1. The gradual deepening of the crisis of capitalism expresses itself more and more in chaotic oscillations between chronic inflation and brutal recession. Although each of these shifts allow the most powerful countries to win for themselves a short respite - pompously referred to as a ‘recovery' - such respites occur only to the detriment of the weakest economies. One after another, in a movement from the periphery of capitalism towards its centre, from the Third World towards the industrial metropoles, such countries are being plunged into a hopeless state of chaos. In Europe, the weak Portuguese national capital was the first to be hit in this manner. Today, while capitalism is allowing itself to be lulled by soothing talk of a ‘recovery', it is Italy's turn to play the role of ‘sick man'. Tens of billions of dollars in debt, with inflation on a ‘South American' scale, with its currency continuing to plummet in value, with a fall in productivity which defies all measures taken to counter it - Italy and the ‘Italian miracle' has become a nightmare for the bourgeoisie.
2. Today not only has the basis for this much-vaunted ‘miracle' been completely used up, it has to some extent been transformed into an additional handicap for Italian capital. The relative success of Italian capital in the period following World War II obscured the fact that Italian capitalism remained structurally weak and extremely dependent on foreign capital. Its post-war boom was based to a large extent on the existence within the country of a large backward agricultural sector which constituted a massive reserve of cheap labour power. Through the exploitation of this labour force Italian capital was able to take advantage of the period of reconstruction to grab hold of important markets in Europe, particularly in the sphere of consumer goods (automobiles, clothing, electrical appliances, etc). This favourable situation was supplemented by the fact that Italy had none of the colonial problems which served to hold back the development and competitiveness of rival European countries (France, Portugal, Spain and Belgium).
This conjunction of favourable conditions was disrupted for Italy at the end of the reconstruction period. The solution of their colonial problems found by other European countries meant that Italy no longer had any advantage over them in this area. At the same time a growing number of problems began to plague the Italian economy. In particular, at a time when a more and more restricted world market could no longer absorb Italy's products, the backward agricultural sector of the economy became a reservoir of unemployed workers who had to be supported by the state and so became a heavy weight upon the shoulders of Italian capital. Italian agriculture remained unable to supply the population with food. Moreover the rapid post-war development of industrial production in a country still deeply marked with underdevelopment created internal imbalances and destabilization on the economic, social, and political levels.
3. Such weaknesses of Italian capital have expressed themselves on the social level in the development of a movement of class struggle which ever since the ‘rampant May' of 1969 has placed the proletariat of Italy owing to the depth and extension of its struggles in the front ranks of the world proletariat. These struggles have also constituted an additional handicap for Italian capital. On the political level, the weaknesses of Italian capital have manifested themselves in a series of governmental crises which, although they did not seriously disturb the ‘boom' during the reconstruction period, have with the arrival of the economic crisis become an additional barrier against any attempt to re-establish economic order. The basis of this vulnerability within the political apparatus of Italian capital has been the growing corruption, exhaustion, and senility of the ruling party - the Christian Democracy. Basing itself on the most anachronistic sectors of Italian society and having been saddled with an almost solitary exercise of power for thirty years, the Christian Democratic Party is becoming less and less capable of managing the national capital. This deficiency within the political apparatus of the bourgeoisie is at the root of the general ‘anything goes' attitude permeating the state apparatus. At a time when the situation demands a resolute intervention on the part of the state in the affairs of the national economy, the state thus finds itself more and more impotent.
4. In spite of this accumulation of weaknesses, Italian capital does have a particularly important trump card yet to play. Although it cannot accomplish a new ‘miracle' the ‘Communist Party' (PCI) is one of the last resorts of Italian capital.
With a membership of over a million, an electorate of twelve million, and a highly structured mode of organization, the PCI is the greatest political force in Italy, the most powerful Stalinist party in the Western world, and one of the leading political parties in the whole of Europe. While exerting an extremely effective control over the workers, particularly through the main trade union body - the CGIL - the PCI has also acquired a great deal of experience in the direction of ‘public affairs'. It not only controls some of the most important towns in Italy it also exercises political control over an appreciable number of regions.
Carrying on the work it began by mobilizing the Italian proletariat for World War II (via the ‘resistance'), and by containing and repressing the class in the interests of ‘national reconstruction' after the war (the comrade minister Togliatti did not hesitate to shoot workers when he was in the government then), the PCI has distinguished itself (especially since 1969) in the loyal service it has rendered to its national capital. Whether through its ‘clean' management of the municipalities and regions under its control, through the discreet support it has given to government policies (for several years the majority of laws, including some of the most repressive legislation Parliament has adopted, have been voted for by the PCI), or through activities aimed at keeping order in the factories, this ‘party of the working class' has given proof of its "elevated sense of responsibility"... to capitalism. In the latter sphere it has shown since 1969 its great ability to recuperate the extra-and even anti-trade union organs of class struggle which emerged from the ‘rampant May' of 1969 by integrating them back into official trade union channels. By organizing ‘days of action' to demobilize the class, by taking charge via its union conveyor belt of the various movements for the ‘self-reduction' of rents and fares, by its agitation about the ‘fascist menace', and by presenting its own participation in government as the perspective for getting the country back on to its feet, the PCI has up until now succeeded in diverting the increasing discontent of the workers and thereby channeling it into a dead-end.
5. Although the PCI's policy of ‘constructive opposition' has for several years allowed Italian capital to avoid an even bigger catastrophe than that which it currently faces, the present situation has made a much more direct participation of the PCI in the management of the national capital an urgent necessity. The perspective of the PCI entering the government cannot indefinitely steep the class struggle in check if such an event is continually being postponed. The draconian austerity measures which are needed if the Italian economy is going to slow down its progress towards bankruptcy can only have a chance of being accepted by the working class if they are put into effect by a government which the workers feel to be representative of their interests. And only the PCI, by being given an effective presence in the government, can provide it with such a ‘proletarian' colouring. If the PCI spends too much time supporting austerity measures from outside the government, it runs the risk of suffering from the unpopularity such measures will give rise to while being unable to counteract this with the myth of a ‘working class victory' that the presence of ‘comrades' at the head of the state is supposed to represent.
In a more general sense the accession of the PCI to governmental office would considerably strengthen the Italian state, not only in its capacity to mystify the workers, but also in its ability to undertake all its other tasks. Presenting itself as the party of ‘order', ‘morality' and ‘social justice' the PCI is that party in the political spectrum least tied to the defence of particular petty interests or to a more or less parasitic ‘clientele'. It is therefore the best equipped to stand for the general interests of the national capital against any particular interests or privileges of groups within it. In particular it is the only party which can effectively contribute to the operation of state capitalist measures imposed by the deepening crisis on the Italian economy. In a country where the state sector already dominates the economy, the restoration of the authority of the state itself is a first and foremost requirement. It is the only party which can present measures necessary for the defence of capital as ‘great victories' for the working class and thus be in a position to use such measures as effective instruments of mystification. Moreover the strong state which the PCI calls for and explicitly proposes to help set up is the precondition for the re-establishment of order in the street and in the factories and hence for an increased rate of exploitation of the working class.
6. While the extreme vulnerability of Italian capital makes it necessary for it to adopt emergency measures internally, it also makes Italy extremely dependent on the other countries of Europe and the imperialist bloc to which it belongs - the US. This explains why the PCI has for a number of years, and more and more today, loosened its ties with Russia and made itself a partisan of the EEC and keeping Italy in NATO. Furthermore, because it is perfectly aware of the fact that the Western bloc absolutely refuses to accept a government dominated by the PCI - even if it does ardently defend the EEC and NATO - the PCI has built its whole perspective around the ‘historic compromise' (an alliance between the PCI, Christian Democracy and the Socialists) in which it would be a minority, rather than an alliance of the left alone which the PCI would overwhelmingly dominate.
In this the PCI differs from the French and Portuguese CPs who can count on an alliance with the Socialist Parties alone. In these countries the CPs are less strong than the SPs and would therefore only play a secondary role in any ‘Union of the Left'. Even if the CPs' participation in government becomes absolutely indispensable in certain western European countries, the American bloc would only allow a minority participation by the CPs in government. The eviction of the Portuguese CP from a government it had to all intent and purposes been running on its own following massive pressure being exerted by the western countries is a striking illustration of this.
The ‘Communist' Parties are above all parties of national capital. In a world divided into imperialist blocs and where each national capital has to decide its policies in relation to those blocs, they represent the faction of national capital most favourably predisposed towards an alliance with the USSR and a greater independence with respect to the US. Because they are parties of national capital, if this original orientation of the CPs enters into conflict with a coherent and effective defence of the national capital, then the CPs will jettison their previous international options. This is especially true when the country is weak and thus more dependent on its imperialist bloc. This situation is particularly applicable to the PCI which, because of the extreme dependence of Italian capital on the US since the end of World War II, has always been in the vanguard of ‘polycentrism', independence from the USSR, and ‘Eurocommunism'. However, such an orientation by the Stalinist parties should not be considered as fixed. In a different balance of forces between the imperialist blocs these parties would be the most susceptible in the national political arena to ‘revising' their position in order to tip their country toward the Russian bloc. It is for this reason that the western bloc cannot tolerate the establishment of governments dominated by the CP. Even though such governments might be loyal in the short term, in different circumstances they could swing their national capital into the other bloc.
7. Despite the urgent need for the PCI to participate in government, despite the PCI's realism and flexibility both in terms of its foreign and internal policies, Italian capital is exhibiting the greatest hesitation and encountering great difficulties in playing this vital card. The reason for this is the enormous pressure being exerted by the American government and the governments of the major western European countries against Italian capital resorting to this solution. (The French government included - it has more and more abandoned the ‘independent' line of Gaullism). Important sectors of the American bourgeoisie - the so-called liberals - have understood that the accession of the PCI to governmental responsibility is inevitable. In particular they have understood that an ally sunk into a state of chaos is in no position to carry out its functions within the bloc, both from an economic and military point of view. The present ruling team in America showed its own understanding when it put pressure on the Spanish bourgeoisie to abandon the political structures inherited from the Franco era since such a political apparatus is less and less capable of dealing with Spain's social and economic problems. But the ‘democratization' programme prescribed for Spain does not necessarily imply the entry of the PCE into government. In the case of Italy, the American government is still holding to a policy of resolute resistance to any governmental formula that includes the PCI. Whether in the name of ‘defending democracy' or defending the Atlantic Alliance, it is making a great deal of noise, even to the extent of threatening economic sanctions, in order to dissuade the Italian bourgeoisie from resorting to such a solution. This is a striking example of one of the aspects of the political crisis facing the bourgeoisie as a result of the economic crisis: the contradiction between the essentially national interests of capital and the necessity to strengthen the blocs in response to growing inter-imperialist tensions. For the moment, as long as the survival of capitalism itself is not at stake, the blocs tend to give priority to their immediate general interests, (ie the interests of the dominant power) over and above the particular difficulties of the national capitals which make up the blocs - sometimes to the detriment of their future interests.
8. In Italy itself, this resolute opposition orchestrated by the US to any governmental role for the PCI, has determined allies in the most anachronistic strata of Italian capital. This strata includes those most threatened by the political and economic house-cleaning advocated by the PCI and who, apart from those who are behind the MSI, are grouped around the right of the Christian Democracy under the leadership of Fanfani. However, this opposition up until now has only been decisive because extremely important strata of the Italian bourgeoisie remain very distrustful of the PCI. Its democratic and pro-Atlantic turns have not obscured the fact that the PCI belongs to a particular category of capitalist parties. It is one of those parties which is most resolute in defending the general tendency towards state capitalism and which is always liable, if the situation demands it to eliminate all the factions of the bourgeoisie who are tied to individual property, both on the economic level (statification of capital) and on the political level (the one party state). Even if decisive sectors of Italian capital, of which the former ‘boss of bosses' Giovanni Agneli is a significant representative, have become convinced of the necessity for the PCI to enter the government, they will try to obtain the maximum guarantees that the PCI will not embark upon any ‘totalitarian' course at their expense.
9. The recent Italian elections have not fundamentally modified this situation. By maintaining the position of the Christian Democracy electorally - a party which is so used up and discredited - the elections served to highlight the importance of the opposition to the PCI coming into the government. The Christian Democrats under Fanfani's leadership based its whole election campaign on this issue. However, while spreading alarm among the most backward sectors of the bourgeoisie, the powerful advance of the PCI has also strikingly demonstrated to the ruling class the inevitability of the ‘historic compromise' - the PCI's participation in government. The polarization engendered by the electoral confrontation has not, despite the hopes of the right-wing of the Christian Democracy, led to an irremediable break between the two main parties of the political apparatus of Italian capital. By eliminating any possibility of going back to the ‘centre-left' formula which has been used until recently, the result of the elections has pointed out for the whole Italian bourgeoisie the path that it must follow: an alliance between the two main parties. This is the meaning of the agreements between the parties of the ‘constitutional arc' concerning the allocation of a certain number of parliamentary appointments which, in the context of Italian politics, are actually posts in the executive.
These agreements, a new step towards the ‘historic compromise', are the practical expression of the fact that the objective needs of the whole national capital must in the end take precedence over the resistance put up by this or that faction of the bourgeoisie. However, the delay in this solution being achieved is an expression of the continuing importance of the resistance to it, which the recent elections have not been able to overcome. In fact, although the recent elections have clarified what is at stake in the Italian political game and clearly shown to the ruling class the path that it must follow, they have also partly tied its hands. Since it has been so obviously restored to power on the basis of its refusal to conclude the ‘compromise' with the PCI, the Christian Democracy cannot for the moment throw away all its electoral promises and involve itself fully in such a compromise.
The situation created by the Italian elections highlights the fact that, while electoral and parliamentary mechanisms still constitute an effective instrument for the mystification of the working class in the most developed countries, they can equally serve as an obstacle to the national capital's adoption of measures most appropriate for the defence of its interests. As an expression of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production inaugurated by World War I, the general tendency towards state capitalism which has already emptied Parliament of any real power to the benefit of the executive wing of the state, tends more and more to enter into conflict with the vestiges of parliamentary bourgeois democracy which has been inherited from the system's ascendant phase. This is particularly the case in the weakest countries where the general tendency towards state capitalism is at its strongest.
10. The coming to power of the PCI is inevitable, but the delay in this happening is another manifestation of the insoluble contradictions which capitalism faces. A coherent defence of capital can only take place at a national level, but each nation, especially in the Western bloc, is divided internally into a host of contradictory interests. Because the Italian bourgeoisie has not yet called upon the PCI to assume governmental office, this shouldn't be interpreted as the result of a machiavellian plan to play the card of the PCI as late as possible, when the economic and social situation is even worse. Apart from the fact that the bourgeoisie -- imprisoned as it is by its own prejudices - is generally incapable of achieving a long term vision of how to defend its interests, today in Italy it would have nothing to gain from putting off still further the economic and political measures of ‘national salvation' that the situation demands. And these measures require the institution of the ‘historic compromise'. The more these economic measures are put off the harder it will be for Italian capital to get back on its feet even with the PCI in power. Similarly, the bourgeoisie has no interest in waiting for the class struggle to really get going before applying more effective methods of containment and mystification. Measures imposed in the heat of struggle are always less effective than preventative measures, since they are less sophisticated than the latter and the instability which gives rise to them can never be totally re-absorbed. Since it would be presented in any circumstances as a ‘victory for the working class', the coming to power of the left in response to a massive class mobilization would tend to instill in the workers the idea that ‘it pays to struggle', whereas all the efforts of the bourgeoisie are aimed at demonstrating the contrary.
These structural contradictions of capital, which oblige it to carry out a pragmatic short term policy in the face of the threat posed by the working class, constitute a highly favourable factor for the proletariat in its ultimate confrontation with the existing social order. However, all these antagonisms within the ruling class itself, both on the national and international level, must not lead the revolutionary class to forget that, in the face of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie maintains a fundamental unity which it can reinforce at the most crucial moments - even if this means sacrificing important factions of its own class - in order to safeguard what is essential: the maintenance of capitalist relations of production. In particular the workers today must reject any idea of trying to make use of conflicts within the ruling class by supporting one faction against another: democracy against fascism, state capital against private capital, this nation against that nation, etc. For over half a century, such ‘tactics' have never led to the weakening of capitalism, but they have always led to the negation of the autonomy and unity of the working class, and in the end, to its defeat.
11. Owing to its geographic location, the weight of its economy, and the combativity of its working class, Italy occupies an extremely important position in Europe against which the bourgeoisie can counter-pose a highly sophisticated arsenal. Moreover the proletariat of Italy has since the First World War benefited from one of the richest veins of experience, both from the practical and the political-theoretical point of view (Labriola, Bordiga, the Italian Left).
For some time Portugal operated as an important laboratory for all the various ‘solutions' the bourgeoisie has put forward to ward off the crisis. But with the further deterioration of the economic, political, and social situation, Spain appeared as one of the weak links of capitalism. This was evidenced in the intensity of social conflicts taking place there and the pronounced delay of the bourgeoisie in setting up the appropriate structures to limit and direct these conflicts. With the brutal unfolding of the crisis in Italy, the axis of the social-political situation in Europe is today passing through this country.
For a whole period this axis will continue to be centred both in Spain and Italy. Events in Spain, which the European bourgeoisie will exploit to the utmost in order to set its anti-fascist mystifications into operation, will allow revolutionaries and the class as whole to draw a whole number of lessons. However, as the crisis and the class struggle develop, the situation in Italy will tend to come to the forefront to the extent that Italy is a country where since 1969 the class struggle has attained one of its highest levels, while at the same time Italy's general characteristics closely resemble those of the main capitalist metropoles of Europe. In this sense the experience that comes out of the future social conflicts in Italy will be extremely important both to the bourgeoisies of these metropoles and to the proletariat and its vanguard.
12. Up until now one of the general characteristics of the present situation, exemplified significantly in Italy where the class struggle has achieved such high levels of expression, is the existence of an enormous gap between the depth of the political crisis of the bourgeoisie reflecting the depth of the economic crisis, and the still-limited degree of mobilization and consciousness within the working class. This contrast is notable in Italy where the first manifestations of the crisis provoked a generalized proletarian response in 1969 that managed to a great extent to break free of the trade union straight jacket. Today however the crisis has produced a much more limited proletarian response entirely kept under control by the unions, despite its increased gravity.
The cause of this gap resides in the weight of mystification which the left and the leftists have systematically developed within the working class by presenting the coming to power of the left as a solution to the crisis, and the way of obtaining a ‘victory' that the workers have not been able to obtain through economic struggle. This mystification is made possible by the difficulty the class has in disentangling itself from the deepest counter-revolution it has ever known. The role of the leftists in Italy, particularly those regrouped in the ‘Proletarian Democracy' electoral cartel, has been overwhelmingly important. Through their left-wing anti-fascism (more ‘radical' than that of the PCI) and their ability to take charge of sectors of the class like the unemployed who tend to escape the control of the PCI and the unions, coupled with their advocacy of a ‘working class alternative' in the form of a Socialist Party/Communist Party leftist government, they have undertaken with a gusto their task as touts of the capitalist left. Far from being an expression of the development of consciousness in the class, the development of these leftist currents as the evolution of the situation in Italy over the last seven years has shown, represents a secretion by the capitalist organism of anti-bodies against the virus of class struggle. We will see these antibodies coming into existence alongside the development of the class struggle in all countries in the future. Such anti-bodies serve the purpose of guiding back into the official left with its policies of ‘critical' support, all those elements of the class who begin to move away from it.
The gap existing between the level of the crisis and the level of class struggle will not be prolonged indefinitely. Today when the left can no longer be content with carrying out its capitalist functions in opposition but is more and more constrained to take up its governmental responsibilities, the conditions are ripening for the disappearance of this gap. If at the beginning the governments of the left will allow a more effective containment of the class in the interests of capital to take place, their inevitable economic bankruptcy and the increasingly violent anti-working class measures the irresolvable crisis will force them to impose, will eventually undermine the mystifications which today obscure the consciousness of the proletariat.
The International Communist Current
“When the proletariat,” Marx tells us, “calls for the destruction of the existing world order, it is simply expressing the secret of its own existence, because it constitutes the actual destruction of this world order.”
However this destruction can in no way be a blind and strictly predetermined act - somehow the direct product, the mechanical result of a certain number of economic causes. On the contrary it demands of its subject a fully developed consciousness of the goal to be attained. But if one holds to a bourgeois vision of history, this consciousness, defined as an awareness that one has of one’s own existence, is limited to the subjective and intellectual category of a sum of ideas applied to the interpretation of reality.
For all bourgeois science, thought, consciousness, detached from the general movement of matter, is above all the affair of isolated individuals or groups of individuals with some vague interests in common. Thus, because its reasoning is unable to break free from the gross distortions of the dominant ideology, bourgeois science conceives of the process of gaining consciousness only as a purely mental mechanism which leads an individual, or even a social group, to gain a consciousness of what he (or it) is, through a process of stimulus-reactionreflection-action. By transforming this movement of an isolated individual into the dynamic of a social class, this vision is led to depict and fix social classes in individual and mythical terms. The proletariat thus appears solidified, objectified as a simple economic category. It is reduced to a kind of compact to ‘gain consciousnesses’ as a single entity of what it is and what it has to accomplish. And from this learned two-dimensional view of society the conclusion is reached that the proletariat is now simply a class-for-capital; or that it is enough for it to wait, a ‘teeming mass’, for consciousness to come simultaneously and homogeneously into the brain of each worker; or that it is nothing more than a sort of human body, with the party for a head, the workers’ councils for legs, etc ...
This completely erroneous way of conceiving of the historic process of a social class, first criticized by Marx in the Theses on Feuerbach, is explained by the fact that the bourgeoisie, unable to question its own existence, can only think in terms of stratifications, categories and arbitrary divisions. For the bourgeoisie there is only the complete and finished reality of a world divorced from practice, unchanging and dead matter, thought surrounding reality like a veil, neither able to transform itself nor reality itself. Form and content, perceived object and conceived subject, idea and matter, theory and practice, are joined, stuck hack to back and bonded inseparably but also differentiated, envisaged each according to a mode of existence of its own. The world of objects is content to ‘be there’. As for their unity, which in the bourgeois mind can be no more than that of parallel lines which meet at infinity, it is reduced to no more than an intellectual conjuring trick.
In fact it is the failure of all vulgar materialism that, even if it recognizes the determination of matter it only considers the object in a form independent of and exterior to the subject, and not as human practice. Class consciousness has only to be condensed into a theoretical programme, and held by a minority while the proletariat acts in the material world unable to achieve consciousness without the help of an intermediary, an indispensable link, the party which provides the mediation between experience and class consciousness. Or else proletarian class consciousness is no more than a sort of instructive, immediate response to external stimuli and revolutionaries - for fear of disturbing and violating this natural metabolism, can only bury their heads in the sand like ostriches and wait for things to happen spontaneously.
Revolutionaries themselves cannot be content with this simplistic view; because they are aware that they have not arrived at their vision of reality by chance, nor is it the product of individual will; because the essential role they play in social reality cannot be restricted to an intellectual or empirical description of the objective and subjective conditions of the communist revolution. And what might seem too abstract or too theoretical is only a necessary step, a moment in the practice of their organized intervention. Conceiving of a movement theoretically, trying to get a mental ‘picture’ of a process, is rather like wanting to float down a river without leaving the bank. This is why revolutionaries, having no interests separate from those of the proletariat, cannot be content with abstract representations or schemas, with journalistic or day-to-day descriptions of social reality. Part of a whole, products of and active factors in an historical process, their theoretical reflections signify, in the last instance, the adoption of political positions on reality, a desire to radically transform society. Today in the era of social revolution, when the proletariat is re-emerging onto the historical scene, their intervention is even more vital - after a half-century of counter-revolution and confusion which has weighed heavily on the class struggle, grossly falsifying revolutionary theory, leading some groups into the swamp of degeneration, and demanding of today’s revolutionary minorities an indispensable theoretical clarification as a precondition for organized practice within the class.
For this reason, these reflections on class consciousness and the role of revolutionaries and the party must absolutely not be approached from their purely theoretical aspect. If the first elements of the analysis put forward here have been confined to tracing the broad outlines, other factors taken from the actual experience of class struggle will reinforce, modify and clarify a number of points. In the last analysis only the activity of the class can confirm or invalidate revolutionary theory. As Marx wrote in the Theses on Feuerbach: “All systems which lead theory towards mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the understanding of this practice.” (Thesis no.8).
Conditions of the communist revolution1. When the capitalist mode of production has exhausted its usefulness, it can only be superseded by the action of a class in which consciousness is generalized and which is united on a world scale: the proletariat. And this condition is of such central importance because it is the only one which enables us to clarify the specific character of the communist revolution, and the passage from a mode of production based on the law of value to a higher mode of existence. In fact there is a gulf between what humanity has experienced up to now, on the level of its historical development, and the qualitative leap for which it is preparing itself, a leap which will bring the present period to a close and liberate man from all exploitation. And this immense difference is all the more difficult to conceive of since the historical succession of different modes of production has unfolded as a necessary, determined, and more or less unconscious process; since up until the present period of time the motive force had been a revolutionary class which already possessed economic power within the old outmoded system of production. This qualitative difference is reflected in the historic level of consciousness which is demanded for the destruction of the capitalist mode of production and the transition towards communism. This consciousness, far from being reducible to a simple mental, ideological or individual phenomenon, must be placed within the context of a social class.
2. The concept of social class comprises not simply an economic classification or category, or a sum of isolated individuals. It is essentially based on a historical evolution which forges common political interests. The proletariat does not really exist as a class except through the historical development which places it in mortal confrontation with capitalism, and this development itself is fundamentally only real in the process of coming to consciousness which accompanies it. The communist revolution differs fundamentally from all previous revolutions to the extent that for the first time in the history of humanity a revolutionary class, the bearer of new social relations, does not possess any economic power within the old society. The proletariat is the first and the last revolutionary class in history which is also an exploited class. This clearly shows that it must, because of the socio-economic position that it occupies in the capitalist mode of production, be fully conscious of its historic goals. In fact it is the only class which has the subjective and objective possibility of coming to an understanding of the whole of society. The proletariat has no roots in capitalism’s soil; it has no possibility of developing an ideology on the basis of these roots, because it does not possess within itself the seeds of a new exploitation of man by man.
Since ideology presupposes a politico-juridical superstructure and an economic infrastructure determined by the productive forces which continue to dominate man, the process of coming to consciousness can, for the proletariat, only pose itself as a necessary precondition for the capture of power and the complete dismantling of the capitalist infrastructure.
3. The proletariat is the only class in history for which the historic necessity to destroy the whole system of exploitation coincides completely with its interests as a revolutionary class, interests which are themselves linked to the interests of the whole of humanity. No other class or social strata in society can bring about this historic future. This is why these classes cannot reach a consciousness of the necessity to transform the whole of society, even if they have vague awareness of the social barbarism which surrounds them (an awareness which is however always recuperated in one way or another by the dominant class and the blindness of bourgeois ideology). From a capitalist and thus an ideological point of view, realization of the historic and transitory character of society is obviously impossible. For the bourgeoisie, social relations are fixed, eternal, existing outside the realm of human will. Although the bourgeoisie uses its mystifications against the working class more or less clear-sightedly, its whole aim is to banish all awareness of the class struggle. In this way the objective limits of capitalist production determine the limits of its consciousness, which because of these limitations can never be more than mere ideology. It is in this context that the principal bourgeois mystifications today attempt to make the proletariat believe that a new kind of management more appropriate to the system could put off the collapse of capitalism indefinitely.
4. Class consciousness, far from coinciding with ideology, is above all its principal negation, its fundamental antithesis. Today it is above all a question of drawing humanity from the lethargy in which it is submerged, of making the world conscious of itself and its actions - which no ideology can possibly achieve. Because ideology, the product of economic factors and an alienated social reality, attributes an autonomous existence to objects, and to consciousness a power of abstraction divorced from all material contingencies, it is impossible for it to undertake the critical or practical transformation of society. Revolutionary class consciousness, far from preceding action so as to direct it towards a precise aim, is above all the process of transforming society; a living process which, as a product of the development and exacerbation of the contradictions of the decadent capitalist mode of production, forces a social class to realize the essence of its existence through a practical and theoretical (and thus conscious) negation of its conditions of life. The history of this process includes the history of proletarian struggle, and that of the revolutionary minorities which have arisen as an integral part of this struggle.
The characteristics of coming to consciousness1. The fundamental differences between ideology and class consciousness are based on the origin itself of ideology and its material roots. These roots reach back into the history of the division of labour, the separation of the producers from what they produce, the independence of the relations of production and the domination of man by the material form of his own labour. The laws inherent in capitalism, laws which are characterized by the domination of dead labour over living labour, the domination of exchange value over use value and the fetishism of value, lead to the transformation of social relations into relations between things, and allow the development of juridical relations whose point of departure is the isolated individual.
It is also these laws which through the development of specialization prevent man from seeing things as a totality, and imprison him in a series of separate categories, isolated and independent from one another (the nation, the factory, the neighbourhood etc ...). The vision of totality becomes nothing more than a simple addition of different branches of knowledge; knowledge which is itself the exclusive property of specialists.
For its part, class consciousness appears as a vision of totality, the consciousness of the class as a whole. This can only be a wholly collective process, Its point of departure is a class united in struggle, destined to destroy capitalist social relations: it implies the domination of the whole over the parts. But this totality can only be posed if the subject which poses it is itself a totality, and only if the subject is a class does it possess this character of a totality. This is why to become a unified, conscious class, the proletariat will have to smash all barriers, all separation, all frontiers whatsoever, and impose the dictatorship of its workers’ councils beyond national barriers.
Another consequence of the reification of social consciousness is the separation between parts and the whole. In this period of capitalist decadence, where all reform has become impossible and where revolution is the order of the day, economic struggles tend to transform themselves into political struggles and openly confront the system. The proletariat is led to consciously transform society: this is why for the proletariat the vision of totality implies an understanding of the dialectical contradiction between its immediate interests and the final goals, between an isolated moment and the totality. From the isolated moment, in other words in situations where the class is atomized and mystified and an integral part of the capitalist system, the proletariat must go on to unite on a world scale and transform itself from an economic category to a revolutionary class. Only the proletariat is able to achieve this unification as a conscious class, because the nature of associated labour gives it the possibility of this global vision.
2. The nature of this coming to consciousness, which makes it above all a class consciousness, allows us to understand the fundamental opposition which at present exists between ideology and consciousness. And it is not out of linguistic purism that we affirm that there is no proletarian ideology or revolutionary science, and further that a revolutionary minority can never be the ‘bearer’ or the ‘embodiment’ of this class consciousness. Reducing a whole historical phenomenon, at once practical and theoretical, to a mere reflection crystallized in the party programme, Leninists and Bordigists of every tendency understand the nature of class consciousness with the same flawed reasoning that allows mystics to affirm that the body of Christ is the incarnation of the Holy Ghost.
In fact both ideology and mysticism owe their existence to the fact that the separation between manual and intellectual work has allowed the development of a mode of thought which is characterized by the distance it attempts to place between its own reality and the material conditions of its existence, and by its concern to appear as independent and autonomous thought, as the unique causal agent which animates matter.
Conceiving of reality as a series of mediations, necessary steps between man and matter, bourgeois ideology refuses to recognize its real origins. Attributing to reality an independent existence, bourgeois ideology opposes to metaphysical materialism an idealism of action, by considering theoretical acumen as the only valid and true cause of action and by relegating practice to its lowest ‘natural’ form.
For its part, class consciousness coincides fully with social reality, its raison d’etre being a product of the historical development of the contradiction between the productive forces and the relations of production. The need for a radical transformation of the relations of production demands a true, global vision of the whole of social reality.
Class consciousness recognizes its origins and its object: the proletariat, the living kernel of production, a social class in a constant state of becoming. The process of the proletariat’s coming to consciousness, based on the dialectical unity between being and thought, rejects any form of intermediary or mediation between existence and consciousness. Proletarian class consciousness becomes conscious of itself and in this way restores the unity between man and reality.
3. The proletarian is forced to sell his labour power as a mere object in relation to the whole of his personality, and it is this objectivity, this rupture created between labour power, an object condemned to exploitation and the subject who sells it, which makes for the possibility of gaining consciousness. It is through its struggle against capitalist exploitation that the proletariat is able to perceive itself at the same time as the subject and the object of understanding. This perception, and the proletariat’s awareness of its own condition of extreme poverty and inhumanity, is at the same time the exposure and destruction of the whole of society.
Thus by destroying the whole of society the proletariat simply expresses the essence of its own existence, being itself a negation of society (the only social relation existing between capitalism and the proletariat being the class struggle). The self-realization of the proletariat as a class-for-itself is achieved through the destruction of the system; consciousness is both a factor and a product of this process. For the proletariat the understanding of itself is the understanding of the essence of society; it arrives not simply at a consciousness about an object, but at a direct consciousness of the object itself. To this extent it is already practice and effects a modification of the object. By recognizing the objective character of labour as a commodity this process can expose the fetishism of commodities and reveal the human character of the labour-capital relation.
The illusions, mystifications and barriers imposed on thought by ideology are thus simply the mental expressions of a reality itself reified by an economic structure and their negation cannot be accomplished by a simple effort of will, but only by overcoming them in practice. This is why class consciousness is not simply a theoretical calling into question of capitalist society but proceeds above all from a critique and a material destruction of the system as a whole. Class consciousness, by recognizing the historical nature of economic laws, exposes the historic and transitory character of the capitalist mode of production, describes the objective limits of this mode of production and analyzes the historical periods of society. This exposure is a process which joins theory and practice to the extent that each illusion which is dispelled, each mystification exposed, corresponds to a real desire to destroy wage slavery.
4. However, if this historic consciousness emerges from the need for the proletariat to gain an overall understanding of reality from a class viewpoint, this does not in itself means that the proletariat will immediately attain this understanding. On the contrary, the class character of this process exactly corresponds to the heterogeneous and painful development of working class practice and theory, which right from the very beginning confronted the coercive pressures of the bourgeoisie.
The proletariat, even when unified in times of struggle, cannot act as a single entity mechanically directed towards its goal. The dialectical contradiction between its position as a revolutionary class and an exploited class, its total destitution within society, means that it is the first victim of bourgeois ideology. Unable to develop its consciousness along the set lines of an ideology, or a series of practical ‘recipes’, the proletariat can only come to consciousness of its position through a real process linked to the material conditions of its social existence. It is these objective conditions and the ever-present oppression of the dominant ideology which constrain the proletariat, as an integral part of the tendency to constitute itself as a revolutionary class, to secrete revolutionary minorities in order to accelerate the process of theorization of its historic acquisitions, and the diffusion of these within the class struggle. Class consciousness is thus not a ‘mirror’ of reality, a mechanical reflection of the economic situation of the working class (if this were true it would have no active role to play), and is not the spontaneous product of the soil of capitalist exploitation.
In reality class struggle arises from the convergence of several factors: the economic premises, although indispensable, are not in themselves sufficient. The economic struggle of the proletariat is not enough to engender a whole theoretical and practical movement; it doesn’t have magic creative powers, like the single, all-powerful force which is idolized by certain spontaneists. Class struggle is not an entity in itself, separated from the world and detonator of the movement of matter, it is the world, forged by it and forging it in its turn. For this reason, only the fusion of a number of elements, the product of the development of the class struggle itself, can in the last analysis lead socialist consciousness to its highest historical level. Fundamentally these elements are the following:
-- the economic constraints to which the proletariat is subjected and its position as an exploited class;
-- the objective conditions of the period and the level reached by the contradictions of the system (the decadence of capitalism, deepening of the crisis);
-- the level of class struggle in response to the situation, and the more or less developed tendency for the proletariat to organize itself as an autonomous class;
-- the increasingly decisive influence of revolutionary groups in the class struggle and the ability of the proletariat to re-appropriate its revolutionary theory.
None of these elements can, seen in isolation, be detached from the others and be posed as a single basic cause of the whole process. It is quite clear that economic constraints and revolutionary theory impose themselves as active factors in the development of proletarian consciousness, but they do not constitute the primary cause of the process. To look for a basic, isolated cause of a whole process leads to the fossilization of this process and to completely sterile debates like ‘which came first, the chicken or the egg?’.
The role of revolutionaries and partyTo define proletarian consciousness as an historic process characteristic of a social class, and characterized by the affirmation of the ‘conscious being’ on the scene of history, is to go no further than a simple statement of fact. To stop at this point would leave us with nothing more than a theoretical dissertation on the characteristics of class consciousness with no understanding of the objective forces which have led us to formulate these definitions. In fact it is by going beyond the purely theoretical aspect of their activity that revolutionaries gain a consciousness of their historical role as an active part of a whole. One can’t knock down a wall by blowing at it, or destroy a whole system of exploitation with pious words and philosophical reflections. It is by fully taking up their responsibilities to the working class that revolutionaries can accelerate the process of gaining consciousness and the constitution of the proletariat as an autonomous class. For revolutionaries this responsibility necessitates a clear vision of their function, the identification of the historic tasks for which they have been engendered.
1. The nature and function of revolutionary groups and of the party can only really be explained through the profoundly contradictory nature of the process of the proletariat’s coming to consciousness. This is a contradiction which underlies and accompanies the development of class struggle itself, and will continue to be a feature of the period of transition right up to the final disappearance of classes: the contradiction between the position of the working class as an exploited class and its historic tasks which will lead to the abolition of all exploitation; the contradiction between the proletariat’s inability to create a ‘proletarian ideology’ on the basis of any kind of economic power, and the over-riding need to gain a theoretical understanding of the lessons of its struggle, to be fully conscious of its historic goals. Thus the proletariat is force:
-- on the one hand to put into practice in its day-to-day struggles the fundamental watchword of the communist revolution: “the emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves”;
and on the other hand to forge the indispensable theoretical weapons for its conscious emancipation, even though it is impossible for the proletariat to break completely from the hold of the dominant ideology.
Revolutionary minorities thus appear as products of this contradictory need. They arise as an integral part of the proletariat and yet are not necessarily members of the working class in a sociological sense. Because the economically dominant class controls the material and ideological means of production, the proletariat cannot give birth to a culture or ideology ‘sociologically intrinsic’ to itself, since this would imply an economic interest, and thus an interest in the perpetration of its position as an exploited class. For this reason revolutionaries are defined as members of the proletariat (according to political criteria); their task is the theoretical elaboration of the historic lessons of the class, and to ensure that these lessons are understood on the widest possible scale.
2. Because the proletariat has to consciously overthrow the old society, this transformation, at once practical and theoretical, demands a clear vision, a keen understanding of “the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement” (Marx, The Communist Manifesto). So long as class antagonism and capitalist exploitation continue to exist, this vision of the final goals of the movement will continue to be confronted with the coercive influence of bourgeois ideology. For this reason this vision will not immediately be granted to the majority of the proletariat. The diffusion and growth of revolutionary theory, and consciousness of the final goals of the proletarian revolution within the class as a whole, cannot take the form of a ‘natural’ phenomenon, or a mathematical and linear progression: above all it is the product of an organized effort by the class. This conscious attempt by the proletariat to equip itself with a revolutionary theory, and to draw lessons from its past struggles, takes a material form in the appearance of revolutionary minorities and their constitution in pre-revolutionary periods into a party.
This constant striving of the proletariat itself towards the constitution of a revolutionary party is absolutely not comparable to the voluntarist action of individuals or groups of individuals who think that the construction of a revolutionary party is a substitute for action by the class as a whole. The fact that revolutionary theory appears as the theory of revolutionary groups does not make it a result of individual effort or the ‘discovery’ of “this or that would-be universal reformer” (Marx, The Communist Manifesto). It is the concretization of the development of actual class struggle, and arises in response to a vital need in the proletariat.
3. The proletariat is thus not considered as a class on an abstract level, but on the level of its real actions, its incessant struggle to confront the objective conditions of the period. From this historic practice there has arisen, not a series of dogmatic principles applied to the class struggle like a theoretical ‘recipe’, but the theoretical expression of this experience. Revolutionary theory does not constitute a definitive and invariant body of principles, but a true reflection of the concrete activity of the proletariat, made explicit and generalized on a theoretical level by revolutionary groups and re-appropriated by the class. Thus each problem solved by the struggle and self-organization of the class corresponds to a new theoretical gain, which will itself be transformed into actual practice by the intervention of revolutionaries in future struggles. Thus theory, product of the social existence of struggles, draws its energy from practice, and in turn influences the political clarity of coming struggles.
Developing out of the concrete struggles of the class, revolutionary theory, originally the expression of revolutionary groups does not remain their exclusive property, like a hidden treasure. On the contrary, the very role of revolutionaries and the party concretizes the fundamental concern of the proletariat to re-appropriate its historical lessons and to generalize them as widely as possible. Their function is to diffuse revolutionary theory within the class, understanding that this process is a phenomenon occurring within the proletariat itself, and that it isn’t a question of ‘injecting’ theory into practice, or of seeing theory as some sort of chemical yeast which activates a whole historical process.
Theory and practice complement and interpenetrate one another. To concentrate on one at the expense of the other, to insist that theory is the primal cause, or on the other wand to ignore the active side of theory, is to risk being lead down the dangerous paths of voluntarism or academicism.
4. It is not the existence of revolutionary groups which makes the proletariat a revolutionary class. Even if the bourgeoisie were to suppress every revolutionary in the world, it would be simply putting back the hour of its death, without being able to suppress the class struggle or prevent the proletariat from throwing up new groups of revolutionaries. By destroying the first blossoms on a tree, one can’t definitively halt the whole process of its reproduction.
For this reason revolutionaries, while having no interests distinct from those of the class, are at the same time not synonymous with it. They are only a part of it, the most resolute part. Revolutionaries are not the general staff of an unconscious and obedient army, nor are they the helmsmen of the revolution. They trace the broad outlines of the struggle and point out the final aims of the movement. Their function is not to prepare to take on the ‘management’ of workers’ struggles or to issue the “correct slogans (which) organically give birth to the conditions and possibilities for the technical organization of the proletariat” (Lukacs). Their role is not to organize the class, to direct the autonomous organization of the class by means of practical ‘recipes’ for this or that form of unitary organization, but to always put forward the general political aims of the movement.
5. Revolutionaries and the party cannot substitute themselves for the class. This implies that their function, while being indispensable, does not constitute an end in itself, a complete and perfect process which can replace the activity of the proletariat itself, or inject into the spontaneous mass class movement the truth which is inherent to it, or ‘raise’ the proletariat from the level of its primitive economic needs to conscious revolutionary activity. This is why, while being an active and constituent part of the proletariat, which participates fully in the proletariat’s coming to consciousness, the party is in no way a mediator between theory and practice, experience and consciousness. Both of them, the party and the class, are the material unity between theory and practice; there is no need for this unity - identical in both party and class - to be the responsibility of an intermediary (since an intermediary can only really be placed between two initially separate entities). This unity is a living process which determines both the party and the class as a whole and the class’s unitary organization in workers’ councils. To make the party the mediation between theory and practice comes down to conceiving of theory as external to the proletariat, as the sole property of the party, which thus becomes the only force able to ‘draw the sense out of praxis’; it comes down to denying all possibility of the political and conscious seizure of power by the proletariat. Following this reasoning, the workers’ councils would become empty shells, administrative and statified organizations. The party would be the sole bearer of revolutionary content within the councils. In which case it would be very logical to assign to the party the actual direction of the dictatorship over society and to put the party at the head of the state and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The party is not a directive or executive organization, an organ created by the proletariat for the seizure for power. The idea that the direction of the workers’ dictatorship is the task of a single revolutionary party constituted as a mass party during the post-revolutionary period, shows a grave misunderstanding of the real political goals of the party. In fact the party does not aim at disproportionate growth so as to incorporate as many elements as possible into itself. Its function is not that of a single totalitarian state party. On the contrary it will always remain the expression of a part of the class and its raison d’être will tend to disappear in proportion to the growth of socialist consciousness within the class as a whole.
The fact that the party does not have the task of substituting itself for the class in no way implies that its existence represents a last resort, a necessary evil which should be kept in check or avoided as much as possible. Revolutionaries and the party are necessary products, indispensable elements in the process of the proletariat’s coming to consciousness. To negate their function using the excuse of substitutionist errors in the past is to display a sterile purism; it is to disarm the proletariat of one of its most vital weapons. The historic task of revolutionaries and the party, far from representing some sort of panacea, forms part of a general tendency for the proletariat to constitute itself as a conscious revolutionary class. Revolutionaries are the most combative and resolute elements within the working class; they develop an organized intervention within the class struggle with the perspective of putting forward the final goals of the movement. Their active participation within the class struggle exercises a decisive influence on the general orientation of the movement, an influence which can actually show material results in the general political direction of the struggle, the acceleration of the constitution of the proletariat as an autonomous class with the aim of seizing power and destroying wage slavery.
ConclusionThe rift between the relations of production and the means of production has reached such a high level in the period following World War I that today the obviously mendacious character of the ideologies corresponding to these social relations makes it inadequate and forces the bourgeoisie to use a whole series of mystifications which consist in diverting workers’ struggles from their true end.
These basic differences from the ascendant period fundamentally affect the unity between theory and practice; the developments of the objective conditions for the communist revolution have strengthened this unity. In the period of decadence the communist revolution becomes an objective possibility and the struggles of the class are radicalized in this direction; theory tends more and more to see class consciousness as a true unity of theory and practice, thus affirming itself as the simple expression of a conscious unity.
The strengthening of the unity between the social being of the proletariat and its theory expresses itself, throughout the history of the working class in the period of decadence, in the appearance of revolutionary organizations of the class which no longer see their objectives as the amelioration of the living conditions of the proletariat inside capitalism, but clearly put forward for the working class the violent destruction of the capitalist mode of production and the taking of political power through its own autonomous organizations.
In the ascendant period of capitalism, when the permanent organization of the proletariat in its class parties and unions represented its own struggles for real and lasting reforms, the appearance of revolutionary minorities occurred within a limited framework. Today all permanent forms of organization of the class are inevitably doomed to disappear or be integrated into the counter-revolution. As for revolutionary minorities, they are not limited simply to theorizing the lessons of the experience of the proletariat; their practice within the class struggle can be a real contribution to the transformation and clarification of the historical perspective of the class. Theory tends not only simply to be realized in practice, but reality itself changes and begins to incorporate thought; that is to say, that the proletariat tends to re-appropriate theory for itself, by developing in struggle an awareness of the class frontiers which express the acquisitions of its historic past.
Thus, the revolutionary programme isn’t simply a sum of more or less flexible positions following the fluctuations of history. It is the result of the historic link which unites the different moments of the appearance of the proletariat as a class thinking and struggling for its historic mission, which is the destruction of capitalism.
The intervention of revolutionaries represents nothing more than the attempt of the proletariat to reach an understanding of its real interests by going beyond a simple empirical statement of particular phenomena; it is the attempt to find the relationship between these phenomena by using the general principles drawn from its historic experience.
Because the incessant defence of class frontiers, the increasingly profound clarification of the historic goals of the proletariat simply concretizes, in the final analysis, the necessity for it to be fully conscious of its practice, the existence of revolutionary organizations is truly a product of this necessity. Because this coming to consciousness both precedes and completes the taking of power by the proletariat through the workers’ councils, it heralds a mode of production in which men, finally masters of the productive forces, will develop them in a fully conscious manner in order to end the reign of necessity and begin the reign of freedom.
J.L.
August 1976
In the fourth number of the International Review we published the first in a series of articles taken from Bilan, covering the period from the fall of the Primo de Rivera regime and the monarchy to the events of 1936. In these articles, Bilan attempted to show that the fall of the old regime was due to its anachronistic features, which made it absolutely incapable of dealing with the problems posed to Spanish capitalism by the general crisis of world capital. Only by beginning from this global historical context could the development of the situation in Spain be understood. The stance adopted by the Communist Left, led by the Italian Fraction, was radically opposed to Trotsky’s and that of other groups born out of the degeneration of the Communist International. They began by fixating on all the specific characteristics of Spain which led them into all manner of aberrations, the most noteworthy of which was to see in the advent of the Republic the triumph of some kind of ‘progressive’ bourgeois-democratic revolution over the old ‘feudal’ order. Bilan, of course, never ignored the backward characteristics of Spanish capital, but insisted on that point. However, it energetically rejected the deviation of defining backward Spain as a feudal society about to give birth to a bourgeois-democratic revolution and all that that implied. In general Bilan categorically rejected any idea of the possibility of bourgeois-democratic revolutions taking place in the present period of the decline of capitalism.
In this historical epoch the only alternative facing society is proletarian revolution or imperialist war, socialism or barbarism.1
The great majority of groups on the left, even if they did not talk about an ‘anti-feudal revolution’, still saw the events in Spain as a movement of continual advance for the working class, a movement which was forcing the bourgeoisie to retreat. This was how they interpreted any strengthening of the Republic and the left-wing parties inside it. The development of ‘democracy’ was seen by such groups as the expression of the proletariat’s advance, as a strengthening of its class positions. The reinforcement of the ‘democratic’ state and its apparatus, in however violent and repressive a manner, was seen as an indication of the weakness of the bourgeoisie and synonymous with the advance of the proletariat.
Bilan’s interpretation was in diametrical opposition to this analysis. It saw in the formation of the democratic Republic, the state structure best adapted to divert the proletariat from its own class terrain in order to fragment it politically while controlling it physically. At that time capitalism - of which Spanish capitalism was an integral part - was moving faster and faster towards the only answer it had to the world crisis: imperialist war. Moreover, capitalism had managed to completely dominate and master the only alternative, the only barrier to war: the class struggle of the proletariat. Having suffered a multitude of defeats, having seen the triumph of Stalinism, fascism, Hitlerism, and the Popular Fronts, the working class in the most important countries was in a profoundly demoralized and powerless position. Only in the Iberian region was there a section of the proletariat which had maintained a tremendous combative potential. In such circumstances such combativity was absolutely intolerable to capitalism; it not only had to break apart such resistance, but also make use of it - to turn Spain into an immense bloodbath that would help mobilize the workers of the entire world for the imperialist massacre. This was the real meaning of the rise to power of the democratic Republic and the triumph of the Popular Front in Spain. Such a radically different analysis led the Italian Fraction to be increasingly isolated from other groups who had survived the degeneration of the Communist International. Bilan’s warnings against the imminent catastrophe that was being prepared for the proletariat in Spain received no echo. And all Bilan could do was sadly recognize the blindness which had struck these groups, their gradual tendency to go astray, which made them at once the victims and the accomplices of the ‘antifascist’ massacre in Spain.
The development of events quickly sealed the fate of these groups. Not one of them had the strength to avoid being dragged into support for the imperialist war which followed on from Franco’s military uprising. The magnificent spontaneous response of the proletariat, which by staying on its class terrain rapidly got the better of the army in the main working class centres in Spain, was soon broken by the contortions and manoeuvrings of the Republican state. All the political forces organized within and against the working class - the Communist Party, the Socialist Party, the anarchists, trade unionists of the UGT and CNT - managed to deprive the workers of their victory over the army by turning their class victory into a battle for the defence of democracy, the Republican state, and capitalist ‘order’. Class lines were blurred; class frontiers obliterated. The class struggle of the proletariat against capitalism was replaced by the struggle against fascism, by the union of all the democratic forces of the bourgeoisie - the characteristic line-up of capitalist rule. Spain was a general rehearsal for the whole campaign of mystification that would be used to march the proletariat off under the banners of democracy against fascism to fight in the second imperialist world war.
The trap was snapped shut, tragically confirming Bilan’s position on the function of democracy generally in capitalism and in Spain in particular. Far from being a sign of the proletariat strengthening itself, and far from representing a step towards new conquests by the proletariat as the various groups on the left claimed, the struggle for democracy was actually a sign of the derailment and defeat of the working class. The function of democracy was to lead the class into an imperialist war. Not only was Bilan’s position fully confirmed by events, but this revolutionary marxist thesis enabled it to remain loyal to the principles of the class, and to resist being drawn into the nauseous cess-pit of the ‘anti-fascist’ imperialist war. And this was to its lasting honour and credit.
Very different was the fate of the great majority of other groups, even communist ones. Without wasting words on the riffraff of the socialist left like Pivert and Co., all the groups of the Trotskyist opposition, the POUM, the revolutionary-syndicalists of Revolution Proletarienne, up to an including groups like L’Union Communiste in France and the internationalist group in Belgium, all plunged miserably into the anti-fascist mire. Some with enthusiasm, others with doubts and breast-beating, but all of them caught up in the antifascist web they themselves had woven, and there they ended their days in lamentable debates and hagglings. The most radical groups denounced the Popular Front and participation in the Republican government, but still considered it absolutely necessary to participate in the war against Franco, arguing that a military victory over fascism was the precondition for the success of the revolution. Or else they tried to link the ‘external’ war at the Front against Franco with the ‘internal’ class struggle against the bourgeois Republican government.
In the International Review no.6 we reproduced a series of articles in which Bilan exposed this whole tissue of lies and sophisms whose only function was to justify participation in an imperialist war under the guise of proletarian anti-fascism. The war in Spain led directly to World War II. The radical groups, caught in their own trap, could do nothing then but fall apart and disappear; as for others, like the Trotskyists, they simply passed once and for all into the camp of the class enemy by fully participating in the generalized imperialist war.
The events in Spain reaffirmed a fundamental lesson for revolutionaries: a proletarian group cannot stick its finger into the wheels of capitalism with impunity. At a given moment, in one of those sudden convulsions which occur in history, it can become irremediably caught within those wheels and dashed to pieces. If the proletariat, deluded and crushed, is unable to spring back into struggle, its revolutionary organizations will be likewise hamstrung since they are simply the organizations and instruments of the class. The working class as a class is and remains the subject of history. Caught up in the spokes of the class enemy’s machine, revolutionary groups are irretrievably lost and destroyed, and then there is nothing for it but for the class to engender new organizations. Revolutionary organizations are thus constantly exposed to the danger of corruption by the class enemy. There is no absolute guarantee against this danger. Only loyalty to principles and a constant political vigilance can offer the revolutionary organization some assurance against the corrosive penetration of bourgeois ideology. And even then there can be no total security.
In no.6 of the International Review we terminated the series of articles from Bilan with an article entitled ‘The Isolation of our Fraction in the Face of the Spanish Events’. Here Bilan wrote: “Our isolation is not fortuitous. It is the consequence of a profound victory by world capitalism which has managed to infect with gangrene even the groups of the Communist Left.” Not only did the Italian Fraction find itself isolated as other communist groups became infected with the gangrene of world capitalism, the Fraction itself did not succeed in escaping from such contamination, despite all its vigilance. It, in turn, found this gangrene in its own midst in the form of a minority calling for the support of the ‘anti-fascist’ war in Spain. We know that when World War I was declared, a large part of the Parisian section of the Bolshevik Party gave its support to the ‘defensive’ war of the ‘democratic’ allies against Prussian imperialist militarism. With the experience of the minority of the Italian Fraction we can see once again that no absolute immunity exists against the penetration of capitalist gangrene into the body of a revolutionary organization. But once more, as was the case with the Bolshevik Party, the robust health of the organization allowed it to get the better of the gangrene without too much damage being done to itself.
We considered it absolutely necessary to publish all the texts and declarations, both of the minority and the majority, concerning the debates and crisis provoked by the events in Spain in the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left. This was done for several reasons, not least because to have done otherwise would have meant failing in that elementary duty of providing other revolutionaries with all the information. Reading these texts is a highly edifying experience and gives some idea of the breadth, content, and seriousness of these discussions, as well as a more precise picture of the political life of the Fraction. The arguments of the minority, which were more the result of a sentimental reaction to the events in Spain than anything else, were not especially different from those of other radical groups who had fallen into the same mystifications and errors. Their main argument boiled down to saying that non-intervention would be to assume an aloof attitude of intolerable indifference to what was happening in Spain. Accusations of this sort often act as a cover for thoughtless, ill-considered, and rash actions.2 The minority’s own sad experience attests to this. It is striking to find this same accusation of indifference thrown at us today by the Bordigists as a justification for their support for national liberation struggles (read massacres).
It came as no surprise that after their misadventures in the anti-fascist militia of the POUM following its dissolution and incorporation into the army, the minority returned from Spain and plunged straightaway into the swamps of L’Union Communiste. A natural home for them! Neither was it surprising that at the end of the war, it was the minority who were the most enthusiastic participants in the formation of the Bordigist’s International Communist Party; the French section of the Party was virtually constituted by the minority. That Party was also a perfect home for them. What an ironic revenge. And it was precisely the positions of the minority which really, if not formally, triumphed within the ICP. If the ICP does not recognize its origins in the Italian Fraction and Bilan it should at least see its roots in the political positions of the minority of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left and give them the honour they deserve.
Finally, it is extremely interesting and significant to see how the Fraction conducted these discussions, to see how patiently it put up with all the organizational infringements of the minority by making all kinds of organizational concessions to them. This was done not in order to hang on to the minority whose political positions were considered absolutely incompatible with those of the Fraction, nor to prevent the inevitable split from happening, but to clarify political differences as far as possible so that the split would strengthen the consciousness and cohesion of the revolutionary organization. In this the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left has given us an extremely rare and valuable lesson. Today, with the tendency towards the reconstitution of the revolutionary movement, the young groups springing up must reflect carefully on this lesson in order to fully assimilate it and make it an added weapon in the regroupment of revolutionaries.
To conclude, we are publishing the Appeal of the Communist Left issued in response to the massacres of May 1937 which finally settled the debate with the minority on the meaning of the anti-fascist Republican coalition and the events in Spain. Those who claim to be able to draw other positive lessons from these events (the collectivizations in the countryside or the syndicalization of industry are often presented as new or higher forms of working class autonomy) are allowing themselves to be mystified by an appearance which they take for reality.
The one tragic reality was the transformation of Spain into an immense field of massacre on which hundreds of thousands of Spanish workers were executed in the name of defending democracy and in preparation for the second imperialist war. This and this alone is the lesson of Spain that the workers of the world must never forget.
The communiqué of the Executive CommissionThe events in Spain have caused a grave crisis within our organization. The present situation has not made it possible for us to embark upon a thorough going discussion of the divergences, especially because some of our comrades are unable at the present time to clarify their position.
In this situation, the Executive Commission of our organization has only been able to record the initial attempts of these comrades to put forward their political positions, while at the same time insisting that those positions inevitably pose the question of a split in our organization. This split will obviously be ideological and not simply organizational, provided the differences over the fundamental problems are presented with complete clarity.
Beside the position publically defended by our Fraction (which needs no further explanation here), other opinions have been put forward which, as we have said, have not yet coalesced into a general position. Neither have the comrades who hold these opinions been able to define precisely the respective arguments they agree on. The central idea of those comrades who do not share the opinion of what is today the majority of the organization is, however, that they consider it possible to defend the autonomy of the working class, especially in Catalonia, without the whole situation in Spain first undergoing a radical transformation and without posing the front of the class struggle in the towns and countryside, against the present (territorial) fronts in Spain, which we consider to be of an imperialist nature.
The Executive Commission has decided the discussion should not be carried on in a hurried manner so that the organization can benefit from the contribution of the comrades who are unable at the moment to intervene actively in the debate, and also because the further evolution of the situation in Spain will allow for a more complete clarification of the fundamental differences which have emerged.
With these considerations in mind, it is clear that the comrades of the present minority have, as much as anyone else, the possibility of publically setting apart their responsibilities from those of the Fraction and, while still claiming membership in the Fraction, carrying on the struggle in Spain on the basis of their positions (ie of seeking to establish the autonomy of the working class within the framework of the present situation in Spain).
In the next issue of Bilan we intend to publish all the documents relevant to the divergences which have emerged in our organization.
(Bilan,
no.34, August-September, 1936)
The crisis in the Fraction: The communiqué of the Executive Commission
The crisis which has developed in the Fraction as a consequence of the events in Spain has now reached a decisive point in its evolution. The fundamental divergences which we mentioned in our first communiqué have come up once again during the course of discussions which have taken place within the organization. The discussions have not yet led to a clarification of the fundamental points of difference; this is mainly because the minority has not yet found it possible to elaborate an analysis of the recent events in Spain which could serve as a confirmation of the central positions they defend.
Faced with major disagreements that not only make collective discipline impossible but turn such discipline into an obstacle to the expression and development of the two political positions, the Executive Commission, on the basis of the programmatic conceptions it defends concerning the construction of the party, considers it necessary to work towards a separation on the organizational level. This separation must be as clear as the one which already exists on the political level, where the two conceptions are in reality an echo of the opposition between capitalism and the proletariat.
The Executive Commission is aware that the minority, having set up a ‘Co-ordinating Committee’, is moving in a similar direction. This Committee has taken a series of decisions which the Executive Commission has limited itself to recording, while refraining from criticism and taking every measure to ensure that the minority has every possibility of carrying on its activity. However, the Executive Commission believes that it cannot accept the minority’s demand for the recognition of the Barcelona Federation, since the latter was founded on the basis of enlistment in the militias, which have more and more become appendices of the capitalist state. The disagreement with members of the minority itself on the question of the militias can still be submitted for discussion at the next Congress of our Fraction, because this difference has arisen on the basis of a solidarity affirmed in the fundamental documents of the organization. It quite another thing for those who want to join the organization on the political basis of enlistment in the militias; the question of whether this is compatible with the programmatic documents of the Fraction can only be decided by the Congress. For these reasons, the Executive Commission has decided not to recognise the Barcelona Federation and to count the votes of comrades who are now part of it as votes coming from the groups that they belonged to prior to joining the Federation.
The Executive Commission reaffirms that the unity of the Fraction, which has been broken by the events in Spain, can only be rebuilt on the basis of excluding political positions which, far from being able to express any solidarity with the Spanish proletariat, can only serve to justify in the eyes of the masses those forces profoundly hostile to the proletariat, which capitalism is using to exterminate the working class in Spain and all over the world.
See below: ‘Communique of the Coordinating Committee’.
(Bilan, no.35, September-October, 1936)
The Spanish RevolutionThis article, by a comrade in the minority of the Fraction, was written on 8 August at a time when the extreme scarcity of news hardly permitted an analysis of the events to be made. It has not been possible for the author to revise his text in order to take certain necessary corrections to statements of fact contained in it. The reader should bear this in mind.
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The fall of the monarchy, although it happened in a peaceful even chivalrous manner - in an atmosphere of rejoicing and not struggle - opened up the revolutionary crisis in Spain. The dictatorship of Primo de Rivera was also a symptom of this crisis.
The political and economic structure of Spain was entirely built upon the feudal scaffolding of a state that existed parasitically for four centuries through the exploitation of its immense colonial empire, a source of inexhaustible wealth. At the end of the nineteenth century when it lost its last colonial possessions, Spain was reduced to a third-rate power, surviving on the basis of its agricultural exports. The world crisis following the war considerably reduced its markets and bit into the reserves of capital accumulated during the war thanks to Spain’s policy of neutrality. The crisis also posed the question of the economic transformation of the country. The attempt to stimulate Spain’s productive forces by creating a modern industrial apparatus and an internal market for industrial production by transforming the system of production in the countryside came up against the conservative spirit of the old privileged feudal castes.
Five years of successive right- and left-wing governments did not even solve the political problem of the constitutional form of the regime. The existence of the Republic itself was threatened by a determined monarchist party. Still less was any solution found to the economic problem which can only finally be resolved by a violent transformation of social relations in the countryside. The agrarian question is of fundamental importance. It cannot be solved within a framework of bourgeois institutions, but only by revolutionary methods - the expropriation without compensation of the latifundia and the seigneurial estates.
Of the million square kilometres which constitute Spain, two-thirds of the land belongs to 20,000 landowners. The remaining fragments are left to the twenty million human beings who live out their misery in brutish time-honoured ignorance.
Azana’s attempt at agrarian reform had to have a negative outcome. The confiscation of the land, with indemnity being paid to the landowners, was followed by a dividing up of the land. This put a heavy burden on the peasant who now not only had to cultivate land which was often arid and neglected but started off doing so with debts and without any circulating capital. In places where the land was divided up, discontent grew among the peasants who were unable to derive any advantage from their own possession of the land. This situation of discontent explains why in some agrarian provinces the ‘rebels’ found support among the local population.
After two years of right-wing dominated governments, the threat of a thorough-going attack led to the formation of a coalition of Republican and workers’ parties, and ultimately to the electoral victory of 16 February. The mass pressure leading to the release of 30,000 political prisoners even before the amnesty decree was proclaimed shifted the balance of forces. But the hopes of the masses were dashed. During the five months in which the Popular Front governed the country, there was no real, change in the situation. Meanwhile, the economic situation continued to be extremely serious. Nothing was done to find a lasting solution to the crisis, since the bourgeois character of the new government limited it to taking up a defensive position towards the monarchist party. It simply dispatched to Morocco a large number of officers disloyal to the Republican regime. This explains why Morocco was the guiding centre of the military rebellion, capable of mustering within a few days an army of 40,000 fully-equipped troops and completely shielded from any repressive measures. The Foreign Legion, ‘La Bandera’, which formed the basis of this army only had a few foreigners in its midst (10-15%). In the main it was made up of Spaniards -- unemployed, declassed, or criminal elements -- in other words, real mercenaries easily tempted by the mirage of a soldier’s pay.
The murder of the socialist Lieutenant de Castillo, followed the next day by the murder of the monarchist leader, Carlos Sotelo in reprisal (July 9 and 10), caused the Right to decide on action. The insurrection began on 17 July. It did not have the character of a typical military pronunciamento, which is based on surprise, speed, and limited goals and objectives; in short, a change of governmental personnel. The length and intensity of the struggle shows that we are dealing with a vast social movement in the process of transforming Spanish society down to its roots. The proof of this lies in the fact that the democratic government, itself altered twice within the space of a few hours, instead of folding up or rushing to make a compromise with the insurgent military leaders, chose to ally itself with the workers’ organizations and to hand out arms to the proletariat.
This event is tremendously important. Although the struggle is formally situated within the framework of a conflict between two bourgeois groups, and although its pretext is the defence of the democratic Republic against the threat of fascist dictatorship, it has today a much wider meaning, a profound importance for the class. It has become the lever, the motor force of a genuine social war.
The authority of the government is in pieces. In a few days the control of military operations had passed into the hands of the ‘workers’ militias; logistical services, the general direction of all matters related to the war effort, circulation, production, distribution, all this has fallen under the control of the workers’ organizations.
The de facto government is the workers’ organizations; the legal government is an empty shell, a facade, a prisoner of the situation.
The burning of all the churches, the confiscation of goods, the occupation of houses and other properties, the requisitioning of newspapers, summary trials and executions -- even of foreigners -- all these are formidable passionate plebian expressions of this profound transformation of class forces which the bourgeois government can no longer prevent. In the meantime the government intervenes not to wipe out these ‘arbitrary’ measures, but simply to legalize them. It takes over banks and factories abandoned by their owners, and nationalize the factories engaged in war production. Social measures have been taken: the forty hour week, 15% increases in wages and a 50% reduction in rents.
On 6 August a ministerial shake-up took place in Catalonia as a result of pressure exerted by the CNT. It appears that Companys, President of the Generalidad, was forced by the workers’ organizations to stay at his post in order to avoid any international complications that cannot but fail to arise in the course of such events.
The bourgeois government remains standing. Without any doubt, once the danger passes, it will make a desperate attempt to regain its lost authority. Then a new stage of struggle will begin for the working class.
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It is undeniable that the struggle has been set in motion by the conflict between two bourgeois factions. The working class has ranged itself alongside the one dominated by the ideology of the Popular Front. The democratic government is arming the proletariat as a last-ditch defensive measure. But the state of decomposition of the bourgeois economy is making any re-adjustment in the situation an impossibility, no matter whether fascism or democracy is victorious. Only the autonomous intervention of the proletariat can solve the political crisis of Spanish society. But the result of that intervention is dependent on the international situation. The Spanish revolution is intimately linked to the problem of the world revolution.
The victory of either the one faction or the other cannot resolve the basic problem. It can only be decided by a change in the balance of class forces on an international scale and by the demystification of the masses, hypnotized by the serpent of the Popular Front. However, the victory of the one group rather than the other will have political and psychological repercussions which have to be borne in mind in any analysis of the situation. The victory of the army would not only be a defeat for bourgeois democracy; it would also signal a brutal and merciless defeat for the working class since it has thrown itself wholeheartedly into the fray. The working class would be nailed to the cross of its defeat in an irremedial and total manner, just as it was in Italy and Germany. Moreover, the entire international situation would be modeled on the victory of Spanish fascism. A storm of violent repression would descend upon the working class throughout the whole world.
We will not even bother to discuss the conception which holds that the proletariat would be able to develop a firmer class consciousness after the victory of the reactionaries.
A victory for the government, by giving encouragement and consciousness to the proletariat of other countries, would lead to extremely important changes in the international situation. Without doubt these advantages would be partially neutralized by the nefarious influence of intensive nationalist, anti-fascist, warmongering propaganda on the part of the parties of the Popular Front and first and foremost among them the Communist Party.
It is doubtful whether a defeat of the army would inevitably lead to a strengthening of the democratic government. On the other hand, it is certain that the masses, still armed, proud of their painfully-acquired victory and strengthened by the experience of war, would demand their dues from this government. The ideological powder used by the Popular Front to confuse the masses could explode in the hands of the bourgeois state.
Only an extreme distrust in the class instincts of the masses could lead one to think that the demobilization of millions of workers who had already gone through a long hard struggle could be carried out without confrontations and upheavals ensuing.
But, even given the validity of the supposition that the victory of the government would be followed by a material and spiritual disarmament of the proletariat -- without any friction occurring -- this would still not mean that the whole balance of class forces had changed. New and powerful energies could arise out of such a vast social conflagration and the movement towards the formation of the class party would thereby be accelerated.
The class struggle is not made of soft wax that we can mould according to our schemas and our preferences. It evolves in a dialectical manner. In politics, prediction can only be an approximation of reality. To close one’s eyes in the face of reality, simply because it does not correspond to the mental schema we have constructed, is to withdraw from the real movement by completely removing oneself from the dynamics of the situation.
The ideological poison of the Popular Front and the lack of a class party are two negative elements of overwhelming importance. But it is precisely because of this that we must place all our efforts on the side of the Spanish workers.
To say to them that this danger exists and then not intervene ourselves to fight this danger is an expression of insensibility and dilettantism.
Our abstentionism over the Spanish question signifies the liquidation of our Fraction, a sort of suicide resulting from an indigestion of doctrinaire formulae.
Obsessed with ourselves, like Narcissus, we drown in the waters of abstraction, while the beautiful nymph Echo dies of langour out of love for us.
Tito
(Bilan, no.35, September-October, 1936)
The crisis in the Fraction: Communiqué of the ‘Coordinating Committee’The minority of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, after examining the Spanish events and hearing the verbal report of a delegate who was sent to Spain:
-- Denies any solidarity with and responsibility for the positions taken by the majority of the Fraction in its press (Bilan, Prometeo, manifestos, etc);
-- Approves the attitude taken by the group of comrades who, against the veto of the Executive Commission, have gone to Spain to defend, arms in hand, the Spanish revolution -- even on the military front;
-- Considers that the conditions for a split already exist, but that the absence of the comrades who have gone to the Front would remove from the present discussion an indispensable political and moral element of clarification;
-- Accepts the proposal to wait for the next Congress to come to a definitive solution to our disagreements;
-- Remains, therefore, from the organizational point of view -- if no longer from the ideological point of view -- in the ranks of the Fraction on the condition that the thought of the minority will be guaranteed free expression both in the Fraction’s press and its public meetings.
Decides:
-- To send one of its delegates to Spain immediately to be followed, if necessary, by a group of comrades in order to embark upon an effective activity within and in agreement with the spirit of the vanguard of the Spanish proletariat wherever it is to be found so as to accelerate the political evolution of the proletariat in struggle until it has completely emancipated itself from all capitalist influences and from any illusion in class collaboration. This political work will be done, when it becomes possible, in association with the comrades who are now at the Front;
-- To nominate a Coordinating Committee which will take charge of relations between the comrades, the Barcelona Federation (recognition of which we demand immediately) and the comrades of other countries, in order to define the relations which the minority will have with the Executive Commission;
-- To authorize the comrades of the minority to fight against the positions of the majority and to refrain from distributing the press and other documents based on the official positions of the Fraction;
-- To demand that this resolution is published in the next issue of Prometeo and Bilan;
-- Concludes by sending a fraternal greeting to the Spanish proletariat which is defending the world revolution within its workers’ militias.
The Minority of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left
(Bilan, no.35, September-October, 1936)
The crisis in the Fraction: Communiqué of the Executive CommissionThe Executive Commission remains firmly bound to the principle that a split within the fundamental organ of the proletariat disturbs and arrests the delicate living process of that organ when such a split is not the result of programmatic differences which express or tend to express the historic demands, not of a tendency, but of the class as a whole.
The Executive Commission is of the opinion that the minority is basing itself on different criteria and is threatening to split not only before the Congress, but even before the discussion has begun; and this on the controversial issue of the recognition or non-recognition of the Barcelona group. Despite the minority’s injunction, the Executive Commission reaffirms the necessity of resolving the crisis within the Fraction at the Congress.
The Executive Commission has ratified the position taken by one of its representatives who was charged with taking down all the decisions of the Coordinating Committee. But the Committee restricted itself to demanding the recognition of the Barcelona group which was therefore not a decision but a request to the Executive Commission, which remained free to make its own decision. It is thus inaccurate to talk about any undertakings not having been met.
The Executive Commission based its decision on an elementary criterion and a principle the organization was founded upon when it decided not to recognize the Barcelona group. This decision was taken on the basis of considerations which were not even discussed by the Coordinating Committee and which were published in our previous communiqué. It was decided that no member of the minority was to be expelled and thus the decision of the Coordinating Committee in considering the whole minority expelled if the Barcelona group was not recognized, is quite incomprehensible.
The Executive Commission, faced with today’s situation wherein there are no perfectly defined norms to regulate the life of an organization that is going through a period of crisis, although convinced that its previous decision was correct, has decided, in order to guide the whole Fraction towards a programmatic discussion and faced with the ultimatum of the Coordinating Committee, to redress its former decision and recognize the Barcelona group.
The Executive Commission has also raised certain political considerations concerning the impossibility of recruiting new militants in a period of crisis which must -- in the shared opinion of both tendencies -- lead to a split, since the new elements who came into the organization on the basis of disputed programmatic principles would find it quite impossible to resolve the fundamental issue. This fundamental issue revolves around the problem of the programme. It can only be resolved by those who were part of the organization before the crisis broke out and who joined on the basis of the programmatic documents of the Fraction.
The Coordinating Committee is pursuing a path which can offer nothing positive to the proletarian cause, while at the same time claiming that the Executive Commission has been led to act as it has done out of fear of becoming a minority within the organization. The Coordinating Committee knows just as well as the Executive Commission that even if the absurd idea of counting the votes of the workers who joined the Fraction in Barcelona were taken up, the present balance of forces would not be overturned.
The Executive Commission urges all the comrades to recognize the gravity of the situation and to restrain from any impulsive reactions, in order chat a discussion may be initiated whose aim will not be a victory for one tendency or the other but will allow the Fraction to be able to live up to the cause of the revolutionary proletariat by ridding itself of any ideology which, during the course of the Spanish events, will have shown itself to be injurious to the needs of the proletarian class struggle.
Documents of the minority Communiqué of the minorityThe Coordinating Committee, in the name of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left:
Is of the opinion that the Executive Commission has not kept the promise given by its representative to the Coordinating Committee, that it would accept the resolution presented by the minority in which, among other things, the recognition of the Barcelona group was demanded;
In view of the communiqué of the Executive Commission which appeared in Prometeo where it declared that it did not want to recognize the Barcelona group, using as a pretext the claim that the basis for the constitution of this group was participation in the military struggle;
Considering that the basis for the constitution of this group is the same as for the whole of the minority;
Has decided that, if the Executive Commission persists in this position, the minority can only consider this position as signifying the expulsion of the whole minority of the Fraction.
For the minority,
The Coordinating Committee
Postscript: Since the decision of the Executive Commission dated 23 October, not to recognize the Barcelona group is based on the fact that the minority could become the majority, the Coordinating Committee declares that it is prepared not to count the votes of the new members in Barcelona and that the Executive Commission can consider as valid only the votes of the comrades who were part of the organization before going to Spain. For its part the minority considers the new recruits as members of the Fraction.
24 October 1936
Motion (address) adopted at the meeting of the Barcelona group of the Italian Fraction of the 'Communist Left (taken before their departure to the Front).
Barcelona, 23 August 1936
The comrades of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left have entered the ranks of the workers' militias in order to support the Spanish proletariat in its great struggle against the bourgeoisie. We are at the side of the workers ready to make any sacrifice for the victory of the revolution.
During the long years of militant activity, of struggle and exile, we have had a dual experiences that of fascist reaction which has hurled the Italian proletariat into a desperate situation, and the degeneration of the Communist Party which has ideologically crucified the masses. However, the problem of the revolution can find no solution if the masses do not disengage themselves from the influence of the IInd and IIIrd Internationals and reconstruct a genuine class party capable of guiding it to victory.
We hope that the dynamic development of the present events can create in Spain and elsewhere the party of the revolution. The present vanguard in the POUM has in front of it a great task and a profound responsibility.
We are going off to the battle front within the International Column of the POUM’s militias, inspired by a political ideal which is held by all those heroic and magnificent Spanish workers: the ideal of fighting to the end, not to save the debris of the bourgeoisie, but to uproot and hurl down all forms of bourgeois power and to assist in the victory of the proletarian revolution. So that the efforts of all of us will not be in vain, the revolutionary vanguard of the POUM must succeed in conquering its last hesitations and resolutely place itself on the path leading to the Spanish October. Today it must choose between giving either direct or involuntary support to the bourgeoisie, and allying itself with the revolutionary workers of the whole world.
The destiny of the workers of the world depends on the character of political activity undertaken in the present social conflagration in Spain.
Long live the workers’ militia!
Long live the revolution!
(Blonde’s motion and the most recent resolution of the minority will appear in the next issue -- The Editors.)
(Bilan, no. 36, October-November, 1936)
Resolution voted by the Executive Commission (29 November 1936) on the relationship between the Fraction and the members of the organization who accept the positions contained in the letter of the Coordinating Committee25 December 1936
Throughout the development of the crisis within the Fraction, the Executive Commission has been guided by a dual principle: to avoid disciplinary measures so that the comrades of the minority could co-ordinate their activities in order to form a current within the organization whose aim would be to show that the other current had broken with the fundamental principles of the organization while it alone remained the real and faithful defender of these principles. This polemical confrontation could only take place at the Congress.
Following the meeting of the Parisian Federation of 27 September, at which the Coordinating Committee was born, the Executive Commission urged the Fraction to put up with a situation in which the minority enjoyed a privileged position. It was not participating in the financial effort necessary to keep our press alive, while at the same time it could write for that press. The Executive Commission did this solely to prevent a split taking place over a question of procedure.
Immediately after this came the threat of a split if the Executive Commission did not recognize the Barcelona group. The Executive Commission while still basing itself on the same principle -- that splits must take place over questions of principle and not over questions particular to a tendency and still less over organizational questions -- then decided to recognize the Barcelona group.
Finally, when the Executive Commission was forced to assert that the minority’s refusal to exchange with the other current documents relating to its political life would split the organization (but despite this the Executive Commission still defended the necessity for the Congress); the minority, through a ‘verbal’ communication of comrade Candiani, informed us that it would immediately break with the organization. The last appeal of the Executive Commission (25 November) received a response which must undermine any possibility of the minority attending the Congress.
In these circumstances, the Executive Commission is of the opinion that the evolution of the minority is clear proof that it can no longer be considered as a tendency of the organization but as a reflection of the manoeuvres of the Popular Front within the Fraction. Consequently there can be no problem of a political split in the organization.
Considering, moreover, that the minority is flirting with obvious counter-revolutionary enemies of the Fraction (in the shape of Ginestizia e Liberta, debris of maximalist Trotskyism while at the same time declaring any discussion with the Fraction to be useless, the Executive Commission has decided to expel for political unworthiness all the comrades who are in solidarity with the Coordinating Committee’s letter of 25 November 1936, and it will allow fifteen days for the comrades of the minority to come to a collective decision. These comrades are invited to give their individual responses by 13 December. An exception will be made for the comrades who are living in Barcelona; we will wait for their return so that they can be put fully in the picture. These reservations do not concern comrade Candiani who, before going back, had every opportunity of finding out about the situation.
Documents of the minority (cont’d)(After their return from the Front and after they had been in contact with the official delegate of the Fraction)
Spain today is the key to the whole international situation. The situation in Europe depends on the victory of one side or the other. A victory for Franco would mean the strengthening of the military bloc between Italy and Germany. A victory for the Popular Front would mean the strengthening of the anti-fascist military bloc (both outcomes leading towards an imperialist war); while victory for the proletariat would be the point of departure for a world-wide reawakening of the proletarian revolution.
In Spain we are confronted with an objectively revolutionary situation.
The February elections which ended in a victory for the Popular Front acted as a cushion, a safety valve, functioning to prevent the violent explosion of class antagonisms. The big strikes and demonstrations following the elections prove this.
The revolutionary menace of the proletariat forced the bourgeoisie to steal a march on events. This enabled us to conclude that the struggle was not between two factions of the bourgeoisie, but between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat; and that the proletariat was taking up arms to defend its living conditions and its organizations from attack by the reactionaries. For the same reasons that the Russian proletariat took up arms against Kornilov, the Spanish workers took up arms against Franco. It is not a question of democracy versus fascism, but of capitalism versus the proletariat. And if the bourgeoisie is still more or less in power, if the relations of production have not undergone a profound transformation, the cause must be sought in the fact that the proletariat is not ideologically armed. It does not possess a class party.
The existence of a class party would have settled the issue in the proletariat’s favour from the first days of the struggle. The Spanish Revolution has not yet entered into decline and the possibility of a victory for the proletariat cannot be categorically excluded.
Against capitalism fighting on two fronts, the proletariat must also fight on two fronts: both the social and the military. On the military front the proletariat is fighting to defend what it has conquered after decades of struggle; on the social front, the proletariat must accelerate the decomposition of the capitalist state, forge its own class party and the organs of proletarian government that will allow it to mount an attack on the capitalist power. On the military front the proletariat is today moving towards the creation of a future red army. Within the zones the militias have occupied, in one after another, we have seen the immediate foundation of peasant committees and the collectivization of the land happening under the very noses of the Madrid and Barcelona governments.
The group set up in Spain considers that it has not broken with the principles of the Fraction and for this reason it should not go unrecognized. We have been asked to break off all contact with the POUM: such contact never existed. To dissolve the Column is not in our power because it was not us who set it up. As for dispersing ourselves among the proletariat in its place of work, this will be done as far as possible.
(This document should be considered as a response to the Executive Commission resolution of 27 August 1936 and must have been written at the end of September.)
Declaration
A group of comrades in the minority of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left, disapproving of the official attitude taken by the Fraction towards the Spanish Revolution, has broken abruptly all disciplinary and formalistic links with that organization and has put itself at the service of the Revolution, up to and including participating in the workers’ militias and going off to the Front.
Today a new situation is emerging full of unknown perils for the working class. The dissolution of the Central Committee of the Anti-fascist Militias, an organ arising out of the revolution and guaranteeing the class nature of the militias, and their re-organization into a regular army dependent on the Council of Defence, violates the principle of a voluntary workers’ militia.
The necessities imposed by the historic moment in which we are living demand an extreme vigilance on the part of the vanguard of the proletariat. This vigilance is crucial in order to prevent the new military structure in which the masses are now being organized from becoming an instrument of the bourgeoisie which in the future could be used against the interests of the working class. The work of vigilance will be all the more effective if the class organizations become conscious of their interests and engage in a wholly proletarian course of political action.
Political work in these organizations assumes a primordial importance and is no less crucial than the military tasks at the Front.
These same comrades, while holding firmly to the principle of the necessity for armed struggle at the Front, have not agreed to be part of a regular army which is not an expression of proletarian power and within which it would be impossible to carry out direct political activity. On the other hand they can make a more effective contri button to the cause of the Spanish proletariat today through political and social activity, which is indispensable for preserving and strengthening the revolutionary ideology of the workers’ organizations. These organizations must re-appropriate on the political and social terrain the influence which in the new conditions, has been weakened at the level of military leadership.
These same comrades, while abandoning their posts as militiamen in the Lenin International Column, are still mobilized in the services of the revolutionary proletariat of Spain, and have decided to continue to dedicate their activity and their experience on another terrain, until the definitive victory of the proletariat over all forms of capitalist rule.
Barcelona, October 22 1936
(Bilan, no.37, November-December 1936)
Bullets, machine guns, prisons: this is the reply of the Popular Front to the workers of Barcelona who dared to resist the capitalist offensiveWorkers!
July 19th 1936 -- the workers of Barcelona, barehanded, crushed the attack of Franco’s battalions which were fully armed to the teeth.
May 4th 1937 -- the same workers, now equipped with arms, left many more dead on the streets than in July when they had to fight back against Franco. This time it is the anti-fascist government -- including the anarchists and receiving the indirect solidarity of the POUM -- which unleashes the scum of the forces of repression against the workers.
On 19 July the workers of Barcelona were an invincible force. Their class struggle, free from any ties with the bourgeois state, echoed inside Franco’s regiments and caused them to decompose by awakening the soldiers’ class instincts. It was the strike that snatched the rifles and cannons from Franco and shattered his offensive.
History only records a few brief moments during which the proletariat can become completely autonomous from the capitalist state. A few days after 19 July, the Catalan proletariat reached the cross-roads. Either it would enter into a higher stage of struggle and destroy the bourgeois state, or capitalism would reforge the links in its chain of power. At this stage in the struggle, when class instinct is not enough and consciousness becomes the decisive factor, the proletariat can only win through if it has at its disposal theoretical capital accumulated patiently by its left fractions, transformed by the explosion of events into parties. If the Spanish proletariat today is living through such a stark tragedy, this is the result of its lack of maturity in being unable to forge its class party: the brain which, alone, can give life to the class.
From 19 July in Catalonia the workers created, spontaneously and on their own class terrain, the autonomous organs of their struggle. But immediately the anguishing dilemma arose: either fight to the end the political battle for the total destruction of the capitalist state and thus bring to perfection the economic and military successes, or leave the enemy’s machinery of oppression standing and thereby allow it to deform and liquidate the workers’ other conquests.
Classes struggle with the means imposed on them by the situation and by the level of social tension. Confronted with class conflagration, capitalism cannot even dream of resorting to the classical methods of legality. What threatens capitalism is the independence of the proletarian struggle, since that provides the condition for the class to go on to the revolutionary stage of posing the question of destroying bourgeois power. Capitalism must therefore renew the bonds of its control over the exploited masses. These bonds, previously represented by the magistrates, the police, and prisons, have in the extreme conditions which reign in Barcelona taken the form of the Committee of Militias, the socialized industries, the workers’ unions managing the key sectors of the economy, the vigilante patrols, etc.
And so in Spain today, history once again poses the problem resolved in Italy and Germany by the crushing of the proletariat: the workers manage to keep their own class weapons that they have themselves created in the heat of struggle, only as long as they use them against the bourgeois state. The workers arm their future executioners if, lacking the strength to smash their class enemy, they allow themselves to be caught in the net of the bourgeoisie’s apparatus of power.
The workers’ militia of 19 July was an organ of the proletariat. The ‘proletarian militia’ of the following week was a capitalist organ adapted to the needs of the moment. And in the implementation of its counterrevolutionary strategy, the bourgeoisie was able to call upon the centrists (the Stalinists), the CNT, the FAI, and the POUM to convince the workers that the state changes its nature when it’s managing personnel changes colour. Disguising itself behind a red flag, capitalism patiently set about sharpening the sword of its repression which by May 4 was made ready for use by the forces who had since 19 July broken the class backbone of the Spanish proletariat.
The son of Noske and the Weimar Constitution was Hitler; the son of Giolitti and ‘workers’ control’ was Mussolini; the son of the Spanish anti-fascist Front, the ‘socializations’, and the ‘proletarian’ militias was the carnage in Barcelona on 4 May 1937.
And only the Russian proletariat responded to the fall of Czarism with October 1917 because it alone had managed to build its class party through the work of the left fractions.Workers!
Franco was able to prepare his attack under the wing of the Popular Front government. In a spirit of conciliation Barrio tried to form on 19 July a united government capable of carrying out the programme of Spanish capitalism as a whole, either under the leadership of Franco, or under the mixed leadership of a fraternally united left and right. But the workers’ revolts in Barcelona, Madrid, and the Asturias forced capitalism to divide its government in half, to share out the tasks between its Republican and military agents, who were joined together by an indivisible class solidarity.
Where Franco was unable to achieve an immediate victory, capitalism called the workers into its services in order to ‘fight fascism’. This was a bloody trap in which thousands of workers died, believing that under the leadership of the Republican government they could crush the legitimate heir of capitalism - fascism. And so they went off to the passes of Aragon, to the mountains of Guadarrama, to the Asturias, to fight for the victory of the anti-fascist war.
Once again, as in 1914, history has underlined in blood, over the mass graves of the workers, the irreconcilable opposition existing between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Are the military fronts a necessity imposed by the current situation? No! They are a necessity for capitalism if it is to contain and crush the workers! May 4 1937 is stark proof of the fact that after July 19 1936 the proletariat had to fight Companys and Giral just as much as Franco. The military fronts can only dig a grave for the workers because they represent the fronts of capitalism’s war against the proletariat. The only answer the Spanish workers can give to this war is the one given by their Russian brothers in 1917: revolutionary defeatism in both camps of the bourgeoisie, the Republican as well as the ‘fascist’; the transformation of the capitalist war into a civil war for the total destruction of the bourgeois state.
The Italian Left Fraction has solely been supported in its tragic isolation by the solidarity of a current of the International Communist League in Belgium, which has just founded the Belgian Fraction of the International Communist Left. These two currents alone have rung the alarm bells while everyone else has been proclaiming the necessity to safeguard the conquests of the revolution, to smash Franco so as to be able to smash Caballero thereafter.
The recent events in Barcelona are a gloomy confirmation of our initial thesis. They showed how the Popular Front, flanked by the anarchists and the POUM, turned on the insurgent workers on the 4th of May with a cruelty equal to that of Franco.
The vicissitudes of the military battles were so many occasions for the Republican government to regain its grip over the masses. In the absence of a proletarian policy of revolutionary defeatism, both the military successes and failures of the Republican army were simply steps in the bloody defeat of the working class. At Badajoz, Irun, and San Sebastian, the Popular Front contributed to the deliberate massacre of the proletariat while strengthening the bonds of the Union Sacree, since in order to win the anti-fascist war, there had to be a disciplined and centralized army. The resistance in Madrid, on the other hand, facilitated the offensive of the Popular Front which could now rid itself of its former lackey, the POUM, and prepare the attack of 4 May. The fall of Malaga reforged the bloody chains of the Union Sacree, while the military victory at Guadalajara opened the period which culminated in the massacre in Barcelona. The attack of 4 May thus germinated and blossomed in an atmosphere of war fever.
Parallel to this, all over the world, Spanish capital’s war of extermination gave life to the forces of international bourgeois repression: the fascist and ‘anti-fascist’ deaths in Spain were accompanied by the murders in Moscow and the machine-gunnings in Clichy. And it was on the bloody altar of anti-fascism that the traitors mobilized the workers of Brussels around the democratic wing of Belgian capitalism in the elections of April 11 1937. ‘Arms for Spain’: this was the great slogan drummed into the ears of the workers. And these arms have been used to shoot their brothers in Barcelona. Soviet Russia, by co-operating in the arming of the antifascist war, has also demonstrated itself to be part of the capitalist system in this carnage. On the order of Stalin -- who exposed his anti-communist violence on 3 March 1937 -- the PSUC of Catalonia took the initiative in the massacre.
Once again, as in 1914, the workers are using their arms to kill each other instead of using them to destroy the regime of capitalist oppression.
Workers!On May 4 1937 the workers of Barcelona returned to the path they had taken up on 19 July. The path capitalism had been able to divert them from with the help of all the forces composing the Popular Front. By launching the general strike, even within the sectors presented as conquest of the revolution, they formed a class front against the Republican-Fascist bloc of capital. And the Republican government responded with the same savagery that Franco displayed at Badajoz and Irun. If the Salamanca government did not take advantage of this conflagration behind the Aragon Front to go onto the offensive, it was merely because it knew that its accomplices on the left would admirably carry out their role as executioners of the proletariat.
Exhausted by ten months of war, by class collaboration by the CNT, by the FAI, and by the POUM, the Catalan proletariat just suffered a terrible defeat. But this defeat is also a step towards the victory of tomorrow, a moment in the emancipation of the proletariat, because it signifies the death of all those ideologies which enabled capitalism to maintain its rule in spite of the gigantic shock of 19 July.
No, the proletarians who fell on 4 May cannot be laid claim to by any of the political currents who on 19 July led them off their own class terrain into the jaws of anti-fascism. The fallen workers belong to the proletariat and to the proletariat alone. They represent the raw stuff of the brain of the world working class: the class party of the communist revolution.
The workers of the whole world bow before all the dead and lay claim to their corpses against all the traitors: the traitors of yesterday and of today. The proletariat of the whole world salutes Berneri as one of its own, and his martyrdom for the ideal of anarchism is yet another protest against a political school which has met its downfall during these events in Spain. It was under the direction of a government in which the anarchists participated that the police have done to the body of Berneri what Mussolini did to the body of Matteotti!
Workers!The carnage of Barcelona is the harbinger of even more bloody repression against the workers of Spain and the rest of the world. But it is even more a fore-runner of the social tempests which, tomorrow, will sweep across the capitalist world.
In a mere ten months capitalism has had to use up all the political resources it had been hoping to use in order to demolish the proletariat, in order to prevent the class from completing the task of forming the party, the weapon of its emancipation, and creating the communist society. Centrism and anarchism, by rejoining the ranks of Social Democracy, have reached in Spain the end of their evolution, as was the case in 1914 when the war reduced the IInd International to a corpse. In Spain capitalism has unleashed a battle of international importance: the battle between fascism and anti-fascism. In the extreme form of armed confrontation, it demonstrates the acute tension between the classes on the international arena.
The deaths in Barcelona have cleared the ground for the construction of the party of the working class. All those political forces who called upon the workers to fight for the revolution while mobilizing them into a capitalist war have passed to the other side of the barricade. Before the workers of the whole world a bright horizon is opening up: a horizon in which the workers of Barcelona have emblazoned with their own blood the class lessons already sketched in the blood of the dead of 1914-18. The workers’ struggle is a proletarian struggle only if it is directed against capitalism and its state: it serves the interests of the enemy if it is not directed against both, at every instant, in every sphere, in all the proletarian organizations the situation engenders.
The world proletariat must fight against capitalism even when the latter begins to repress its erstwhile lackeys. It is the working class, not its class enemies, which has the responsibility of settling its debts with those forces which were once part of its own development as a class, which were a moment in its struggle for emancipation from capitalist slavery.
The international battle which Spanish capitalism has launched against the proletariat has opened up a new chapter in the life of the fractions in different countries. The world proletariat, which must continue to fight against the ‘builders’ of artificial Internationals, knows that it can only build the proletarian International in a situation where a profound transformation of class forces on a world scale has opened up the way to the communist revolution. In the face of the war in Spain, itself a sign of the development of revolutionary ferment in other countries, the world proletariat feels that the time has come to forge the first international links between the fractions of the communist left.
Workers of the world!Your class is invincible; it is the motor force of historical evolution. The events in Spain are proof of this, because it is your class alone which is the stake in the battle shaking the whole world!
This defeat must not discourage you; you must draw from this defeat the lessons for tomorrow’s victory!
On your own class basis, reforge your class unity, beyond all frontiers, against all the mystifications of the capitalist enemy!
In Spain, against any attempt at a compromise aimed at the establishment of peace based on capitalist exploitation, fight back with fraternization between the exploited of both armies and a simultaneous struggle against capitalism!
On your feet for the revolutionary struggle in all countries!
Long live the workers of Barcelona who have turned a new and bloody page in the history of the world revolution!
Forward to the construction of an International Bureau to accelerate the formation of left fractions in every country!
Let us raise the standard of the communist revolution which the fascist and anti-fascist murderers are preventing the defeated workers from passing on to their class heirs.
Let us be worthy of our brothers who have fallen!
Long live the world communist revolution!
The Belgian and Italian Fractions of the International Communist Left
(Bilan, no.41, June 1937
1 One can measure the enormous distance separating the Bordigist Party (Programa Communiste) from the Italian Fraction by noting the fundamental difference contained in the notion of the historic era which was at the centre of all the analyses made by the Fraction, and the idea of geographic areas (‘progressive’ and ‘non-progressive’) which is the theoretical foundation stone forty years later of the Bordigist Party. It is therefore possible to understand quite easily why this Party cannot claim any continuity with the work of the Fraction nor with Bilan. Not only has this Party situated itself outside the framework of positions defended by Bilan; it is also operates outside the fundamental positions of the IIIrd International and even outside the framework around which it was constituted.
2 Today we can see a specimen of the ‘anti-wait-and-seeism’ school in group like Pour Une Intervention Communiste. The PIC is forever throwing itself into ‘actions’, ‘campaigns’, and participation in ephemeral committees including all kinds of different people in an effort to prove itself much more influenced by pure excitement than by a desire for considered activity. It is true, however, that in contrast to the PIC whose intervention is above all verbal, the members of the minority of the Italian Fraction took their lack of reflection to its final conclusion and joined the militias and fought at the front.
We are publishing here the final text written by the Frazione Comunista di Napoli (the. Communist Fraction of Naples). The Frazione began as a discussion circle in 1975, basing its work on reading texts produced by the ICC and other political tendencies. Most of its members came from the milieu of ‘contestation’ politics and were trying to break with extra-parliamentary leftism in order to move towards revolutionary positions. The evolution of their political discussions reached a point where, on the one hand the members of the original nucleus joined the ICC, while on the other hand the Frazione circle itself dissolved as such. In this document the former members of the Frazione have attempted to make their experience conscious and explicit, by drawing up the lessons of the evolution of their circle so as to assist others who are or will be in the same situation to understand their own political evolution.
Their document shows the inevitable and positive aspect represented in the appearance of ‘political discussion circles’ today. The resurgence of class struggle at the end of the 1960s found the revolutionary movement dispersed and cut off from any organic link with past revolutionary organizations. The need to create ‘circles’ in order to contribute to political clarification is a result of the difficulties of orientating oneself after so many years of counter-revolution. However, the document also shows the ambiguities and difficulties which can be encountered by such circles during the course of their political development. Using the particular experience of the circle in Naples as our example, we will attempt to draw out the general lessons of how this process of gaining consciousness proceeds.
One of the main dangers of any ‘discussion circle’ is that its members take it to be what it can’t be: an actual political group. A ‘discussion circle’ expresses one moment in the process of political clarification. It represents a relatively open framework in which discussion and political research can be carried on through the confrontation of ideas. This is very different from a political group based on a coherent platform that finds its concrete expression in an international organization seeking to intervene in the class struggle on a world scale. The process should not be confused with its final goal, either by freezing a moment in the evolution of such circles by producing incomplete and incoherent ‘semi-platforms’, or by setting up a local, isolated ‘organization’, or by attempting to intervene as a political body in the class struggle without any clear political framework for doing so. The Frazione Comunista came up against these difficulties when it tried to adopt a partial platform, and also when it tried to face up to the political responsibility implied in producing publications. The former Frazione comrades themselves point out in their text that the idea of writing a ‘mini-platform’ for the Frazione actually expressed their desire to preserve the ‘autonomy’ of the Naples circle, to ‘resist’ pressures exerted by other political groups, notably the ICC - even though this desire wasn’t entirely conscious at the time. Despite these difficulties, the Frazione was able to go beyond its weaknesses thanks to its profound conviction in the international nature of the class struggle. This conviction made it keep in contact with the ICC.
Another danger such circles are prone to in the course of their evolution is that of not being aware of their inevitable heterogeneous nature. The members of a circle may not only develop in different directions, but even their evolution towards the same goal may take place at a varying rhythm. It is extremely important that those members of the circle who achieve a relatively coherent vision learn how to galvanize the work of the whole circle without hindering their own development under the pretext of artificially preserving the circle as a united body. Those who become conscious more quickly always have the greatest responsibility; this applies to every level of political life. Thus although we cannot put forward any neat solutions or recipes, we can assert that a circle must remain open to influences outside itself and the dynamic in its own internal evolution.
After a period of several months of political maturation, the founding members of the Frazione became aware that a discussion circle has no meaning in itself unless it leads to commitment to militant activity within the class. Since they agreed with the platform of the ICC, they integrated themselves into the work of the Current through its section in Italy. But as soon as they recognized the necessity for a pole of organizational regroupment, these comrades understood that their circle should not transform itself into an obstacle to understanding by maintaining itself as a sort of political ‘ante-chamber’. For this reason, affirming that its work had come to an end, they dissolved the Frazione.
In general, discussion or study circles can’t be seen as ends in themselves; one does not search out ‘ideas’ for their own sake, but as the expression of a social activity. These circles are part of a whole social process within the working class by which the class tends to secrete a political organization. In this sense, the appearance of these circles all over the world today is proof that we are entering into a new period of class struggle. After the organizational break in the workers’ movement, we are seeing the rebirth of small nuclei moving towards revolutionary positions. In order that this enormous effort - unfortunately so fragmented - may lead somewhere, it is especially important to recognize that the evolution of these circles can’t remain stationary. Either they integrate themselves into a coherent international political current, or they will end up as obstacles to the development of consciousness. If these circles preserve themselves as local and politically limited formations, all that will be left will be the scattered dust of small, half-baked groups, each one isolated from the other, and all sowing confusion both about the need for overall political coherence and for the organizational regroupment of revolutionaries on an international scale. Most often such aborted groupings end up breaking themselves to bits and the founding members of the group disappear, victims of the most abject demoralization. In sum, discussion circles while constituting a positive step forward, must be transcended.
If we make so much of the experience of the Frazione in Naples, it’s precisely because its experience is not a ‘Neapolitan’ affair. Its experience contains the same richness and the same problems as that of many other circles in Spain - one of which has joined Accion Proletaria - Seattle, Toronto, Sweden, Denmark, France, and Bombay. Certain of the experiences of the above circles have led to some sort of political clarification, but with others self-dispersal and demoralization provide the only balance-sheet the working class can draw up from them. And if we are able to cite certain examples, we know perfectly well that there are dozens more we don’t know about because of their isolation. If the ICC insists so much on the necessity for the regroupment of revolutionary forces, it’s not, as some claim, out of any “desire for hegemony, exerted openly or underhandedly over other groups” (Jeune Taupe! no.10, paper of Pour Une Intervention Conununiste).
Such claims simply prove that when a problem is not understood, it is often reduced to the level of psychological explanations concerning some kind of ‘will to power’. Such explanations only serve to mask the real problem, the resistance put up by small groups in an attempt to preserve their own autonomy. The ICC intervenes as actively as possible in the development of all political life and particularly in the evolution of political nuclei. In the case of the Frazione, the intervention of the ICC was a decisive factor in the process of clarification within the Frazione, precisely because we tried to generalize its experiences and always put forward the overall goals of the discussion.
The fundamental aim of the ICC’s intervention in such circles is to help break down the walls of isolation and political confusion. When some elements get lost along the way owing to confusion and the constant political pressure of the enemy class, the whole movement suffers from that loss. The former Frazione comrades who have written this text have done so in the spirit which animates the whole ICC: that of carrying out the task of political clarification within the class and so working towards the constitution of a coherent pole of revolutionary regroupment.
J.A.
A political balance-sheet
“In any case it can only function as a provisional organization. And an awareness of this provisional character is a precondition for a positive final result. A discussion circle which pretends to be a full political organization is neither a good political organization nor a good discussion circle.” (Letter from the ICC to the Naples comrades, 3 December 1975)
If we look back over the history of its political evolution, we can see that the group which originated the Frazione began to discuss during the spring and summer of 1975 on the basis of reading texts of the ICC. For a whole period the Frazione developed more and more into a centre for political debate, above all in the autumn of 1975. The publication of the document on Portugal1 marked a radical turning point: in order to sign the text the group gave itself a name (Frazione Comunista di Napoli) and the introduction to it which the Frazione wrote, was that of a political group. The first consequence of this was that the number of comrades already in the Frazione was doubled by the arrival of new elements who were in actual practice joining a political group in formation in the same way as they would have joined any extra-parliamentary group.
Later on, we often said that writing this introduction was too big a step forward for the group; but in fact it was the publication of the document itself which was too big a step. A discussion circle is, by its very nature, transitory and informal; it can’t have any outside intervention (publications, etc) with all that intervention implies: organizational and political crystallization, etc. What happened was that political positions were taken up - without being fully understood - because it was felt that “the document can’t come out just as it is”. The result of all this was that the immediate necessity to situate ourselves vis-a-vis the outside world got in the way of our internal debate, and thus of our eventual conscious self-definition.
The Frazione’s agreement with the ICC’s letter was in fact only a formal agreement, because while defining itself as a discussion group, the original group was already no longer a discussion group and was halfway towards being a political group. This was expressed in the production of the platform of the Frazione Comunista, which gave concrete expression to the level reached by the comrades and defined the programmatic basis for joining the group. This was certainly an anomalous situation for a discussion group to be in. It was not by chance that it was realized later on that the platform had only been fully understood by the original members of the group. It was also significant that the platform was proposed and written by comrades (now members of the ICC) who were afraid of the ICC using the Frazione. By adopting their own platform they were instinctively tending towards defending their own little group against ‘external invasion’, which is a typical problem with such groups and which invariably leads to degeneration in the end.
The whole existence of the Frazione was impregnated with this basic ambiguity, which threatened to jeopardize the enormous amount of work that had already been achieved. The subsequent abandonment of all external activities including producing publications (after ‘I sindicati contro la classe operaia’ the Frazione didn’t publish anything else) was an indication of the Frazione’s growing understanding of the danger of becoming fixated in a bastardized, semi-political form. This helped to clarify the ambiguous situation of the comrades who had formed the original nucleus and who had inspired the political positions of the platform; these comrades recognized that they stood outside this intermediate situation and saw the ICC as the political organization they wanted to discuss with. The speed with which this discussion led to their integration into the Current was the proof that this step had been necessary for a long time.
We must be clear about this: the discussion group in Naples was dead the moment it adopted a platform, which signified its transformation into a semi-political, group. Although we now understand the need to denounce the Frazione as a bastard organization doomed to political degeneration, this was no less true and inevitable five months ago.
Any organization which defines itself organizationally without basing itself on a coherent political programme and taking up its own militant responsibilities towards the class can only transform itself into an obstacle to the regroupment of revolutionaries, into a kind of purgatory or swamp inhabited by semi-militants trapped in a perpetual state of semi-confusion.
This is especially true today when the proletariat is returning to the stage of history after a period of counter-revolution so deep that it almost wiped out all trace of the revolutionary wave of the early twenties from the consciousness of the working class. The small communist fractions which survived the defeat and preserved the lessons of the struggle could not avoid succumbing one by one to the triumphant counter-revolution. It is therefore without their direct support that the proletarian giant must get off its knees and rediscover its historical mission. Moreover, with the end of the period of reformism and the entry of capitalism into its decadent phase, all the old instruments of the class have been transformed into so many obstacles to the development of consciousness. The trade unions, labour laws, ‘Houses of the People’: this whole reformist apparatus which once hundreds of socialist workers converged upon after a day’s work to gain information, discuss the events of the day, prepare their struggles - these former centres of working class life - are now active instruments of the bourgeoisie.
Those workers who are now rediscovering the path of class struggle without the traditional apparatus of support feel the need to come together to discuss and reflect all the more because it is so difficult for them to do so. This is why after every wave of struggle we see the creation of dozens of small workers’ groups, generally formed around anti-trade union positions. It is certainly not by chance or because of any academic spirit that many of the workers’ collectives formed during the ‘hot autumn’ in the Italian factories called themselves ‘study groups’. This was an expression of the overriding need for reflection, for the working class to rediscover its own history and its own future.
But the gulf of fifty years which is the reason for the proliferation of these groups is also the reason for their intrinsic weakness. The disappearance of the communist fractions, which had left the degenerating International, has meant that these workers have been deprived of the natural framework for their research. They find themselves practically alone in the face of demoralization, reflux, and the weight of localist tendencies and of the left-wing of the unions.
This is why we must insist that none of these groupings can resist for very long the weight of the dominant ideology, as long as they are unable to break completely with the narrow horizon of a single factory and to orientate their activity towards the clarification of basic political questions and their own position as militants. The only way that comrades who have come out of these experiences can subsequently contribute to the class struggle is to integrate themselves actively and consciously into the process of the international regroupment of revolutionaries: to follow any other path must lead to an impasse.
What lessons can be drawn out of our experience? A discussion circle is by its very nature a transitory formation, engendered by the necessity to clarify the problems of the class struggle. To the extent that, by means of discussion, this clarification is accomplished, the discussion circle does not strengthen itself (through adopting a platform, organizational structures, etc) - it withers away, having exhausted its role. Whatever the future of its members as individuals (evolution or disappearance), the discussion circle itself can then only degenerate or die.
It is the task of revolutionaries to indicate the function and the limits of such circles, and to denounce any pernicious survivals.
The former members of the ex-Frazione Comunista
1 Lotte Operaie in Portugallo: Una Lotta Esemplare: Il Lavoratori della TAP di fonte al PCP ed al ‘Esercito Democratico’.
The Portuguese group, Combate, was formed in 1974 in the re-emergence of the workers’ struggles in Portugal after the overthrow of the Caetano dictatorship. Like similar groups in other countries, Combate’s appearance was symptomatic of the general awakening of the workers’ movement after fifty years of world counter-revolution, an awakening which has been on the rise since 1968. During and after the May days in France, many groups emerged promising to contribute to the generalization of the lessons the proletariat has so painfully acquired since the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 was engulfed by the growing counter-revolution.
The present revitalization of the international class struggle can be traced to the deepening world crisis of capitalism, caused by the end of the post-war reconstruction. Thus the crisis also lays the social and political preconditions for the emergence of groups which attempt to place their activity within the camp of the working class in opposition to the mystifications of the left-wing of capital and its ideological pimps (Trotskyists, Maoists, populists, anarchists, etc). When it first appeared, Combate was not only a genuine and refreshing emanation of the struggles of the Portuguese workers -- it promised to become much more. Indeed, Combate was the only group in Portugal -- apart from the chronically crippled anarchist and councilist sects -- which rallied around certain revolutionary positions. Combate boldly attacked the mystifications of the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement (AFM) and the trade unions and leftist apparatus of the bourgeoisie. The group defended the autonomous struggles f Portuguese workers and claimed to stand firmly for internationalism. In the repugnant climate of triumphalism created by the leftist carnival in Portugal from April 1974 to November 1975, the stance of Combate offered a glimmer of hope. It was as if in the very midst of the ‘Portuguese Revolution’ -- the ‘carnation revolution’ which ruthlessly confronted workers’ struggles at TAP, Timex, the Post Office, etc -- a proletarian voice had finally been raised.
The limitations of CombateIn issue no.5 of World Revolution, the publication of the ICC in Britain, it was “The main weaknesses of (Combate) appear to be its lack of clarity about organization combined with a certain localism. (Their) article, seems to argue for an abstract opposition to ‘parties’, rather than seeing the reactionary policies of the leftist parties as a function of their capitalist nature. This attitude is linked to a failure on Combate’s part to see the need to organize in a coherent and centralized way, around a definite platform. The article also reveals a tendency to see the present crisis in Portugal as a Portuguese phenomenon rather than as a manifestation of the world capitalist crisis; and furthermore, there seems to be a limited awareness of the fact that the problems facing the Portuguese working class can only be solved at an international level.” (Introduction in World Revolution no.5 to Combate’s article: ‘Portugal -- What Workers’ Councils?’)
These words were confirmed by the subsequent evolution of Combate. Comrades of the International Communist Current met and discussed with Combate extensively in 1975. But, unfortunately, these fraternal discussions only brought to light a propensity in Combate to localism, theoretical stagnation, and eclecticism. In the Portuguese situation, where revolutionaries with very clear heads were and are urgently needed, these negative features rapidly disclosed the widening gap between Combate’s activities and the needs of the working class.
Combate’s limitations had existed within it from its beginning, but they became a real brake on the group’s development when they began to be ‘theorized’. As the class struggle in Portugal entered a temporary lull (during and after the summer of 1975), Combate clearly entered into a state of regression. Confused perhaps by the temporary retreat of the proletariat after the November events, Combate began to exhibit a marked tendency to defend the ideology of self-management, including the defence of populist and marginal struggles. This was paralleled by Combate’s almost complete disregard and abstention from broader political issues confronting the Portuguese and world proletariat over the past few months. Responding to the recent elections in Portugal, Combate printed a front-page headline proclaiming: “No to Otelo, No to Eanes -- for Direct Democracy!”. With this banality, supplemented by an editorial in which ‘direct democracy’ was transformed into ‘workers’ democracy’, Combate then proceeded to submerge its readers in a flood of articles eulogizing workers’ and peasants ‘control’ of Portuguese enterprises (Combate, no.43, June/July 1976) (1). Combate’s evolution is not accidental nor exceptional. It shows the immense weight that the counter-revolution still exerts over emerging revolutionary forces; a weight that is so great that it can easily curtail the positive development of a group, particularly in a situation where in the group is cut off from organic and theoretical continuity with the historic workers’ movement. The evolution of Combate is important, therefore, because it helps revolutionaries to assess the difficulties faced today by the working class in its permanent search for clarity and deeper understanding.
Combate’s originsThe tasks that Combate attempted to fulfill in the Portuguese class struggle were never defined very clearly. Combate began in 1974 as a sort of self-managed ‘collective’, centred around a bookshop in Lisbon. This bookshop in turn, was open to workers in struggle and ‘autonomous revolutionary groups’ as a place to hold meetings. The premises were also offered to ‘self-managed’ enterprises -- which are a common feature of Portuguese light industry since 1974 -- as an outlet for their sales. In answer to a reader’s letter, Combate affirmed in one of its issues that the reason for the paper’s existence was to contribute to the working class’s “self-organization and self-leadership, helping to create conditions that favour and accelerate that self-organization” (Combate, no.29). Although this was correct in itself, the task of ‘helping’ the workers was approached in a purely academic way in the sense of ‘demystifying’ the state capitalist ideology held by the supposed ‘technocratic class’ which was said to be taking over society (a notion culled perhaps from the writings of James Burnham or perhaps Paul Cardan). Otherwise, Combate saw its task as one of intervention within the workers’ commissions which arose during workers’ struggles in Portugal to ‘unify’ them. These commissions have now become, in the downturn of the class struggle, vehicles for self-management ideology within the proletariat.
To these tasks of ideological ‘demystification’ and ‘practical unification’ of the class in Portugal, a weak and incoherent call for internationalism was appended. But this call was understood by Combate only in terms of the “international solidarity” of workers in other countries -- preferably those similarly engaged in ‘self-management’ activities -- with the workers in Portugal. Combate was completely uninterested in the fight to create an international organization, politically defined by its defence of class positions within the international class struggle. Apparently the creation of a body of communists regrouped around a platform with a clear international framework, based on the past and present lessons coming from the struggles of the class, was a bit too ‘theoretical’ for Combate. Over and over again, Combate insisted that it wasn’t “Leninist or anarchist”, as if the question of revolutionary organization could be reduced to such a simplistic level. Combate remained, however, willing to enter into ‘common work’ with anybody -- including Stalinists -- provided a fuzzy common denominator of confusion was respected by the participants. Such frontism was candidly admitted in a manifesto produced by Combate:
“All our work has as its only point of reference, the practical positions assumed in the workers’ struggle. And it has as its only objective to contribute to the unification of the various struggles in a general struggle of the masses of the working class and remaining workers. We are not a party and we do not intend to constitute any party based on the work linked to this paper. Elements or groups coming from any party, or coming independently, are collaborators in this work with the condition that they develop in the workers’ struggle practical revolutionary positions.” (Manifesto of Combate, London, 1975)
Exactly what was meant by developing “practical revolutionary positions” was not made clear, but one is led to suspect that it is the cuckoo’s egg of self-management. Thus, for Combate, the whole question of revolutionary organization was but a vague ‘project’ rooted in localism and buttressed by self-management conceptions -- an effort neatly combining the features of both anarchism and leftist vanguardism. The task of organizing and fermenting the class struggle and with it the struggle within the army and navy was boldly asserted by Combate as the following passage makes clear:
“This paper intends to be an active agent in the linkage of various particular struggles and the organizational experience resulting from them and accelerating in that way the development of the workers’ general struggles. It is from these struggles and the development of the general struggle that the whole elaboration of the paper will be based and will result in the deepening of the positions taken by us. This paper is the first axis of our work.”
Let us note that Combate bases its existence as a newspaper on contingencies, on the existence of “various particular struggles” upon which all its elaboration will be founded. By writing this Combate therefore proclaims its own disappearance at the first sign of a reflux in the struggle, which means that either Combate is completely ignorant of the way the proletarian struggle develops, with all its pauses, refluxes, and sudden upsurges, or that it will refuse to engage in any activity as soon as the class goes into a temporary retreat. In both cases we are dealing with an irresponsible attitude. It shows a grave lack of any sense of responsibility to try to influence a movement as crucial in the destiny of humanity as that of the proletariat without having any understanding of its basic essentials and with the intention of deserting that movement as soon as it meets the slightest setback.
“Intimately connected with the paper, is the work to ferment the organization of mass meetings among workers, soldiers and sailors, or workers with soldiers and sailors located in specific struggles. We know that this is difficult work, which demands not only the preparation of numerous material conditions such as defence against the repression of the bourgeoisie. But there can be no development and generalization of our struggle without the realization of mass meetings among workers who have different particular experiences of struggle. This is the second axis of our work ...” (Ibid)
Although it is true that a revolutionary group intervenes and participates in the struggles of the working class, especially when the entire proletariat is entering a new period of combativity as it is today, the revolutionary organization does not (for that matter cannot) prepare the ‘material conditions’ for the revolutionary struggle of the class (the creation of mass links between workers in struggle, and the launching of class action against the repression of the bourgeoisie and its state, etc). Departing from its previously humble role as a welfare organization offering services to the working class, Combate quite imaginatively adopted the star-billing of majordomo of the revolution -- a transition equivalent to Clark Kent’s transformation into Superman!
The revolutionary minorities of the proletariat defend the final general goal of the proletarian movement: communism. Their task is not to ‘organize’, ‘unify’, or ‘ferment’ the struggle of the proletariat. Only the class as a whole can steel its own battalions, temper them in struggle for the assault on the bastion of bourgeois power, the state, since only the revolutionary proletariat as a whole can become the ruling class of society, not a minority of self-appointed leaders and ‘tacticians’. Combate’s conceptions of its own function not only lack a sense of proportion, owing to the fact that they are not based on a clear definition of the political principles of a revolutionary organization and of the responsibilities of the militants of such an organization; they also lead Combate to invite the class enemy to participate fully with it in “practical revolutionary projects”. Stalinists, populists of the COPCON-PRP variety, isolated Trotskyists, etc, all have their contribution to make as long as they bow their heads to the mysteries of ‘workers’ control’ and ‘self-management’. Their contributions would surely gain Combate’s approval if they chose to add resolute phrases against the creation of ‘political parties’ since for Combate their creation automatically spells Leninism -- indeed there is no reason why Otelo himself might not have some contribution to make to Combate’s efforts.
The Portuguese experience, along with many others, has shown that behind the slogan “No political parties!” you will often find the light artillery, the snipers of capital, those who instead of openly confronting the class movement try to flatter its gropings towards clarification in order to divert them into an impasse. When the workers begin to revolt against bourgeois parties, the ‘nonparty’ specialists try to turn it against all parties, including the organizations which the class has historically engendered in its struggle for consciousness. Unable to eliminate the distrust that the working class has towards the traditional parties and forms of mystification, capital tries to extend this distrust to those revolutionary organizations who defend the historic programme of the proletariat, in order to deprive the class of one of the fundamental weapons of its struggle. In Portugal, as elsewhere where the bourgeoisie has been gasping for breath, this hoary phrase of “No political parties!” in fact expresses the interests of the state machine in its attempts to drown the autonomy of the class struggle under the ‘non-political’ hegemony of Portuguese state capitalism.
Internationalism – Combate styleTo explain the Portuguese events, Combate wrote:
“The unsustainable situation of the Portuguese bourgeoisie in the colonies, the incapacity of militarily defeating the colonial peoples, was one of the factors which made extremely urgent for the bourgeoisie the ‘detournement’ of its politics and led it to search, through military peace, for political and economic neocolonial solutions.
The multiplicity of strikes and struggles that the Portuguese workers were developing were showing to the bourgeoisie that the repressive apparatus of the Caetano regime was already completely inadequate to try to contain and repress these strikes. The bourgeoisie wanted, then, to allow the ‘freedom to strike’ at the same time appointing to the head of the union apparatus reactionary elements contrary to the strike practice.
The exploiting classes and layers needed also to adapt the state apparatus for the resolution of grave economic problems which were accumulating without the Caetano administration being able to find any solution. Inflation, the necessity to expand industrial development relations with the Common Market, emigration, was all urging a rapid and large-scale reorganization of the state institutions.” (Manifesto of Combate, p.1)
As can be seen from the above, Combate’s explanation for the coup of April 1974, did not transcend the narrow framework of localism -- a view of the coup strictly contained within the Portuguese context. Rampant inflation (today at 50per cent), the need to integrate the Portuguese economy more fully into the EEC, the rising wave of class struggle in Portugal, are all aspects of the reality of Portuguese capital as part of the international capitalist system. The Portuguese crisis has been, in other words, an expression, a moment, of the world crisis of capital which has marked the end of the post-war ‘boom’. Combate, however, considered the class struggle in Portugal as an essentially ‘Portuguese’ phenomenon. It was if the whole world revolved around Portugal and around the Portuguese proletariat. The heavy influx of leftists arriving in Portugal gave substance to this illusion and contributed to the euphoric atmosphere generated by the ‘carnation revolution’. Just as Allende’s Chile became a great laboratory for different leftist experiments in ‘socialism’, Portugal too was transformed into a vital centre of leftist mystifications. Portugal, unlike Chile, is in Western Europe and therefore that much more relevant to leftism. As an important link in NATO’s umbrella and a country firmly integrated into the European economy, Portugal became a veritable El Dorado for leftist entrepreneurs.
In such a relatively backward country, where the workers’ movement has suffered immense atomization in the course of the last fifty years, where a strong, coherent tradition of revolutionary politics has never existed, the emergence of pitched class struggle was destined to give revolutionaries in that country a false sense of triumph, especially when their enthusiasm was not tempered by a sober and rigorous understanding of the international class struggle and its perspectives. This false sense of optimism, this naive triumphalism, was to find its accompaniment on the practical level in immediatist activity and local prejudice when confronted with the implications of the development of the international crisis of capitalism and struggle of the proletariat. In January 1976, a member of Combate could write: “I would say that the class struggle in Portugal is ideal, pure: the producers find themselves in struggle against the expropriators, a struggle almost without institutional mediations integrated into the apparatus of exploitation.” The writer could go on to refer to the new Portuguese regime as a “degenerated capitalist state”, degenerated presumably by a working class with “strong consciousness and political ability” (Joao Bernardo, Portugal, Economy and Policy of the Dominant Class, London 1976, p.20). In fact this delirious conception is nothing more than the mindless ‘enthusiasm’ which always characterizes leftist demagogues.
For the localist the whole universe revolves around him, and his dilettantish little ‘projects’. Localism sees the proletarian struggle only from a day-to-day perspective; it gets lost when it attempts to generalize such experiences to a more global level. Localism is thus always inherently nationalist in outlook, incapable of gauging the weight and significance of the immediate situation in relation to wider questions and events. Localists only find renewed ‘sustenance’ in their native and immediate surroundings -- from a chat with an individual worker, a letter by a self-managed enterprise in the vicinity, or the hearsay of everyday life. A certain ‘physical presence’ in the ‘daily struggles’ of the workers gives localists an inflated opinion of themselves causing them to assume the role of interpreters of the local aspirations and consciousness of the proletariat. If a struggle deepens, localists (who tend to become super-activists in such conditions) have their field day. The extent of the struggle is blown out of all proportion and mindless enthusiasm and messianic predictions grip the heart and fall from the tongue of the localist. But when the struggle goes into reflux, the localist is left high and dry, feeling ‘betrayed’ by the class struggle. Pessimism, the deadening ‘theorization’ of individual isolation or a cynical surrender to the goals of leftism follow. In short the political durability of localists is always minimal and unstable and of no positive value to the proletarian struggle at all.
For Combate too, optimism based on a superficial analysis of local events melted away to be replaced by pessimism, when the class struggle in Portugal entered into a phase of retreat. At the beginning of 1976 Combate began to draw up a balance-sheet of its international work:
“We note that for the groups who claim to defend the autonomous struggles of the workers and which sometimes write to Combate there is almost only one worry: the discussion of theoretical concepts in general in an idealistic way and independent of the real experiences of the proletarian struggles, above all, with the object not of publicizing the new forms of social organization which the proletariat in struggle has created, but of publicizing their own political group, considered to be the trustees of theoretical recipes without the knowledge and the study of which the proletariat cannot be saved.
When these groups publish texts from Combate they are, with a few exceptions, the editorials, groups abroad who publish the texts of the workers, or interviews, hardly exist and this is, for us, the part of the newspaper which is more important to know the state of organization, the forms of struggle and the consciousness of the Portuguese workers, for developing these forms of struggle internationally. Almost two years of correspondence has convinced us that these organizations confuse the gigantic world of class struggle with the microscopic world of the struggles of organizations.” (‘Internationalism, the Communist Struggle and Political Organization’, supplement to Combate, no.36)
Preferring telescopes to microscopes, Combate shows us what it means by the “gigantic world of class struggle”:
“From the beginning of this newspaper we have sought that groups and comrades in other countries who have similar practice to ours should unite their forces in order to set up relationships between the workers. (One example, very recently workers of TIMEX said that it was difficult to enter into contact with workers of that multinational in other countries because by telephone they didn’t receive workers at the other end of the line but the bosses who boycotted such a contact). Would it not be easier for the groups who attempt to dynamize the struggles of the workers to work in the sense of making these contacts possible?” (Ibid).
Poor proletariat: It’s gigantic: world is so vast; that it requires the ‘dynamism’ of such groups as Combate to transcend the open spaces. How can the working class unify its struggles if it doesn’t have the correct communications network established for it by the resourceful elves of ‘revolutionary’ organizations working overtime at dialing the right numbers? But Combate doesn’t want to be considered merely as a handy telephone exchange. Its role of revolutionary majordomo can’t stop there -- there has to be some room somewhere for ‘theory’:
“We don’t want to say that we don’t consider the discussion of theoretical problems important, or that these couldn’t be enriched by different practices of struggle in different countries. But in our understanding of it, the platform for the unity of the revolutionary proletariat lies in the forms of organization which are developed by the autonomous struggle and the consciousness which arises from this, and not in one or another individual ideological systems dealing with theoretical disputes. For us, it is more important to contribute to practical forms of struggle, which break down the frontiers and which allow the workers to establish direct relations in the common struggle against capitalism.” (Ibid)
Indeed for Combate, ‘theory’ bears a purely immediate, subordinate and mechanical relation to the fragmented ‘practical forms of struggle’ of the present moment, without any consideration being given to the historical aspect of class consciousness, bound as it is to the whole experience of the international proletariat, gained from more than 130 years of struggle.
These confusions of Combate stem from a total incoherence as to what is the communist goal of the working class, what is the role of the party and the mass proletarian organs, the workers’ councils. Combate fails to understand the present period of capitalist decadence the impossibility of reformism, the reactionary nature of leftist parties (reactionary not because they ‘curtail’ self-management, but owing to their defence of capital over the last fifty years of counter-revolution), and what internationalism for the working class truly implies. In sum, Combate shows under the pretext of rejecting what it calls “theoretical squabbles” a complete disregard for clarity within the revolutionary struggle of the class and the need for a coherent platform within the class struggle. Class consciousness is the historic element in the struggle of the proletariat -- it doesn’t arise anew from scratch every day, generated by each fragmented act of working class individuals. Internationalism is not a random, ad hoc exchange of the ‘practical experiences’ of such individuals or sects operating under an implicitly federalist conception of ‘I'll help you it you help me’. Such ‘practical experiences’ don’t break any frontiers except in tide minds of their advocates.
In fact behind this attitude of abasing oneself in front of every ‘concrete’ struggle and of distrusting past experience, behind this ‘practical’ vision of internationalism, there lies a narrow and distrustful vision of the proletariat. Such a vision no longer sees the class as a social being with a historical and geographical unity: the class has become a simple agglomeration of worker or of enterprises, whose historic movement towards communism can be reduced to the daily accumulation of ‘practical experiences’ and ‘new forms of organization’ which ‘prefigure’ the emergence of new social relations. In this way we arrive unintentionally at a gradualist world-view which believes that communism can be established step by step in capitalism while the bourgeois state continues to hold sway over the whole of social life.
Such nonsense is similar to Bernstein’s theory, but glossed over with the charming, additive of self-management and other ideological trinkets of the last fifty years of counter-revolution, such as the defence of marginalist struggles, the defence of ‘oppressed peoples’, etc. The idea of ‘socialism in one country’ coined by Stalinism, is not inimical to this vague theorizing. Thus we are told by Combate that “communist social forms can be created for a while in certain particular cases, without the society as a whole having reached them and having transformed the mere social forms into effective communist economical organizations” (Ibid). Combate doesn’t seem to have noticed the role played by self-management ideology within the class struggle in Portugal in terms of helping to salvage capitalist production. Instead, workers’ self-management, ‘communist forms’ of running capitalist firms are presented by Combate as the “solidarity of the workers” in struggle. The Titoist, Ben-Bellaist recipes dished up by Combate in its usual ‘non-doctrinaire’ way seeks to avoid confusing the workers struggles with the ‘microscopic’ world of struggle between organizations, by simply drowning the class struggle in the macroscopic swamp of the counter-revolution. When Combate demands ‘autonomy’ for the masses, in fact its appeals have nothing to do with the masses – it’s simply the demand of Combate to be allowed to continue to debase the meaning of communism in its own so practical, so concrete, so ‘apolitical’ and ‘autonomous’ way. It’s a cry for organizational autonomy that demands to be spared the searching and principled criticism of communist organizations who recognize the absolutely vital importance of clarification and not confusionism within the class struggle.
The further evolution of CombateCombate’s fate is the fate of a group which attempted to place itself on the terrain of working class struggle, but failed to recognize that this involved breaking with all the ideological muck of decadent capitalism. No group can last today in the no-man’s land between vague leftist-councilist political positions and the communist positions of the proletariat. In the last analysis, a class frontier separates the one from the other. For Combate to have evolved positively, it would have had to break with its past conceptions and activities completely, and realized the need to regroup with an international organization defending class positions, clarified by the historical struggle of the international proletariat. This did not (and perhaps given the confusions generated by the ‘carnation revolution’ could not have) happened. After a certain point Combate’s evolution became overwhelmingly negative and the group became the mouthpiece of many leftist mystifications, all the while pretending to be the ‘reporter’ of the activities of the workers. The standard bete noire concerns of libertarian politics became increasingly fashionable in the pages of Combate with articles on abortion, reprints from foreign publications such as International Socialism in Britain on women’s problems, or articles on racial issues uncritically reproduced from Race Today, etc. Vital issues confronting the proletarian struggle fared less well in Combate. The need for internationalism in the class struggle, for example, was met with equivocations by Combate, whose half-truths and truisms on the subject seek to evade any organizational responsibility towards this fundamental of working class struggle. Combate, like most confusionist elements, can agree on almost anything with a communist group provided agreement can be given without conviction and thus carries no political consequences. This kind of attitude can only end up in a spineless opportunism.
The difficulties confronted by revolutionaries in Portugal and SpainThe objective limitations of today originate in the disarray, demoralization, and confusion within two generations of the world proletariat who suffered the worst batterings of the counter-revolution. While the present rising level of class struggle creates the conditions necessary for the formation of revolutionary groups, this period is still afflicted by the ideological aberrations and debris of the previous one. Today, if emerging groups do not firmly base their activity within the context of a coherent international framework, sooner or later they will enter into the path of theoretical and practical decomposition. Marx used to say that the ideas of dead generations weigh like a nightmare on the brains of the living. The negative evolutions of Combate poignantly illustrates this truth.
Portugal and Spain today present specific examples of the difficult situation faced by revolutionaries. The economic and political backwardness of these two weak links of European capitalism has meant that the proletariat of these countries has tended to be propelled onto the political arena at the onset of the economic crisis. In order to deflect the proletariat’s struggle, the leftist forces in Portugal and Spain have also appeared on the political stage, announcing to the whole world that the proletariat is to be drowned amidst the whole ‘revolutionary people’. The attempts of leftism to submerge the working class into the common front of ‘the people’ opens the way to a whole barrage of mystifications the left uses to marshal the proletariat behind the needs of the national capital.
A whole mythology was brought into being by the leftists in Portugal in 1974 about the ‘Portuguese revolution’. The same will happen in Spain tomorrow. From every rooftop in Lisbon and Porto, the leftists proclaimed the need to ‘defend’ the fraudulent ‘revolution’ at the same time as they were systematically setting about derailing the autonomous struggles of the workers into the dead ends of ‘national defence’ and ‘workers’ self-management’. The entire revolting campaign for ‘popular committees’, ‘popular democracy’, ‘grass-roots democracy’, ‘workers' councils’ (sic!), ‘inter-empresas’, was used by the leftists in Portugal for all those wretched lies were worth. In Portugal, it was almost impossible to swim against this tide of lies, confusions, and false hopes generated so hysterically by leftism. Initially, Combate seemed to be capable of doing so. But Combate’s mistake was to assume that the rising class struggle in Portugal was a direct harbinger of total social transformation in Portugal. It didn’t realize that the struggles of the Portuguese workers were a growing link in the chain of international class struggle, and that the promise of the Portuguese proletariat was to be seen in terms of the lessons gained in today’s struggle finding their consummation in the revolutionary struggle of the international working class in the years to come.
Combate, however, over-estimated events in Portugal and later proved unable to put forward a communist analysis of what was actually going on. Its emphasis was on self-management and the ‘day-to-day’ struggles of the Portuguese working class. And indeed there was an immediate upsurge of working class militancy in Portugal which demanded the intervention of any revolutionary group to the best of its abilities. But such an intervention could have been fruitful and systematic only if it had been based on a clear international conception of the global class struggle. Combate naively dismissed the need for such clarification. It believed that political clarity would spontaneously flow from the ‘daily struggles’ of the Portuguese working class. There was, therefore, no fundamental need for them to relate to anything outside Portugal beyond ascribing to some vague notion of ‘internationalism’, which at best amounted to a vague sense of moral solidarity between dispersed sectors of the class. Their advocacy of permanent ‘links’ between workers boiled down to a fear that the workers themselves were incapable of establishing class solidarity in a revolutionary upsurge and, in fact, was nothing less that a political defence of the ideas of self-management carried to an ‘international’ level. Different sectors of the class joined together with permanent ‘links’, could apparently struggle better for the fight for reforms. But reformism is impossible today in a world beset by the historical crisis of capitalism. For revolutionaries to advocate ‘links’ or ‘relationships’ based on the reformist illusions of the proletariat is to confuse and lower the level of class consciousness coming out of the sharp battles of the class such as took place in Portugal itself in 1974 and 1975.
The political decomposition of Combate is, in some respects, a loss for the revolutionary movement today. But it is a loss only when one thinks what Combate, and similar groups, could have become had they evolved positively. In their present state such groups act as a barrier to consciousness in the proletariat: they become obstacles to organizational coherence and principled regroupment of revolutionaries. Henceforward, in the absence of any rectification -- which becomes less and less possible the more they settle into their errors and what’s more into theorizing those errors – these groups cannot put up much resistance against the terrible contradiction between their own revolutionary principles and the immense pressure of bourgeois ideology, which they have allowed to penetrate their ranks by refusing to give these principles a clear and coherent basis founded on the historic experience of the class. The choice before them is thus a simple one: either they resolve the contradictions, cross the Rubicon, and join the camp of the bourgeoisie by abandoning principles which have become more and more of an embarrassment to them; or they simply disappear, dislocated by their own inner contradictions. This is probably what will happen to Combat whose disappearance is, as we have seen, already inscribed in the platform on which it bases its existence. If, as is very likely, such a group does not succeed in overcoming its confusions, this is in the final analysis the only outcome which corresponds to the vital necessity for clear communist positions within the workers’ movement.
Nodens,
August 1976
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