemblies and their centralisation through elected and revocable delegates, played an essential political role in the seizure of power, whereas the trade unions didn't play any role at all.
Alongside the soviets, another form of working class organisation played a fundamental, vital role in the victory of the insurrection: the Bolshevik party. While the soviets enabled the whole working class to struggle collectively, the party, representing the most determined and conscious fraction of the class, had the role of participating actively in the movement, of facilitating the widest and deepest possible development of consciousness in the class, and of formulating proposals that could provide a clear orientation for the activity of the class. The masses took power through the soviets, but the class party was no less indispensable. In July 1917, the intervention of the party was decisive in avoiding a definitive defeat for the whole movement.[9] In October 1917, it was again the party which guided the class towards the taking of power. On the other hand, the October revolution showed very clearly that the party must not and cannot replace the soviets: while the party has to play the role of political leadership both in the struggle for power and in the dictatorship of the proletariat, its task is not to take power itself. Proletarian political power cannot remain in the hands of a minority, however conscious and devoted it might be, but has to be exerted by the whole class through the only organism that can represent it as a whole: the soviets. At this level the Russian revolution was a painful experience since it ended up with the party little by little smothering the life of the workers' councils. But on this question, neither Lenin and the other Bolsheviks, nor the Spartacists in Germany were completely clear in 1917, nor could they have been. We must not forget that October 1917 was the proletariat's first experience of a successful insurrection on the scale of an entire country.
"The Russian revolution is only one of the contingents of the international socialist army, on the action of which the success and triumph of our revolution depends. This is a fact which none of us lose sight of...Aware of the isolation of its revolution, the Russian proletariat clearly realises that an essential condition and prime requisite for its victory is the united action of the workers of the whole world...".[10]
For the Bolsheviks it was clear that the Russian revolution was only the first act of the international revolution. The insurrection of October 1917 was in fact the most advanced outpost of a worldwide revolutionary wave, of a series of titanic struggles in which the proletariat came close to overthrowing capitalism. In 1917, it overturned bourgeois power in Russia. Between 1918 and 1923, it launched a series of battles in the central country of Europe, Germany. The revolutionary wave spread rapidly throughout the globe. Wherever a developed working class existed, the proletariat rose up against its exploiters: from Italy to Canada, from Hungary to China.
This proletarian upsurge was no accident. The feeling of belonging to the same class and being part of the same struggle corresponds to the very being of the proletariat. Whatever the country, the working class is subjected to the same ruling class and the same system of exploitation. This exploited class forms a chain across the continents, and each victory and defeat has profound implications for the whole chain. This is why since its origins communist theory has placed proletarian internationalism, the solidarity of all workers across the world, at the top of its principles: "Workers of all countries, unite" was the slogan of the Communist Manifesto written by Marx and Engels. This same Manifesto affirmed clearly that "the workers have no country". The proletarian revolution, which alone can put an end to capitalist exploitation and all forms of exploitation of man by man, can only take place on a world scale. This was already clearly expressed in Engels' Principles of Communism, written in 1847: "The communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place simultaneously in all civilised countries... It will have a powerful impact on the other countries of the world, and will radically alter the course of development which they have followed up to now, while greatly stepping up its pace...It is a universal revolution and will, accordingly, have a universal range".
The international dimension of the revolutionary wave of the years 1917-1923 proved that proletarian internationalism was not just a fine ideal and a great abstract principle but a real and tangible reality. In the face of the bloody nationalism of the bourgeoisie and the barbarism of the First World War, the working class responded with its international solidarity. "There is no socialism outside the international solidarity of the proletariat" - this was the lucid message of the leaflets circulating in the factories of Germany during the war, based on the words of Rosa Luxemburg in her pamphlet The crisis of German social democracy. The victory of the October insurrection, then the threat of the revolution spreading to Germany, forced the bourgeoisie to put an end to the first world butchery. The ruling class was obliged to set aside the imperialist antagonisms that had torn it apart for four years in order to mount a united front in the face of the revolutionary wave.
The revolutionary wave of the last century was the highest point so far reached by humanity. Against nationalism and war, against the exploitation and misery of the capitalist world, the proletariat was able to open up another perspective, that of internationalism and the solidarity of all the oppressed masses. The wave that began in October 1917 was proof of the power of the working class. For the first time, an exploited class had the courage and the capacity to take power from the hands of the exploiters and to launch the world proletarian revolution. Even though the revolution would soon be defeated, in Berlin, in Budapest, in Turin, even if the Russian and world proletariat had to pay a terrible price for this defeat (the horrors of the Stalinist counter-revolution, a second world war and all the barbarism we have seen since), the bourgeoisie has still not been able to completely erase these exalted events and their lessons from the memory of the working class. The scale of the falsifications of the bourgeoisie about October 1917 is proportionate to the fear that it provoked in its ranks. The memory of October 1917 is there to remind the proletariat that the destiny of humanity is in its hands and that it is capable of accomplishing this grandiose task. More than ever, the international revolution is the future of the class struggle!
Pascale, September 2007.
[1]. The cartoon film Anastasia by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman, which presents the Russian revolution as a coup by Rasputin, as a kind of demonic curse on the Russian people, is a gross caricature of this approach but still very revealing.
[2].Ten days that shook the world, Chapter 1.
[3]3. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, "Who led the February insurrection?"
[4]. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, "The paradox of the February revolution".
[5]. History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 3, "Withdrawal from the pre-parliament and struggle for the Soviet Congress".
[6]. Engels, 1883 preface to the Communist Manifesto.
[7]. The head of the provisional government formed after the February revolution.
[8]. Trotsky The November Revolution, 1919.
[9]. See "Russia, July 1917: Facing the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie, the vital role of the Bolshevik party [4]" on our website.
[10]. Lenin, "Report delivered at a Moscow Gubernia Conference of Factory Committees, 23 July 1918", Collected Works, Vol. 27.
The article we reproduce below was published by the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF) in n° 10 of their magazine Internationalisme, which came out in May 1946. Internationalisme saw itself as the continuation of Bilan and Octobre, published by the International Communist Left before the outbreak of the Second World War. The GCF had its origins in this current and maintained its general orientations. But Internationalisme wasn't just a continuation of Bilan: it also went beyond it.
The Russian question was at the centre of the preoccupations and discussions of the proletarian political milieu at the beginning of the 1930s, and these debates became more and more intense during the war and in its aftermath. Broadly speaking, there were four different analyses in these debates:
1) Those who denied any proletarian character to the revolution of October 1917 and to the Bolshevik Party and who saw the Russian revolution as no more than a bourgeois revolution. The main defenders of this analysis were the groups of the councilist movement, in particular Pannekoek and the Dutch Left.
2) At the opposite extreme, we find Trotsky's Left Opposition for whom, despite all the counter-revolutionary policies of Stalinism, Russia still retained the fundamental acquisitions of the October proletarian revolution: expropriation of the bourgeoisie, a statified and planned economy, monopoly of foreign trade. Consequently, the regime in Russia was a degenerated workers' state and had to be defended each time it entered into armed conflict with other powers: the duty of the Russian and international proletariat was to defend it unconditionally.
3) A third "anti-defencist" position was based on the analysis that the regime and the state in Russia were "neither capitalist nor working class", but a "bureaucratic collectivist regime". This analysis saw itself as a complement to the Marxist alternative: capitalist barbarism or proletarian revolution for a socialist society, adding a third way, that of a new society not foreseen by Marxism: a bureaucratic anti-capitalist society.[1] This third current had its adepts in the ranks of Trotskyism before and during the war, and in 1948 some of these broke with Trotskyism to give birth to the Socialisme ou Barbarie group under the leadership of Chaulieu/Castoriadis.[2]
4) The Italian Fraction of the International Communist Left fought energetically against this aberrant theory of a "third alternative" claiming to bring a "correction", an "innovation" to marxism. But since it itself hadn't developed an adequate analysis of the real evolution of decadent capitalism, it preferred in the meantime to stand on the solid ground of the classic formula: capitalism = private property; limitation of private property = a move towards socialism. Applied to the Russian regime this gave rise to the following position: persistence of a degenerated workers' state with a counter-revolutionary policy, non-defence of Russia in case of war.
This hybrid, contradictory formula, which opened the door to all sorts of dangerous confusions, had already provoked criticisms within the Italian Fraction on the eve of the war, but these criticisms were somewhat eclipsed by a much more urgent question - the perspective of the outbreak of generalised imperialist war, which was denied by the leadership of the Fraction (the Vercesi tendency[3]).
The discussion on the class nature of Stalinist Russia was taken up again, during the war, by the Italian Fraction that had been reconstituted in the south of France in 1940 (this had been done without the Vercesi tendency which denied any possibility of the existence of a revolutionary organisation, with its theory of the social disappearance of the proletariat during this war). This discussion quickly led to the categorical rejection of all the ambiguities and sophistries contained in the notion of the degenerated workers' state defended by the Fraction before the war. Instead the Stalinist state was analysed as a product of state capitalism.[4]
But after 1945 it was above all the GCF, which, in its review Internationalisme, deepened and widened the notion of state capitalism in Russia, integrating it into an overall conception of the general tendencies of capitalism in its period of decadence.
The article we're republishing here was one of many texts by Internationalisme devoted to the problem of state capitalism. The article by no means exhausts the question on its own, but in publishing it, leaving aside its undeniable interest, we want to show the continuity and development of thought and theory in the international left communist movement that we come from.
Internationalisme put a definite end to the "mystery" of the Stalinist state in Russia by showing that it was part of a general, historic tendency towards state capitalism. It also pointed out that the specificities of Russian state capitalism, which far from expressing a "transition from the formal domination to the real domination of capital" as our dissidents in the EFICC[5] stupidly claim, have their source in the triumph of the Stalinist counter-revolution after the October revolution had annihilated the old bourgeois class.
But Internationalisme didn't have time to push its analysis of state capitalism further, particularly the question of the objective limits of this tendency. Even though it did write that "The economic tendency towards state capitalism, although it can't be completed in a total socialisation and collectivisation inside capitalist society, nevertheless remains a very real tendency",[6] it wasn't able to develop an analysis of the reasons why this tendency couldn't be completed. It's up to the ICC to approach this problem in the framework drawn up by Internationalisme.
We have to show that state capitalism, far from resolving the insurmountable contradictions of the period of decadence, in fact only brings new contradictions, new factors that end up aggravating the situation of world capitalism. One of these factors is the creation of a swollen mass of parasitic strata, a growing loss of any sense of responsibility by these state agents who, paradoxically, have the job of directing, orienting and managing the economy.
The recent collapse of the Stalinist bloc, the multiplication of scandals about the corruption that reigns in the state apparatus all over the world is a confirmation of this "parasitisation", if we may so speak, of the whole ruling class. It's absolutely necessary to pursue this work of researching into and exposing the tendency towards the parasitism and irresponsibility of all high functionaries, a tendency accelerated under the regime of state capitalism.
MC (1990)
Internationalisme no 10,
Gauche Communist de France, 1946
There's no doubt any more: the first experience of the proletarian revolution, both in its positive acquisitions, and even more in the negative lessons that can be drawn from it, is today at the base of the whole modern workers' movement. As long as the balance sheet of this experience hasn't been made, as long as its lessons haven't been brought to light and assimilated, the working class and the revolutionary vanguard will be condemned to running on the spot.
Even if we imagine the impossible, i.e. that the proletariat comes to power through a combination of miraculously favourable circumstances, it wouldn't be able to hold out in these conditions. In a very short while it would lose control of the revolution, and would soon be shunted back towards capitalism.
Revolutionaries can't be satisfied simply with taking a position on the Russia of today. The problem of the defence or non-defence of Russia has long ceased to be a debate within the camp of the vanguard.
The imperialist war of 1939-45, in which Russia showed itself, before the eyes of the whole world, to be one of the most bloody and rapacious of the imperialist powers, has once and for all revealed those who defend Russia, in whatever form they present themselves, as agencies, political arms of the Russian imperialist state within the proletariat, just as the 1914-18 war revealed that the Socialist parties had definitively become integrated into the national capitalist state.
We don't intend to go back over this question in this study. Neither will we be looking at the nature of the Russian state, which the opportunist tendency within the international communist left still tries to portray as "proletarian with a counter-revolutionary function", as a "degenerated workers' state". We think that we've finished with this subtle sophistry which claims that there is an opposition between the proletarian nature and the counter-revolutionary function of the Russian state, and which, without making any analysis or explanation of Russia's evolution, leads directly to the reinforcement of Stalinism, of the Russian capitalist state and of international capitalism. We also note that since our study of and polemic against this conception, which appeared in no 6 of the Internal Bulletin of the Italian Fraction in June 1944, the defenders of this theory haven't dared to reply openly. The communist left of Belgium has made it known officially that it rejects this conception. The Internationalist Communist Party of Italy doesn't yet seem to have taken a position. And while we don't find an open, methodical defence of this erroneous conception, neither do we find an explicit rejection of it. Which explains why, in the ICP's publications, we see constantly the term "degenerated workers' state" when they are in fact referring to the Russian capitalist state.
It's obvious that this isn't just a matter of terminology, but one of the persistence of an incorrect analysis of Russian society, of a lack of theoretical precision, something we also find in relation to other political and programmatic questions.
The aim of our study is exclusively concerned with drawing out the fundamental lessons of the Russian experience. We don't intend to write a history of the events which unfolded in Russia, however important they were. Such a task is beyond our capacities at present. We only want to look at that part of the Russian experience which goes beyond the context of a particular historical situation and contains lessons valid for all countries and for the whole social revolution to come. In this way we hope to make our contribution to a study of fundamental questions whose solution can only come through the efforts of all the revolutionary groups in the framework of an international discussion.
The Marxist concept of the private ownership of the means of production as a fundamental element of capitalist production, and thus of capitalist society, seemed to imply the validity of another formula: the disappearance of the private possession of the means of production would be equivalent to the disappearance of capitalist society. Thus throughout Marxist literature we find that the disappearance of the private ownership of the means of production is presented as synonymous with socialism. But the development of capitalism, or more precisely, of capitalism in its decadent phase, displays a more or less accentuated, but nevertheless generalised tendency towards the limitation of the private ownership of the means of production - towards their nationalisation.
But nationalisations are not socialism and we won't spend any time here demonstrating this. What interests us here is the tendency itself, and its class nature.
If you consider that the private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental basis of capitalist society, any recognition that there's a tendency towards limiting this kind of ownership leads to an insurmountable contradiction: capitalism is beginning to abolish itself, to undermine the very basis of its existence.
It would be a waste of time to juggle with words and speculate on the inherent contradictions of the capitalist regime.
When one talks, for example, about the mortal contradiction of capitalism, i.e. that in order to develop its production, capitalism needs to conquer new markets, but that in the act of acquiring these new markets it incorporates them into its system of production and so destroys the market without which it cannot live, one is talking about a real contradiction, arising out of the objective development of capitalist production, independent of its will, and presenting an insoluble problem for it. It's the same thing when one refers to imperialist war and the war economy, in which capitalism, through its internal contradictions, produces its own self-destruction.
The same applies to all the objective contradictions of capitalist evolution.
But it's a different thing with the private ownership of the means of production: it's impossible to see what forces are obliging capitalism deliberately and consciously to take on a structure which would alter its very nature and essence.
In other words, in proclaiming that the private ownership of the means of production is the nature of capitalism, you are at the same time proclaiming that capitalism can't exist without private ownership. By the same token, you are saying that any change towards limiting this private ownership means a limitation of capitalism, a change in a direction opposed to capitalism, an anti-capitalist direction. The question of the scale of this limitation isn't the issue here. To get lost in quantitative calculations, or to try to demonstrate that the scale involved is negligible, is simply to avoid the question. In any case it would be wrong: you only have to refer to the breadth of this tendency in the totalitarian countries and in Russia, where it involves the entire means of production, to be convinced of this. What's at issue here isn't the scale of the tendency, but its very nature.
If the tendency towards the liquidation of private ownership really meant a tendency towards anti-capitalism, you would arrive at the following stupefying conclusion: seeing that this tendency operates under the direction of the state, the capitalist state would then be the agent of its own destruction.
And indeed, all the "socialist" partisans of nationalisations, of the command economy, all the makers of "plans" who, if they're not consciously trying to strengthen capitalism, are nevertheless reformers in the service of capitalism, like the groups Abondance, CETES, etc, end up with this theory of the anti-capitalist capitalist state.
The Trotskyists, who don't reason very well, are obviously in favour of these limitations, since for them anything opposed to the alleged nature of capitalism must necessarily be proletarian. They may be a bit sceptical, but they think it would be criminal to neglect the least opportunity. For them, nationalisations are a weakening of capitalist private property. If, unlike the Stalinists and the Socialists, they don't actually say that they are a slice of socialism inside the regime of capitalism, they are convinced that they are "progressive". In their cunning way, they hope to get the capitalist state to do a job which would otherwise have to be done by the proletariat after the revolution. "It means that there'll be less for us to do" they say, rubbing their hands in the conviction that they've outsmarted the capitalist state.
But "that's reformism," exclaims the left communist of the Vercesi type. And, as a good "Marxist", he gets down not to explaining the problem, but to denying it, trying for example to prove that nationalisations don't exist, can't exist, that they're nothing but inventions, demagogic lies of the reformists.
Why this indignation, this persistent denial, which at first sight seems rather surprising? Because the point of departure is the same as that of the reformists, and on it rests the whole theory of the proletarian nature of Russian society.
And since they have the same criterion for appreciating the class nature of the economy, to recognise such a tendency in the capitalist countries could only mean recognising that capitalism is evolving into socialism.
It's not so much that this position clings to the "Marxist" formula about private property, but rather that it's fixated on the formula in reverse, on its caricature, i.e. that the absence of private ownership of the means of production is the criterion for the proletarian nature of the Russian state. This is why it's led to deny the tendency towards, the possibility of, limiting the private ownership of the means of production within capitalism. Rather than observing the real and objective development of capitalism and its tendency towards state capitalism, and thus rectifying his position on the nature of the Russian state, Vercesi prefers to hold onto the formula and save his theory of the proletarian nature of Russia, and too bad for reality. And since the contradiction between the formula and reality is insurmountable, reality is simply denied, and the game is complete!
A third tendency tries to find the solution in the negation of Marxism. "This doctrine", it says, "was true as long as it was being applied to capitalist society, but what Marx didn't foresee, and what ‘goes beyond' Marxism, is the emergence of a new class which is gradually, and to some extent peacefully (!) taking over economic and political power in society at the expense both of capitalism and of the proletariat." This new (?) class is, for some, the bureaucracy, for others, the technocracy, and for yet others, the "synarchy".
Let's leave all these speculations aside and get back to the main issue. It's an undeniable fact that there is a tendency towards limiting the private ownership of the means of production, and that this is accentuating each day in all countries. This tendency is concretised in the general formation of a statified capitalism, managing the main branches of production and the economic life of the country. State capitalism isn't the speciality of one bourgeois faction or of a particular ideological school. We've seen it installed in democratic America and Hitler's Germany, in "Labour" Britain and "Soviet" Russia.
We can't in the limits of this study go into an in-depth analysis of state capitalism, of the historic causes and conditions determining this form. We will simply say that state capitalism is the form corresponding to the decadent phase of capitalism, just as monopoly capitalism corresponded to its phase of full development. Another remark. A characteristic trait of state capitalism seems to be that it develops in a more accentuated manner in direct ratio to the effects of the permanent economic crisis in the various capitalist countries.
But state capitalism is not at all a negation of capitalism, still less does it represent a gradual transformation into socialism as the reformists of various schools claim.
The fear of falling into reformism by recognising the tendency towards state capitalism resides in the mistaken notion of the nature of capitalism. This isn't defined by the private ownership of the means of production, which is just one form of capitalism, characteristic of a given period, the period of liberal capitalism. What defines the nature of capitalism is the separation of the producer from the means of production.
Capitalism is the separation between past labour, accumulated in the hands of an exploiting, directing class, and the living labour of another class. It matters little how the possessing class distributes its wealth among itself. Under capitalism, this distribution is constantly being altered through economic competition or military violence. However important it may be to study the way this distribution is carried out, this isn't what we're looking at here.
Whatever changes may take place in the relations between different layers of the capitalist class, looking at the social system of class relations as a whole, the relationship between the possessing class and the producer class remains capitalist.
The surplus value extracted from the workers in the production process may be distributed in different ways, the parts going to finance, commercial, or industrial capital may be more or less large, but this changes nothing about the nature of the surplus value itself. For capitalist production to take place, it's a matter of complete indifference whether there's individual or collective ownership of the means of production. What determines the capitalist character of production is the existence of capital, i.e. of labour accumulated in the hands of one class that commands the living labour of others in order to produce surplus value. The transfer of capital from individual, private hands into state hands doesn't signify a change in the nature of capitalism towards non-capitalism, but is simply a concentration of capital ensuring a more rational and efficient exploitation of labour power.
What has been shown up as false here isn't the Marxist conception, but simply a restricted understanding of it, a narrow and formal interpretation of it. What gives a capitalist character to production isn't the private ownership of the means of production. Private property and the private ownership of the means of production also existed in slavery and in feudal society. What makes production capitalist production is the separation of the means of production from the producers, their transformation into a means of buying and commanding living labour power with the aim of making it produce surplus value, or in other words the transformation of the means of production from a simple tool in the production process into something which exists as capital.
The form in which capital exists, whether individual or concentrated (trust, monopoly, state) doesn't undermine its existence any more than the scale of the surplus value produced, or the forms the latter takes (profit, land rent). Forms are simply manifestations of the substance and can only express it in various ways.
In the epoch of liberal capitalism, the form in which capital existed was essentially that of private, individual capitalism. Thus Marxists could without any great inconvenience use a formula that basically represented the form as a way of expressing and representing the content.
When it came to propaganda among the masses, this actually had the advantage of making it possible to translate a somewhat abstract idea into a living, concrete image that could more easily be grasped.
"Private possession of the means of production = capitalism" and "getting rid of private possession = socialism" were striking formulae, but they were only partially true.
The inconvenience only arose when the form tended to change. The habit of representing the content through the form, which at a given moment did correspond to each other, was turned into a false identification, and led to the error of replacing the content with the form. We find this error taking place very clearly in the Russian revolution.
Socialism requires a very high level of the development of the productive forces, which is only conceivable in the wake of a considerable concentration and centralisation of the forces of production.
This concentration will involve the dispossession of private owners of the means of production. But this dispossession, whether at national or international level, this concentration of the forces of production after the triumph of the proletarian revolution, is only a condition for the movement towards socialism, but in itself it's not socialism at all.
The most far-reaching expropriation may lead to the disappearance of the capitalists as individuals benefiting from surplus value, but it doesn't in itself make the production of surplus value, i.e. capitalism itself, disappear.
This assertion may at first sight appear paradoxical, but a closer examination of the Russian experience will prove its validity. For socialism to exist, or even a move towards socialism, it's not enough for expropriation to take place: what's essential is that the means of production cease to exist as capital. In other words, the capitalist principle of production has to be overturned.
The capitalist principle of accumulated labour commanding living labour with a view to producing surplus value must be replaced by the principle of living labour commanding accumulated labour with a view to producing consumer goods to satisfy the needs of society's members.
It's in this principle alone, that socialism resides.
The mistake of the Russian revolution and of the Bolshevik Party was to have put the accent on the condition, on expropriation, which in itself isn't socialism or a factor that pushes the economy in a socialist direction, and to have neglected or relegated to second place the basic principle of a socialist economy.
There's nothing more instructive in this matter than reading the numerous speeches and writings by Lenin on the necessity for a growing development of industry and production in Soviet Russia. For Lenin the development of industry was identical to the development of socialism. He used openly and more or less indifferently the terms state capitalism and state socialism, without really distinguishing them. Formulations like "socialism = soviets plus electrification" expressed the stammerings and confusions of the leaders of the October revolution in this domain.
It is very characteristic that Lenin's attention was fixed on the private sector and on small peasant property, which according to him were the source of the danger of the Russian economy evolving towards capitalism. In so doing he completely neglected the much more decisive and concrete danger coming from state industry.
History has clearly shown that Lenin was wrong on this point. The liquidation of small peasant property could and did involve a strengthening not of a socialist sector, but of a state sector whose development meant the reinforcement of state capitalism.
There's no doubt that the difficulties the Russian revolution ran into because of its isolation, and because of the backward state of its economy, would have been gradually attenuated by the development of the world revolution. It's only on the international scale that there can be a socialist development of society and of each country. It remains the case that even on an international scale, the fundamental problem resides not in expropriation, but in the basic principle of production.
Not only in the backward countries, but even where capitalism has reached its highest state of development, private property will subsist for a certain period and in certain sectors of production, and it will only be completely absorbed slowly and gradually.
However the danger of a return to capitalism will not come mainly from this sector, because a society in evolution towards socialism will not be able to return towards a primitive stage of capitalism, one which capitalism itself has left behind.
The real danger of a return to capitalism will come essentially from the statified sector: All the more so because here capitalism attains an impersonal, almost ethereal form. Statification can serve to camouflage, for a considerable period, a process opposed to socialism.
The proletariat will only overcome this danger to the extent that it rejects the identification between expropriation and socialism, to the extent that it is able to distinguish statification with a "socialist" adjective from the actual socialist principle of production.
The Russian experience teaches us and reminds us that it's not the capitalists who make capitalism, but the reverse: it's capitalism which engenders capitalists. Capitalists can't live outside of capitalism but the reverse isn't true.
The capitalist principle of production can continue to exist after the juridical, even the material disappearance of capitalists as the beneficiaries of surplus value. In this case, surplus value, just as under private capitalism, is reinvested in the production process in order to extract a greater mass of surplus value.
Before long, the existence of surplus value gives rise to men who form the class that appropriates surplus value. The function creates the organ. Whether they are parasites, bureaucrats, or technicians who participate in production, whether surplus value is redistributed in a direct manner, or indirectly through the intervention of the state, in the form of high salaries or various types of privileges (as is the case in Russia), this changes nothing about the fact that we're dealing with the rise of a new capitalist class.
The central element in capitalist production is the difference between the value of labour power, determined by necessary labour time, and that labour power which reproduces more than its own value. This is expressed in the difference between the labour time necessary for the worker to reproduce his own subsistence, and for which he's paid, and the extra labour time for which he isn't paid and which constitutes the surplus value taken by the capitalist. The distinction between socialist production and capitalist production lies in the relationship between paid labour time and unpaid labour time.
Every society needs an economic reserve fund in order to ensure the continuation and enlargement of production. This fund is drawn from an indispensable amount of surplus labour. At the same time a quantity of surplus labour is required to meet the needs of the unproductive members of society.
Capitalist society is tending to destroy the enormous mass of accumulated labour drawn from the ferocious exploitation of the proletariat. In the aftermath of the revolution, the victorious proletariat will be faced with ruins and with a catastrophic economic situation, inherited from capitalist society. It will have to reconstruct an economic reserve fund.
This means that, at the beginning, the amount of surplus labour the proletariat has to perform will be as great as it was under capitalism. Thus the socialist economic principle will not, in its immediate application, be able to be measured quantitatively in the relation between paid and unpaid labour. Only the trajectory, the tendency towards altering this relationship can serve as an indication of which way the economy is going, as a barometer of the class nature of production.
The proletariat and its class party will thus have to be extremely vigilant. The greatest industrial conquests (even where the part going to the workers is greater in absolute terms, but less in relative terms) can easily involve a return to the capitalist principle of production.
All the subtle arguments about private capitalism disappearing through the nationalisation of the means of production can't hide this reality.
Refusing to be misled by this sophistry, which aims at perpetuating the exploitation of the workers, the proletariat and its party will immediately have to embark upon an implacable struggle to halt any tendency towards a return to capitalism, and to impose by all the means available an economic policy that leads in the direction of socialism.
In conclusion, we will cite the following passage from Marx to illustrate and summarise our thinking: "The great difference between the capitalist principle of production and the socialist principle is this: with the first the workers confront the means of production as capital, and can only set it to work to increase the surplus product and the surplus value in the interests of their exploiters. With the second, instead of being occupied by these means of production, they use them to produce wealth in their own interests."
Internationalisme 1946
[1]. Among the first to hold this theory, we should mention Albert Treint, who in 1932 published two documents with the overall title of The Russian Enigma, and who, on this position, broke with the group known as the Groupe de Bagnolet. Albert Treint, a former general secretary of the PCF, and a former leader of the left opposition group L'Unite Leniniste in 1927, and of Redressement Communiste from 1928 to 1931, went through an evolution after breaking with the Groupe de Bagnolet which, like so many others, took him to the Socialist Party in 1935, and into the Resistance during the war. In 1945, he was not only reintegrated into the army with a rank of captain, but also became the commandant of a battalion occupying Germany.
[2]. It should be noted that the councilists of the Dutch left, and Pannekoek in particular, agreed with the broad lines of this brilliant analysis of a third alternative (see the correspondence between Chaulieu and Pannekoek in Socialisme ou Barbarie).
[3]. Up until the Second World World War Vercesi was the main animator of the Left Fraction of the Communist Party of Italy, which was formed in 1927 in the Paris suburb of Pantin, and which took the name Italian Fraction of the Communist Left in 1935. His contribution to the political and theoretical development of the Fraction was considerable, as can be seen from numerous articles he wrote for the Fraction's review Bilan. However, in 1938, he started to develop a theory of the "war economy as a solution to the crisis of capitalism", which had the disastrous consequence of denying the threat of world war. When the latter broke out, the Fraction was completely paralysed and Vercesi then theorised the necessity for its dissolution on the grounds of the "social non-existence of the proletariat during the war". This did not stop a certain number of members of the Fraction, one of whom was our comrade MC, from reconstituting the Fraction in the south of France. Vercesi himself reappeared at the end of the war when he animated an anti-fascist coalition in Bruxelles, publishing L'Italia di domani (Tomorrow's Italy), whose name sums up its programme. This was prior to joining the Partito Comunista Internazionalista which had been formed in the north of Italy in 1943 around Onarato Damen. This group was reconstituted in 1945 with the arrival of other elements and groups (the elements around Bordiga in the south, the people who had broken with the Italian Fraction in 1936 on the question of the war in Spain, etc) and continues to exist as the Italian branch of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party. The PCInt publishes the paper Battaglia Comunista and the review Prometeo while its British counterpart, the Communist Workers Organisation, publishes Revolutionary Perspectives.
[4]. In 1945, with the ad hoc constitution of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy, the precipitous dissolution of the Fraction, the arrival of Bordiga with his theories of the "invariance" of marxism, of the "double revolution", of "support for national liberation", of the distinction between "geographical areas", of proclaiming US imperialism to be "enemy number one", this new party went through a clear regression on the question of the class nature of the Stalinist regime, involving a denial of the notion of decadence and of its political expression: state capitalism.
[5]. EFICC (External Fraction of the ICC): this was a split from our organisation in 1985 which argued that the ICC was in the process of "betraying" its own platform and which put itself forward as its real defender. Since then this group, which publishes Internationalist Perspectives, has followed a trajectory towards councilism while abandoning any reference to the ICC's platform; in particular, it has called into question one of its essential axes, the analysis of the decadence of capitalism.
[6]. Internationalisme n° 9.
The "culture of debate" is not a new question either for the workers' movement or for the ICC. Nevertheless, the evolution of history has obliged our organisation - from the turn of the new century on - to return to this question and examine it more closely. There were two main developments which obliged us to do so, the first one being the appearance of a new generation of revolutionaries and the second, the internal crisis we suffered at the beginning of this century.
It was first and foremost the contact with a new generation of revolutionaries that obliged the ICC to more consciously cultivate its openness towards the outside and its capacity for political dialogue.
Each generation forms a link in the chain of human history. Each one is confronted with three fundamental tasks: to receive the collective heritage from the previous generation; to enrich this heritage on the basis of its own experience; to pass it on so that the next generation can achieve more that it was able to.
These tasks, far from being easy, represent a particular challenge. This also goes for the workers movement. The older generation has its experience to offer. But it also bears the wounds and traumas of its struggles, has had to learn to face up to defeats, disappointments, and the realisation that the construction of lasting acquisitions of collective struggle often requires more than one lifetime.[1] It needs the energy and élan of the following generation, but also its new questions and its capacity to see the world with new eyes.
But as much as the generations need each other, their capacity to forge the necessary unity is not automatically given. The more society distances itself from traditional natural economy, the more incessantly and rapidly capitalism "revolutionises" the productive forces and the whole of society, the more the experience of one generation differs from the next. Capitalism, the system of competition par excellence, also pits the generations against each other in the struggle of each against all.
It was with this framework in mind that our organisation began to prepare itself for the task of forging this link. But more than this preparation, it was the actual experience of meeting this new generation which gave the issue of the culture of debate an additional significance in our eyes. We encountered a generation which itself attaches a far greater importance to this question than that of the "1968" generation. The first major indication of this change at the level of the working class as a whole was the mass movement of the students and pupils in France against the "precarisation" of employment in the spring of 2006. Here, the emphasis on the freest and broadest possible debate, in particular within the general assemblies, was very striking. As opposed to this, the student movement, which developed in the late sixties, had often been marked by its incapacity for political dialogue. This difference is first and foremost the expression of the fact that the student milieu today is much more strongly proletarianised than it was 40 years before. Intense, wide scale debate has always been a principle hallmark of mass proletarian movements, and also characterised the workers assemblies of 1968 in France or 1969 in Italy. But also in 2006 there was the openness of youth in struggle towards the older generations, its eagerness to learn from their experience. This was very different from the attitude of the student movement in Germany in the late 1960s (which was perhaps the most caricatural expression of the mood at that time). One of its slogans was: those over 30 to the concentration camps! Hand in hand with this notion went a practise of shouting each other down, of violently breaking up "rival" meetings etc. Here lay, at the psychological level, one of the roots of the development of terrorism as a form of protest not only in Germany, but also in Italy. The break in continuity between the generations of the working class was one of the roots of this problem, since the relations between the generations is a privileged ground, from an early age on, of the forging of the capacity for dialogue. The militants of 1968 saw the generation of their parents either as having "sold themselves" to capitalism or (as in Germany or Italy) as a generation of fascists and war criminals. For the workers who had borne the horrible exploitation of the post 1945 phase in the hope that their children would live better than themselves, it was a bitter disappointment to hear their children accuse them of being "parasites" living from the "exploitation of the third world". But there is also no doubt that the parent generation of that time had to a large extent lost, or itself failed to learn, the capacity for dialogue. This generation was savagely scarred by World War II and the Cold War, by the Fascist, Stalinist and Social Democratic counter-revolution.
As opposed to this, 2006 in France announced something new and extremely fruitful.[2] Already some years beforehand, this concern of the new generation had been announced by the revolutionary minorities of the working class. These minorities, from the moment they took to the stage of political life, were armed with their own critique of sectarianism and the refusal to debate. Among the first demands they raised were that debate should not be seen as a luxury but as an imperious necessity; that those who engage in it should take each other seriously and learn to listen to each other; that arguments are the arms of this combat and not brute force or the appeal to moral or theoretical "authorities". With regard to the proletarian internationalist camp, these comrades in general (and quite rightly) criticised (and were profoundly shocked by) the lack of fraternal debate between the existing groups. They were quick to reject the idea that Marxism is a dogma, which the new generation ought to uncritically adopt.[3]
For our part, we were surprised by the reaction of this new generation to the ICC itself. The new comrades who came to our public meetings, the contacts from all over the world who began to correspond with us, the different political groups and circles with whom we debated - they repeatedly told us that they had recognised the proletarian nature of the ICC as much on account of our behaviour, in particular the way we debate, as through our programmatic positions.
Where does this profound concern of the new generation with this question come from? We think it results from the depth of the historic crisis of capitalism, which today is much graver and more dangerous than after 1968. This demands the most radical possible critique of capitalism, going to the deepest roots of problems. One of the most corrosive effects of bourgeois individualism is the way it destroys the capacity to discuss, and in particular to listen to and learn from each other. Dialogue is replaced by rhetoric; the winner is the one who can make the most noise (as in bourgeois elections). The culture of debate, thanks to human language, is the main way to develop consciousness as the primary weapon for the class that bears humanity's future. For the proletariat it is the sole means for overcoming its isolation and impatience and for directing itself toward the unification of its struggles.
Another aspect of this concern today is the struggle to overcome the nightmare of Stalinism. Many of the militants striving towards internationalist positions today are coming directly from a leftist milieu and are influenced by the latter. This milieu presents a caricature of decadent bourgeois ideology and behaviour in a socialist garb. These militants were brought up politically to believe that exchange of arguments is equivalent to "bourgeois liberalism", that a "good communist" is someone who shuts his mouth and switches off his mind and emotions. The comrades who today are determined to shake off the effects of this moribund product of the counter-revolution increasingly understand that this requires the rejection not only of its positions but also its mentality. In so doing, they are contributing to the re-establishment of a tradition of the workers movement which threatened to die out when the counter-revolution created a rupture in its organic continuity.[4]
The second major impulse for the ICC to return to the question of a culture of debate was our own internal crisis at the beginning of the new century, characterised by the most malignant behaviour we had ever witnessed within our ranks. For the first time ever, the ICC had to exclude not one but several of its members.[5] At the beginning of this crisis there were difficulties and differences of opinion about the question of centralisation in our section in France. There is no reason why divergences of this kind, in themselves, should be the cause of an organisational crisis. Nor were they its cause. What caused the crisis was the refusal to discuss, and in particular the attempt to isolate and denigrate; i.e. to personally attack those with whom one disagrees.
In the aftermath of this crisis, the organisation pledged itself to go to the deepest roots of the whole history of our crises and splits. We have already published contributions on certain of these aspects.[6] One of the conclusions we came to was that a tendency towards monolithism had played a major role in all the split-offs that we suffered. As soon as divergences appeared, certain members began to assert that they could no longer work with the others, that the ICC was becoming a Stalinist organisation or was in the process of degenerating. These crises broke out in relation to divergences which, for the most part, could be perfectly contained within a non-monolithic organisation, and in all cases should be discussed and clarified before any separation takes place.
The repeated appearance of monolithic approaches is surprising in an organisation which specifically bases itself on the traditions of the Italian Fraction, which always defended that, whenever there are divergences concerning fundamental principles, the most profound and collective clarification must precede any organisational separation.
The ICC is the only current of the Communist Left today which places itself specifically in the organisational tradition of the Italian Fraction (Bilan) and the French Communist Left (GCF). As opposed to the groups which came out of the PCInt founded in Italy towards the end of World War II, the Italian Fraction recognised the profoundly proletarian character of the other international currents of the Communist Left which emerged in reaction to the Stalinist counter-revolution, in particular the German and Dutch Left. Far from dismissing these currents as "anarcho-spontaneist" or "syndicalist", it learnt all it could from them. In fact, the main critique it levelled against what became the "councilist" current was its sectarianism expressed through the rejection of the contributions of the Second International and in particular of Bolshevism.[7] In this way, the Italian Fraction maintained, in the teeth of the counter-revolution, the Marxist understanding that class-consciousness develops collectively, and that no party or tradition can claim a monopoly of it. From this it follows that consciousness cannot be developed without fraternal, public, international debate.[8]
But this fundamental understanding, although part of the basic heritage of the ICC, is not easy to realise in practise. The culture of debate can only be developed against the stream of bourgeois society. Since the spontaneous tendency within capitalism is not the clarification of ideas but violence, manipulation and the winning of majorities (best exemplified in the electoral circus of bourgeois democracy), the infiltration of this influence within proletarian organisations always contains the germs of crisis and degeneration. The history of the Bolshevik Party illustrates this perfectly. As long as the party was the spearhead of the revolution, the most lively, often controversial debate was one of its main characteristics. As opposed to this, the banning of real fractions (after the Kronstadt massacre of 1921) was a paramount sign and active factor of its degeneration. Similarly, the practise of "peaceful co-existence" (i.e. the non debate) of conflicting positions, which already characterised the foundation process of the Parti Communiste Internationaliste, or the theorisation of the virtues of monolithism by Bordiga and his supporters, can only be understood in the context of the historic defeat of the proletariat in the mid 20th century.
If revolutionary organisations are to fulfil their fundamental role of the development and spreading of class-consciousness, the cultivation of collective, international, fraternal and public discussion is absolutely essential. It is true that this requires a high level of political maturity (and also, in a more general way, of human maturity). The history of the ICC is one illustration of the fact that this cannot be gained overnight, but is itself the product of a historical development. Today, the new generation has an essential role to play in this ripening process.
The capacity to debate has been a major characteristic of the workers movement. But it was not an invention of that movement. Here, as in other fundamental areas, the struggle for socialism was capable of assimilating the best acquisitions of humanity, adapting them to its own needs. In so doing, it transformed these qualities by raising them to a higher level.
Fundamentally, the culture of debate is an expression of the eminently social nature of mankind. In particular, it is an emanation of the specifically human use of language. The use of language as a means of exchange of information is something which humanity shares with many animals. What distinguishes mankind from the rest of nature at this level is the capacity to cultivate and exchange argumentation (linked to the development of logic and science), and to get to know each other (the cultivation of empathy, linked among other things to the development of art).
Consequently this quality is not new. In fact it preceded class society and certainly played a decisive role in the ascent of humanity. Engels for instance refers to the role of the general assemblies of the Greeks of the Homeric phase, of the early Germanic tribes or of the Iroquois of North America, specifically praising the culture of debate of the latter.[9] Unfortunately, despite the pioneering work of the likes of Lewis Henry Morgan in the 19th century, and those who have followed him, we are insufficiently informed of the early, but most certainly decisive developments in this area.
But what we do know is that philosophy and the beginnings of scientific thought begin to flourish in history where mythology and naïve realism - this ancient, contradictory, inseparable couple - are put in question. Both of them are prisoners of the incapacity to more profoundly understand immediate experience. The thoughts which early man made about his practical experience were religious in nature. "Since very early times, when human beings, still quite ignorant about the construction of their own bodies, and animated by dreams, arrived at the idea that their thinking and feeling would not be an activity of their bodies, but of a separate soul living in this body and leaving it at death - since these times they had to ponder about the relation of this soul to the outer world. If it separated from the body with death, there was no reason to imagine it having a particular death of its own; thus arose the conception of immortality, which at this stage of development appeared not at all as a consolation, but as destiny, and often enough, as with the Greeks, as a real misfortune." [10]
It was in the framework of naïve realism that the first steps in a very slow development of culture and the productive forces took place. Magical thought, while containing a degree in particular of psychological wisdom, had above all the task of explaining the inexplicable, and thus limiting fear. Both made important contributions to the advance of mankind. The assumption that naïve realism has a particular affinity to materialist philosophy, or that the latter developed directly out of the former, is unfounded.
"It is an old postulate of dialectics, which has passed into popular consciousness, that extremes touch. We will hardly go wrong in searching for the most extreme grade of phantasmagoria, credulity and superstition, not in that scientific direction which, as in the German natural philosophy, tries to force the objective world into the framework of its subjective thinking, but rather in the opposite direction, that which, insisting on mere experience, treats thought with sovereign contempt, and which has really gone the furthest in its thoughtlessness. This school rules in England."[11]
Religion, as Engels indicated, emerged not only out of a magic world view, but also out of naïve realism. Its first, often daring, generalisations about the world are necessarily given an authoritative character.
The first farming communities soon understood their dependence on rain, for instance, but they were still far from understanding the conditions on which rainfall depended. The invention of a rain god is a creative self-assuring act, giving the impression that it is possible through bribes or devotion to influence the course of nature. Homo sapiens is the species which has banked on the development of consciousness to assure its survival. As such, it is confronted with a previously unheard of problem: the often paralysing fear of the unknown. The explanations of the unknown thus have to be put beyond all doubt. Out of this need emerges, as its most developed expression, the religions of revelation. The whole emotional basis of this world view is belief, not knowledge.
Naïve realism is but the other side of this same coin, a kind of elementary mental "division of labour". Whatever we cannot explain in an immediate practical sense necessarily enters the world of magic. Moreover, the practical understanding is itself embedded in a religious vision, originally that of animism. Here, the whole world is fetichised. Even the processes which human beings can consciously produce and reproduce appear to take place with the assistance of personalised forces existing independently of our will.
It is clear that in this world there is little room for debate in the modern sense of the term. Around two and a half thousand years ago, a new quality began to assert itself more strongly, directly challenging the twin sisters of religion and "common sense". It developed out of the old, traditional thinking in the sense that the latter was transformed into its opposite. Thus, the early dialectical thinking which preceded class society - expressed for instance in China in the idea of the polarity between yin and yang, between the male and female principles, became transformed into a critical thought based on the essential components of science, philosophy, materialism. But all of this was unthinkable without what we have called the culture of debate. The Greek word for dialectics actually means dialogue or debate.
What gave rise to this new approach? Very generally speaking, it was the enlargement of the world of social relations and knowledge. As Engels loved to repeat, common sense is a strong and healthy boy as long as it is at home in its own four walls, but experiences all kinds of mishaps as soon as it ventures into the big wide world. But the limits of religion in appeasing fear were also revealed. In fact, it had not conquered fear, but merely externalised it. Through this mechanism, humanity had attempted to cope with a terror that would otherwise have crushed it at a moment when it had no other means of self defence. But in doing so, it made of its own fear an additional force ruling over it.
"Explaining" what is still inexplicable means renouncing its real investigation. There thus arose the struggle between religion and science, between belief and knowledge, or, as Spinoza put it, between submission and investigation. Greek philosophy arose originally in opposition to religion. Thales, the first philosopher known to us, already broke out of the mystical world view. Anaximander, who followed him, demanded that nature be explained out of itself.
But Greek thought was no less a declaration of war against naïve realism. Heraclitus explained that the essence of things is not written on their foreheads. "Nature loves to conceal itself" he declared. Or as Marx put it: "But all science would be superfluous if the outward appearance and the essence of things directly coincided."[12]
The new approach challenged at once belief, but also prejudice and tradition, which is the creed of everyday life (in German the two words for belief are related: "Glaube" - belief - and "Aberglaube" - superstition). To this were opposed theory and dialectics. "No matter how much all theoretical thinking may be disdained, you cannot connect two natural facts with each other, or understand their interconnection without theoretical thought."[13]
Increased social intercourse was of course linked to the development of the productive forces. There thus appeared, together with the problem - the inadequacy of the existing modes of thought - the means of its resolution. First and foremost an increase in self-confidence, in particular in the power of human thought. Science can only arise when there is a capacity and a readiness to accept the existence of doubt and uncertainty. As opposed to the authority of religion and of tradition, the truth of science is not absolute but relative. There thus arises not only the possibility, but also the necessity of exchange of opinions.
It is evident that the claim to the rule of knowledge can only be made where the forces of production (in the broadest cultural sense) have reached a certain stage of maturity. It cannot even be thought of without a corresponding development of the arts, of education, of literature, of the observation of nature, of language. And this goes hand in hand, at a certain stage in history, with the appearance of class society and a ruling layer freed from the burden of material production. But these developments did not automatically give rise to the new, independent approach. Neither the Egyptians nor the Babylonians, despite their progress in science, nor the Phoenicians, who first developed a modern alphabet, went as far in this development as the Greeks.
In Greece, it was the development of slavery that made possible the emergence of a class of free citizens alongside the priests. This delivered the material basis for the undermining of religion. (We can thus better understand the formulation of Engels in Anti-Dühring: without the slavery of antiquity no modern socialism). In India, where around the same time there is a development of philosophy, materialism (the so-called Lokayata) and the study of nature, this coincides with the formation and strengthening of a warrior aristocracy opposed to the Brahmin theocracy, partly based on agricultural slavery. As in Greece, where the struggle of Heraclitus against religion, immortality and the condemnation of bodily pleasures was directed against the prejudices both of the ruling tyrants and of the oppressed population, the new militant approach in India originated from an aristocracy. Buddhism and Jainism, appearing around the same time, were much more anchored in the toiling population, but remained in the religious framework - with their conception of the reincarnation of the soul typical of the caste society they wanted to oppose (also to be found in Egypt).
As opposed to this, in China, where there was a development of science and a kind of rudimentary materialism (for instance in the Logic of Mo'- Ti'), this was limited by the absence of a caste of ruling priests against which one could revolt. The country was ruled by a military bureaucracy formed in the struggle against the neighbouring "barbarians".[14]
In Greece there was an additional and in many ways decisive factor, which also played an important role in India: A more advanced development of commodity production. Greek philosophy began, not on the Greek mainland, but in the harbour colonies of Asia Minor. Commodity production involves the exchange not only of goods, but also of the experience contained in their production. It accelerates history, thus favouring the higher expressions of dialectical thinking. It makes possible a degree of individualisation without which an exchange of ideas at such a high level is difficult. And it begins to put an end to the isolation in which social evolution had previously taken place. The fundamental economic unit of all farming societies based on natural economy is village or at best regional autarchy. But the first exploiting societies based on a broader co-operation, often in the interests of irrigation, were still basically agricultural in character. As opposed to this, trade and seafaring opened Greek society to the world. It reproduced, but at a higher level, the attitude of conquest and discovery of the world which characterises nomadic societies. History shows that, from a certain stage of its development, the appearance of the phenomenon of public debate was inseparable from an international development (even
if concentrated in one area), and was in a sense "inter-nationalist" in character. Diogenes and the Cynics opposed the distinction between Hellenes and Barbarians, and declared themselves to be world citizens. Democritus was put on trial for having allegedly squandered a heritage, which he used to pay for educational trips to Egypt, Babylonia, Persia and India. He defended himself by reading out extracts of his writings, the fruits of his journeys - and was declared not guilty.
Debate arose in response to practical necessity. In Greece, it develops through the comparison of different sources of knowledge. Different ways of thinking, modes of investigation and their results, production methods, customs and traditions are compared with each other. They are found to contradict, to confirm or to complete each other. They enter into struggle with each other or support one another, or both. Absolute truths are rendered relative by comparison.
These debates are public. They take place at the harbours, in the market places (the forums), in the schools and academies. In written form, they fill the libraries and extend across the known world.
Socrates - this philosopher who spent his time debating at the market place - embodied the essence of this development. His main preoccupation - how to reach real knowledge of morality - is already an attack against religion and against prejudice, which assume that these questions are already answered. He declared that knowledge is the main precondition of correct ethics, and ignorance its principle enemy. It is thus the coming to consciousness, and not punishment, which enables moral progress, since most people cannot for long consciously go against the voice of their own conscience.
But Socrates went further, laying the theoretical basis for all science and all collective clarification: the recognition that the point of departure of knowledge is the setting aside of pre-judgement. This clears the way for what is essential: search (research). He was a fierce opponent of precipitated conclusions, of uncritical self-satisfied opinions, of arrogance and boasting. What he believed in was the "modesty of non-knowledge" and the passion flowing from a real knowledge based on deep insight and conviction. This is the point of departure of the Socratic Dialogue. Truth is the result of a collective search, consisting in the dialogue of all the pupils, where everybody is teacher and pupil at the same time. The philosopher is no longer a prophet announcing revelations, but a searcher for truth along with others. This brings with it a new conception of leadership: being the most determined in pushing forward clarification, without ever losing sight of its final goal. The parallel to the way the role of the Communists in the class struggle is defined in the Communist Manifesto is striking.
Socrates was a master of the stimulation and directing of discussions. He evolved public debate to the heights of an art or science. His pupil, Plato, developed the dialogue to an extent that has rarely been attained since.
In the introduction to Dialectics of Nature Engels speaks of three great periods of natural science in history to date, with the "genius of intuition" of the ancient Greeks, and the "highly significant, but sporadic" results of the Arabs as the predecessors of modern science which began with the Renaissance. What is striking about the "Arabic-Muslim cultural epoch" was the remarkable capacity to absorb and make a synthesis of the acquisitions of different antique cultures, and its openness to discussion. August Bebel quotes an eyewitness of the culture of public disputation in Baghdad. "Just imagine, at the first meeting there were not only representatives of all the existing Muslim sects, orthodox and heterodox, but also fire worshipers (Parser), Materialists, Atheists, Jews and Christians, in a word every kind of infidel. Each of these sects had their spokesmen who had to represent them. When one of these party leaders entered the hall, everybody stood up respectfully from their seat, and nobody would sit down until he had reached his place. When the hall was almost completely full, one of the infidels began to speak, saying: 'You all know the rules. The Muslims are not allowed to combat us with proofs taken from their holy books, or based on the speeches of their prophet, since we believe neither in your books nor in your prophets. Those present are only allowed to base themselves on arguments taken from human reason.' These words were greeted with generalised rejoicing."[15]
Bebel declares: "The difference between Islam and Christianity was the following: The Arabs collected, during their conquests, all the works which could serve their studies and which could instruct them about the peoples and countries their had conquered. The Christians destroyed during the spreading of their doctrine all such monuments of culture as works of the devil and as pagan horrors." And he concludes. "The Muslim-Arabic cultural epoch is the connecting link between the doomed Greek-Roman culture and the antique culture as a whole, and the European culture which has blossomed since the Renaissance. Without this intermediary, the latter could hardly have attained its present day heights. Christianity was hostile to this whole cultural development."[16]
One of the reasons for the blind fanaticism and sectarianism of Christianity was already identified by Heinrich Heine, and later confirmed by the workers movement: The more sacrifice and renunciation a culture demands, the more intolerable becomes the very thought that its principles could be put in question.
Concerning the Renaissance and the Reformation, which he called "the greatest progressive transformation which humanity had experienced", Engels underlines the role of the development not only of thought, but of emotions, personality, human potential, and combativity. It was a time "which required giants and which produced giants, giants in thought, passion and character, in versatility and learnedness. (...) The heroes of those times were not yet submitted to the yoke of the division of labour, the limiting, one-sided effects of which we so often find among their successors. But what was particularly characteristic was that almost all of them were in the midst of the movements of the time, part and parcel of the practical struggles, taking sides and struggling, sometimes with words, sometimes with a dagger, and sometimes with both."[17]
Reviewing the three "heroic" ages of the human mind, which, according to Engels, prepared the development of modern science, it is noticeable how limited they were in time and space. To begin with, they appear very late relative to the history of humanity as a whole. Even when we include the Indian or Chinese chapters, these phases were geographically restricted. Nor did they last very long (the Renaissance in Italy or the Reformation in Germany only a few decades). And the portions of the already extremely minoritarian, exploiting classes actually actively involved were minuscule.
In relation to this, two things seem astonishing. Firstly, that these moments of upsurge of science and public debate took place at all, and that their impact was so important and so lasting - despite all the breaks and dead ends. Secondly, the extent to which the proletariat - despite the break in the organic continuity of its movement in the middle of the 20th century, despite the impossibility of permanent mass organisation in capitalist decadence - has been able to maintain, and sometimes considerably enlarge, the scope of organised debate. The workers movement has kept alive this tradition, despite interruptions, for almost two centuries. And there have been moments - such as during the revolutionary movements in France, Germany or Russia - where this process has encompassed millions of human beings. Here, quantity becomes a new quality.
This quality is however not only the product of the fact that the proletariat, at least in the industrialised countries, comprises the majority of the population. We have already seen how modern science and theory, after its glorious beginning with the Renaissance, was marred and hampered in its development by the bourgeois division of labour. At the heart of this problem lies the separation of science from the producers to a degree not yet possible in the Arabic epoch or the Renaissance. This break "is completed in modern industry, which makes science a productive force distinct from labour and presses it into the service of capital."[18]
The conclusion of this process Marx described in the first draft of his reply to Vera Sassulitsch: "This society is waging war against science, against the popular masses, and against the productive forces it creates."
Capitalism is the first economic system which cannot exist without the systematic application of science to production. It must limit the education of the proletariat in order to maintain its class rule. It must push forward the education of the proletariat in order to maintain its economic position. Today, the bourgeoisie becomes more and more an uncultivated and primitive class, whereas science and culture are in the hands either of proletarians, or of paid representatives of the bourgeoisie whose economic and social situation increasingly resembles that of the working class.
"The abolition of classes in society (...) presupposes, therefore, the development of production carried out to a degree at which appropriation of the means of production and of the products, and, with this, of political domination, of the monopoly of culture, and of intellectual leadership by a particular class of society, has become not only superfluous but economically, politically, intellectually a hindrance to development. This point is now reached."[19]
The proletariat is the heir to the scientific traditions of humanity. Even more so than in the past, any future revolutionary proletarian struggle will necessarily lead to an unheard of flourishing of public debate, and the beginnings of the move towards the restoration of the unity of science and labour, the achievement of a global understanding more in keeping with the demands of the contemporary age.
The capacity of the proletariat to attain new heights was already proven with the development of Marxism, the first scientific approach concerning human society and its history. The proletariat alone was capable of assimilating the highest acquisition of bourgeois philosophical thought: the philosophy of Hegel. The two forms of dialectics known to Antiquity were the dialectics of change (Heraclitus) and the dialectics of interaction (Plato, Aristotle). Hegel alone combined these two forms, delivering the basis for a truly historical dialectics.
Hegel added a new dimension to the whole concept of debate by attacking, more profoundly than ever before, the rigid, metaphysical opposition of true and false. In the introduction to his Phenomenology of Mind he showed how the different and opposed phases of a process of development - such as the history of philosophy - constitute an organic unity, like the blossom and the fruit. Hegel explained that the failure to recognise this was linked to the tendency to concentrate on the contradiction and lose sight of the development. By placing this dialectic on its feet, Marxism was able to absorb the most progressive side of Hegel, the understanding of processes leading toward the future.
The proletariat is the first class which is at once revolutionary and exploited. As opposed to previous revolutionary classes, which were exploiters, its search for truth is not limited by any interest of self-preservation as a class. As opposed to previous exploited classes, which could only survive by consoling themselves with (in particular religious) illusions, its class interest demands the loss of illusions. As such, the proletariat is the first class whose natural tendency, as soon as it reflects, organises and struggles on its own terrain, is towards clarification.
This unique nature was forgotten by Bordigism when it invented its concept of invariance. Its point of departure is correct: the need to remain loyal to the basic principles of Marxism in the face of bourgeois ideology. But the conclusion that it is necessary to limit, or even abolish debate in order to maintain class positions, is a product of the counter-revolution. The bourgeoisie has understood much better that in order to draw the working class onto the terrain of capital, it is above all necessary to suppress and stifle its debates. Having at the onset attempted this above all through ferocious repression, it has since developed more effective weapons such as democracy and the sabotage of the left of capital. Opportunism has also long understood this. Since its essential characteristic is its incoherence, it has to hide itself, to flee open debate. The struggle against opportunism and the need of a culture of debate are not only not contradictory; they are indispensable to each other.
Such a culture does not at all exclude fierce political collisions of positions, on the contrary. But this does not mean that political debate is necessarily traumatic, leading to splits. The most edifying example of the "art" or "science" of debate in history is that of the Bolshevik Party between February and October 1917. Even in the context of massive incursions of alien ideology, these discussions were passionate, but extremely fraternal, and inspiring to all the participants. Above all, they made possible what Trotsky called the "re-arming" of the party, the re-adjustment of its policies to the changing demands of the revolutionary process, one of the preconditions for victory.
The "Bolshevik Dialogue" requires an understanding that not all debates have the same meaning. The polemic of Marx against Proudhon was of the demolishing kind, because its task was to dismiss to the rubbish bin of history what had become a fetter to the whole workers movement. As opposed to this, the young Marx, while engaging in titanic struggles against Hegel, and against utopian socialism, never for a moment lost his enormous respect for Hegel, Fourier, Saint Simon or Owen, whom he helped to enshrine for ever in our common heritage. And Engels was later to write that without Hegel, there would not have been Marxism, and without the utopians, no scientific socialism as we know it.
The gravest crises in the workers organisations, including the ICC, were for the most part caused, not by the existence of divergences as such, however fundamental, but by the avoidance and even the open sabotage of the process of clarification. Opportunism uses every possible means to this end. These include, not only the playing down of important divergences, but equally the exaggeration of secondary divergences, or the invention of non-existent ones. They also include personalisation and even denigration.
The dead weight, on the workers movement, of everyday common sense on the one hand, and of an uncritical, almost religious abiding to certain habits and traditions on the other, was linked by Lenin to what he called the circle spirit. He was profoundly correct about the submission of the process of the construction of the organisation and its political life to the "spontaneity" of everyday common sense and its consequences. "The spontaneous movement in the direction of the least resistance leads to the domination of bourgeois ideology, why? For the simple reason that the bourgeois ideology is much older than the socialist, is developed in a more many sided manner and commands incomparably more means."[20]
Characteristic of the circle mentality is the personalisation of debate, the reaction to political argumentation according, not to what is said, but to who says what. It goes without saying that this personalisation is an enormous hindrance to a fruitful collective discussion.
Already the Socratic Dialogue understood that the development of debate is a question not only of thought; it is an ethical question. Today, the quest for clarification serves the interests of the proletariat, whereas the sabotage of clarification harms it. In this sense, the working class could adopt the motto of the German enlightener Lessing, who said that there was one thing he loved more than the truth, that being the search for the truth.
The most powerful examples of a culture of debate as an essential element of mass proletarian movements are provided by the Russian Revolution.[21] The class party, far from opposing it, was itself the vanguard of this dynamic. The discussions within the Party in Russia in 1917 concerned questions such as the class nature of the revolution, whether or not to support the continuation of the imperialist war, and when and how to seize power. Yet throughout, the unity of the Party was maintained despite political crises in which the fate of the world revolution, and with it that of humanity, were at stake.
Yet the history of the proletarian class struggle, in particular that of the organised workers movement, teaches us that these levels of culture of debate are not always reached. We have already mentioned the repeated intrusions of monolithic approaches within the ICC. It is not surprising that these intrusions often gave rise to splits from the organisation. Within the framework of monolithism, there can be no other resolution of divergences than separation. However, the problem is not resolved by the splitting of those elements that embodied this approach in a caricatural manner. The possibility for such non-proletarian approaches to appear and reappear indicates the existence of more widespread weaknesses on this question within the organisation itself. These consist in often small and hardly perceptible confusions and misconceptions in the everyday life and discussions, but which can pave the way for more serious difficulties under certain circumstances. One of these is a tendency to pose each debate in terms of a confrontation between Marxism and opportunism, of the direct struggle against bourgeois ideology. One of the consequences of this is to inhibit debate, giving comrades the feeling that they no longer have the right to be mistaken or to express confusions. Another consequence is the "banalisation" of opportunism. If we see it everywhere, (crying "wolf" at the appearance of the least divergence) we will probably fail to recognise it when it really appears. Another is the problem of impatience in the debates, resulting in an inability to listen to other arguments and a tendency to want to monopolise discussions, to crush ones "opponents", to convince the others "at all costs".[22]
What all of these approaches have in common is the weight of petty bourgeois impatience, the lack of confidence in the living practise of collective clarification inside the proletariat. They express difficulties to accept that discussion and clarification is a process. Like all fundamental processes of social life, it has an inner rhythm and law of development of its own. Its unfolding corresponds to the movement from confusion towards clarity, involves mistakes and wrong turns and their correction. Such processes require time if they are to be really profound. They can be accelerated, but not short-circuited. The wider the participation in this process, the more participation from the whole class is encouraged and welcomed, the richer it will become.
In her polemic against Bernstein,[23] Rosa Luxemburg pointed out the fundamental contradiction of the workers struggle as a movement within capitalism, but striving towards a goal which lies beyond it. From this contradictory nature flow the two main dangers to this movement. The first of these is opportunism, that is the openness towards the fatal influence of the class enemy. The motto of this deviation from the path of the class struggle is: "the
movement is everything, the final goal is nothing". The second main danger is sectarianism, that is the lack of openness towards the influence of the life of one's own class, the proletariat. The motto of this deviation is: "the goal is everything, but the movement is nothing".
In the wake of the terrible counter-revolution, which followed the defeat of the World Revolution at the end of World War I, there developed within what remained of the revolutionary camp, the fatal misconception that it would be possible to combat opportunism by means of sectarianism. This approach, which leads only to sterility and fossilisation, fails to recognise that opportunism and sectarianism are two sides of the same coin, since both separate goal and movement. Without the full participation of revolutionary minorities in the real life and movement of their class, the goal of communism cannot be achieved.
ICC, September 2007.
[1]. Even such mature and theoretically clear young revolutionaries as Marx and Engels believed - at the time of the convulsions of 1848 - that the realisation of communism was more or less on the immediate agenda. A supposition which they soon had to correct.
[2]. See our "Theses on the Student Movement in France [6] ", International Review nº 125.
[3]. Within the proletarian camp this notion was theorised by "Bordigism".
[4]. The biographies and reminiscences of past revolutionaries are full of examples of their ability to discuss, and in particular to listen. Lenin was legendary in this respect, but he was not the only one. Just one example here, the memoirs of Fritz Sternberg about his "Conversations with Trotsky" (written in 1963). "In his conversations with me, Trotsky was extraordinarily polite. He almost never interrupted me, mostly only to ask me to explain or develop on a word or concept."
[5]. Read the article in nº 110 and 114 of the International Review: "Extraordinary conference of the ICC: The fight for the defence of organisational principles [7] " and "15th Congress of the ICC: reinforce the organisation faced with the stakes of the period [8] ".
[6]. See "Confidence and Solidarity in the Proletarian Struggle" and "Marxism and Ethics" in International Review n° 111 [9] , 112 [10] , 127 [11] and 128 [12] .
[7]. Consult our books on the Italian and the Dutch Communist Left.
[8]. The GCF was later to uphold this understanding after the dissolution of the Italian Fraction. See for instance its critique of the concept of the "brilliant leader" republished in International Review nº. 33 and that of the idea that discipline means militants of the organisation are simple order takers who don't have to discuss the political orientations of the organisation in International Review nº34
[9]. Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.
[10]. Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach. Beginning of Chapter Two.
[11]. Engels: Dialectics of Nature. Beginning of the Chapter: "Natural research in the spiritual world".
[12]. Marx: Capital. Volume 3. Chapter 48, "The Trinitary Formula", beginning of part 3.
[13]. Engels: Dialectic of Nature.
[14]. On developments in Asia around 500 BC, see the lectures of August Thalheimer held at the Sun-Yat-Sen university in Moscow in 1927: Introduction to Dialectical Materialism: www.marxists.org/archive/thalheimer/works/diamat/index.htm [13]
[15]. August Bebel: Die Mohamedanisch-Arabische Kulturepoche (1889). Chapter VI. Scientific Development, Poetry.
[16]. Ibid.
[17]. Engels, Dialectics of Nature.
[18]. Capital Vol. 1. Chapter 12: "Division of Labour and Manufacture". Section 5: "The Capitalistic character of Manufacture".
[19]. Engels: Anti-Dühring. Part III : "Socialism" . Chapter II: "Theoretical".
[20]. Lenin: What Is To Be Done. Part II: "Spontaneity of the Masses and Consciousness of Social Democracy". End of Part b) "The Worship of Spontaneity". Rabotschaja Mysl.
[21]. See for instance Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution, or John Reed: Ten Days that Shook the World.
[22]. The report on the work of the 17th congress [14] of the ICC in International Review n° 130 develops further on these questions.
[23]. Rosa Luxemburg: Social Reform or Revolution?
With this article from Bilan n° 35 (September-October 1936), the theoretical publication of the Italian left communists, we continue our re-publication of the series of studies on the period of transition by Mitchell. The previous article in the series (International Review n° 130 [16]) began the discussion on the economic tasks of a proletarian dictatorship, responding to the efforts of the Dutch left communists of the GIK to outline the ‘fundamentals of communist production and distribution' in the light of the experience in Russia. The debate between these two currents of the communist left has to a large extent been buried by history, above all by the weight of the counter-revolution, and needs to be re-excavated as a new generation searches for answers about a real alternative to the capitalist system.
We will be returning in more depth to the issues raised by this debate. The article that follows focuses in particular on the problem of the repartition of the social product during the transition towards a fully communist society, a period in which it is not yet possible to universally apply the principle "to each according to his needs, from each according to his means". As we said in our introduction to the previous article, we do not share all of Mitchell's (and Bilan's) views on this question, for example their view that the USSR had in some sense eliminated capitalism by formally abolishing the private ownership of the means of production; and there is certainly a discussion to be had about whether the principal transitional economic measure advocated by Marx, the GIK and the Italian left - the system of labour time vouchers - is the most adequate basis for the development of communist social relations after the destruction of the capitalist state. But the article still conveys many of the best qualities of the Italian left:
- its insistence on basing its investigations on a critical re-examination of the marxist tradition, in particular Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme;
- its capacity to examine the problem of distribution in some theoretical depth, notably by invoking the problem of the law of value;
- its avoidance of all easy solutions to the immense tasks that will confront the proletariat once it takes control of society. It is particularly striking, for example, that where for the GIK the remuneration of work according to a calculation of the ‘hour of social labour' guaranteed a virtually automatic progression towards integral communism (when not being identified with communism itself), for Mitchell the persistence of such a system was proof that the proletariat had not yet freed itself from the law of value and in that sense represented a survival of wage labour. The difference may seem to be between that of a glass half empty and a glass half full, but it is nevertheless symptomatic of a very different approach to the reality of the proletarian revolution.
There has been a lot of chatter about "the product of social labour" and its "full" and "equitable" distribution, confused formulations which can easily be taken over by demagogues. But the essential question of the destination of the social product, i.e. of the sum of the activities of labour, is concentrated around two basic issues: how is the total product to be distributed? And how should the fraction of that product which enters immediately into individual consumption be distributed?
Obviously we know that there is no one response valid for all societies and the mode of distribution is conditioned by the mode of production. But we also know that there are certain fundamental rules which any social organisation has to keep to if it wants to survive: societies, like the men that make them up, are subject to the laws of preservation, which requires not just simple reproduction but enlarged reproduction. This is a truism that we have to remind ourselves of.
At the same time, as soon as an economy breaks through its natural, domestic framework and generalises into a commodity economy, it acquires a social character which, with the capitalist system, takes on an immense significance, through the conflict which irreducibly opposes it to the private character of the appropriation of wealth.
With the "socialised" production of capitalism, we are in the presence not of isolated individual products, but of social products, i.e, products which not only don't respond to the immediate use of the producers, but which are also the common result of their activity: "The thread, the cloth, the metal objects that come from the factory are from that point on the common product of numerous workers, through whose hands it has to pass in succession before it can be completed. No individual can say about it that I made that, this is my product."[1]
In other words, social production is the synthesis of individual activities and not simply their juxtaposition; consequently, "in society, the relation of the producer to the product after its completion is extrinsic, and the return of the product
to the subject depends on his relations to other individuals. The product does not immediately come into his possession. Its immediate appropriation, moreover, is not his aim, if he produces within society. Distribution, which on the basis of social laws determines the individual's share in the world of products, intervenes between the producer and the products, i.e., between production and consumption."[2]
This remains true in socialist society; and when we say that the producers must re-establish their domination over production, which capitalism has taken away from them, we are not talking about the overthrow of the natural course of social life, but of the relations of production and repartition.
In his Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx, in denouncing the reactionary utopianism of Lassalle's idea of "the products of labour", poses the question in these terms: "What are the ‘proceeds of labour'? The product of labour, or its value? And in the latter case, is it the total value of the product, or only that part of the value which labour has newly added to the value of the means of production consumed?" (our emphasis - Mitchell).
Marx indicates how in social production - which is dominated not by the individual producer but by the social producer - the concept of the "product of labour" differs essentially from the product of the independent worker: "Let us take, first of all, the words 'proceeds of labour' in the sense of the product of labour; then the co-operative proceeds of labour are the total social product.
"From this must now be deducted: First, cover for replacement of the means of production used up. Second, additional portion for expansion of production. Third, reserve or insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc".
This transforms the "full product of labour" into a partial product, i.e., that fraction of the objects of consumption which are distributed individually among the collective producers. In sum, this "partial product" not only does not include the part materialised in former labour provided by previous productive cycles, and which is absorbed by the replacement of the means of production that have been consumed; it also does not represent the entirety of the new labour added to social capital, since we have to take into account the deductions we have just mentioned. This boils down to saying that the "partial product" is equivalent to the net income of society, or the fraction of gross income which has to return to the individual consumption of the producer, but which bourgeois society does not integrally restore to him.
Here then is the response to the first question: "how is the total product distributed?" The simple conclusion is that surplus labour, i.e. the fraction of new or living labour required by the totality of collective needs, cannot be abolished in any kind of social system. But whereas under capitalism it is a barrier to the development of the individual, in a communist society it has to be the condition for the latter's all-round development. "In the capitalist as well as in the slave system, etc., it merely assumes an antagonistic form and is supplemented by complete idleness of a stratum of society."[3]
What in effect determines the rates of capitalist surplus labour are the necessities of the production of surplus value, which is the motor force of social production; the domination of exchange value over use value subordinates the needs of enlarged reproduction and of consumption to the needs of the accumulation of capital; the development of the productivity of labour results in an increase in the rate and the mass of surplus labour.
By contrast, socialist surplus labour has to be kept to the minimum required by the needs of the proletarian economy and to the necessities of the class struggle that continues on a national and international scale. In reality, fixing the rate of accumulation and the rate of administrative and unproductive costs (absorbed by the bureaucracy) will be located at the centre of the proletariat's concerns; but we will examine this aspect of the problem in a subsequent chapter.
We must now respond to the second question: "how is the partial product then distributed?" i.e. that fraction of the total product which immediately falls under individual consumption, and thus into the wage fund, since the capitalist form of the remuneration of labour persists during the transitional period.
Let's begin by saying that there is a conception among certain revolutionaries that has been adopted rather too easily: the idea that if collective appropriation is to mean anything, it must ipso facto result in the disappearance of wages and the installation of equal remuneration for all; the corollary to this is the idea that the inequality of wages presupposes the exploitation of labour power.
This conception, which we will find when we examine the arguments of the Dutch internationalists, proceeds on the one hand - we have to emphasise this again - from a denial of the contradictory movement of historical materialism, and on the other hand from a confusion between two different categories: labour and labour power; between the value of labour power, i.e. the quantity of labour needed to reproduce this labour power, and the total quantity of labour which this labour power can supply in a given time.
It is exact to say that to the political content of the dictatorship of the proletariat there has to correspond a new social content to the remuneration of labour, which can no longer be no more than the equivalent of the products strictly necessary for the reproduction of labour power. In other words, what constitutes the essence of capitalist exploitation, the opposition between the use value and the exchange value of this particular commodity we call labour power, disappears with the suppression of the private ownership of the means of production, and consequently the private use of labour power also disappears. Obviously the new utilisation of this labour power and of the mass of surplus labour which derives from it can indeed be turned away from their proletarian objectives (the Soviet experience demonstrates this), and in this way there can arise a mode of exploitation of a particular nature, which strictly speaking is not capitalist. But this is another story that we will come back to elsewhere. For the moment we don't have to remain at this proposition; the fact that in a proletarian economy the basic motive force is no longer the ceaselessly enlarged production of surplus value and of capital but the unlimited production of use values does not mean that the conditions are right for a levelling of "wages" that translates into equality in consumption. In fact, such an equality can exist neither at the beginning of the transitional period nor in the communist phase, which is based on the formula "to each according to his needs". In reality, formal equality can never exist, while communism will finally realise a real equality in natural inequality.
It remains however to explain why the differentiation of wages subsists in the transitional phase despite the fact that the wage, while preserving its bourgeois envelope, has lost its antagonistic content. The question is immediately posed: what will be the juridical norms of repartition prevailing in this period?
In the Critique of the Gotha Programme, Marx responds: "Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby". When he notes that the mode of distribution of the objects of consumption can only be the reflection of the mode of repartition of the means of production and of the mode of production itself, for him this is only a schema which is realised gradually. Capitalism did not install its relations of distribution immediately; it did it by stages, on the accumulated ruins of the feudal system. The proletariat cannot also not immediately regulate distribution according to socialist norms. It has to do it by virtue of "rights", which can only be those of "a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges". But there is a major difference between the conditions for the development of capitalism and those for the development of socialism. The bourgeoisie, by developing its economic positions inside feudal society, was also constructing the bases for the future juridical superstructure of its system of production; and its political revolution codified these economic and juridical gains. The proletariat does not benefit from any similar evolution and cannot base itself on any economic privilege or any concrete embryo of "socialist right", because for a marxist there can be no question of seeing the "social conquests" of reformism as such a right. It has to thus temporarily apply bourgeois right, albeit in a limited way, to the mechanisms of distribution. This is what Marx meant when, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, he talked about equal rights; and in turn, Lenin, in his State and Revolution, noted with his clear and powerful realism "the interesting phenomenon that communism in its first phase retains ‘the narrow horizon of bourgeois right'. Of course, bourgeois right in regard to the distribution of consumer goods inevitably presupposes the existence of the bourgeois state, for law is nothing without an apparatus capable of enforcing the observance of the rules of law.
"It follows that under communism there remains for a time not only bourgeois right, but even the bourgeois state, without the bourgeoisie!"
Marx, again in the Critique of the Gotha Programme analyses how and in relation to which principles bourgeois equal rights are applied: "The right of the producers is proportional to the labour they supply; the equality consists in the fact that measurement is made with an equal standard, labour".[4]
And the remuneration of labour is carried out in the following way: "Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made - exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labour [our emphasis]. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labour time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labour (after deducting his labour for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labour cost. The same amount of labour which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
"Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values. Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no one can give anything except his labour, and because, on the other hand, nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labour in one form is exchanged for an equal amount of labour in another form".[5]
When Marx talks about a principle analogous to the one which regulates the exchange of commodities and of the individual quantum of labour, he undoubtedly meant simple labour, the substance of value, which means that all individual labour has to be reduced to a common measure in order to be compared, evaluated, and consequently remunerated through the application of "right that is proportional to the labour supplied". We have already noted that there is still no scientific way of reducing simple labour and, as a result, the law of value persists in this function, although only within certain limits determined by the new political and economic conditions. Marx also dispels any doubts about this when he analyses the measurement of labour:
"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labour in the same time, or can labour for a longer time; and labour, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only - for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.
"But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society".
From this analysis, it emerges clearly that, on the one hand, the existence of bourgeois equal rights is indissolubly linked to the existence of value; and on the other hand, the mode of distribution hides a dual inequality: one, which is an expression of the diversity of "individual gifts", of "productive capacities", of "natural privileges"; and the other which, on the basis of equal labour, arises from differences of social condition (family, etc): "In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"[6]
But in the transitional phase, bourgeois right installs a de facto inequality which is inevitable because the first phase of communism "cannot yet provide justice and equality; differences, and unjust differences, in wealth will still persist, but the exploitation of man by man will have become impossible because it will be impossible to seize the means of production--the factories, machines, land, etc.--and make them private property. In smashing Lassalle's petty-bourgeois, vague phrases about ‘equality' and ‘justice' in general, Marx shows the course of development of communist society, which is compelled to abolish at first only the ‘injustice' of the means of production seized by individuals, and which is unable at once to eliminate the other injustice, which consists in the distribution of consumer goods ‘according to the amount of labour performed' (and not according to needs)."[7]
The exchange of equal quantities of labour, although in fact translating into inequality in distribution, does not at all imply exploitation, since the foundation and form of the exchange have been modified and the political conditions which determined this change continue to exist, ie the real maintenance of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It would thus be absurd to invoke marxist theory to argue that the degeneration of this dictatorship results in a kind of exploitation. On the contrary, the thesis that the differentiation of wages, the demarcation between qualified labour and unqualified labour, simple and compound labour, are sure signs of degeneration within the proletarian state and indications of the existence of an exploiting class, this thesis has to be categorically rejected, on the one hand because it implies that this degeneration is inevitable, and on the other hand because it can in no way serve to explain the evolution of the Russian revolution.
We have already made it clear that the Dutch internationalists, in their attempt to analyse the problems of the period of transition, are inspired much more by their desires than by historical reality. Their abstract schema, in which as people who are perfectly consistent with their principles, they exclude the law of value, the market and money, must logically entail an "ideal" distribution of products as well. This is because for them "The proletarian revolution collectivises the means of production and thus opens the way to communist life; the dynamic laws of individual consumption must absolutely and necessarily be linked together because they are indissolubly linked to the laws of production. This link is made ‘by itself' though the passage to communist production" ( p72 of their work).
The Dutch comrades thus consider that the new relation of production, thanks to collectivisation, automatically determines a new right over the products "This right will be expressed through equal conditions for individual consumption which resides solely in an equal measure of consumption. Just as the hour of individual labour is the measure of individual labour, it is at the same time the measure of individual consumption. In this way consumption is socially regulated and is cast in the right direction. The passage to the social revolution is nothing else than the application of the measure of the average hour of social labour to the whole of economic life. It serves as a measure for production and also as a right of the producers over the social product" (p 25).
But once again, this affirmation can only become a positive one if we draw out its concrete significance, which is to say that when you talk about labour time and the measurement of labour, you are talking about value. This is what the Dutch comrades leave out and this leads them to adopt a false judgment of the Russian revolution, and above all to severely curtail the scope of their research into the underlying causes of the reactionary evolution of the USSR. They don't seek the explanation for the latter in the subsoil of the national and international class struggle (one of the negative characteristics of their study is that they more or less remove any consideration of political problems), but in the economic mechanism, as when they say: "When the Russians restored production on the basis of value, they proclaimed there and then the expropriation of the workers, their separation from the means of production, ensuring that there would be no relationship between the growth of the mass of products and the workers' share in this mass" (p 19).
For them maintaining value was the equivalent of maintaining the exploitation of labour power, but we think we have shown, on the basis of marxist theory, that value can subsist without its antagonistic content, i.e. without the remuneration of the value of labour power.
But apart from this, the Dutch internationalists falsify the significance of Marx's words about the repartition of products. When they say that the worker receives from the process of distribution a pro rata of the quantity of labour he has given, they only discover one aspect of the dual inequality which we have underlined, and it is the one which results from the social situation of the worker (p 81); but they don't dwell on the other aspect, which expresses the fact that the workers, in the same amount of labour time, provide different quantities of simple labour (simple labour which is the common measure exerted through the play of value), thus giving rise to unequal repartition. They prefer to stick with their demand for the suppression of inequality in wages, which remains hanging in mid air because the suppression of capitalist wage labour does not immediately result in the disappearance of the differences in the remuneration of labour.
Comrade Hennaut comes up with a similar solution to the problem of distribution in the period of transition, a solution which he also draws from a mistaken, because incomplete, interpretation of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme. In Bilan, p 747, he said: "the inequality which still exists in the first phase of socialism results not from an unequal remuneration being applied to various kinds of labour: the simple work of the labourer or the compound work of the engineer, with all the stages in between. No, all these types of labour are of equal worth, only their duration and intensity has to be measured; inequality results from the fact that men who have different capacities and needs are carrying out the same tasks with the same resources". And Hennaut inverses Marx's thinking when he locates inequality in the fact that "the part of the social profit remains equal - an equal amount of remuneration of course - for each individual, whereas their needs and the effort made to achieve the same remuneration are different"; whereas, as we have indicated, Marx saw inequality in the fact that individuals received unequal shares because they provided unequal shares of labour and this is the basis for the application of bourgeois equal rights.
A policy of equalisation of wages cannot be adopted in the transition phase, not only because it would be inapplicable, but because it would lead inevitably to the collapse of labour productivity.
If, during "war communism", the Bolsheviks applied the system of equal rations, independent of qualification and of the amount of labour provided, this was not an economic method capable of ensuring the systematic development of the economy; it was the regime of a people under siege and concentrating all its energies on the civil war.
If we begin from the general consideration that variations and differences in the qualification of labour (and its remuneration) are in inverse proposition to the technical level of production, we can understand why in the USSR after the NEP very large variations in wages between qualified and non-qualified workers[8] were the result of the greater importance of the individual qualification of the worker in comparison to the highly developed capitalist countries. In the latter, after the revolution, wage categories could be much more uniform than in the USSR, by the virtue of the law that the development of labour productivity tends to level out the qualities of labour. But marxists should not forget that the "enslaving subordination of individuals to the division of labour" can only disappear through a prodigious technical development placed at the service of the producers (to be continued).
Mitchell
[1]. Engels, Anti-Duhring.
[2]. Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "Production, consumption, distribution, exchange".
[3]. Capital Vol 3 ch 48.
[4]. We have judged it useful to reproduce the full text of the Gotha Programme as regards distribution, because we see every part of it to be extremely important
[5]. Here Marx understands by ‘value of labour' the quantity of social labour furnished by the producer, since it goes without saying that since it is labour that creates value, that it forms its substance, there is no such thing as value in itself, as Engels remarked, otherwise we would be talking about a value of value, which would be like talking about the weight of weight or the temperature of heat.
[6]. Marx Critique of the Gotha programme.
[7]. Lenin, State and Revolution.
[8]. We are obviously not thinking here about the forms of "Stakhanovism" which are simply the monstrous product of centrism.
In this fourth article in the series on the CNT we will show how syndicalism weakened the revolutionary currents within the CNT (those with a Marxist orientation, which were in favour of joining the Third International, as well as those oriented towards anarchism). The CNT had been weakened by the workers' demoralisation after the defeat of the struggles of 1919-1920 and by the brutal repression carried out by armed bands paid by the bosses and co-ordinated by the military and administrative authorities.[1] In 1923 it was once more outlawed by the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, which systematically closed its offices and imprisoned the leading committees as soon as they were formed.
In spite of the constant persecution of its militants, the CNT maintained a certain activity. However, as we showed at the end of the third article in this series, this activity was oriented very differently from that in the period 1911-1915. At that time it focussed on supporting the struggles that arose and reflecting generally on the attacks that rained down on the working class and humanity (especially on the question of the imperialist war).[2] Now however it concentrated almost systematically on supporting any conspiracy hatched by bourgeois politicians against the Dictatorship. It played a decisive role in the formation of the Spanish Republic in 1931, which pretended to represent "liberties" and "rights", and to be a "Workers' Republic" (as it proclaimed itself) but which would massacre the workers' struggles ruthlessly.
The dictatorship of General Primo de Rivera was a result of various elements.
Firstly, the wearing out of the Restoration Regime that had dominated the Spanish state since 1876:[3] a system that saw the alternation of two parties (conservative and liberal) which represented the dominant part of the Spanish bourgeoisie. However, this system was unable to integrate important factions of the bourgeoisie, the regionalists in particular, and it marginalised the petty bourgeoisie (traditionally republican and anti-clerical). Moreover, the only language it knew in relation to the peasants and the workers was ferocious repression.
Secondly, once the war was over, Spanish capital saw the decline and disappearance of the easy profits it had made by selling all kinds of goods to both sides under the cover of its "neutrality". The crisis had returned in full force and unemployment, inflation and extreme misery hit hard.
Thirdly, the Spanish bourgeoisie got bogged down in the Moroccan colonial war which went from disaster to disaster (the best known was the massacre of Spanish soldiers at the hands of Moroccan guerrillas in 1921). The Spanish army was weakened by internal struggles, by the inability of the political administration to lead and by a monstrous bureaucracy (there was one general to every two sergeants and five soldiers). It needed reinforcing.
This was so in the case of the Italian Duce Mussolini, of General Horthy in Hungary, who came to power after the failed proletarian revolution in 1919, of General Pildsuki in Poland, and so on.
The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera was very well received by the Spanish bourgeoisie, especially in Catalonia[5] and in particular in was supported almost unconditionally by the PSOE[6] whose union, the UGT,[7] became a state union. Its leader, Largo Caballero, who was also a leader of the PSOE, was made a state councillor by the dictator.
In order to ensure its monopoly as a union, the UGT actively persecuted the CNT and many UGT members scabbed and denounced the CNT workers or those who were simply combative.
representative of the Catalan opposition and head of the revolutionary movement that was formed at the time."[11] From 1924 to 1926 there were several attempts to cross the French frontier and attempted military uprisings; these were co-ordinated with the CNT, which was to call for the general strike. In 1926 there was a farcical attempt to kidnap the Spanish monarch in Paris by radical anarchists (Durruti, Ascaso and Jover). On each occasion the CNT supplied militants, that is, it supplied canon fodder. The result was always the same: the dictatorship unleashed savage repression against the members of the CNT by condemning them to death, sending them to prison or by torturing them horribly.
How could the CNT support national sovereignty, the unity of the army and navy and the energetic maintenance of social order?
In a note, Peirats[16] describes direct action by the fact that "conflicts must be resolved by direct contact between the parties concerned: the issue of work with the bosses and that of public order with the authorities"[17] This conception no longer has anything to do with the original vision of the CNT, for which it meant the direct struggle of the masses outside of the framework imposed by the bourgeoisie. It had now become a question of direct negotiation between the unions and the bosses when there is a "labour conflict" and between unions and the authorities in the case of conflicts involving public order! The new direct action is no more than the liberal corporatist vision of direct agreements between bosses and unions. No bourgeois politician would object to this!
On the question of anti-parliamentarianism, during an intervention at the June 1931 Congress (we will come back to this later), Peiró explains how he sees things when describing his conversations with Colonel Macia: "he asked us what conditions would be made by the confederation for it to support the revolutionary movement whose aim was to establish a Federal Republic. The reply of the representatives of the Confederation: ‘it is of little importance to us what may happen after the revolution. What is important is the liberation of all our prisoners without exception and that collective and individual liberty is absolutely guaranteed'". The correct but insufficient concept of revolutionary syndicalism at the outset to "denounce parliament as a dishonest state mask", is now substituted by union neutrality which gives carte blanche to the "politicians" as long as they form a state that guarantees the freedom of union action.
This "alteration" of concepts so dear to revolutionary syndicalism and anarchism made it possible to approach a policy of integration into the bourgeois state. This was not an evil conspiracy on the part of "reformist leaders" but rather a necessity that syndicalism was powerless to ignore. It was obliged to adapt to state capitalism and so "its only interest" was juridical freedom and institutional needs. This was necessary for it to carry out its job of controlling the workers and submitting their demands to the needs of the national capital, as we will now see.
The Spanish bourgeoisie was, to say the least, ungrateful. From 1930 to 1931 the number of strikes increased through the whole country but the newly legalised CNT made no attempt to encourage or develop the potential strength of the movement. Contrary to what it had done previously, it did what it could to contribute to the political aim of the bourgeoisie to replace the dictatorship with the Republican façade. In this period it busied itself mobilising the workers as cannon fodder for all street agitation supporting the change that the majority of bourgeois politicians were calling for in the hope of becoming the "saviours of the situation". Francisco Olaya[25] gave eloquent testimony showing that this was the main orientation of the CNT.
When the elections that were to push through the proclamation of the Republic took place in April 1931, the leaders of the CNT decided (albeit coyly) in favour of voting, as Olaya acknowledges: "We voted for the first time in 8 years as if it were a right that we had won. The turn out was massive, even on the part of CNT militants, who were influenced by their hatred of the monarchy and sensible of the critical situation of thousands of social detainees."[29] In an article evaluating the elections Solidaridad Obrera stated that "the vote was for the armistice and the Republic, against the atrocities and injustices committed by the monarchy". This was another striking precedent which was to be manifested much more overtly during the famous elections of February 1936!
The argument of the lesser evil is a trap. In essence it means claiming not to renounce final aims while supporting in practice so-called "minimal aims", which are by no means minimum demands of the proletariat but rather the programme of the bourgeoisie. The "lesser evil" is no other than a demagogic means of pushing through the programme of the bourgeoisie in a crucial political situation while maintaining the illusion that one is really continuing to struggle for a "revolutionary future".
During the Extraordinary Congress, the CNT made an enormous effort to break into the framework of the capitalist system. Of course numerous criticisms were made and the debates were stormy but the work of the Congress went systematically in the direction of integration into the structures of capitalist production and the institutional framework of the bourgeois state.
This is why the Congress endorsed the policy of making a pact with bourgeois conspirators as Gomez Casas recognises euphemistically: "the report of the national committee was discussed with great fervour as the activity of the representative organ, particularly in referring to the past conspiracy, was somewhat different to the habitual orthodoxy of confederate militancy."[33] How quaint to say it was "somewhat different to the orthodoxy" when in fact it marked a radical change from the CNT's activity from 1910 to 1923!
If we analyse this amendment seriously we can see that it did not really change anything. The moderate rhetoric of the presentation was given a more radical language by invoking "principles", among which is included "a list of minimal demands". It means that the every day policy of the union conformed to the fact that - as Gomez Casas says - "anarcho-syndicalism, albeit implicitly, had given a degree of confidence to the timid and embryonic Republic."[37] This was a realisation of the aims of the liberal monarchist Sanchez Guerra, quoted above: for national sovereignty, for the dignity and unity of the national navy and army and above all, to energetically maintain public order. This maintaining of "public order" entailed the assassination of more that 500 workers and journalists between April and December 1931!
because the aim of the union in capitalism's decadent period is only to become a part of the wheels of state and of the national economy.
The period that we have just analysed shows a fundamental volte-face in the history of the CNT. It was the main supplier of cannon fodder in the bourgeois battles for the Republic. It adulterated the concepts of direct action and anti-parliamentarianism, it accepted the "lesser evil" logic and the principle of Republican "freedom", it turned the bourgeois programme into the "minimum programme" of the proletariat while turning its own "maximum programme" into a radical version of the needs of the bourgeois national economy.
However these evident changes were hard to swallow. This was true for the old militants who had lived through the period in which, in spite of its difficulties and contradictions, the CNT had been a workers' organisation. It was also true for the young elements that flocked towards it under the pressure of an unbearable situation and the profound disappointment rapidly produced in the working masses towards the Republic.
The resistance and opposition were continuous. The convulsions within the CNT were violent. The "moderates", those in favour of abandoning those that they called the "maximalist anarchists" and of a pure, tough syndicalism, split temporarily to form oppositional unions and were reintegrated in 1936. Angel Pestaña however, who was in favour of a Spanish form of "workerism", split definitively to form an ephemeral Syndicalist Party.
However the situation was very different from that of 1915 to 1919 when, as we showed in the second article of this series, the orientation of the majority of the militants was towards the development of a revolutionary consciousness. The resistance and opposition in this later period suffered from profound disorientation and were not up to offering a real perspective.
There are many reasons for this difference. The deepening of capitalist decadence and, more concretely, the development of the general tendency towards state capitalism, meant that unionism had lost all capacity to recuperate working class efforts and initiatives. The unions can exist only as organisations in the service of capital, whose function is to imprison and sterilise the energies of the working class. This reality inflicted itself like a blind and implacable force upon the militants of a union such as the CNT, in spite of their good will and undoubted desire to the contrary.
Secondly, the 30s was the period that saw the triumph of the counter-revolution whose spearheads were Stalinism and Nazism. Unlike the period 1915-19, when many anarchists and revolutionary syndicalists gravitated towards the Bolsheviks and the Spartacists, the workers' combativity and reflection no longer had the benefit of a similar political compass. What now predominated was the destruction of proletarian reflection by means of the infernal alternative between fascism and anti-fascism, which prepared the way for the imperialist war. The strikes and struggles were directed towards national unity and anti-fascism, as was to be seen in 1936 in Spain and France.
Thirdly, whereas in the period 1910-23 the CNT was open as an organisation and collaborated and discussed with various proletarian tendencies, it was now dominated ideologically by anarchism. In its anarcho-syndicalist variety it simply wrapped a pure, tough unionism in a torrent of grandiloquent radicalism and a frantic activism which did not favour proletarian reflection or initiative.
Finally, the domination of anarchism and its romantic vision of the revolution were encouraged by the Republic's policy of appropriating to itself the old tendency of the Spanish bourgeoisie to repress and persecute the CNT. This policy gave the CNT an aura of being a victim and of defending a "radical and intransigent heroism" which, in the context of the ideological disorientation of the international proletariat that we have just described, enabled it to integrate into its ranks the best elements of the Spanish proletariat.
In the period 1931-36, when there were enormous convulsions of Spanish capital, the CNT became a huge mass organisation regrouping the core of the living forces of the Spanish proletariat in spite of being persecuted. As we will see in the next article in this series, this enormous force was to contribute to the defeat of the proletariat, to dragging it into the imperialist war that bourgeois factions were already preparing in 1936-39.
RR - C. Mir (1st September 2007)
[1]. See the third article in this series in International Review n° 130, under the sub heading "The defeat of the movement and the second disappearance of the CNT."
[2]. See the second article in this series in the International Review n°129.
[3]. See the first article in this series in the International Review n°128.
[4]. Authoritarian regimes based on a single party were formed mainly in the weakest countries or those suffering most from insoluble contradictions - as in the case of Nazi Germany. On the other hand, in the stronger countries it developed more gradually, more or less respecting the democratic form.
[5]. Primo de Rivera was a conspirator who represented the small Andalusian lords; brutal and arrogant land owners who led an idle life of oriental luxury. However he also had very good relations with the Catalonian shop keepers and business men who were dynamic, active and progressive, supposedly the opposite of the small Andalusian lords.
[6]. Partido Socialista Obrero Español - Spanish Socialist Workers Party.
[7]. Union General de Trabajadores - General Workers Union
[8]. Juan Peiró was a CNT militant from its foundation although he did not hold a responsible position in the organisation until 1919. He was minister for industry during the Republic. He was shot by Franco's authorities in 1942.
[9]. Reference is made to this book with the dates of various editions in the second and third articles in this series (International Review n° 129 and 130).
[10]. He was secretary general of the CNT in the 70s.
[11]. p.177.
[12]. A military conspiracy supported by the CNT, which was to take place on St. John's night (24th June) but which failed because a number of military men backed out at the last minute.
[13]. Ibid, p.181.
[14]. Series of articles entitled "Delimiting the Camps", published in Workers' Social Action, 1929.
[15]. See the first article in the series on revolutionary syndicalism in International Review n°118.
[16]. Author of the book on the CNT in the Spanish Revolution, quoted in the first article in this series.
[17]. Ibid. p. 52,
[18]. In the book already quoted, Gomez Casas relates that General Berenguer sent Mola, the head of Security (he later became one of the most inflexible military putchists) to discuss with the CNT delegate, Pestaña. Gomez Casas notes that during these discussions "Pestaña acknowlwdged the the CNT was basically apolitical and independent on all parties. However the organisation was sympathetic to ‘the regime that was closest to its ideal'" (p. 185). These ambiguous words show that it already wanted to integrate itself into the capitalist state.
[19]. For a more detailed account of this period, see our book , 1936 Franco and the Republic massacre the workers (available in Spanish).
[20]. Ibid, p.52.
[21]. Liberal ideology vaunts " direct action" on the part of "social forces" without "state interference". This is no more than a deception of course because the bosses' organisations and the "workers'" union organisations are forces of the state which work strictly - and it cannot be otherwise - within the economic and legal framework of the state.
[22]. The American bourgeoisie used a similar policy of marginalisation and repression against the IWW (see the International Review n° 125). This is why these union organisations never attained the influence that the CNT had within the Spanish proletariat.
[23]. Editor's note : according to the bourgeoisie there are only two alternatives ; integration into the democratice framework of the bourgeois state or the "radical" path of terrorism and, as Gomez Casas says, the law of the talion. In fact the working class alternative is the autonomous international struggle on its own class terrain., an alternative that is opposed to the alienated alternatives of the bourgeois.
[24]. Ibid, p.164.
[25]. A very committed anarchist, less subtle than Gomez Casas. The following quotations (translated by us) are extracts from his book History of the Spanish Workers' Movement which we have quoted in previous articles.
[26]. The same political orientation was adopted in Madrid and elsewhere against meetings of monarchist circles which were increasingly isolated.
[27]. A Republican oppositional publication to which some of the CNT leaders contributed; leaders such as Peiró who signed the Manifesto of Republican Intelligence.
[28]. Olaya, History of the Spanish Workers' Movement, p.628, editors note.
[29]. Ibid, p. 646.
[30]. Ibid, p. 660).
[31]. Ibid.
[32]. Ibid, p.664.
[33]. Ibid, p.196.
[34]. The Republican parliament which was to adopt the new constitution declaring Spain to be a " Workers' Republic".
[35]. Gomez Casas, op.cit., p.202.
[36]. Ibid., p.203.
[37]. Ibid.
[38]. Ibid. p.200.
[39]. The delegate made reference to the version of marxism presented by the Stalinists and the Social-Democrats, for whom socialism is equivalent to economic and social state control.
[40]. Ibid., p.200.
[41]. Ibid., p.201.
[42]. Ibid., p.200.
[43]. Ibid., p.201
Links
[1] http://www.mcclatchydc.com
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/305/july-1917
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/375/period-transition
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/125_france_students
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/110_conference.html
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/114_congress.html
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/111_OT_ConfSol_pt1
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200301/1893/orientation-text-2001-confidence-and-solidarity-proletarian-struggle
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/marxism-and-ethics
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/128/marxism-and-ethics-pt2
[13] http://www.marxists.org/archive/thalheimer/works/diamat/index.htm
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/130/17th-congress-summary
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/orientation-texts
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/129/commy-5-pot
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/395/communism-agenda-history
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/271/revolutionary-syndicalism
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/revolutionary-syndicalism