On 11th September 1973, a bloody military coup led by General Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government. A terrible period of repression of the working class followed: thousands of people,1 mostly workers, were systematically massacred, tens of thousands imprisoned and tortured. This appalling barbarity was accompanied by hundreds of thousands of redundancies (10% of the workforce during the first year of military dictatorship).
The order that reigned in Santiago (set up with the support of the CIA2) was nothing other than the order of capitalist terror in its most caricatural form.
With the 30th anniversary of the overthrow of Allende’s “socialist” government, the whole “democratic” bourgeoisie has made full use of the occasion to try to derail workers from their own class interests. It has been trying to sell the idea that the only struggle workers should support is the defence of the democratic state against dictatorship and evil tyrants. This is the meaning of the campaign orchestrated by the media, when they draw the parallel between Pinochet’s coup d’Etat of 11th September 1973, and the attack on the Twin Towers in New York (see for example, the headline in Le Monde of 12th September: “Chile 1973, the other 11th September).
In the forefront of this campaign by all the forces of bourgeois democracy are the left wing parties, and the leftists who supported the Chilean MIR3 to the hilt by enrolling the workers behind the Allende clique and thus delivering them over to Pinochet’s butchers.4 Against this gigantic mystification that consists in presenting Allende as a pioneer of “socialism” in Latin America, revolutionaries have the responsibility to re-establish the truth about the reality of Chilean democracy. For the workers should never forget that Pinochet’s military junta only finished off the job of putting down workers’ struggles that had already been begun by the “popular” army of Allende’s “socialist” government.
We are reprinting below two leaflets produced by two of the groups that were later to form the ICC’s sections in Britain and France: the first was distributed by World Revolution at the big protest demonstrations that followed the coup. The second was distributed by Révolution Internationale shortly after the coup itself.
In Chile, as in the Middle East, capitalism shows once more that its crises are paid for in working class blood. As the junta butchers workers and anyone who opposes the naked rule of capital, the “left” of the whole world joins in a chorus of hysteria and mystification. Parliamentary resolutions, Cassandra-like squealings of Labour MPs, irate “I told you so” shrieks of the Trotskyists, mass demos – all these are carefully planned rehearsals of the official and not-so-official “left”. Their cohorts in Chile, the deposed Popular Unity government of Allende, prepared the massacre after physically and ideologically disarming the Chilean workers for three years. By considering the Allende coalition as “working class” or “socialist”, the whole “left” tries to hide or minimise Allende’s real role, and helps to perpetuate the myths created by state capitalism in Chile.
What was the Allende regime? Let the myth-makers of the “left” answer this question: Was it a “working class government”? But how can the working class “govern” the capitalist state, parliament, the army and the police? Is working class parliamentary or trade union support the criterion? But that is to say that almost all the bourgeois democracies are “working class” today. Was it a “socialist” regime? Only if you understand by that the policies of state capitalism. Was Allende’s coalition an expression of the organised might of the Chilean workers at the point of production, an expression of the self-activity of workers’ councils, factory and neighbourhood committees? Was Allende’s coalition a result of a huge wave of revolutionary working class activity not only in Chile but also in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, the US and the world? Was his coalition the class response of the workers to the deepening crisis of world capitalism in decadence? Was the whole thrust of his policies to abolish capitalist production, ie to abolish wage labour, commodity production and extend the revolutionary impetus towards the world arena? No? Of course not! A million times NO!
The whole policy of the Popular Unity was to strengthen capitalism in Chile. This large, state capitalist faction, based on the trade unions (which are everywhere capitalist organs today) and sectors of the petty bourgeoisie and technocracy was welded together 15 years ago by the Communist and Socialist Parties. Under the names of Workers’ Front, FRAP or Popular Unity, this faction wanted to make a backward Chilean economy competitive on the world market. Such a policy, envisaging a strong state sector, was capitalist pure and simple. To have oozed over it a bit of “nationalisation under workers’ control” would not have changed the basic capitalist relations of production, which remained untouched under Allende, and were reinforced to the hilt. At the point of production, in the public and private sectors, the workers still had to sweat for a boss, still had to sell their labour power. The vampire-lust of capitalist accumulation, exacerbated by the chronic underdevelopment of the Chilean economy and an intolerable foreign debt, had to be satisfied, especially in the mining sector (copper) from which the Chilean state apparatus obtained 83% of its foreign revenue. It is not an accident that the “left” began to call the copper workers “well-paid”, “highly-paid”, “a privileged group”, “an aristocracy of labour”, “an economist layer” etc, because it is this sector of the class which refused to go along with Allende’s mystifications. It is here that the “Battle for Production” of the PU foremen was utterly lost.
Once nationalised, the copper mines had to become profitable. From the beginning, the resistance of the miners helped destroy this capitalist plan. Instead of giving credence to the reactionary PU catch-phrase “voluntary work is revolutionary duty”, the Chilean industrial working class, especially the miners, kept on struggling for higher wages, and resisted speed-ups by absenteeism and walk-outs. It was the only way they could begin to catch up with the inflation of the previous years and the growing inflation under the new regime, which was up to 300% per annum on the eve of the coup.
Working class resistance to Allende began in 1970. In December 1970, 4,000 Chuquicamata miners struck, demanding higher wages. In July 1971, 10,000 coal miners struck at the Lota Schwager mine. New strikes at the mines of El Salvador, El Teniente, Chuquicamata, La Exotica and Rio Blanco spread at around the same time, demanding higher wages.
Early in 1971, the Chilean state copper corporation, Codelo, had predicted an output of copper of 840,000 metric tons for 1971. By May, because of many technical problems caused by nationalisation and the falling price of copper following the end of the Vietnam inter-imperialist war, the target was reduced to 625,000 metric tons. It is then that the strikes really deepened the crisis of Chilean capital.
Allende’s reaction was a typically capitalist one: to alternatively slander and cajole the workers. In November 1971 Castro came to Chile to reinforce Allende’s anti-working class policies. Castro thundered at the miners, and spoke against trouble-making “demagogues”; at the Chuquicamata mine he said that “a hundred tons less per day means a loss of $36 million a year”.
While copper is the main source of Chile’s foreign revenue, mining represents only 11% of the country’s GNP, and employs only 4% of the labour force, that is, around 60,000 copper miners. However, the numerical size of this sector of the class is quite out of proportion to the weight the miners have in the national economy. Small in numbers, but highly powerful and conscious of it, the miners forced the escalator clause for wages onto the state and inspired the wages offensive which spread through the Chilean working class in 1971. Journalists like Richard Gott side directly with state capital when they write: “The prolonged strike at El Teniente earlier this year was a contributory factor to the atmosphere that permitted Allende’s downfall”. And adds: “Any government that really wanted to do something for the poorest section of Chilean society would inevitably have looked unfavourably on the wage demands of such a privileged group as the copper miners” (The Guardian, 1.10.73). This same scribbler thinks that Allende the freemason was a “marxist”, while the rest of the capitalist press assents and tries to prove that the “Chilean road to socialism” was a variety of “socialism” which failed. The Stalinists and Trotskyists of course agree, with their Talmudic differences. To the latter, Allende’s capitalism deserved “critical support”. Anarchists weren’t left behind: “…the only way out for Allende would have been to appeal to the working class to seize power for themselves to forestall the inevitable coup” claims Libertarian Struggle (October 1973). Thus Allende was not only a “marxist” – he was also a failed Bakunin. But what is really laughable is to imagine that a capitalist government could ever “appeal” to the workers to destroy capitalism!
In May-June 1973, the miners began to move again. 10,000 struck at the El Teniente and Chuquicamata mines. The El Teniente miners asked for a 40% wage rise. Allende put the O’Higgins and Santiago provinces under military rule, because the paralysis at El Teniente “seriously threatened the economy”. “Marxist” managers, PU members, sacked workers and brought in strikebreakers and replacements. 500 carabineros attacked the workers with tear gas and water cannon. When 4,000 miners marched to Santiago to demonstrate on 14 June, the riot police savagely charged them. The government branded the workers as “agents of fascism”. The CP organised parades in Santiago against the miners, calling on the government to use a “firm hand”. The MIR group, an extra-parliamentary “loyal opposition” of Allende, criticised the use of force and advocated the use of persuasion. Allende appointed a new Minister of Mines in August 1973: General Ronaldo Gonzalez, the munitions director of the army. In the same month, Allende alerted army units in all of Chile’s 25 provinces. It was a move against the lorry owners’ strike, but also against some sectors of the workers who were striking, in public works and urban transport. Throughout the last months of Allende’s regime, generalised attacks and killings against workers and slum dwellers by the police, army and fascists became the order of the day. From within, the class had already been attacked, vilified and demoralised by the Trojan Horse of the capitalists, the PU. Organisationally, the PU had attempted to strait-jacket its whole electoral support into all kinds of hierarchical “popular committees”, such as the 20,000 or so which existed in 1970, People’s Supply Committees (JAPS) and finally, the much vaunted “cordones” which Trotskyists and anarchists are presenting now as types of “soviets” or “factory committees”. It is true that the cordones were in many cases the spontaneous creation of the workers, as were many factory occupations, but they ended up integrated within the ideology and organisational apparatus of the PU. As a Trotskyist paper itself admits, “by September 1973 such cordones had been formed in all the industrial suburbs of Santiago, and the political parties of the left were pushing for the creation of similar cordones throughout the country” (Red Weekly, 5.10.73). The cordones weren’t armed and had no independence from the whole network of PU trade unions, local committees, secret police, etc. Their independence would have been posed only if the workers had begun to organise themselves separately and against the Allende apparatus. That would have meant to open up the class struggle against the PU, the army and the rest of the bourgeoisie.
Allende’s government didn’t just attack the workers and peasants. As all capitalist governments, it also had in-fights with its own supporters. In 1970 a MIR member was killed by an armed commando group of the CP, the “Ramona Parra Brigade” in Concepcion. A terrorist guerrilla group, the VOP, was pulverised in 1971. Throughout 1972, the MIR itself was attacked as “provocateurs” by the CP. In April 1972, even a Trotskyist “leader”, Luis Vitale, was badly beaten by the police in Concepcion at a demo which was crushed with batons and tear gas. The governor, a CP Central Committee member called Vladimir Chavez, ordered such attacks. Police officers were also CP members, which is quite usual wherever there is a large CP machine. Searches for arms and fugitive guerrillas always led to scores of injured and sometimes deaths. The population was terrified into submission. In December 1971, Pinochet, one of Chile’s new dictators, was let loose on the streets of Santiago by Allende. The army imposed curfews, press censorship and arrests without warrants. In October 1972, the army – Allende’s dear “Popular Army” – was called into the cabinet. Allende knew by then that this coalition had proven useless to beat the working class into the ground. He had tried hard but failed. The job had to be continued by the army, without parliamentary niceties. But at least the PU had helped disarm the workers ideologically. That facilitated the tasks of the bloodhounds when 11 September came.
The working class stood on the sidelines during the coup. True, many militants fought back, but to defend their lives, not to bring back the wretched PU caretaker government. Those who fought back, heroically, were in the main PU supporters from the slum tenements, a sort of lumpen-proletariat – Gott’s “poorest” section of Chilean society. These militants, their dreams shattered, are suffering terribly. They were Allende’s cannon fodder, they were the support of the MIR, a support which succumbed to the populist and nationalist demagogy of the Chilean “left”. On the whole, the electoral basis of Allende was dwindling at the time of the coup. The workers in the mines and the large manufacturing concerns didn’t move. The battle wasn’t theirs. No general strike was called, and even if the statified Chilean TUC, the CUT, had called for one, probably nobody would have followed the suicidal appeal. Allende was right when he said that “our companeros were not prepared”.
The truth is that Allende came to power in 1970 to save bourgeois democracy in a crisis-ridden Chile. Having reinforced the state sector in a manner befitting the whole of the distorted Chilean economy, and having mystified parts of the working class with “socialist” phraseology (an impossibility for the two other bourgeois parties), his role came to an end. Exit the King. The logical end of his position, a fully state controlled capitalism, wasn’t possible because Chile remained in the sphere of influence of US imperialism, and had to trade with a hostile world market in which that imperialism was predominant.
The “left” here, and wherever there are liberals, humanists, quacks and technocrats, are all lamenting Allende’s downfall. They must encourage the lie of Allende’s “socialism” in an attempt to mystify the working class. Already in September, in Helsinki, social democrats of all stripes representing 50 nations got together in order to “oust” the Chilean junta. The obscene slogan of “anti-fascism” is again being raised to obscure the class struggle, to obscure the fact that the workers have nothing to gain by fighting and dying for any bourgeois or “democratic” (read imperialist, east or west) cause. The Judith Harts are already mouthing their “unity of the left” cries against the junta. Mitterand and the “Programme Commun de la Gauche” in France, and every bourgeois scoundrel and progressive parson has jumped on the “anti-fascist” bandwagon. Under the cover of “anti-fascism” and support for the PU, sections of the world ruling class are trying to mobilise workers for parliamentary carve-ups. Against this new “International Brigade” of the bourgeoisie, the working class can only show contempt and hostility.
The opportunists of the state capitalist “extreme left” are (most naturally) on this bandwagon just as the MIR was on Allende’s. But, oh this delicious “but” – they are “critically” on it. The real questions aren’t even posed in such quarters. It is not a question of “parliament versus armed struggle”, it is a question of capitalism versus communism, the bourgeoisie the world over against the workers the world over. We workers have only one programme: the abolition of frontiers, the abolition of the state and parliament, the elimination of wage labour and commodity production by the producers themselves, the liberation of world humanity initiated by the victory of the revolutionary workers’ councils. Any other programme is the programme of barbarism, the barbarism and dupery of the “Chilean way”
World Revolution 4th November 1973
The military scum are slaughtering the Chilean workers by the thousands. They are being hunted down, humiliated, and murdered, house by house, factory by factory. Order reigns. And the order of capital is BARBARISM.
Still more vile and disgusting is the fact that the workers have their backs to the wall, and that they are forced to fight, whether they want to or not, in a struggle where they are beaten in advance and without any perspective, without any possibility of believing that they are dying in the defence of their own interests.
The “left” is protesting at the massacre. But it is the Popular Unity government that called this criminal army to power. The “left” is carefully keeping quiet about the fact that only ten days ago they were in government hand in hand with these assassins described as the “People’s Army”. They were still saluting these criminals and torturers when they had ALREADY begun to arrest workers and carry out searches in the factories.
Let one thing be clear. In three years of left government the workers have ALWAYS been deceived, exploited, and suppressed. The “left” organised the exploitation. The “left” put down the strikes of the miners, the farm workers, and the hunger-stricken homeless in the slums. The “left” denounced the workers in struggle as “provocateurs” and called the military into the government.
The Popular Unity government has never been anything but a particular means of maintaining order by deceiving the workers. Faced with a world wide crisis, Chilean capital found itself in difficulty and had to settle things in its own way, first of all putting down the proletariat and crushing its ability to resist. To do so, it proceeded in two stages. First it mystified the workers, then it dragged them before the firing squad behind the banners of bourgeois “democracy”.
The left and the leftists are not satisfied with dragging the workers to the slaughter. Here in France, they even have the gall to use the corpses of Chilean workers to undertake a large scale DECEPTION: the blood is barely dry in Santiago, and already they are calling on the workers to demonstrate and to strike to defend “democracy” against the military. And in doing so, Marchais, Mitterand, Krivine & Co are preparing to play the SAME role here as Allende, the CP, and the leftist MIR in Chile. For in France, and throughout the world, as the crisis deepends the same problem will be posed for the bourgeoisie: how to break the proletariat.
By organising the “democratic” deception over Chile, the left today is preparing to take in hand the operation which will mean enrolling the workers under the banner of “nationalisations”, the “republic”, and similar swindles, in order to pin them down on a terrain which is not their own and deliver them up to repression. And by refusing to denounce the left for what it really is, the leftists also take their stand on the side of capital.
The crisis has hit sooner and harder in Chile than elsewhere. And even before the proletariat could engage ITS OWN struggle, all the forces of the left, the bourgeoisie’s Trojan horse amidst the working class, have undertaken to muzzle it, to prevent it appearing as an independent force on its own terrain, with its own programme, which is not some “democratic” or state capitalist reform, but the social revolution.
And all those, like the Trotskyists, who have given the slightest support to this castration of the working class, by supporting however critically the forces of the “left”, also bear responsibility for the massacre. The Trotskyists in France prove that they are on the same side of the barricades as the left wing of capital, since they debate with the latter as to the “tactical” and military means of taking power and reproach Allende for not having done a better job of enrolling the workers under his banner!
From France 1936 to Chile 1973, by way of the Spanish Civil War, Bolivia, and Argentina, the same lesson has been meted out to us over and over again.
The proletariat can make no alliance, enter no front with capital, even draped in the banner of “socialism” or “freedom”. Any force that contributes, however slightly, to tie the workers to a fraction of capital, is on the other side. Any force that encourages the slightest illusion in the left wing of capital is nothing but a link in the chain that leads to the slaughter of the workers.
There is only one “unity”: the unity of the workers of the world. There is only one guiding line: the total autonomy of the workers’ forces. There is only one banner: the destruction of the bourgeois state and the international extension of the revolution. There is only one programme: the abolition of wage slavery.
As for those who are tempted to let themselves be deceived by fine talk, the hollow speeches about the “republic”, the disgusting old songs of “Popular Unity” - then let them look the horror of Chile in the face.
As the crisis deepens, there is only one alternative: the resurgence of the revolution or the crushing of the proletariat!
Révolution Internationale,
18th September 1973
NOTES
1 The official figures are 3,000 dead. According to the associations for aid to the victims, there were at least 10,000 dead or missing.
2 We should note that the United States were not alone in supporting the “gorillas” of Latin America. The junta which seized power in Argentina shortly afterwards, and which was itself responsible for 30,000 deaths, cooperated actively with the Chilean government in the assassination of political opponents during “Operation Condor” , and received “technical” help from the French military who passed on their “expertise” in the struggle against “subversion” learned during the war in Algeria.
3 MIR: “Movement of the Revolutionary Left”
4 See our article in Révolution Internationale new series, n°5: “Le Chili révèle la nature profonde de la gauche et des gauchistes”.
For more than 2.5 years the bourgeoisie has been announcing a recovery which it has been forced to put off at every quarter. For more than 2.5 years economic performance has fallen systematically below forecasts, forcing the ruling class to revise these downwards. The present recession, beginning in the second half of the year 2000, is already one of the longest since the end of the 1960s. And, although there are some signs of recovery in the United States, this is still far from being the case in Europe or Japan. Moreover, any improvement in United States is essentially the product of some of the most vigorous state intervention in 40 years, and an unprecedented increase in debt, leading to fears that the new speculative bubble in the housing market is about to burst.
As regards state intervention aimed at maintaining economic activity, it should be noted that the American government has allowed an unrestrained increase in the budget deficit. From a positive balance of $130 billion in 2001, by 2003 the budget had fallen into deficit to the tune of $300 billion (3.6% of GNP). Today, the American business and political classes are increasingly alarmed by the size of the deficit and by the increases forecast as a result of the conflict in Iraqi and a reduction in tax returns as a result of the fall in income tax.
With regard to the debt, the Federal Reserve's drastic reduction in interest rates was intended above all to maintain household consumption thanks to the renegotiation of their mortgage loans. Reducing the load of housing loan repayments made it possible for the banks to grant new loans and so increase household debt. American households' mortgage debt has thus grown by $700 billion (more than twice the budget deficit!). The United States' ability to recover more rapidly than other countries is due to the triple growth of American debt: state, households, and foreign debt. However, this recovery will only last if sustained economic activity continues into the medium-term. Otherwise America runs the risk of finding itself in the same situation as Japan more than ten years ago, faced with the bursting of a speculative property bubble and an enormous increase in bad debt.
Europe can scarcely afford such luxury, since its deficits were already impressive when the recession began again, and the continued recession has only served to increase these deficits. Thus Germany and France, which represent the economic heart of Europe, but today are revealed as the worst students in the class, with budget deficits of the 3.8% and 4% respectively. These are already well beyond the 3% ceiling fixed by the Maastricht treaty, and, as a result France and Germany are both under threat of punishment by the European commission and the enormous fines provided for by the treaty. This reduces still further Europe's ability to undertake a serious policy of recovery. Moreover, any European recovery will have to carry the weight of the fall in the dollar against the Euro organised by the US to reduce its trade deficit: Europe will have more and more difficulty in maintaining its export surplus. It is hardly surprising that countries at the heart of Europe like Germany, France, Holland and Italy are in recession and that the others are not far behind.
Those who believed the bourgeoisie's talk about a new era of prosperity thanks to the opening of East European markets after the collapse of the Berlin Wall are having to think again. Far from providing a springboard for "German domination", reunification is still proving to be a heavy burden for Germany. Once the locomotive of Europe, Germany now has difficulty in keeping up with the train. Inflation is down almost to the point of deflation, high real interest rates are a dampener on economic activity, and the existence of the Euro makes it impossible to undertake a policy of competitive devaluation of the national currency. Unemployment, wage restrictions, and recession have all led to a stagnation of the domestic market never seen during previous downturns. The future integration of Eastern countries into the European Union will weigh still more heavily on the economic situation.
The uninterrupted decline in growth rates since the end of the 1960s (see our article "The reality of 'economic prosperity' laid bare by the crisis" in International Review n°114, and the graph below), reveals the immense bluff that the bourgeoisie has maintained throughout the 1990s about capitalism's supposed renewed economic prosperity thanks to the 'new' economy, globalisation, and the recipes of neo-liberalism. This is hardly surprising, since the crisis has nothing to do with economic policy: the exhaustion of the Keynesian policies of the 1950s and 60s, followed by the neo-Keynesian policies of the 1970s, and the inability of the neo-liberal recipes of the 1980s and 1990s to offer any kind of solution, are due to the fact that the world wide crisis is not the result of "bad economic management", but of the fundamental contradictions that pervade the whole mechanism of the capitalist economy. And if the crisis has nothing to do with economic policy, it has still less to do with the government of the day. Whether they be on the right or on the left, governments have gone the rounds of all the recipes available. We thus have the British and American governments applying the most neo-Keynesian policies imaginable, with run-away budget deficits, despite being at opposite ends of the political spectrum. Similarly, the austerity programmes of the Schröder government in Germany (social-democrat and ecologist), and of the Raffarin government in France (liberal right), are as alike as two peas in a pod.
One of the main responsibilities of revolutionaries, confronted with this 35-year uninterrupted spiral of crisis and austerity, is to demonstrate that its roots are to be found in the historical obsolescence of the wage labour that lies at the heart of capitalist relations of production.[1] [3] Wage labour concentrates within itself all the social, economic, and political limitations of the production of capitalist profit, and its very mechanisms set a barrier in the way of the latter's complete realisation.[2] [4] The generalisation of wage labour lay at the heart of capitalism's expansion in the 19th century, and, since World War I, has lain at the heart of the inadequacy of the solvent market relative to the needs of the process of accumulation.
Against all the false explanations for the crisis, it is up to revolutionaries to demonstrate that while capitalism was once a necessary and progressive mode of production, it is now historically redundant and is dragging humanity to its doom. As in the decadence of previous modes of production (feudalism, slavery, etc.), this historical obsolescence lies in the fact that the social relations of production have become too narrow to contain and encourage the development of the productive forces as they once did.[3] [5]In today's society, it is wage labour that is holding back the full satisfaction of human needs. Humanity will only be able to free itself from these contradictions by overthrowing this social relationship and creating communism.
Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the bourgeoisie has mounted endless campaigns on the "absurdity of communism", the "utopia of revolution", and the "dilution of the working class" in a formless mass of citizens whose only legitimate activity is supposedly the "democratic" reform of a capitalism presented henceforth as humanity's only horizon. Within this monstrous ideological swindle, the anti-globalisation movement has been accorded a monopoly on anti-establishment protest. The ruling class takes endless trouble to put them at the forefront of the criticism of its own system: their analyses and activity are widely reported in the media, their most eminent representatives are occasionally invited to summit meetings, etc. And with good reason, the stock in trade of the anti-globalisation movement perfectly complements the bourgeoisie's ideological campaign on the "utopia of communism", since both are grounded in the same hypothesis: that capitalism is the only possible system, and its reform the only alternative. According to this movement, with the organisation ATTAC and its council of "economic experts" at its head, capitalism could be humanised if only a "good regulated capitalism" could expel "bad financial capitalism". The crisis is supposedly the result of neo-liberal deregulation and the dictatorship of finance capital imposing its demand of 15% return on investment from industrial capital - all supposedly decided at an obscure 1979 meeting called "the Washington consensus". Austerity, financial instability, recession - all this is nothing but the result of a new balance of forces within the bourgeoisie itself, to the benefit of usurious capital. Whence the ideas of "regulating finance", "pushing it back", and "redirecting investment towards the productive sphere", etc.
In this atmosphere of general confusion as to the causes of the crisis, revolutionaries must establish a clear understanding of what are its origins, and above all demonstrate that it is the product of capitalism's historical bankruptcy. In other words, they must re-establish the validity of marxism in this domain. Sadly, when we look at the analyses of the crisis proposed by the groups of the proletarian political milieu (eg the PCInt - Programme Communiste, or the IBRP), we can only say that they have great difficulty in marking a clear separation with the ambient ideology of anti-globalisation, and of mounting a clear defence of marxism. Both groups are undoubtedly part of the proletarian camp, and set themselves fundamentally apart from the anti-globalisation crowd by the denunciation of reformist illusions and their defence of a revolutionary communist perspective. However, their own analysis of the crisis is to a large extent borrowed from the anti-globalists' defrocked leftism.
Some choice selections: "The profits gained from speculation are so great that they are attractive not only to 'classical' businesses but also for many others such as insurance companies or pension funds, of which Enron is an excellent example (...) Speculation is a complementary, not to say the principal, means whereby the bourgeoisie appropriates surplus-value (...) A rule has been imposed, fixing the minimum return on invested capital at 15%. To achieve or to outdo this rate of growth in share value, the bourgeoisie has had to increase the conditions of exploitation of the working class: the rhythm of labour has intensified, real wages have fallen. Collective redundancies have affected hundreds of thousands of workers" (Bilan et Perspectives n°4, p.6, our translation). We can start by pointing out that this is a strange way to pose the problem on the part of a group that proclaims itself "materialist" in contrast to the ICC's "idealism". "A rule has been imposed", says the IBRP. But how? By itself? We will not insult the IBRP by suggesting that they imagine any such thing. This new rule must have been imposed by a class, a government, a given human organisation, but why? Because certain powerful individuals have suddenly become greedier and nastier than usual? Because the "bad guys" have won out over the "good guys" (or the "less bad guys")? Or simply, as marxism would have it, because the objective conditions of the world economy have obliged the ruling class to intensify their exploitation of the workers. Unfortunately, the passage we have quoted does not pose the problem like this.
Worse still, we could read the same analysis in any anti-globalist pamphlet: financial speculation has become the main source of capitalist profit (!), financial speculation imposes its 15% rule on business, financial speculation is responsible for the increase in exploitation, massive lay-offs and falling wages, and it is even financial speculation that is the source of a process of de-industrialisation and of poverty all over the planet: "The accumulation of speculative and financial profit feeds a process of de-industrialisation that brings in its wake unemployment and poverty all over the planet" (idem, p.7).
The PCInt - Programme Communiste is scarcely any better, even if it does refer to the authority of Lenin, and couch its analysis in more general terms: "Thanks to the development of finance capital, the banks have become the real actors of capital's centralisation, increasing the power of gigantic monopolies. In capitalism's imperialist phase, it is finance capital that dominates the market, companies, indeed the whole of society, and this domination itself leads to further financial concentration to the point where 'Finance capital, concentrated in a few hands and exercising a virtual monopoly, exacts enormous and ever-increasing profits from the floating of companies, issue of stock, state loans, etc., strengthens the domination of the financial oligarchy and levies tribute upon the whole of society for the benefit of monopolists' (Lenin, in Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism[4] [6]). Capitalism was born from minuscule usurious capital, and ends its evolution in the form of gigantic usurious capital" (Programme Communiste, n°98, p1, our translation). This vigorous denunciation of parasitic finance capital could satisfy the most radical anti-globalist.[5] [7]
One would search in vain through these few extracts for any kind of demonstration that it is capitalism as a mode of production which is outmoded, that it is capitalism as a whole which is responsible for the world's crises, wars, and poverty. One would search in vain for any denunciation of the anti-globalists' central idea: that crises are caused by finance capital, when in fact it is the capitalist system as a whole which lies at the heart of the problem. By adopting whole segments of the anti-globalist argument, these two groups of the Communist Left leave the door wide open to a theoretical opportunism towards leftist analyses. These present the crisis as the consequence of a change in the balance of forces within the bourgeoisie, between the financial oligarchy and industrial capital. The moment when the financial oligopoly got the upper hand over business capital, is supposedly linked to the decision taken in Washington to suddenly raise interest rates.
There has not in reality been any "triumph of finance over industry", it is the whole bourgeoisie which has changed gear in its offensive against the working class.
The denunciation of the theme of finance capital is today a theme common to all the so-called "critical" economists. It is the fashion among the "critics of capitalism" to claim that the rate of profit has increased but that it has been confiscated by the financial oligarchy, and that as a result the industrial rate of profit has not significantly recovered. This is supposed to explain the failure of growth to recover (see the graph in this article, below). It is true that, since the decision to raise interest rates in 1979, a large part of extracted surplus value has not been accumulated via company self-financing, but has been distributed in the form of financial revenue. The typical response to this observation is to present the growth in finance capital as a drain on global profit, which thus hinders productive investment. The weakness of economic growth is thus explained by the parasitism of the financial sphere, by the hypertrophy of "usurious capital", whence the pseudo-marxist "explanations" based on Lenin's mistakes (such as the passage cited above from Programme Communiste) according to which financial profit is supposedly a "drain" on company profit (the famous 15% return on investment).
This analysis is a return to the vulgar economics of a capital choosing between productive or financial investment depending on the relation between the return on industrial investment and the return on finance capital. On a more theoretical level, these approaches to finance as a parasitic element demand a return to two theories of value and profit.
According to marxist theory, value exists prior to its redistribution and is produced solely in the production process through the exploitation of labour power. In Book III of Capital, Marx clearly states that interest is "The part of the profit paid to the owner is called interest, which is just another name, or special term, for a part of the profit given up by capital in the process of functioning to the owner of the capital, instead of putting it into its own pocket" (Capital, Vol III, Part V, Chapter 21, "Interest-Bearing Capital").[6] [8] In saying this, Marx radically sets himself apart from bourgeois economics, which presents profit as the sum of different factors of profit (revenue from the factor of labour, revenue from the factor of capital, revenue from the factor of rent, etc.). Exploitation disappears, since each factor is remunerated according to its own contribution to production: "For vulgar political economy, which seeks to represent capital as an independent source of value, of value creation, this form is naturally a veritable find, a form in which the source of profit is no longer discernible, and in which the result of the capitalist process of production - divorced from the process - acquires an independent existence" (Capital, Vol III, Part V, Chapter 24, "Externalisation of the relations of capital in the form of interest-bearing capital"). The fetishism of finance consists in the illusion that holding a part of capital (a share, a treasury bond, a debenture) will, in the true sense of the term, "produce" interest. Buying a share means buying the right to receive a fraction of the value created, but that does not in itself create value. It is labour, and only labour, that gives value to what is produced. Capital, property, shares, a savings account, or a stock of machines, produce nothing whatsoever by themselves. It is human beings who produce.[7] [9] Capital has a "return" in the same sense that the hunting hound "returns" with the game. It creates nothing, but it gives its owner the right to a share of what has been produced by whoever set the capital in motion. In this sense, capital is less an object than a social relation: a share of the fruit of the labour of the workers ends up in the hands of the owner of capital. The ideology of anti-globalisation turns things upside down by mixing up the extraction of surplus value with its distribution. The source of capitalist profit lies solely in the exploitation of labour, there is no such thing as speculative profits for the bourgeoisie as a whole (although this or that sector of the bourgeoisie may gain from speculation); the stock market does not create value.
The other theory, flirting with vulgar economy, conceives global profit as the sum of industrial profit on the one hand, and financial profit on the other. The rate of accumulation is supposedly low because finance profit is higher than industrial profit. This vision is directly inherited from the late and unlamented Stalinist parties, which spread a "popular" criticism of capitalism seen as the confiscation of "legitimate" profit by a parasitic oligarchy (the "200 families" in France, etc.). Here the idea is the same: it is based on a veritable fetishism of finance, which sees the stock market as a means of creating value in the same way as the exploitation of labour. This is the basis for the whole anti-globalist mystification of the Tobin tax, the regulation and humanisation of capital. Any theory which transforms a contradiction as effect (the increasing role of finance capital) into a contradiction as cause carries with it the risk of falling into a typically leftist vision: that there is a distinction between a "good" capitalism that invests and a "bad" capitalism that speculates. This leads to a vision of finance capital as a sort of parasitic growth on an otherwise healthy capitalist body. The crisis will not disappear, even after the abolition of the "gigantic usurious capital" so dear to Programme Communiste. In a sense, the idea of capitalism dominated by finance capital leads to an under-estimation of the depth of the crisis, since it implies that the crisis is the result of the parasitic role of finance capital demanding extravagant interest rates from companies, and therefore preventing them from undertaking productive investment. If this were indeed the root of the crisis, then its resolution would merely be a matter of "euthanasia for the rentiers" as Keynes put it.
This sliding into leftism at the analytical level leads to the presentation of various economic data with the aim of demonstrating this absolute domination by finance capital, and its enormous drain on the economy: "the major companies saw their investments oriented towards the supposedly more 'profitable' financial markets (...) This phenomenal market developed faster than production (...) As far as currency speculation is concerned, of the $1,300 billion that moved daily from one currency to another in 1996, at most 5-8% corresponded to payment for goods or services sold between countries (to which we should add non-speculative currency exchange operations). Of these $1,300 billion, 85% thus corresponded to purely speculative daily operations! These figures would need to be brought up to date, but we can bet that the figure has gone beyond 85%" (IBRP, Bilan et Perspectives, n°4, p.6). The figure is indeed higher now, and the sums exchanged are now in the region of $1,500 billion, or in other words almost the entire debt of the Third World... but these figures only frighten the ignorant for they are meaningless! In reality, this money is merely going round in circles and the faster it turns the higher the figures. We need only imagine a speculator converting 100 currency units every ½ hour; after 24 hours, the total transactions will amount to 4,800 units, and if he speculated every ¼ hour, then the total sum counted would double... but this sum is purely virtual since the speculator only actually possess the original 100 +5 or -10, depending on his talents as a speculator. This media presentation of the facts, adopted by the IBRP, unfortunately gives credit to the interpretation of the crisis as a product of the parasitic action of finance.
In reality, the growth in the financial sphere is to be explained by the increase in non-accumulated surplus-value. It is the crisis of over-production - and therefore the scarcity of fields for profitable accumulation - which engenders the payment of surplus-value in the form of finance revenue, rather than finance capital which opposes or substitutes itself for productive investment. The increasing role of finance capital corresponds to a growing proportion of surplus-value, which can no longer be profitably re-invested.[8] [10]The distribution of financial revenue is not automatically incompatible with accumulation based on company self-financing. When there is attractive profit to be drawn from economic activity, finance revenue is re-invested and participates in companies' accumulation. What needs explaining, is not that profit goes out in the form of the distribution of finance revenue, but that it doesn't come back to be productively reinvested in the economic cycle. If a significant part of these sums were reinvested, then this would be expressed in a rise in the rate of accumulation. And if this is not happening, it is because there is a crisis of over-production, and therefore a scarcity of possibilities for profitable accumulation.
Financial parasitism is a symptom of capitalism's difficulties, not a cause. The financial sphere is the crisis' showcase, for this is where stock market bubbles, currency collapses, and banking upheavals make their appearance. But these upheavals are the product of contradictions whose origins lie in the productive sphere.
What has happened over the last twenty years? Austerity and falling wages[9] [11] have allowed companies to re-establish their rate of profit, but these increased profits have not led to an increase in the rate of accumulated investment. Growth has therefore remained depressed (see the graph in this article). In short, the brake placed on wage costs has restricted markets, and fed financial revenue rather than the reinvestment of profit. But why is the level of reinvestment so low despite the fact that companies have re-established their profits? Why has accumulation not started up again despite a twenty-year increase in the rate of profit? Marx, followed by Rosa Luxemburg, have shown that the conditions of production (the extraction of surplus-value) are one thing, while the conditions for the realisation of this surplus labour crystallised in manufactured commodities are another. The surplus labour crystallised in production only becomes surplus-value in the form of liquidities that can serve for accumulation if the commodities produced have been sold on the market. It is this fundamental difference between the conditions of production and the conditions of realisation that allows us to understand why there is no automatic link between the rate of profit and growth.
The graph summarises very well capitalism's evolution since World War II. The exceptional phase of prosperity during the period of reconstruction saw all the basic variables of profit, accumulation, growth, and labour productivity either increase or fluctuate at high levels until the re-appearance of the open crisis at the turn of the 1960s-70s. The exhaustion of gains in productivity that began in the 1960s dragged all the other variables down together until the beginning of the 1980s. Since then, capitalism has been in an altogether unprecedented situation on the economic level, combining a high rate of profit with mediocre labour productivity, rates of accumulation, and therefore of growth. This separation, for more than 20 years, between the evolution of the rate of profit and that of the other variables, can only be explained in the framework of capitalism's decadence. The IBRP does not believe this, and considers that the concept of decadence should be confined to the dustbins of history: "What role then does the concept of decadence play on the terrain of the militant critique of political economy, in other words of a profound critique of the phenomena and dynamics of capitalism in the period in which we are living? None. (...) We will not be able to explain the mechanisms of the crisis, nor denounce the relationship between the crisis and the increasing influence of finance capital, or the relationship between the latter and the policies of the super-powers in their struggle for control of financial income and its sources, using the concept of decadence".[10] [12] The IBRP thus prefers to abandon the key concept of decadence on which its own positions are based[11] [13] and to replace them with concepts in vogue in the anti-globalist milieu, such as "financiarisation" (which we have translated as the "increasing influence of finance capital") and the "rent of finance capital" in order to "understand the crisis and the policies of the super-powers". They even end up declaring that "these concepts [decadence in particular] are foreign to the method and the arsenal of the critique of political economy" (idem).
Why is the framework of decadence so vital for understanding the crisis today? Because the uninterrupted decline in growth rates in the OECD countries since the end of the 1960s (respectively 5.2%, 3.5%, 2.8%, 2.6%, and 2.2% for the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and the years 2000-02) confirm capitalism's return to the historic tendency that began with World War I. The parenthesis of the exceptional period of growth (1950-75) is definitively closed.[12] [14] Like a broken spring returning to its position of rest after one last rebound, capitalism is inexorably returning to the growth rates of the period from 1914 to 1950. Contrary to the vociferous claims of our critics, the theory of the decadence of capitalism is not in the least a specific product of the period of stagnation in the 1930s.[13] [15] It lies at the very heart of historical materialism, the secret at last discovered of the succession in history of modes of production. As such, it gives us the framework for analysing the evolution of capitalism, and above all of the period since World War I. Its bearing is general, and valid for a whole historical era. It is absolutely not dependent on a particular period or economic conjuncture. Moreover, even if we include the exceptional phase of growth between 1950 and 1975, the two world wars, the depression of the 1930s, and more than 35 years of austerity and crisis until the present day, condemn capitalism out of hand: barely 35 years of "prosperity" (if we count large) against 55-60 years of war and/or economic crisis (and the worst is still to come!). The historical tendency for capitalism's obsolete relations of production to hold back the growth of the productive forces is the rule, the framework that allows us to understand the evolution of capitalism, including its exceptional phase of prosperity after World War II (we will return to this point in future articles). By contrast, it is the abandonment of the theory of decadence which is a pure product of the years of "prosperity", analogous to the way in which the reformists of the Second International allowed themselves to be deceived by capitalism's performance during the Belle Époque that preceded 1914.
Moreover, the graph demonstrates clearly that the mechanism at the basis of the increase in the rate of profit is neither an increase in labour productivity, nor a reduction in capital. It also allows us definitively to wring the neck of all the nonsense about the "new technical revolution". There are some university professors who are dazzled by computers to the point where they fall for the bourgeoisie's campaigns about the "new economy", and confuse the frequency of their computer's CPU with the productivity of labour: it is not because the Pentium 4 is 200 times faster than the first-generation processors that the office worker types 200 times faster on his keyboard, or increases his productivity by the same amount. The graph shows clearly enough that labour productivity has declined since the 1960s. And despite the restoration of profits, the rates of accumulation (investments which underpin possible gains in productivity) have not taken off. The "technological revolution" only exists in the campaigns of the ruling class and in the heads of those who swallow them. More seriously, the empirical observation that the increase in productivity (progress in technology and the organisation of labour) has been constantly slowing down since the 1960s, contradicts the media image of increasing technical change, a new industrial revolution supposedly borne on a wave of computing, telecommunications, the Internet, and multimedia. How are we to explain the strength of this mystification, which turns reality upside down in the heads of every one of us?
Firstly, we should remember that the increases in productivity were much more spectacular immediately following World War II than those which are presented today as a "new economy". The organisation of labour in three eight-hour shifts, the generalisation of production lines throughout industry, rapid progress in the development and extension of all kinds of transport (trucks, trains, aircraft, cars, ships), the replacement of coal by cheaper oil, the invention of plastics and their use to replace more expensive materials, the industrialisation of agriculture, the universal supply of electricity, natural gas, running water, radio and the telephone, the mechanisation of home life thanks to the development of household appliances, etc... all these are far more remarkable in terms of an increase in productivity than the recent developments in computing and telecommunications. And since the "Golden 60s", the increase in productivity has fallen continuously.
Furthermore, there is a constantly encouraged confusion between the appearance of new commodities for consumption and the progress of productivity. The tide of innovation, and the proliferation of the most extraordinary new consumer products (DVD, GSM phones, the Internet, etc.) is not the same thing as an increase in productivity. An increase in productivity means the ability to reduce the resources needed to produce a commodity or a service. The term "technical progress" should always be understood as progress in the "techniques of production and/or organisation", strictly from the standpoint of the ability to economise the resources used in the production of a commodity or the supply of a service. No matter how extraordinary, the progress of digital technology is not expressed in significant increases in productivity within the productive process. This is the bluff of the "new economy".
Finally - and despite the assertions of our critics, who deny the reality of capitalism's decadence and the validity of Rosa Luxemburg's theoretical work, and who make the fall in the rate of profit the alpha and omega of capitalism's evolution - the history of the economy since the beginning of the 1980s shows us clearly that it is not because profit rates increase that growth starts up again. Certainly, there is a link between the rate of profit and the rate of accumulation, but it is neither mechanical nor unambiguous: the two variables are partially independent. This contradicts those who make the crisis of overproduction dependent on the fall in the rate of profit, and the return to growth on its renewed rise: "This contradiction between the production of surplus value and its realisation appears as an overproduction of commodities and therefore as a cause of the saturation of the market, which in turn holds back the process of accumulation, which makes the system as a whole unable to counter-balance the fall in the rate of profit. In reality, the process is the opposite (...) It is the economic cycle and the process of valorisation which makes the market 'solvent' or 'insolvent'. It is on the basis of the contradictory laws which control the process of accumulation that we can explain the 'crisis' of the market" (Battaglia Comunista's presentation to the first conference of groups of the Communist Left, May 1977, our translation). Today, we can see clearly that the rate of profit has been rising for some twenty years despite the fact that growth remains depressed and the bourgeoisie has never spoken of deflation as much as it does today. It is not because capitalism can produce profitably that it is also able to create automatically, by the same mechanism, the solvent market where it will be possible to transform the surplus labour crystallised in commodities, into hard cash which alone allows the profit to be reinvested. The extent of the market does not depend automatically on the evolution of the rate of profit; like the other variables that condition capitalism's evolution, it is partially independent. Understanding this fundamental difference, between the conditions of production and those of realisation, already highlighted by the theoretical work of Marx as it was continued by Rosa Luxemburg, allows us to understand why there is no automatic relationship between growth and the rate of profit.
Because they reject decadence as the framework for understanding the present period and the crisis, point to financial speculation as the cause of the world's misfortunes and under-estimate the development of state capitalism on every level, the two most important groups of the communist left apart from the ICC - the PCInt - Programme Communiste and the IBRP - can offer no coherent orientation for the resistance struggles of the working class. We need only read their analyses of the bourgeoisie?s austerity policies and the conclusions they draw from their analysis of the crisis to see this: "During the 1950s, the capitalist economies returned to growth and the bourgeoisie at last saw profits flourish durably. This expansion, which continued during the decade that followed, was thus based on a growth in credit and was possible thanks to the support of the state. It undeniably found expression in an improvement in the workers' living conditions (social security, collective bargaining, rising wages...). These concessions by the bourgeoisie, under pressure from the working class, were expressed in a fall in the rate of profit, which is itself an inevitable phenomenon linked to the internal dynamic of capital (...) While at the beginning of the imperialist stage, the profits gained thanks to the exploitation of the colonies and of their peoples allowed the dominant bourgeoisies to guarantee a certain social peace by allowing the working class to benefit from a fraction of the extorted surplus value, the same is no longer true today, since the logic of speculation implies a calling into question of all the social gains won by the workers of the 'central countries' during the previous decades from their bourgeoisie" (IBRP, Bilan et Perspectives, n°4, our translation).
Here again, we can see that abandoning the framework of decadence opens wide the door to concessions to leftist analyses. The IBRP prefers to copy the leftists' fairy-tales about the social gains of "social security, collective bargaining, rising wages" which were supposedly "concessions by the bourgeoisie, under pressure from the working class", and which today are called into question by the "logic of speculation", rather than basing itself on the theoretical contributions inherited from the groups of the international communist left (Bilan, Communisme, etc.), who analysed these measures as the means whereby the bourgeoisie made the working class dependent on, and attached it to, the state.
During capitalism's ascendant phase, the development of the productive forces and of the proletariat was not adequate to threaten the bourgeoisie and to make a victorious international revolution a possibility. This is why, even though the bourgeoisie did everything it could to sabotage the proletariat's organisation, the workers were nonetheless able, in bitter struggle, to combine in a "class for itself" within capitalism, through their own organisations: the working class' political parties, and the trades unions. The unification of the proletariat was achieved through struggles to wrest reforms from capital in the form of improvements in working class living conditions: reforms on both the economic and the political terrain. As a class, the proletariat won the right to a political life within society, or to use Marx's terms in The poverty of philosophy: the working class won the right to exist and to assert itself in social life as a 'class for itself', in other words as an organised class with its own meeting places, its own ideas, and its own social programme, its traditions and even its songs.
With capitalism's entry into its decadent phase in 1914, the working class demonstrated its ability to overthrow the bourgeoisie's domination by forcing the latter to bring the war to an end and by developing and international wave of revolutionary struggle. Ever since, the proletariat has been a permanent potential threat for the bourgeoisie. This is why the bourgeoisie can no longer tolerate its class enemy being able to organise permanently on its own class terrain, being able to live and grow within its own organisations. The state extends its totalitarian domination over every aspect of social life. Everything is in the grip of its omnipresent tentacles. Everything that lives in society must either submit unconditionally to the state, or confront it in a fight to the death. The time when capital could tolerate the existence of permanent organisations of the proletariat is over. In the same way, "Since World War I, in parallel with the role of the state in the economy, the laws that regulate the relationship between capital and labour have proliferated, creating a strict framework of 'legality' within which the proletarian struggle is circumscribed and reduced to impotence" (ICC pamphlet The unions against the working class). This state capitalism on the social level means the transformation of all class life into an ersatz on bourgeois terrain. Whether through the trades unions in some countries, or directly in others, the state has laid hands on all the different strike funds or funds for mutual assistance in case of sickness or unemployment, created by the working class during the 19th century. The bourgeoisie has deprived the proletariat of its political solidarity, to transform it into economic solidarity in the hands of the state. By dividing wages into a part paid directly by the employer, and another part paid indirectly by the state, the bourgeoisie has greatly reinforced the mystification that the state is an organ standing above classes, a guarantee of the common interest and of the working class' social security. The bourgeoisie has succeeded in tying the working class materially and ideologically to the state. This was how the Italian and Belgian Fractions of the international communist left analysed the unemployment and mutual aid funds set up by the state during the 1930s.[14] [16]
What has the IBRP to say to the working class? First and foremost, that the "logic of speculation" is responsible for "calling into question of all the social gains"... and here we are back again to the absolute evil of "financiarisation"! In passing, the IBRP forgets that the crisis and the attacks on the working class did not wait for the appearance of the "logic of speculation" to rain down on the proletariat. Does the IBRP really believe, as its prose suggests, that all will be rosy for the working class if only the "logic of speculation" were eradicated? On the contrary, this leftist mystification that the struggle against austerity depends on the struggle against the "logic of speculation" should be fought as vigorously as possible!
Worse still, it is a gross mystification to lead the proletariat to the belief that social security, collective bargaining, or even the automatic sliding scale of wages indexed to inflation, are "gains won by the workers" in struggle. Certainly, the reduction of the working day, the outlawing of child labour, or of night work for women, were really concessions won by the workers' struggles during capitalism's ascendant phase. By contrast, the so-called "social gains" like social security, or the collective bargaining enshrined in the "Social Pacts for Reconstruction" have nothing to do with the struggle of the working class. It was not the working class exhausted by war, drunk with nationalism, in the euphoria of the Liberation, which won these "gains" thanks to its "struggle". The "Social Pacts for Reconstruction" were worked out by the governments in exile as they prepared to set up measures of state capitalism. It was the bourgeoisie which took the initiative, during 1943-45 and in the midst of the war, of bringing together all the "live forces of the nation" and the "social partners", through tripartite meetings of representatives of the employers, of the government, and of the different parties and trades unions, in other words in the perfect national harmony of the resistance, to plan the reconstruction of its devastated economies, and to negotiate the socially difficult phase of reconstruction. There were no "concessions by the bourgeoisie, under pressure from the working class", in the sense of a bourgeoisie forced to accept a compromise faced with a working class mobilised on its own terrain and developing a strategy that broke with capitalism; these were the means adopted by the collusion of all the different components of the bourgeoisie (employers, trades unions, government) to ensure the social control over the working class during the reconstruction period.[15] [17] We should also remember that after the war, it was the bourgeoisie itself that created from nothing trades unions like the CFTC in France or the CSC in Belgium.
Obviously, revolutionaries denounce any reduction in either direct or indirect wages. Obviously, they denounce the attacks on living conditions when the bourgeoisie reduces the coverage of social security. But they will never defend the principle of the mechanism that the bourgeoisie has set up to tie the working class to the state.[16] [18] On the contrary, revolutionaries must denounce all the ideological and material logic that underpins these mechanisms, such as the supposed "neutrality" of the state, or of the social security organised by the state.
There is much at stake in the general aggravation of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, and in the difficulties that the working class has in rising to the situation. It is up to revolutionaries to respond adequately to the new questions that history poses, and they need to deepen their analyses to do so. But this deeper analysis cannot be founded on the adulterated garbage produced by the extreme left fractions of the bourgeoisie's political apparatus. Only by taking their stand on marxism, and on the gains of the communist left, especially on the analysis of the decadence of capitalism, will revolutionaries be able to live up to their responsibilities.
C. Mcl
1 [19] Since as Marx says, "Capital therefore presupposes wage-labour; wage-labour presupposes capital. They condition each other; each brings the other into existence" (Wage labour and capital [20]).
2 [21] We cannot, in the framework of this article, go back over what Marx and marxist theoreticians have had to say about the contradictions engendered by capitalist society, in other words by the transformation of labour power into a commodity. For more detail on what marxists have had to say on the subject, we refer our readers to our pamphlet The decadence of capitalism and to our articles in the International Review.
3 [22] "At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is but a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters" (Preface to Introduction to the critique of political economy [23]).
5 [26] Unfortunately, Lenin is not much help here since his study on imperialism, however decisive it may be on certain aspects of capitalism?s evolution and the stakes at play for imperialism at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, accords far to much importance to the role of finance capital and ignores the far more fundamental process of the development of state capitalism (see the International Review n°19 "On imperialism" and Révolution Internationale n°3 and 4 "Capitalisme d'Etat et loi de la valeur"). Contrary to the analyses of Lenin and Hilferding, state capitalism drastically restricted the power of finance capital after the crisis of 1929, before restoring a certain freedom to it during and after the 1980s. The decisive point here is that it is the nation states which ordered the movement and not some international phantom of financial oligarchy imposing its diktat one evening in Washington in 1979.
6 [27] "Interest, as we have seen in the two preceding chapters, appears originally, is originally, and remains in fact merely a portion of the profit, i.e., of the surplus-value, which the functioning capitalist, industrialist or merchant has to pay to the owner and lender of money-capital whenever he uses loaned capital instead of his own" (Capital, Vol III, Part V, Chapter 23, "Interest and Profit of Enterprise" [28]).
7 [29] To grasp this point, we need only imagine two "catastrophic" scenarios: in one all the machines are destroyed and only human beings remain, in the other the human beings are destroyed and only machines remain!
8 [30] Moreover, the fact that rates of company refinancing have been higher than 100% for some time destroys this thesis, since it means that companies do not need finance capital to finance their investments.
9 [31] In Europe, wages as a share of added value have fallen from 76% to 68% between 1980 and 1998, and since wage inequalities have grown considerably during the same period, this means that the reduction in workers? average wage is still greater than at first sight appears from this statistic.
10 [32]IBRP, "Eléments de réflexion sur les crises du CCI", our translation.
11 [33]Let us just quote, from the text presented by Battaglia Comunista to the first conference of the groups of the Communist Left in 1977, this paragraph entitled "Crisis and decadence": "When this begins to appear, the capitalist system has ceased to be a progressive system, in other words necessary to the development of the productive forces, to enter into a phase of decadence characterised by attempts to resolve its own insoluble contradictions, adopting new organisational forms from the productive point of view (...) In fact, the state's increasing intervention in the economy should be considered as the sign of the impossibility of resolving the contradictions that are accumulating within the relations of production and is therefore the sign of capitalism's decadence".
12 [34] We refer the reader to the report on the economic crisis of our 15th International Congress, published in the previous issue of this Review. Without in the least calling into question the exceptional nature of the period 1950-75, this report demystifies the calculation of growth rates during the period of decadence in general, and especially since World War II which have been substantially over-estimated.
13 [35] A few quotes:
14 [36] See "Une autre victoire du capitalisme: l'assurance chômage obligatoire" in Communisme n°15, June 1938, also "Les syndicats ouvriers et l'Etat" in n°5 of the same review.
15 [37] There were indeed social struggles during the war, and even more during the immediate post-war period in view of the appalling living conditions of the time. But, apart from a few notable exceptions such as in Italy or in the Ruhr valley, they presented no real threat to capitalism. These struggles were all thoroughly controlled, and often broken, by the left parties and the trades unions, in the name of the national concord necessary for reconstruction.
16 [38] It is absolutely incredible that the IBRP should include in the category of "social gains" the "collective bargaining agreements" which are - it is blindingly obvious - the codification and the imposition of social peace in the workplace by the bourgeoisie.
Although the working class conquered power in Russia in October 1917, it took revolutionaries in Japan a long time to establish direct contact with the centre of the revolution and the international movement. There is no evidence of contacts between Japanese and Russian revolutionaries in 1917 and 1918. At the founding congress of the Communist International in March 1919 there was no delegation from Japan. Although S. Katayama – coming from the USA – was to be a delegate for Tokyo and Yokohoma, he could not attend the congress either. And, although in November 1918 and 1919 the first and second congresses of “Communist Organisations of the East” were held in Moscow, where delegates from Japan were invited, nobody from Japan attended them. At the Baku Conference in September 1920 a Japanese participant came from the USA. He was a member of the IWW, but had no mandate from any organisation in Japan and had come of his own accord.
The reason for the prolonged isolation of revolutionaries in Japan from the rest of the world can be partly explained by the fact that the overland connections between Russia and Japan were largely interrupted because of the civil war, since the Japanese army – as one of the most ruthless opponents of the workers revolution – fought until 1922 in Siberia. But the political weaknesses of the revolutionaries themselves was the main explanation. There was no group among them that acted as the driving force for the construction of an organisation and for its integration into the international revolutionary movement. There was no reference point for the Comintern, which was looking intensively for contact in Japan.
The absence of a faction that would have laid the basis for a new organisation turned out to be a big weakness. The preparatory work, which a faction accomplishes for the construction of the party, is itself a result of a long process of maturation and of a hard combat for a Marxist understanding of the organisation question. It was after the movement had reached its height and was going into a retreat that the Comintern made desperate and opportunistic attempts to contribute to the setting up of an organisation.
After the Comintern opened the Far East Secretariat in Shanghai in 1920, where revolutionaries from Korea and China were active, contact was established in October 1920 with the Japanese anarchist Osugi. He received a fund of 2,000 Yen from the Comintern Far East Secretariat, because he committed himself, vis-a-vis the Comintern delegates, to set up an organisation in Japan.
But what programmatic and organisational credibility did an anarchist have for the construction of a communist party? Osugi himself demanded autonomy for each “national section” and only agreed to the foundation of an international co- ordination office. Moreover, he had no mandate from any group. When he returned from Shanghai, Osugi founded the paper Rodo Undo (Labour Movement). The other, still dispersed, revolutionaries showed no great determination at the turn of 1920/1921 to found an organisation. Osugi, who remained faithful to his anarchist principles, when following developments in Russia called for the overthrow of the government after the events at Kronstadt in 1921. The Comintern then refused any further contact with him. Efforts to set up an organisation with Osugi had failed.
In Japan itself Yamakawa, Sakai and Arahata made more efforts to regroup forces from the end of 1920 on. In August 1920 the August League (Hachigatsu Domei) was founded, which in December 1920 became the Japanese Socialist League (Nihon Shakai-shugi Domei). Different currents of different theoretical-programmatic backgrounds had merged. Some 1,000 members had joined. The official newspaper was Socialism (Shakaishugi).
From the very beginning the police wanted to repress the organisation. Between August and November 1920 6 preparatory meetings were broken up by the police, and on December 9th 1920, the scheduled founding conference in Tokyo was also broken up by the police. The attempt to set up an organisation failed because of strong police pressure. Thus dispersal and fragmentation prevailed and the process of clarification and regroupment could not make a breakthrough. Instead the different groupings continued to publish different papers – such as Studies in Socialism – edited by Sakai and Yamakawa, Japan Labour News by Arahata, and Labour Movement by Osugi. In May 1921 the Socialist League was officially forbidden.
The Socialist League which should have played the role of a pole of regroupment, was unable to establish a clear demarcation, to bring about a selection through clarification, or to lay the foundations for a revolutionary organisation. Instead the trend of different personalities, each of whom was regrouping elements around them and each of whom was publishing a paper, continued to dominate.
After the fiasco of contact with Osugi the delegates of the Shanghai office of the Comintern suggested to Yamakaw in April
1921 that he start preparations for the foundation of a party. Until then Yamakawa and Sakai, who was very close to him, had an attentist attitude. But now, Yamakawa, Kondo and Sakai started to work on a platform and they elaborated the statutes of a “communist preparation committee”. But even in spring 1921 these comrades still did not have the intention of setting up a communist party at that time. The concept of a communist organisation as an organisation of combat, which would have to play a vanguard role in the revolutionary struggle, had not yet been anchored sufficiently. The emphasis was still on the spreading of ideas and communist propaganda only. However, these comrades were willing to intensify contact with the Comintern.
Kondo was sent to Shanghai in May 1921 in order to plan further steps with the Comintern. Kondo, whose political development had been influenced by the IWW while in the USA, and who had previously worked on Osugi’s paper Labour movement ( Rodo Undo), exaggerated the progress that had been made when he spoke to the delegates of the Comintern, because in reality very little progress had been made in the setting up of an organisation. Impressed by Kondo, the delegates promised financial help. Kondo returned with funds worth 6,500 Yen but failed to use the money for the construction of an organisation.1
Upon his return to Tokyo contrary to agreements with the Comintern, Kondo founded his own group Gyomin Kysanto (Enlightened People’s Communist Party), and became its chairman in August 1921. Yakamawa and Sakai rejected his proposal to shape the Communist Propaganda Group into a party, since they still had not digested the setback of the dissolution of the Socialist Party in May 1921. After a police raid in December 1921 Kondo’s group was outlawed and dissolved. A delegate of the Comintern, Grey, who was arrested at the same moment, was also carrying funds of the Comintern with him and a list of contacts. Both fell into the hands of the police.
At the time of the 3rd Congress of the Comintern in summer 1921, there was still no delegate from Japan. The only Japanese comrades present came from the USA (Gentaro was a member of the Japanese Socialist Group and Unzo was a member of the IWW). As a consequence revolutionaries in Japan were once again cut off from the central debate in Moscow around the course and the methods of the Comintern. At this congress the delegates of the currents which later became known as the Communist Left fought against the growing opportunist trend of the Comintern.
In the meantime, the Comintern itself had set up some committees with Radek as their co-ordinator with Japan. They decided on a campaign for the introduction of general voting rights. This occurred even though the 1st Congress of the Comintern had denounced in 1919 the dangerous role of bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism, and at the 2nd and 3rd Congresses the comrades of the Italian and Dutch-German Left warned against the attempts to try and use parliamentarism.
At the 3rd World Congress Taguchi Unzo, a member of the IWW, also opposed this campaign.
In autumn 1921 the Comintern called for a Conference of Far Eastern Peoples, which was planned as a direct counter- conference to the summit of the imperialist powers in Washington in Nov 1921, where the latter planned to carve up their zones of influence in the Far East.
Different groups from Japan were invited to attend the Far Eastern Conference. Both the group around Yamakawa as well as Kondo‘s Enlightened People’s Communist Party sent delegates, two anarchists and more individuals joined the delegates from Japan. At the Conference, which finally started in January 1922 in Petrograd, Takase, who spoke on behalf Kondo’s Enlightened People’s Communist Party, claimed a communist party had already been formed. Obviously this was a bluff. Impressed by the congress the anarchist Yoshida announced he had been “converted” to communism; but on his way back to Japan he took up anarchist positions again.
At the conference Bukharin demanded that the next phase of workers‘ struggles should focus around the construction of an entirely democratic regime, instead of aiming immediately at the setting up of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Moreover, the main goal should be to abolish the imperial system. In January 1922 Zinoviev still spoke of Japan as an imperialist power; but only a few months later, when the Communist Party of Japan was going to be founded, Japan was no longer considered an imperialist country.
Despite the efforts of the revolutionary forces gathered in Petrograd in January 1922, revolutionaries in Japan continued to remain dispersed.2
Difficulties in making any decisive progress in the construction of an organisation were compounded by the year-long isolation and the insufficient efforts to establish links beyond Japan. The Comintern hardly knew the different components of the revolutionary milieu in Japan, let alone the more serious ones. The underestimation of the organisation question amongst the most serious elements, their lack of initiative in establishong contact, although in the most difficult circumstances, also account for the failures of the Comintern.
If the Comintern put its confidence in the anarchist Osugi and the very individualistic and unpredictable Kondo this was because the most serious elements in Japan had not yet grasped the need to take up contact directly with the Comintern. They themselves left this step to the anarchist and least serious elements.
Even if the Comintern tried to offer all sorts of possible help to revolutionary forces in Japan, the indispensable conviction of comrades in the country itself cannot be replaced. The responsibility of revolutionaries towards their class is never a “national” one, limited to the geographical area revolutionaries live in, but must be based on an international and long-term approach.
Thus it was all the more tragic that the critical attempts to draw the lessons of decadence in relation to the question of parliamentarism were unkown because revolutionaries in Japan had no contact with the forces of the Communist Left, which were emerging at the same time. The consequences of these difficulties in overcoming their isolation contributed to their political and programmatic confusion.
When the revolutionary wave in Japan entered into reflux in 1920, the working class in Japan had fought without any real intervention by revolutionaries at its side. Thus the wave of struggles ebbed, without a real faction, not to mention a party, having arisen. When the Comintern had already embarked upon an opportunistic course, the Comintern managed to regroup revolutionaries in Japan, who wanted to participate in the construction of a party.
This is why the foundation of the Japanese Communist Party on July 15th 1922 took place at an inauspicious time, that is under the influence of growing opportunism.
The party was a regroupment of leaders and members of different groups, who had little organisational experience and without a real Marxist wing – in particular there was no Marxist wing on the organisation question. Old revolutionaries, inspired by the Comintern, joined, such as Sakai Yamakawa, Arahata, and with them the groups they had headed until then, such as Yamakawa’s Wednesday Society Group and the publication Vanguard, the circle around Sakai’s The Proletariat, the Enlightened People’s Communist Party Group, members of Sodomei (the League of Japanese Trades Unions, formed in 1921). In 1923 there were some 50 members. But the very concept of membership was a problem, since individual members did not belong to the party but to one of the groups that comprised the party. Moreover, there was no platform and no statutes. No central leadership was elected. The party members were active above all in their former groups, with the groups around Yamakawa and Sakai having the greatest number of members.
Instead of working towards the construction of a single united body, party life was going to be fragmented and influenced very strongly by these groupings and the weight of the former leading personalities.
Since programmatic clarification had not advanced sufficiently, no programme had actually been elaborated.
Moreover, the party did not have a press and because of illegality it did not issue any public statements. Instead individual members took position in different political publications. It was only in April 1923 that three papers – Vanguard, The Proletariat, Studies in Socialism, merged into one – Red Flag – (Sekki), which was to act as a party organ.
At the same time the party aimed at becoming a mass party. Following the orientations of the Comintern, Yamakawa called for the formation of a mass party. This mass party was to encompass all “organised and unorganised workers, peasants and lower strata of the middle classes and all anti-capitalist movements and organisations”. The CPJ thus took up the orientation that the Comintern had opted for, but which was an expression of opportunism. The period of mass parties was over – as was most explicitly analysed by the German KAPD at the time.
In November 1922 a programme on Japan was drafted by a commission of the Comintern, with Bukharin at its head. While the draft dealt with the fast economic development of Japan during World War I, it emphasised above all that “Japanese capitalism today still shows residues of feudal relationships of the past. The biggest left over is the emperor (mikado) as the head of government... The residues of feudalism also play a dominant role in the entire structure of the present-day State. The organs of the State are still in the hands of a block, which is composed of different parts of the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and big landlords. The special semi-feudal nature of the State is above all illustrated through the outstanding leading role of genro (nobility – feudal landlords) in the constitution. On this background, forces who are directed against the State, arise not only from the working class, the peasantry and petty-bourgeoisie, but they also emerge from the broad layers of the so-called liberal bourgeoisie – whose interests are also opposed to those of the present government... The completion of the bourgeois revolution may became the prologue /prelude of the proletarian revolution, aiming at the domination of the bourgeoisie and the setting up of proletarian dictatorship... The struggle between feudal lords and the bourgeoisie will certainly take on a revolutionary character.” (Houston, p. 60).
Whereas at its founding congress the Communist International in its manifesto put proletarian revolution on the agenda everywhere, the degenerating Comintern started in 1922 to ascribe different historical tasks to the proletariat according to the different parts of the world.
Placing Japan, China and India on the same level, since there was still a higher proportion of peasants in Japan and above all because there was still an emperor and feudal remnants, the Comintern proposed that the working class in Japan should set up an alliance with bourgeois groups. The Comintern and also the CPJ underestimated the real development of state capitalism that had already occurred in Japan.
While the emperor still played a role as a political representative, this did not change anything about the class composition of Japanese society and it did not alter the world historical tasks that the working class was facing.
Private industry was certainly less developed in Japan than in other industrial countries. This was due to the way capitalism unfolded in Japan. But ever since the expansion of the capitalist mode of production, - this specificity of Japanese capital - the relatively weak proportion of private in relation to state owned capital was “compensated” by the early rapid growth of the State. From a very early stage the State played a very active and interventionist role to defend Japanese national interests. Behind this position of the CPJ and the Comintern there was a serious underestimation of the level of state capitalism which had taken on much bigger proportions and which was to some extent more developed in Japan than in most western countries.
Even if, due to the weak development of the private capitalist sector during the ascendant phase there were not as many bourgeois parties as in Europe, and if on the whole parliamentarism had less weight and influence than in other countries this did not mean that the working class in Japan was facing different historic tasks and would have to fight for bourgeois democratic parliamentarism.
This orientation of the CPJ came up against resistance within its ranks. Thus Yamakawa said that although there was no bourgeois democracy in Japan, it was nevertheless ruled by bureaucratic and military cliques. But unlike the Comintern, he said, there was no need of catching up a bourgeois revolution. He took a position against mobilisation for parliamentarism.
The theses were discussed at a party conference on March 15th 1923, but no decisions were taken. Sano Manabu suggested an alternative platform, with the main idea that proletarian revolution was also on the agenda in Japan. There were also divergences regarding the demand for general voting rights. The same Sano Manabu rejected participation in parliament. Yamakawa also spoke up against participation in elections.
Since Left Communist voices from Europe could not be heard in Japan, which might have helped to deepen the framework of this critique, it could not be developed and based on a more profound programmatic base.
Since the wave of revolutionary struggles was already on the decline, both internationally and in Japan, the CP was spared the test of intervention in the heat of the struggles. Considering its limited organisational experience, its politically confused and opportunistic positions, it can be assumed that the party would have had great difficulties to act as an organisation of combat and to play a vanguard role.
The strategy of the Japanese bourgeoisie was that of any other ruling class: the use of repression and infiltration of the CPJ. On June 5th 1923 the party was forbidden, some 100-200 members were arrested and all party members known to the police were thrown into prison.
In March 1924 the party was finally dissolved. Arahata opposed its dissolution, defending the need to fight for its existence. Yamakawa and Sakai backed up its dissolution, saying that an illegal vanguard party was no longer necessary or desirable. According to Yamakawa such a party would be alienated from the workers and could only fall victim to bourgeois repression. Revolutionary Marxists should join mass organisations such as unions and peasants organisations and prepare a legal proletarian party of the future. Thus the first CP, which was never a solid body but rather a regroupment of different personalities, having no organisational tissue and working without a party spirit, was never able to accomplish its tasks.
After the worldwide reflux of struggles, revolutionaries were facing the same task. Whereas the degenerating Comintern put forward the slogan of the construction of mass parties and the policy of the united front, thus further increasing the confusion amongst the increasingly tired and disoriented workers, revolutionaries were in fact faced with the task of pursuing the work of a faction.
However, once again revolutionaries in Japan were to face great difficulties in fulfilling this task. No fraction emerged from its ranks fighting against the degeneration of the Comintern and laying the basis for a future party.
The bourgeoisie used the international balance of forces, which was bending in its favour, in order to increase its attacks against the working class in Japan.
Whereas the working class during World War I and in the ensuing revolutionary wave had not been very radicalised and only took part in a peripheral manner in these struggles, the working class was to be hard hit during the 1920s by rising counterrevolution. After the banning of the party in 1923, the government seized the opportunity of the effects of the devastating earthquake which shook Tokyo on September 1st 1923, when more than 100,000 people were killed and large parts of the city were destroyed, to increase repression against the working class. A special “thought police” (Tokko) was established. In the following years there were repeated mass arrests of workers: 1928: 4,000; 1929: 5,000; 1932: 14,000; 1933: 14,000.
Whereas in Europe there was a weak and short economic recovery in the 1920s, Japan was hit by the world economic crisis earlier, which led to increased attacks against the working class in Japan. Prior to the start of the big crisis in Japan, which began in 1927 two years before the crash of 1929, production had already fallen by 40% in the main industrial areas. The value of Japanese exports shrunk by 50% from 1929 to 1931. Japanese capital was again heading for military conquests. The military budget, which by 1921 – at the peak of the intervention against Russia – reached some 50% of the state budget, was never really reduced after World War I. Unlike Europe or the USA there was no real demilitarisation. Whatever cuts in the military budgets were decided the money was immediately invested in modernisation of the weapon systems. Unlike Europe, where the working class – although increasingly being weakened – blocked the road to war until the end of the 1920s, the working class in Japan was only able to offer a weaker resistance against the capitalist attacks and its militaristic course. On this background in Japan the State took over the leading positions in the economy much earlier than the State in Europe and started developing a widespread state capitalist regime and embarked upon a determined course of military conquests.
Workers’ living standards, which were much lower than in Europe, were reduced even more. Workers’ real incomes dropped from an index of 100 in 1926 to 81 in 1930 andto 69 in 1931. In the countryside there was widespread hunger.3
In the context of a weakened working class, with capital on the offensive, it was fatal for revolutionaries to want to try and overcome the disadvantageous balance of forces at all costs by provoking struggles artificially and by trying to build a mass party.
After the end of the revolutionary wave in 1923 and as Stalinism within Russia and the Comintern grew stronger, more and more Communist Parties submitted to the rule of Moscow and became its tools. The development of the CPJ illustrates this glaringly.
The Comintern tried to build a new party at all costs, which would defend Russian interests. After the dissolution of the party in March 1924 the Comintern founded a new Communist Group in August 1925, which proclaimed a new party on December 4th 1926 that was nothing but a parrot of Moscow. In 1925 the Comintern stated the positions and the work of the former party in the Shanghai Theses. The Comintern’s orientation was that the bourgeois- democratic revolution, which had been inaugurated with the Meiji-restoration, should be terminated, since feudal remnants (above all of the feudal landlords) and the bourgeoisie still subsisted. The Comintern placed emphasis on feudal remnants, although it had to admit: “The Japanese state itself is a powerful element of Japanese capitalism. No European country has advanced so much in the introduction of state capitalism as Japan, where some 30% of all investment in industry and in the financial sector are financed by the state” (Houston, p. 67).
Nevertheless, according to the Comintern, the Japanese state would still have to become really bourgeois- democratic. Yamakawa opposed this analysis. He insisted on the amalgamation of the State with big finance capital. He claimed that the bourgeoisie had been holding power in Japan for a long time and that the proletariat should set up an anti- bourgeois alliance with the peasantry, rejecting the “two-stage revolution” as it was defended by Moscow. Yamakawa supported the idea that a left wing within the workers‘ movement or a workers- peasant-party could take the place of the prohibited CP. Yamakawa started to publish a paper in December 1927 RONO (Labour- Farmer).
The Comintern continued to practice the policy of “undermining and conquering the trades unions”. The CPJ gained a big influence in the Labour Union Council of Japan, Nihon Rodo Hyogikai, founded in May 1925.
In the parliamentary elections of 1928 the CPJ defended a “united front” with the other “left capitalist” parties, whose number had increased and out of which seven had joined to form the Musantaishuto (Proletarian Mass Party).
After another wave of repression in March 1928 all left parties were forbidden and their leaders sent to jail. The death penalty was threatened if political activities were continued underground. However, once the police had imprisoned the former CPJ leaders, Moscow could “staff” the party again in November 1928 and supply another central committee, which followed the instructions of Moscow. The central committee and the politburo of the CPJ were replaced in the ensuing years whenever the Comintern changed its course. After the respective repressions and arrests a new leadership was always sent by Moscow. The party was kept alive “artificially” by Moscow but despite Moscow’s efforts it never managed to increase its membership significantly. The CPJ had become a complete lackey of Moscow.
When in 1928 the Comintern declared “socialism in one country” as its official policy and threw out all the remaining Left Communist remnants and kicked out the Trotskyist left opposition forces, the CPJ saw no reason to speak of a betrayal of the working class interests by the CI. The CPJ, staffed for five years by Moscow, organisationally and programmatically a totally loyal defender of Moscow, never produced a force of resistance against this. In 1927, a group of arrested members of the CPJ, led by Mizino Shigeo, had already rejected internationalism and started to defend the idea of “national socialism”.
Language problems and the difficult access to texts of that time require us to be cautious in a definite assessment of the attitude of the CPJ, but at the time of writing this text, we do not know of any groups that were expelled or which split form the CPJ because they fought against Stalinisation and the introduction of the idea of “socialism in one country”. We can assume that the JPC did not produce any critical voices or even resistance to Stalinisation. At any rate, if there were opposition voices, they were not in contact with the opposition in Russia or with the Left Communist currents outside Russia. Even on the events in neighbouring China in 1927, which were debated very heatedly within the Comintern and internationally, as far as we know, there were no critical voices raised from Japan denouncing the disastrous policy of the Comintern.
Even if the party did not immediately betray following the declaration of “socialism in one country” by the Comintern, it was unable to give birth to any proletarian resistance, fighting for an internationalist position.
Since Japanese capital had come up against a working class offering less resistance than the proletariat in Europe, it could therefore embark upon a systematic war course earlier than its European rivals. In September 1931 the Japanese army invaded Manchuria and set up a puppet state Manchuko.
While the course towards war was gaining momentum internationally, and whereas the war in Spain in the mid-thirties was the rehearsal for the confrontations in Europe and the 2nd World War, the war between Japan and China unfolded from 1937-45.
Japanese imperialism pushed the spiral of barbarism onto a higher level before World War II started. In 1937 more than 200,000 Chinese were massacred in Nanking within a few days. A total of 7 million people were killed during this war.
The Left Communist group Bilan, which was one of the few groups to defend an internationalist position (even at the price of a split) during the Spanish war served as the internationalist reference point to all revolutionary forces. In Japan, however, the precious traditions of internationalism during the war in 1905 between Japan and Russia and of World War I had been silenced by Stalinism. The Japanese State Socialist Party (Nihon Kokka Shakaito – comparable to the NSDAP in Hitler’s Germany) which was founded in 1931, and the Social Democratic Party of Japan openly supported the imperialist war course of Japanese capital. The Social Masses Party (Shakai – Taishuto) also spoke up in favour of supporting the “defence efforts” of the Japanese Army in October 1934, since the “army fights both against capitalism and fascism”. The party leadership of the Socialist Party (Shakai Taishuto) called the war against China “the sacred war of the Japanese nation”. The Japanese Trades Union Congress Zenso outlawed workers strikes in 1937.
Whereas only the Left Communist forces defended internationalism, both the Stalinist CPJ and Trotsky himself called for the defence of China against Japan.
In September 1932 the CPJ declared: “The war of Japanese imperialism in Manchuria marks the beginning of a new series of imperialist wars directed primarily against the Chinese Revolution and the USSR.... Should the imperialists of the whole world hurl their challenge at our fatherland, the USSR, we will show them that the world proletariat will rise in arms against them... Long live the Red Army of the Soviet Union and the Red Army of Soviet China” (Langer, Red Flag in Japan, 1968, S. 49). And under the slogans “Down with the Imperialist War”, “Hands off China”, “Defend Revolutionary China and the Soviet Union” the CPJ called for the support of Russia and China against Japanese capital. The CPJ had become a total lackey of Moscow.
But Trotsky also threw overboard his own position, which he held in World War One. Starting off from a totally mistaken view, that “The present Japanese adventure in Manchuria can lead to revolution in Japan” (1931), (“Can fascism really triumph? Germany – the key to the international situation”, 26/11/1931) – he called upon the Soviet Union to arm China: “in the present gigantic historical struggle (between China and Japan) the Soviet government cannot remain neutral, it cannot take up the same position in relation to China as to Japan. It is obliged to fully support the Chinese people.” Regarding the position that there were still “progressive wars possible”, he said: “If there is any just war in this world, then it is the war of the Chinese people against its oppressors. All working class organisations, all progressive forces of China, will without abandoning their programme and their political independence, fulfil their duty in this war of liberation” (30.7.1937),
“In my declaration to the bourgeois press I spoke of the duty of all workers organisations in China to participate actively and in the front line in the war against Japan, without renouncing in the least possible manner on their programme and their autonomous activities. But the Eiffelists4 call this ‘social-patriotism’. This means capitulation under Chiang Kaishek! It means turning your back on the principle of class struggle. ‘In imperialist war, Bolshevism stood for revolutionary defeatism. Both the Spanish civil and the Chinese-Japanese war are imperialist wars. (..) We take up the same position in relation to the Chinese war. The only salvation for the workers and peasants of China is to act as an autonomous force against both armies, both against the Chinese as well as against the Japanese‘. Just these four lines of the document of the Eiffelists4 of Sept. 1 1937 reveal they are either traitors or complete idiots. But when stupidity reaches such proportions, then this amounts to betrayal. (...) To speak of revolutionary defeatism in general without distinguishing between oppressed and oppressing countries means turning Bolshevism into a miserable caricature and to place this caricature in the service of imperialism. China is a semi-colonial country, which is being transformed by Japan into a colonial country in front of our eyes. As far as Japan is concerned it is leading an imperialist, reactionary war. As far as China is concerned, it is fighting a progressive war of liberation (...) Japanese patriotism is the abject hideous face of international banditism. Chinese patriotism is legitimate and progressive. To place these two on the same level and to speak of ‘social-patriotism’, means you have not read anything from Lenin, you have not understood anything at all about the attitude of the Bolsheviks in the imperialist war, and defending this therefore only means to insult Marxism (...) We have to underline with great emphasis, that the 4th International takes sides with China against Japan” (“On the Chinese-Japanese War”, Letter to Diego Riviera, 23/09/1937).
“The workers organisations of both countries cannot take up the same position (..) There is no doubt that Japan is leading a war of conquest, China is leading a national liberation struggle. Only conscious or unconscious agents of Japanese imperialism place both countries on the same level” (Trotsky 25/09/1937).
The whole tradition of a ruthless struggle against both imperialist sides was abandoned by Trotsky. Only the Left Communist groups defended a clear internationalist position in this imperialist confrontation. The group Bilan took up the following position on the war: “Experience has shown that when the internaional proletariat was led, by the Communist International and the Russian Soviet, to envisage the possiblity of bourgeois and anti-imperialist revolutions in China (in 1927), then in reality it sacrificed itself on the altar of world capitalism” (Resolution by the EC of the international communist left on the Sino-Japanese conflict, Bilan p.1449, Nov- Dec 1937).
“And it is in this historic phase, when national wars have been consigned to the museum of antiquities, that the workers are supposed to mobilise for a ‘war of national emancipation’ of the ‘Chinese people’.
Who today supports China’s ‘war of independence’ (...)? Russia, Britain, France, the United States. Every imperialism supports it (...) even Trotsky supports it, letting himself be carried away by the current of imperialist war and calling for support for the ‘just’ war of the ‘Chinese people’ (...)
On each side of the front there is a greedy ruling bourgeoisie, which wants nothing but to have the workers slaughter each other: on each site there are proletarians being driven to the abattoir. It is false, totally false, to think that there exists a bourgeoisie with which the Chinese workers can, however temporarily, ‘march side by side’, and that only Japanese imperialism need be defeated for the Chinese workers to struggle victoriously for the revolution. Everywhere, imperialism controls the game, and China is nothing but the plaything of the other imperialisms. If they are to find the road to revolutionary struggle, then Chinese and Japanese workers must find the class road which will lead them to find each other: the fraternisation which will cement their simulataneous assault on their own exploiters (...)
Only the fractions of the International Communist Left are opposed to all the currents of traitors and opportunists, and hold high the banner of the struggle for revolution. Alone, they will struggle for the transformation of the bloody imperialist war in Asia, into a civil war of the workers against their exploiters: fraternisation of Chinese and Japanese workers; destruction of the fronts of ‘national war’; struggle against the Kuomintang, struggle against Japanese imperialism, struggle against all the currents that act for imperialist war amongst the workers (...)
In this new war, the international proletariat must find the strength to escape from its executioners and traitors, and to express its solidarity with its class brothers in Asia, by unleashing its own struggles against its own bourgeoisie.
Down with the imperialist war in China. Long live the civil war of all the exploited against the Chinese bourgeoisie and against Japanese imperialism” (Bilan, “A bas le carnage imperialiste en Chine: contre tous les bourreaux: Pour la transformation immédiate de la guerre en guerre civile”, p.1415, Oct-Nov.1937).
This was the internationalist tradition of the Communist Left, that stood for the only and real continuity with the positions of revolutionaries during WW1. However, no revolutionary forces in Japan seem to have been able to hold up this internationalist banner.
In Europe the bourgeoisie launched the “popular fronts” in order to enrol the working class in the imperialist battle for the defence of the “democratic states” against fascist Hitlerite Germany. In order to mobilise the workers for war, the bourgeoisie needed to lure the workers into the defence of “democracy”. However, in Japan the working class had already been defeated sufficiently.
The initial calls by the CPJ for the setting up of a united front of the Left parties with the CPJ, in order to defend the Soviet Union, were rejected by the other Left parties, which had submitted to the interests of the Japanese state. The CPJ in turn had chosen its camp.
The residues of the CPJ, which had been prescribed once again before the Chinese- Japanese war started, called for the defence of the Soviet Union against Japan.
During the war, the residues of the CPJ called for the “destruction of the feudal-militaristic order in Japan through a bourgeois democratic revolution, [saying that] within this process active co- operation with the capitalist nations would be necessary”. On the basis of such arguments the CPJ supported the USA and Russia in their fight against “imperial Japan”.
In the winter of ‘45-‘46 the CPJ was re-founded as a political organisation under the US occupation. A programme was drafted, which as in the theses of 1927 & 32 contained a project of a “two-phase- revolution”. The immediate task was the “overcoming of the imperial system, the democratisation of Japan, a land reform”. This strategy offered a basis for co- operating with the USA in the demilitarisation and demobilisation of Japan. The Supreme Commander of the US-Allied Forces was a part of the progressive bourgeoisie, whose historic function was to accomplish the bourgeois- democratic revolution.
As in the rest of the world, the working class came out of the war weaker than before.
Reconstruction was undertaken with a heavily defeated and demoralised class. For decades the ruling class took pleasure in presenting the working class in Japan as a show case of a docile, subservient, defeated and humiliated class, working terribly long hours and receiving very little pay.
When, in 1968, after the massive strikes in Europe, in particular in France, the working class world wide managed to appear on the stage of history again, ending a more than 50 year long period of counter- revolution, the class gave birth to a series of small revolutionary groupings out of whom some managed to turn towards the tradition of the Communist Left. However, in Japan the groups of the capitalist Left completely dominated the political scene. As far as we know no forces have appeared which have established contact with the international and historical political proletarian milieu, i.e. the groups claiming to defend the tradition of the Communist Left.
Since the economy of what was once the showcase of the reconstruction period, has been in crisis and open recession for almost a decade, it is only a question of time before the working class in Japan will be forced to defend itself against the attacks of the crisis on a qualitatively higher level.
These class confrontations will require the most determined intervention of revolutionaries. However, for revolutionaries to fulfil this task, the emerging politicised proletarian elements
must establish a link with the international proletarian political milieu and conceive themselves as a part of this international entity.
More than 100 years of relative political isolation and lagging behind must be overcome. The conditions for tackling this task have never been so good.
Dav
1 Having arrived in the Japanese port of Shimonoseki, however, he missed his train to Tokyo. He had to spend the night in town – where he spent a part of the funds of the Comintern paying for a prostitute and alcohol. During the night he fell into the hands of the police, drunk, who confiscated the remaining money which the had not taken from him. Talking to a police spy in his prison cell he confessed about his mission in China. Nevertheless, he was released from jail.
2 At the same time as the Conference met in Petrograd, the group around Yamakawa started to publish a paper with the name Vanguard (Zenei). From April 1922 on, the group around Sakai published The Proletariat (Musankaikyu) from June 1922 on Labour Union (Rodo Kumiai) was also published. In the meantime, from January 1922 on, the anarchist Osugi had also started editing Labour Movement.
3 Hunger amongst the population in the countryside was widespread. Working hours in the textile industry were around 12 hours a day and more. In the 1930s there was still a 44% proportion of women working in the factories, and in the 1930s in the textile industry 91% of the female work force lived in dormitories, always available for exploitation.
4 Eiffel was the pseudonym of Paul Kirchhoff (1900-1972), a member of the KAPD. After the Nazis seized power in 1933 he emigrated to France, he worked in the German Trotskyist leadership in exile, but opposed the Trotskyist policy of entrism. During his stay in Mexico between 1936- 1940s he co-operated in publication of Comunismo, paper of the Grupo de trabajadores marxistas, see International Review n°10, 19, 20
In previous issues of the International Review[1]we have published a considerable amount of correspondence with the Marxist Labour Party in Russia. The main focus of this exchange has been our disagreements about the problem of capitalism’s decadence and its implications for certain key questions, notably the class nature of the October revolution and the problem of “national liberation”.
Following an ICC trip to Moscow in October 2002, we encountered different elements claiming adherence to the MLP, and heard news of a split within the group. There are now two MLPs, one which refers to itself as the MLP (Bolshevik) and the other – the current with which we have conducted the debate so far – the MLP (Southern Bureau). In order to clarify a rather confusing situation, and to understand better the real position of the MLP concerning fundamental questions of proletarian internationalism, we wrote to the MLP (SB) with a series of questions (for the rest of this article, MLP refers to the MLP (SB) unless otherwise stated). These questions are reproduced (in italics) in the MLP’s reply, which we reprint below. There then follows our reply to the MLP’s letter, which again concentrates on our differences over the national question.
There has since been a further response by the MLP, which we will come back to in the next issue of the Review, as well as developing our response to other issues raised by the letter printed below, in particular anti-fascism and the nature of the Second World War.
Though your letter was addressed to the “South Bureau of the MLP”, we have brought its contents to our fellows in the organisation who live not only in the south of Russia.
Our collective answer to you is such:
We hold that before speaking for or against the support of national-liberation struggles in the 20th century, one should gain an understanding of what itself the national-liberation struggle on the whole is. But in its turn, it is difficult to be done, if a more or less clear determination to “nation” has not been previously given.
Besides, in our opinion, one should clarify, what was Marx and Engels’ attitude towards this question in their time, as well as what was the position of the Bolsheviks-Leninists in this connection - both before and after the October revolution 1917. Finally, one should consider the evolution of views of the Comintern on the given problems…
The national-liberation movement is an objective thing. Having set a high standard, it indicates that one or another people has embarked on the path of its own capitalist development and that the corresponding ethnic group either is on the threshold of turning into the BOURGEOIS nation, or has already turned into it.
In contrast to what the Bolshevik-Comintern tradition orders, offering not only to support national-liberation movements as progressive-bourgeois ones, but even orientating to create communist(!) parties in backward countries, parties consisting of the peasantry under the leadership of the national progressive-revolutionary intelligentsia, and to fight for the establishment of Soviet power in the absence or minimum presence of the industrial proletariat there (the notorious theory of “non-capitalist development” or “socialist orientation in developing countries”), the MLP (not to be confused with the MLP(B)!) considers that the support for national-liberation movements creates only an illusion of solving the social problems in national borders. In particular, this illusion finds its expression in the “Marxist-Leninist” slogan: “From the national liberation to the social one!”
It is only the world social revolution that will be able to solve national problems among other ones.
The participation in whichever national-liberation movement, i.e. in the fight for the state separation of one more bourgeois nation, is not a special task for marxists.
At the same time we are not opponents of national-liberation movements. As, for instance, of the political movement coming out in favour of separating Chechnya from Russia, in which some members of the MLP (B) actively participate.
If the majority of the population of a certain nationality and on a determined historical territory has decided to use the “right of nations to self-determination” against the “imperialist expansion”, we shall not come out against such a position under two conditions:
a) if the territorial separation is able to stop the bloody slaughter with multiple victims amongst the working people from both sides;
b) if the state independence of a new bourgeois nation leads more quickly to the situation where inside this nation its own industrial proletariat will emerge and get stronger, which will then launch its class struggle against the local national bourgeoisie, no more digressing on the illusion of any “liberation” besides the social one. Before the proletarians of all countries can unite, proletarians in these countries must simply exist!
And here again it is necessary first to define what should be understood under “reaction(ism)”. The word “reactionary” in its primary sense means “counteracting progress” or, more exactly, “counteracting the advancement onward”. It is clear, however, that this definition is highly general.
Being marxists, we can and must speak of that sort of reactionism which prevents the longing to finish with both the bourgeois-capitalistic mode of production and the secondary (private-ownership and exploiting) formation as a whole, which prevents mankind from advancing to the “tertiary formation” - communism.
At the same time, the classics of marxism taught us to understand the progressiveness of the bourgeois-capitalistic mode of production with respect to the modes of production preceding it and to the more retarded social-economic structures co-existing with it within the framework of the secondary formation. They also taught us to distinguish the progressive stages of development of this mode of production itself. In our opinion, any other approach would be scholastic and dogmatic but not historical-dialectical!
In the 20th century petty bourgeois and peasant production was giving place to the large-scale capitalist one. From the marxist standpoint, the productive forces change the social structure of society in the course of their development. This is objectively progressive.
Hereinafter. In our opinion, with reference to the 20th century one should speak not of the decay of the capitalism as such, but only of the process by which the national-state form of capitalism outlives its necessity, i.e. a definite next-in-turn stage of its development becomes exhausted.
And we cannot say that with the beginning of WW1 the capitalism has unambiguously exhausted its progressiveness. In our opinion, this process gets under way only from the second half of the 20th century. The clear evidence of it being the present globalisation and economic unification of Europe, for example.
It is in our time that the capitalism has begun to exhaust its progressiveness.
There approaches the time to sweep it away on the international scale by means of the world social revolution.
(...)
Among the different questions posed in this correspondence we have chosen to answer first one question that to us is particularly important to clarify. It is also a question that is posed by the emerging elements and political groups in Russia. This is the national question and particularly the communist position in relation to national liberation struggles and the famous slogan of Lenin on the “rights of nations of self-determination”.
Although the MLP in their reply to our letter state that they do not support national liberation movements, because they “create only an illusion of solving the social problems in national borders”, they at the same time find certain occasions when they would not oppose them. This is when “the majority of the population of a certain nationality and on a determined historical territory has decided to use the ‘rights of nations for self determination’ against the ‘imperialist expansion’…”
These occasions are either when the separation would stop a bloody slaughter or if a new independent state would lead to the growth of the proletariat in that state and later lead to class struggle against the local national bourgeoisie.
What that means concretely for the MLP is that they are “not opponents of national-liberation movements. As for instance, of the political movement coming out in favour of separating Chechnya from Russia, in which some members of the MLP (B) actively participate”.
First of all we find it very strange when the MLP says they are not against national liberation movements but at the same time not in favour. Is the MLP indifferent or just only not actively fighting the ideology of national liberation, although according to them it can “create only illusions of solving the social problems in national borders”? What does the MLP mean when they write that participation in national liberation movements “is not a special task of marxists”? And yet the MLP do not oppose the activities of the membersof the MLP(B) who “actively participate” in a Chechyan separatist movement. What are we to make of this?
For us this expresses a highly opportunist position on the question of national liberation movements. We get the impression that this vagueness about taking position is only an opening for participation in these movements by certain members of the MLP. In fact the MLP’s position opens the door to support for any national liberation struggle, because it will always be possible to find a criterion that would apply.
It should be possible for the MLP to argue that national separation would stop a bloody slaughter on many occasions. For example, this position would logically have led the MLP in 1947 to have supported the separation of Pakistan from India to stop the massacres between Muslim and Hindu. The ensuing dispute over Jammu and Kashmir between Pakistan and India is perhaps also a good example how the “right of nations of self-determination” (now in the name of the British Independence Act) will only lead to further bloody slaughter. Today we see how the dangerous conflicts and constant tensions between Pakistan and India are threatening this highly populated area with millions of deaths through nuclear war between Pakistan and India – and this in addition to the all the deaths from the conflict over Kashmir.[2] This example shows just how absurd and completely un-marxist is the criterion that the MLP put forward as reasons for “not opposing” the separation of a new state.
The other criterion which the MLP uses is the hypothesis that a separation would lead to a development of industry and hence a development of the proletariat, and, in the end, the increase of the class struggle against the “local national bourgeoisie”.
As the MLP does not have the concept of a “decay of capitalism” (capitalism’s entrance into a phase of decadence from its progressive phase), at least not until the end of the 20th century, which for them was brought about by the globalisation of capitalism and the economic unification of Europe, they could logically apply it to a number of cases in the 20th century. For example there were several groups in the seventies in Europe which were close to proletarian positions in other respects, but on the question of national liberation during the 70s “critically” supported the NLF in Vietnam because, they argued, it would establish a new bourgeois state which would further industrialisation and develop the proletariat. As soon as the national bourgeoisie was victorious, they said, the proletariat should immediately turn itself against its own bourgeoisie. This false application of marxism was and is still today (at best) a cover for opportunist concessions to bourgeois ideology. This position is very close to Trotskyism which always find an excuse for supporting so-called national liberation struggles, when actually in this epoch these are nothing other than a cover for world wide imperialist conflicts.
These initial remarks oblige us to return to the question which we think is necessary to pose in a marxist framework (and which is also posed in the beginning of the MLP’s reply to our questions): what was the attitude of Marx and Engels in relation to national liberation struggles, and what was the position of communists on this question from within the Zimmerwald left up to the Comintern? Finally what must be the communist position on this today?
The MLP states correctly that before we take a position for or against national liberation struggles it is necessary to understand the nature of these struggles, and also to have a clear understanding what the concept of a nation means for marxists.
The concept of a nation is not an abstract and absolute concept but can only be understood within a historical context. Rosa Luxemburg gives one definition of this concept in her Junius Pamphlet:
“The national state, national unity and independence were the ideological shield under which the capitalist nations of central Europe constituted themselves in the past century. Capitalism is incompatible with economic and political divisions, with the accompanying splitting up into small states. It needs for its development large, united territories, and a state of mental and intellectual development in the nation that will lift the demands and the needs of society to the plane corresponding to the prevailing stage of capitalist production, and to the mechanism of modern state capitalist class rule. Before capitalism could develop, it sought to create for itself a territory sharply defined by national limitations.”
It was in this understanding that Marx and Engels on different occasions argued for support for certain national liberation struggles. But they never did that as a principle, only in cases where they thought the creation of new nation states could lead to a real development of capitalism against the feudal forces. The creation of new nation states could in Europe at that time only be accomplished by revolutionary measures and play a historically progressive role in the class struggle of the bourgeoisie against the feudal power:
“The national programme could play a historic role only so long as it represented the ideological expression of a growing bourgeoisie, lusting for power, until it had fastened its class rule, in some way or other, upon the great nations of central Europe and had created within them the necessary tools and conditions of its growth” (Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet)
The method Marx and Engels used was not based on any abstract slogan but always on an analysis of each case, on an analysis of the political and economical development of the society. “Marx did not pay any attention to that abstract formula [of the “right of nations to self-determination”], and hurled thunderbolts at the heads of the Czechs and their aspiration for freedom, aspirations which he regarded as a harmful complication of the revolutionary situation, all the more deserving of severe condemnation, since, to Marx, the Czechs were a dying nationality, doomed to disappear soon.” (R. Luxemburg, The national question and autonomy)
Marx and Engels were not always right in their analysis, as Rosa Luxemburg was able to show for example with the case of Poland.
The definition of a nation is not based on some general abstract criterion like a common language and culture but on a precise historical context. In class society a nation is not something homogeneous but is divided into classes with antagonistic interests, views, cultures, ethics, etc. The abstract notion of “rights” of nations can only be “rights” of the bourgeoisie.
From this there can be no such thing as a uniform will of a nation, of a will to self-determination. Behind this slogan lies a concession to the idea that in order to reach socialism it is necessary to pass over the democratic stage. Behind this lies also the idea that there should be a way to determine the “will” of the people. The MLP uses the expression “The majority of the population of a certain nationality”. In this expression there are two abstract concepts. First the “will of the population” assumes that there is a peaceful way, over and above real class antagonisms, of deciding (maybe through a referendum – as was proposed by the Bolsheviks) the fate of nations. Secondly the use of the term “nationality” is very vague. If it denotes a specific ethnic or cultural group the relationship to national self-determination is very unclear.
The nation is a historical category and the creation of the nation state plays a certain role for the bourgeoisie historically. The nation state is not only a framework for the bourgeoisie to develop and defend its economy and system of exploitation, it is at the same time also an offensive against other nation states for political conquest and domination, for the suppression of other nations. So the “right of nations to self-determination” is in real life a “right”, like any other bourgeoisie, to suppress the “rights” of other nations, other ethnic groups, languages and cultures. The “rights of nations to self-determination” is nothing else than an abstract utopia, which can only let in by the back door the nationalism of the bourgeoisie.
Within the Zimmerwald left - the internationalist current that most resolutely opposed the first world war - there arose a discussion on the question of the slogan “right of nations to self-determination”.
This slogan emanated from the Second International: “In the Second International it played a double role: on the one hand, it was supposed to express a protest against all national oppression, and on the other hand the readiness of Social Democracy to “defend the fatherland”. The slogan was applied to specific national questions only to avoid the necessity of investigating its concrete content and the tendencies of its development.” (‘Imperialism and National Oppression’[3])
The Dutch and Polish adherents of the Zimmerwald left rejected the slogan of the Bolsheviks. This was a position the Bolsheviks had inherited from social democracy. Rosa Luxemburg had very early - already in 1896 in relation to the congress in London of the Second International, and later together with Radek and others in the SDKPiL - criticised this slogan which they thought was an opportunist concession. Also within the Bolshevik party, represented by Pyatakov, Bosh and Bukharin, there was a critique of the slogan of the “right of nations to self-determination”. They based their critique on the fact that during the imperialist epoch:
“The answer to the bourgeoisies’ imperialist policy must be the socialist revolution of the proletariat; Social Democracy must not advance minimum demands in the fields of present-day foreign policy.
1. It is therefore impossible to struggle against the enslavement of nations other than through a struggle against imperialism. Ergo a struggle against imperialism; ergo a struggle against finance capital; ergo a struggle against capitalism in general. To turn aside from this path in any way and advance ‘partial’ tasks of the ‘liberation of nations’ within the limits of capitalist society diverts proletarian forces from the true solution of the problem and unites them with the forces of the bourgeoisie of the corresponding national groups.” (Theses on the Right of Nations to Self-determination, Pyatakov, Bosh, Bukharin, from the book Lenin’s struggle for a revolutionary International, Pathfinder Press 1986).
Lenin had another answer to this question, which really underpinned the whole question of advancing minimum demands and the link between the national question and the question of democracy.
“It would be a radical mistake to think that the struggle for democracy was capable of diverting the proletariat from the socialist revolution or of hiding, overshadowing it, etc. On the contrary, in the same way as there can be no victorious socialism that does not practise full democracy, so the proletariat cannot prepare for its victory over the bourgeoisie without an all-round, consistent and revolutionary struggle for democracy.”[4]
There is in this passage a certain tendency to conflate “democracy” with the dictatorship of the proletariat, and more particularly, to see the forms of bourgeois democracy in the future proletarian dictatorship. This is false at many levels – not least because whereas proletarian rule can only maintain itself on a world scale, capitalist democracy is inevitably national in form, and inseparably connected to the nation state. Of even more immediate importance was the confusion between the struggle for democratic demands – including the “rights of nations” –and the struggle for proletarian power and the destruction of the bourgeois state. It was a mistake of Lenin to take up the old social democratic slogan of the “right of nations to self-determination” - which really expressed the opportunist view that socialism could only be achieved through democracy, through the peaceful gaining of power via parliament – and try to graft it on to a revolutionary programme. It also indirectly supported the arguments of the Mensheviks that the revolution in Russia had to pass over a period of bourgeois democracy before being ready for socialism. Lenin and the Bolsheviks drew completely different conclusions from this idea, in that they supported and worked for revolutionary struggle, while the Mensheviks opposed any struggle that according to their theory would surpass the “objective reality” of capitalism. This reformist idea had still a great influence among the Bolsheviks as revealed by the first reactions of the majority of “Old Bolsheviks” inside Russia to the revolution in February. This position – which was not supported by the most radical layers of the party – was the dominant position in the leading organs before Lenin arrived at the Finland station in Petrograd and immediately attacked this opportunism, which implied a support for the Kerensky government and its war effort. Lenin developed this later in his famous “April Theses”.
Now Lenin came to understand that the revolution in Russia was not merely a bourgeois revolution but the first step of the proletarian revolution. It was the real revolutionary practice of Lenin and the Bolsheviks that would disprove the Menshevik dogma of a necessary democratic stage before the socialist revolution was possible. In fact history shows (and quite contrary to Lenin’s beliefs in 1916 when he defended the “right to self-determination”) that not only in Russia were illusions in democracy the most dangerous poison against the revolution: in almost all the countries affected by the Russian revolution, the question of democracy was the main weapon put forward by the bourgeoisie to counter-act the revolutionary movement.
Against the idea that all countries had to pass over a certain stage in their mode of production to arrive at new mode of production Rosa Luxemburg wrote:
“Therefore historically speaking, the idea that the modern proletariat could do nothing as a separate and conscious class without first creating a new nation-state, is the same thing as saying that the bourgeoisie in any country should first of all establish a feudal system, if by some chance it did not come about normally by itself, or had taken on a particular form, as for instance in Russia. The historical mission of the bourgeoisie is the creation of the modern “national” state; but the historical task of the proletariat is the abolition of this state as a political form of capitalism, in which they themselves, as a conscious class, come into existence to establish the socialist system.” (The National Question and Autonomy, Rosa Luxemburg- our emphasis)
Rosa Luxemburg had this to say of the decision at the London congress of 1896 to adopt the slogan of the “right of nations to self-determination”: “the nationalist position is to be smuggled in under the international banner”.[5] Although Lenin’s position is not to be mixed up with the social chauvinism of the old social democratic parties when they came to “defend the fatherland”, Lenin’s effort to make it part of the revolutionary programme is still a mistake.
The revolution in Russia must be seen in a world historic framework, at the same time part of and signal to a world revolution. The February revolution was not the necessary bourgeois revolution before the socialist revolution could take place, but the first phase in the proletarian revolution in Russia, establishing a situation of dual power to prepare the next step of taking power in October. This is also more or less the view of Lenin in his April Theses, which de facto is an attack against the mechanical, national, opportunist view of the proletarian revolution. In Lenin’s preface to the first edition (August 1917) of his State and Revolution he clearly states his view on the Russian revolution when he writes:
“Lastly, we sum up the main results of the experience of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and particularly of 1917. Apparently, the latter is now (early August 1917) completing the first stage of its development; but this revolution as a whole can only be understood as a link in a chain of socialist proletarian revolutions being caused by the imperialist war.”
It is also from within this view of the Russian revolution as expressing nothing else than the dynamic of a world wide proletarian revolution, that Rosa Luxemburg reiterated with even greater intransigence her critique of the “right of nations to self-determination” slogan, and its use by the Bolshevik party in power:
“Instead of acting in the same spirit of genuine international class policy which they represented in other matters, instead of working for the most compact union of the revolutionary forces throughout the area of the Empire, instead of defending tooth and nail the integrity of the Russian Empire as an area of revolution and opposing to all forms of separatism the solidarity and inseparability of the proletarians in all lands within the sphere of the Russian Revolution as the highest command of politics, the Bolsheviks, by their hollow nationalistic phraseology concerning the ‘right of self-determination to the point of separation,’ have accomplished quite the contrary and supplied the bourgeoisie in all border states with the finest, the most desirable pretext, the very banner of the counter-revolutionary efforts. Instead of warning the proletariat in the border countries against all forms of separatism as mere bourgeois traps, they did nothing but confuse the masses in all the border countries by their slogan and delivered them up to the demagogy of the bourgeois classes. By this nationalistic demand they brought on the disintegration of Russia itself, pressed into the enemy’s hand the knife which it was to thrust into the heart of the Russian Revolution.” (The Russian Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg).
In all the cases where the “right to self-determination” slogan of the Bolsheviks has been applied, it has opened up illusions in democracy and nationalism – sacred myths which the bourgeoisie itself has always trampled underfoot when it came to fighting for its life against the proletarian revolution. Faced with this danger, the national bourgeoisies have always turned away from the idea of national independence and quickly given up their national dreams to cry for support from antagonistic foreign bourgeoisie powers to help them crush “their own” proletarian class.
At the same time, and for precisely the same reason, the entire history of the “epoch of wars and revolutions” (the Communist International’s term for the epoch of capitalist decline) shows that whenever the proletariat had any illusions of conducting a common struggle with the bourgeoisie, this only led to massacres of the proletariat.
Finland and Georgia are striking examples of how the national bourgeoisie immediately asked, as soon as it got its “independence”, for help to crush the proletarian bastion in Russia - all under the banner of national independence. In Finland German troops were sent to crush the Finnish Red Guard and the Finnish revolution turned into a terrible defeat for the proletariat. The Red Army was forced to be “neutral” according to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk and did not intervene officially (although many Bolsheviks in the Red Army aided the Finnish Red Guards). The Finnish bourgeoisie mobilised the poor peasants to fight against the “Russian enemy” – many of those recruited into the Finnish “White Guard” thought they were fighting Russian troops. In Georgia the Mensheviks (now part of the national bourgeoisie – defending the “right for national self-determination”) also turned for help from German imperialism.
There were certain changes by the Bolsheviks on the national question at the beginning of the Russian revolution, seeing the slogan as merely a tactical necessity rather than a political principle. This was expressed in the fact that the slogan for “self-determination” was not only watered down inside the Bolshevik party itself, but was approached with much greater clarity at the First Congress of the 3rd International, which focussed much more on the international struggle of the proletariat, on the independence of the proletariat in relation to all national movements, never letting it be subordinated to the national bourgeoisie.
But with the development of greater opportunism within the Communist International, which was linked to the growing confusion between the policy of the CI and the foreign policy of the degenerating Soviet state, there was a real falling back on the national question, a tendency to lose sight of the relative clarity of the First Congress. One expression of this was the policy of supporting alliances between Communist parties in Turkey and China and the nationalist bourgeoisies, which in both cases led to a massacre of the proletariat and the decimation of the Communists by their erstwhile “national revolutionary “ allies. In the end the mistakes of the Bolsheviks and Lenin on these issues have been turned into an ideology in defence of imperialist war, particularly by Trotskyism. What was once an opportunist mistake by the Bolsheviks has today enabled the left of capital to use the name of Lenin to defend imperialist wars. Instead of going back to these errors, communists must base their positions on the more consistently internationalist critique which was developed by the Marxist left, from Luxemburg to Pyatakov and from the KAPD to the Italian Left Fraction.
1 We refer the reader also to other articles on the MLP in the International Review, in particular nos. 101, 104 and 111. The comrades of the MLP have informed us that the correct translation of their group’s Russian name is in fact “Marxist Workers’ Party” rather than “Marxist Labour Party”. However, we have retained the name “Marxist Labour Party” for the sake of continuity with our previous issues.
2 Pakistan is demanding a referendum to decide which country this region should belong to, while India already thinks that the question is settled.
3 Imperialism and National Oppression, theses presented in 1916 by Radek, Stein-Krajewski and M. Bronski, which belonged to a fraction of SDKPiL and had similar positions as Rosa Luxemburg.
4 The discussion on self-determination summed up, Lenin, 1916, CW vol. 22
5The Polish Question at the International Congress in London, Rosa Luxemburg, 1896.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/south-and-central-america
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/chile
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote1sym
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote2sym
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote3sym
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote4sym
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote5sym
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote6sym
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote7sym
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote8sym
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote9sym
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote10sym
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote11sym
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote12sym
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote13sym
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote14sym
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote15sym
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote16sym
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote1anc
[20] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/index.htm
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote2anc
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote3anc
[23] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/index.htm
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote4anc
[25] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch03.htm
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote5anc
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote6anc
[28] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch23.htm
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote7anc
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote8anc
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote9anc
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote10anc
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote11anc
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote12anc
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote13anc
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote14anc
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote15anc
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/115_crisis.htm#sdfootnote16anc
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/japan
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2066/katayama-sen
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2067/osugi
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/russia-caucasus-central-asia
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left-influenced