In issue no 13 of Workers Voice a Statement was printed ‘severing relations’, as they put it, with our International Communist Current (ICC). This may seem odd to our readers and to revolutionary militants who share our political orientation, both because Workers Voice (WV) has evolved quite closely in discussion with our tendency over the past two years and also because the idea of ‘severing (diplomatic) relations’ among revolutionary groups is indeed bizarre.
The WV Statement reaffirms the essential class positions which are the basis for both our Current and WV. However, because of disagreement on l) the regroupment of revolutionaries today and 2) the question of the state in the future period of transition after the proletarian revolution, WV announces that they are breaking all ties with us.
Before going into their assertions in any detail, it must be said from the outset that WV has to take the full responsibility for deciding to ‘sever’ all contact discussion and even minimal communication with our groups. Our Current does not abandon discussion with groups in evolution - particularly if their basic political orientation follows along the same class lines we consider so important to defend and disseminate in the class. Ceasing all communication and ending discussion must be motivated by profound political and class lines. We do not discuss organisationally with Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists etc, because tahere is no sense in ‘discussing’ with the counter-revolution. But although our Current and WV have important political differences, it has never been our will or desire to cease discussion. We consider this a desertion of the duty of revolutionaries to clarify positions through the confrontation of ideas whenever possible.
How does WV motivate this step? On the question of regroupment of revolutionaries, WV agrees that “the issues/class lines for an international regroupment already exist”. Furthermore these class lines for regroupment are fundamentally those at the basis of our Current and WV. The problem for WV is that 1) the time isn’t right and our Current is hurrying regroupment (“.... the conditions do not yet exist in which any real meaningful regroupment on an international scale can take place”) and 2) our Current supposedly feels “that regroupment takes place only by others joining them on their terms.”
WV are rather timid defenders of regroupment - all they can offer on the positive side is the rather pale statement that they “are not against it in, principle”. But why be for it? Why not have each small revolutionary group (or at the extreme, each individual) doing its ‘own’ work in its ‘own’ corner of the globe, each one master in his own house, protecting his group from the “imperialist aggressions” of other groups? Why not have relations among comrades consist of flamboyant insults and petulant exclusions, as the situationists unfortunately popularized so well? Why has our Current consistently encouraged comrades to realize the importance of the problem of consolidating and concentrating revolutionary forces on the basis of clear programmatic agreement?
In a world where the crisis of capitalism is continuing its path towards economic chaos and deprivation for the working class; where the bourgeoisie is facing repeated and profound political crises in so many countries, using their ‘left’ mask of mystification and repression more and more; where working class resistance has expressed itself in powerful, if sporadic form all over the world; where class struggle is facing important battles in the future - revolutionary forces are extremely limited. Counter-revolution and the confusion of fifty years of darkness are taking and will take their toll on the workers’ movement. But WV seemingly thinks it has plenty of time to think about all this while essentially continuing to be what it always was, a local group, concerned with collecting international ‘contacts’ (but not with us) as long as nothing more substantial is implied. How can we avoid drawing this conclusion?
As for having to join “our” current “on our terms”, the only valid political reason to refuse to join with others is that the class positions defended are not the same (including positions on the need for organization of revolutionaries and the means to carry it out). This is the only possible interpretation for “on our own terms”. Our only “terms” in fact are solid and profound political and theoretical agreement. WV is afraid of “artificial coming together that signifies nothing” and admonishes us not to think of our limited efforts towards international unity as a party. We can only thank them for advice on something we have been defending for years. We do not consider our international current as a party even though we hope to be making a necessary contribution to the future formation of the party which will emerge as a process in our general period of the growth of class struggle and confrontation. The party or parties of the proletariat of today will be formed only when class struggle has generalized and intensified on an extensive scale. But this must not be interpreted to mean that prior to this period revolutionaries should remain isolated, in their own corner, inactive or unorganized and that what we do today has no influence on the organization and activity of tomorrow.
Without encouraging international discussion and joining our forces, if political agreement is reached, all the revolutionary programmes on paper would be just words in the air. The real issue may be that WV and our Current have quite profound differences on the necessity and means of organization of revolutionary groups today. These differences could only be clarified (if not overcome) by discussion. In any case, disagreements on the pace or timeliness of putting internationalism into organizational practice do not constitute a principal reason for an end to all contact between revolutionary groups. But escaping the issues is always easier than sticking it out.
As for the second point - the question of the period of transition - the WV Statement reads, “Revolution Internationale (RI) believes that in the period of transition a state would exist independently of the class”. Embroidering a bit on this theme, they then say that this assertion warrants a total break with us because we have become blatantly counter-revolutionary.
This point must be cleared up straight away. Neither RI nor any of the groups in our International Communist Current nor anyone in our groups has ever said or printed such a statement. Saying that the state would exist independently of the class (the workers’ councils) would be destroying the entire meaning of the proletarian dictatorship and is therefore a non-marxist and unacceptable orientation. Anyone reading the first issue of our Current’s International Review (April, 1975) where we print several articles on the period of transition, will be able to see that our theoretical analyses have never defended this position. Fear of ridicule obviously does not hinder WV and others from making unfounded accusations.
The question of the unfolding of the period of transition is under discussion in all our groups and as our Review shows, we have by no means reached unanimity on this point. We do not feel that all these questions can be settled immediately and for all time by us or anyone, else before the full experience of the class has come into play. That WV could take such a drastic step as breaking all contact with us and denouncing us as counter-revolutionary on the basis of their garbled heresay version of what the blind man read and told the deaf man, is a measure of the weakness and lack of seriousness of revolutionary elements today facing such a difficult and complex problem as the period of transition.
If we are to deal with the question of the state in the period of transition, we must separate the marxist conception from that of anarchism. Contrary to anarchism’s ignorance of the economic laws of capitalism, and the evolution of history, marxists have affirmed that between capitalist society and full communism a period of transition will exist during which the struggle of the proletariat continues, against the vestiges of the law of value, to insure the definitive suppression of the bourgeoisie and to integrate the remaining non-exploitative strata and classes into new relation of production to carry forward the process of social transformation through the political domination of the proletariat. This process will end with the realization of a classless society but during the period of transition (that is, until this point is reached,) society will still be divided into classes. Out of this still divided society a state will inevitably appear. Unlike the anarchist idea that the state is the embodiment of all evil in itself and that it can be done away with by willing it to disappear, marxists assert that the state is an expression of social relations and can only be eliminated through the conscious transformation of the material basis of these social relations and divisions - through the realization of the working class programme.
Once the inevitability of the state in the period of transition is recognized, the question then becomes: how to deal with the state of the transitional period in the context of the proletarian dictatorship? Within the marxist current, the Bolsheviks offered a ‘solution’ to this question - the complete identification of the proletariat with the state; the creation of a ‘workers’ state, and the identification of the class with the party, the creation of a party bureaucracy to whom the state is ‘entrusted’. The historical experience of the Russian Revolution must lead us to reject this ‘solution’ to the problem of the state after the revolution.
Drawing on the lessons of the historical experience of the proletariat we hold that first of all, the state cannot be turned over to a party; the role of the party is not to take power in the name of the class; to substitute itself for the whole class. Secondly, it is the existence of classes in the transition period which defines the necessity of a state and not any needs of the workers to create a state. If the world were to be composed only of the proletariat after the revolution, there would be no state; there would be the “administration of things” but not the “government of men”. The question is therefore: if the state arises out of the existence of a society still divided into classes, does the proletariat identify its historical class goals of social transformation with the state apparatus?
The proletariat must not let the state exist independently of itself -in fact, the state must be dominated by the interests of the proletariat, as far as possible. But the state is not the instrument of social transformation - the communist programme can only be preserved and carried forward by the specific international organs of the proletariat alone. In other terms: must the workers recognize an authority of the state over their decisions if they consider that it is not in their class interests? If the answer is yes, because the state is a ‘workers’ state, then Trotsky was correct to militarize labour and forbid strikes against the ‘workers’ government because they would be reactionary and unacceptable. If the state is the full and complete instrument for the realization of the communist programme, why were the Bolsheviks wrong to want to control and dominate the state against the workers if necessary?
For many of our comrades it seems important to stress the fact that the working class must maintain its own class organizations - regardless of what state forms may or may not be necessary; it is important that the workers guard against being blurred by non-integrated strata and resist any efforts to have them recognize any superior state authority over their decisions. Unlike WV we do not say, the state is the class and the class is the state, but rather that this semi-state, the scourge inherited from class society must be used by the proletariat but never identified with it nor allowed to dominate it.
For many of our comrades, completely identifying the state with the class is paving the way to Kronstadt. This question seems to escape WV completely and they end up in a false debate. We do not hold that the state must be independent from the working class but rather that the workers, while exercising their domination through the state, must maintain their international organization. The working class is the only class in the post-revolutionary society to organize itself as a class: the proletarian dictatorship. Individuals from other social strata will be represented in the state individually through a form of territorial soviets. The state must not have ultimate authority over the class no matter what the contingent situation (even though the state has final authority over all other sectors of the population) nor should the state be mystified into a ‘workers’ state’.
We do not pretend to have solved all the problems nor found the answer to these difficult questions but we reject the idea of prematurely cutting off debate with the absurd accusation of being counterrevolutionary - the judgment of history handed down by WV.
What is the class to conclude from the spectacle of two groups who share class positions - our Current and WV – ‘severing relations’ on issues which at best do not warrant an end to all contact and discussion and at worst are a hodge-podge of suppositions and false accusations?
The last thing the workers’ movement needs is confusionism and these kinds of tactics. We hope WV will reconsider their hasty and unfounded decision. The positions and work of WV have been a positive contribution to the movement but if WV is to be the carrier of confusion and unfounded hostility, it is better for the workers’ struggle that they disappear as quickly as possible. If WV can no longer bear to discuss the issues in a principled manner or open their minds, if their hostility continues to serve as a smokescreen to hide their localism and small group patriotism, it would be better for the group to disappear and make way for expressions of the working class who are capable of evolving.
J.A.
For the International Communist Current
* For a further treatment of this question, see ‘Sectarianism Unlimited’ in World Revolution No 3.
Lessons of the German Revolution
1. The formation of the German Communist Party (Spartakusbund)
When the German Communist Party was founded between 30 December, 19181. and 1 January, 1919, the revolutionary opposition to Social Democracy seemed to have found an autonomous, organized expression. But the German Party (appearing at the very moment when the proletariat was engaging in armed struggle in the streets and, for a short time, actually taking power in some industrial centres), was to immediately reveal both the heterogeneous character of its origins as well as its inability to attain a global and complete understanding of the tasks which it was formed to accomplish.
Which were the forces which came together to form the Party? And what were the problems which immediately presented a stumbling block in the way of these forces?
We will examine the most interesting of these factors here because they will enable us to understand the errors of the Party and because they were to weigh so heavily on future developments.
The trajectory of events after 4 August, 1914 encompassed many difficulties and confusions. The history of the Spartakus group is clear proof of this. Its role as a brake on theoretical clarification and development is very obvious.
At the time of the Spartakus League (Spartakusbund) all important decisions were characteristic of the positions of Rosa Luxemburg. (The group took the name Spartakus League in 1916; throughout 1915 the group had been called Internationale after its review which first appeared in April 1915.)
At Zimmerwald (5-8 September, 1915), the Germans were represented by the Internationale group; by Borchardt from Berlin who represented the small group around the review Lichtsrahlen (Shafts of Light) and by the centrist wing close to Kautsky. Only Borchardt supported the internationalist positions of Lenin, while the other Germans supported a motion couched in the following terms:
"Under no circumstances should the impression be given that this conference wants to provoke a split and to found a new International."
At Kienthal (24-30 April, 1916), the German opposition was represented by the Internationale group (Bertha Thalheimer and Ernst Meyer), by the Opposition in the Organization (the centrists around Hoffman), and by the Bremer Linksradikalen (Bremen left radicals) through Paul Frolich.
The hesitations of the Spartakists (Internationale) were not immediately overcome; once again, they were nearer to the positions of the centrists than to those of the left (Lenin-Frolich). E. Meyer stated: "We want to create the ideological base........of the new International, but we don't want to commit ourselves on the organizational level because everything is still in a state of flux."
This was the classical position of Luxemburg for whom the party was more necessary at the end of the revolution than during its initial preparatory stages. ("In a word, historically, the moment when we will have to take the lead is not at the beginning but at the end of the revolution.")
The most important factor on the international level was the appearance of the Bremer Linksradikalen.1 As early as 1910 the Social Democratic newspaper of Bremen, the Bremer BurEerzeit, was publishing weekly articles by Pannekoek and Radek, and it was under the influence of the Dutch Left that the Bremen Group formed itself around Knief, Paul Frolich, and others. At the end of 1915, the ISD (International Socialists of Germany) was formed, born from the union of the Bremen communists with the Berlin revolutionaries who published the review Lichtsrahlen. The Bremerlinke became independent from Social Democracy, in formal termo, in December 1916, but already in June of the same year it had begun the publication of Arbeiterpolitik2 which was the most important legal organ of the Left. Apart from the articles of Pannekoek and Radek, there appeared in it contributions from Zinoviev, Bukharin, Kamenev, Trotsky and Lenin. Arbeiterpolitik immediately displayed a more mature consciousness of the break with reformism. In their first issue they wrote that August 4th was "the natural end of a political movement whose decline had been underway for some time".
From Arbeiterpolitik there arose the tendencies who were to take the lead in raising the question of the party. The discussion between the Bremen Group and the Spartakists was difficult, because of the persistence of the latter to remain within Social Democracy.
On 1 January, 1916 at the national conference of the Internationale group, Knief criticized the absence of a clear perspective calling for a total break with the Social Democratic party and the formation of a revolutionary party on a radically new foundation.
While the Spartakist group Internationale adhered to the Socialdemocratische Arbeiter-gemeinschaft (Social Democratic Work Collective) in the Reichstag and was producing declarations such as:
"A struggle for the party but not against the party ..... a struggle for democracy in the party, for the rights of the rank and file, for the comrades of the party against the leaders who have forgotten their duties ..... Our watchword is neither split nor unity, new nor old party, but the reconquest of the party at the base by the rebellion of the rank and file ...... The decisive struggle for the party has begun." (Spartakus-Briefe, 30 March, 1916)
At the same time, in Arbeiterpolitik one could read:
"We consider that a split, both on the national and international level, is not only inevitable but an indispensable precondition for the real reconstitution of the International, for the reawakening of the proletarian movement. We consider that it is inadmissible and dangerous to hold back from expressing this profound conviction in front of the labouring masses." (Arbeiterpolitik, no.4)
And Lenin in On The Junius Pamphlet (July 1 91 6 ) wrote:
"The greatest weakness in German revolutionary marxism is the absence of a tightly knit illegal organization ..... such an organization would be forced to define clearly its attitude towards opportunisms such as that of Kautsky. Only the International Socialists of Germany (ISD) have expressed a clear, unambiguous position on this question."
The Spartakists also continued to adhere to the USPD (Independent Democratic Party of Germany founded 6-8 April, 1917; a centrist party not substantially different except in size from the Social Democracy itself but linked to the growing radicalization of the masses) the party of Haase, Ledebour, Kautsky, Hilferding and Bernstein. This adherence made the relationship between the Bremen Communists and the Spartakists even more difficult. In March 1917 one could still read in Arbeiterpolitik:
"The left radicals are facing a momentous decision. The greatest responsibility lies with the Internationale group, which despite the criticisms we have made of it we recognize as the most active and largest group to be the kernel of the future radical left party. Without them, we must say frankly, we - ourselves and the ISD - would be unable to construct a party capable of acting in the foreseeable future. It depends on the Internationale Group whether the struggle of the left radicals will be led in an orderly fashion under one flag, or whether the oppositions within the workers' movement which have appeared in the past and whose competition is a factor of clarification will waste great deal of time and energy only to end up in canfusion." (Our emphasis)
In the face of the adhesion of the Spartakus group to the USPD, the same paper said:
"The Internationale group is dead ..... a group of comrades have formed thrmselves into an action committee for the construction of a new party."
Indeed, in August 1917, a meeting of delegates from Bremen, Berlin, Frankfurt and other German towns was held in Berlin with the object of establishing the basis for a new party. Otto Ruhle with the Dresden group took part in this meeting.
In the Spartakus group itself there were a number of elements whose positions were very close to those of the Linksradikalen and who did not accept the organizational compromise of the ‘Zentrale' around Rosa Luxemburg. At first this was manifested in the opposition of the Spartakus groups in Duisburg, Frankfurt and Dresden, to the participation in the Arbeiter-gemeinschaft. (The organ of the Duisburg group, Kampf, engaged in an animated debate against this participation.) Subsequently, other groups, for example the important Chemnitz group around Heckert, voiced their opposition to adhesion to the USPD. These groups in practice shared the position expressed by Radek in Arbeiterpolitik:
"The idea of building a party with the centrists is a dangerous utopia. The left radicals, whether the circumstances have prepared them for it or not, must, if they want to fulfill their historic task, build their own party."
Liebknecht himself, more closely linked to the ferment within the class, expressed his own position in a prison text (1917) in which, seeking to grasp the living pulse of the revolution, he distinguished three social strata within the German Social Democracy. The first was composed of stipendary officials, the social base of the politics of the majority of the Social Democratic Party. The second was composed of:
"The most well-to-do and educated workers. For them the imminence of a serious conflict with the ruling class is not clear. They want to react and to struggle. They are the base of the Socialdemocratische Arbeiter-gemeinschaft."
Finally, the third category was composed of:
"The proletarian masses, the uneducated workers. The proletariat in the strict sense of the word. Only this stratum, because of its real condition, has nothing to lose. We support these masses: the proletariat."
All this shows two things:
1. That an important fraction of the Spartakus group was oriented in the same direction as the left radicals, and was coming into conflict with the minority centre represented by Luxemburg, Jogisches and Paul Levi.
2. The federalist, non-centralized character of the Spartakus group.
The Russian Revolution
The disagreements which arose between the Spartakists and the USPD majority concerning this revolution, led Arbeiterpolitik to take up the discussion with the Spartakists once again.3 The Bremen Communists never separated solidarity with the Russian Revolution from the need to form a communist party in Germany. Why, asked the Bremen Communists, had the revolution triumphed in Russia?
"Uniquely and solely because in Russia there is an autonomous party of left radicals which from the beginning has raised the flag of socialism and fought under the banner of social revolution."
"If at Gotha one could out of good will still find reasons for the attitude of the Internationale group, today all semblance of justification for association with the Independents has vanished."
"Today the international situation makes the foundation of a radical left party an even more urgent necessity."
"For our part we are firmly committed to dedicating all our strength to creating in Germany no conditions for a Linksradikalen Partei. We therefore invite our friends of the Internationale group, in view of the weakness of the Independents over the last nine months and in view of the corrosive repercussions of the Gotha compromise (which can only prejudice the future of the radical movement in Germany)4, to break unambiguously and openly with the pseudo-socialist Independents and to found an autonomous radical left party." (Arbeiterpolitik, 15 December, 1917) (Our emphasis)
In spite of everything, another year was to pass before the foundation of the party in Germany, and that a year in which social tensions were steadily growing: from the Berlin strikes of 17 April to the navy mutiny of the summer and the strike wave of January 1918 (Berlin, Ruhr, Kiel, Bremen, Hamburg, Dresden) which lasted for the whole summer and autumn.
Let us know examine some other minor groups characteristics of the German situation. We mentioned above that the ISD also regrouped the Berlin group around the review Lichstrahlen. The most important representative of this group was Borchardt. The ideas which he developed in the review were violently anti-Social Democratic, but already, because of their semi-anarchist orientation, represented a break with the Bremen Communists. As Arbeiterpolitik observed: "In place of the party, be (Borchardt) poses a propagandist sect of an anarchist nature." Later on, the left communists were to consider him as a renegade and baptised him ‘Julien the Apostate'.
In Berlin, Werner Moller (already a participant in Lichstrahlen became the keenest collaborator with Arbeiterpolitik and later its representative. (He was brutally murdered in cold blood by Noske's men in January 1919).
In Berlin, the left current was very strong, with, among others, the Spartakists Karl Shroder and Friedrich Wendel, (later of the KAPD).
The Hamburg group occupies a particular place in the revolutionary opposition to Social Democracy. It only joined the ISD in November 1918 when, at Knief''s proposal, the latter changed its name to the IKD (Internationale Kommunisten Deutschland) on 23 December 1918. The leaders in Hamburg were Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim. What distinguished them from the Bremen Communists was a sharper polemic of a syndicalist and anarchist tone directed against leaders. Arbeiterpolitik on the other hand maintained a correct position when it wrote on 28 July 1918:
"The cause of the Linksradikalen, the cause of the future communist party of Germany into which will flow sooner or later all those who have remained faithful to the old ideals, does not hinge on great names. On the contrary, what is and must be the truly new factor if we are ever to attain socialism is that the anonymous mass takes its destiny into its own hands; that each comrade taken individually makes his own contribution without concerning himself about the ‘great names' that are alongside him." (Our emphasis)
The overtly syndicalist character of the Hamburg group's political orientation was derived in part from the activity undertaken by Wolffheim when he had been involved with the International Workers of the World in America.
But undoubtedly, the best expression of class struggle in Germany at this time was to be found among the Bremen Communists. In saying this one exposes all the question begging and errors of the Spartakus group (including its best theoretician, Rosa Luxemburg) on the problems of organization, the conception of the revolutionary process, and the role of the party. However, to point out the mistakes of Rosa Luxemburg in no way signifies a rejection of her heroic struggle; it does allow for an understanding that in conjunction with the far-reaching insights she developed in her theoretical fight against Bernstein and Kautsky, she also defended positions which we cannot accept.
We have no gods to worship; on the contrary we must face up to the necessity of understanding the errors of the past in order to be able to avoid them ourselves; to know how to draw the useful but incomplete lessons (in this case, on the function and organizational tasks of revolutionaries) from the historical proletarian movement.
In order to be able to carry out our own tasks, we must also be able to understand the indissoluble link which exists between the activity of small groups when the counter-revolution has the upper hand and the example of the work of Bilan and Internationalisme is an eloquent testimony to this) and the action of the political group when the insurmountable contradictions of capitalism push the class towards the revolutionary struggle. It is no longer a question of simply defending the positions, but (on the basis of a constant elaboration of these positions, on the basis of the programme of the class) of being capable of cementing the spontaneity of the class, of being an expression of the consciousness of the class, of helping to unify its forces for the decisive offensive, in other words, of building the party, an essential moment in the victory of the proletariat.
But parties, no less than revolutions, do not spring, fully formed, from nowhere. Let us explain. Organizational artificialities do not just serve any old cause; rather, more often, they have served the counterrevolution. To proclaim a ‘party', to build up one's organization as a party in a period of counter-revolution is an absurdity, a very grave error which signifies an inability to understand the essence of the problem when there is no immediate revolutionary perspective. But it is no less grave an error to put this task aside or to put it off until it is too late. In the context of this study, it is this second error which is most interesting.
Those who say that all problems will be solved spontaneously are, in the final analysis, eulogizing unconscious spontaneity and not the passage from spontaneity to consciousness; they fail to understand, or are unwilling to understand, that this attainment of consciousness by the class in its struggle must also lead it to recognize the necessity of an adequate instrument for carrying out the assault on the state, the fortress of capital.
If the spontaneity of the class is a moment which we advocate, spontaneism - that is, the theorization of spontaneity - actually kills spontaneity, expresses itself in a series of stale formulae: a feverish attempt to ‘be where the workers are', an inability to judge when to be ‘against the current' in moments of relapse and reflux in order to be ‘with the current' in decisive moments later on. The deviations of Luxemburg on organizational questions also manifested themselves in her conception of the conquest of power - and we would add that this was inevitable given the intimate connection between these two questions:
"For us the conquest of power will not be effected at one blow. It will be a progressive act, for we shall progressively occupy all the positions of the capitalist state, defending tooth and nail each one that we seize." (From ‘The Speech to the Founding Convention of the German Communist Party', in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press)
But, unfortunately, this was not the end of it. While Paul Frolich (representing the Bremen group) was issuing the following appeal from Hamburg in November I918: "It is the beginning of the German revolution, of the world revolution: long live the greatest action of the world revolution! Long live the German workers republic! Long live world-wide Bolshevism!" Rosa Luxemburg, a little over a month later, instead of asking why such a massive attack by the proletariat had come to be defeated, was saying: "On November 9th, the workers and soldiers destroyed the old regime in Germany .,... On November 9th, the proletariat arose and threw off its shameful yoke. The Hohenzollerns were chased away by the workers and soldiers organized in councils." So she interpreted the passing of power from the gang of William II to that of Ebert-Scheidemann-Haase as a revolution, and not as a changing of the old guard against the revolution.5
This inability to understand the historic role of Social Democracy was to cost Luxemburg her life, as it also did Liebknecht and thousands of proletarians. The KAPD (Communists Workers Party of Germany ), as did the Italian Left, saw clearly how to draw the lessons of this experience. (One of the KAPD's most fundamental points of opposition to the C.I. (Communisst International) and the KPD (German Communist Party) was its refusal to have any contact with the USPD. We will return to this later.) Bordiga wrote on 6 February 1921 in Il Communista an article entitled ‘The Historic Function of Social Democracy' from which we will quote a few passages:
"Social Democracy has an historic function in the sense that there will probably be a period in the western countries in which the Social Democratic parties will be in the government, either on their own or in collaboration with the bourgeois parties. But, while the proletariat may not have the capacity to prevent this, such an intermediary stage does not represent a positive and necessary condition for the development of revolutionary forms and institutions; instead of being a useful preparation for the latter, it will constitute a desperate attempt of the bourgeoisie to diminish and divert the offensive of the proletariat, in order to be able to ruthlessly massacre the workers under the banners of the white reaction later on, if the workers still have enough strength to dare to revolt against the legitimate, humanitarian, decent government of Social Demooracy."
"For us there can be no other revolutionary transfer of power than that from the ruling bourgeoisie to the proletariat, just as there can be no other form of proletarian power except the dictatorship of the Workers' Councils."
II. The faltering steps of the German Communist Party (Spartakusbund)
We began this study at the Founding Congress of the German Communist Party (30 December 1918/1 January) and then made a detour to examine its origins. We will now continue from the initial point of departure.
At the Founding Congress two diametrically opposed positions became crystallized. On the one hand there were the minority around Luxemburg, Jogisches and Prefi Levi, which regrouped the most important personalities of the new party, and who, despite being in the minority, assumed the leadership of it, (The minority's scoffing attitude and its semi-refusal to allow expression to the preponderant positions of the Left - only Frolich was admitted to the Zentrale - were to lead, a few months later, to the farce of the Heidelberg Congress). On the other hand, were the great majority of the party: the passion and revolutionary potential which was expressed by the IKD and a good part of the Spartakists. The positions of the Left, with Liebknecht at their head, triumphed with an overwhelming majority: against participation in elections, for leaving the unions, for the insurrection,
But the majority, faced with the immediate tasks of preparing for an insurrectional offensive lacked a clear perspective and the military problem also called for the centralized and leading role of the Party. A sort of federalism and regionalist independence dominated the scene. In Berlin, hardly anyone knew what was happening in the Ruhr, or in the centre or south of the country ann. vice versa. Rote Fahne, itself, recognized on 8 January 1919, that: "the non-existence of a centre charged with organizing the working class cannot last ...... It is vital that the revolutionary workers set up directing organisms capable of guiding and utilizing the combative energy of the masses." And note that this report speaks only about the situation in Berlin.
This disorganization was to increase and reached the level of paroxysm after the death of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. The Party, at the moment when it was forced into clandestinity and subjected to counter-revolutionary terror, found itself beheaded. The Soviet Republics which arose almost everywhere in Germany: Bremen, Munich, Bavaria etc were defeated one by one, the proletarian fighters annihilated. The proletarian wave, the immense potentiality within the class, suffered a reflux. We can hardly refrain from citing the whole of the letter Lenin wrote in April 1919 to the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Needless to say the vast majority of the ‘concrete measures' recommended by Lenin were never taken.
Greetings to the Bavarian Soviet Republic
"We thank you for your message of greeting and in turn we heartily salute the Soviet Republic of Bavaria. We would immediately like you to inform us more often and more concretely about the measures you have taken in your struggle against the bourgeois executioners, Scheidemann and Co; if you have created soviets of workers and household servants in the districts of the town; if you have armed the workers and disarmed the bourgeoisie; if you have made use of the warehouses of clothes and ether articles as widely and as immediately as possible, to help the workers and above all the day-labourers and small peasants; if you have expropriated the factories and goods of the Munich capitalists as well as the capitalist agricultural enterprises in the surrounding area; if you have abolished the mortgages and rent of small peasants; if you have tripled the wages of day-labourers and workmen; if you have confiscated all the paper and printworks in order to publish leaflets and newspapers for the masses; if you have instituted the six-hour day with two or three hours dedicated to the study of the art of state administration; if you have crowded the bourgeoisie together in order to immediately install workers in the rich apartments; if you have taken over all the banks; if you have chosen hostages from among the bourgeoisie; if you have established a food ration which gives more to workers than to members of the bourgeoisie; if you have mobilized all the workers at once for defence and for ideological propaganda in the surrounding villages. The most rapid and widespread application of these measures as well as other similar measures, carried out on the initiative of the soviets of workers and day-labourers and, separately, of small peasants, must reinforce your position. It is vital to hit the bourgeoisie with an extortionary tax and to ameliorate practically, immediately, and at all costs the situation of the workers, day-labourers and small peasants. Best wishes and hopes for your success," Lenin.
This lack of theoretical preparedness, this inability to rise to the situation, was to provoke a split in the German movement at the first sign of a reflux. On the other hand, there were those who began to look more towards Bolshevism, towards victorious Russia, in order to take up its propaganda, its strategic and tactical methods in an absurd attempt to apply them to Germany. The case of Radek is a typical example of this: formerly the spokesman for the Bremen Communists, the most intransigent wing of the movement, he was to become after the reflux of the struggle in the summer of 1919, one of the architects, along with Paul Levi of the Heidelberg Congress (October, 1919) where the gains of the Founding Congress of the Party were repudiated and replaced with the ‘tactical' use of elections, of work in the ultra-reformist unions and, in the end, of ‘open letters' and the united front.
Thus, the call for centralization made by this tendency is of doubtful value since they were taking an opposite course to that of the development of the spontaneous movement. On the other hand, the revolutionary wing which refused to make this artificial choice and whose methods and prognostications were far more fruitful were, once they constituted themselves into an organized tendency, to confront a solid wall of growing difficulties.
Did the World Revolution Fail because of the Inadequacies of the Russian Revolution Or did the Russian Revolution Fail because of the Inadequacies of the World Revolution?
The answer to this problem is not a simple task and requires an understanding of the social dynamic of these years. The Russian Revolution was a magnificent example for the western proletariat. The Third International founded in March 19196 is an example of the revolutionary will of the Bolsheviks and represented a real effort on their part to gain the support of the European communists. But the internal difficulties of the Russian Revolution, which skyrocketed at the end of the civil war, and which could have no solution within the Russian framework; the defeat of the first phase of the German revolution (January-March, 1919) and of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, convinced the Russian communists that the revolution in Europe was a long term perspective. According to them, it was now primarily a question of regaining the majority of workers for the coming period, of convincing the Social Democratic masses of the correctness of communist positions, etc. There was a tendency to recuperate the USPD, to regard them as the right wing of the workers' movement and not as a faction of the bourgeoisie - and a steady abandonment of the struggle against Social Democracy, of the attempt to relate to the most advanced layers of the class by insisting on the necessity of attacking and exposing Social Democracy on the basis of the combativity of these workers.
We could thus say that if the hesitations of the western communists were deadly throughout the first phase (1918-19), it was the Communist International itself which was to become an obstacle to the flowering - however late - of an authentic proletarian vanguard in Europe when the situation there was still revolutionary (and we are only speaking of the years 1920-21, after which one could speak for two more years of a proletarian reaction against the assaults of the bourgeoisie (cf Hamburg ‘23) and only then of the final defeat and massacre of the working class). If the passage from one situation to another took place gradually, we can still point to decisive moments of the decline: to the dissolution of the Amsterdam bureau by the Communist International and Lenin's text, Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder.
Let us return to the vicissitudes of the German Communist Party. On 17 August, 1919, a National Conference was held at Frankfurt. Levi's attack on the Left was a failure; but in October of the same year, it had more success. In a clandestine Congress which had only a sparse representation from the district sections, and against the wishes of many, a split was decided in practice by the change of the programmatic positions arrived at in January. Point 5 of the new programme of the Party read:
"The revolution, which wall not happen all at once but will be a long and persevering struggle of a class oppressed for centuries and thus not fully conscious of its mission and its strength, is subject to flux and reflux." (our emphasis)
And Levi, shortly afterwards, supported the view that the new revolutionary wave would come in .......1926! But the decision to expel the ‘leftists', the ‘adventurists', was not taken officially and was not resolved until the Third Congress of the KPD in 1920. After Heidelberg, the Left attempted to form itself into a KPD(O) (the ‘O' stood for Opposition), effectively ensuring that after the first few months of 1920 there were almost two KPD organizations: the KPD(S) (KPD-Spartakusbund) and the KPD(O). All this took place in a completely chaotic situation. The news which managed to get through to Moscow was infrequent and fragmentary. In Greetings to the Italian, French and German Communists dated 10 October, 1919, Lenin wrote:
"Of the German Communists we know fully that there is a communist press in many towns. It is inevitable that, in a movement which is' rapidly extending itself, which is subjected to vigorous persecution, dissension will arise. That is a growing pain. The divergences within the German Communists, as far as I can judge, can be reduced to the problem of ‘using legal channels', of using bourgeois parliaments, reactionary unions, the legal councils which have been perverted by the Scheidemannites and Kautskyists - to the problem of participating in these institutions or boycotting them."
Lenin came down on the side of participation and gave his seal of approval to Levi's policies.
But the central problem, which was to manifest itself a few months later, was either to adopt illegal revolutionary struggle and military preparation or legal activity in the unions and parliament. This was the basis of the confrontation between the two ‘lines' of the KPD. The centre of the Opposition was based for a while in Hamburg. But Laufenberg and Wolffheim quickly began to be discredited. It was they who began to elaborate the theory of National Bolshevism, according to which the defence of Germany against the Entente was a revolutionary duty, even at the price of an alliance with the German bourgeoisie.7 From then on Bremen, which was already functioning as an ‘information centre', was to become the point of reference for Left Communism. The Bremen ‘information centre' struggled on two fronts up to the beginning of 1920: against the Party Zentrale and against Hamburg. Bremen did not try to split but tried to hold the results of the Heidelberg Congress up for discussion; but the Zentrale backed by Levi was opposed to all discussion and was aided in this by the struggle against the ‘National Bolshevism' of Hamburg. The attempted Kapp Putsch, by giving these divergences a ‘practical' content, put an end to all discussion.
Let us examine the proletarian response to this attempted putsch and the behaviour of the various organizations.
In the Ruhr the Reichswehr did not immediately clarify its position towards Kapp and given that all, from the ADGB (the German union, Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerschafs Bund)8 and Social Democrats to the centrists and the KPD(S) called for a general strike, (although the KPD centre was somewhat hesitant in the first days), the situation would have had revolutionary possibilities, if the leadership of the unions and the parliamentary parties could have been broken; indeed, a number of zones like the Ruhr and central Germany had not undergone the massive proletarian defeats of the preceding years, as had Berlin, Munich, Bremen, Hamburg etc.
In the Ruhr there was considerable tension between the Reichswehr and the workers, and such was the situation provoked by the Kapp Putsch, that it immediately led to the arming of the workers on strike. (The fact that many combative workers had managed to escape the domination of the ADGB by joining the FAUD(S)9 was also important.) Because of the democratic, constitutionalist character of the general strike, the Independents and the innumerable Social Democrats were able only, in the first few days, to attempt to moderate the aggressiveness of the workers, although without success in the first high points of the struggle. The situation developed as follows: locally, in each town, independently of the unions, there were formed proletarian units who, took up arms against the soldiers of the Reichswehr. The insurgent towns united their forces and marched against the towns still in the hands of the army, in order to give support to the local workers.
While one part of the ‘Red Amy' of the Ruhr, (as it was called), pushed the Reichswehr out of the Ruhr by forming a front parallel to Lippe, other workers' units took over, one by one, the towns of Remscheid, Essen, Dusseldorf, Mulheim, Duisburg, Hamborn and Dinkslaken, and pushed the Reichswehr back along the Rhine as far as Wesell in a short period between 18 and 21 March.
On the 20 March, the ADGB, after the failure of the putsch, declared the general strike to be over and on 22 March the SDP and the USPD did the same.
On 24 March, representatives of the Social Democratic government, the SDP, the USPD, and part of the KPD came to an agreement at Bielefeld; proclaimed a cease-fire, the disarming of the workers and freedom for workers who had committed ‘illegal' acts. A large part of the ‘Red Army' did not accept the agreement and carried on with the struggle.
On 30 March, the Social Democratic government and the Reichswehr issued an ultimatum to the workers: to either accept the agreement immediately, or else the Reichswehr (whose strength had at least quadrupled thanks to the arrival of the Freikorps from Bavaria, Berlin, Northern Germany and the Baltic) would begin a new offensive. Co-ordination between the various workers' units was from now on at a minimum because of the treachery of the Independents, the centrism of the KPD(S) and the syndicalists, and the rivalry between the three military centres of the ‘Red Army'. The Reichswehr and the numerous White troops opened a huge offensive on all fronts: on 4 April, Duisburg and Mulheim fell, followed by Dortmund on the 5th and Gelsenkirchen on the 6th.
A brutal White Terror then began; it took its victims not only from among the armed workers, but also from among their families who were massacred, and among the young workers who had helped the wounded fighters get away from the front.
The ‘Red Army' of the Ruhr was composed of between 80,000 and 120,000 workers; it managed to organize artillery and a small air-force. The development of the struggles had caused the formation of its three military centres:
Hagen: led by the USPD accepted the Bielefeld agreement without hesitation.
Essen: led by the KPD and the Left Independents was recognized as the Supreme Centre of the army of March 25th. When the Social Democratic government issued its ultimatum to the workers on 30 March, this centre took up the very ambiguous call for a return to the general strike (when the workers were already armed and fighting!).
Mulheim: led by the Left Communists and the revolutionary syndicalists followed completely the military ‘Centre' at Essen, but when the latter reacted in a centrist fashion to the Bielefeld agreement, the Mulheim Centre took up the slogan "struggle on till the end". The three leaderships of the USPD, KPD(S) and the FAUD(S) all took up the same ignoble position, and let it be known that they considered these struggles to be ‘adventurist'.
No national Zentrale took over the leadership of the struggles: the local proletarian movement displayed all its will towards centralization within the limits of its strength at the local level. Even in Central Germany the workers armed themselves and, under the leadership of the communist, M. Hoelz, a number of towns around Halle staged uprisings, but the movement was unable to go further, because the KPD(S), very strong at Chemnitz where it was the largest party, contented itself with arming the workers in agreement with the Social Democrats and the Independents, and with waiting for......... the return of Ebert to the Government.
Brandler, who led the workers' council of Chemnitz, saw his role as a local communist leader as consisting of preventing the outbreak of struggles between the Communists under Hoelz, who wanted to arm themselves with the numerous weapons abandoned by the Reichswehr in Chemnitz and in the surrounding area, and the Social Democrats who were always at the ready for an attack against the revolutionaries - making several attempts to launch the Heimwehr (armed White groups of the local bourgeoisie) against them.
The centrism of the KPD(S) was fully revealed by the fact that, while the workers were in struggle, the Levi Zentrale issued on 26 March the slogan of ‘loyal opposition' in case of a ‘workers' government' composed of the Social Democrats and the Independents. Die Rote Fahne, the central organ of the KPD(S) (number 32, 1920) wrote:
"We understand loyal opposition in the following way: no preparation for the armed seizure of power, full freedom for the Party's agitation for its goal and its solutions."
The KPD thus officially abdicated its revolutionary goals, making the need for a revolutionary communist party in the German proletariat more urgent than ever.
It was thus as a natural historic result that the Left Communists, faced with the treason of the official section of the IIIrd International, formed in the following month (April 1920) the KAPD, the Communist workers Party of Germany.
This long extract from The German Left and the Union Question in the Third International (a work through which an important part of the Bordiguist PCI (Parti Communiste Internationale) split in 1972) needs no comment.
In the course of these months, another important event occurred: the abandonment of the KPD(O) by the Bremerlinke and its return to the KPD(S) where it was to play an internal opposition role under Frolich and Karl Becker (we will see later the development of his position in the course of the following years and in particular in the Spring of 1921). We do not possess all the material to understand and to pass judgment on what was a very serious blow to Left Communism and a great success for the Levi leadership. What undoubtedly influenced the decision of the Bremen group was its feeling of loyalty to the CI (which gave its support to the KPD(S) while expressing strong reservations) and its clear opposition to the Hamburg group of Laufenberg and Wolffheim.
Up to now we have not spoken about the trade unions, councils, and ‘Workers' Associations' (Arbeiterunionen) which were central points of debate and of the divergences within the German movement. The complexity of the question forced us to deal with other problems before being able to approach the ‘union question' in the clearest possible way.This is what we shall attempt to do in our next text.
S.
1 Historians and historigraphy have used the term ‘linksradikalen' to describe groups like the Bremen and Hamburg groups, then subsequently the KAPD and the Unions (Workers' Associations). The term ‘ultralinke' was on the other hand used to describe the left opposition (Friesland-Fischer-Maslow) within the KPD in the years that followed.
2 There was even a subscription for this publication among the naval shipyard workers in Bremen.
3 All sorts of divergences existed on the interpretation of the Russian events between the Bremen Communists and the Spartakists. We will mention only the question of the use of ‘revolutionary terror'. For the Bremen group, Knief criticized Luxemburg's position of refusing to utilize class terror in the revolutionary struggle.
4 The Spartakists joined the USPD at Gotha.
5 At the Fourth Congress of the Communist International (November 1920), Radek took up this position again, saying that it was necessary to thank Social Democracy for having "done us the favour of overthrowing the Kaiser".
6 It should be remembered that at the First Congress of the Communist International the representative of the KPD was mandated to vote against the foundation of the International. It was only the insistence of and pressure exerted by delegates which led Eberlein to abstain instead.
7 The position of ‘National-Bolshevism' was taken up again without raising any scandal by the KPD in 1923. Brandler and Thalheimer made declarations such as:
"In so far as it is engaging in a defensive struggle against imperialism, the German bourgeoisie plays, in the situation which is created by this, an objectively revolutionary role - but as a reactionary class, it cannot have recourse to the only methods which would allow it to resolve the problem.
In these circumstances, the precondition for the victory of the proletariat is the struggle against the French bourgeoisie and its capacity to support the German bourgeoisie in this struggle, by taking over the organization and leadership of the defensive struggle sabotaged by the bourgeoisie."
And in Imprekor, June 1923, the reader would find the following statement:
"National-Bolshevism in 1920 could only have been an alliance to save the generals who immediately after their victory would have crushed the Communist Party. Today, it signifies the fact that everyone is convinced that the only solution lies with the communists. Today we are the only possible solution. The rigorous insistence on the national element in Germany is a revolutionary act just as it is in the colonies." (our emphasis)
8 Prior to 19 June it was called Freien Gewerkshaften.
9 Freie Arbeiter Union Deutschlands Syndicalist - an anarcho-syndicalist union organization founded on December 1919.
There
is a whole theory which, beginning from a national framework,
attempts to study modern Italy with reference to the imbalance, the
uneven development between the industrial north and the Mezzogiorno,
an area characterized by agricultural production based on a system of
great landed estates and tenure, a region which at the beginning of
the century produced an income less than a half of that of the
northern provinces. This is the thesis of that notable pupil of B.
Croce; that pro-interventionist of 1914; that revisionist who decreed
that October had invalidated the analysis of Marx; in other words, A.
Gramsci, now the darling of the ‘New Left'. Their hagiography
tries to present him as the most powerful and original marxist
thinker outside Russia.1
On this question, marxism is quite clear: if the southern land system, trapped in a semi-feudal straight jacket, constituted one of the main sources for emigration, while the reservoir of wealth in the alluvial plain of the Po was the object of particular care and attention on the part of capitalism this is fundamentally a result of conditions on the world market, and of the international division of labour which derives from it. To illustrate this we can say that the depopulation which resulted from emigration from the southern provinces corresponded to the world crisis and the agricultural depression at the end of the last century. The adoption of protectionism was one of the first acts of Italian capitalism, favouring the landowners of the plain of the Po and supplying the absentee proprietors with an assured income. The discovery of large numbers of sulphur beds in Louisiana led to the ruin of Sicily, which had for a long while been the sole producer of sulphur extracted from its sub-soil.2
Italian capitalism emerged at a time when the division of the world had already been practically completed. All that fell to this latecomer, deprived of a capitalist birthright, were the scraps which the major powers didn't want to be encumbered with - not because they were philanthropically inclined, but because they had to take into consideration a colonial budget which inevitably weighed heavily on the metropolitan centres of capital. But still Italy continued tirelessly to demand new sphere's of expansion in order to elevate herself/ to their level. In a conjunctural situation unfavourable to Italian imperialism were nurtured the seeds of nationalism which defined Italy as "the proletarian among nations". In this, Mao found his predecessors in the persons of Crispi, Corradini or Mussolini, another helmsman, who using the language of Dante, called himself ‘Duce'.
At a time of growing imperialist rivalry, Italy got down to building a war economy with the hope of using it for policies of territorial conquest. In this way Italy prepared for the conquest of a part of those zones rich in the main sources of raw materials so cruelly absent in the metropolitan economy itself. This also meant that the Italian workers, unlike their English, Belgian, French or Dutch class brothers, did not participate in any way in the sharing out of imperialist booty.
The development of certain industries, in particular metallurgical, chemical, aeronautical, and naval construction industries, progressed successfully enough to impress even, the most blase experts of the older imperialist bastions. The Italian war effort, which also led to an extension of the railway from 8,200 kilometres in 1881 to 17,038 in 1905, won the unanimous acclaim of all the engineers, financiers, scribes and politicians who visited the peninsula at that time.
Owing much of its development to the influx of French capital invested in massive quantities in the Italian economy after 1902, and to aid supplied by Swiss and German banks, Italy built powerful hydro-electric centres in the north of the country. This enabled the state to make up for the insignificant extraction of coal in the Aosta Valley and to electrify the railway lines, which in turn allowed for the transportation of cannon-fodder to the arena of military operations later on ... but in doing so, the state had to reckon with some formidable uprisings of soldiers and railwaymen's strikes, which were declared illegal. During the course of this brief period of economic recovery, the seat of political power passed out of the possession of the Sardinian and Genoan ship-owners and merchants - Commerce between Italy and the Ottoman Empire grew by 150% between 1896 and 1906 - into the hands of the industrialists of Lombardy and Piedmont.
The difficulty of finding unoccupied extra-capitalist territories thus led to the development of a vast war economy. In the first years of the century, military expenses continued to devour over a quarter of the budget. From May 1915 to October 1917, the monthly production of machine-guns rose from. 25 to 800, that of cannons from 80 to 500, that of shells from 10,000 to 85,000 per day. Although in May 1915, Italy had almost no trench-mortars, she was in possession of 2,400 on the eve of Caporetto. At the end of December 1914, Italy was able to line up one and half million men.
However, while Parliament was voting for orders of material from heavy industry and for defence credits, in the majority of industrial centres the mass of workers, either in blue-collars or in uniform, were taking to the streets to demand bread and work. Not one town escaped from being paralysed by the general strike; not one industrial centre escaped invasion by the mounting revolutionary wave. In Naples, the year 1914 began with a riot against rent increases; in March the cigar makers of state tobacco factories began a long strike which lasted two months. As brave as ever, the proletariat of Italy reacted with class violence to the murder of its fighters. On 7June, during the ‘Red Week', it seized control of Ancona where it immediately abolished taxation; it did not protest platonically against the disciplinary squads in the army by signing some kind of ‘Appeal of One Hundred', but by taking power for itself. In Bologna, in Ravenna, the ‘Red Republic' was proclaimed; the general strike spread to the whole peninsula,, irremediably dividing Italy into two camps. Salandra, called to power to mop up the colonial war in Libya, had to use 100,000 troops to restore order.
Let us pay.homage to the anarchist militants who gave their lives in this struggle, thus "rightly mocking the bourgeois pedants who calculated the cost of this civil war in dead, wounded and money". (Marx)
The struggle against the warMonarchical and democratic Italy had entered the war to reconquer the African countries lost after the total military disaster of Adowa against the Abyssinian armies in March 1896. She tried to establish her rights over Libya, rights which had been encroached upon by a series of Franco-English treaties, and also to gain sole possessions in the Red Sea area. The outbreak of World War I - fought to divide the world between the imperialist powers, - and not as a struggle for ‘liberty' as the social democratic lie would have it -appeared to the Italian ruling class as a means to annex for itself the irredentist regions under Austrian control: Trentino, the outlet of Trieste, Istia and Dalmatia - and, under French administration, Corsica and Tunisia. More than a million Italian-speaking residents were to re-discover the hospitality of the mother country.
The workers and peasants of Italy were only spared for one year the desolation and suffering of this conflagration, which Italy had to enter in order to avoid being forever relegated to second rank, a fate she had been trying to escape since her formation as a nation. The late entry of Italy into the world war expressed not only the difficulties the bourgeoisie found in getting the workers and peasants to swallow the interventionist bait, but also its own hesitation in choosing between the offers made by Austro-Germany and those made by the Allies, That is why Rome's diplomacy consisted of playing a double game of parallel underhand deals. To the Austrians, Italy laid claim not only to Trentino but also to the right to extend her frontiers to the western shores of the Isonzo, the power to take over Trieste and Carso, the Curzola islands at the centre of the Dalmatian coast, and finally, the establishment of Italian preponderance over Albania. The Entente was to be more generous: on entering the war on their side after a delay of one month, Italy was to receive the Upper Adige, Trentino, the Julian Alps, Trieste and Albania, plus assurances about the Turkish zone of Adalia, (Antalya) and the confirmation of her ccupation of the Dodecanese. England also consented to give Italy a loan of 50 million pounds (1.25 billion lira).
Thus Italy sold herself to the highest bidder - it was irrelevant whether this happened to be the Entente or Germany to which Italy had maintained links since 1882. As the game got serious, the Germans sent the Reichstag Social Democratic Deputy, Sudekum, - according to Lenin a social chauvinist entirely devoid of scruples - to persuade Italy to respect her political and economic commitments to the signatories of the Triple Alliance. For its part the French government gave the Socialist Deputy, Cochin, the job of buying through the good offices of Mussolini, Italy's military cooperation. .But Austria found Italy's demands excessive and hence unacceptable, which only illustrates that the Central Empires saw Italy as being only ‘relatively valuable'. Austria refused to cede any of the Habsburg territories, refused to allow Italy to occupy them, or to extend them beyond the southern part of Trentino. Thus, on 26 April 1915, Sonnino, signed the Pact of London, and 4 May, Italy denounced the Triple Alliance.
The trip made by Cachin and Jouhaux to ensure Italy's entrance into the fray was to prove profitable to French imperialism. French money was added to the subsidies which the pro-interventionist industrialists of FIAT, ANSALDO, and EDISON doled out to the newspaper, Popolo d'Italia. In the columns of this publication, Mussolini exalted "the war of liberation", which "must above all efface the ignoble myth that Italians do not fight; it must wipe out the shame of Lissa and Custozza, it must show the world that Italy is capable able of waging a war, a great war. We say it again, a great war." (Popolo d' Italia, 14 January 1915)3
Those who, in the interests of the bourgeoisie, wrote about the scenes of enthusiasm, ‘the glorious May days' among the Italian masses, were lying. At the same time such scribblers obscured the role of Social Democracy in a war fought for the economic and political domination of spheres of• investment for finance capital. In reality, there was no working class marching willingly to the slaughter with flowers in their rifles and the national anthem on their lips. Neither the proletarians nor the peasants, to whom the war had been sold as their own private affair, believed in the patriotic harangues directed at them by the offices of the state, or in the promises of a better future once the enemy had been vanquished.
At first contact with the rather less glorious realities of the war, defeatist sentiments revived, and young socialists and anarchists became devoted, body and soul, to the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil war. The only difference between the two was that the former knew that such a transformation was conditioned by the fact that capitalism had arrived at the final phase of its contradictions as a system of production, while the latter thought that they could accomplish this task by the strength of their will alone. But both of them carried out the elementary duties of socialism during the war - propaganda for the class struggle.
The years of hostilities were characterized by a ground-swell made up of strikes against the disastrous consequences of the war economy, of demonstrations of soldiers in garrison towns, and of uprisings of agricultural workers. Throughout the duration of the imperialist conflict, there was a ceaseless outbreak of serious social disturbances. The workers demanded an immediate peace and general demobilization so that they could go home. The army hesitated, and the soldiers deserted their posts in thousands. Towards the end of October 1917 the dawn of the civil war rose over the carnage of the Isonzo; the front disintegrated in a battle zone of prime importance, The conclusive display of lack of ardour for the war on the part of the Italian soldiers was the collapse of the front at Caporetto. In successive waves, 350,000 men threw down their arms and backpacks, abandoning the battlefield in the face of the Austro-German advance, whose front line was making use of poison gas. The Italian reservists sent to stop the offensive and arrest deserters refused, in turn, to hold the line.
This defeat for the reactionary Italian bourgeoisie opened up wide perspectives for the eventual progress of the revolution. The Caporetto debacle shook the whole Italian governmental machine: the road to revolution had definitely been cleared. From the murdered breasts of hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the charnel-houses of Galicia, through rivers of blood to the trenches of the Isonzo, the cry of revolutionary defeatism was at last triumphant. Thousands of miles away, revolutionary workers, soldiers and sailors were seizing control of the Winter palace in Petrograd.
The break-down of the Italian army, the total disorder undergone by the organs of the state, opened up a profound political crisis, from which there could be no recovery. Italian dependence on the Entente grew more acute as Generalissimo Foch and the Supreme English General, Robertson, imposed profound changes on the Italian High Command.
After the disintegration of the Second Army, which left the enemy one day's march from Venice, the bourgeoisie combined exaltation of patriotic zeal win the King's solemn appeals to all men of law and order. At all costs the bourgeoisie had to form a united front against ‘Bolshevik subversion', because they understood that if the war machine stopped, "the mass of workers in the arms factories would be unemployed: hunger and cold would make them unite with the masses deserting from the army. There would be a revolt, then the revolution."4 For the central trade union, the Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, Rigola declared, "When the enemy is trampling on our soil, we have but one duty - to resist!" They were indeed the allies of the whole bourgeois bloc and the bookkeepers of imperialism.
Up and down the peninsula, government propagandists poured out revengeful discourses in an attempt to stir up vindictiveness against the ‘Caporettist Poison', to revive the morale of the population, and to stimulate the sectional consciousness of the working class. The patriotic slogan, "Resist, Resist, Resist" cost the state more than 6 billion lira to disseminate. How to swell the morale of an army which was demonstrating its refusal to be butchered? Simple: reorganize the army with a pinch of democratization, regular leave and higher pay. Nitti, the Finance Minister at that time, set up the National Society of Servicemen with the aim of facilitating the acquisition of land by the peasants after their demobilization.
The internationalist militants convicted of high treason were subjected to ferocious reprisals, dragged in front of court-martials.-and sent to the front line. They had not just hoped for the defeat of their government, but had also prepared themselves for the new tasks of the hour: the reconstruction of an International. At that time the anarchists with Malatesta at their head knew that war was permanently gestating in the capitalist social organism; that it was the consequence of a regime based on the exploitation of labour power, that all wars from that point on would only be imperialist wars. And so both socialists and libertarians had to taste the chastisements of democracy. While they were being hunted down and martyred, several deputies of the Socialist Party had already begun to participate in the work of certain parliamentary commissions, making great strides towards their complete fusion with the kingdom, which they hoped to see climb to the highest rungs of the imperialist ladder.
Gorter quite rightly expressed the idea that the bourgeoisie, thanks to its own decomposition, was able to identify similar putrefaction, and could immediately grasp the profound corruption of Social Democracy. From the beginning of hostilities, the Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party), had, above all else, tried to avoid anything which might turn Italy away from neutrality. If necessary, they were prepared to use the general strike to ensure it! The Italian socialists' love of neutrality led them to meet the Swiss socialist delegation at Lugano in October 1914. That particular mountain gave birth to a mouse: a message of peace and concord was launched to the world; attempts were made to renew contacts with the neutralist minorities of the Socialist Parties; a fraternal caution (sic) was addressed to the comrades in the countries at war, to encourage the struggle for an armistice; it was decided to apply pressure to the belligerent governments to make them act peaceably. The whole of Italian maximalism, which held in its hands the destiny of the PSI was there. The neutralist position adopted by the PSI (which could not have been more ambiguous) it should be remembered, was shared by the industrial and commercial milieu led by Giolitti and the Vatican, as protector of the Austrian Catholic Empire.
The tactic of the PSI consisted solely in holding back the class struggle throughout the duration of the war under the cover of the hypocritical slogan, "Neither sabotage nor participation!", which in fact meant trampling upon the most fundamental principles of international class struggle. Just like the socialists of neutrality, Benedict XV issued his famous circular inviting the Powers to negotiate an honourable peace without annexations or indemnities. In a word, understanding with a justified fear that the war would give rise to the proletarian revolution, the PSI in its ambiguous struggle against the war was, quite simply, struggling against the revolution.
In spite of its efforts build the Sacred Union, the Italian bourgeoisie had not managed to smother the class struggle. During the summer of 1917, in the second year of total war, Turin was covered with barricades. On 21 August, because of the lack bread and provisions, (although the prefect had decided to distribute flour to the bakers), the workers of several factories stopped work to form a procession to the Labour Ministry; but they came up against the forces of order who had arms at the ready. From this moment on, pushed on by its own dynamic, the strike demonstrated that it was not just a ferment for the amelioration of living conditions. It quickly transformed itself into a frontal struggle, since, after fraternizing with the soldiers of the Alpine regiment, the poorly armed workers fought for five days against crack troops, withstanding machine gun batteries and tanks. So great was the Turin uprising that-calm - and a precarious one at that - was not restored until after a wave of repression which left fifty dead and 200 wounded.
Towards the end of 1916 in order to prevent the outbreak of wildcat strikes at a moment when war production had to function at its full output, the bourgeoisie had instituted Committees of Industrial Mobilization. Without any hesitation, the unions had agreed to collaborate in the construction of this state capitalist bulwark; municipalities with a ‘red' reputation, notably Bologna, Reggio D'Emilia, and Milan, undertook to humanize the war, and in a fine display of charity began to dress the wounds of war: aid and supplies were given to the families of soldiers, etc. The Internal Commissions, composed exclusively of workers under the supervision of their union branch, had the task of defusing tension on the shop floor. They became permanent institutions which, among other things, were granted the right to deal with problems of no less importance than those concerning the relationship between wages and output or the firing of workers. It was these openly collaborationist structures, set up in every factory after February 1919, which the Ordinorists (the milieu around Gramsci's New Order review), were to regard as a basis for ‘revolutionary praxis', the ‘embryonic soviets' of the proletarian dictatorship, the means par excellence of the autonomous organization of the class at the point of production. As for the class, it had to fight and fight again this organ far the self-regulation of capital.
The majority socialists were not alone in following the nationalist policies of their bourgeoisie. The Sorelians and anarcho-syndicalists (or at least an important contingent) did the same; the militants (once so combative) who rallied round their bourgeoisie, could no longer be counted on. Didn't the veteran, A. Cipriani, declare that if it weren't for his seventy-five years, he would be in the trenches of ‘democracy' fighting ‘German militarist reaction'? It was the same scenario as that surrounding the capitulation of Social Democracy at the moment of its great historical test, the outbreak of the war; but repeated almost simultaneously on the other side of the Alps. Such a general collapse of the International led its defenders to say to Rosa Luxemburg that Social Democracy had put itself at the service of the bourgeoisie because from 4 August 1914 to the signing of the peace, "the class struggle could only profit the enemy". In Italy as well, these organizations were to ask the workers to refrain free striking, to put off the class struggle so as not to undermine the strength of the democratic state and in so doing compromise the chances for a quick peace. While such deceitful propositions were being made, the profits of Italian heavy industry were growing like mushrooms after the rain and the piles of corpses were forming mountains. Meanwhile, anarchist and Sorelian groups were raising the fasci for "the European Revolution against barbarism, against German militarism and treacherous Roman Catholic Austria".
Example after example could be given. The rallying of whole sections of Social Democracy around the bourgeoisie at the outbreak of war, and the ultra-chauvinist attitude of these organizations was a worldwide phenomenon with its roots found in the definite change in the period of capitalism and not, as the subjective explanation would have it, in the personal treachery of the leadership. Decades of development undergone by the PSI had not left the original programme undamaged. On a material level that organization had become all-powerful, with its control of 223 of 280.cmmunes in Emilia, its hundreds of trade unions, peasant leagues, co-operatives and labour exchanges. But this ‘earthly' power was to act as a dead weight on the proletariat: the extremely important historical mission of reformism had come to an end.
Obviously, the passing of Italian Social Democracy into the bourgeois camp did not suddenly happen from one day to the next. Already in 1912, when as a counter-part for abandoning designs on Morocco and Egypt, Italian imperialism was authorized by the Anglo-French to set its sights on Tripoli and prepare the conquest of the Dodocanese and of Rhodes, the Party, then twelve years old had been split over the colonial question. Considering that the establishment of 2 million Italians from the mainland in the desert zones of Tripoli and Cyrenaiea would provide an exceptional opportunity to release an important number of the unemployed, and also to regain hold of this ancient colony of Rome, the Socialist Deputies, Bissolati, Proceda and Bonomi - whom we shall meet again later on - declared themselves to be convinced partisans of Italian expansionism. In the Near East, the Balkans, and the Seychelles, Italy had to take charge of the relief of that ‘Sick Man of Europe' - Ottoman Turkey. This splendid bunch of politicians proclaimed from the heights of the parliamentary tribune and from the platforms of public meetings that the socialists could not simply abandon the monopoly on patriotism to the enemies of the Right, And with all the irony of history it was the future ‘Duce' who forced the expulsion from the Party of the war-mongering elements, the Freemasons, as "class enemies" for their immoderate attachment to the cause of reformist democracy and their sympathy for class collaboration.
Thus the Party had to amputate these gangrenous limbs and set up a new leadership capable of defending class positions on the colonial question. Against the partisans of colonial conquest, the Left insisted, "Not a man, not a penny, for the African adventures!". Alas, the expansionist tendencies within the workers' movement had deeper roots than could be appreciated by those who had brandished the hot knife in the hope of a quick recovery. When in July 1900 at Monza, the anarchist worker, Bresci, arose gun in hand to revenge the proletarian fighters of Milan of 1898, the socialist journals appeared with the usual ostentatious signs of mourning. But the socialists were weeping for Umberto Ist, the butcher king. Thus we could say that during World War I, the Italian Party signed a new truce with the House of Savoy, and by tacit agreement placed its cause, to put it bluntly, in the lap of the state. Thus, instead of calling for class struggle against militarism, for international solidarity, it maintained that in the wake of the necessary sacrifices imposed by the national cause, a long period of capitalist prosperity would open up allowing for an accompanying retinue of social reforms to be instituted. All that was required was a government based on the popular will the masses in order to leave all the vulgar tumult in the streets well behind, and proceed towards vast, very vast reforms.
More than ever before the state would subsidize insurance funds for industrial accidents, regulate conditions of employment for women and children, extend the weekly day rest to new strata of the working class, facilitate the participation of wage-earners in the profits of their enterprises. In this way, the measures of social legislation taken during 1905-1906, at the time of a brief economic stability in Italy, would be fortified and enlarged. The kingpin of the industrial and commercial bourgeoisie, Giolitti, lent his support to the soporific speeches of the Parliamentary Socialists, and affirmed the necessity to move "to the left, always further to the left".
However, at the end of the war, the Italian social situation hardly measured up to the idyllic picture painted by the bourgeoisie and its Social Democratic lackeys.
A Catastrophic SituationThe ending of hostilities on 4 November 1918 did not confer great new conquests on the imperialist powers. Once the war had finished, the Entente showed itself to be very stingy in doling out the compensations it had promised. Taking maximum advantage of the imprecision of Article 13 of the Fact of London, France refused to cede the whole of Dalmatia to Italy, preferring instead that Fiume, following the example of Danzig, be made a ‘free city' under the tutelage of the League of Nations. Moreover, England and France authorized the Greek troops of Venizelos to occupy Smyrna instead of the Italians and the possibility of Italy obtaining a mandate over ex-German Togoland was completely ruled out. Despite the acquisition of new frontiers to the north and east, the conquest of the Adriatic side of Istria and the port of Zadar along with a narrow hinterland around the town, plus a few small islands, the protectorate over Albania and Italian sovereignty over the Dodocanese, none of this solved the problem of outlets for the Italian economy.
The disappearance of her powerful Austrian rival - which had to cede to Italy practically the whole of its merchant fleet - and her replacement by a handful of buffer states, did not spare Italy from having to face up to the greatest historic crisis since the attainment of national unity.
For big capital, heavy industry had constituted an ever-growing sphere of accumulation: not only could Italy guarantee its production of weapons and projectiles, but also exported vehicles and aeroplanes to her allies. On the way it had encountered the ‘pacifist' hostility of the traditional industries which had preceded it in the genesis of Italian capitalism. It had to reconvert to peace time production when the hour of reconciliation dawned, when commercial competition replaced the open brutality of war. The solution which presented itself to the magnates of trusts, such as ANSALDO, BREDA, MONTECATINI, etc. was to pack up and go elsewhere, because it had become too difficult to valorize the enormous amounts of capital invested to the point of hypertrophy in the industries of ‘national defence'. The production of cast iron fell from 471,188 tons in 1917 to 61,381 in 1921 and during the same period steel production fell from 1,333,641 tons to 700,433. FIAT which had assembled 14,835 vehicles in 1920, only put together 10,321 one year later. In addition, the trade deficit increased by nearly 5% in relation to 1914; America reduced immigration from 800,000 in 1913 to less than 300,000 in 1921-1922; England cut its coal exports by one third.
As the vice of the crisis began to tighten visibly, the new government presided over by Nitti arose; its task was, above all else, to rebuild the ruins of war. The whole of Italian foreign trade had to be rebegun - a job beyond the real capacities of the country, since at that point the public debt had run to some 63 billion lira, two thirds of which was derived from war costs.
Through fiscal pressures, the creation of extra taxes and above all through wage-gouging, the state had made the labouring classes bear the weight of the war; the Italian taxation apparatus had become one of the most onerous in the world. Nitti's cabinet, which combined the same policies, took the following fiscal measures on 24 November 1919:
- an 18% tax on capital revenues
- a 15% tax on mixed capital and labour revenues
- taxes on wages staggered frem 9-12%
At the same time, he introduced new taxes aimed at curbing consumption. What made the situation worse for Italian capital was its lack of raw materials, and fuel. The rhythm of production broke down, the number of unemployed grew; the possibilities of emigration, through which 900,000 workers and peasants had been siphoned off in 1913, began to evaporate. The Italian bourgeoisie was unable to readapt the national economy to the new needs of the world market because their rivals were in a better position to impose rule over it. The public debt grew by one thousand million lira every month; as Nitti wrote in a letter to his electors in October 1919, it was one of the seven plagues of the country. Italy owed 14.5 thousand million lira to her allies.
The ‘mutilated victory' made it impossible to implement the policies of national reconciliation which the social-patriot Cachin had carried out with the subsidies of the French government. At the beginning of 1920, 320 people died in the aftermath of the strikes.
The struggle preceding the occupationIt is not really possible to understand the mass strikes which swept over Italy without locating them within the framework of the general crisis of capitalism which began in 1914, and also within the proletarian eruption which was the response to this crisis throughout most of Europe. Like their counter-parts in Russia, the upheavals in Italy were simply a moment in the world revolution which was born out of the misery and unspeakable horrors spawned by militarism. Hungry, bloodstained Italian workers rose up like a volcano for bread and for the chance to go home. Since 1913, their real wages had fallen by 27% and the war had cost the proletariat 651,000 dead and 500,000 mutilated.
First in Romany then in Luguria, in Tuscany and down to the toe of the Italian boot, the starving masses began to attack the food shops. At this point the trade unions clearly played out their role as the guard dogs of the system. Seized by panic, the shopkeepers, who had been hoping to be able raise prices by hoarding goods, entrusted the keys of their sacrosanct boutiques to the trade union bosses. In return, the latter assured them of a protection which the state was unable to provide, since at that moment it did not have at its disposal sufficient forces to intervene wherever the safeguarding of private property demanded it. The strikes became so powerful that the state was forced to import grain and to impose ‘political bread prices' supported by subsidies which cost it six thousand million a year. When in June 1920, Nitti's third ministry decided to get rid of these price restraints it immediately provoked so much trouble that he was forced to offer his resignation. The fear of a revolutionary upheaval was well-grounded that Parliament rejected proposals to increase the price of bread again and again. The bourgeoisie had to wait for the reflux of the revolutionary tide in 1921 before it could go on the offensive, and then it was the neutralist, the man of the ‘left', Giolotti, who tackled the job of getting rid of price restraints on bread.
In the countryside, occupations of landed estates began. These were essentially movements of demobilized soldiers, who had finally lost confidence in the state's promise to divide up the land.
In Italy, all the propositions about the agrarian question put forward by the reformers of the liberal era or by certain enlightened elements in the Catholic Church were really just frauds. The idea of creating agricultural associations to gather together all the little parcels of land into one communal co-operative -enterprise had sprung up among the philanthropists of the post-Risorgimento period. There had been a great deal of enthusiasm for this proposition, which aimed to tie the future of the peasants to a system of common cultivation, in which harvests would be shared out in proportion to the contribution of each peasant in land, cattle, and materials. The small farmers who suffered the most under the regime of landed property, put their hopes in the free associations pro posed in its turn by the Social Democracy.
In this way the cooperative associations got underway amid general enthusiasm, whether from the farmers who saw in them a remedy to their material poverty or from the socialists who saw them as transitional forms of production which had the potential of progressively leading towards the realization of socialism. They ought to have thought again when they saw the state itself setting up rural communes, and the Catholic clergy organizing agricultural co-operation in regional dioceses. But already the minimum programme of reforms to be obtained within capitalism had played out its role. By its own practice, limited to the particular national conditions of Italy, by its very manner of operating, Social Democracy became more and more the representative of capitalism. The solution to the agrarian problem was no longer seen to lie in the socialization of the land, ("the land belonging to no one, the fruits will go to everyone" (Babeuf)), but in the liberation of the sharecropper bent double working the parcel of land to which he dedicated all his energies. It could thus be resolved, according to Social Democracy, without the proletariat having triumphed in its historic struggle to organize the satisfaction of human needs on a basis free of commodity relations; there was for them, no need for the land and the instruments of labour to pass into the hands of society as a whole.
Under intensive cultivation, the plain of the Po yielded an output of grain of between 15 and 19 hundredweight per hectar of land, and sometimes even 27 to 30 hundredweight. Here the Socialist Party had organized the day-labourers into agricultural co-operatives. The watchword of the managers of these enterprises had been - increased productivity, in order to compete with the co-operatives of the Catholic Popular Party. In Bologna, Ravenna, and Reggio d' Emilia, where the co-operative movement began, the trade unions controlled the whole economic life of their provinces and - a great victory for the workers, this - decided the prices of the produce which they distributed through the medium of the co-operatives. In this fashion, the Italian working class was supposed to be able to peacefully expropriate the bourgeoisie by persuading it that its power was of no further use. This at least was the tactic of the Socialist leaders, who were proud of their ability to administer the concrete proof of the fact that their programme was no idle dream.
Referring to Owen and the Rochdale pioneers, Lenin said this about the co-operativa ideal: "They dreamed of realizing the socialist democratic control of the world without taking into account a vital factor: the class struggle, the conquest of political power by the working class, the overthrow of the rule of the exploiters". This was exactly the case with the Italian leaders who proposed to move towards new social relations by making them immediately practicable.
Co-operatives could not solve anything because socialism cannot dig itself in amid the relations of production of the old society and so become a new economic force. Throughout the whole territory of Italy, where competition made itself felt very keenly especially in grain and maize production, the agrarian struggle grew very intense. But as this hopeless struggle could not hold back the decline of the small producer and also met with violent state repression, the only way out was through emigration to the American metropolis and the coffee-producing regions of Brazil.
The preparations of the bourgeoisie for civil warHardly three months had passed since the formation of Parliament (16 November, 1919) when the Nitti ministry, which had in another connection launched the slogan "Produce more, consume less!", decided to set up an auxiliary police force, the Royal Guard. This new armed detachment, tens of thousands strong, was to be equipped from head to foot in order to uphold bourgeois ‘order' which was itself becoming more and more shaky, Even before fascism let loose the brown terror, hundreds of workers were to fall beneath the bullets of the Royal Guard. Needless to say, this ‘democratic' reinforcement of the state apparatus gave a great deal of satisfaction to the bourgeoisie. On 20 April, troops fired on strikers at Decima, leaving nine workers dead in the streets; the commemoration of the 1st of May was marked by fifteen death; on 26 June, there were five killed in an uprising at Ancona directed against the deployment of Italian troops to occupy Albania. Under the leadership of the anarchists, the revolt extended to the Marches and Romany. In Mantua, workers and soldiers invaded the railway station, tore up the rails to block the trains of the Royal Guard and also those carrying arms and munitions for the war against the Soviets, manhandled all the officers and attacked the prison which they burned down after liberating the inmates. In one year, from April 1919 to April 1920 the machine guns of ‘democracy' made mincemeat of 145 workers and wounded another 444 in all regions of Italy. But each time the dead were strewn on to the streets, the workers continued the struggle by proclaiming the general strike: among postal workers, railway workers, in Milan. All of which, were doubly disavowed by the PSI and the CGIL, whose representatives, elected by universal suffrage, were more occupied in leaving the inaugural sitting of the new Parliament shouting "Long live the Republic!". In the Puglia region, the agricultural day-labourers fought to obtain payment for time they had worked; there were six dead on the side of the day-labeurers and three among the land owners.
The fall of the Hohenzollern, the consecutive collapse of the Austro-German Empire, the world revolution flaring up in eastern and Central, Europe, added to the ferment of a more and more feverish Italy. Not only did the Italian proletariat concretize its solidarity with the Russian and Hungarian Soviets through the general strike; it was the only working class to sabotage in its own country the armed intervention of the Allied powers in favour of Kolchak.
The more the movement of proletarian struggle developed, the more the ruling class felt the need to arm itself. In March 1920, the industrialists regrouped themselves into a General Confederation of Industry and signed in Milan an agreement wherein each contracting party would commit all its forces to the liquidation of ‘Italian Bolshevism' and in. particular the militants who had kept to the one and only class position during the imperialist war: revolutionary defeatism. Not without reason, the defenders of ‘order' saw in them the kernel of the revolutionary party which was calling the proletariat to struggle against His Majesty's Government, to regroup under the banner of the civil war for the overthrow of the bourgeois democratic dictatorship. On 18 August, the General Confederation of Agriculture was set up on the same model, attracting to its programme all forms of large, middle, and small-scale agricultural exploitation, all those interested in putting an end to the occupations of the land. All of them wanted the heads of the ‘Caporettists', the ‘reds', who were seen to be paid agents of the enemy. Every means of preventing communst propaganda from getting on the road was to be used shamelessly. We will see the role of these organizations in the coming to power of fascism later on.
The factory occupationsIn August 1920, the harbinger of what was to become the movement of factory occupations was obstructionism. This was generally applied in response to any lock-out by the bosses, as a consistent tactic which, according to the strategy of the Federazione Italiana Operai Metacheccanici was to replace the strike which had been used to the point of obsolescence. One of the favourite propaganda arguments of the delegates was to say that the crisis was much less serious than the bosses pretended. Since the national economy could withstand an increase in wages - because commodities had an outlet in the reconstituted market.- the workers had to force open the gates of the factories in order to keep production going. Not less than 280 metallurgical enterprises in Milan were occupied and put under workers' management, which gave the trade unionists the hope that the Socialists would soon be participating in government.
In this situation, the trade unionists were the most adept propagandists for the ‘gradualist economy'. According this idea, the workers would prove through their own sense of responsibility that they scrupulously respected the now ‘communal' property, that out of proletarian discipline they would agree to tighten their belts and get down to work. In order to be able to produce more cheaply -than under the employers' control, the working class had to arm itself with technical and administrative know-how, thus replacing the technicians who had left their workplaces on the orders of the old administration. In a certain way, the working class was called to govern a state which had to closely reflect the real economic structure of the country.
Immediately the Left began to struggle against this ideology of self-management, which instead of posing the problem at a central political level was imprisoning and emasculating the movement within each separate factory:
"We want to prevent the absorption by the working class of the idea that it is enough to develop the Councils solely to take hold of the factories and eliminate the capitalists. This would be an extremely dangerous illusion .... If the conquest political power has not taken place, the Royal Guard and the carabinieri will see to the dissipation of all such illusions, with all the mechanisms of oppression, all the forces which the bourgeoisie wields through its apparatus of political power." (A. Bordiga)
This vigorous and prophetic warning against the illusions of self-management came up against the propaganda of Ordino Nuovo which put all its emphasis on workers' control and on the technological education of the proletariat as a means of allowing the proletariat to manage the factories. In the factory the worker could attain a communist conception of the world, and from there go on to overthrow the bourgeois economic-political system and replace it with the Workers' Councils state. The Council system was superior to the trade union and party form because it made every worker in the enterprise, from the technician to the lowest underling, an ... elector to the Workers' Commissions (Report to the Executive Committee of the Communist International, July 1920); and what is more, this elector expressed himself not through a show of hands but through the petit-bourgeois form of the secret ballot. Faced with the grandeur of their task, ought not the workers suppress their egoistic impulses and accept new productive innovations, since these could serve to augment their productive capacity, and thus their importance to the nation? The workers had to stop blundering about as they had been doing for the last few years. Now they could achieve something tangible, now they had to run the factories under the broadest workers' democracy uniting all from the reformists to the anarchists. There really was no break in continuity when, shortly afterwards this group as the standard-bearer of the Stalinist counter-revolution was called upon to apply the measures of Bolshevization within the young Communist Party.
Once again the Left had to reaffirm its total opposition to these educational exercises so dear to the old parties of the Second International as well as to the young Ordino Nuovo; as for the PSI, it was busy advertising a ‘menage a trois' through its flag which simultaneously displayed the hammer, the sickle, and the book. It was also firmly set on parliamentarism since in the middle of a revolutionary explosion, the Socialist Party decided to participate in Parliamentary elections and advised the workers to participate in them en masse (16 November, 1919), convinced that the recently adopted method of proportional representation would ensure it a comfortable majority. And indeed with 1,840,000 votes behind them the Socialists gained 156 representatives in Parliament, and a few months later won 2,800 communes. Lenin was well pleased with the ‘excellent work' this represented in relation to the international situation, hoping that it would also serve as an example to the German Communists (letter to Serrati, 29 November, 1919). The Communist International saluted the result as a great success. What did the socialist mayors and deputies do to justify all this acclaim? They did what they had been doing before the war they set about the construction of public works, the constitution of trade unions and co-operatives - in short, they administered the affairs of the city. Thus Italy was to complete the national revolution left unfinished by the Risorgimento, but under the guiding hand of the Socialists. They wanted to have their cake and eat it - the Constituent Assembly and the Soviets, the dictatorship of the proletariat and the electoral struggle. As the Left said - at the hour of decision, the bourgeoisie was defending itself from the proletarian revolution by playing the card of democracy.
The very first factory occupation took place under the banner of the Italian tricolour. It happened in .the small town of Dalmine, at the initiative of a fascist-controlled union, the Italian Association of Labour, with the warm encouragement of Popolo d'Italia which wrote:
"The Dalmine experience has a very great value: it shows that the proletariat has the ability to directly manage the factory."
On reading these lines, followed by others no less revealing, political parties, trade unions, and leftists made use of similar phrases as those of their friendly enemy to salute workers' management. Mussolini visited the locality in person to encourage with his voice and gestures the workers' resistance to the ‘employers' abuses'. The workers at Gregorini-Franchi had continued for three days to ensure the proper functioning in all departments of the enterprise, as a response to the management's refusal to concede the five day week. For Mussolini, the working class was worthy of succeeding the bourgeoisie in the management of production since it had abandoned the traditional strike, which was so bad for the nation.
One year later, this first occupation was followed by more of a series of ephemeral attempts at workers' management: at Sestri-Ponente on the outskirts of Genoa on 18 February 1920; at the ANSALDO Shipyards in Viareggio the next day; at Ponte Canavese and Torre Pellice on 28 February; in the wood-processing factories of Asti on 2 March; in the Miani-Sivestri mechanics workshops in Naples on 24 March; in the Spadaccini enterprises in Sesto m 4 June; at the ILVA iron and steel trust in Naples, 10 June.
These regularly repeated occupation-strikes, brought with them an organizational form, the Workers' Council, which united the majority of the workers, independently of their political convictions, in the struggle against capitalism. However, because this movement never found enough strength to go beyond the confines of control of isolated factories towards a confrontation with the state, because its protagonists became intoxicated with ephemeral and artificial evidences of the immediacy of its success, it decayed on the spot. That is why the bourgeoisie was able to get its property back without firing a single shot. To get rid of the occupiers it used the FIOM which on several occasions had declared that its objective was simply workers' control over production, that it had no intention of going any further, that it would evacuate the factories once this right had been recognized by Parliament. The directors of the Banca Commerciale assured the FIOM of its benevolent neutrality; the prefect of Milan offered to smooth relations between industrialists and trade unionists; Mussolini visited the secretary of the FIOM, Buozzi, to tell him that the occupations had the full support of the fascists; the director of Corriere della Sera rushed to ‘comrade' Turatti to advise the Socialists to enter the government; the president of FIAT and AGNELLI expressed the desire to give the trade unions a greater role to play.
However, the numerous examples of feverish preparations in the use of arms, of the setting up of combat groups, shows that the most conscious fraction of the class had decided, not to go on running the factories as the CGIL was advising, but to fight with guns in their hands. At FIAT, Turin, the leaders stood in the way of the groups who had transformed lorries into armoured cars equipped with machine guns for a sortie into the town. Once the arms introduced into or built in the factories were discovered and seized by the police, the FIOM had a free hand to sign "its greatest concordat", the recognition of the Workers' Commissions. In the end, the time came to negotiate the defeat of the workers with the Confindustria. The CGIL accepted the reduction of working time for all categories of workers and employees. This was still presented as a great victory against ‘egoism', since poverty is nothing if it is shared out fairly among its victims, as a sign of solidarity among the workers! The result of the compromise was that all the workers found their wages considerably reduced.
Now that the fruit was ripe, the bourgeoisie was able to intervene with complete confidence. Instead of making the mistake of using open repression - which the Confindustria and the Confragricultura wanted - Giolitti acted as a man who knows what he is doing, as an adroit defender of the long term interests of capitalism. There were two choices in front of him: either to use the forces of repression to crack the whip over the metallurgical workers of Fiedmont, the typographical workers of Rome, the sailors and dockers of Trieste, up to and including the rather less stubborn schoolteachers - or to wait for hunger to take its toll. And Giolitti kept his cool: ho counted on this, and on the work of the unions in undermining the struggle. Taking full advantage of his experience in the face of previous social disturbances, his tactic once again was to allow the movement to develop and then to recede on its own. Who could say that he would have had so much success if he'd had recourse t systematic repression?
The political balance sheetThe Factory Committees proved that the proletariat could neither assert itself on the economic terrain nor lay claim to society as a whole by beginning from the occupation of the factories, even though this might make some changes in property and administrative forms. The expropriation of the capitalists will only be accomplished by a proletarian revolution. Thus the proletariat must therefore constitute itself into a political party, not within the bourgeois horizon of the nation, but internationally. From the very beginning of its revolutionary activity, it must work towards the formation of the World Party, whose essential character is not measured by economic accomplishments, but by the proletariat's armed destruction of the state*. When the problem is posed in this way, we are in a position to understand why the Paris Commune - which, due to the undeveloped level of the productive forces in capitalism's ascendancy, was able to decree very little in the way of social change - was a genuine proletarian revolution, 'the first in history.
Only the Left, which had begun its work as a fraction in the struggle against frontism (the policy of Socialists giving support to the Italian bourgeoisie), orientated itself towards the denunciation of the cult of electoralism - only the Left emerged from all this confusion with its head held high. Again and again it incited the Italian proletariat as a whole to go beyond the old leaders who were completely imbued with their dangerous methods of collaboration. Alone and against all the rest, it called upon the most conscious and combative elements of the proletariat to break out of the prison of the factory gates, to constitute themselves into a class-party, since it was precisely by paralyzing itself on the fragmented terrain of the isolated factory that the Italian working class was digging its own grave. Against the numberous currents who held out the bright prospect of the class being able to seize control of the means of production and exchange without first destroying the bourgeois state apparatus, it insisted that:
"According to the genuinely communist conception, workers' control over production can only be realized after the smashing of bourgeois power if control of the functioning of each enterprise passes to the proletariat as a whole united in the Council-state. The communist management of production in all its branches and units of production will be carried out by the rational collective organs representing the interests of all the workers associated in the work of building Communism." (Theses of the Abstentionist Communist Fraction of the Italian Socialist Party, May 1920)
The Left (and this was its most urgent revolutionary task) had the courage to confront the prevalent taboo of the expropriatory general strike, and to place its emphasis on the political priority: the constitution of the proletariat into a party. While the striking workers were being cajoled into bending diligently over their work-benches, into learning the value of capital used in production, into finding ways of raising their output, the Left was posing the only real problem, without detours or democratic quibbles: "Are we going to take power or take the factories?". The enunciation of this simple truth made Gramsci and his team froth at the mouth. Your party is a sectarian, hierarchical conception of the revolution, whereas ours is a unitary, generous, and libertarian vision - such was the reposte of the worshippers of unity whose one morbid fear was a split in the Socialist Party. And the unity they revered was unity with Seratti's unitary maximalist majority which wanted to make Parliament and the Communes into active bases for revolutionary propaganda; unity with the reformists around Turatti, the adversary of the Turin councils and the Communist International; unity with the trade unionists purified of their extreme-right elements. Thus the name of the party's daily - Unita. Reassuring overtures were even made to the Catholic intellectuals organized in the Popular Party:
"In Italy, in Rome, there is the Vatican, the Pope. The liberal state had to find a system of equilibrium with the spiritual power of the Church; the workers' state will also have to find one."
The efforts of the Left towards the constitution of a purely communist party, beginning from the renunciation of electoral participation, were in the eyes of Gramsci, nothing but a "hallucinated particularism"; what he wanted was the revival of the PSI, which "from being a petit-bourgeois parliamentary party must become the party of the revolutionary proletariat". The ‘Nine Points' published in Ordino Nuovo under the heading ‘For a renovation of the PSI' corresponded to the wishes of the leadership of the Communist International: progressive purge of the right wing, yes - a split, no. Before Livorno Lenin had declared:
"To lead the revolution and to defend it, the Italian party must still make a certain move to the left (without tying its hands) and without forgetting that later circumstances could easily demand a few steps to the right."
The move to the left having been made at Livorno, the circumstances of the struggle against the reactionary offensive demanded "a few steps to the right"; at the IVth Congress of the Communist International the fusion of the Italian Communist Party and the PSI was drawn up.
R.C.
Revolution Internationale
Note *
When the author refers to the proletariat "constituting itself into a party" he is using this phrase in the way Marx used it: to describe the general process whereby the proletariat organizes itself around its historic programme. This does not mean that the proletariat and the actual communist party can every be identical, since the latter is a conscious fraction of the class, and cannot substitute itself for the class as a whole.
The footnotes to this text will appear in the third issue of this review which will contain the second part of this article.
1 See the introduction written by the Trostkyist, P. Broue, to Leonetti's book, Notes Sur Gramsci, EDI, Paris, 1974, p.7.
2 E. Malatesta, the hero of Benevento adventure of 1877, was one of the revolutionary elements conscious of the gravity of the situation: "If we let the moment pass, we will pay in tears of blood for the fear we have put into the bourgeoisie."
3 Lissa and Custoza were battles lost against the Austrians in the first war for Italian independence of 1866, which also marked the return of Venice to the Kingdom of Italy.
4 Letter of Lieutenant-General Oscar Raffi, commander of the army corps, to Giolitti, the day after Caporetto, 5 November, 1917.
The Spartacusbond, a Dutch group from the Council Communist tradition, has recently published two issues of a Bulletin of International Discussion in English. It is certainly encouraging that the Spartacusbond make its ideas more available for those who cannot read Dutch and that they should be actively concerned about participating in international discussion and debate.
Both issues of the Spartacusbond International Discussion Bulletin have been devoted to a critique of our International Communist Current (ICC): the first issue was in answer to an article on international regroupment which appeared in Internationalism (USA), No 5; the second issue applauded Workers Voice's evolution away from our Current and criticized an article on the KAPD which appeared in Revolution Internationale, No 6 and Internationalism No 5.
The article on our international conference in 1974 from Internationalism No 5 stressed the need for a regroupment of revolutionaries in the period of heightened class struggle today. In the past, fifty years of counter-revolution, the defeat of the working class's revolutionary efforts, the mobilization for world war, and the lethargy of the years of reconstruction, had their effects on the revolutionary groups which tried to keep the flame of revolutionary theory alive as contribution to future struggle. The inevitable consequence of this long period of defeat and chaos was the atomization and isolation of revolutionary groups. But a necessity is not a virtue. The fragmentation and isolation of revolutionaries on an international scale is inevitable in defeat but today when the promise of revolution is once again alive in the struggles of the working class all over the world, this isolation of revolutionaries is no longer inevitable. On the contrary, our new period of class struggle has brought - and will bring - a new birth of consciousness in the working class which is already being expressed in the appearance of revolutionary groups and circles all over the world.
The purpose of the Internationalism article was to put forward the idea that:
* revolutionary groups must make the effort to understand and defend the principles of a revolutionary orientation today: they must base their activity on clear class positions.
* that this can only be achieved by understanding the historic dynamic of class struggle today and the lessons of past workers' struggles through international discussion and confrontation of ideas.
* that international discussion must take place within the framework of eventually UNITING our efforts if a clear principled basis is achieved, so that we may contribute to the development of class consciousness in the proletariat through active participation in the struggles of the class.
But where we write "regroupment of revolutionaries" the Spartacusbond sees only the Bolshevik party looming its head once again. "We wonder if the groups at the international conference really want to form a Bolshevik party." (Spartacusbond Bulletin, No l, p 3). For the Spartacusbond, apparently, any international organization has to be a party and any party has to be a Bolshevik one. This self-contained syllogism is in fact a condemnation of any revolutionary work today.... for fear that the demons of the past have not been exorcized.
First of all, it is surprising that Spartacusbond thinks it necessary to ask us whether we are heading towards a Bolshevik party or not. Surely if they have read our publications they must realize that the political platforms on which our activity is based in several countries are clear and unequivocal on the rejection of the Bolshevik conception of the party, both in its relation to the class and its internal structure. One of the basic premises of any possible revolutionary work today is the rejection of the Bolshevik conception of the party; without this basis no further discussion is possible. From its very beginnings, our Current has defended the idea that:
1. The Leninist conception of class consciousness coming from outside the class, from ‘intellectual' elements, is completely false. There can be no separation between being and consciousness, between the proletariat as an economic class and its historic goal of socialism, between the class and its struggles. Political organizations of revolutionaries are a manifestation of the class consciousness developing in the class; they are an emanation of the working class.
Consciousness is not limited to the party; .it exists in the whole class, but not in a homogeneous or simultaneous way. The aim of those who have come to consciousness faster than others in the class is to organize a way to contribute to the heightening of consciousness in the whole class. The party is not the sole repository of consciousness as the Bordigist ultra-Leninist conception would have it; it is simply an organized intervention which tends towards the greatest clarity and coherence of class 'perspectives so as to actively contribute to the process of developing consciousness in the class. This is by no means an absolute for all time but a constant effort to strengthen proletarian consciousness.
2. The Leninist conception, shared to one degree or another by all revolutionaries at the beginning of the great revolutionary wave of 1917-23, that the party has to take power ‘in the name of the class' must be rejected. The historical experience of the Russian Revolution shows that this conception leads only to state capitalism, not socialism.
The working class as a whole is the subject of revolution and no minority of the class or outside it can ‘bring' socialism to it, no matter how enlightened it may be or think it is. Socialism is only possible through organized, conscious self-activity of the working class, learning from its own practice and struggle.
The role of the party is not to ‘rule' over the workers in any way, shape or form; nor is it to assume state power. The party's role is to contribute to class consciousness; to the understanding of the general aims and historic purpose of the class struggle. The workers' councils are the instrument for the proletarian dictatorship and not the party.
3. Following Marx in rejecting the anarchist notion of ‘federalism' in revolutionary organization, our Current holds that the international centralization of revolutionary organizations does not mean any loss of democratic procedure within the framework of the political principles of the group. A political group is not a monolith on the Stalinist model and cannot possibly be if it is to express the real debates and discussions of the workers' movement. Comrades do not simply have the ‘right' but the duty to express and clarify all differences freely in the organization, within the framework of its political principles. The Bolsheviks built the party as a quasi-military apparatus because the goal was seen to be the taking of power by the party. This is NOT the goal of the proletarian party and therefore its internal structure must suit the needs of political clarification for which it was created.
These were and are, in short, the principles upon which all the groups in our Current are based. Wondering if we are not just going to become another Bolshevik party shows either that the Spartacusbond does not know our principles or that they feel that some ‘fatal destiny' will turn us into our opposite because despite everything we say or do the Spartacusbond sees the invisible stigmata of death upon us. We can only say that the Spartacusbond has no monopoly of sincere opposition to the Leninist conception of the party. Nor does everyone who rejects the Leninist conception of the party have to end up with the ideas of the Spartacusbond.
The real problem is that our Current is forming an international organization. Not a party, because a party can only be formed in a period of intense and generalized class struggle. But we are building the political and organizational basis for an international regroupment. In rejecting the Leninist conception of organization, the Spartacusbond rejects ALL forms of international organization. "We dispute every idea of the necessity of a party in the workers' struggle" (Bulletin, No 2, p 3) and again: "their presentation (the ICC's) erodes the difference and opposition between party and class." (Bulletin, No 1, p 1) Leninists see the party as outside and above the class; the Spartacusbond accepts this definition as inevitable and true, and therefore rejects all parties. The reasoning is the same, only the conclusions are different.
Throughout the history of the working class movement political organizations have been formed, grouping those individuals who defend a given orientation in the class struggle. From Babeuf through the secret societies, the Communist League and the First International, the early years of the workers' movement were alive with political activity and debate. Gradually through the experience of struggle itself the perspective and role of these political organizations were tested against reality and many aspects were clarified or rejected. The conspiracies of sects, putschist notions were abandoned, and the role of the party as a contribution to the development of class consciousness became clearer with the positive and negative lessons of the Second and Third Internationals. Throughout this period, Marxists as well as Marx himself fought the Proudhonist refusal to organize politically as well as the anarchist resistance to centralization, stressing the need for revolutionaries to put forward a clear idea of the "final goals of the struggle and the means of attaining them."
It is fruitless to argue that growing consciousness in the working class did not express itself in the growth and unification of revolutionary groups. The Spartacusbond does not even attempt this. They simply state that TODAY these kinds of organizations have become not merely useless but a veritable hindrance to the working class movement.
Why? Has the development of class consciousness so essential to the proletarian struggle miraculously become a homogeneous and automatic process in the class? Is there no longer need for elements who see things more clearly at an earlier stage to join together to disseminate their analyses and perspectives? Clearly the answer to both these questions is NO. Even the Spartacusbond recognizes this. "There is no doubt that those who attain this insight (into the need for workers' councils) will feel the need to propagate their experiences in every field of the struggle. But as soon as they intend to start a party or an international which is considered to be the leader of the class, they will relapse into ideas and organizational patterns of the past." (Bulletin, No 2, p 3)
This is clearly a contradiction. If those who attain insights are inevitably going to want to organize to propagate their insights, are they making a positive contribution to the struggle or not? The answer seems to be that if they are simply a loose group of isolated individuals, they can say what they have to say without fear. But if they try to organize into an international organization and try to make their impact more widespread and effective, then according to the Spartacusbond, they are a hindrance to the class. As long as groups are inefficient, isolated and vague, the Spartacusbond is prepared to give them its seal of approval. But once they tend towards political and organizational coherence, groups supposedly become a positive evil. Why then does the Spartacusbond exist, we may ask? To organize themselves to tell others not to organize? An anti-group group? To the Spartacusbond once a group tries to exert any influence in favour of its ideas, it will inevitably become ‘leaders' (that is, on the Bolshevik model). If we follow this logic, our only hope is to condemn ourselves to self-imposed impotence.
The Spartacusbond claims to be part of the Dutch council communist tradition. Need we remind them that the council communists with Gorter tried to form a Fourth International in the early 20s? Does this mean that Gorter had become the Dutch disciple of Lenin? An unconscious Bolshevik? A similar effort was attempted by the Dutch council communist group (after the break with the Spartacusbond) in 1947. This group encouraged the initiative of the Belgian council communists who called for an international conference and the Dutch group actively participated in this conference of different groups of the left communist tradition in 1948. Is this not more in the real tradition of council communism than the Spartacusbond's non-participation then and condemnation of international regroupment today?
But the debate goes deeper. What is the role of revolutionaries? Is it simply to "propagate their experience" as individuals as the quote implies, or is it to distil the experience of all working class struggles in history, to enrich present-day struggles with the lessons of the past? But for the Spartacusbond, the past is wiped away in one anti-Leninist sweep. The Russian Revolution was merely a bourgeois revolution with the Bolsheviks as a state capitalist party "in its essence" from the beginning. The erroneous conceptions of the Bolsheviks were taken over from elements of the Social Democracy. Therefore the Second International must be wiped away as well. And we end up with a hodge-podge, incoherent, moralistic approach to history. Why even bother analyzing past struggles and defeats when it is so much more simple to read them out of existence?
The Russian Revolution, according to the Spartacusbond, was a bourgeois revolution. But in the "West" (Western Europe), revolution was on the agenda because of objective changes in the capitalist system (the period of decadence, the beginning of the cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction); and this brought forth revolutionary upheavals in Germany and elsewhere. The Spartacusbond realizes that a new period of struggle, revolutionary struggle, had begun at that time because they correctly maintain that unions were no longer adequate as organizations of working class struggle. So we are left with the absurd contradiction that capitalism was ripe for proletarian revolution in "Western Europe" but not in Russia where the bourgeoisie as a historical class was still capable of pushing forward its bourgeois revolution. Capitalism ceases to be a system which dominates the world and becomes a question of geographical regions: in one area the proletarian revolution is on the agenda; in another area we have the bourgeoisie just beginning its task. In one area workers are attempting to take power while in another area their fellow workers are fighting Russian ‘feudalism'. And the workers of Western Europe who are pushing forward struggles against the bourgeois order are, at the same time, so non-conscious that they join the Third International and mistake the "bourgeois" revolution in Russia for the avant-garde of their own revolution! This is a thoroughly incoherent logic, an Alice in Wonderland view of history. Either the revolutionary socialist programme is a world possibility or it is simply a utopian adventure for "Western" Europe. How the Spartacusbond explains the existence of workers' councils, the organization of the working class for the revolutionary assault on the capitalist order, in the midst of a "bourgeois" revolution in Russia, we shall leave to the contortions of their illogical argument. But the Russian Revolution remains a closed book to those who are so obsessed by defeat that they must simply refuse any proletarian character to the Russian experience. This inevitably leads to a rejection of any proletarian roots in the Third International. History becomes an enigma of everyone running around doing incomprehensible things. For the Spartacusbond any lessons of the past are useless because the major workers' struggles are "bourgeois"; proletarian history becomes a huge blank.
It is understandable that the Spartacusbond sees the revolutionary's contribution as simply propagating ‘their experience' in an immediatist way without a full historical dimension. They have a regrettable difficulty in coming to grips with the past as it really was. In an article on the KAPD printed in Internationalism, No 5, Hembe quotes Jan Appel's (Hempel) speech at the 3rd Congress of the Third International, to show that the KAPD was not anti-party as were certain later council communists. The KAPD opposed the Bolshevik policies in the Communist International and contested the whole idea of a party taking state power ‘in the name of the class'. But they did not reject the party as a necessary contribution to class consciousness.
"The proletariat needs a strongly formed, hard-core party. Each communist must be unimpeachable ... and he must be a leader on the spot. In the struggles into which he is thrown, he must be consistent and what enables him to do this is his programme. He acts in accordance with decisions made by the communist group. Here the strictest discipline reigns. Here one can change nothing or be excluded or sanctioned,....." Jan Appel
The Spartacusbond "wants to express (their) indignation about the fact that Internationalism is abusing Jan Appel's name in trying to re-harness the working class." (Bulletin, No 2, p 5)
First of all the Spartacusbond feels it necessary to prove that the KAPD is in ‘their' tradition and that our Current has no business quoting the KAPD to support our ideas. They are reduced to "doubting the correctness of the quote" which is a puerile tactic since none from the KAPD or Appel himself, either at the time or later on, or today, ever protested that these speeches were a falsification or a lie, The reader can refer to La Gauche Allemande (Supplement to Invariance No 2, Paris 1974) to discover whether Internationalism has correctly transcribed this quote from the interventions of the KAPD.
But the Spartacusbond goes further. "The fact is that he (Appel) left the Communist International and after that as a member of the KAPD went through the theoretical and practical struggle of the German working class." (Ibid., p 5) This quote implies that after making his speech Appel realized his error and joined the KAPD. In fact, Appel was speaking as a delegate of the KAPD to the Communist International and expressed the ideas of his organization which never renounced his speeches. Appel didn't wait until 1921 to be part of the struggles of the German working class; he was part of it from World War I onward. And he is still active in the revolutionary movement, in particular as a close associate of our Current, and has made valuable contributions to our international conferences. We would hardly have brought up this issue if the Spartacusbond had not deemed it necessary to parade their "indignation" and publicly accuse us of falsifying. It is certainly an accusation which can be easily turned against the accusers. But leaving aside polemics, it is revealing that those whose view of history is limited to an obsession with the Leninist party have difficulty in understanding the content of past experiences.
But what gives the Spartacusbond the right to claim our Current wishes to "re-harness the working class"? Aside from statements already referred to, the Spartacusbond berates us for trying to understand the positive contributions of the Bolsheviks. Our Current has indeed claimed that the clear and unequivocal positions of the Bolsheviks against the first imperialist world war were a clarion call to the working class and a rallying point for the international left which continued to defend an internationalist position against the war. The positions of the Bolshevik Party on this question and on the need to break with the Second international greatly influenced the German left communist movement, among others. The Bolshevik position against any compromise with the bourgeois democratic government of Kerensky and the call for "all power to the Soviets" are extremely positive contributions to revolutionary practice. Although we cannot go any deeper into the Russian experience here, we simply want to point out that these positions warrant the attention and study of revolutionaries and cannot simply be eliminated by the Spartacusbond's idea of the "essence" of Bolshevism or by pretending that this was all a Machiavellian plot to fool the workers! Dealing with the Bolsheviks' positive contribution on these questions cannot in any way be interpreted as an apology for the Bolshevik position on the party or on other aspects of the class struggle. If the Bordigists make an apology for every sentence and word of Lenin, the Spartacusbond simply throws the baby out with the bath water and rejects everything the Bolsheviks may have said. Unfortunately for the Spartacusbond, real proletarian history cannot be reduced to the ‘all bad or all good' simplifications which they put forward.
We entirely agree with the .Sparatacusbond that workers' councils are the essential instrument of proletarian power, the class-wide organs revolutionary struggle and the construction of socialism. We also agree that parties are left-overs of a bourgeois society, a society divided into classes. Unfortunately the fact that the proletariat is an exploited class means that the power of "dominant ideas", bourgeois ideology, will retard and delay the simultaneous and homogeneous development of class consciousness in the working class. Therefore it is inevitable and necessary that those who can see the roots of the struggle more clearly will organize and try to propagate their ideas in the class. This aim cannot be served by remaining isolated and ineffective individuals or local groups, nor can revolutionary activity be limited to telling workers to "form workers' councils", or reduced to the ridiculous idea of telling other revolutionaries - "do not organize".
The working class does not need revolutionaries to prod them into forming workers' councils. In revolutionary periods, workers have done this without any advice on the mechanics of this operation. In the past, where the working class was inexperienced, revolutionaries played a significant role in encouraging the formation of the organizations of economic struggle, the unions. Today, the period is different and the form of workers' councils is much less the result of revolutionaries' agitation than a relatively spontaneous movement of the class in response to objective conditions. The task of the revolutionary organization is much more a question of clarifying the perspectives for struggle, of defending goals and offering a clear denunciation of the dangers of capitalist recuperation and partial struggles.
There is no opposition between the workers' councils and the party, between the whole and one of its parts. Each has a role to play in the life of the class.
The Spartacusbond's rejection of any role for an international revolutionary organization, not to mention a party, is not a continuation of the central ideas of the KAPD; it reflects the ideas of the Ruhle faction which left the KAPD, and these ideas were further developed in the thirties, during the period of defeat and demoralization. Despite the many contributions of council communism to a fuller understanding of the importance of workers' councils, the theories of some of its tendencies, notably the Spartacusbond remains unfinished and partial; in fact it remains locked in the Leninist trap. The only difference is that for the Leninists the party is everything,for the Spartacusbond the party is nothing.
"Of course there is no objection to international study and co-operation of groups which aim to stimulate the independent workers' struggle. But these groups cannot create a new international working class movement." (ibid., p 4).
Quote implies that as long as revolutionary groups ‘study' and ‘co-operate' they are part of the class. But if they want to push ‘co-operation' of local and national groups to the international level of a principled international organization with an active function in the class, then the Spartacusbond dooms their efforts. Each country for itself, each group for itself, - and above all do not come together internationally because regroupment will make you "leaders" and "Leninists". Apparently not only power corrupts, but also organization.
The fundamental incoherence of all this is perfectly clear. But more important, the influence of this fear and resistance to regroupment debilitates the workers movement and slows down the efforts of the new generation of revolutionaries to organize themselves in response to the needs of the contemporary class struggle.
J.A.
Part II "Councilism" come to the aid of third-worldismPresent-day ‘councilists' like those around the Dutch groups, Spartacusbond and Daad en Gedachte are distinguished mainly by their Menshevik confusionism, which rises to the most pathetic heights when the question of the Russian Revolution is posed.
The council communists who in the 1930's struggled militantly for clarification against the counter-revolution, and who wrote for International Council Correspondence and other communist journals, were by no means Mensheviks. Their traditions were wholly proletarian. In the demoralization and confusion caused by the utter defeat of the world revolution, they tried to understand the reasons for the downturn within a proletarian framework even though they defended certain erroneous conceptions. But confronted with the decline of the proletarian revolution, they too began to decline. How different it had been when they were one with the proletarian revolution in the upsurge, when they enthusiastically swam with the seemingly irresistible tidal wave of class struggle marking the period 1917-23. Menshevism never stood that test of events: it attacked the proletarian revolution from start to finish.
A "bourgeois revolution": A case of sour grapesJust like the fox in the fable who walked away from the unreachable grapes muttering that they must be sour anyway, the present-day ‘councilists' treat the October Revolution as a bourgeois revolution. As we have said, the German and Dutch Left Communists who began to espouse a theory of the ‘bourgeois revolution' in the1930s in order to explain the Russian counter-revolution, were an authentic communist current. This was so in spite of their tentative but erroneous assertions as to the reasons for the relapse of the Russian Revolution. Today's ‘councilists', however, do not constitute such a revolutionary current. They are but its pale and impoverished residue, sharing (and contributing more confusion) to all the later defects of the German and Dutch Left Communists. What is more telling is that they do not share any of the original ardour, creativity and coherence which distinguished the German and Dutch Left: in sum, none of their virtues. The revolutionaries of the KAPD, and of the other groups which identified with their positions began already as communist militants who unhesitantly supported the October Revolution, because they correctly saw it as a moment in the unfolding world revolution. What they said after, when the world revolutionary wave was receding, is another thing. In demoralization and retreat, communist minorities inevitably become confused and make mistakes, especially when the whole class has suffered epochal defeats. But let us be plain about this fact: Spartacusbond and Daad en Gedachte and Co. pick up from amongst the debris, all the confusion and demoralization of what once was an authentic evolutionary fraction. Therein lies the whole difference.
An examination of a few statements made by Spartacusbond glaringly demonstrates their complete regression from any revolutionary position:
"The Third International, being promoted by the economically and politically backward structure of the - in reality bourgeois - revolutionary Russia (sic), was such an organizational structure of the past, at least for Western Europe." (Spartacusbond Bulletin, No 2, p 3).
And:
The decline of the revolution "was the result of the structure of Russia and the state-socialist ideas which existed in Bolshevism from the start and which could only result in state-capitalism." (Ibid., p3)
Cajo Brendel, a ‘councilist' contributor to Daad en Gedachte also believes that the October Revolution was ‘bourgeois':
"For some time the Russian (bourgeois) revolution seemed to have great consequences for similar bourgeois developments in Asia and Africa." (Cajo Brendel, Theses on the Chinese Revolution, Solidarity pamphlet 46, London 1974, p 3)
Observing the increasingly repugnant debasement of marxism and the needs of the world revolution perpetrated by Moscow and the Comintern, the German and Dutch Left Communists of the early 20's reacted in many confused ways. Some like Gorter and Pannekoek, began to say that what had happened in Russia was somehow ‘inevitable' owing to Russia's economic backwardness; Otto Ruhle and many others openly stated that Russia had gone through a ‘bourgeois revolution'. Even Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism according to Pannekoek, philosophically expressed the economic level of arrested bourgeois development in Russia, and thus Bolshevism was more and more seen as a special ‘hybrid' type of bourgeois Jacobin movement, ‘forced' by history to establish state capitalism in Russia. Following this train of thought, but adding his own philistine garnishings, Brendel calls the Bolsheviks "political idealists" (Ibid., p 2) doomed to be "suddenly and horribly" awoken to the realities of state capitalism. Paul Mattick, who has become another ‘councilist' leftover, puts forward a similar idea: for the Bolsheviks to "remain in power under the actually ensuing conditions meant to accept the historical role of the bourgeoisie but with different social institutions and a different ideology." (Paul Mattick, ‘Workers Control' in The New Left, Boston, 1970, p 388). According to Mattick, the objective necessity of bourgeois revolution co-existed alongside a proletarian revolutionary wave (released by World War I) which he qualifies as "feeble". Thus everything that happened in Russia was inevitable because of the economic backwardness of Russia, Bolshevik state capitalist ideology and the feebleness of the world proletariat. The profundity lurking beneath the surface of these utterances could perhaps be summed up as: ‘All's bad that ends bad'.
Menshevism resurrectedDefending the Russian Revolution against the Menshevik and Kautskyite renegades, Luxemburg and the Western communists who supported the Bolshevik regime maintained that capitalism had in 1914 entered its long-awaited period of decline. Therefore the Russian Revolution was a link in the rising chain of proletarian communist revolutions. The imperialist war had given a mortal blow to the ascendant period of capitalist development. From then on the communist programme, the maximum programme, was on the immediate agenda of humanity. The working class was facing the alternative of socialism or barbarism in an ever-present epochal manner. The spiral of the war-reconstructioncrisis-war cycle had appeared in history with all its murderous effects, signifying that our epoch was also the epoch of the world proletarian revolution.
To speak of ‘bourgeois revolutions' under such conditions, or about ‘necessary capitalist stages' previous to the communist revolution when capitalism world-wide was showing the death agonies of decadence, was indeed the apex of Kautskyite cretinism. Kautsky and the Mensheviks opposed the October Revolution on the grounds that Russian economic development was too backward, allowing for only the creation of a bour geois republic. "Theoretically this doctrine ... follows from the original ‘marxist' discovery that a socialist revolution is a national and, so to speak, a domestic affair in each modern country taken by itself", said Rosa Luxemburg (The Russian Revolution, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, New York, 1970, p0368). But marxists of her time understood that bourgeois development was impossible within the limits of bourgeois society. This applied to all countries, from Russia to Paraguay. The worldwide connections of capital, which make of all countries a single integrated organism, the world market allowed no room for the theories of ‘exceptionalism' so beloved by leftists of all hues and persuasions. Already in 1905-6, Parvus and Trotsky had begun to grasp this reality, after the experience of the 1905 Russian Revolution. Lenin and Luxemburg went firmly over to this point of view in 1917, and realized that the Russian proletariat could only take power as a prelude to the world socialist revolution. It was not that the workers in Russia had to take power in order to ‘complete the bourgeois revolution' even in passing, but that the world-wide capitalist crisis permitted only an uninterrupted and immediate struggle towards socialism.
The arguments of Kautsky, Plekhanov, and Martov and of the various doctrinaires of national-capitalism, were completely refuted by the revolutionary wave of 1917-23. The fact that this wave was finally crushed in no way alters this conclusion. If the proletarian revolution's failures in the period of decadence are always due to ‘economic backwardness' then there's no hope for communism. Capitalist decay moans precisely that the productive forces are increasingly constrained and dammed up by capitalist relations of production. In other words, capitalism in decline can only stagnate and check the development of the productive capacities of humanity; it can only maintain economic backwardness as a whole.
The reasons for the defeat of the 1917-23 revolutionary wave are too complex to discuss here. It is enough to note that the glib answers of the Mensheviks about the ‘backwardness' of Russia only confuse the issue. The roots of proletarian defeats during the epoch of the proletarian revolution are to be found mainly at the level of proletarian consciousness which in turn helps explain subjective factors such as the clinging to old traditions and insufficient clarity as to the communist programme, which are factors which might at given moments paralyse the class as a whole and allow capital to regain the upper hand. The subjective problems of the class thus assume a socio-material aspect which can at times become an objective obstacle. But the mechanic determinism of the Kautskyites has nothing to say about this process, which is more akin to an ‘organic' process rather than a mathematical one.
It was therefore a theoretical regression for those Left Communists who were later called ‘council communists' to resurrect the Menshevik arguments about the inevitable ‘bourgeois nature' of the Russian Revolution. In so doing, these militants went against even their own pasts, and against one of the greatest of working class experiences. Yes, it was true that the Russian Revolution was drowned in blood by the world counter-revolution expressing itself through the ‘workers' state' in Russia. It was even more painful to see the Bolsheviks themselves assuming in the main, the task of foremen, in this degeneration. But this doesn't refute the proletarian nature of October, whose defeat meant a monstrous debacle for the world class.
Only stupidity can then haughtily raise its diminutive brow and find a ‘bourgeois revolution' amidst the carnage. If ‘bourgeois revolutions' emanate from the bones and blood of millions of defeated class conscious proletarians, or to put it differently, if ‘bourgeois revolutions' are what workers would simply call counter-revolutions then indeed the likes of Noske, Scheidemann, Stalin, Mao, Ho, Castro and countless others are ‘bourgeois revolutionaries'. But only impudence and obtuseness can honestly compare Cromwell, Robespierre, Saint-Just, Garibaldi, Marat, or William Blake to those bloody abortions of capitalist decay.
But scribblers like Brendel excel in impudence. Their profound declamations concerning the history of the proletarian revolution contrasts strikingly with the shallowness of such remarks as:
"The Chinese Revolution had essentially (not in details) the same character as that in Russia in 1917. There may indeed be differences between Moscow and Peking, but China just like Russia is on its way to state-capitalism. Just as Moscow does, Peking pursues a foreign policy that has little to do with revolution elsewhere in Asia (not even middle-class revolution)." (Brendel, op.cit.p.2)
Thus revolutions equal counter-revolutions; Lenin and Trotsky are the same as Mao and Chou-En-Lai. The most reactionary aspect of this ‘revolutionary' sauce is that it implicitly denigrates and shrouds in confusion extremely vital and complex moments of the workers' movement. Brendel, the barrister of eternal capitalist development, thinks himself capable of passing judgment on what he paternalistically calls ‘political idealists'. The Bolsheviks he-compares to Mao, the heir of Stalin and self-styled demigod to 800 million human beings. With a quick washing of hands, our Pontius Pilate denies any historical responsibility for the course of the Russian Revolution. All that was to be, was. But "It is not Russia's unripeness which has been proved by the events of the war and the Russian Revolution", asserted Luxemburg, "but the unripeness of the German proletariat for the fulfillment of its historic tasks". Brendel, of course, will have none of this. In his meanderings, he too, like Kautsky or the Mensheviks, stumbles into the cesspit the workers' movement has set aside for those forever ‘unripe' to understand the communist revolution.
Roles in search of actors
Brendel speaks easily about the occurrence of all kinds of revolutions - middle class, state capitalist, bourgeois, and even peasant. Everything gets a mention except the proletarian revolution, which remains for him a closed book with seven seals attached. According to him, the bourgeois revolution is inevitable in backward areas and the drama ensues in desperately searching for actors to carry it through. Thus: "In neither Russia nor China could capitalism triumph except in its Bolshevik form." (Ibid., p.11) But nowhere does his Menshevik conception come out more openly than here:
"In both Russia and China the revolutions had to solve the same political and economic tasks. They had to destroy feudalism and to free the productive forces in agriculture from the fetters in which existing relations bound them. They also had to prepare a basis for industrial development. They had to destroy absolutism and replace it by a form of government and by a state machine that would allow solutions to the existing economic problems. The economic and political problems were those of a bourgeois revolution; that is, of a revolution that was to make capitalism the dominant mode of production." (Ibid., p.10)
The message is clear: the proletariat ‘had' to be fragmented into different national units which in turn have exceptional paths of development which are separate from that of the world market and the world economy. Each national capital is autarkic and accumulation can proceed quite well within a purely capitalist confine. The only limits to healthy accumulation would be the sudden revolt o the ‘order-takers' (a la Cardan/Solidarity) or an eventual ‘fall in the rate of profit' (a 1a Grassman/Mattick). The important thing here is the conception that Brendel has of the proletarian revolution: a bourgeois, nationally fragmented, localistic conception. But then how can the world proletariat, assert itself as a unified class? How will this be possible if each proletariat faces fundamentally different national conditions? What will materially unify the rising class struggle for world socialism? Brendel and the other journalists of ‘councilism' are silent on this point saving all their strength presumably, for spouting incantations about workers' councils, or ‘workers' self-management'.
Brendel, himself, is devoid of any awareness concerning these questions. For example, the Chinese workers' struggles according to him were doomed; not because those struggles found themselves at the mercy of the world counter-revolution (already triumphant in Russia, Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, etc) but because of the workers "insignificance" in numbers! But we must allow Brendel to delineate his own course of thought:
"It is claimed by some that these uprisings were attempts by the Chinese proletariat to influence events in a revolutionary direction. This could not have been the case. Twenty-two years after the massacres in these two towns the Chinese Ministry of Social Affairs announced that in China there were fourteen industrial towns and just over a million industrial workers in a population of between four and five hundred millions - ie industrial workers comprised less than 0.25% of the population. In 1927 this figure must have been still lower.
"With the proletariat insignificant as a class in 1949, it seems unlikely (sic) that they could have engaged in revolutionary class activity twenty-two years earlier. The Shanghai uprising of March 1927 was a popular uprising whose aim was to support Chiang Kaishek's Northern Expedition. The workers only played a significant role in it because Shanghai was China's most industrialized town, where one-third of the Chinese proletariat happened to live. The uprising was ‘radical-democratic' rather than proletarian in nature and was bloodily quelled by Chiang Kai-shek because he scorned Jacobinism not because he feared the proletariat. The so-called ‘Canton Commune' was no more than an adventure provoked by the Chinese Bolsheviks in an attempt to bring off what they had already failed to achieve in Wu Han.
"The Canton uprising of December 1927 had no political perspective and expressed proletarian resistance no more than the KTT (Chinese Communist Party) expressed proletarian aspirations. Borodin, the government's Russian adviser, said that he had come to China to fight for an idea; it was for similar political ideas that the KTT sacrificed the workers of Canton. These workers never seriously challenged Chiang Kai-shek and the right-wing of the KMT; the only serious, systematic and sustained challenge came from the peasantry." (ibid., p.15)
The charge that the Chinese workers never ‘seriously challenged' Chinese capital is a complete misconstruction. Any self-action of the proletariat challenges capitalism even if at the beginning stages the workers aren't aware of their own final goals and potential strength. But capital is, and that is why Chiang, Stalin, Bukharin and Borodin helped strangle the Chinese revolutionary movement. What criteria does Brendel use to make this nonsensical claim, this assertion of a "non-existing" proletarian challenge? Did the February 1917 Petrograd Soviet, controlled by Mensheviks and liberals "challenge" Russian capital? Brendel's answer would be ‘no'. In fact, for him, the workers should never think of challenging capitalism since all they are bound to get is state capitalism, ‘Jacobinism', etc. The Chinese workers in Shanghai, Hankow and Canton, indeed rose by the thousands and created strike committees and armed detachments which by their very nature would have had to confront not only Chiang but the Chinese Communist Party if the class were to politically survive and connect up to the world class struggle. But because there was no world revolution to connect to anymore, no perspectives were open to the Chinese proletariat's rising. The proletarian movement was definitely strangled by world political reaction in 1927, not by its ‘numerical' lack of strength. The proletariat's weight in the economy, and its international class character, are, with its consciousness, the only real basis for its struggle. Brendel's slanders against the proletariat have, however, a more ominous ring. He is against ‘adventures' but only as long as they are proletarian. When he talks about the peasantry, his true colours show. Thus it was the peasantry that presented ".... the only serious, systematic and sustained challenge...." to the KMT. No adventures here, please!
The logic of his position flows forth, almost majestically:
"After twenty years of tentative attempts, the peasant masses at last discovered how to unite a revolutionary force. It was not the working class, still very weak, which brought about the downfall of Chiang Kai-shek but the peasant masses, organized under primitive democracy into guerilla armies. This demonstrates another fundamental difference between the .Chinese and Russian revolutions. In the latter the workers were at the head of events at Petrograd, Moscow and Kronstadt, and the revolution progressed outward from the towns into the countryside. In China the opposite was the case. The revolution moved from rural to urban areas." (Ibid, p.16)
It is no longer a question of the proletarian revolution struggling against capitalism; no, now it's a question of ‘revolutions' in the abstract, of plays in search of authors and actors. The idea that the peasants were organized under ‘primitive democracy' into guerilla armies is nothing but a cynical Maoist apology, typical of writers like Edgar Snow.
"In China, just as in Russia, it was not the party which showed the way to the peasants - the peasants showed the way to the party." (Ibid., p.17)
The logic of this position is clear, even if not spelled out by this half-wit: if the peasant masses show the way to the bureaucracy, then it follows that the bureaucracy can be controlled from below. Thus communists should support that bureaucracy against other capitalist factions which do not allow such control (ie Chiang's). The marxist movement of the nineteenth century in the ascendant period of capitalism didn't hesitate doing this when it supported genuine national liberation struggles; it supported the struggle of the petty-bourgeois democrats or advanced capitalist factions against reactionary or absolutist ones. The ethical cant of Brendel and Co., however, does not permit such honest admissions. The truth is that the Chinese peasants were mobilized by Mao's Chinese Communist Party during and after the anti-Japanese war as cannon-fodder for the imperialists' carve-up. During World War II Mao's CCP was simply allied to the democratic imperialist faction fighting the fascist imperialisms. Brendel is not the type who would have opposed such a war. In China he would have sided with ‘the peasants' democratic guerilla armies' (sic!), • In other words, he would have died with the Allies, like all liberals and Stalinists did. Our Pontius has shown, however, that he doesn't like things spelt out quite like this; straight in the face. But the traditions of the workers' movement demand it, because this is the only way the proletariat can affirm its revolutionary programme against all confusionists and openly reactionary scribes.
We thus have seen how Menshevism (old or new style) inevitably leads to a capitulation to different capitalist factions. There is nothing neutral in the class struggle, and those philistines who warn that ‘not everything is black or white, greys exist too' ignore the fact that in order to appreciate gradations in colour one mist first determine what is black and what is white. Another expression of this reactionary confusion appears in the following extract taken from a pamphlet published by Solidarity, a group which has been influenced by ‘councilism' in its degenerated form:
"Just because the communist front organization, for whatever tactical and sectional reasons, is at times forced to struggle, even if only to ‘represent' itself as the ‘leader' of that struggle, the revolutionary must not desert that struggle. To do so is to opt out of a struggle the terms of which have been determined by the class. To opt out is tantamount to asserting that the terms of the struggle have been decided by the ‘party' and not the ‘class'. Such a decision in these circumstances would be totally reactionary." (Bob Potter, Vietnam: Whose Victory? Solidarity Pamphlet 43, London 1973, p.29)
So, for the sophist, Potter, the ‘class' ‘determines' the terms of the struggle. Thus the partisans of Tito, the British 8th Army, the American Rangers in D-Day, could all be called expressions of the ‘class' ‘determining' its ‘anti-fascist' struggle in 1939-45, just like the ‘class' in Vietnam supposedly ‘determined' the struggle against Thieu and US imperialism. The apology is again a cheap Stalinist trick. In fact, it signifies the complete degeneration of these ideas, which under the pretense of supporting the class ‘from below' in fact capitulates to capitalist factions which are portrayed as expressions, however distorted, of the class itself.
In their 1970 introduction to Brendel's Theses, the Cardanites of Aberdeen Solidarity nicely showed the utter subordination of latter-day ‘councilism' to the leftist ideology of third-worldism.
"However, the struggles of the colonial peoples made a contribution to the revolutionary movement. That poorly-armed peasant populations could withstand the enormous forces of modern imperialism, shattered the myth of the invincible military-technological-scientific power of the West. The struggle also revealed to millions of people the brutality and racism of capitalism and drove many, especially youth and students, to come out in struggle against their own regimes. But the support of the colonial peoples against imperialism, does not, however, imply support for this or that organization engaged in the struggle." (Aberdeen Solidarity Pamphlet 2, p. iii)
The last sentence is a non-sequitor given what precedes it and in any case is merely thrown in to appease some bad consciences.
These conceptions are an inevitable result of the years of sterility and confusion which finally devoured the councilist movement. Menshevism was indeed resurrected by councilism (and the Bordigists who speak about the ‘colonial revolution' fervently join in this particular seance.
According to Biblical legend, Jesus resurrected Lazarus, and if all evidence is true, nobody seems to have opposed the deed. The case would have been different had Jesus chosen instead to resurrect Herod, Xerxes or any bloodthirsty Sumerian despot. This sort of "savior" would have rapidly earned the justifiable scorn of his contemporaries. The deed of Sparatacusbond, Daad en Gedachte, etc, in resurrecting Menshevism twice over is no less foul for the workers' movement.
Nodens
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/correspondance-other-groups
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-workers-organisation
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/375/period-transition
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1919-german-revolution
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/26/revolutionary-wave-1917-1923
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1917-russian-revolution
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/council-communism
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/german-and-dutch-left