In International Review n° 132 we looked at the development of workers' struggles which have been breaking out simultaneously all over the world in response to the worsening economic crisis and the growing attacks on proletarian living standards. The latest convulsions of the world economy, the scourge of inflation and the food crisis, can only further aggravate the poverty of the most poverty-stricken social layers in the peripheries of capitalism. This situation, which reveals the impasse reached by the capitalist system, has provoked hunger riots in numerous countries, at the same time as workers' struggles for wage increases, above all in response to the spiralling cost of basic foodstuffs. With the deepening crisis, hunger riots and workers' struggles can only become more and more general and simultaneous. These revolts against poverty are products of the same thing: the crisis of capitalist society, its inability to offer humanity any future and even to ensure the immediate survival of a significant part of it. However, they do not both contain the same potential. Only the struggle of the proletariat on its own class terrain can put an end to poverty and generalised famine by overthrowing capitalism and creating a new society without poverty, hunger and war.
The common denominator of the hunger riots which since the beginning of the year have exploded virtually all over the world is the surge in the price of foodstuffs or their desperate scarcity, which have struck the poor and working populations of numerous countries. To give a few particularly clear figures, the price of maize has quadrupled since summer 2007, the price of grain has doubled since the beginning of 2008, and in general food prices have increased by 60% in two years in the poorer countries. It is a sign of the times that the devastating effects of the 30-50% increase in food prices at a world level have violently affected not only the populations of the poor countries but also those of the "rich" ones. Thus, for example, in the USA, the world's leading economic power, 28 million Americans could no longer survive without the food distribution programmes run by municipal and federal authorities.
At this very moment, 100,000 people are dying of hunger every day across the world; a child under 10 is dying every five seconds; 842 million people are suffering from chronic malnutrition and are being reduced to the status of invalids. And right now, two out of the six billion human beings of the planet (i.e. one third of humanity) are in a daily fight for survival because of the rise in the cost of basic foodstuffs.
The experts of the bourgeoisie - the IMF, the FAO, the UN, the G8 etc - have announced that such a state of affairs is only temporary, when in fact it is not only becoming chronic but is due to get worse, with the dizzying increase in the price of basic necessities and their growing scarcity across the planet. At a time when the productive capacities of the planet would make it possible to feed 12 billion human beings, millions and millions are dying of hunger because of the laws of capitalism, the system that dominates the world: a system of production aimed not at satisfying human need but at generating profit; a system totally incapable of responding to the needs of humanity. Furthermore, all the explanations of the current food crisis we are being given converge in the same direction, pointing to the method of production that obeys blind and irrational laws:
1. The surge in oil prices which is increasing the cost of transporting food etc. This phenomenon is indeed an aberration typical of the system, not a factor external to it.
2. The significant growth in the demand for food, the result of a certain increase in the buying power and of the new eating habits of the middle classes in the "emerging" countries like India and China. If there is an ounce of truth in this explanation, it is a significant mark of the real nature of an "economic progress" that increases the consuming power of some only to condemn millions of others to die of hunger because of the resulting penury on the world market
3. Frenzied speculation on agricultural products. This is also a pure product of the system and its economic weight is all the more important given that the real economy is prospering less and less. Some examples: cereal stocks are the lowest they have been for thirty years, and speculation mania is more and more focused on foodstuffs in the hope of finding some good investments at a time when there's nothing to be gained in the property market. At the Chicago Stock exchange, "the volume of contracts being exchanged over soya, grain, maize, beef, pork and even living cattle" (Le Figaro, 15/4/08) went up by 20% in the course of the first three months of this year.
4. The growing market in biofuels, spurred on by the rising cost of oil and which is also the object of frenzied speculation. This new source of profit is at the root of the explosion of this kind of cultivation at the expense of food crops. Numerous countries that produce basic necessities have turned whole swathes of their agricultural economy over to biofuel production, on the pretext of fighting against the greenhouse effect. This has drastically decreased the production of basic necessities and dramatically increased their cost. This is the case with Congo Brazzaville which is extensively developing sugar cane for biofuels when its population is sinking into hunger. In Brazil, where 30% of the population live below the poverty line and have great difficulty feeding themselves, agricultural policy is increasingly geared towards biofuel production.
5. Trade war and protectionism, which are also characteristic of capitalism, when imposed on the agricultural sector, mean that the most productive forms of agriculture in the industrialised countries, often thanks to government subsidies, are exporting an important part of their produce to the countries of the "Third World",[1] thus ruining the peasantry of these regions, and rendering them incapable of meeting the food needs of the local population. In Africa, for example, many local farmers have been ruined by European exports of chicken and beef. Mexico can no longer produce enough basic necessities to feed its population, so that it now has to import 10 billion dollars worth of foodstuffs.
6. The irresponsible use of the planet's resources, driven by the hunt for immediate profit, is leading to their exhaustion. The over-utilisation of fertilisers damages the balance of the soil, so that the International Rice Research Institute foresees a threat to rice production in Asia in the medium term. Unrestrained fishing in the oceans is leading to a dearth of many species of edible fish.
7. As for the consequences of the warming of the planet, in particular floods and droughts, they are rightly pointed to as reasons for the fall in production in certain cultivable areas. But this too in the last instance is the result of the effects that capitalist industrialisation has had on the environment, at the expense of the immediate and the long term needs of humanity. Thus, the recent heat waves in Australia have led to severe damage and a significant drop in agricultural production. And the worst is in front of us since according to calculations a one degree Celsius rise in temperature will result in a 10% fall in the production of rice, grain and maize. Initial researches indicate that an increase in temperature will threaten the survival of many animal and plant species and will reduce the nutritional value of many plants.
Famine is not the only consequence of the aberrant way capitalism exploits the earth's resources. Thus, the production of biofuels leads to the exhaustion of cultivable land. Furthermore, this "juicy" market leads to crazy and anti-natural behaviour: in the Rocky Mountains, in the USA, where growers have already devoted 30% of their maize crop to the manufacture of ethanol, the gigantic investment in the production of "energy" maize in soils unsuitable for it leads to an incredible waste of fertiliser and water for very poor results. Jean Ziegler explains: "To produce a full 50 litre tank of ethanol, you have to burn 232 kilos of maize"; and to produce a kilo of maize, you need 1000 litres of water! According to recent studies, not only is the "pollution" balance sheet for biofuels negative (recent research shows that it produces more air pollution than normal fuel), but their global ecological and economic consequences are disastrous for the whole of humanity. What's more, in many regions of the world, the soil is increasingly polluted or even totally poisoned. This is the case for 10% of Chinese soil; this is a country where every year 120,000 peasants die from cancers linked to the pollution of the soil.
All the explanations given us about the food crisis contain a small element of truth. But none of them itself constitutes an explanation. When it comes to the limits of its system, above all when this expresses itself in the form of an open crisis, the bourgeoisie has no choice but to lie to the exploited, who are the first to suffer its consequences, in order to hide the necessarily transitory nature of capitalism, as with all previous systems of exploitation. To a certain extent it is also forced to lie to itself as a social class, to avoid having to face the fact that its reign has been condemned by history. What is so striking today is the contrast between the bourgeoisie's assurances and its inability to make any credible response to the food crisis.
The different explanations and solutions proposed - apart from their cynical and hypocritical character - all correspond to the immediate interests of this or that fraction of the ruling class to the detriment of others. Some examples: at the last summit of the G8 the main leaders of the world invited the representatives of the poor countries to react to the hunger revolts by proposing an immediate cut in customs' duties on agricultural imports. In other words, the first thought of the spokesmen of the great capitalist democracies is to take advantage of the crisis by increasing their own export opportunities! The European industrial lobby made a fuss over the agricultural protectionism of the European Union being responsible, among other things, for ruining subsistence agriculture in the "Third World". And why? Feeling threatened by competition from Asian industry, it wants to reduce agricultural subsidies in the EU as being above its means. As for the agricultural lobby, it sees the hunger revolts as proof of the need to increase the same subsidies. The EU seized on the occasion to condemn the orientation of agricultural production towards "renewable energy"...in Brazil, one of its main rivals in this sector.
Capitalism has, like no other previous system, developed the productive forces to the point where it would be possible to establish a society where all human needs would be met. However, the enormous forces it has set in motion, as long as they are imprisoned by the laws of capital, not only cannot be used for the benefit of the great majority, but actually turn against it: "In the most advanced industrial countries we have subdued the forces of nature and pressed them into the service of mankind; we have thereby infinitely multiplied production, so that a child now produces more than a hundred adults previously did. And what is the result? Increasing overwork and increasing misery of the masses...Only conscious organisation of social production, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planed way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for mankind in the specifically biological aspect".[2] Since capitalism entered its phase of decline, not only does the wealth it produces not contribute to the liberation of the human species from the reign of necessity, but it threatens its very existence. Thus, a new danger now threatens humanity: generalised famine, which only recently was being dismissed as a nightmare of the past. In fact, as illustrated by the warming of the planet, since all productive activity - including the production of food - is subjected to the blind laws of capital, it is the very basis of life on earth that is being put into question, above all through the squandering of its resources,
It is the most impoverished masses of the "Third World" who are being hit by abject scarcity. The looting of shops is a perfectly legitimate reaction faced with an unbearable situation where the survival of yourself and your family is at stake. In this sense, the hunger riots, even when they provoke destruction and violence, should not be put at the same level as the urban riots (like that in Brixton in Britain in 1981 and those in the French suburbs in 2005) or race riots (like those in Los Angeles in 1992).[3]
Although they also trouble "public order" and result in material damage, the latter, in the final analysis, only serve the interests of the bourgeoisie, which is perfectly capable of turning them not only against the rioters themselves but also against the whole of the working class. In particular, these manifestations of desperate violence (in which elements of the lumpen-proletariat are often involved) always provide the ruling class with the opportunity to strengthen its apparatus of repression through increasing police patrols of the poorest areas where working class families live.
These types of riot are a pure product of the decomposition of the capitalist system. They are an expression of the despair and feelings of "no future" that it engenders and this is expressed in their totally absurd character. This was the case for example with the riots which blazed across the French suburbs in 2005 when the young people didn't unleash their actions in the rich neighbourhoods inhabited by their exploiters but in their own neighbourhoods which became even more difficult to live in as a result. The fact that it was their own families or neighbours who were the main victims of their depredations reveals the blind, desperate and suicidal character of these riots. It was the cars of workers living in the neighbourhoods that were burned, or the schools and colleges attended by their brothers and sisters or the children of their neighbours which were destroyed. And precisely because of the absurdity of these riots the bourgeoisie was able to make use of them and turn them against the working class. Their massive exposure in the media enabled the ruling class to make as many workers as possible see the young rioters not as victims of capitalism in crisis, but as "thugs". Apart from the fact that these riots made it possible to step up a witch hunt of immigrant youth, they undermined any possibility of solidarity among the working class towards these young people excluded from production, deprived of any perspective for the future and subjected to the permanent pressure of police harassment.
For their part, the hunger riots are first and foremost an expression of the bankruptcy of the capitalist economy and of the irrationality of its system of production. This is now taking the form of a food crisis which is hitting not only the most disenfranchised layers in the "poor" countries, but more and more wage workers, including those in the so-called "developed" countries. It's not by chance that the majority of workers' struggles developing today all over the planet put forward wage rises as their key demand. Galloping inflation, the spiral in the price of basic necessities, the fall in real wages and of retirement pensions eaten away by inflation, the precariousness of employment and the waves of redundancies - these are all manifestations of the crisis and contain all the ingredients for ensuring that the question of hunger, of the struggle for survival, is more and more being posed within the working class. Already several inquiries have shown that the supermarkets and high streets where workers do their shopping are less and less able to sell their products and are being forced to reduce their orders.
And it is precisely because the question of the food crisis is already hitting the workers of the "poor" countries (and will more and more affect those in the central countries) that the bourgeoisie will have the greatest difficulty in exploiting the hunger riots against the proletarian class struggle. Generalised want and famine - here is the future that capitalism has in store for the whole of humanity and this future is being highlighted by the hunger riots which have broken out recently in a number of countries.
Obviously, these riots are also reactions of despair by the most impoverished masses of the "poor" countries, and in themselves they do not contain any perspective for the overthrow of capitalism. But unlike the urban and racial riots, hunger riots are a concentrated form of all the absolute misery which capitalism is imposing on ever larger portions of humanity. They show the fate that awaits the whole working class if this mode of production is not overthrown. In this sense, they contribute to the process through which the proletariat becomes aware of the irredeemable bankruptcy of the capitalist economy. Finally, they show the cynicism and ferocity with which the ruling class responds to explosions of anger by those who loot shops to avoid dying of hunger: repression, tear gas, truncheons and machine guns.
What's more, unlike the riots in the suburbs, these riots are not a factor of division in the working class. On the contrary, despite the violence and destruction that may be involved in them, hunger riots tend to give rise to spontaneous feelings of solidarity on the part of the workers, given that they are among the first to be affected by the food crisis and are finding it harder and harder to feed their families. In this sense, the hunger riots are much more difficult for the bourgeoisie to exploit by setting workers against each other or creating divisions within the poorer neighbourhoods.
Even so, although in the "poor" countries we are seeing a simultaneous development of hunger riots and workers' struggles against capitalist misery, these are two parallel movements of a very different nature.
Even if workers may be led to participate in hunger riots by pillaging shops, this is not the terrain of the class struggle. It is a terrain in which the proletariat is inevitably drowned amidst other "popular" strata, the poorest and most marginalised. In this kind of movement, the proletariat can only lose its class autonomy and abandon its own methods of struggle: strikes, demonstrations, general assemblies.
Moreover, hunger riots are only a flash in the pan, a revolt that has no tomorrow and which can in no way solve the problem of famine. They are no more than an immediate and desperate reaction to the most absolute misery. Once the shops have been emptied by looting, there's nothing left, whereas the wage rises that result from workers' struggles can be maintained for longer (even if they will eventually be overtaken). It is obvious that in the face of the famine now hitting the populations of the countries at the periphery of capitalism, the working class cannot remain indifferent; all the more so because in these countries the workers themselves are being hit by the food crisis and are finding it increasingly difficult to feed their families on their miserable wages.
The present manifestations of the bankruptcy of capitalism, in particular the surge in prices and the food crisis, will more and more tend to level downwards the living conditions of the proletariat and the most impoverished masses. Because of this, workers' struggles in the "poor" countries can only multiply at the same time as the hunger riots. But while hunger riots don't offer any perspective, workers' struggles are the starting point for the workers to develop their strength and their own perspective. The only way for the proletariat to resist the increasingly violent attacks of capital is to preserve its class autonomy and develop its own struggles and solidarity. In general assemblies and massive demonstrations it needs to put forward demands that are common to all and integrate solidarity with the famished masses. In these demands, workers must not only demand wage rises and cuts in the price of basic foodstuffs: their platform of demands should also include free distribution of the vital minimum for the most deprived, the unemployed and those who have no way of earning a living.
It's only by developing its own methods of struggle and strengthening its class solidarity with the oppressed and famished masses that the proletariat can rally behind it the non-exploiting strata of society.
Capitalism has no perspective to offer humanity except increasingly barbaric wars, increasingly tragic catastrophes, and growing poverty for the great majority of the world population. The only possibility for society to get out of the barbarism of the present world is the overthrow of the capitalist system. And the only force capable of doing this is the world working class. It is because, up till now, the working class has not found the strength to affirm this perspective through the massive development and extension of its struggles, that growing masses of the population in the "Third World" have been forced to engage in desperate hunger riots. The only real solution to the "food crisis" is the development of proletarian struggles towards the world communist revolution, which will make it possible to provide a perspective and a meaning to hunger revolts. The proletariat can only lead the other non-exploiting strata behind it if it affirms itself as a revolutionary class. It is by developing and unifying its struggles that the working class will be able to show that it is the only force capable of changing the world and bringing a radical solution to the scourge of famine, but also to the problem of war and all the expressions of despair produced by the rotting of society on its feet.
Capitalism has brought together the conditions for abundance but, as long as this system is not overthrown, it can only lead to an absurd situation where the overproduction of commodities goes along with scarcity of the most elementary goods.
The fact that capitalism is no longer capable of feeding whole swathes of humanity is a clarion call to the proletariat to assume its historical responsibilities. It is only through the world communist revolution that it will be able to lay the bases of a society of abundance where famine will be forever eradicated from the planet.
ICC, 5th July 2008
[1]. The term "Third World" was invented by the French economist and demographer Alfred Sauvy in 1952, in the midst of the Cold War, originally to describe countries which were not tied directly either to the western bloc or the Russian bloc; but this meaning has been virtually abandoned, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall. But it was equally used to describe countries that had the lowest levels of economic development, in other words the poorest countries on the planet, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America. And it's obviously in this sense, which is more current than ever, that we still use it.
[2]. Engels, Introduction to Dialectics of Nature, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 25, p351. Lawrence and Wishart.
[3]. On the race riots in Los Angeles, see our article "Faced with chaos and massacres, only the working class has an answer" in International Review n° 70. On the riots in the French suburbs in the autumn of 2005, see "Social riots; Argentina 2001, France 2005...Riots or revolution?" in International Review n°124 and "Theses on the students' movement in Spring 2006 in France" in International Review n° 125.
Faced with all the lies about the events of May ‘68, it is necessary for revolutionaries to re-establish the truth, to draw the real lessons of these events and prevent them being buried under an avalanche of flowers and wreaths.
That's what we have begun to do in publishing the previous article[1] that retraced the first component of the "events of ‘68", the student revolt. We are turning here to the essential component of the events: the movement of the working class.
This first article concluded: "May 14, discussions continued in many firms. After the immense demonstrations of the previous evening (in solidarity with the student victims of repression), with the enthusiasm and feeling of strength that came out of them, it was difficult to go back to work as if nothing had happened. In Nantes, the workers of Sud-Aviation, led by the youngest among them, unleashed a spontaneous strike and decided to occupy the factory".
This is the point at which we take up the story.
In Nantes, it was the young workers, the same age as the students, who launched the movement; their reasoning was simple: "if the students, who can't pressurise with strikes, have the strength to knock back the government, the workers can also make it retreat". For their part, the students of the town came to show solidarity with the workers, mingling with the pickets: fraternisation. Here, it was clear that the campaigns of the PCF[2] and the CGT[3] warning against "leftist provocateurs in the pay of the bosses and the Interior Ministry" had only a feeble impact.
In total, there were 3,100 strikers on the evening of May 14.
May 15, the movement reached the Renault factory at Cléon, in Normandy as well as two other factories in the region: total strike, unlimited occupation, locking up the management and the red flag on the gates. At the end of the day, there are 11,000 strikers.
May 16, the other Renault factories join the movement: the red flag at Flins, Sandouville, le Mans and Billancourt. That evening there were only 75,000 strikers in total, but Renault joining the struggle is a signal: it's the biggest factory in France (35,000 workers) and for a long time the saying was: "When Renault sneezes, France catches a cold".
On 17 May 215,000 were on strike: the strike was beginning to spread across France, especially in the provinces. It was a totally spontaneous movement; the unions were just following it. Everywhere, the young workers were at the forefront. There were numerous cases of fraternisation between students and young workers: the latter went to the occupied faculties and invited the students to come and eat at their canteens.
There were no specific demands. It was just a general feeling of being fed up. On the walls of a factory in Normandy it said, "Time to live and with dignity!" On that day, afraid of being outflanked from below and also by the CFDT,[4] which was much more involved in the early strikes, the CGT called for the extension of the strike. It had "jumped on the bandwagon" as was said at the time. Its communiqué wasn't known about till the next day.
On the 18 May, a million workers were on strike by midday, even before the CGT line was known about. By the evening it was 2 million. By Monday 20 May there were 4 million on strike and 6 and a half million the day after that.
On 22 May, there were 8 million workers on indefinite strike. It was the biggest strike in the history of the international workers' movement. It was much more massive than the two previous benchmarks: the May 1926 General Strike in Britain (which lasted a week) and the May-June strikes in France in 1936.
All sectors were involved: industry, transport, energy, post and telecommunications, education, administration (several ministries were completely paralysed), the media (national TV was on strike, with workers denouncing the censorship imposed on them), research labs, etc. Even the undertakers were out (it was a bad idea to die in May ‘68!). Even professional sports people joined the movement: the red flag flew over the building of the Fédération Française de Football. The artists didn't want to be left out and the Cannes Festival was interrupted on the initiative of the film directors.
During this period the occupied faculties (as well as other public buildings, like the Odéon Theatre in Paris) became places of permanent political discussion. Many workers, especially the younger ones but not only them, took part in these discussions. Some workers asked those who defended the idea of revolution to come and argue their point of view in the occupied factories. In Toulouse, the small nucleus which went on to form the ICC's section in France was invited to expound its ideas about workers' councils in the occupied JOB factory. And the most significant thing was that this invitation came from militants of the CGT and the PCF. The latter had to negotiate for an hour with the permanent officials of the CGT, who had come from the big Sud-Aviation factory to "reinforce" the JOB strike picket, to get authorisation to allow the "leftists" to enter the factory. For more than six hours, workers and revolutionaries, sitting on rolls of cardboard, discussed the revolution, the history of the workers movement, soviets, and even the betrayals...of the PCF and the CGT.
Many discussions also took place in the street, on the pavements (the weather was good all over France in May ‘68!). They arose spontaneously; everyone had something to say ("We talk and we listen" as one slogan had it). Everywhere there was an atmosphere of festival, except in the rich neighbourhoods where fear and hatred were building up
All over France, in the neighbourhoods and in or around certain big enterprises, "Action Committees" were formed. Within them there were discussions about how to wage the struggle, about the revolutionary perspective. They were generally animated by leftist or anarchist groups but many more were brought together outside of these organisations. At ORTF, the state radio and television station, an Action Committee was created by Michel Drucker,[5] and the hard-to-describe Thierry Rolland[6] was also part of it.
Faced with such a situation, the ruling class underwent a period of disarray, expressed in muddled and ineffective initiatives.
Thus, on May 22, the National Assembly, dominated by the right, discussed (before rejecting it) a motion of censure tabled by the left two weeks earlier: the official institutions of the French Republic seemed to live in another world. It's the same for the government that took the decision to forbid the return of Cohn-Bendit who had been to Germany. This decision only increased discontent: May 24 saw multiple demonstrations, notably denouncing the prohibition of Cohn-Bendit: "Frontiers mean fuck all!" "We are all German Jews!" Despite the cordon sanitaire of the CGT against the "adventurers" and "provocateurs" (that's to say the "radical" students) many young workers join up with the demonstrations.
In the evening, the President of the Republic, General de Gaulle, gave a speech: he proposed a referendum so that the French could pronounce on "participation" (a sort of capital and labour association). He couldn't have been further from reality. This speech fully revealed the disarray of the government and the bourgeoisie in general.[7]
In the street, demonstrators listened to the speech on portable radios, anger still mounting: "His speech is shafting us!" Confrontations and barricades were mounted throughout the night in Paris and several provincial towns. There were numerous windows broken, some cars burnt, which had the effect of turning part of public opinion against the students who were seen as "hooligans". It's probable, moreover, that among the demonstrators were mixed in Gaullist militias or plain-clothes police in order to "stir things up" and frighten the population. It is clear that a number of students thought they were "making a revolution" by throwing up barricades and burning cars, symbols of the "consumer society". But above all these acts expressed the anger of the demonstrators, students and young workers, in the face of the risible and provocative responses of the authorities to the biggest strike in history. An illustration of the anger against the system was the setting alight of that symbol of capitalism, the Paris Bourse.
It was only the following day that the bourgeoisie finally took effective initiatives: on Saturday May 25 the Ministry of Labour (Rue de Grenelle) opened negotiations between unions, bosses and government.
Straightaway, the bosses were ready to give much more than the unions imagined: it's clear that the bourgeoisie was afraid. The Prime Minister, Pompidou presided: on Sunday morning he had an hour-long one to one session with Seguy, boss of the CGT:[8] the two main people responsible for the maintenance of social order in France needed to discuss without witnesses the means to re-establish this order.[9]
The night of May 26/27 the "Grenelle Accords" were concluded:
7% wage increases for all from June 1st; then 3% from October 1st;
increase of the minimum wage in the region of 25%;
reduction of patients' contributions from 30% to 25% (not paid for by social security);
union recognition within the firm;
a series of vague promises of negotiations, notably on the length of the working day (which was 47 hours a week on average).
Given the importance and strength of the movement, it was a real provocation:
the 10% would be wiped out by inflation (which was quite high during this period);
nothing on safeguards against inflation in the wage packet;
nothing concrete on reduction of the working week; they talked about aiming at "the progressive return to 40 hours" (already officially obtained in 1936!); in the time scale proposed by the government it will take... 40 years!
the only workers who would gain significantly were the poorest workers (dividing the working class by pushing them back to work) and the unions, rewarded for their role as saboteurs.
On Monday May 27 the "Grenelle Accords" were unanimously rejected by the workers' assemblies.
At Renault Billancourt, the unions organised a grand "show" amply covered by television and radio: coming out of negotiations, Seguy said to journalists: "The return to work won't be long" and he hoped that the workers at Billancourt would give the example. However, 10,000 of them, meeting at dawn, decided to continue the movement even before the arrival of the union leaders.
Benoit Frachon, "historic" leader of the CGT (who had been present at the negotiations of 1936) declared: "The Grenelle accords will bring millions of workers a comfort that they couldn't have hoped for": this was greeted by a deadly silence!
Andre Jeanson, of the CDFT, expressed satisfaction with the initial vote in favour of continuing the strike and talked of solidarity of the workers with the students in struggle, bringing the house down.
Seguy, finally, presented "an objective account" of what "had been gained at Grenelle": whistles then general booing for several minutes. Seguy then made an about turn: "If I judge from what I hear, you will not let it happen": applause but in the crowd you could hear remarks like "He's fucking us about".
The best proof of the rejection of the "Grenelle Accords": the number of strikers increased still more on May 27 to reach 9 million.
This same day at the Charléty Stadium in Paris, a big meeting took place called by the student union UNEF, the CDFT (which went one better than the CGT) and the leftist groups. The tone of the speeches was very revolutionary: it was a question of giving an outlet to growing discontent against the CGT and the French Communist Party. Aside from the leftists there was the presence of social democratic politicians like Mendes-France (old boss of the 50s government). Cohn-Bendit made an appearance (he'd already been at the Sorbonne the night before).
May 28 was the day the parties of the left began their games:
In the morning, François Mitterand, President of the Left Democratic and Socialist Federation (which brought together the Socialist Party, the Radical Party and divers small groups of the left) held a press conference: considering that there was a vacancy for power, he announced his candidature for the Presidency of the Republic. In the afternoon, Waldeck-Rochet, boss of the PCF, proposed a government with "Communist participation": it was important for them not to allow the social democrats to exploit the situation solely for their own benefit. This was relayed the next day, May 29, through a large demonstration called by the CGT demanding a "popular government". The right immediately cried "a communist plot".
This same day, we had the "disappearance" of General de Gaulle. There were rumours that he had withdrawn but, in fact, he went to Germany to make sure of the support of the army through General Massu who commanded the occupation troops in Germany.
May 30 constituted a decisive day in the bourgeoisie taking the situation in hand. De Gaulle made a new speech: "In the present circumstances, I will not withdraw (...) I am today dissolving the National Assembly..."
At the same time in Paris, an enormous demonstration in support of De Gaulle took place on the Champs-Élysées. It mobilised those from the posh and wealthy districts and rural areas, thanks to army trucks. The "people" came, the wealthy, the well-heeled, and the bourgeois; representatives of religious institutions, high level bureaucrats imbued with their "superiority", small businessmen trembling for their shop windows, old combatants embittered by attacks on the French flag, veterans of French Algeria and the OAS,[10] young members of the fascist group Occident, the old nostalgic for Vichy (who, however, detested de Gaulle); this whole, beautiful world came to proclaim its hatred for the working class and its "love of order". In the crowd, alongside the old combatants of "Free France", you could hear chants like "Cohn-Bendit to Dachau!"
But the "party of order" couldn't be reduced to those who demonstrated on the Champs- Élysées. The same day, the CGT called for negotiations branch by branch in order to "ameliorate the acquisitions of Grenelle": it was the tactic of dividing the movement so as to finish it off.
Elsewhere, from this date (it was a Thursday), the return to work began to take place, but slowly because on June 6 there were still six million on strike. The return to work was made in a dispersed fashion:
May 31: steel in Lorraine, textiles in the north,
June 4: weapons manufacturers, insurance,
June 5: EDF,[11] coal mines,
June 6: post, telecommunications, transport (in Paris, the CGT pushed the return to work: in each depot the union leaders announced that other depots had returned to work, which was not true);
June 7: primary teachers;
June 10: the police forces occupy the Renault factory at Flins: a student charged by the police falls into the Seine and drowns;
June 11: intervention of the CRS[12] at the Peugeot factory at Sochaux (second largest in France); 2 workers are killed.
We then see new demonstrations of violence throughout France: "They have killed our comrades!" At Sochaux, facing the determined resistance of the workers, the CRS evacuated the factory: work only resumed 10 days later.
Fearing that the indignation would only re-launch the strike (3 million still remained on strike), the unions (with the CGT at their head) and the parties of the left led by the PCF, insistently called for a return to work "so that the elections can take place and complete the victory of the working class". The Communist Party daily, l'Humanité, headlined: "Strong with their victory, millions of workers go back to work".
The systematic appeal for a strike by the unions from May 20 now has its explanation: they had to control the movement in order to provoke the return of the less combative sectors and demoralise the others.
Waldeck-Rochet, in his speeches on the electoral campaign declared that: "The Communist Party is the party of order". And, little by little, bourgeois order returned:
June 12: secondary teachers return;
June 14: Air France and merchant marine;
June 16: the Sorbonne is occupied by the police;
June 17: chaotic return at Renault Billancourt;
June 18: de Gaulle frees the leaders of the OAS who were still in prison;
June 23: first round of the legislative elections with gains for the right;
June 24: return to work at the Citroën Javel factory (Krasucki, number two of the CGT, spoke at an assembly calling for an end to the strike);
June 26: Usinor Dunkirk goes back;
June 30: second round of the elections with a historic victory for the right.
One of the last firms to go back to work was the ORTF on July 12: numerous journalists didn't want to return to the restrictions and censorship that they submitted to before from the government. After the return, many of them would be sacked. Order returned throughout, including with the news items that the state judged useful to broadcast to the population.
Thus, the greatest strike in history ended in defeat, contrary to the affirmations of the CGT and of the PCF. A crushing defeat sanctioned by the return in force of the parties and of the "authorities" that had vilified the movement. But the workers' movement has known for a long time that: "The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the immediate result, but in the ever-expanding union of the workers" (Communist Manifesto). Also, beyond their immediate defeat, the workers in France, in 1968, gained a great victory, not for themselves but for the whole of the world proletariat. That is what we are going to look at in the next part of this article where we are going to try to show the fundamental causes, as well as the world and historic stakes, of France's "merry month of May".
In the majority of the numerous books and television programmes on May 1968 that have occupied the media recently, the international character of the student movement that affected France during the course of this month has been underlined. Everyone knows, as we've also underlined in our previous article, that the students in France were not the first to mobilise massively; that they had, in a manner of speaking, "jumped on the bandwagon" of a movement that began in the American universities in Autumn 1964. From the United States, this movement affected the majority of the western countries, and in Germany 1967 it went through its most spectacular developments, making the students of this country the reference point for other European countries. However, the same journalists or historians who are happy to underline the international breadth of student protest in the 60s in general don't say a word about the workers' struggles that unfolded all over the world during this period. Evidently, they couldn't simply ignore the immense strike that was so obviously the most important aspect of the "events" of ‘68 in France: it would be difficult for them to blot out the greatest strike in the history of the workers' movement. But, if they talk about it, this movement of the proletariat is seen as a sort of "French exception".
In reality, and perhaps even more than the student movement, the movement of the working class in France was an integral part of an international movement and one can only really understand it in this international context
It's true that in May ‘68 in France there existed a situation that wasn't found in any other country, except in a very marginal fashion: a massive movement of the working class developing from a student mobilisation. It is clear that the student mobilisation, the repression that it suffered - and which fed it - and the final retreat of the government after the "night of the barricades" of May 10/11, played a role, not only in unleashing the movement, but also in the breadth of the workers' strike. That said, if the proletariat of France entered such a movement, it was surely not "to do the same as the students", but because of the profound and generalised discontent that existed within the class, and also because it had the political strength to engage in the fight.
This fact is not in general hidden in the books and TV programmes dealing with May ‘68: it's often recalled that, from 1967, workers undertook important struggles, the characteristics of which broke with those of the preceding period. In particular, whereas the very limited strikes and union days of action did not arouse any great enthusiasm, we saw some very hard, very determined struggles facing a violent repression from the bosses and the state, and with the unions being outflanked on several occasions. Thus, from the beginning of 1967, important confrontations occurred at Bordeaux (the Dassault aviation factory), at Besançon and in the Lyonnaise region (occupation and strike at Rhoda, strike at Berliet leading to a lock-out and to the occupation of the factory by the CRS), in the mines of Lorraine, in the naval dockyards of Saint-Nazaire (which was paralysed by a general strike on April 11).
It was in Caen, Normandy, that the working class engaged in one of the most important combats before May ‘68. On January 20 1968, the unions at Saviem (trucking) launched the order for an hour-and-a-half strike; but the workers, judging this action insufficient, spontaneously struck on the 23rd. Two days later, at four in the morning, the CRS dispersed the strike picket, allowing the management and "scabs" to enter the factory. The strikers decided to go to the town centre where workers from other factories also on strike joined them. At eight in the morning, 5000 people peacefully converged on the central square: the Gardes mobiles[13] charged them brutally, even firing on them. On January 26, workers from all sectors of the town (including teachers) as well as numerous students, demonstrated their solidarity: a meeting in the central square brought together 7,000 people by 6 o'clock. At the end of the meeting the Gardes mobiles charged in order to evacuate the square but were surprised by the resistance of the workers. The confrontations lasted through the night; there were 200 wounded and dozens of arrests. Six young demonstrators, all workers, got prison sentences of 15 days to 3 months. But far from the working class retreating, this repression only provoked the extension of the struggle: January 30 saw 15,000 on strike in Caen. On February 2nd, the authorities and the bosses were obliged to retreat, calling off the repression and increasing wages by 3 to 4%. The following day, work restarted but, under the impulsion of the younger workers, walkouts continued at Saviem for a month.
Saint-Nazaire in April ‘67 and Caen in January ‘68 were not the only towns to be hit by general strikes of the whole working population. It was also the case with towns of lesser importance such as Redon in March and Honfleur in April. These massive strikes of all the exploited of one town prefigured what would happen in mid-May in the whole country.
You couldn't say that the storm of May 1968 had broken out from a clear, blue sky. The student movement had set the land on fire, but it was ready to burst into flames.
Obviously the "specialists", notably the sociologists, tried to show the causes of this French "exception". They talked in particular about the raised tempo of industrial development of France during the 1960s, transforming this old agricultural country into a modern industrial power. This fact explained the presence and the role of an important number of young workers in the factories who were often ill-adjusted. These young workers, frequently coming from a rural milieu, weren't unionised and found the barracks discipline of the factory difficult. They also generally received derisory wages even when they had professional certificates. This situation helps us to understand why it was the youngest sectors of the working class who were the first to engage in combat, and equally why the majority of the important movements that preceded May ‘68 took place in the west of France, a rural region relatively lately industrialised. However, these explanations by the sociologists fail to explain why it wasn't only the young workers that entered into struggle in May ‘68 but the very great majority of the working class of all ages.
In fact, behind a movement of such breadth and depth as May ‘68, there were much more profound causes that went beyond, very far beyond, the framework of France. If the whole of the working class of this country launched itself into a general strike, it's because all its sectors had begun to be hit by the economic crisis which, in 1968, was only at its inception, a crisis that wasn't "French" but of the whole capitalist world. It's the effects in France of this world economic crisis (growth of unemployment, freezing of wages, intensification of production targets and attacks on social security) that to a large extent explains the workers' combativity in this country from 1967:
"In all the industrial countries of Europe and the USA, unemployment is developing and the economic prospects are becoming gloomy. Britain, despite a multiplication of measures to safeguard equilibrium, was finally forced to devalue of the pound in 1967, dragging along behind it devaluations in a whole series of countries. The Wilson government proclaimed a programme of exceptional austerity: massive reductions of public spending... wage freeze, reduction of consumption and imports, efforts to increase exports. On January 1st 1968, it was the turn of Johnson [US president] to raise the alarm and announce indispensably severe measures in order to safeguard economic equilibrium. In March, a financial crisis of the dollar broke out. The economic press became more pessimistic each day, more and more evoking the spectre of the 1929 crisis (...) May 1968 appears in all its significance for having been one of the most important reactions of the mass of workers against a deteriorating situation in the world economy".[14]
In fact, particular circumstances saw the proletariat in France leading the first widespread battle against the growing attacks launched by capitalism in crisis. But, quite quickly, other national sectors of the working class entered the struggle in their turn. From the same causes come the same effects.
At the other end of the world, in Argentina, in May 1969, there took place what is remembered as the "Cordobazo". On May 29, following a whole series of mobilisations in the workers' districts against the violent attacks and repression by the military junta, the workers of Cordoba had completely overrun the forces of the police and the army (even though they were equipped with tanks) and were masters of the town (the second largest in the country). The state was only able to "re-establish order" the following day thanks to massive troop deployments.
In Italy, at the same time, there was a movement of workers' struggles, the most important since the Second World War. Strikes began to multiply at Fiat in Turin, first of all in the principle factory of the town, Fiat-Mirafiori, spreading to other factories of the group in Turin and the surrounding areas. On July 3 1969, at the time of a union day of action against an increase in rents, workers' processions, joined by those of students, converged toward the Mirafiori factory. Violent scuffles broke out with the police. They lasted practically the whole night and spread to other areas of the town.
From the end of August, when the workers returned from holidays, strikes took off again at Fiat, but also at Pirelli (tyres) in Milan and in many other firms.
However, the Italian bourgeoisie, learning from the experience of May ‘68, wasn't taken aback as the French bourgeoisie was a year earlier. It was absolutely necessary for it to prevent the profound social discontent from turning into a generalised conflagration. It's for that reason that its union apparatus took advantage of the expiry of collective contracts, notably in steel, chemicals and building, in order to develop its manoeuvres aimed at dispersing the struggles and fixing the workers on the objective of a "good contract" in their respective sectors. The unions used the tactic of so-called "linked" strikes: one day metal workers on strike, another for chemical workers, yet another for those in building. Some "general strikes" were called but by province or even by town, against the cost of living and the raising of rents. At the level of the workplace, the unions advocated rolling strikes, one factory after another, with the pretext of causing as much damage as possible to the bosses with the least cost to the workers. At the same time, the unions did what was necessary to take control of a base that tended to escape them: whereas, in many firms, the workers, discontented with traditional union structures, elected workshop delegates, these latter were institutionalised under the form of "factory councils" presented as "rank and file organs" of a unitary trade union that the three confederations, CGIL, CISL and UIL said they wanted to construct together. After several months in which the workers' combativity exhausted itself in a succession of "days of action" by sectors and "general strikes" by province or town, collective contracts of sectors were signed successively between the beginning of November and the end of December. And it was a little before the signature of the last contract, the most important since it concerned the private steel sector, the avant-garde of the movement, that a bomb exploded on November 12 in a bank in Milan, killing 16 people. The attack was attributed to anarchists (one of them, Guiseppe Pinelli, died in the custody of the Milanese police) but it was learned much later that it could be traced to certain sectors of the state apparatus. The secret structures of the bourgeois state had lent a strong hand to the unions in order to sow confusion in the ranks of the working class at the same time as strengthening the means of state repression.
The proletariat of Italy wasn't alone in mobilising during autumn 69. On a lesser, but still significant scale, German workers came into struggle when in September wildcat strikes broke out against the signing of agreements by the unions for "wage moderation". The workers were supposed to be "realistic" faced with the degradation of the German economy, which, despite the post-war "miracle", wasn't spared the difficulties of world capitalism that had started to develop after 1967 (the year that the German economy saw its first recession since the war).
This awakening of the proletariat in Germany, even if it was quite tentative, had a particular significance. On one hand, this was the most important and most concentrated sector of the working class in Europe. But above all, this proletariat had in the past, and will have in the future, a position of prime importance within the world working class. It was in Germany that the fate of the international revolutionary wave was played out, which, from October 1917 in Russia had threatened capitalist domination throughout the world. The defeat suffered by the German workers during their revolutionary attempts between 1918 and 1923 opened the door to the most terrible counter-revolution of its history. And it was where the revolution went furthest, Russia and Germany, that this counter-revolution took the deepest and most barbarous forms: Stalinism and Nazism.
The immense strike of May ‘68 in France, then the Hot Autumn in Italy gave proof that the world proletariat was coming out of this period of counter-revolution. It was confirmed by the German workers' struggle of September 1969, and on a still more significant scale, by the struggle of the Polish workers on the Baltic during winter 1970-71, which obliged the authorities, after a brutal initial repression (300 deaths), to step back and abandon the price increases of basic goods that had provoked the workers' anger. The Stalinist regimes constituted the purest incarnation of the counter-revolution: it was in the name of "socialism" and of the "interests of the working class" that the latter suffered the worst terrors of all. The "hot" winter of the Polish workers proved that here, where the counter-revolution maintained its heaviest weight, i.e. in the "socialist" regimes, the class struggle was back on the agenda.
We can't enumerate all the workers' struggles that, after 1968, confirmed this fundamental change of the balance of forces between bourgeoisie and proletariat at a world level. We will only give two examples, those of Spain and Britain.
In Spain, despite the ferocious repression exercised by the Francoist regime, workers' combativity expressed itself in a massive fashion during the year 1974. The town of Pamplona, in Navarre, saw a number of strike days per worker higher than that of the French workers of 1968. All industrial regions were hit (Madrid, Asturias, Basque Country) but it was in the immense workers' concentrations of Barcelona that strikes took their greatest extension, touching all the firms in the region, with exemplary manifestations of workers' solidarity (often, a strike unfolded in one factory solely in solidarity with the workers of other factories).
The example of the proletariat in Britain is equally very significant since this was the oldest proletariat in the world. Throughout the 1970s, it led massive conflicts against exploitation (with 29 million strike days in 1979, workers in Britain are in second place statistically behind workers in France in 1968). This combativity even obliged the British bourgeoisie to twice change Prime Minister: in April 1976 (Callaghan replaced Wilson) and, at the beginning of 1979 (Callaghan was toppled by Parliament).
Thus, the fundamental historical significance of May 1968 is neither found in "French specificities", nor in the student revolt, nor in a "moral revolution" that we are told about today. It is in the emergence of the world proletariat from the counter-revolution and its entry into a new historic period of confrontations against capitalist order. In this period, proletarian political currents, that previously had been eliminated or reduced to silence by the counter-revolution, began to develop - including the ICC.
At the beginning of the 20th century, during and after the First World War, the proletariat engaged in titanic battles. In 1917, it overthrew bourgeois power in Russia. Between 1918 and 1923, in the principal European country, Germany, it undertook numerous struggles in order to achieve the same aim. This revolutionary wave reverberated throughout the world wherever a developed working class existed, from Italy to Canada, from Hungary to China.
But the world bourgeoisie succeeded in containing this gigantic movement of the working class and it didn't stop there. It unleashed the most terrible counter-revolution in the whole history of the workers' movement. This counter-revolution took the form of an unimaginable barbarity, of which Stalinism and Nazism were the two most significant representatives, precisely in the countries where the revolution went furthest, Russia and Germany.
In this context, the Communist Parties that had been at the vanguard of the revolutionary wave were converted into parties of the counter-revolution.
When the socialist parties, faced with imperialist war in 1914, betrayed the working class, this gave rise to currents within these parties that were determined to pursue the defence of proletarian principles: these currents had been instrumental in the foundation of the communist parties. In turn, when the latter also betrayed, we saw the appearance of left fractions committed to the defence of real, communist positions. However, while those who had struggled within the socialist parties against their opportunist slide and betrayal had gained strength and a growing influence in the working class, to the point where they were able to found a new International after the Russian revolution, it was nothing like this for the left currents that came out of the communist parties, because of the growing weight of the counter-revolution. Thus, although at the beginning they regrouped a majority of the militants in the German and Italian parties, these currents progressively lost their influence in the class and the greater part of their militant forces, or were scattered into multiple small groups, as was the case in Germany even before the Hitler regime had exterminated them or sent the last militants into exile.
In fact, during the 1930s, aside from the current animated by Trotsky more and more eaten up by opportunism, the groups who continued to defend revolutionary positions, such as the Group des Communistes Internationalistes (GIC) in Holland (that advocated "Council Communism" and rejected the necessity for a proletarian party) and the Left Fraction of the Italian Communist Party (which published the review Bilan) only counted some dozens of militants and no longer had any influence over the course of the workers' struggle.
Contrary to the first, the Second World War didn't result in an overthrow of the balance of forces between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. Quite the contrary. Learning from the historic experience and with the precious support of the Stalinist parties, the bourgeoisie was careful to kill at birth any new uprising of the proletariat. In the democratic euphoria of the "Liberation", the groups of the communist left were still more isolated than they were in the 1930s. In Holland, the Communistenbond Spartacus picked up from the GIC in the defence of councilist positions, positions that were equally defended from 1965 by Daad en Gedachte, a split from the Bond. These two groups did much publishing work although they were handicapped by the councilist position that rejected the role of an organisation of the avant-garde of the proletariat. However, the greatest handicap was from the ideological weight of the counter-revolution. This was also the case in Italy where the constitution in 1945, around Damen and Bordiga (two old militants of the Italian Left in the 1920s) of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (which published Battaglia Comunista and Prometeo), didn't fulfil the promise its militants expected. Although this organisation counted 3000 militants at its foundation, it progressively weakened, a victim of demoralisation and splits, notably the one in 1952 which led to the formation of the Parti Communiste International (which published Programma Comunista). The causes of these splits also lay in the confusion that reigned over the regroupment of 1945, which was made on the basis of the abandonment of a whole series of acquisitions elaborated by Bilan in the 1930s.
In France, the Gauche Communiste de France (GCF), which had been formed in 1945 in continuity with the positions of Bilan (but also integrating a certain number of programmatic positions of the German and Dutch Left) and which published 42 numbers of the review Internationalisme, disappeared in 1952. In the same country, outside of some elements attached to the Parti Communiste International, who published le Proletaire, another group defended class positions up until the 1960s with the review Socialisme ou Barbarie (SouB). But this group, coming out of a split from Trotskyism after the Second World War, progressively and explicitly abandoned marxism, which led to its disappearance in 1966.
We can also cite the existence of other groups in other countries. But what marked the situation of currents that continued to defend communist positions during the course of the 1950s and beginning of the 60s, was their extreme numerical weakness, the confidential character of their publications, their international isolation, as well as various political regressions. These led either to their disappearance pure and simple or into a sectarian withdrawal, as was notably the case with the Parti Communiste International that considered itself to be the only communist organisation in the world.
The general strike of 1968 in France, then the different massive movements of the working class, which we've mentioned previously, put the idea of communist revolution, back on the agenda in numerous countries. The lie of Stalinism, which presented itself as "communist" and "revolutionary", had begun to fall apart. This evidently profited the currents who denounced the USSR as deviating from the ideals of the ‘Socialist Fatherland', such as the Maoists and Trotskyists. The Trotskyist movement, particularly because of its history of struggle against Stalinism, went through a second youth from 1968 and came out of the shadows cast up to then by the Stalinist parties. Its ranks were swollen in a spectacular fashion, notably in countries like France, Belgium and Britain. But since the Second World War this current had ceased to be part of the proletarian camp, above all because of its position on the defence of the alleged "workers' gains" in the USSR, i.e. the defence of the imperialist camp dominated by this country. In fact, the workers' strikes that developed from the end of the 60s showed the anti-working class role of the Stalinist parties and the unions. They also showed the electoral and democratic farce as instruments of bourgeois domination and this led to numerous elements around the world turning towards political currents which, in the past, had most clearly denounced the role of the unions and parliamentarism and which had better incarnated the struggle against Stalinism - the currents of the communist left.
Following May 68, the writings of Trotsky were distributed massively. Also those of Pannekoek, Gorter[15] and Rosa Luxemburg who, shortly before her assassination in January 1919, was one of the first to warn her Bolshevik comrades of certain dangers that menaced the revolution in Russia.
New groups appeared that drew on the experience of the communist left. In fact, the elements who understood that Trotskyism had become a sort of left wing of Stalinism turned much more towards councilism than towards the Italian Left. There were several reasons for this. On one hand, the rejection of the Stalinist parties often accompanied the rejection of any idea of the communist party; and the fact that the Bordigist current (the sole descendent of the Italian Left that had any real international extension) defended the idea of the taking of power by the communist party and defended the idea of "monolithism" in its own ranks, strengthening mistrust towards the historic current of the Italian Left. At the same time, the Bordigists completely overlooked the historic significance of May 68, seeing only the student dimension.
While new groups inspired by councilism began to appear, those who had existed beforehand experienced an unprecedented success, seeing their ranks strengthen in a spectacular fashion at the same time as being capable as acting as a pole of reference. This was particularly the case for the group Informations et Correspondances Ourvieres (ICO) coming out of a split from SouB in 1958. In 1969, this group organised an international meeting in Brussels attended by Cohn-Bendit, Mattick (an old militant of the German Left who had emigrated to the United States where he published diverse councilist reviews) and Carlo Brendel, animator of Daade en Gedachte. However, the success of "organised" councilism didn't last long. Thus, ICO pronounced its self-dissolution in 1974. The Dutch groups ceased to exist as their main animators grew too old or passed away.
In Britain, the group Solidarity, inspired by the positions of Socialisme ou Barbarie, after a success similar to that of the ICO, underwent a split and exploded in 1981 (although the group in London continued to publish a magazine up to 1992). In Scandinavia, the councilist groups which had emerged after 1968 were capable of organising a conference in Oslo in September 1977, but it didn't lead to much.
In the final account, the current which developed the most during the course of the 1970s was the one which attached itself to the positions of Bordiga (who died in July 1970). It benefited largely through an influx of elements coming out of the crises that had hit certain leftist groups (notably the Maoists) in this period. In 1980, the International Communist Party, was the most important and influential group of the communist left at the international level. But this opening out of the Bordigist current to elements strongly marked by leftism led to its explosion in 1982, reducing it to a myriad of small sects.
In fact, the most significant long term expression of this renewal of positions of the communist left has been our own organisation.[16] It was first constituted 40 years ago, in July 1968 in Toulouse, with the adoption of a first declaration of our principles by a small group of elements who had formed a discussion circle the year beforehand with a comrade, RV, who had entered political life in the group Internacionalismo in Venezuela. This group had been founded in 1964 by Marc Chirik who had been the main animator of the Gauche Communiste de France (1945-52), after having been a member of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left from 1938 and having entered into militant life from 1919 (at the age of 12), first of all in the Palestinian Communist Party and then the French Communist Party.
During the general strike of May 1968, elements of the discussion circle published several leaflets signed Movement for the Founding of Workers Councils ((MICO) and undertook discussions with other elements which then finally formed the group that published Revolution Internationale from the end of September 1968. This group made contact and discussed with two other groups belonging to the councilist movement. One was l'Organisation conseilliste de Clermont-Ferrand and the other published Cahiers du communism de conseils and was based in Marseilles.
Finally, in 1972, the three joined together in order to constitute what was going to become the section in France of the ICC and which began the publication of Revolution Internationale (new series).
This group, in continuity with the policy undertaken by Internacionalismo and Bilan, engaged in discussions with different groups who had appeared after 1968, notably in the United States (Internationalism). In 1972, Internationalism sent a letter to about twenty groups claiming links with the communist left, calling for the constitution of a network of correspondence and international debate. Revolution Internationale responded warmly to this initiative while proposing that the perspective should be of holding an international conference. Other groups belonging to the councilist movement also gave a positive response. For their part, groups claiming the heritage of the Italian Left were either deaf, or judged this initiative premature.
On the basis of this initiative several meetings took place between 1973 and 1974 in England and France, involving World Revolution, Revolutionary Perspectives and Workers' Voice, the first two coming out breaks with Solidarity and the last coming out of a break with Trotskyism.
Finally, this cycle of meetings ended in January 1975 with the holding of a conference where the groups sharing the same political orientation - Internacionalismo, Internationalism, Revolution Internationale, World Revolution, Rivoluzione Internazionale (Italy) and Accion Proletaria (Spain) - decided to unify within the International Communist Current.
The Current decided to pursue this policy of contacts and discussions with other groups of the communist left. This led it to participate in the 1977 Oslo conference (at the same time as Revolutionary Perspectives) and to respond favourably to the initiative launched in 1976 by Battaglia Comunista with a view to holding an international conference of groups of the communist left.
The three conferences that took place in 1977 (Milan), 1978 (Paris) and 1980 (Paris) aroused a growing interest among elements claiming links with the communist left but the decision by Battaglia Comunista and the Communist Workers' Organisation (coming out of a regroupment of Revolutionary Perspectives and Workers' Voice in Britain) to henceforth exclude the ICC sounded the death knell for this effort.[17] In a certain way, the sectarian closing up of BC and the CWO (who regrouped into the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party in 1984), at least towards the ICC, was an indication of the exhaustion of the initial impulsion given to communist left by the historical resurgence of the world proletariat after May 1968.
However, despite the difficulties that the working class has met these last decades, notably the ideological campaigns on the "death of communism" after the collapse of the Stalinist regimes, the world bourgeoisie has not succeeded in inflicting a decisive defeat on it. That is shown by the fact that the current of the communist left (represented principally by the IBRP[18] and above all by the ICC) has maintained its positions and is now experiencing a growing interest in them from elements who, with the slow reappearance of class combats since 2003, are turning towards a revolutionary perspective.
Fabienne (July 6 2008)
[1]. International Review n° 133.
[2]1. French Communist Party
[3]. Confederation Generale du Travail. The most powerful main union, notably among the workers of industry and transport as well as public sector workers. The French Communist Party controls it.
[4]. Confederation francaise democratique du Travail. This main union was at first of Christian origins but at the beginning of the ‘60s, it rejected references to Christianity and was strongly influenced by the Socialist Party as well as by the small Unified Socialist Party (now disappeared).
[5]. Broadcaster of animation.
[6]. Sports commentator of unbridled nationalism.
[7]. The day after this speech, local authority workers in many areas announced that they would refuse to organise a referendum. Similarly, the authorities didn't know how to print the ballot papers: the national print works was on strike and private printers who weren't on strike refused: the bosses didn't want any more trouble from their own workers.
[8]. Georges Seguy was also a member of the political bureau of the PCF.
[9]. It was later learnt that Chirac, Secretary of State for Social Affairs, had also met (in a granary!) Krasucki, number two of the CGT.
[10]. Organisation armee secrete: a clandestine group of military and partisans for the maintenance of France in Algeria which showed itself at the beginning of the 60s through terrorist attacks, assassinations and even an attempt to assassinate de Gaulle.
[11]. Electricite de France: electrical supply company.
[12]. Compagnies republicaines de Securite: national police force specialising in the repression of street demonstrations.
[13]. Forces de la Gendarmerie nationale (ie, the army) having the same role as the CRS.
[14]. Revolution Internationale (old series) n° 2, Spring 1969.
[15]. The two principal theoreticians of the Dutch Left.
[16]. For a more complete history of the ICC, read our articles "Construction of the revolutionary organisation: 20 years of the International Communist Current" (International Review n° 80) and "30 years of the ICC: learning from the past to build the future" (International Review n° 123).
[17]. Regarding these conferences see our article "The international conferences of the Communist Left (1976 - 1980) - Lessons of an experience for the proletarian milieu" in International Review n° 122.
[18]. The fact that the IBRP has grown less compared to that of the ICC is principally down to its sectarianism as well as its political opportunism regarding regroupment (which has led it to build on sand). On this subject see our article ‘An opportunist policy of regroupment that will only lead to ‘abortions'' (International Review n° 121).
In the first part of this series [5], published to mark the 90th anniversary of the proletarian revolutionary attempt in Germany, we examined the world historic context within which the revolution unfolded. This context was the catastrophe of World War I, and the failure of the working class and its political leadership to prevent its outbreak. Although the early years of the 20th century were marked by the first manifestations of a general tendency towards the development of mass strikes, apart from Russia, these movements were not yet powerful enough to undermine the weight of reformist illusions. As for the organised, internationalist workers movement, it turned out to be theoretically, organisationally and morally unprepared for a world war which it had long predicted would take place. Prisoner of its own schemas of the past, according to which the proletarian revolution would be the more or less inevitable product of capitalist economic development, it had adopted as a kind of implicit assumption the idea that the primordial task of socialists was to avoid premature confrontations, passively allowing the objective conditions to ripen. With the exception of its revolutionary left opposition, the Socialist International failed - or refused - to take into account the possibility that the first act of the period of decline of capitalism would be world war rather than world economic crisis. Above all, by ignoring the signals of history, the urgency of the approaching alternative of socialism or barbarism, the International completely underestimated the subjective factor in history, in particular its own role and responsibility. The result was the bankruptcy of the International in the fact of the outbreak of war, and the chauvinistic frenzy of part of its leadership, in particular the trade unions. The conditions for the first attempt at a world wide proletarian revolution were thus determined by the relatively sudden and cataclysmic descent of capitalism into its phase of decadence, into world imperialist war, but also by an unprecedented catastrophic crisis of the workers movement.
It soon became clear that there could be no revolutionary response to war without the restoration of the conviction that proletarian internationalism is not a tactical issue, but the most "sacred" principle of socialism, the one and only "fatherland" of the working class (as Rosa Luxemburg put it). We thus saw, in the previous article, how Karl Liebknecht's public declaration against the war on May Day 1916 in Berlin, no less than the internationalist socialist conferences held during the same period, such as those at Zimmerwald and Kienthal, and the widespread feelings of solidarity which they inspired, were indispensable turning points towards revolution. In the face of the horrors of the war in the trenches, and the pauperisation and intensified exploitation of the working masses on the "home front", wiping out all the acquisitions of decades of labour struggle at one go, we saw the development of the mass strike and the maturation of politicised layers and centres of the working class capable of leading a revolutionary assault.
Understanding the causes of the failure of the socialist movement in face of war was thus the main concern of the previous article, just as it was a leading preoccupation of revolutionaries during the first phase of the war. This is clearly expressed in Rosa Luxemburg's Crisis of Social Democracy, also known as the "Junius Pamphlet". At the heart of the events dealt with in this second article, we find a second decisive question, a consequence of the first: Which social force will bring the war to an end, and in which manner?
Richard Müller, one of the leaders of the "revolutionary delegates", the Obleute in Berlin, and later one of the main historians of the revolution in Germany, formulated the responsibility of the revolution as being to prevent: "The foundering of culture, the liquidation of the proletariat and of the socialist movement as such".[1]
As was so often the case, it was Rosa Luxemburg who posed the world historic question of the day in the clearest manner. "What will be after the war, which conditions and which role await the working class, depends entirely on how peace comes about. Should it result merely from the mutual exhaustion of the military powers, or even - which would be worse - through the military victory of one of the warring sides, should it in other words come without the participation of the proletariat, with social calm within the different states, then such a peace would only seal the world historic defeat of socialism in war. (...) After the bankruptcy of the 4th August 1914, the second decisive test for the historic mission of the working class is as follows: Will it be able to end this war which it was unable to prevent, not to receive peace from the hands of the imperialist bourgeoisie as the work of cabinet diplomacy, but to conquer it, to impose it on the bourgeoisie?"[2]
Here, Rosa Luxemburg describes three possible scenarios of how the war might come to an end. The first is the ruin and exhaustion of the warring imperialist parties on both sides. Here, she recognises from the outset the potential for the deadlock of capitalist competition in the epoch of its historic decline to lead to a process of rotting and disintegration - if the proletariat is unable to impose its own solution. This tendency towards the decomposition of capitalist society was to become fully manifest only decades later, with the "implosion" of the Russian led imperialist block and the Stalinist regimes in 1989, and the ensuing decline of the leadership of the remaining US American super-power. She already realised that such a dynamic is, in itself, not favourable to the development of a revolutionary alternative.
The second is that the war would be fought out to the bitter end, resulting in the total defeat of one of the two opposing blocks. In this case, the main result would be the inevitable cleavage within the victorious camp, producing a new line up for a second, even more destructive world war, which the working class would be even less able to oppose.
In both cases, the result would be not a momentary, but a world historic defeat of socialism for at least one generation, which might, in the long term, undermine the very possibility of a proletarian alternative to capitalist barbarism. Revolutionaries at that time already understood that the "Great War" had opened a process with the potential to undermine the confidence of the working class in its own historic mission. As such, the "crisis of social democracy" constituted a crisis of the human species as such, since only the proletariat is the bearer, within capitalism, of an alternative society.
How to end the imperialist war by revolutionary means? The eyes of the true socialists of the whole world were turned towards Germany for answers to this question. Germany was the main economic power of continental Europe, the leader - in fact the only major power - of one of the two contesting imperialist blocks. And it was the country with the largest number of educated, socialist trained, class conscious workers, who in the course of the war increasingly rallied to the cause of internationalist solidarity.
But the proletarian movement is international by nature. The first answer to the above question was given, not in Germany, but in Russia. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a turning point in world history. It helped to transform the situation in Germany as well. Until February 1917, with the beginning of the upheaval in Russia, the goal of the class conscious German workers was to develop the struggle to an extent obliging governments to sue for peace. Even within the Spartakusbund,[3] at the moment of its foundation on New Years Day 1916, nobody had believed in the possibility of an imminent revolution. In the light of the Russian experience, by April 1917 the clandestine revolutionary circles in Germany had come to the conclusion that the goal was not only to end the war, but in so doing to topple the whole regime. Soon, the victory of the revolution in Petrograd and Moscow in October 1917 clarified, for these circles in Berlin or Hamburg, not so much the goal as the means to that end: armed insurrection organised and led by the workers' councils.
Paradoxically, the immediate effect of Red October on the broad masses in Germany was something like the opposite. A kind of innocent euphoria about approaching peace broke out, based on the assumption that the German government could not but accept the hand of "peace without annexations" being reached out from the east. This reaction shows to what extent the propaganda of what had become the "socialist" war mongering party, the SPD - that the war had been foisted on an unwilling Germany - still held sway. As far as the popular masses were concerned, the turning point in the attitude towards the war induced by the Russian Revolution only came three months later, with the peace negotiations between Germany and Russia at Brest-Litovsk.[4] These negotiations were followed intensely by workers throughout Germany and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. Their result - the imperialist Diktat of Germany and its occupation of large parts of the western regions of what had become the Soviet Republic, savagely suppressing the revolutionary movements there in the process - convinced millions of the correctness of the slogan of Spartakus: the main enemy is "at home", it is the capitalist system itself. Brest gave rise to a gigantic mass strike, which began in Austria-Hungary, centred on Vienna. It immediately spread to Germany, paralysing economic life in over twenty major cities, with half a million workers on strike in Berlin. The demands were those of the soviet delegation at Brest: immediate ending of war, without annexations. The workers organised themselves through a system of elected delegations, by and large following the very concrete proposals of a leaflet of the Spartakusbund drawing the lessons from Russia. The eye-witness report of the SPD daily Vorwärts, writing for the January 28th 1918 issue, described how the streets of Berlin had been deserted and shrouded in fog that morning, so that the outline of the buildings, indeed of the world seemed vague and distorted. When the masses took to the streets in silent determination, the sun came out and drove away the fog, the reporter wrote.
This strike gave rise to a debate within the revolutionary leadership about the immediate goals of the movement, but which increasingly touched the very heart of the question of how the proletariat could end the war. The main centre of gravity of this leadership lay at the time within the left wing of the social-democracy which, after being excluded from the SPD[5] because of its opposition to the war, formed a new party, the USPD (the "Independent" SPD). This party, which brought together most of the well known opponents to the betrayal of internationalism by the SPD - including many hesitant and wavering, more petty bourgeois than proletarian elements - also included a radical revolutionary opposition of its own, the Spartakusbund: a fraction with its own structure and platform. Already in the summer and autumn of 1917 the Spartakusbund and other currents within the USPD began to call for protest demonstrations in response to mass discontent and growing enthusiasm for the revolution in Russia. This orientation was opposed by the Obleute, the "revolutionary delegates" in the factories, whose influence was particularly strong in the armaments industry in Berlin. Pointing to the masses' illusions about the "will for peace" of the German government, these circles wanted to wait until discontent became more intense and generalised, and then give it expression in a single, unified mass action. When, during the first days of 1918, calls for a mass strike from factories all over Germany were reaching Berlin, the Obleute decided not to invite the Spartakusbund to the meetings where this central mass action was prepared and decided on. They feared that what they called the "activism" and "precipitation" of Spartakus - which in their eyes had become dominant in this group since its main theoretical mind, Rosa Luxemburg, had been sent to prison - could constitute a danger to the launching of a unified action throughout Germany. When the Spartakists found out about this, they launched a summons to struggle of their own, without waiting for the decision of the Obleute.
This mutual distrust then intensified in relation to the attitude to be adopted towards the SPD. When the trade unions discovered that a secret strike leadership committee had been constituted, which did not contain a single member of the SPD, the latter immediately began to clamour for representation. On the eve of the January 28 strike action, the majority at a clandestine meeting of factory delegates in Berlin voted against this. Nevertheless, the Obleute, who dominated the strike committee, decided to admit delegates of the SPD, arguing that the social-democrats were no longer in a position to prevent the strike, but that their exclusion would create a note of discord and thus undermine the unity of the coming action. Spartakus strongly condemned this decision.
The debate then came to a head in the course of the strike itself. In face of the elementary might of this action, the Spartakusbund began to plead for the intensification of the movement in the direction of civil war. The group believed that the moment might already have come to end the war by revolutionary means. The Obleute strongly opposed this, preferring to take responsibility themselves for an organised ending of the movement, once it had reached what they considered to be its culmination point. Their main arguments were that an insurrectional movement, even were it to succeed, would remain restricted to Berlin, and that the soldiers had not yet been won over to the side of the revolution.
Behind this dispute about tactics lay two much more general and profound questions. One of them concerned the criteria for judging the ripeness of conditions for revolutionary insurrection. We will return to this question in the course of this series.
The other related to the role of the Russian proletariat in the world revolution. Could the toppling of bourgeois rule in Russia immediately inspire a revolutionary uprising in central and western Europe, or at least oblige the main imperialist protagonists to end the war?
The very same discussion took place in the Bolshevik Party in Russia, both on the eve of the October insurrection and on the occasion of the peace negotiations with the German imperial government at Brest-Litovsk. Within the Bolshevik Party, the opponents of signing any treaty with Germany, led by Bukharin, argued that the main motivation for the proletariat to take power in October 1917 in Russia was to trigger off the revolution in Germany and the west, and that to sign a treaty with Germany now would be tantamount to abandoning this orientation. Trotsky adopted an intermediary position of stalling for time which did not really resolve the problem. The proponents of the need to sign a treaty, such as Lenin, in no way contested the internationalist motivation of the October insurrection. What they contested was that the decision to seize power was based on the assumption that the revolution would immediately spread to Germany. On the contrary: the advocates of insurrection had pointed out at the time that the immediate extension of the revolution was not certain, and that the Russian proletariat was thus risking isolation and unheard of suffering by taking the initiative to begin the world revolution. Such a risk, Lenin in particular had argued, was justified, because what was at stake was the future, not only of the Russian but of the world proletariat; the future, not only of the proletariat, but of the whole of humanity. This decision should therefore be taken in full consciousness and in the most responsible manner. Lenin repeated these arguments in relation to Brest: the Russian proletariat was morally justified to sign even the most unfavourable treaty with the German bourgeoisie in order to gain time, since it was not certain that the German revolution would begin immediately.
Isolated from the world in her prison cell, Rosa Luxemburg intervened in this debate with three articles - "The Historical Responsibility", "Towards Catastrophe", and "The Russian Tragedy". Written in January, June and September 1918 respectively - which constitute three of the most important of the famous underground "Spartakus Letters". Here, she makes clear that neither the Bolsheviks nor the Russian proletariat could be blamed for the fact that they had been forced to sign a treaty with German imperialism. This situation was the result of the absence of the revolution elsewhere, above all in Germany. On this basis, she was able to identify the following tragic paradox: although the Russian Revolution was the highest peak conquered by humanity to date, and as such a turning point in history, its first immediate effect was not to shorten, but to prolong the horrors of world war. And this for the simple reason that it freed German imperialism from the obligation to wage war on two fronts.
If Trotsky believes in the possibility of an immediate peace under the pressure of the masses in the west, she writes in January 1918, "then we have to pour a lot of water into Trotsky's foaming wine". And she continues: "The first result of the cease-fire will only be that German troops will be transferred from the east to the west. In reality this is already taking place".[6] In June she drew a second conclusion from this dynamic: Germany had become the gendarme of the counter-revolution in eastern Europe, massacring the revolutionary forces from Finland to the Ukraine. Paralysed by this development, the proletariat was "acting dead". In September 1918 she then explains that the world war is threatening to engulf revolutionary Russia itself. "The iron circle of the world war, which seemed to have been broken in the east, is once again relentlessly encompassing the whole world: the Entente is advancing with Czech and Japanese troops from the north and east as a natural, inevitable consequence of Germany's offensive from the west and south. The flames of the world war are leaping across Russian soil and at any moment may engulf the Russian Revolution. To withdraw from the world war - even at the price of the greatest sacrifices - is something which, in the final analysis, it is simply impossible for Russia to do"[7]
Rosa Luxemburg clearly recognised that the immediate military advantage which Germany gained through the Russian Revolution would also, for some months, contribute to tipping the balance of class forces in Germany in favour of the bourgeoisie. Although the revolution in Russia inspired the German workers, although the "robbers peace" imposed by German imperialism after Brest robbed these workers of many of their illusions, it would take almost a year for this to mature into an open rebellion against imperialism.
The reason for this is connected to the specific nature of a revolution in the context of world war. The "Great War" of 1914 was not only slaughter on a scale never before witnessed; it was also the most gigantic organised economic, material and human operation in history hitherto seen. Literally millions of human beings, as well as all the resources of society, became cogs in an infernal machine, the very size of which defied human imagination. All of this gave rise to two intense feelings within the proletariat; hatred of war on the one hand, and a feeling of powerlessness on the other. Under such circumstances, it takes immeasurable sufferings and sacrifices before the working class can recognise that it alone is the force able to end war. Moreover, this process takes times and unfolds in an uneven, heterogeneous manner. Two of the most important aspects of this process are the recognition of the real, robber like motivations of the imperialist war effort, and of the fact that the bourgeoisie itself does not control the war machine, which as a product of capitalism has become independent of human will. In Russia 1917, as in Germany and Austria-Hungary 1918, the recognition that the bourgeoisie was not able to end the war even when it was heading for defeat, turned out to be decisive.
What Brest-Litovsk and the limits of the mass strikes in Germany and Austria-Hungary in January 1918 revealed was above all this: that the world revolution could be initiated in Russia, but that only a decisive proletarian action in one of the main belligerent countries - Germany, Britain or France - could put a stop to the war.
Although the German proletariat was "playing dead" as Rosa Luxemburg put it, it's class consciousness continued to mature during the first half of 1918. Moreover, from the summer of that year on, the soldiers began for the first time to become seriously infected by the bacillus of revolution. Two factors in particular contributed to this. In Russia, the German rank and file prisoners of war were freed and given the choice of remaining in Russia to participate in the revolution, or returning to Germany. Those who chose the latter were of course immediately sent back to the front as cannon fodder by the German army. But they carried the news of the Russian Revolution with them. In Germany itself, thousands of leaders of the January mass strike were punished by being sent to the front, where they carried the news of the growing working class revolt against the war. But it was the growing recognition of the futility of the war and the inevitability of the defeat of Germany that was decisive in changing the mood in the army.
With the autumn of that year there thus began something which only a few months beforehand would have seen unthinkable: A race against time between the class conscious workers on the one hand, and the leaders of the German bourgeoisie on the other, to determine which of the two great classes of modern society would put an end to this war.
On the side of the German ruling class, two major problems within its own ranks had initially to be resolved. One of them was the complete inability of many of its main representatives to even conceive of the possibility of the defeat that was staring them in the face. The other was how to sue for peace without irreparably discrediting the very heart of its own state apparatus. Concerning this latter question, we have to keep in mind that in Germany the bourgeoisie was brought to power, and the country unified, not by a revolution from below, but through the military, first and foremost the royal Prussian army. How to admit defeat without putting in question this pillar and symbol of national strength and unity?
September 15: the western allies broke through the Austrian-Hungarian front in the Balkans.
September 27: Bulgaria, an important ally of Berlin, capitulated.
September 29: The commander in chief of the German army, Erich Ludendorff, informed the high command that the war was lost, that it was only a matter of days or even hours before the whole military front collapsed.
In fact, the description Ludendorff gave of the immediate situation on the front was somewhat exaggerated. We do not know if he himself fell into panic, or if he deliberately painted a picture blacker than reality in order to have the German leadership accept his proposals. At all events, his proposals were accepted: capitulation and the instalment of a parliamentary government.
With this course of action, Ludendorff wanted to forestall a total German defeat, and to take the wind out of the sails of revolution. But he had an additional aim. He wanted the capitulation to be declared by a civilian government, so that the military could continue to deny its defeat in public. He was preparing the terrain for the Dolchstosslegende, the myth of the "stab in the back", according to which a victorious German army was vanquished by a treacherous enemy behind the lines. But this enemy, the proletariat, could not of course be mentioned by name. This would only cement the growing abyss separating bourgeois and proletariat. For this reason, a scapegoat had to be found, to be blamed for "misleading" the workers. Given the specific history of western civilisation in the past two thousand years, the most suitable victim of such a scape-goating was close at hand: the Jews. It was thus that anti-Semitism, already on the rise, above all in the Russian Empire, in the years before the great war, returned to the centre stage of European politics. The road to Auschwitz begins here.
October 1st 1918: Ludendorff and Hindenburg demanded an immediate peace offer to the Entente.[8] At the same moment, a national conference of the most intransigent revolutionary groups, the Spartakusbund and the Bremen Left, called for reinforced agitation among the soldiers, and for the formation of workers' councils. By this time, hundreds of thousands of army deserters were on the run behind the front. And, as the revolutionary Paul Frölich was later to write (in his biography of Rosa Luxemburg), there was a new attitude of the masses which could be seen in their eyes.
Within the camp of the bourgeoisie, the efforts to end the war were held up by two new factors. For one thing, none of the ruthless leaders of the German state, who never hesitated to send millions of their own "subjects" to certain and senseless death, had the courage to inform the Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, that he would have to renounce his throne. For another, the opposing side in the imperialist war, kept thinking of new excuses to postpone a ceasefire, since they were not yet convinced of the immediate likelihood of revolution and of the danger this posed to their own rule. The bourgeoisie was losing time.
But none of this prevented it from preparing the bloody repression of the revolutionary forces. In particular, it had already chosen those parts of the army which, returning from the front, could be used to occupy the main cities.
Within the camp of the proletariat, revolutionaries more and more intensely prepared an armed rising to end the war. The Obleute in Berlin initially fixed November 4, and then November 11 as the day of insurrection.
But in the meantime, events took a turn, which neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat had expected, and which had a profound influence on the course of the revolution.
Mutiny in the navy, dissolution of the army.
In order to fulfil the conditions for a ceasefire stipulated by its war opponents, the government in Berlin stopped all navy military operations, in particular submarine warfare, on the 20th of October. A week later it declared its willingness to agree a cease-fire without conditions.
In the face of this beginning of the end, officers of the war fleet on the north German coast went mad. Or rather, the madness of their age old caste - defence of honour, the tradition of the duel, of demanding or granting "satisfaction," was brought to the surface by the madness of modern imperialist war. Behind the backs of their own government, they decided to embark with the war fleet for the great sea battle against the British Navy which they had been awaiting in vain throughout the war. They preferred to die in honour rather than surrender without a battle. They assumed that the sailors and crew - 80,000 lives in all - under their command would be ready to follow them.[9]
This however was not the case. The crew mutinied against the mutiny of their commanders. At least some of them did. During one dramatic moment, ships which had been taken over by their crews, and ships where this was not (yet) the case, had their guns targeted against each other. Then the mutinous crews surrendered, probably to avoid shooting at their own colleagues.
But this was not yet what triggered off the revolution in Germany. What was decisive was that part of the arrested crew were brought as prisoners to Kiel, where they were likely to be condemned to death as traitors. The other sailors, who had not had the courage to join in the original rebellion at high sea, now fearlessly expressed their solidarity with their colleagues. But above all, the whole working class of Kiel came out in solidarity, fraternising with the sailors. The Social Democrat Gustav Noske, sent to mercilessly crush the uprising, arrived in Kiel on November 4 to find the city in the hands of armed workers, sailors and soldiers. Moreover, mass delegations had already left Kiel in all directions to summons the population to revolution, knowing full well that they had crossed a threshold after which there was no way back: Victory or certain death. Noske was completely taken aback, both by the speed of events, and by the fact that the rebels of Kiel greeted him as a hero.[10]
Under the hammer blows of these events, the mighty German military machine finally disintegrated. The divisions flooding back from Belgium, which the government planned to use to "restore order" in Cologne, deserted.
On the evening of the 8th of November, all eyes were turned towards Berlin, the seat of government, and the point where the main armed forces of the counter-revolution were concentrated. It was rumoured that the decisive battle would be fought in the capital the following day.
Richard Müller, leader of the Obleute in Berlin, later recalled. "On November 8th I stood at Hallisches Tor.[11] Heavily armed infantry and machine gun columns and light field artillery were being moved in endless rows towards the city centre. The human material seemed to consist of cut-throats. It had been used with "success" already to crush the Russian workers and peasants, and in Finland. There was no doubting that it was intended to use them in Berlin to drown the revolution in blood." Müller goes on to describe how the SPD was sending out messages to all of its functionaries, instructing them to oppose the outbreak of the revolution by all means. He continues. "Since the outbreak of the war I had been at the head of the revolutionary movement.
Never, even in face of the worst setbacks, had I ever doubted the victory of the proletariat. But now, as the decisive hour approached, I was gripped by a feeling of apprehension, a great worry about my class comrades, the proletariat. I myself, in face of the greatness of the hour, felt myself to me shamefully small and weak."[12]
It has often been claimed that the German proletariat, on account of the culture of obedience and submission which, for historic reasons, dominated the culture in particular of the ruling classes of that country for several centuries, is incapable of revolution. The 9th of November 1918 disproves this. On the morning of that day, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators from the great working class districts which encircle the government and business quarters on three sides, moved towards the city centre. They planned their routes to pass the main military barracks on their way to try and win over the soldiers, and the main prisons, where they intended to liberate their comrades. They were armed with guns, rifles and hand grenades. And they were prepared to die for the cause of the revolution. Everything was planned on the spot and spontaneously.
That day, only 15 people were killed. The November Revolution in Germany was as bloodless as the October Revolution in Russia. But nobody knew or even expected this in advance. The proletariat of Berlin showed great courage and unswerving determination that day.
Midday. The SPD leaders Ebert and Scheidemann were sitting in the Reichstag, the seat of the German parliament, eating their soup. Friedrich Ebert was proud of himself, having just been summoned by the rich and the nobles to form a government to save capitalism. When they heard noises outside, Ebert, refusing to allow a mob to interrupt him, silently continued his meal. Scheidemann, accompanied by functionaries who were afraid the building was going to be stormed, stepped out on the balcony to see what was going on. What he saw was something like a million demonstrators on the lawns between the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. A crowd which fell silent when it saw Scheidemann on the balcony, thinking he had come to make a speech. Obliged to improvise, he declared the "free German republic". When he got back to tell Ebert what he had done, the latter was furious, since he had been intending to save not only capitalism, but even the monarchy.[13]
Around the same moment the real socialist Karl Liebknecht was standing on the balcony of the palace of that very monarchy, declaring the socialist republic, and summoning the proletariat of all countries to world revolution. And a few hours later, the revolutionary Obleute occupied one of the main meeting rooms in the Reichstag. There, they formulated the appeals for delegates to be elected in mass assemblies the next day, to constitute revolutionary workers and soldiers councils.
The war had been brought to an end, the monarchy toppled. But the rule of the bourgeoisie was still far from being over.
At the beginning of this article, we recalled the stakes of history as formulated by Rosa Luxemburg, concentrated in the question: which class would end the war? We recalled the three possible scenarios for the war to be ended: by the proletariat, by the bourgeoisie, or by mutual exhaustion of the warring parties. The events show clearly that in the end, it was the proletariat which played the leading role in ending the "Great War". This fact alone illustrates the potential might of the revolutionary proletariat. It explains why the bourgeoisie to this very day shrouds in silence the November Revolution of 1918.
But this is not the whole story. To a certain extent, the events of November combined the three scenarios depicted by Rosa Luxemburg. To a certain extent, these events were also the product of the military defeat of Germany. By the beginning of November 1918 it really was on the verge of total military defeat. Ironically, only the proletarian uprising spared the German bourgeoisie the fate of military occupation, obliging the Allies to call a halt to the war to prevent the spreading of the revolution.
November 1918 also revealed elements of "mutual ruin" and exhaustion, above all in Germany, but also in Britain and France. In fact it was only the intervention of the United States on the side of the Western allies from 1917 onwards which tipped the scales in their favour, and opened a way out of the lethal deadlock in which the great European powers were trapped.
If we mention the role of these other factors, it is not in order to minimise the role of the proletariat. They are important to take into consideration because they help to explain the character of events. The November Revolution gained victory as an irresistible force. But this was also because German imperialism had already lost the war, because its army was in full decomposition, and because not only the working class, but broad sectors of the petty bourgeoisie and even the bourgeoisie now wanted peace.
On the day after its great triumph, the population of Berlin elected workers' and soldiers' councils. These in turn appointed, alongside their own organisation, what was considered to be a kind of provisional socialist government formed by the SPD and the USPD under the leadership of Friedrich Ebert. That same day, Ebert sealed a secret agreement with the new military leadership to crush the revolution.
In the next article, we will examine the forces of the revolutionary vanguard in the context of the beginning of the civil war and on the eve of the decisive events of the world revolution.
Steinklopfer, July 2008.
[1]. Richard Müller: Vom Kaiserreich Zur Republik ("From Empire To Republic"), Part I of his trilogy on the German Revolution.
[2]. Rosa Luxemburg: "Liebknecht". Spartakusbriefe N°1. September 1916. In German: Luxemburg Werke Vol. 4, p. 216, 217.
[3]. The Spartakusbund began as a tiny illegal grouping founded amongst others by Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Clara Zetkin and Franz Mehring. It published the illegal Spartakusbriefe (Spartacus letters) and was to provide the nucleus of the KPD founded at the end of the war.
[4]. The Brest-Litovsk treaty was signed on 3rd March 1918 between Germany and its allies, and the new Soviet Republic. The negotiations lasted three months. See also our article "The communist left in Russia, 1918-1930" in International Review n°8.
[5]. The German Socialist Party which had supported participation in the war.
[6]. "Die geschichtliche Verantwortung" ("The historic responsibility") in Luxemburg Werke Vol. 4, p. 375.
[7]. "The Russian Tragedy" in Rosa Luxemburg, Selected political writings (Jonathan Cape, 1972).
[8]. The Franco-British alliance, so-called from the "Entente cordiale" which was a series of agreements signed on 8th April 1904 between the United Kingdom and France.
[9]. The Kamikaze actions of the Japanese air force in World War I, and the suicide bombing of Islamic fundamentalists thus have their European predecessors.
[10]. See the analysis of these events by the German historian Sebastian Haffner in: 1918/19, Eine deutsche Revolution (1918/19, a German Revolution).
[11]. Overhead and underground station of the Berlin public transport system, to the south of the city centre.
[12]. Richard Müller "Vom Kaiserreich Zur Republik" p. 143.
[13]. Anecdotes of this kind, from inside the camp of the counter-revolution, can be found in the memoirs of leading Social Democrats of the hour. Philipp Scheidemann: Memoiren eines Sozialdemokraten. ("Memoirs of a Social Democrat"). 1928. Gustav Noske: Von Kiel bis Kapp - Zur Geschichte der deutschen Revolution. ("From Kiel to Kapp - On the History of the German Revolution"). 1920.
In the first part of this series [8] , we looked at the pattern of world wars, revolutions, and global economic crises that are the manifestations of capitalism's entry into its epoch of decline in the early part of the 20th century, and which have posed mankind with the historic alternative: the advent of a higher mode of production or a relapse into barbarism. But to understand the origins and causes of the crisis facing human civilisation, only a theory that encompasses the entire movement of history will suffice. But general theories of history are no longer much in favour among official historians, who, as the epoch of capitalism's decline unfolded, have been increasingly at a loss to offer any overview, any real insight into the sources of the spiral of catastrophes that have marked this period. Grand historical visions are frequently dismissed as the province of 19th century German idealist philosophers like Hegel, or over-optimistic English liberals who, in the same era, developed the idea of history as a continuous story of progress from darkness and tyranny to the marvellous freedom enjoyed by the citizens of the modern constitutional state.
In fact this incapacity even to consider the historical movement as a whole is characteristic of a class which no longer stands for historical progress and whose social system can offer no future to humanity. The bourgeoisie could look back, and forward, on a large scale, when it was convinced that its mode of production represented a fundamental advance for humanity in comparison to previous social forms, and when it could regard the future with the increasing confidence of an ascendant class. The horrors of the first half of the 20th century dealt a death-blow to this confidence. Not only did symbolic place-names like the Somme and Paschendale, where tens of thousands of young conscripts were butchered in the First World War, or Auschwitz and Hiroshima, synonymous with the mass murder of civilians by the state, or equally symbolic dates like 1914, 1929 and 1939, call into question all prior assumptions about progress, above all at the moral level; they also alarmingly suggested that the present order of society might not be as eternal as it had once seemed. In sum, faced with the prospect of its demise - either through the collapse of its order into anarchy or, which for the bourgeoisie amounts to the same thing, through its overthrow by the revolutionary working class - bourgeois historiography prefers to put on blinkers, losing itself in the narrow empiricism of brief time-spans and local events, or to develop theories like relativism and post-modernism, which reject any notion of a progressive development from one epoch to another and any attempt to uncover a pattern of development in human history. Furthermore, this repression of historical consciousness is reinforced every day in the sphere of popular culture, reinforced by the desperate needs of the market: everything of value must be now and new, coming from nowhere and going nowhere.
Given the small-mindedness of much of the established learning, it is little wonder that so many of those who still pursue the quest to grasp the pattern of history as a whole are seduced by the snake-oil salesmen of religion and occultism. Nazism was an early manifestation of this trend - a farrago of occultist theosophy, pseudo-Darwinism, and racist conspiracy theory which offered a catch-all solution to all the world's problems, effectively removing any further need for thought. Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, or the numerous conspiracy theories about the secret societies who manipulate history, play the same role today. Official bourgeois reason not only fails to offer any answers to the problems of the social sphere - it has largely given up even asking the questions, leaving the field free for unreason to cook up its own mythological solutions.
The ruling wisdom is to some extent aware of all this. It is prepared to recognise that it has indeed suffered a loss of its old self-confidence. Rather than positively singing the praises of liberal capitalism as the finest achievement of the human spirit, it now tends to portray it as the best of a bad bunch, flawed certainly, but greatly preferable to all the forms of fanaticism that appear to be arrayed against it. And in the camp of the fanatics it not only ranges fascism or Islamic terrorism, but also marxism, now definitively refuted as a brand of utopian messianism. How many times have we been told, usually by third-rate thinkers who have the air of saying something new: the marxist view of history is merely an inversion of the Judaeo-Christian myth of history as a story of salvation; primitive communism is the Garden of Eden, future communism the paradise to come; the proletariat is the Chosen People or the Suffering Servant; the communists are the prophets. But we are also told that these religious projections are far from harmless: the reality of "marxist rule" has shown where all such attempts to realise heaven on earth must end up: in tyranny and labour camps, the mad project to mould imperfect mankind to its vision of perfection.
And indeed, to support this analysis, we have the apparent trajectory of marxism in the 20th century: who can deny that Stalin's GPU reminds us of the Holy Inquisition, or that Lenin, Stalin, Mao and other Great Leaders have been turned into new gods? But this evidence is deeply flawed. It rests upon the greatest perjury of the century: that Stalinism equals communism, when in fact it is its total negation. If Stalinism is indeed a form of the capitalist counter-revolution, as all genuinely revolutionary marxists hold, then the argument that the marxist theory of history must lead inevitably towards the Gulag must be put into question.
And we can also respond, as Engels did in his writings on the early history of Christianity, that there is nothing strange about the similarities between the ideas of the modern workers' movement and the sayings of the Biblical prophets or the early Christians, because the latter also represented the strivings of oppressed and exploited classes and their hopes for a world based on human solidarity instead of class domination. Because of the limitations imposed by the social systems in which they appeared, these early communists could not go beyond a religious or mythic vision of the classless society. This is no longer the case today, because historical evolution has made communist society a rational possibility as well as an urgent necessity. Thus rather than viewing modern communism in the light of old myths, we can understand old myths in the light of modern communism.
For us, marxism, historical materialism, is nothing if not the theoretical outlook of a class which, for the first time in history, is both an exploited class and a revolutionary class, a class which carries a new and higher social order in itself. Its effort and indeed its need to examine the pattern of the past and the perspectives for the future can thus be unclouded by the prejudices of a ruling class, which is always, in the end, compelled to deny and obscure reality in the interests of its system of exploitation. Marxist theory is also, in contrast to the poetical strivings of previous exploited classes, founded on a scientific method. It may not be an exact science in the same category as some of the natural sciences, because it cannot shrink humanity and its vastly complex history into a series of repeatable laboratory experiments - but then the theory of evolution is also subject to similar constraints. The point is that marxism alone is capable of applying the scientific method to the study of the existing social order and to the social orders that preceded it, rigorously using the best scholarship that the ruling class can offer but going beyond them and adumbrating a higher synthesis.
In 1859, while deeply involved in the work that would give rise to Capital, Marx wrote a brief text that gives a masterly summary of his entire historical method. It was in the Preface to a work called Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, a work which in itself was largely superseded or at least overshadowed by the appearance of Capital. Having given us a condensed account of the development of his thought from his first studies in law to his present preoccupation with political economy, Marx comes to the nub of the matter - the "guiding principles of my studies". Here the marxist theory of history is summarised with masterly precision and clarity. We therefore intend to examine this passage as closely as possible in order to lay the bases for a real understanding of the epoch in which we are living.
We have included the most crucial passage from this text in full as an appendix to this article, but from here we intend to look in detail at each of its component parts.
"In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life"
Marxism is frequently caricatured by its critics, conventionally bourgeois or pseudo-radical, as a mechanistic, "objectivist" theory which seeks to reduce the complexity of the historical process to a series of iron laws over which human subjects have no control and which drags them like a juggernaut to a fatefully determined ultimate result. When not being told that it is another form of religion, we are informed that marxist thought is a typical product of the 19th century's uncritical worship of science and its illusions in progress, which sought to apply the predictable, verifiable laws of the natural world - physical, chemical, biological - to the fundamentally unpredictable patterns of social life. Marx is then portrayed as the author of a theory of inevitable and linear evolution from one mode of production to another, leading inexorably from primitive society, through slavery, feudalism and capitalism to communism. And this entire process is all the more predetermined because it is supposedly caused by a purely technical development of the productive forces.
As with all caricatures, there is a grain of truth in this picture. It's true, for example, that during the period of the Second International, when there was a growing tendency for the workers' parties to become "institutionalised", there was an equivalent process at the theoretical level, a vulnerability to the dominant conceptions of progress and a certain tendency to envisage "science" as a thing in itself, detached from the real class relations in society. Kautsky's idea of scientific socialism as an invention of the intellectuals which then had to be injected into the proletarian mass was one expression of this tendency. It is even more the case that, in the 20th century, when so much of what had once been marxism now became an open apology for the capitalist order, mechanistic visions of historical progress now became officially codified. There is no clearer demonstration of this than in Stalin's primer of "Marxism-Leninism", the History of the CPSU (Short Course) where the theory of the primacy of the productive forces is put forward as the materialist view of history:
"The second particularity of production is that its changes and its development always begin with changes and developments in the productive forces and, above all, the instruments of production. The productive forces are, consequently, the most dynamic and revolutionary element in production. First, the productive forces of society modify themselves and develop; then, in relation to and in conformity with these modifications, the relations of production between men, the economic relations, are also modified".
This conception of the primacy of the productive forces coincided very neatly with the fundamental project of Stalinism: to "develop the productive forces" of the USSR at the expense of the proletariat and with the aim of making Russia a major world power. It was entirely in Stalinism's interest to present the piling up of heavy industrial plant that took place during the 1930s as so many steps towards communism, and to prevent any inquiry into the underlying social relationship behind this "development" - the ferocious exploitation of the class of wage labourers, in other words, the extraction of surplus value with a view to the accumulation of capital.
For Marx, this whole approach is negated by the first lines of the Communist Manifesto, which presents the class struggle as the dynamic force in historical evolution, in other words, the struggle between different social classes ("freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman") over the appropriation of surplus labour. It is negated no less plainly in the opening lines of our citation from the Preface: "in the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations..." It is human beings of flesh and blood who "enter into definite relations", who make history, not "forces of production", not machines, even if there is necessarily a close connection between the relations of production and the productive forces that are "appropriate" to them. As Marx puts it in another famous passage from the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past".
Note carefully: in conditions not of their own choosing; men enter into definite relations "independent of their will". So far, at least. Under the conditions which have predominated in all hitherto existing forms of society, the social relations which human beings form among themselves have been more or less unclear to them, more or less clouded by mythological and ideological representations; and by the same token, with the advent of class society, the forms of wealth that men engender through these relations tend to elude them, to become an alien force standing above them. In this view, human beings are not passive products of their environment or of the tools that they produce to satisfy their needs, but at the same time they are not yet masters of their own social forces or of the products of their own labour.
"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness... In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production".
In sum, men make history, but not yet in full consciousness of what they are doing. Hence, when studying historical change, we cannot content ourselves with studying the ideas and beliefs of an epoch, or with examining the modifications in the systems of government or law; to grasp how these ideas and systems evolve, it is necessary to go to the fundamental social conflicts that lie behind them.
Again: this approach to history does not dismiss the active role of consciousness, of belief and of legal/political formations, their real impact on the social relations and the development of the productive forces. For example, the ideology of the slave-holding class of antiquity was one in which labour was held in utter contempt, and this attitude played a direct part in preventing the very considerable scientific advances made by Greek thinkers from translating itself into the practical development of science, into the invention and actual putting into general operation of tools and techniques that would have increased the productivity of labour. But the underlying reality behind this barrier was the slave mode of production itself: it was the existence of slavery at the heart of classical society's creation of wealth which was the source of the slaveholder's contempt for labour and their understanding that if you wanted to increase the surplus product, you had to supply more slaves.
In later writings, Marx and Engels had to defend their theoretical approach from both open critics and misguided supporters who interpreted the dictum that "social being determines social consciousness" in the crudest possible way, for example, by pretending that it meant that all members of the bourgeoisie were fatally determined to think in one way because of their economic position in society, or even more absurdly, that all members of the proletariat are bound to have a clear consciousness of their class interests because they are subject to exploitation. Such reductionist attitudes were precisely what led Marx to claim that "I am not a Marxist". There are numerous reasons why, among the working class as it exists in the "normality" of capitalism, only a minority recognise their real class situation: not only differences in individual histories and psychologies, but, more fundamentally, the active role played by the dominant ideology in preventing the dominated from grasping their own class interests - a dominant ideology which has a far longer history and effect than the immediate propaganda of the ruling class, since it is deeply internalised in the minds of the exploited "The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living", as Marx phrased it straight after the passage from the 18th Brumaire about men making history in conditions not of their choosing.
In fact, Marx's comparison between the ideology of an epoch and what an individual thinks about himself, far from expressing Marx's reductionism, actually shows a psychological depth: it would be a poor psychoanalyst who showed no interest in what a patient was telling him about his feelings and convictions, but it would be an equally poor one who stopped short at the patient's immediate awareness of himself, ignoring the complexity of hidden and unconscious elements in his overall psychological profile. The same goes for the history of ideas or "political" history. They can tell us much about what was happening in a past epoch, but in themselves they only give us a distorted reflection of reality. Hence Marx's rejection of all historical approaches which remain at the surface appearance of events:
"In the whole conception of history up to the present this real basis of history has either been totally neglected or else considered as a minor matter quite irrelevant to the course of history. History must, therefore, always be written according to an extraneous standard; the real production of life seems to be primeval history, while the truly historical appears to be separated from ordinary life, something extraterrestrial. With this the relation of man to nature is excluded from history and hence the antithesis of nature and history is created. The exponents of this conception of history have consequently only been able to see in history the political actions of princes and States, religious and all sorts of theoretical struggles, and in particular in each historical epoch have had to share the illusion of that epoch. For instance, if an epoch imagines itself to be actuated by purely "political" or "religious" motives, although "religion" and "politics" are only forms of its true motives, the historian accepts this opinion. The "idea," the "conception" of the people in question about their real practice, is transformed into the sole determining, active force, which controls and determines their practice. When the crude form in which the division of labour appears with the Indians and Egyptians calls forth the caste-system in their State and religion, the historian believes that the caste-system is the power which has produced this crude social form".[1]
We now come to the passage from the Preface that most clearly leads to an understanding of the present historical phase in the life of capitalism: "At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal term - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution."
Here again Marx shows that the active element in the historical process is the social relationships that human begins enter into to produce the necessities of life. Looking back over the movement from one social form to another, it becomes evident that there is constant dialectic between periods in which these relations give rise to a real development of the productive forces, and periods in which these same relations become a barrier to further development. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels showed that capitalist relations of production, emerging out of decaying feudal society, acted as a profoundly revolutionary force, sweeping away all the stagnant, static forms of social and economic life that stood in its way. The necessity to compete and produce as cheaply as possible compelled the bourgeoisie to constantly revolutionise the forces of production; the ceaseless necessity to find new markets for its commodities forced it to invade the whole globe and create a world in its image.
In 1848, capitalist social relations were clearly a "form of development", and they had as yet only established themselves firmly in one or two countries. However, the violence of the economic crises of the first quarter of the 19th century initially led the authors of the Manifesto to conclude that capitalism had already become a fetter on the development of the productive forces, placing the communist revolution (or at least a rapid transition from bourgeois to proletarian revolution) on the immediate agenda.
"In these crises, a great part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed. In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity - the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilisation, too much means of subsistence, too much industry, too much commerce. The productive forces at the disposal of society no longer tend to further the development of the conditions of bourgeois property; on the contrary, they have become too powerful for these conditions, by which they are fettered, and so soon as they overcome these fetters, they bring disorder into the whole of bourgeois society, endanger the existence of bourgeois property. The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them".[2]
With the defeat of the 1848 revolutions and the enormous expansion of world capitalism that got underway in the ensuing period, they were to revise this view, even if they could still understandably be impatient for the advent of the long-awaited era of social revolution, the day of reckoning for the arrogant order of world capital. But what is central to this approach is the basic method: the recognition that a social order could not be swept away until it had definitively entered into conflict with the development of the productive forces, precipitating the whole society into a crisis which was not a momentary one, not a crisis of youth, but an entire "era" of crisis, of convulsion, of social revolution; in other words, a crisis of decadence.
In 1858, Marx again returned to this question: "The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market. Since the world is round, the colonisation of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan would seem to have completed this process. For us, the difficult question is this: on the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character. Will it not necessarily be crushed in this little corner of the earth, since the movement of bourgeois society is still, in the ascendant over a far greater area?"[3]
What's interesting about this passage is precisely the questions it poses: what are the historic criteria for determining the passage to an epoch of social revolution under capitalism? Can there be a successful communist revolution as long as capitalism is still a globally expanding system? Marx was premature in thinking that the revolution was imminent in Europe. In fact, in a letter to Vera Zasulich about the problem of Russia, written in 1881, he again seems to have modified his view: "the capitalist system is past its prime in the West, approaching the time when it will be no more than a regressive social regime".[4] Thus over 20 years later than 1858, the system is still only "approaching" its "regressive" period even in the advanced countries. Again, these express the difficulties Marx faced given the historic situation in which he lived. As it turned out, capitalism still had before it one last phase of real global development, the phase of imperialism, which would also usher in a period of convulsions on a world scale, indicating that the system as a whole, and not simply one part of it, had plunged into its crisis of senility. However, Marx's preoccupations in these letters show how seriously he took the problem of basing a revolutionary perspective on deciding whether or not capitalism had reached this stage.
"No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
"Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation."
In this next passage, Marx further stresses the importance of basing a perspective for social revolution not on the purely moral abhorrence inspired by a system of exploitation, but on its inability to develop the productivity of labour and, in general, the capacity of human beings to satisfy their material needs.
The argument that a society never expires until it has worn out all capacity for development has been used to argue against the idea that capitalism has reached its period of decadence: capitalism has clearly grown since 1914 and we can't say it is decadent until all growth ceases. It's true that a great deal of confusion has been caused by theories such as Trotsky's in the 1930s, who asserted that the productive forces had ceased to grow. Given that capitalism was in the throes of its greatest ever depression at the time, this view seemed plausible; furthermore, the idea that decadence is marked by a complete halt in the development of the productive forces, and even a regression, can to some extent be applied to previous class societies where the crisis was always the result of underproduction, an absolute inability to produce enough to sustain society's basic needs (and even in those systems, the process of "descent" was never without phases of apparent recovery and even vigorous growth). But the basic problem with this view is that it ignores the fundamental reality of capitalism - the necessity for growth, for accumulation, for the expanded reproduction of value. As we shall see, in the system's decadence, this necessity can only be met by tampering more and more with the very laws of capitalist production, but as we shall also see, the point will probably never be reached when capitalist accumulation becomes absolutely impossible. As Rosa Luxemburg pointed out in The Anticritique, such a point was "a theoretical fiction, because capital accumulation is not just an economic but also a political process".[5] Furthermore, Marx had already posited the notion of growth as decay: "The highest development of this basis itself (the flower into which it transforms itself; but it is always this basis, this plant as flower; hence wilting after the flowering and as a consequence of the flowering) is the point at which it is itself worked out, developed, into the form in which it is compatible with the highest development of the forces of production, hence also the richest development of individuals. As soon as this point is reached, the further development appears as decay, and the new development begins from a new basis".[6]
Capitalism has certainly developed sufficient productive forces for a new and higher mode of production to arise. In fact from the moment the material conditions for communism have been developed, the system enters into decline. By creating a world economy - fundamental for communism - capitalism also reached the limits of its healthy development. The decadence of capitalism is thus not to be identified with a complete cessation of production, but by a growing series of convulsions and catastrophes which demonstrate the absolute necessity for its overthrow.
Marx's main point here is the necessity for a period of decadence. Men do not make revolutions for mere pleasure, but because they are obliged by necessity, by the intolerable suffering brought about by the crisis of a system. By the same token, attachment to the status quo is deeply rooted in their consciousness, and it can only be the growing conflict between that ideology and the material reality they face that will lead men to challenge the prevailing system. This is above all true for the proletarian revolution, which for the first time requires a conscious transformation of every aspect of social life.
Revolutionaries are sometimes accused of adhering to the idea of "the worse the better": the idea that the more the masses suffer, the more they are likely to be revolutionary. But there is no mechanical relation between suffering and revolutionary consciousness. Suffering contains a dynamic towards reflection and revolt, but it also contains one that can wear down and exhaust the capacity for revolt, or else it can just as easily lead to the adoption of utterly false forms of rebellion, as the present growth of Islamic fundamentalism shows. A period of decadence is necessary to convince the working class that it needs to construct a new society, but on the other hand an indefinitely prolonged epoch of decadence can threaten the very possibility of a revolution, dragging the world through a spiral of disasters that serve only to destroy the accumulated productive forces, and in particular, the most important productive force of all, the proletariat. This is indeed the danger posed by the final phase of decadence, the phase we refer to as decomposition, which has in our view already begun.
This problem of society rotting on its feet is particularly acute in capitalism because, in contrast to previous systems, the maturation of the material conditions for the new society - communism - does not coincide with the development of new economic forms within the shell of the old social order. In the decline of Roman slavery, the development of feudal estates was often the work of members of the old slave-owning class who had distanced themselves from the central state in order to avoid the crushing burdens of its taxes. In the period of feudal decadence, the new bourgeois class arose in the towns - which had always been the commercial centres of the old system - and set about laying the foundations of a new economy based on manufacturing and trade. The emergence of these new forms was both a response to the crisis of the old order and a factor pushing more and more towards its final demise.
With the decline of capitalism, the productive forces it has set in motion certainly enter into growing conflict with the social relations under which it operates. This is expressed above all in the contrast between capitalism's enormous productive capacity and its inability to absorb all the commodities it produces: in short, in the crisis of overproduction. But while this crisis makes the abolition of commodity relations more and more urgent, and the operation of the laws of commodity production more and more distorted, it does not result in the spontaneous emergence of communist economic forms. Unlike previous revolutionary classes, the working class is a propertyless, exploited class, and cannot build its own economic order inside the framework of the old. Communism can only be the result of a more and more conscious struggle against the old order, leading to the political overthrow of the bourgeoisie as the precondition for the communist transformation of economic and social life. If the proletariat is unable to raise its struggle to the necessary heights of consciousness and self-organisation, then the contradictions of capitalism will lead not to the advent of a higher social order, but to "the mutual ruin of the contending classes."
Gerrard, July 2008
Appendix
The complete passage from the Preface is as follows:
The general conclusion at which I arrived and which, once reached, became the guiding principle of my studies can be summarised as follows.
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.
In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.
Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation. In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as epochs marking progress in the economic development of society. The bourgeois mode of production is the last antagonistic form of the social process of production - antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism but of an antagonism that emanates from the individuals' social conditions of existence - but the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create also the material conditions for a solution of this antagonism. The prehistory of human society accordingly closes with this social formation.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm [9]
[1]. The German Ideology. Part I. "Feuerbach", Chapter I.1 "Ideology in general, German ideology in particular"
[2]. Communist Manifesto, Chapter I, "Bourgeois and Proletarians".
[3]. Marx to Engels, 8 October 1858, Collected Works, Vol. 40, p.347, Lawrence and Wishart.
[4]. Cited in Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road, KP, p103). See Collected Works, Vol. 24, p. 362, footnote c for a slightly different translation.
[5]. p146, Monthly Review Press, 1972.
[6]. Grundrisse p 541. Penguin edition
This is the concluding section of the series on "Problems of the period transition" published in Bilan between 1934 and 1937.This article appeared in Bilan n° 38 (December/January 1936/7). It is the continuation of a theoretical debate that the Italian left communists were extremely keen on developing, since they saw it as key to drawing the lessons from the defeat of the Russian revolution and thus for preparing the ground for a successful revolution in future. As we have mentioned in the introduction to the previous article in the series, the debate was very wide-ranging: the article that follows refers to the Trotskyist current, the Dutch internationalists, and even to disagreements between Mitchell (a member of the minority of the Ligue des Communistes Internationalistes which went on to form the Belgian Fraction of the Communist Left) and "the comrades of Bilan", who in his view did not place sufficient emphasis on the problem of the economic transformation following the proletarian seizure of power.
Whether or not this was the case, Mitchell's text poses a number of important questions about the economic policy of the proletariat, particularly with regard to overcoming the domination of production over consumption which is characteristic of the capitalist social relation, and to the intimately related problem of eliminating the law of value. We will not try to address these questions here, but will return to them in a subsequent article, which will go in more depth into the differences between the Italian and Dutch left communists, since to this day this debate remains a fundamental starting point for approaching the problem of how the working class can do away with capitalist accumulation and create a mode of production geared to the real needs of humanity.
It remains for us to examine some of the norms of economic administration which, in our view, condition the relationship between the party and the masses, the basis for strengthening the dictatorship of the proletariat.
It's true that any system of production can only develop on the basis of enlarged reproduction, i.e. the accumulation of wealth. But a type of society is expressed less by its external forms and manifestations than by its social content, by the motivation for producing, i.e. by the class relations. In the evolution of history, the two processes, internal and external, are engaged in a constant contradiction. The development of capitalism has shown that the progress of the productive forces also engenders its opposite, the regression in the material conditions of the proletariat, a phenomenon which is expressed in the contradiction between use value and exchange value, between production and consumption. We have already noted that the capitalist system is not progressive by nature, but by necessity, spurred on by accumulation and competition. Marx underlined this contrast by saying that "the development of the productive forces only has any importance to the extent that it increases the surplus labour of the working class and not to the extent that it diminished the time necessary for material production" (Capital, Book X).
Beginning from an observation that is valid for all types of society, i.e. that surplus labour is inevitable, the problem is thus essentially concentrated on the mode of appropriation and of destruction of surplus labour, the mass of surplus labour and its duration, the relation between this mass and the total labour, and finally the rhythm of its accumulation. And immediately we can bring out another remark by Marx: "the real wealth of society and the possibility of the continual enlargement of the process of reproduction do not depend on the duration of surplus labour, but on its productivity and the more or less advantageous conditions in which this productivity is set to work" (Capital Book XIV). And he adds that the fundamental condition for the advent of the "realm of freedom" is the reduction in the working day.
These considerations enable us to grasp the tendencies that have to be imprinted in the evolution of a proletarian economy. It also allows us to reject the conception that sees the growth of the productive forces as the absolute proof of "socialism". This is a conception defended not only by Centrism but also by Trotsky: "liberalism pretends not to see the enormous progress of the Soviet regime, i.e. the concrete proofs of the incalculable advantages of socialism. The economists of the classes who have been dispossessed by it pass over in utter silence its rhythms of industrial development, unprecedented in world history" (Lutte de classes, June 1930).
We have already noted at the beginning of this chapter that this question of "rhythm" is at the forefront of the preoccupations of Trotsky and his Opposition, when in fact it does not at all correspond to the mission of the proletariat, which consists of modifying the motivation for production and not of accelerating its rhythm on the back of the impoverishment of the proletariat, exactly as under capitalism. The proletariat has all the less reason to be attached to the factor of "rhythm" given that this has to be seen on an international scale; the rhythm of production taking place in the USSR at present is as nothing compared to the contribution that the most advanced capitalist technology would bring to a world socialist economy.
When we pose the necessity to change the motive for production, gearing it towards the needs of consumption, as a primordial economic task, we are obviously talking about a process and not about an immediate result of the revolution. The very structure of the transitional economy, as we have already shown, cannot engender any such economic automatism, since the survival of "bourgeois right" means the subsistence of certain social relations of exploitation and labour power still to a certain extent retains the character of a commodity. The politics of the party, stimulated by the workers' struggles for immediate demands through their trade union organisations, must precisely tend to overcome the contradiction between labour and labour power, which has been developed to an extreme by capitalism. In other words, the capitalist use of labour power for the accumulation of capital must be replaced by the "proletarian" use of this labour power for purely social ends, which will facilitate the political and economic consolidation of the proletariat.
In the organisation of production, the proletarian state must be inspired above all by the needs of the masses, developing the branches of production which can respond to those needs, obviously in relation to the specific material conditions that prevail in the economy in question.
If the economic programme that has been elaborated remains in the framework of building the world socialist economy, and thus remains tied to the international class struggle, the proletarian state will be all the more able to confine its tasks to developing consumption. On the other hand, if this programme takes on an autonomous character which aims directly or indirectly at a form of "national socialism", a growing part of the surplus labour will be siphoned off into the construction of enterprises which in the future will have no justification in the international division of labour; at the same time these enterprises will inevitably be obliged to produce the means for the defence of the "socialist society" under construction. We will see that this is exactly what has happened in the Soviet Union.
It is certain that any improvement in the material situation of the proletarian masses depends in the first place on the productivity of labour, and this in turn depends on the technical level of the productive forces, and consequently on accumulation. In the second place it is linked to the output of labour that corresponds to the organisation and discipline within the labour process. Such are the fundamental elements that exist in the capitalist system as well, with the characteristic that the concrete results of accumulation are diverted from their human destination to the benefit of accumulation "in itself"; the productivity of labour does not translate into objects of consumption, but into capital.
It would be pointless to hide that the problem is far from being solved by proclaiming a policy aimed at enlarging consumption. But you have to begin by affirming it, because it is a major directive which is irreducibly opposed to the one that pushes first and foremost towards industrialisation and accelerated growth, inevitably sacrificing one or several generations of workers (Centrism[1] has declared this openly). A proletariat that has been "sacrificed", even for objectives that may seem to correspond to its historical interests (though the reality of Russia demonstrates that this is not at all the case) cannot constitute a real strength for the world proletariat. It can only be turned away from the latter under the hypnosis of national objectives.
Continuing on the basis of the internationalist considerations we have developed, we thus have to affirm (unless we want to fall into abstraction) that the economic tasks of the proletariat, from the historical point of view, are primordial. The comrades of Bilan, animated by the correct concern to show the role of the proletarian state on the global terrain of the class struggle, have singularly restricted the importance of the question, by arguing that "the economic and military domains[2] can only be accessory questions, questions of detail, in the activity of the proletarian state, whereas they are essential for an exploiting class" (Bilan p 612). We repeat: the programme is determined and limited by the world policies of the proletarian state, but having established this, the proletariat can still not invest too much vigilance and energy into searching for a solution to the redoubtable problem of consumption, which still conditions its role as a "simple factor in the struggle of the world proletariat".
In our view the comrades of Bilan make another mistake[3] when they make no distinction between a form of administration that tends towards the "building of socialism" and a socialist administration of the transitional economy, declaring that "far from envisaging the possibility of a socialist administration of the economy in a given country and the international class struggle, we must begin by proclaiming that such a socialist administration is impossible". But what is a policy which aims at improving the living conditions of the workers if not a truly socialist one, seeking precisely to overturn the capitalist process of production. In the period of transition, it is perfectly possible to develop this new economic course towards a production based on need even while classes still exist.
But the fact remains that the motivation of production does not depend solely on adopting a correct policy, but above all on the proletariat's organisations exerting pressure on the economy and adapting the productive apparatus to its needs. Furthermore the amelioration of living conditions does not fall from the sky. It is a result of the development of productive capacity, whether that is the consequence of an increase in the mass of social labour, a greater output, through better organisation of the labour process, or through an increase in labour productivity thanks to the use of more powerful means of production.
As regards the mass of social labour - if we take the number of workers to be constant - we have said that it is given by the length and intensity of the use of labour power. Now, it is precisely these two factors, linked to the falling value of labour power as a result of its greater productivity, which determines the degree of exploitation imposed on the proletariat in the capitalist regime.
In the transitional phase, labour power still conserves its character as a commodity to the extent that wages are directly linked to its value. By contrast, it throws off this character to the extent that wages moves towards the equivalent of the total labour provided by the worker (once the surplus labour earmarked for social needs is deducted).
Unlike the policy of capitalism, a truly proletarian policy seeking to increase the productive forces can certainly not be based on surplus labour that derives from a greater length of intensity of social labour, which in its capitalist form constitutes absolute surplus value. On the contrary it has to be linked to the rhythms and duration of labour that are compatible with the existence of a real dictatorship of the proletariat; it must therefore preside over a more rational organisation of labour, over the elimination of any wasted social activity, even if in this domain the possibilities of increasing the mass of useful labour are quickly exhausted.
In these conditions, "proletarian" accumulation must find its essential source in labour that has become available through a higher level of technique.
This means that increasing the productivity of labour poses the following alternative: either the same mass of products (or use values) determines a reduction in the total volume of labour consumed, or, if the latter remains constant (or even if it diminishes depending on the level of technical progress), the quantity of products to be distributed will increase. But in both cases, a diminution in relative surplus labour (relative that is to the labour strictly necessary for the reproduction of labour power) can perfectly well be conjoined to greater consumption and thus to a real rise in wages and not fictional ones as in capitalism. It is in the new use of productivity that we will see the superiority of proletarian administration over capitalist administration, rather than competition over production costs, since on this basis the proletariat will inevitably be beaten, as we have already indicated.
In effect it is the development of the productivity of labour which has precipitated capitalism into its crisis of decadence where, in a permanent manner (and no longer only through cyclical crises) the mass of use values is set against the mass of exchange values. The bourgeoisie is overcome by the immensity of its production and yet is pushed towards suicide by a huge mass of unsatisfied needs.
In the period of transition, the productivity of labour is of course still a long way from responding to the formula "to each according to his needs", but the possibility of using it fully for human ends overturns the givens of the social problem. Marx already noted that although it was well below its theoretical maximum, the increasing productivity of labour was basic to capitalism. But after the revolution it will be possible to reduce, then suppress, the capitalist antagonism between the product and its value, provided that the proletarian policy tends not to reduce wages to the value of labour power - a capitalist method which diverts technical progress to the benefit of capital - but to more and more elevate it above this value, on the basis of the development of productivity.
It is obvious that a certain fraction of relative surplus labour cannot return directly to the worker, given the basic necessities of accumulation without which there can be no technical progress. And once again we are faced with the problem of the rhythm and rate of accumulation. And while it appears to be a question of measurement, any arbitrary element will be excluded on a principled basis that defines the economic tasks of the proletariat.
Furthermore, it goes without saying that determining the rate of accumulation is based on economic centralism and not on the decision of the producers in their enterprises, as in the view of the Dutch internationalists (p 116 of their work). What's more they do not seem very convinced of the practical value of such a solution, since they bring it in immediately after affirming that "the rate of accumulation cannot be left to the free choice of the separate enterprises and it is the general congress of the enterprise councils that will decide on the obligatory norms", a formula which seems to be a kind of disguised centralism.
If we apply this to what has happened in Russia, we can see all the more clearly the fraud of Centrism, which claims that the suppression of the exploitation of the proletariat flows directly from the collectivisation of the means of production. We can see that the economic processes in the Soviet Union are those of the capitalist economy; even if they begin from a different basis they have ended up flowing towards the same outlet: imperialist war. Both have unfolded on the basis of a growing extraction of surplus value which is not returned to the working class. In the USSR, the labour process is capitalist in substance, if not in its social aspects and in the relations of the production. There is a drive to increase absolute surplus value, obtained through the intensification of labour, which has taken the form of "Stakhanovism". The material conditions of the workers are in no way linked to the technical improvements and the development of the productive forces, and in any case the relative participation of the proletariat in the patrimony of society is not increasing but diminishing. This is a phenomenon analogous to what the capitalist system has always engendered, even in its most prosperous periods. We lack elements to establish the extent to which there is a real growth of the absolute part that goes to the workers.
Moreover, the USSR practises a policy of wage reductions, which tends to substitute unqualified workers (coming from the immense reserves of the peasantry) for qualified workers, who are also the most class conscious.
To the question of how this enormous mass of surplus labour becomes congealed, we are given the facile answer that a major part goes to the bureaucratic "class". But such an explanation is disproved by the very existence of an enormous productive apparatus which remains collective property, and in comparison to which the beefsteaks, automobiles and villas of the bureaucrats cut a small figure! The official statistics and others, as well as the inquiries, confirm that there is an enormous and growing disproportion between the production of means of production (tools, buildings, public works, etc) and the objects of consumption destined for the "bureaucracy" and for the worker and peasant masses. If it was true that the bureaucracy is a class which disposes of the economy and appropriates surplus labour, how are we to explain how the latter is to a large part transformed into collective wealth and not private property? This paradox can only be explained by discovering why this wealth, while still remaining within the Soviet community, goes against it in the way that it is distributed. Let's note that today we are seeing a similar phenomenon within capitalist society, i.e. that the major part of the surplus value doesn't end up in the pockets of the capitalists but is accumulated in the form of goods which are only private property from the juridical point of view. The difference is that in the USSR this phenomenon doesn't take on a capitalist character properly speaking. The two evolutions also start from a different origin: in the USSR it doesn't arise out of an economic antagonism, but a political one; from a split between the Russian proletariat and the international proletariat; it develops under the banner of the defence of "national socialism" and of its integration into the mechanisms of world capitalism. By contrast, in the capitalist countries, the evolution is determined by the decadence of the bourgeois economy. But the two social developments end up in a common objective: the construction of war economies (the Soviet leaders boast of having set up the most formidable war machine in the world). This, it seems to us, is the answer to the "Russian enigma". This explains why the defeat of the October revolution does not come from an overturn in the relations between classes within Russia, but on the international arena.
Let's now examine the policies that are orienting the course of the class struggle towards imperialist war rather than the world revolution.
For certain comrades, as we have already said, the Russian revolution was not proletarian and its reactionary evolution was determined in advance by the fact that it was carried out by a proletariat which was culturally backward (even though, at the level of class consciousness, it was in the vanguard of the world proletariat) and which was obliged to take over a backward country. We will limit ourselves to opposing such a fatalist attitude by referring to that of Marx with regard to the Commune: although the latter expressed a historical immaturity of the proletariat vis-à-vis the taking of power, Marx nevertheless saw its immense importance and drew fertile lessons from it, the precise lessons that would inspire the Bolsheviks in 1917. While acting in the same way towards the Russian revolution, we don't deduce from this that future revolutions will be photographic reproductions of October. What we do say is that the fundamental traits of the October revolution will indeed be found in these revolutions, recalling what Lenin meant when he talked about the "international value of the Russian revolution" (Left Wing Communism). A marxist does not "repeat" history but interprets it to forge the theoretical weapons of the proletariat, to help it avoid errors and finally triumph over the bourgeoisie. To search for the conditions that would have placed the Russian proletariat in a position to have won a definitive victory is to give the marxist method of investigation all its value by adding a new stone to the construction of historical materialism.
While it's true that the retreat of the first revolutionary wave led to the temporary isolation of the Russian proletariat, we think that it's not there that we have to look for the decisive cause of the evolution of the USSR, but in the interpretation which was subsequently made of the events, and in the false perspectives about the evolution of capitalism that derived from this. The conception of the "stabilisation" of capitalism naturally engendered the theory of "socialism in one country" and consequently the "defensive" policy of the USSR.
The international proletariat became the instrument of the proletarian state, a force to defend it against imperialist aggression, while the world revolution faded into the background as a concrete objective. If Bukharin still talked about the latter in 1925 it was because "for us the world revolution has this importance, that it is the only guarantee against interventions, against a new war"
He thus elaborated the theory of the "guarantee against interventions", which the CI took up as it became the expression of the particular interests of the USSR and no longer the interests of the world revolution. The "guarantee" was no longer sought in linking up with the international proletariat but in modifying the character and content of the relations between the proletarian state and the capitalist states. The world proletariat remained only as a point of support for the defence of "national socialism".
As regards the NEP, basing ourselves on what we said previously, we don't think that it offered a specific terrain for an inevitable degeneration, although it did give rise to a very considerable recrudescence of capitalist ambitions among the peasantry in particular; and, under Centrism, the alliance with the poor peasants (the smytchka), which Lenin saw as a means to strengthen the proletarian dictatorship, became a goal, at the same time as a union was forged with the middle peasants and the kulaks.
Contrary to the opinion of the comrades of Bilan, we also don't think that we can infer from Lenin's declarations about the NEP that he would have advocated a policy of separating the economic evolution of Russia from the course of the world revolution.
On the contrary, for Lenin, the NEP was a "holding" policy, a policy of respite, until the revival of the international class struggle: "when we adopt a policy that has to last for many years, we don't forget for a moment that the international revolution, the rapidity and the conditions of its development, can change everything". For him it was a question of re-establishing a certain economic balance, making concessions to capitalist forces without which the dictatorship would have collapsed, but not of "calling for class collaboration with the enemy with the aim of building the foundations of the socialist economy".
By the same token it is incorrect to say that Lenin was a partisan of "socialism in one country" on the basis of one apocryphal document.
On the other hand, the "Trotskyist" Russian opposition is helping to accredit the opinion that the key struggle is the one between the capitalist states and the Soviet state. In 1927 it saw an imperialist war against the USSR as inevitable, at the very time that the CI was tearing workers away from class positions and hurling them onto the front of the defence of the USSR, simultaneously presiding over the crushing of the Chinese revolution. On this basis the Opposition is getting involved in the preparations of the USSR - the "bastion of socialism" - for war. This position means theoretically sanctioning the exploitation of the Russian workers in order to build a war economy (the Five Year Plans). The Opposition is even going so far as to agitate the myth of the unity of the party "at any cost" as a precondition for the military victory of the USSR. At the same time it makes equivocal statements about the "the struggle for peace" (!) by considering that the USSR should try to "put off the war", even to pay a ransom while "preparing the economy, the budget etc to the maximum with a view to war", and considers that the question of industrialisation is decisive for ensuring the technical resources needed for defence (Platform).
Subsequently Trotsky, in his Permanent Revolution, took up this thesis of industrialisation at the quickest possible pace as a guarantee of "external threats" while also serving to raise the living standards of the masses. We know that the "external threat" comes not from a "crusade" against the USSR, but through its integration into the front of world imperialism; and at the same time that industrialisation in no way implies a better existence for the proletariat, but the most frenzied exploitation with the aim of preparing for imperialist war.
In the next revolution, the proletariat will win, independently of its cultural immaturity and its economic deficiencies, provided that it bases itself not on the "building of socialism" but on the extension of the international civil war.
Mitchell,
(republished August 2008)
[1]. It should be noted that at the time Bilan published this contribution the whole of the Italian left still qualified the Stalinist policy that guided the Communist International as "Centrism". It was only later, notably by Internationalisme after the war, that the current coming from the Italian left clearly qualified Stalinism as counter revolutionary. We refer the reader to the critical presentation of these texts published in International Review nº 132.
[2]. We agree with the comrades of Bilan that the defence of the proletarian state cannot be posed on the military terrain but on the political level, through its links with the international proletariat
[3]. Which may be just a question of formulation, but it is still important to raise it since it is connected to their tendency to minimise economic problems.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/food-riots
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/may-68
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/504/may-68
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1968-may-france
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/133/germany_1919
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/503/germany-1918-19
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1919-german-revolution
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/2008/132/decadence_of_capitalism
[9] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/779/decadence-capitalism
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/395/communism-agenda-history
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/375/period-transition