In April 1996 the section in France of the International Communist Current held its 12th Congress. This was the congress of a territorial section of our international organisation, but the ICC had decided to invest it with a significance beyond that of the merely territorial framework, making it a kind of extraordinary international congress.
The congress was held a few months after we had seen in France a highly significant episode in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie: the strikes inthepublicsectorattheendof1995, which were the result of an international manoeuvre by the bourgeoisie aimed at the entire proletariat of the industrialised countries. But these events only constituted one aspect of the general offensive that the bourgeoisie is waging against the working class and its organisations. And it is precisely as a vital moment in the arming of the communist organisation against the different aspects of this offensive that the 12th Congress of the section in France assumes all its importance.
An unprecedented attack by the bourgeoisie against the proletariat
The bourgeoisie is forced to accompany its economic attack against the working class with a political attack. As we saw with the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie at the end of 1995, this attack has both short and medium term aims: its objective is to weaken the proletariat in advance of the struggles which it will have to wage in the years ahead. However, it would be dangerously underestimating the ruling class if we thought that this attack didn't go further than this.
The most lucid sectors of the ruling class knew very well that the impact of the immense campaigns on the "death of communism" and the "definitive victory of capitalism" could not last forever, that it would inevitably be shattered by the aggravation of the capitalist crisis and the consequent revival of workers' struggles. This is why it has had to take precautions for the future.
"... We should underline the recent change in some of the language used by the ruling class. Whereas the first years after the collapse of the eastern bloc were dominated by campaigns around the theme of the "death of communism" and the "impossibility of revolution ", we are now seeing a certain return to fashion of talk about "marxism", "revolution" and "communism" - on the part of the leftists, obviously, but not only them" (Resolution on the International Situation, 11th ICC Congress).
Before a growing number of workers recognise marxism as the theory of the proletarian struggle for emancipation, it is necessary to elaborate and disseminate a false marxism designed to pollute and derail the whole process through which the working class becomes conscious of itself.
But this offensive doesn't end there. It is also necessary to discredit the left communist current, which at the time of the degeneration and death of the Communist International was the real defender of the communist principles which had presided over the October 1917 revolution. Thus, with the publication of the archives of Vercesi, the main animator of the Italian Left Fraction, the academics of Brussels University have presented this current as being anti-fascist, ie the very antithesis of what it really was. The most fundamental issue is to compromise the future of the left communist current, ie the only one which works towards the foundation of the communist party which the proletariat will need in order to carry through its revolution.
And this attack against the communist left isn't limited to the university. The "specialists" of the ruling class are quite aware of the danger represented by the groups of the proletarian political milieu, precisely the ones who claim continuity with the communist left. Obviously, this danger is not an immediate one. Continuing to suffer the effects of the terrible counter-revolution which fell on the proletariat at the end of the 1920s, and which lasted until the middle of the 1960s, the communist left is still marked both by a numerical weakness and by its low impact on the working class as a whole. A weakness that is further exacerbated by the dispersion into several currents (ICC, IBRP, the multiple "Parties" of the Bordigist current). But it would be singularly naive to think that the ruling class and its specialised institutions are not using, right now, all possible means to prevent this current from strengthening itself when the proletariat develops its consciousness, with the ultimate aim of liquidating it altogether. One of these means is obviously police repression. But in the context of the "democracies" which govern the industrialised countries, this is an instrument that the bourgeoisie uses very sparingly, in order to avoid unmasking itself. There is also infiltration by specialist organs of the capitalist state, with the aim of informing the latter and above all of destroying communist organisations from the inside. Thus, in 1981, the ICC unmasked the individual Chenier, whose activities helped to exacerbate the crisis the ICC was going through at the time and to provoke the loss of a number of militants. Finally, and above all, our organisation has exposed the particular role played today by the parasitic milieu as an instrument for the bourgeoisie's attack on the proletarian political milieu.
The attack by parasitism against the proletarian political milieu and against the ICC
This is not a new concern for our organisation. Thus, just after our 11th Congress, one year ago, we wrote:
"It is preferable for the bourgeoisie to erect a wall of silence around the positions and even the existence of revolutionary organisations. This is why the work of denigrating them, and sabotaging their intervention, is undertaken by a whole series of groups and parasitic elements whose function is to drive away individuals who are coming towards class positions, to disgust them with any participation in the difficult task of developing a proletarian political milieu.
All the communist groups have been subjected to the attacks of parasitism, but the latter has paid particular attention to the ICC, because it is today the most important organisation in the proletarian milieu" (International Review 82).
It was thus on the basis of a whole series of attacks by parasitism on the proletarian political milieu and the ICC in particular that the Congress discussed and adopted a resolution from which we will cite certain extracts:
"The notion of political parasitism is not an innovation of the ICC. It belongs to the history of the workers' movement. Thus, in the struggle of the General Council of the International Workingmen's Association, Marx described Bakunin's Alliance as "parasitic". The parasitic groups do not belong to the proletarian political milieu. In no sense are they an expression of the effort of the class to become conscious. On the contrary, they represent an attempt to abort this effort. In this sense their activity completes the work of the forces of the bourgeoisie in sabotaging the intervention of revolutionary organisations within the class.
What animated the activity and determines the existence of these groups is not at all the defence of the class principles of the proletariat, but at best the spirit of the little sect or "circle of friends", the affirmation of individualism and individuality vis-a-vis the proletarian political milieu. The point of departure of the parasitic approach, which can lead to the formation of a parasitic group, is based on personal scores, resentments, frustrations and other squalid concerns typical of the ideology of the decomposing and futureless petty bourgeoisie. In this sense, what characterises a parasitic group is not the defence of a programmatic platform but essentially a political attitude to revolutionary organisations, and more particularly towards the main pole of regroupment, the ICC.
The function of parasitism is thus:
- to reinforce confusions in the class;
- to develop attacks on marxist organisations with a view to the destruction of the proletarian political milieu;
- to fuel the bourgeoisie's campaigns against communism by spreading the idea that any marxist organisation that lays claim to Lenin's combat for the party is by nature condemned to Stalinist degeneration;
- to ridicule the organisational principles of the proletariat by inoculating the idea that the intransigent defence of these positions can only lead to sectarianism.
All these themes, developed in the offensive of parasitism against the ICC, are a confirmation of the active contribution by the parasitic groups to the bourgeois state's attack on marxism since the collapse of the eastern bloc. They are there to sabotage the efforts of the proletariat to rediscover its revolutionary perspective. In this sense, the parasitic groups are a highly favourable soil for the manipulations of the state".
This doesn't mean that the parasitic groups are simple organs of the capitalist state, as are for example the leftist groups who defend a capitalist programme. Similarly it is certain that most of the elements of the parasitic milieu, whether organised or informal, have no direct link with the organs of the state. But bearing in mind the approach which animates this milieu, the organisational and political laxity which characterises it, the friendship networks that run through it, its predilection for all kinds of intrigues, nothing could be easier than for a few specialists to infiltrate it and guide it in the direction which most favours the action of the bourgeoisie against the communist organisations.
The organisational arming of the ICC
The 12th Congress of the section in France also had to make a balance sheet, one year after the international congress, of its capacity to put into practice the perspectives that the latter had drawn out. We will be brief on this point because, despite all its importance, it was secondary in relation to what has been developed above, and to a large extent subordinated to the latter. The resolution adopted by this Congress says:
" ... the 11th Congress affirmed that the ICC is much stronger than it was at its previous congress, that it is incomparably better armed to confront its responsibilities faced with future upsurges of the class, even if, obviously, it is still in a state of convalescence" (point 11).
"This does not mean that the combat that we have waged now has to end... The ICC must carry it on through being vigilant at all times, through its determination to identify each weakness and deal with it without delay ... In reality, the history of the workers' movement, including that of the ICC, teaches us, and the debate has amply confirmed this, that the combat for the defence of the organisation is permanent and without respite" (point 13).
All this has been fully confirmed in the past year for our section in France. Thus, faced with an event as important as the strikes at the end of 95, it was immediately able to identify the trap which the bourgeoisie had set for the working class and to intervene actively in the class.
The 12th Congress of our section in France has once again shown how the combat for the defence of the organisation is a long term combat, a permanent fight which cannot be relaxed. But for revolutionaries, difficulty is not a factor of demoralisation. On the contrary. As the vanguard of a class which draws from the daily struggles it wages against the capitalist enemy the strength that will allow it to change the world, communists can only strengthen their own conviction, their own determination, through the struggle against the attacks of the enemy class, such as we are seeing today, and against the difficulties
they encounter in their activity.
ICC
12th Congress of Revolution Intemationale
Resolution on the International Situation
1) In the year since the 11th ICC Congress, the state of the world economy has fully confirmed the perspective put forward at the Congress: the bourgeoisie's boasted "recovery" was no "end of the tunnel" for the capitalist economy, but only a moment in its plunge into a crisis without end. The 11th Congress emphasized that one of the main sources of this "recovery" - which we described at the time as a 'jobless recovery" - was a headlong flight into debt, which could only lead to new convulsions in the financial world, and a new dive into open recession. These financial convulsions - dramatic problems in the banking sector, and a spectacular collapse in the dollar - have been affecting capitalism since the beginning of autumn 1995, and have been merely the precursors of a new fall in the growth rates of most of the industrialised countries since the beginning of winter, with even more gloomy forecasts for 1996.
Irreversible deepening of the economic crisis
2) One of the most striking illustrations of the world economy's worsening state, is the difficult situation of the greatest power on the European continent. Germany today is confronted with the worst unemployment (4 million) since World War II, hitting not just the East, but spreading to the more "prosperous" Western regions. It is symbolic of the German economy's unprecedented difficulties that Daimler, one of its leading companies, has just announced that its shareholders will receive no dividends: Daimler has just suffered its first losses (and substantial ones at that) since the war. This has put an end to one of the myths so complacently put about by the bourgeoisie (and believed by some groups in the proletarian milieu) following the Eastern bloc's collapse and the reunification of Germany: the myth of a recovery fuelled by the reconstruction of the backward Eastern regions. As the ICC said, against the reigning euphoria of the time, it was impossible for the Eastern bloc countries emerging from the Stalinist variety of state capitalism to provide any breath of oxygen for the world economy. More particularly, the reconstruction of East Germany demanded a gigantic capital investment. Although this raised the German economy's growth rates for a few years, it was only at the cost of massive debt, which could only lead to an abrupt slowdown, mirroring the capitalist economy as a whole.
3) The plunge into open recession by Germany, which model of economic rectitude, is all the more significant of the depth of the crisis today, in that it is accompanied by the collapse of another "model": Japan's record-breaking dynamism and growth rates. Whereas Japan's growth rates ran at about 4-5% throughout the 80s, they have not risen above 1% since 1992. Five government recovery plans have had no effect: growth rates have continued to fall, reaching 0.3% in 1995. And not only have the recovery plans failed to improve the situation, the debt on which they are based has only made it worse. As we have said for a long time, the "remedies" of the capitalist economy must eventually worsen the disease and kill the patient a little more. The Japanese economy today is facing a mountain of$460 billion of bad debt, as a result of the frenzied speculation of the late 80s and early 90s. This is all the more catastrophic, not just for the world's second economic power but for the entire world economy, in that Japan constitutes the world's savings bank, providing 50% of the OECD countries' finance capital.
4) As for the world's greatest power, whose results last year were less sombre than those of its immediate followers, growth rates for 1996 are forecast at 2%, a clear decline from the rate of the previous year. For example, the 40,000 redundancies announced by ATT - the symbol of one of the economy's leading sectors, telecommunications - signify the American economy's worsening condition. And if, for the moment, the US is managing better than its rivals, this is only thanks to unprecedentedly brutal attacks against the workers (many of whom are forced to hold down two jobs to survive), and to using the advantages conferred by its special status as world super-power: financial, monetary, diplomatic and military pressure all put to the service of the trade war it is waging against its competitors.
Concretely, in a capitalist world stifled by generalised over-production, the strongest can only breathe better at the expense of its rivals: the German and Japanese bourgeoisies are the first to make this bitter observation. And this trade war is getting worse, since the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the disappearance of the Western bloc which inevitably followed, have meant that the coordination established for years between the countries of the Western bloc is more and more giving way to the rule of "look after number one", which can only exacerbate capitalism's convulsions.
The logic of "every man for himself" sharpens imperialist rivalries
5) "Every man for himself': this rule finds its most spectacular expression in the field of imperialist antagonisms. At the very moment of the Eastern bloc's collapse, the ICC denounced the bourgeoisie's false prophecies of a "new world order" of peace and prosperity. The division of the world into two blocs was not the cause of imperialist antagonisms, but their consequence, one of the means adopted by the different countries of the planet to confront them. Far from putting an end to antagonisms between states, and military confrontations, the disappearance of the bloc system that had emerged from World War II unleashed antagonisms which the bloc system had previously kept within certain limits. Although this put on the historical agenda the formation of new imperialist blocs - a perspective which could not take immediate effect given the relative weakness of the new potential bloc leader, Germany, in relation to the world's greatest power - in the immediate it led to an explosion of "look after number one", in an imperialist landscape marked by an upheaval of alliances unprecedented since the beginning of the century. The international situation has since only confirmed this perspective. And while the tendency towards the formation of new blocs appeared clearly at the beginning of the 1990s, it has since been replaced by the rule of "look after number one", one of the most significant expressions of capitalist society's general decomposition.
6) The ICC's 11th Congress showed that the effect of an unbridled policy of "look after number one" was "a considerable weakening, even a crisis, of American world leadership", whose most striking expressions were the estrangement between the US and Britain - the world's two most faithful allies since the beginning of the century - and the fact that the world's greatest power was virtually absent from the then most important zone of imperialist conflict, Yugoslavia. Since then, the estrangement between the two Anglo-Saxon powers has not healed - far from it. By contrast, the US has spectacularly improved its position in ex-Yugoslavia. Since last summer, and its support for the Croat offensive in the Krajina, the US has succeeded in radically reversing the situation in its favour. Thanks to its military superiority - its main means of action internationally - the US has completely eclipsed the British and French dominance in the region, which the two powers had exercised for years though UNPROFOR, and were proposing to strengthen with the creation of the Rapid Reaction Force (RRF). The USA's return in strength was not merely a response to the RRF. Whereas the Franco-British tandem's only ally on the spot was Serbia, the USA has succeeded today in bringing onto its side, willingly or not, not only their original Muslim allies, but also the "friends" of Germany, the Croats, and the "enemies" of yesterday, the Belgrade Serbs, thanks to the latter's divorce from the Pale Serbs.
7) The USA's recovery of the initiative is not limited to the situation in ex-Yugoslavia, but also extends to its traditional zones of hegemony, such as the Middle East, and to the Far East. The Sharm El Sheik summit on terrorism in Israel was thus a means for Uncle Sam to remind everybody who is the godfather in the region. The USA's firmness in the defence of Taiwan against China's posturing was the clearest warning to the latter's imperialist ambitions, as well as those of Japan (the resolution of the 11th International Congress already highlighted both powers' efforts at rearmament). Faced with this powerful American comeback, the second fiddles France and Britain have no choice but to keep a low profile. They came reluctantly to the Sharm El Sheik "Clinton show". And it was to avoid being totally side-lined that they reassigned their troops from UNPROFOR to I-FOR, which is a creature under the control of the USA, just as France was forced to take part in "Desert Storm" in 1990-91, despite being fundamentally opposed to it. Similarly, the rapprochement between the world's greatest power and its main rival, Germany, over ex-Yugoslavia has been principally to the benefit of the former. And although Germany's Croatian ally has conquered positions that it has coveted since independence, this apparent success for Germany has been largely thanks to the US, which is an uncomfortable position for an imperialist power, especially when it is posing as a candidate to the leadership of a new bloc. Like France and Britain, and in particular through its participation in I-FOR, Germany is thus obliged to submit to the conditions imposed by the USA.
Resistance to American leadership increases world chaos
8) The return to the limelight of the world's greatest power does not mean that it has definitively overcome the threat to its leadership. This threat, as we emphasized at our last international congress, springs essentially from the fact that today, there no longer exists the essential precondition for any real solidity and stability in alliances between bourgeois states in the imperialist arena: the existence of a common enemy threatening their security. The powers of the ex-Western bloc may be forced, at one time or another, to submit to Washington's diktats, but it is out of the question for them to remain faithful on a durable basis. On the contrary, they will seize any opportunity to sabotage the orientations and dispositions imposed by the USA. So the fact that Britain has been forced to toe the US line in ex-Yugoslavia has in no way re-established the former's allegiance to its transatlantic big brother. This is why the latter has renewed its pressure over the Irish question, notably by foisting the responsibility for the renewed IRA bombing campaign (which it is probably behind) onto London. This is why Chirac's recent journey to Beirut represents France's attempt to go poaching in America's Middle Eastern hunting grounds, after sponsoring the Barcelona conference designed to check US progress in the Mediterranean. In fact, the recent evolution of imperialist relations demonstrates the complete upheaval of alliances, their utter instability, following the end of the cold war bloc system. Old "friendships" of 40 or even 80 years' standing are breaking up. There is a deep rift between London and Washington. Similarly, every day that passes aggravates the differences between France and Germany, in other words the two leading architects of the European edifice.
9) Concerning these last aspects, it is important to emphasize the driving forces behind these imperialist alliances. The new Entente Cordiale between France and Britain can only be based on the estrangement between Washington and London on the one hand, and between Paris and Berlin on the other. The fact that France and Britain are both second-rate, historically declining, powers of essentially equal strength, confronted by the pressure of the two great powers - USA and Germany - confers a certain solidity on this new Entente Cordiale. This is all the more true in that there exists within Europe a fundamental, insurmountable antagonism between Britain and Germany, whereas despite three wars, there has been room for long periods of "friendship" between the latter and France. Indeed, some sectors of the French bourgeoisie rallied to the German alliance even during World War II. However, the rising power of German imperialism in recent years cannot help but revive the French bourgeoisie's old fears of its too powerful neighbour. Even without a complete break between Paris and Berlin, all this leads to a profound degradation in Franco-German relations. Even if France would like to play the umpire between its two great neighbours, such an alliance of the three is in fact impossible. In this sense, any real construction of a political union in Europe is a utopia, and can never be anything but a domain of mystification. The impotence of European institutions, illustrated in ex-Yugoslavia, where it gave the USA the chance to make its comeback in the region, will continue to appear in the future. America will continue to stir up the ant heap, as it did in the Balkans, to prevent any gathering of discontent directed against it. More generally, and as the ICC has said for a long time, the imperialist scene can only be marked by growing instability, with advances and retreats by the USA, and above all the continued and growing use of brute force, the clash of arms, and horrible massacres.
Bourgeois offensive against renewed class struggle
10) As we said in the resolution of the last International Congress, "More than ever, the struggle of the proletariat remains the only hope for the future of human society" (Point 14). And this last year has clearly illustrated the words of this resolution:
"Particularly since 1992, [the workers'] struggles have been testimony to the proletariat's capacity to get back onto the path of struggle, thus confirming that the historic course has not been overturned. They are also testimony to the enormous difficulties which it is encountering on this path, owing to the breadth and depth of the reflux [following the collapse of the stalinist regimes, the accompanying ideological campaigns, and everything that has followed]. The workers' struggles are developing in a jagged, sinuous manner, full of advances and retreats" (ibid). "These obstacles have allowed the unions to get their grip on the workers' combativity, channelling them towards "actions" entirelv under union control. However, the unions' present manoeuvres have also, and above all, a preventative aim: that of strengthening their hold on the workers before the latter deploy far more their combativity, which will necessarily result from their growing anger faced with the increasingly brutal attacks demanded by the crisis" (Point 17).
The French social movements of late 1995: a bourgeois manoeuvre against the international proletariat
The strikes in France at the end of autumn 1995 have thoroughly confirmed this perspective: " ... to prevent the working class from entering the combat with its own weapons, the bourgeoisie has taken the lead, and has pushed the workers into a premature struggle, completely under the control of the unions. It has not left the workers time to mobilise at their own rhythm and with their own methods" (International Review no.84). They have also confirmed that, as we have already pointed out, the bourgeoisie organises and carries out its actions against the working class at an international level:
- through the unprecedented media coverage of these strikes (whereas social movements which really worried the bourgeoisie have suffered from a total media blackout in other countries); a media coverage which tried in particular to exploit the reference to May 68, both to fix workers' attention on the events in France, and to distort their nature, while at the same time distorting the nature of 68 itself;
- the Belgian bourgeoisie's use, with the same success, of an identical repeat of the manoeuvre which trapped the workers in France, on the basis of this media campaign.
11) The renewed strength and credibility of the union apparatus, which was a specific characteristic of the social movements in France at the end of 95, is not a new phenomenon, either in France or internationally. This was already pointed out a year go by the last ICC Congress: " ... it is important to show that the tendencies towards going beyond the unions, which appeared in 1992 in Italy, have not been confirmed - far from it. In 1994 the "monster" demonstration in Rome was a masterpiece of union control. Similarly, the tendency towards spontaneous unification in the street, which appeared (although only embryonically) in autumn 1993 in the Ruhr in Germany, has since given way to large scale union manoeuvres, such as the engineering "strike" of early 1995, which have been entirely controlled by the bourgeoisie" (Point 15). This renewed credibility of the unions was one result of the Eastern bloc's collapse at the end of the 80s: "reformist ideology will weigh very heavily on the struggle in the coming period, making the activity of the unions much easier" ("Theses on the economic and political crisis in the USSR and the countries of the Eastern bloc", September 1989). This sprang from the fact, not that the workers still had any illusions in the "socialist paradise", but that the existence of a kind of society presented as "non-capitalist" seemed to mean that something other than capitalism could exist on earth. The end of these regimes was presented as "the end of history". Given that the terrain par excellence of the unions and of unionism is the improvement of the proletariat's living conditions in capitalism, the events of 1989, aggravated by a whole series of blows dealt the working class since then (due to the Gulf War, the explosion of the USSR, the war in ex-Yugoslavia), could only lead to the return to influence of the trades unions, which can be seen in all countries today, and which was particularly highlighted by the events in France at the end of 1995. A return to strength which has not come overnight, but which is the result of a whole process in which "radical" forms of unionism (COBAS etc, in Italy, SUD and FSU in France, etc) have reinforced union ideology, to leave the limelight to the traditional union hierarchies.
What is today's balance of forces between the classes?
12) As a result, in the main capitalist countries, the working class has been brought back to a situation which is comparable to that of the 1970s as far as its relation to unions and unionism is concerned: a situation where the class, in general, struggled within the unions, followed their instructions and their slogans, and in the final analysis, left things up to them. In this sense, the bourgeoisie has temporarily succeeded in wiping out from working class consciousness the lessons learnt during the 80s, following the repeated experience of confrontation with the unions. The ruling class will make the most, for as long as possible, of this strengthening of the unions and unionism, which will force the working class into a long period of confrontation with the latter (as it did during the 70s and up until the end of the 80s, even if this period does not last as long) before it can once again get out of their grip. At the same time, it will have to see through all the ideological campaigns around the question of the "internationalisation of the economy", which the bourgeoisie uses to try to conceal the real cause of its attacks against the proletariat: the dead-end crisis of the capitalist system. The unions will propose to "counter" these campaigns, by dragging the workers onto the rotten ground of nationalism, and competition with their class brothers in other countries.
13) The working class thus still has a long way to go. But the difficulties and obstacles it encounters should not be a factor of demoralisation, and it is up to revolutionaries to combat any such demoralisation resolutely. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, knows perfectly well the potential that the proletariat bears within it. This is why it organises manoeuvres like that at the end of 1995. As revolutionaries have always said, and as the bourgeoisie itself confirms, the crisis of the capitalist economy is the proletariat's best ally, which will open the workers' eyes to the dead-end in which today's world finds itself, and give them the determination to destroy it despite all the obstacles which every sector of the ruling class will not fail to strew in their path.
I CC, June1996
Following the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in eastern Europe at the end of the 80s, and with all the media campaigns about the 'death of communism', the 'end of the class struggle', and even the 'disappearance of the working class', the world proletariat suffered a massive ideological defeat, a defeat aggravated by the events that followed, in particular the Gulf war in 1991, which further amplified its feelings of powerlessness. Since then, notably with the big movements in the Autumn of 92 in Italy, the proletariat rediscovered the path of the class struggle; this was undeniable even if it was still fraught with difficulties. What fed this revival of proletarian struggles were the incessant and increasingly brutal attacks which the bourgeoisies of all countries were forced to unleash as its system sank deeper into an insoluble crisis. The ruling class knows quite well that it can only get these attacks through, and prevent them provoking a radicalisation of workers' resistance, if it sets up a whole political arsenal aimed at derailing and sterilising the class struggle. To do this, it has to be able to count on the effectiveness of those organs of the bourgeois state in the ranks of the workers: the trade unions. In other words, the bourgeoisie's ability to impose its will on the exploited class depends and will continue to depend on the credibility of the unions and of trade unionism in general. This is demonstrated very clearly by the strikes in France and Belgium at the end of 1995. It is also being demonstrated at the time of writing by the union agitation in the main European country: Germany.
In our two previous issues of the International Review, we examined the means employed by the bourgeoisie, during the strike movement in France at the end of 1995, to take the initiative faced with a perspective of the resurgence of workers' struggles. The analysis which we have developed on these events can be summarised by the following extracts from the article that we published in IR 84, at a time when the movement was not yet over:
"In reality, the French proletariat is the target of a massive manoeuvre aimed at weakening its consciousness and combativity; a manoeuvre, moreover, which is also aimed at the working class in other countries, designed at making it draw the wrong lessons from the events in France"(‘Behind the unions, struggle leads to defeat').
And the first wrong lesson that the bourgeoisie wants the working class to draw is that the unions are genuine organs of the proletarian struggle:
"This renewed credibility of the unions was one of the bourgeoisie's fundamental objectives, a vital precondition for dealing blows still more brutal than today's. Only on this condition can it hope to sabotage the struggles which will certainly surge up against these new attacks "(ibid).
In number 85 of our Review, we indicated how, almost at the same time as the manoeuvre by the French bourgeoisie, the Belgian bourgeoisie, taking advantage of the latter, made a carbon copy which incorporated all its main ingredients:
- a series of capitalist attacks affecting all sectors of the working class (in this case, an attack on social security), but which were especially provocative for a particular sector (in France, the rail way workers and Paris transport workers; in Belgium, the railway workers and the national airline workers); the 'Juppe method' , concentrating in a short space of time an avalanche of attacks, carried out in a cynical and arrogant way, is all part of the manoeuvre: the discontent has to be detonated by;
- very radical appeals by the unions for the extension of the workers' riposte, putting forward the example of the 'vanguard' sector chosen by the bourgeoisie;
- a retreat by the bourgeoisie on the most provocative measures; the unions then cry 'victory' for the mobilisation they have organised, the 'leading' sectors then go back to work and this demobilises the other sectors.
The result of these manoeuvres has been that the bourgeoisie has been able to push through the measures which have the broadest effects, the ones which hit the whole working class, while giving the impression of having had to retreat in the face of the workers' struggle, which lends credit to the idea that they achieved a victory under the leadership of the trade unions. This benefits the government, the bosses and the trade unions. What appears to many workers to have been a 'victory' or a semi-victory (it was not hard for the great mass of workers to see that on the essential questions, like social security, the government did not retreat) and was, in reality, a defeat - a defeat at the material level, of course, but above all a political defeat since the main enemy of the working class, the most dangerous because it presents itself as its ally, the union apparatus, increased its grip and its power of mystification over the workers.
The analyses of the communist groups
The ICC's analyses of the social movements at the end of 1995, presented both in the IR, its territorial press and at public meetings, were met with interest and approval by the majority of its readers and those who came to its meetings. On the other hand, these analyses were not shared by most of the other organisations of the proletarian political milieu. In the previous issue of this Review, we showed how the two organisations who comprise the IBRP, the CWO and Battaglia Comunista, fell into the bourgeoisie's trap precisely because they were unable to identify the manoeuvre. These comrades, for example, made the reproach that our analyses lead to the idea that the workers are imbeciles because they allowed themselves to be taken in by the bourgeoisie's manoeuvres. More generally, they consider that, with our vision, the proletarian revolution is impossible because the workers will always be the victims of mystifications set up by the bourgeoisie. Nothing could be more wrong.
In the first place, the fact that today the workers have fallen into the bourgeoisie's trap does not mean that this will always be the case. The history of the workers' movement is full of examples in which the same workers who allowed themselves to be mobilised behind the flags of the bourgeoisie were subsequently capable of waging exemplary and even revolutionary struggles. It was the same Russian and German workers who had been slaughtering each other under their national banners in 1914 who launched themselves into the proletarian revolution in 1917, and who forced the bourgeoisie to put an end to the imperialist butchery in 1918. More generally, history has taught us that the working class is capable of drawing the lessons from its defeats, of springing the traps in which it has previously been ensnared.
And it is precisely the task of revolutionary minorities, of the communist organisations, to contribute actively to such a development of consciousness in the class, in particular by clearly and resolutely denouncing the traps that the bourgeoisie has laid.
Thus, in July 1917, the Russian bourgeoisie tried to provoke a premature insurrection by the proletariat of the capital. The most advanced fraction of the working class, the Bolshevik party, identified the trap and it is clear that without its far-seeing attitude which aimed to stop the Petrograd workers from rushing into an adventure, the latter would have suffered a bloody defeat, and that this would have blocked the movement that culminated in the victorious insurrection of October 1917. In January 1919 (see our articles on the German revolution in the IR), the German bourgeoisie reissued the same manoeuvre. This time, it was successful: the proletariat of Berlin, isolated, was crushed by the Freikorps, and this dealt a decisive blow to the revolution in Germany and on a world scale. The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was able, alongside the majority of the leadership of the newly formed Communist Party, to understand the nature of the trap that the bourgeoisie had laid. On the other hand, Karl Liebknecht, even though he had been hardened by years of revolutionary militancy, notably during the course of the imperialist war, did fall into the trap. Thanks to his prestige, and despite himself, he participated in a tragic defeat of the working class, one which cost him his life and the lives of many of his comrades, including Rosa Luxemburg herself. But even though the latter had done all she could to warn the proletariat and her own comrades against the bourgeoisie's trap, she never thought that those who had fallen into it were idiots. On the contrary, her last article, written on the eve of her death, 'Order reigns in Berlin', insists on an essential idea: that the proletariat must learn from its defeats. Similarly, by affirming that the workers in France and Belgium at the end of 1995 have been the victims of a trap laid by the bourgeoisie, the I CC never thought or implied that the workers were idiots. In fact,
the very opposite is the case.
If the bourgeoisie took the trouble to construct such a sophisticated trap for the working class, the building of which involved the government, the bosses, the unions and even the leftist groups, it is precisely because it does not underestimate the working class. It knows perfectly well that the proletariat today is not the proletariat of the 1930s, that, unlike with the latter, the economic crisis is not driving it deeper into demoralisation but tends to push it towards increasingly powerful and conscious struggles. In fact, in order to understand the significance of the bourgeois manoeuvre at the end of 1995, it is first necessary to have recognised that we are not now in a historic course dominated by the counter-revolution, in which the mortal crisis of capitalism can only result in world imperialist war, but in a course toward class confrontations. One of the best proofs of this reality can be found in the kind of themes and methods used by the unions in these recent manoeuvres. During the 1930s, the ideological campaigns of the left and the unions were dominated by anti-fascism, the 'defence of democracy' and nationalism, and they succeeded in derailing the combativity of the proletariat into a tragic impasse and mobilising it for the imperialist butchery (the best examples of this were the June 1936 strikes in France and the civil war in Spain). If at the end of 1995 the unions were very low key about such themes, if by contrast they adopted a very 'workerist' language, putting forward the classic demands and methods of struggle of the working class, it's because they know quite well that they could not have managed such a massive mobilisation or restored their credibility in the eyes of the workers by making their usual speeches about the 'national interest' and other openly bourgeois mystifications. The national flag or the defence of democracy could be effective in the inter-war period, but now the unions need calls for 'extension', for 'the unity of all sectors of the working class', for sovereign general assemblies. But we should note that if the current discourse of the unions did succeed in deceiving the majority of the working class, it also succeeded in deceiving organisations which claim the heritage of the communist left. The best example of this is probably provided by the articles published in no. 435 of the newspaper Le Proletaire, organ of the International Communist Party ((lCP), which in Italy publishes II Comunista, ie one of the numerous ICP's of the Bordigist tendency.
The digressions of Le Proletaire
This issue of Le Proletaire devotes four pages out of ten to the 1995 strikes in France. Many details about these events are provided, and even false details which prove either that the author was poorly informed, or, and this is more probable, that he has taken his desires for reality[1]. But the most striking thing in this issue of Le Proletaire is the two page article entitled 'The ICC against the strikes'. This title already says a great deal about the tone of the whole article, in which we discover that:
- the ICC is the emulator of Thorez, the French Stalinist leader, who at the end of the second world war declared that "strikes are weapons of the trusts";
- the ICC expresses itself "just like a scab";
- we are "modern Proudhonists" and "deserters (their emphasis) of the proletarian struggle".
Obviously, this article immediately places itself alongside the parasitic milieu, for which everything is fair when it comes to denigrating the ICC. In this sense, Le Proletaire is now making its little contribution (deliberate or unconscious?) to this milieu's attack on our organisation. Of course we are not against polemics between organisations of the revolutionary milieu, and we have always shown this in our press. But a polemic, however vehement, implies that we are in the same camp in the class war. For example, we don't polemicise with the leftist organisations; we denounce them as organs of the capitalist class, something Le Proletaire is incapable of doing since it defines a group like Lutte Ouvriere, the flower of French Trotskyism, as "centrist". Le Proletaire reserves its sharpest arrows for organisations of the communist left like the ICC. If we are "deserters", it means that we have betrayed our class, thank you very much. Thanks also to the parasitic groups for whom the ICC has gone over to Stalinism. Nevertheless, the ICP should one day work out what camp it is in: that of the serious organisations of the communist left, or that of the parasites whose sole reason for existing is to discredit these organisations, to the unique advantage of the bourgeoisie.
Having said that, while Le Proletaire seeks to teach us a lesson about our analyses of the 1995 strikes, what its article demonstrates above all is:
- its lack of clarity, not to say its opportunism, on the question which is so vital for the working class, the question of trade unionism;
- its crass ignorance of the history of the workers' movement, which leads it to an incredible underestimation of the enemy class.
The union question: Achilles Heel of the ICP and Bordigism
The ICP talks about the ICC being "anti-trade union on principle", and in doing so proves that it does not consider the union question to be one of principle Le Proletaire tries to be very radical when it asserts:
"The union apparatuses have become, as the result of a process of degeneration accelerated by the international victory of the counter-revolution, instruments of class collaboration", and, even more, "if the big union organisations obstinately refuse to use these weapons (authentically proletarian methods of struggle) this is not simply because they have a bad leadership whom it would be enough to replace: decades of degeneration and of domestication by the bourgeoisie have emptied these big union apparatuses of their last class vestiges and have transformed them into organs of class collaboration, trading proletarian demands for social peace ... This fact is enough to show the falsity of the traditional Trotskyist perspective of conquering or reconquering for the proletarian struggle these apparatuses of professionals in conciliating workers' interests with the demands of capitalism. On the other hand, there are a thousand examples to show that it is very possible to transform a Trotskyist into a union bureaucrat ..."
In reality, what the ICP shows here is its lack of clarity and firmness on the nature of trade unionism. It doesn't denounce the latter as a weapon of the bourgeois class, but only the "union apparatuses". In doing so, despite its words, it doesn't manage to break free of the Trotskyist vision: nowadays you can find very similar statements in the press of a group like Lutte Ouvriere. What Le Proletaire, which considers itself to be faithful to the tradition of the Italian communist left, refuses to admit, is that any trade union form, whether small or large, legal and openly working at the highest levels of the bourgeois state, or illegal (as was the case with Solidamosc in Poland for several years, and the Workers' Commissions in Franco's Spain) can be nothing else but an organ for the defence of capitalism. Le Proletaire accuses the ICC of being hostile "to any organisation for the immediate defence of the proletariat". In doing so it reveals either its ignorance of our position or, most likely, its bad faith. We have never said that the working class must not organise itself to wage its struggles. What we do say, in line with that current of the communist left which Bordigism treats with such disdain, the German left, is that, in the present historic period, such an organisation is constituted by the general assemblies of the workers in struggle, by strike committees nominated by these assemblies and revocable by them, by central strike committees composed of delegates from the different strike committees. By their nature, these organisations exist by and for the struggle and are destined to disappear once the struggle is over. Their main difference with the unions in the past is precisely that they are not permanent and thus are not able to be absorbed by the capitalist state. This is precisely the lesson that Bordigism has never wanted to draw after decades of "betrayal" by all the union, whatever their form, their initial aims, their political positions and their founders, whether they see themselves as being for 'reforms' or for 'class struggle', or even as 'revolutionary'. In decadent capitalism, when the state tends to absorb all the structures of society, when the system is incapable of according the least lasting improvement in the living conditions of the working class, any permanent organisation which takes as its aim the defence of these living conditions is destined to be integrated into the state, to become one of its cogs. To quote what Marx said about the trade unions last century, as Le Proletaire does in the hope of shutting us up, just isn't enough to earn the title of 'marxist'. After all, the Trotskyists are very happy to resort to other quotes from Marx and Engels against the anarchists of their era to attack the position that the Bordigists defend today alongside the whole communist left: the refusal to participate in the electoral game. Le Proletaire's method here shows only that it has not understood a vital aspect of marxism - that it is a living and dialectical way of thinking. What was true yesterday, in the ascendant period of capitalism - the necessity for the working class to form trade unions, to participate in elections or to support certain national liberation struggles, is no longer true today, in decadent capitalism. To stick to the letter of quotes from Marx while turning your back on the conditions he was addressing, while refusing to apply the method of this great revolutionary, merely demonstrates the poverty of its own thought.
But the worst of it isn't this poverty in itself, it's that it leads to the sowing of illusions in the class about the possibility of a 'real trade unionism'; it's that it leads straight towards opportunism. And we find expressions of this opportunism in the articles of Le Proletaire when it shows the greatest timidity in denouncing the unions' game:
"What we can and must reproach the present unions with. ...". Revolutionaries don't reproach the unions with anything, any more than they reproach the bourgeoisie with exploiting the workers or the cops with repressing their struggles: they denounce them.
"... the organisations at the head of the movement, the CGT and FO, who to all appearances had been negotiating behind the scenes with the government to put a stop to the movement ...". The union leaders don't 'negotiate' with the government as though they had different interests, they march hand in hand with the latter against the working class. And this is not "to all appearances", it is certain! This is what is indispensable for the workers to know and this is what Le Proletaire is incapable of telling them.
The danger of the opportunist position of Le Proletaire on the union question becomes all the more clear when it writes:
"But if we reject the possibility of reconquering the union apparatuses, we don't draw from this the conclusion that we must reject working in these same unions, as long as this work is done at the base, in contact with the workers and not in the hierarchical organs, and on a class basis". In other words, when in an absolutely healthy and necessary way workers disgusted by union intrigues want to tear up their union cards, there will be a militant of the ICP to speak up like any Trotskyist: "don't do that comrades, we must stay and work in the unions!". What work, other than toiling at the base to restore the image of organs which are the enemies of the working class?
For the choice is clear:
- either you really want to carry out a militant activity "on a class basis", in which case one of the essential points you'd have to defend is the anti -working class nature of the unions, not simply because of their hierarchy, but as a whole; what clarity could the ICP militant bring to his comrades at work by saying: "the unions are our enemies, we have to fight outside and against them, but I'm staying inside them"?[2];
- or you want to stay "in contact" with the union "base", to make yourself "understood" by the workers who compose it, which means opposing the "base" to the "rotten hierarchy", ie the classic position of Trotskyism; certainly this means doing "work", but not on a "class basis", since you are preserving the illusion that certain structures of the union, the enterprise branch for example, can still be organs of the workers' struggle.
We really want to believe that the ICP militant, unlike his Trotskyist colleague, does not aspire to be a union bureaucrat. But he will still be carrying out the same anti-working class "work" of mystifying the nature of the trade unions. Thus, the application of the ICP's position on the union question has once again made a small contribution to demobilising the workers in the face of the danger represented by the unions. But this demobilising activity doesn't stop there. It comes out in broad daylight once again when the ICP shows a complete underestimation of the capacity of the bourgeoisie to carry out elaborate manoeuvres against the working class.
Underestimating the class enemy
In another article in Le Proletaire, 'After this winter's strikes, prepare the struggles ahead', we read:
"The movement this winter shows precisely that if, in these circumstances, the unions have shown an unusual flexibility and allowed the spontaneity of the most combative workers to express itself, rather than opposing it as they normally do, this tolerance allowed them to keep hold of the leadership of the struggle without any great difficulty, and thus to decide to a very great extent its orientation, the way it evolved and its outcome. When they judged that the moment had come, they gave the signal for the return to work, abandoning in the blink of an eye the central demand of the movement, without the strikers being able to come up with any alternative. The rank and file and democratic appearance of the way the movement was conducted was even used against the objective needs of the movement: it wasn't the thousands of daily general assemblies of strikers who gave the movement the centralisation and direction it needed, even if these organs did allow the massive participation of the workers. Only the union organisations could make up for this lack and so the struggle was suspended according to slogans and initiatives launched centrally by the union organisations and passed down through the apparatus to all the general assemblies. The climate of unity reigning in the movement was such that the mass of workers not only did not feel or express disagreements with the orientations of the unions, except with the orientations of the CFDT and their leadership of the struggle, but even saw their actions as one of the most important factors for victory".
Here Le Proletaire gives us the secret of the attitude of the unions in the strikes of 1995. Perhaps this is the result of reading what the ICC had already written about them. The problem is that when it comes to drawing the lessons from this obvious reality, Le Proletaire, in the same article, tells us that the movement was "the most important of the French proletariat since the general strike of May-June 68", that it salutes the "strength" which imposed a "partial retreat by the government". Decidedly, coherence of thought is not Le Proletaire's strongpoint. Do we have to recall here that opportunism, which is always trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, also avoids it like the plague?
For our part, we concluded that this movement was not able to prevent the government from pushing through its main anti-working class measures and that it had succeeded in restoring the image of the unions, as Le Proletaire shows very clearly. This movement was not initiated against the will of the unions or the government; they wanted it to happen precisely to obtain these objectives. Le Proletaire tells us that the feature of this movement "which must become an acquisition for the future struggles was the general tendency to breakout of sectional barriers and the limits of the enterprise or administration and spread to all sectors". This is quite true. The only thing is that this took place with the blessing, or rather, very often, the direct impulsion of the unions. The fact that workers have rediscovered a proletarian method of struggle no longer constitutes an advance for the working class the moment that this conquest is seen by the majority of the workers as being due to the action of the unions. The working class was bound to rediscover these methods of struggle sooner or later, through a whole series of experiences. But if such a rediscovery had been made through an open confrontation with the unions, this would have struck a mortal blow against the unions when they had already been strongly discredited, and this would have deprived the bourgeoisie of one of its essential weapons for sabotaging workers' struggles. Thus it was far preferable for the bourgeoisie that the rediscovery took place in a way that was poisoned and sterilised by trade unionist illusions.
The fact that the bourgeoisie could manoeuvre in such a way completely escapes Le Proletaire:
"If we are to believe the ICC, 'they' (no doubt the whole bourgeoisie) are extraordinarily tricky: pushing 'the workers' (this is how the ICC baptises all the wage-earners who went on strike) to enter into struggle against the government's decisions in order to control their struggle, to inflict a defeat on them and come back later on with even harder measures, this is a manoeuvre which would have stupefied Machiavelli himself.
The modern Proudhonists of the ICC go even further than their ancestor because they accuse the bourgeoisie of provoking the workers' struggle and allowing it to be victorious in order to derail the workers from the real solution: they hit themselves in order to avoid being hit. If we wait a while longer and look through the ICC's magic lantern we will see the bourgeoisie organise the proletarian revolution and the disappearance of capitalism with the sole aim of preventing the proletariat from doing it"[3].
Le Proletaire likes to think that it is very witty. Good luck to it. The problem is that its tirades show more than anything else the total vacuity of its political understanding. So, to prevent it from falling into total idiocy, we will permit ourselves to recall certain banalities:
1. It is not necessary for the whole bourgeoisie to be "extraordinarily tricky" for its interests to be well defended. In order to assume its defence, the bourgeois class has at its disposal a government and a state (although perhaps Le Proletaire doesn't know this) which defines its policies by relying on the advice of an army of specialists (historians, sociologists, political pundits ... and union leaders). The fact that there are still bosses in existence who think that the unions are the enemies of the bourgeoisie doesn't change anything: they are not the ones who are charged with elaborating the strategies of their class any more than sergeant-majors are given the job of running wars.
2. It is precisely the case that between the bourgeoisie and the working class there is a state of war, the class war. It's not necessary to be a specialist in military matters, but anyone who has a middling intelligence and a little bit of education (but perhaps this isn't the case with the editors of Le Proletaire?) knows that trickery is an essential weapon for any army. In order to defeat the enemy, it is usually necessary to deceive him, unless you enjoy a crushing material superiority.
3. The main weapon of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat is not the material strength of its forces of repression, but precisely its capacity for trickery, for mystifying the workers.
4. Even if Machiavelli, in his day, was laying down the bases of a bourgeois strategy for conquering and exercising power as well as for the art of war, the leaders of the ruling class, after centuries of experience, know a lot more than he did. Perhaps the editors of Le Proletaire think the opposite, but they would do well to spend a bit of time with their history books, particularly those dealing with recent wars, and above all with the workers' movement. They would discover that the machiavellianism which the military strategists are capable of in conflicts between national fractions of the same bourgeois class are nothing compared to what the bourgeoisie as a whole can come up with against its mortal enemy, the proletariat.
5. In particular, they would discover two elementary things: that provoking premature combats is one of the classic weapons of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, and that in a war, the generals have never hesitated to sacrifice part of their own troops or their own positions the better to lure the enemy into a trap, by giving him an illusory feeling of victory. The bourgeoisie will not make the proletarian revolution to stop the proletariat doing so. But in order to prevent it, it is quite prepared to make 'retreats', to grant apparent 'victories' to the workers.
6. And if the editors of LeProletaire take the trouble to read the classical analyses of the communist left, they will finally learn that one of the main ways the bourgeoisie inflicted on the proletariat the most terrible counter-revolution in its history was precisely to present its greatest defeats as 'victories': the 'building of socialism' in the USSR, the Popular Fronts, the 'victory over fascism'.
Thus, we can only say one thing to the editors of Le Proletaire: back to the drawing board. And before you do that, try to reflect a little and to overcome your terrible ignorance. Well-turned phrases and witty words are not enough to defend correctly the positions and interests of the working class. And we can give them one last word of advice: listen to what's really happening in the world. Try, for example, to understand what's just happened in Germany.
Union manoeuvres in Germany: a new example of the strategy of the bourgeoisie
If we needed further proof that the manoeuvre concocted by all the forces of the bourgeoisie at the end of 1995 in France had an international scope, the recent union agitation in Germany provides it in the most striking manner. In this country, obviously with its local specificities, we have seen a 'remake' of the French scenario.
At the beginning however, the situation seemed very different. Just after the French unions had been giving themselves an image of radicalism, of being intransigent organs of the class struggle, the German unions, faithful to their traditions of being negotiators and agents of the 'social consensus', signed with the bosses and the government, on 23 January, a 'pact for employment' which among other things contains wage reductions of up to 20% in the most threatened industries. At the end of these negotiations, Kohl declared that "everything must be done to avoid a scenario a la francais". At this point he was not contradicted by the unions who, a few weeks before, had been saluting the strikes in France: the DGB "assured its sympathy to the strikers who were defending themselves against a big attack on social rights"; IG-Metall affirmed that "the struggle of the French is an example of resistance against the blows aimed at social and political rights".
But in reality, the German unions' salute to the strikes in France was not at all Platonic; they are already getting prepared to carry out their own manoeuvres. The scope of these manoeuvres would be revealed in April. This was the moment Kohl chose to announce an unprecedented austerity plan: a wage freeze in the public sector, cuts in unemployment benefit and social security, increase in the working week, increase in the age of retirement, abandoning of the principle of 100% sick pay. And what was most striking was the way this plan was announced. As the French paper Le Monde put it on 20.6.96: "By imposing in such an authoritarian way his plan for economies of 50 million Marks at the end of April, Chancellor Kohl has given up the mantle of moderator, which he made so much of, to take up that of the decisive leader ... For the first time, the 'Kohl method' begins to resemble the 'Juppe method'".
For the unions, this was a real provocation which had to be met with new methods of action: "We have left consensus and are entering into confrontation" (Dieter Schulte, president of the DGB). The scenario 'a la francais', in its German version, was set up. The attitude of the unions hit a crescendo of radicalism: 'warning strikes' and demonstrations in the public sector (like at the beginning of autumn 95 in France): nurseries, public transport, postal services, cleaning services were hit. As in France, the media made a lot of noise about these movements, giving the image of a country paralysed, and making no secret of their sympathy for the strikes. References to the strikes in France became more and more commonplace and the unions even waved French flags in the demonstrations. Schulte invoking the French "hot autumn" promised a "hot summer" in the industrial sector. Then began the preparations for the huge demonstration of 15 June which was already announced in advance as "the most massive since 1945"[4]. Schulte predicted that it would "only be the beginning of sharp social conflicts that would lead to conditions a la francais". Similarly, whereas a few weeks before he had asserted that "there was no question of calling a general strike in the face of a democratically elected government", on June 10 he announced that "even a general strike cannot be ruled out". A few days before the 'march' on Bonn, the negotiations in the public sector gave birth to an accord which finally conceded some flimsy wage increases and the promise not to threaten sick pay, which allowed the unions to make it look like this 'retreat' was the result of their actions, as had been the case in France when the government had 'retreated' on the planned contract on the railways and on retirement in the public sector.
Finally, the immense success of "everyone to Bonn" (350,000 demonstrators), achieved thanks to an unprecedented media barrage and the enormous efforts made by the unions (thousands of coaches and nearly 100 special trains) looked like a show of force by the latter on a scale never seen before, while at the same time it made it possible to push into the background the fact that the government had not made any concessions on the essentials of its austerity plan.
The worldwide character of the manoeuvres of the bourgeoisie
Thus, within an interval of a few months, in the two main countries of continental Europe, the bourgeoisie has developed two very similar manoeuvres aimed not only at pushing through a whole train of brutal attacks but also at giving a new image to the trade unions. Of course there are differences in the precise objectives of the two national bourgeoisies. As regards France, it was necessary to restore the image of the unions in the eyes of the workers, an image that has been particularly tarnished by their support for the policies of the left when it was in the government; this is why they had to allow the coordinations to take centre stage in the task of sabotaging the struggles of the railway workers in 1986 and the hospital workers in 1988. As regards Germany, the problem wasn't that the unions were discredited. On the whole, these organs of the bourgeois state still had a considerable standing in the working class. On the other hand, the image they have had for the workers has been that of specialists in negotiation who have succeeded, thanks to the 'round tables' they have taken part in, to preserve something of the gains of the 'social state', a task obviously made easier by the fact that German capital has been better placed to resist the effects of the world crisis. But with the growing difficulties of the German economy (recession in 1995, record rates of unemployment, explosion of state deficits), this image could not have lasted much longer. At the negotiating table the government and the bosses will now only be able to propose increasingly brutal attacks on the workers' living standards and the dismantling of the 'social state'. The prospect of the outbreak of workers' anger is inevitable and this is why it has been necessary for the unions, if they are going to be up to the task of derailing this militancy, to shed their habits as 'negotiators' and take on the mantle of' organs of the workers' struggle'.
But granted the differences in the social situation in the two countries, the important thing is that the points these two episodes have in common should open the eyes of those who think that the strikes in France at the end of 1995 were 'spontaneous' and that they 'surprised the bourgeoisie', that they were not planned and provoked by the latter for its own ends.
Moreover, just as the bourgeois manoeuvre at the end of 1995 in France had an international significance, the different forces of the German bourgeoisie did not carry out their manoeuvre in the spring of 1996 for purely domestic reasons. F or example, in Belgium, if the bourgeoisie organised a copy of the French scenario last winter, it has again shown what an excellent mimic it is by also copying the German episode. Not long after the signing of the of 'pact for jobs' in Germany, a 'contract for the future of employment' was signed in Belgium between the unions, the bosses and the government, and this too proposed to introduce wage cuts in return for promises of jobs. Then the unions did a 180 degree turn and suddenly denounced this accord "after consulting the rank and file". This spectacular about-face, which again was given maximum coverage by the media, allowed the unions to take on a 'democratic' image, to pretend to be "interpreting the will of the workers", while at the same time washing their hands of any responsibility in the plans to attack the working class that have been prepared by the government (which is partly made up of the Socialist Party, the traditional ally of the most 'militant' union, the FGTB).
But if the international dimension of the manoeuvres of the French bourgeoisie at the end of 1995 were not limited to Belgium, as we've just seen with the manoeuvres in Germany in the spring, the significance of the events in Germany is also not restricted to this small country. The social agitation in Germany, well publicised by the TV in a number of countries, have a similar role to that of the strikes in France. Once again, it's a question of reinforcing illusions in the unions. The 'fighting' image of the French unions, spread far and wide by the media, has been used to rejuvenate the unions in other countries. Similarly, the radicalisation of the German unions, their threat to stir up a "hot summer" and the alarmist comments by the media in other countries about "the end of the German consensus" serves to relay the idea that the unions - even where they have a tradition of consultation and negotiation - can be authentic organs of the workers' struggle, and effective organs to boot, capable of defending workers' interests against the austerity of the bosses and the government.
Thus, it is indeed on a world scale that the bourgeoisie is carrying out its strategy against the working class. History has taught us that all the conflicts of interest between national bourgeoisies - commercial rivalries, imperialist antagonisms - fade out when it comes to confronting the only force in society that represents a mortal danger to the ruling class, the proletariat. The bourgeoisie elaborates its plans against the latter in a coordinated and concerted manner.
Today, faced with the workers' struggles that are brewing, the ruling class has to resort to a thousand traps in order to try to sabotage them, exhaust them and defeat them, to prevent them leading to a growth of consciousness in the working class about the ultimate perspective of its struggle: the communist revolution. Nothing would be more tragic for the working class than to underestimate the strength of its enemy, its ability to set such traps, to organise itself on a world scale to make them more effective. Communists have to be able to expose and denounce these traps in front of their class. If they can't do this, they are not worthy of their name.
FM, 24.6.96
[1] One of the most striking examples of this rewriting of the facts is the way the return to work at the end of the strike is dealt with: we are told this only began almost a week after the government announced its 'retreat', which is not true.
[2] It's true that the Bordigists are not lacking in contradictions: towards the end of the 70s, when there was a growing agitation amongst the immigrant workers, we often saw ICP militants explaining to flabbergasted immigrants that they should demand the right to vote in order to be able to ... abstain. You can't get more ridiculous than a Bordigist. It's also true that when ICC militants tried to intervene in a demonstration of immigrants in order to defend the necessity not to get trapped in bourgeois demands, members of the ICP lent a hand to the Maoists in chasing them away.
[3] We should note that issue number 3 of L 'Esclave Salarie, a parasitic bastard of the ex-Ferment Ouvriere Revolutionnaire, gives us an original version of the ICC's analysis of the bourgeoisie's manoeuvre: "We want to congratulate the ICC (ES thinks it's very witty to write the initials of our organisation in lower case) for its remarkable analysis which fills us with admiration and we would like to know how this elite of thinkers managed to infiltrate the bourgeois class to get so much information about its plans and traps. We wonder whether the ice isn't invited to the meetings of the bourgeoisie in order to study its anti-working class plots concocted in secret and through the rites of freemasonry". Marx was not a freemason and he wasn't invited to the meetings of the bourgeoisie, but he did devote a large part of his militant activity to studying, elucidating and denouncing the plans and traps of the bourgeoisie. We can only think that the writers of ES have never read The Class Struggles in France or The Civil War in France. This would be logical for people who have such contempt for thought, which is by no means the monopoly of an 'elite'. Frankly, it wasn't necessary to be a freemason to discover that the strikes at the end of 95 in France were the result of a bourgeois manoeuvre: it was enough to observe the way they were presented and publicised by the media in all the countries of Europe and America, and even as far as India, Australia or Japan. It's true that the presence in these countries of sections or sympathisers of the ICC assisted it in its work, but the real cause of the political poverty of ES does not reside in its weak geographical extension. What is provincial about this group is its political intelligence, which really is set in lower case.
[4] This refrain is a bit worn out: the demonstration of 12 December 95 in France was also presented as "the most massive since the war" in many provincial towns.
In the previous article, we showed how the revolutionaries in Germany had been confronted with the question of building the organisation in the face of the betrayal of social democracy: first by waging to the bitter end the struggle within the old party, carrying out the work of a fraction, and then, when this was no longer possible, preparing the foundation of a new party. It was this responsible attitude that the Spartakists adopted towards the SPD, and which later led them to adhere to the newly formed USPD, unlike the Bremen Left who called for the immediate foundation of the party. In this article we will deal with the foundation of the KPD and the organisational difficulties in the construction of this new party.
The Linksradikalen fail to form the new party
On 5th May 1917, the Bremen and Hamburg Left Radicals reproached the Spartakists for having given up their organisational independence by entering the USPD; they considered that "the time has come to organise the radical left in the Internationale Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands ".
During the summer, they organised preparatory meetings with a view to founding a new party. The founding conference was fixed for 25th August, in Berlin. Only thirteen delegates reached their destination, five of them from Berlin itself. The police had no difficulty in dispersing the conference. Determination is not enough by itself: adequate organisational resources are necessary as well. "It is not enough to brandish the 'banner of purity '. Our duty is to carry it to the masses, to win them over", wrote Rosa Luxemburg in the Duisburg Der Kampf
On 2nd September, a new attempt was made. This time, the organisation took the name "Internationaler Sozialistischer Arbeiterbund". Its statutes planned that the sections should be autonomous.
It considered that "the separation into political and economic organisations is historically out dated". Yet another indication of its great confusion in organisational matters. It would be a travesty of the truth to say that the Bremen Left was the clearest group at the political and practical level during the revolutionary movements in Germany. The Dresden group around Otto Ruhle, amongst other currents, was beginning to develop conceptions hostile to political organisation. The future council communism continued to ripen. Although the council communists did not themselves adopt political organisational forms, their voice nonetheless found an important echo in the class.
While the Spartakists' audience was growing, the Bremen Left and the ISD never succeeded in rising above the stage of a small circle. Although eighteen months of work in the USPD did not bring the Spartakus League all the results it had hoped, it never sacrificed its independence (despite the lSD's initial accusation). Without ever letting itself be gagged, Spartakus developed an active intervention within the USPD.
Whether during the polemics around the Brest-Litovsk negotiations from December 1917, or during the vast wave of strikes in January 1918, when a million workers downed tools and the workers' councils first appeared in Germany, the Spartakus League was more and more in the front line.
Just as German capital prepared to send yet more cannon fodder to the slaughter[1] the Spartakus League increased its organisational strength. It had eight publications, with a print run varying between 25,000 and 100,000 copies - and all this with almost its entire leadership in gaol[2].
Even when the Bremen Left decided to form an independent party, the Spartakus League refused to adopt a sectarian attitude, and continued to work for the regroupment of all the revolutionary forces in Germany.
On 7th October 1918, the Spartakus group called a national conference, with delegates from the various local groups of the Linksradikalen. It was decided that Spartakists and Radicals should collaborate, without the latter being obliged to join the USPD. Nonetheless, despite a developing revolutionary combat by the workers in Germany, the conference still failed to put forward, as a priority for its work, the necessity for the foundation of the party. Lenin emphasised the extreme importance of this question: "Europe's greatest misfortune, its greatest danger, is that there exists no revolutionary party ... Certainly, a powerful revolutionary movement by the masses may correct this defect, but the fact remains a great misfortune and a great danger"[3].
The Spartakists' intervention in the revolutionary struggle
When revolutionary struggles broke out in November 1918, the Spartakists accomplished a heroic labour, and the content of their intervention was of very high quality. They insisted first and foremost on the need to build a bridge to the working class in Russia. They unhesitatingly unmasked the manoeuvres and sabotage of the bourgeoisie. They recognised the role of the workers' councils, and emphasised the need once the war was over, for the movement to attain a higher level, where it could gain strength thanks to the pressure from the factories.
For reasons of space, we cannot deal with this intervention in greater detail. Despite their strength at the level of political content, the Spartakists nonetheless did not have a determining influence in the working class. To be a real party, correct political positions alone are not enough. A corresponding influence within the working class is also necessary. A party must have the strength to lead the movement, like a man at the tiller of a boat, for it to move forward in the right direction.
As the conflict broke, the Spartakists carried out a tremendous work of propaganda, but still remained only a loose regroupment. A closely knit organisation was sorely lacking.
A further difficulty should be pointed out: the Spartakists still belonged to the USPD, and for many workers the difference was still not clear between the centrists and the Spartakists. The SPD made the most of this confused situation, to put forward the indispensable "unity" between workers' parties, to its own benefit of course.
Organisational development only speeded up after the struggle broke out. On 11th November 1918, the "Spartakus Group" became the "Spartakus League", and a Central Committee of twelve members was formed.
Whereas the SPD possessed more than a hundred publications, and could base its counter-revolutionary activity on an extensive apparatus of bureaucrats and the unions, during the decisive week of 11th-18th November 1918, the Spartakists had no press at all: they were unable to publish Die Rote Fahne. They were forced to occupy the offices of a bourgeois paper. The SPD then did everything it could to prevent Die Rote F ahne from being printed on the occupied presses. Only after the occupation of another printing works could Die Rote Fahne appear again.
After failing to win their demand for an extraordinary congress of the USPD, the Spartakists decided on the formation of an independent party. On 24th December, the ISD (which in the meantime had changed its name to IKD) held a national conference in Berlin, with delegates from Wasserkante, the Rhineland, Saxony, Bavaria, Wurtemberg and Berlin. During the conference, Karl Radek argued strongly for a merger between the IKD and the Spartakists. On 30th December 1918, and 1st January 1919, the Kommunistischer Partei Deutschland was formed from a regroupment ofthe IKD and the Spartakists.
The formation of the KPD
The first point on the agenda was an evaluation of the work in the USPD. On 29th November 1918, Rosa Luxemburg had already come to the conclusion that in a period of rising class struggle, "there is no place for a party of ambiguity and half measures"[4]. In a revolutionary situation, centrist parties like the USPD can only break up.
"We were in the USPD to take out of it what could be taken out, to push forward the valuable elements of the USPD, radicalise them, to reach our goal by a process of dissociation, and so to win over the strongest possible revolutionary forces, in order to bring them together in a united and unitary revolutionary proletarian Party ... The results achieved were extraordinarily meagre ... [Since then} the USPD has served as a fig-leaf for Ebert and Schiedemann. They have wiped out among the masses any notion of a difference between the policies of the USPD and those of the majority socialists ... Now, the time has come where all the revolutionary proletarian elements must turn their backs on the USPD in order to form a new, autonomous party, with a clear programme, firm goals, a unitary tactic, inspired by the highest possible degree of revolutionary determination, and conceived as a powerful weapon for the fulfilment of the social revolution which is beginning"[5].
The task of the moment was to regroup revolutionary forces in the KPD, and to make the clearest possible demarcation between them and the centrists.
In analysing the state of the revolutionary struggle, Rosa Luxemburg's Report on the programme and the political situation showed great clarity, in warning against any underestimation of the difficulties facing the new party:
"As I have described it to you, this whole process seems much slower than one would have thought at first sight. I think it is good for us to look clearly at all the difficulties, all the complications of this revolution. For I hope that, like me, none of you will be paralysed in your ardour, your energy, by a review of all the great difficulties and labours that await us".
Moreover, she strongly emphasised the importance of the party's role in the developing movement:
"The present revolution, which is now just beginning, and which has such vast horizons before it as well as problems of a historic and universal dimension to be overcome, must have assure compass, which at every stage of the struggle, whether in victory or in defeat, is able to point unfailingly towards the same supreme goal, the goal of world socialist revolution, of the proletariat's merciless struggle for power, and for the liberation of humanity from the yoke of Capital. To be this sure compass pointing out the road to follow, this spearhead thrusting forwards, this socialist proletarian yeast in the revolution, is the specific task of the Spartakus League in the present confrontation between two worlds"[6].
"We must teach the masses that the workers' and soldiers' councils must be the lever for the overthrow of the state machinery, that they must absorb all the forces of action and channel them into the furrow of socialist transformation. Even those working masses already organised into workers' and soldiers' councils are a thousand miles from carrying out these duties - except of course from a few small minorities who are clearly aware of them.[7]
Lenin considered that the Spartakus programme (What does Spartakus want?), which he received at the end of December, formed the corner-stone for the foundation of the Communist International.
"In this perspective we must: a) draw up the points on principles for the platform I think that we can draw on the theory and practice of Bolshevism; and b) more extensively from 'What does Spartakus want? ' with a + b the platform 's fundamental principles appear clearly enough.[8]
The organisational question at the Congress
At the Congress, 83 delegates were present, representing 46 sections, most of them with no real mandate. Their composition reflected the organisation's immaturity. Alongside the older generation of revolutionary workers who before the war had belonged to the Party's radical left opposition around Rosa Luxemburg, appeared young workers who during the war had become the carriers of revolutionary propaganda and action, but who possessed very little political experience, as well as soldiers marked by all the suffering and privations of war. They were joined by pacifists who had fought courageously against the war, had been pushed towards the left by repression, and who now saw the radical workers' movement as a favourable terrain for action, as well as by artists and intellectuals swept along by the revolutionary tide - in short just the sort of elements that any revolution suddenly sets in motion.
The struggle against the war united different forces in a single front. But at the same time, many leaders were in prison; many experienced workers from the Party were dead or missing, and their place taken by young radical elements with almost no organisational experience. All this goes to show that war does not necessarily create the most favourable conditions for building the party.
As far as the organisational question was concerned, the KPD contained a marxist wing represented by Luxemburg and Jogisches, an anti-organisation wing which would later give birth to the council communist current, and finally an activist wing which remained undecided on the organisational level, embodied by Liebknecht.
The Congress revealed the abyss between, on the one hand, the programmatic clarity (despite important disagreements that did exist) expressed by Luxemburg in her speech on the programme, and, on the other hand, weakness on organisational issues.
Weakness on organisational issues
To start with, organisational questions were given little time at the founding Congress; moreover, by the time the discussion started, some of the delegates had already left. The report for the Congress, drawn up by Eberlein, reflected the KPD' s weaknesses on the issue. Eberlein began with a balance-sheet of the revolutionaries' work to date:
"In name, and in all their activities, the old organisations were "electoral associations" [Wahlvereine}. The new organisation must be, not an electoral club, but a fighting political organisation ... The social-democratic organisations were Wahlvereine. Their whole organisation was based on preparation and agitation for elections, and in reality what little life there was in the organisation only appeared during elections or the preparation for them. The rest of the time, the organisation was empty and lifeless"[9].
This description of the pre-war SPD shows how the reformist gangrene had emptied its local organisations of political life, through the exclusive concentration on parliamentary elections. Parliamentary cretinism and the resulting attachment to bourgeois democracy had given rise to the dangerous illusion that the essential focus for the Party's struggle was its activity in parliament. This situation only began to be questioned in many local organisations after the outbreak of war and the betrayal of the parliamentary fraction in the Reichstag.
During the war, however, " ... we had to work illegally, and because of this illegal activity it was impossible to build a solid form of organisation"[10]. For example, Liebknecht spent the years between the summer of 1915 and October 1918, either in the army or in prison, and was thus forbidden any "free expression" or contact with his comrades. Luxemburg was imprisoned for three years and four months; from 1918, Jogisches was in the same situation. The majority of the Central Committee formed in 1916 was behind bars by 1917. Many only emerged on the very eve of the explosion of revolutionary struggle at the end of 1918.
The bourgeoisie was unable to silence Spartakus. Nonetheless, it dealt a heavy blow to the construction of the party by depriving an organisationally incomplete movement of its leadership.
But although the objective conditions of repression and illegality were serious hindrances to the formation of a revolutionary party, they should still not hide the fact that there existed among the revolutionary forces a serious underestimation of the need to build a new organisation. Eberlein revealed this weakness when he declared:
"You know that we are optimistic that the weeks and months to come will make our discussions on all this superfluous. So given the short time available to us today, I don't want to keep you any longer ... We are in the midst of a political struggle, which is why we have no time to waste on nitpicking over paragraphs ... During these days, we must not and we cannot focus on these little organisational questions. As far as possible, we want to leave you to deal with all that in the local sections during the coming weeks and months ... If we count on having more members, with conviction and ready to enter into action in the days to come, who bend their minds to the action of the coming period, then we will easily overcome the little problems of organisation and organisational form"[11].
Naturally everything was urgent, everything was pressing in the heat of the revolution; the time factor was crucial. This is why it would have been desirable, indeed vital, to have clarified the organisational questions in advance. But while all the delegates were preparing for an acceleration of the revolutionary combat in the weeks ahead, a number of them had developed feelings of distrust towards the organisation and began to think that the party would be superfluous.
In the same way, Eberlein's declarations expressed not only impatience but a dramatic underestimation of the organisation question: "For these last four years, we haven't had the time to spend on looking at the way we want to organise ourselves. During this time, we were, day by day, confronted with new facts and had to take the necessary decisions without asking ourselves whether we would be able to elaborate organisational statutes"[12].
It is doubtless true, as Lenin stressed, that the Spartakists had "accomplished a systematic work of revolutionary propaganda in the most difficult conditions ", but it is clear that there was one danger they were unable to avoid. A revolutionary organisation cannot 'sacrifice' itself for its intervention in the class; however necessary that intervention might be, it must not lead to the paralysis of its organisational activities. In a situation as dramatic as a war a revolutionary organisation may intervene intensively and heroically. But if when the workers' struggle revives it does not have a solid organisational tissue, ie if there is no political organisation at the proletariat's side, the work done previously will be lost. The construction of an organisational framework, the clarification of the organisation's function and way of functioning, the elaboration of organisational rules (statutes) are indispensable foundation stones for the existence, functioning and intervention of the organisation. This work of constructing the organisation must not be obstructed by intervention in the class. The latter can really only bear fruit if it is not carried out to the detriment of the construction of the organisation.
The defence and construction of the organisation is a permanent responsibility of revolutionaries, whether the class struggle is in deep reflux or at its highest points.
Furthermore, within the KPD, there was a tendency to react like a scalded cat to the experience of the SPD. The latter had developed a huge bureaucratic apparatus which, in the process of opportunist degeneration, allowed the party leadership to block local initiatives. Thus, out of fear of being stifled by a new Centrale, part of the KPD became the mouthpiece of federalism. Eberlein clearly joined this choir:
"It will be necessary in this form of organisation for the organisation as a whole to allow the greatest possible freedom for the different sections, to make sure that there are no schematic instructions from above ... We also think that the old system of subordinating local organisations to the Centrale must be abandoned, that the different local organisations, the different factory organisations must have a total autonomy. .. They must have the possibility of moving into action without needing instructions from the Centrale "[13].
The appearance of a wing hostile to centralisation, which would later give birth to the council communist current, led to a regression in the organisational history of the revolutionary movement.
The same went for the press: "We also think that the question of the press cannot be regulated at the central level; we think that the local organisations must have the possibility of creating their own papers ... Some comrades have attacked us (the Centrale) and said to us: 'You are bringing out a paper, what should we do? We can't use it, we will bring out our own paper'"[14].
This lack of confidence in the organisation, and above all in centralisation, manifested itself above all with the old Linksradikale of Bremen[15]. Starting from the correct understanding that the KPD could not be a simple continuation of the old SPD, they tended to fall into the opposite extreme of denying all continuity: "We have no need at all to plunge into the old organisational statutes in order to choose what bits we can use"[16].
Eberlein's declarations show the heterogeneity of the newly formed KPD on the organisational question.
The marxist wing in a minority on the organisational question
Only the wing grouped around Luxemburg and Jogisches intervened in a resolutely marxist manner during the Congress. Directly opposed to them was the council communist wing, which fundamentally underestimated the role of political organisations in the class, above all rejecting centralisation out of distrust of organisation, which led them to call for complete autonomy for the local sections. Otto Ruhle was their main representative.[17] Another wing, without a clear organisational alternative, was the one grouped around Karl Liebknecht. This wing was notable for being extremely combative. But to act as a party it's not enough to want to participate in workers' struggles; on the one hand, programmatic clarity and solidity are indispensable. Liebknecht and those who followed him orientated their activities almost exclusively towards intervention in the class.
This appeared clearly on October 23rd 1918 when he was released from prison. Around 20,000 workers came to welcome him at Anhalt station in Berlin. His very first action was to go immediately to the factory gates to agitate among the workers. However, in October 1918, with the temperature rising within the working class, the most pressing duty of revolutionaries was not simply to carry out agitation but to commit all their strength to the construction of the organisation, all the more so because the Spartakists still only formed a loose organisation, without solid structures. Liebknecht's attitude to organisation was very different from Lenin's. When Lenin arrived at the Petrograd station in April 1917 and was given a triumphal reception, he immediately made known the April Theses and did everything he could to pull the Bolshevik party out of the crisis it was in and to equip it with a clear programme through the convening of an extraordinary Congress. Liebknecht's first concern, by contrast, was not really the construction of the organisation. What's more, he seemed to be developing a conception of the organisation in which the revolutionary militant had to be a hero, a pre-eminent individual, rather than seeing that a proletarian political organisation lives above all by its collective strength. The fact that, subsequently, he continued to push for action off his own bat is the proof of his erroneous view of organisation, Luxemburg often complained about his attitude: "Karl is always rushing from one workers' meeting to another; he doesn't often come to editorial meetings of Die Rote Fahne. In general it's difficult to get him along to meetings of the organisation".
Liebknecht's image was that of the lone fighter. He never managed to understand that his main contribution was to participate in the construction of the organisation.
The weight of the past
The SPD had for years been steeped in the parliamentary tradition. The illusions created by the predominance of parliamentary-reformist activity had lent weight to the idea that the struggle in the framework of bourgeois parliament was the main weapon of the working class, rather than a transitory tool for taking advantage of the contradictions between the different factions of the ruling class in order to obtain momentary concessions from capital. Pampered by parliamentarism, there was a tendency to measure the strength of the struggle by the yardstick of votes obtained by the SPD in parliamentary elections.
This was one of the main differences between the conditions of struggle for the Bolsheviks and those of the left in Germany. The Bolsheviks had been through the experience of 1905 and were intervening in conditions of illegality and repression. They did intervene in the Russian parliament but through a much smaller group of deputies; in any case, their centre of gravity was not in the parliamentary and trade union struggle . While the SPD had become a powerful mass party deeply infected by opportunism, the Bolshevik party was relatively small and had more effectively resisted opportunism despite the crises it had been through. And it was no accident that, in the KPD, the marxist wing on questions of organisation, that of Luxemburg and Jogishes, had emerged from the Polish-Lithuanian party - the SDKPiL, that is a fraction of the revolutionary movement which had direct experience of the struggles of 1905 and had not been bogged down in the parliamentary swamp.
The construction of the party can only succeed on an international scale
The founding Congress of the KPD expressed another weakness of the revolutionary movement. While the bourgeoisie in Germany had immediately obtained help from the bourgeoisie of countries with whom it had just been at war, while capital was uniting at an international level in its struggle against the revolutionary working class (the White Armies of 21 countries had joined together to wage civil war against the new proletarian power in Russia), revolutionaries were way behind at this level. To some degree, this was due to conceptions inherited from the Second International. The parties of the Second International were built in a federalist manner. The federalist conception developed tendencies towards 'everyman for himself' in the organisation and prevented the question of organisation being posed in an international and centralised way. Thus the components of the left wing fought separately from each other in the different parties of the Second International.
"Lenin's fractional work was earned out uniquely within the Russian party, without him trying to take this onto the international level. To be convinced of this it's enough to read his interventions at the different Congresses, and we can affirm that this work was completely unknown outside the Russian sphere".[18]
Thus Karl Radek was the only foreign delegate at the founding Congress. And it was only through luck and perseverance that he was able to get through the net of controls set up by the German government run by the SPD. This Congress would surely have had a very different outcome if it had been attended by other important leaders of the revolutionary movement, such as Lenin or Trotsky from Russia, Bordiga from Italy or Gorter and Pannekoek from Holland.
We can today draw the lesson that the party can't be built in one country if revolutionaries don't carry out this task simultaneously at an international level, and in a centralised manner.
The parallel with the task of the working class is clear: communism can't be built in one isolated country. Likewise, the construction of the party demands that it be carried out on an international level.
The KPD was born as a very heterogeneous party, divided on the programmatic level, and with the marxist wing on organisational matters in a minority. Distrust towards organisation and in particular towards centralisation was already widespread among the delegates. The KPD did not yet have sufficient influence to decisively stamp its presence in the movement.
The experience of the KPD shows that the party must be built on solid organisational foundations. The elaboration of organisational principles, functioning on the basis of the party spirit, aren't things that can be created by decree but are the result of years of practice based on these principles. The construction of the organisation demands a lot of time and patience. It's obvious that revolutionaries today must draw the lessons from the weaknesses of the revolutionaries in Germany.
DV
[1] Between March and November 1918, Germany lost some 200,000 killed, 450,000 prisoners or missing in action, and 860,000 wounded on the Western Front.
[2] After Liebknecht's arrest at the beginning of the summer of 1916, a conference of the Left Social-Democracy was held on 4th June 1916. A five member action committee was formed to reconstitute the links between revolutionary groups, broken by repression. The committee included Dunker, Meyer, and Mehring, with Otto Ruhle as chairman. The fact that such a responsibility should be given to a comrade like Ruhle, who rejected centralisation and the construction of the organisation, shows just how difficult repression had made things for the Spartakists.
[3] Lenin, writing in Pravda, 11th October 1918.
[4] Rosa Luxemburg, 'The Congress of the Independent Socialist Party' in Die Rote Fahne, no.14.
[5] Karl Liebknecht, in Proceedings of the KPD founding Congress.
[6] Rosa Luxemburg, "National Conference of the Spartakus League", in Die Rote Fahne no.43, 29th December 1918.
[7] Rosa Luxemburg, Speech on the programme and the political situation", 30th December 1918.
[8] Lenin, Correspondence, December 1918.
[9] Eberlein's report on the organisation question to the KPD's founding Congress.
[10] idem
[11] idem
[12] idem
[13] idem
[14] idem
[15] Paul Froelich, a member of the Bremen Left during the war, elected to the Centrale by the founding Congress, thought that "in all their actions, the local organisations must have a complete right to self-determination. It follows that there must be a similar right of self-determination in all the rest of the party's work, within the framework of the programme and the resolutions adopted by the Congress" (11 January 1919, Der Kommunist). J Knief, a member of the Bremen left, defended the following conception:
"Without denying the necessity for a Centrale, the communists (of the IKD) demand, in conformity with the present revolutionary situation, the greatest autonomy and liberty for the local and regional organisations" (Arbeiterpolitik No 10, 1917).
[16] idem
[17] Already in 1917 J. Borchardt was declaring: "The important thing for us is the abolition of any form of leadership in the workers movement. What we need to reach socialism is pure democracy among comrades, that is to say equal rights and autonomy, free arbitration and the means for the personal activity of each individual. We don't need leaders, but only organs of execution, which instead of imposing their will on comrades, act simply as their mandates." (Arbeiterpolitik number 10, 1917)
[18] G. Mammone, Bilan 24, page 814, "La fraction dans les parties socialistes de la Seconde Internationale"
We have become used to the politicians, economists and media using the most extraordinary theories to hide the total bankruptcy of the capitalist system and to justify the interminable growth of the attacks on the working class's living conditions.
25 years ago, Nixon, an American president of the most rank conservatism, proclaimed to the whole world that "We are all Keynesians". In that period faced with the aggravation of the crisis the bourgeoisie offered "state intervention", the development of a "social and egalitarian state", as the solution. And in the name of this policy asked the workers for sacrifices in order to "reach the end of the tunnel".
In the 80s, confronted with the economic stagnation, the bourgeoisie changed horses. Now "less state" was the cure-all for all the problems of the state. These were the hard years of "Reaganomics" which meant the largest world-wide wave of state organised lay-offs since the 30's.
At present, the crisis of capitalism has reached such a serious level that the order of the day for all the industrialised states is purely and simply the liquidation of the minimum social guarantees (unemployment benefits, pensions, health and education spending: also length of the working day, job security etc.), that the workers still receive under the ideological disguise of the "welfare state".
This merciless attack, a qualitative leap in the tendency to the absolute pauperisation of the working class, announced by Karl Marx, a tendency which today is justified and accompanied by a new ideology: the "globalisation of the world economy".
The servants of capital have discovered the moon. 150 years after Engels demonstrated in the Principles of Communism (written in 1847): "That things have reached such a point that a new machine invented now in England can, in the space of a year, condemn millions of workers in China to starvation. In this way, big industry has linked all the peoples of the world to each other, it has united all of the local markets into one world market, everywhere it has prepared the ground for civilisation and progress and has organised things in such a way that what happens in the civilised countries must necessarily have repercussions in all the others" (Principles of Communism).
Capitalism had to expand across the world imposing its regime of wage slavery into every comer of the Earth. The integration into the world market, by the beginning of the century, of the most significant territories of the planet and the difficulty of finding others capable of satisfying expanding capitalism's ever growing needs, marked the decadence of the bourgeoisie order, as revolutionaries have said for 80 years.
In this framework of the chronic saturation of the world market, the XXth century has witnessed an unprecedented deepening of competition between the different national capitals. Faced with this ever increasing need to realise surplus value the markets have become increasingly smaller. This forces a double imperative on every national capital: on the one hand, to protect with all kinds of measures (monetary, legislative, etc) its own products faced with the assault of its rivals. On the other hand, to try to convince the other national capitals to open their doors to its commodities (trade treaties, bilateral accords etc.).
When bourgeois economists talk of "globalisation" they are trying to give the impression that capitalism can be consciously controlled and unified by the rules that mark the world market. What really happens is just the opposite: the realities of the world market impose their own laws, but in a framework dominated by the desperate efforts of each national capital to escape them and to push all their weight onto their rivals. The present "globalised" world market is not a framework for progress and unification but of anarchy and disintegration. The tendency of decadent capitalism is towards the break-up of the world market, under the powerful centrifugal forces of the national economies structured by hypertrophied states which try to protect with all means (including military) the product of their exploitation of the workers against the assault of their competitors. While in the last century competition between nations contributed to the formation and unification of the world market, in the XXth century, the organised competition between each national state tends just to the opposite: to the disintegration and decomposition of the world market.
It is exactly for this reason that "globalisation" is something that can only be imposed by force. In the world of Yalta, the United States and Russia, created very structured organisms, using the advantages given to them by the discipline of imperialist blocs, to regulate (in their favour, obviously) world trade: GATT, the IMF, the Common Market, Comecon in the Russian bloc etc. These organisms, the expression of the bloc leaders' military and economic strength, were never able to overcome the tendencies to anarchism and organise the world market in a harmonious and unified way. The collapse of the two old imperialist blocs after 1989[1] has considerably accelerated competition and the chaos on the world market.
But perhaps "Globalisation" will stop this tendency? According to the apostles of "globalism" the part of the world market which is "already unified" is going to have a "salutary effect" on all economies and is going to permit the entire world to come out of the crisis by freeing themselves from "national egotism".
If we examine each of the features that the economists identify with "Globalism" none of them will "overcome" the chaos of the world market nor the crisis it is aggravating. To begin with, "electronic transactions via the Internet" are going to considerably accentuate the already very high risk of non-payment, adding to the growing burden of insupportable debt. As for the globalisation of the monetary and financial markets we have already analysed this in International Review No 81 (Financial Storms: Madness?): "A financial crisis is inevitable. Indeed, in some respects it is already happening. Even from capitalism's point of view, a strong "purge" of the "speculative bubble" is vital " ... Today, the speculative bubble, and above all state indebtedness have increased fanatically. In these circumstances, nobody can tell where the violence of such a purge would stop. But at all events, it will involve a massive destruction of fictitious capital which will hurl whole areas of world capital into ruin".[2]
In reality, that which is presented as "globalism" is something very different from the celestial music that its enthusiasts sell us. It is a response to the two pressing problems that are posed by the present state of the capitalist crisis:
-the reduction of production costs
- the destruction of protective barriers in order that the most competitive capitalisms can make full use of the increasingly reduced markets.
In respect of the reduction in production costs we have already pointed out that "The intensification of competition between capitalists, exacerbated by the crisis of overproduction and the scarcity of solvent markets, pushes the capitalists to modernise continually the process of production, replacing men by machines, in a frenzied search for cost reductions. The same race obliges them to shift part of production to countries where labour power is cheaper (China and South East Asia today, for example)".[3]
This second aspect of the reduction of costs (transferring of certain parts of production to countries with low labour costs) has accelerated in the 90's. We can see how the "democratic" states, have made good use of the services of the Chinese regime in order to produce compact disks, sports shoes, hard disks, modems etc., at absurdly low cost. The take-off of the famous "Asiatic dragons" based on the manufacture of computers, steel, electronic components, fabrics etc. has transferred to these "low labour costs" paradises.
Capitalism, forced by the crisis, has to take full advantage of the differences in wage costs: "the total wage costs (including taxes) in the industry of the different countries on the road to development which produce and export manufactured goods as well as services, vary between 3% (Madagascar, Vietnam) to 40% in respect to those of the richest European countries. China is situated between 5-16% and India around 5%. With the collapse of the Soviet bloc there now exists on the doorstep of the European Union a labour reserve whose costs do not surpass 5% (Rumania) or 20% (Poland and Hungary) of those in Germany".[4]
This is the first aspect of "globalisation".
Its consequences are forcing a world-wide reduction in wages. In the second place, it is provoking massive lay-offs in the great industrial centres without these jobs being replaced, in the same numbers, through the supply of jobs in the new ultra-automated factories. Thirdly, far from remedying the chronic illness of capitalism (the saturation of the market) it has made it worse through reducing demand in the great industrial countries without an equivalent growth of consumption in the "emerging countries"[5]
As for the destruction of customs barriers, the pressure of the "great powers" have certainly made countries like India, Mexico and Brazil reduce their import duties at the price of a considerable indebtedness (repeating the same formulas employed in the 70' s and which led to the catastrophe of the 1982 debt crisis). The relief supplied to the whole of world capital however, is completely illusory: "the recent financial collapse of another "exemplary" country, Mexico, whose money lost half of its value overnight, necessitating an urgent injection of close to $50 billion of credit (by far the largest "rescue" operation in capitalism's history), sums up the reality of the mirage of the "emergence" of certain Third World countries"[6]. Under the pressure of "globalisation" we are not seeing a reduction in protectionism or of state intervention in respect to commercial exchange, what we are seeing is a recourse as much to the traditional means as to newer ones:
- the same Clinton who in 1995 obliged the Japanese to open their frontiers to American products, who never tires of asking his "associates" for "free trade" demonstrated this by ordering the increase of duties on planes, steel and agricultural products and limiting state agencies acquisition of foreign products.
- the famous Uruguay Round which led to the substitution of the old GATT by the new World Trade Organisation obtained a really derisory accord: only eliminating tariffs on 10 industrial products and reducing the percentage in 8 of these products by around 30% and that over a 10 year period!
- a massive expression of neo-protectionism is found in the environmental, health and even "welfare" standards, that the most industrialised nations use to impose unattainable criterion's on their competitors; "in the new WTO, industrial groups, union organisations and militant greens plead that the collective benefits from the environment, social welfare etc. and the standards they involve shouldn't be regulated by the market but, by national sovereignty which cannot share responsibility on this terrain".[7]
The formation of "regional areas" (European Union, The North American Free Trade Agreement, etc) do not contradict this tendency because they obey the necessity for groups of capitalist countries to create zones of protection from which to confront their most powerful rivals. Faced with the European Union the US responded with the Free Trade Agreement, while Japanese capital confronted with both promoted an accord with the Asiatic dragons. These "regional groups" try to protect from competition what at times looks like areal vipers nest where commercial confrontations between partners grow daily. It's enough to look at the edifying spectacle of the "harmonious" European Union rocked by the continuous litigation between its 15 member countries.
There is no effort to deceive anyone here, the most aberrant tendencies that express the decomposition of the world market constantly affirm this: "Today, international currency insecurity has reached such a point that we are seeing the resurgence of the most archaic form of exchange, in other words the direct exchange of commodities without having recourse to money as an intermediary."[8] Another type of weapon that capitalist states, even the richest, have at hand, is the devaluation of their currency which automatically permits them to sell their goods at a lower price and increases those of its rivals. All the straightjackets that have been used to stop the generalisation of this practice have in the majority of cases ended in fiascos and this was borne out by the collapse of the European Monetary System.
"Globalisation" an ideological attack on the proletariat
We can see therefore that "globalisation" is an ideological smoke screen used to hide the reality of capitalism's collapse into generalised crisis and the subsequent growth of chaos on the world market.
Nevertheless, "globalism" is very ambitious. It proclaims nothing less than the overcoming and even the "destruction" (in the words of the most daring of the globalists) of the nation state. One of them, the well-known Japanese business guru Kenichi Ohmae, says that: "In a few words, in terms of the real flows of economic activity, the nation state has lost its role as a significant participant in the frontierless economy of the present world."[9]. Further on he calls nation states "brutal filters" and promises us the paradise of a "global" economy: "due to the growth of the number of individuals who pass through the brutal filter which separates geographical areas through the old fashioned customs of the world economy,' power over economic activity will be inevitably transferred from the central governments of the nation states to the frontierless network of innumerable individual decisions, based on the maket."[10]
Up until now the only social class that fought the nation state was the proletariat. But we can see that the audacity of bourgeoisie ideologists is limitless: they set themselves up as the standard bearers of the "struggle against national interests". At the height of delirium two authors of this genre, Misters Alexander King and Bertrand Schneider, have called their book "The First World Revolution".
However, the most dangerous aspect of this anti-nation "phobia" is the role that it plays in the bourgeoisie's ideological offensive against the whole proletariat. One part of this offensive is to entrap the proletariat in a false dilemma:
- on the one hand, the political forces that strongly defend "globalism" (in Europe they are the partisans of Maastricht), underlining the necessity to "overcome backwards national egotism" in order to integrate the "whole world" which will allow the crisis to be overcome;
- on the other, the parties of the left (above all when they are in opposition) and the unions that link the defence of worker's interests to that of the national interest supposedly trampled underfoot by "traitorous" governments.
The tenants of "Globalism", completely serve the national interest with their fulminations against so-called "minimum social guarantees", which means Social Security, redundancy pay, unemployment benefits, pensions, support for education and housing, and labour regulations that stipulate the length of the working day, the rhythm of production, the working age, etc. All the "horrors" forced on the nation state taken prisoner by "sinister" pressure groups formed by the workers .
Here we have the heart of globalism, stripped of its tinsel (about "overcoming the crisis" or "the internationalism of the free individual in a free market"). What we are presented with is the new alibi for the attacks imposed on all nation states by the crisis of capital: which means finishing with "minimum social guarantees", all social costs and labour legislation which with the development of the crisis are no longer insupportable.
And here, another pole of the bourgeoisie's ideological attack comes in to play: the unions and the Left. Over the last 50 years this "minimum social guarantee" has been the flagship of the "welfare state". This forms the "beautiful face" of state capitalism. The "social state" is presented to the workers as "evidence" that capitalist exploitation has been sweetened and has been placed within limits, as "proof" that within the national state class conciliation is possible and that their respective interests will be taken into account.
The unions and the Left (particularly when they are in opposition) pose as the greatest defenders of the "social state". They maintain that the conflict is between the "national interests" that demands the maintenance of a "social minimum" and "traitorous cosmopolitanism". This aspect played a very important role in the French bourgeoisie's manoeuvre through the strikes in the Autumn of 95. The movement was presented as a demonstration against Maastricht, as a an expression of the general populations' resentment against the demands of "convergence", into which the unions channelled this "movement".
The contradictions of Battaglia Comunista faced with "globalisation"
The task of the groups of the Communist Left (the basis for the future World Party of the proletariat) is to denounce, without concessions, the ideological poison of the dilemma between "savage globalisation" and "globalisation with guarantees". Faced with these new attacks the working class cannot choose between the spokesmen for the "national interest" or the standard bearers of "globalism". Its demands are not situated on the terrain of the defence of the "welfare state", but on the intransigent defence of its class interests. The perspective for the struggles is not in the false dilemma between "social-patriotism" and "globalisation", but in the destruction of the capitalist state in all countries.
The question of "globalisation" has been dealt with several times by Battaglia Comunista, through articles in its quarterly review Prometeo. BC firmly defends a series of positions of the Communist Left that we want to highlight:
- they unconditionally denounce "globalisation" as a powerful attack on the working class showing that it is based "on the progressive impoverishment of the world proletariat and the most violent forms of exploitation."[11]
- they reject the idea that "globalisation" represents an overcoming of capitalism's contradictions: "Here it is noteworthy to point out that even the most recent changes in the system of the world economy can be entirely reduced to the ambit of capital's concentration-centralisation process. Whilst a new phase in capital's history is undoubtedly underway this doesn't mean that the inherent contradictions of capital accumulation process have been overcome."[12]
- they recognise that the restructuring and "technological innovations" that capitalism introduced in the 80's and 90's do not represent a widening of the world market:
"Unlike the powerful economic growth of monopoly capitalism's first period; restructuring did not lead as expected to a 'virtuous circle' of new productive activity which would compensate for the manpower replaced by new technology. For the first time additional investments were leading, not to an expanded productive base and an overall growth in the productive labour force, but to their relative and absolute diminution."[13]
- they refuse any idea that sees "globalisation" as a way of creating an ordered and harmonious world production, instead they make it clear that "Thus we have a paradox of a system which pursues, via monopolies, the maximum rationality but which brings with it the highest level of irrationality: all against all; each capital against all the others; all capitals against each."[14]
- they record that: "the downfall (of the capitalist system) is not the mathematical result of the contradictions of the economic world, but the work of the proletariat which is conscious that this is not the best of all possible worlds."[15]
We support these positions and based on them we want to combat a series of insufficiencies and contradictions which, in our judgment, affect BC. This polemic has a clear militant aim: confronted with the aggravation of the crisis it is vital to denounce "theories" about "globalisation" whose aim is to obstruct the development of consciousness about the fact that the capitalist system is today "the worst of all possible worlds" and the necessity to destroy it world-wide.
What surprises us first of all is that BC thinks that: "Thanks to developments in microelectronics, both in the sphere of telecommunications and in relation to the actual organisation of the productive cycle the planet have really been unified."[16]. BC has been carried away by all the bourgeoisie's nonsense about telecommunications and the Internet supposedly being the "miracle unifier" and have forgotten that : "since the internationalisation of capitalist interests expresses only one side of the internationalisation of economic life, it is necessary also to review its other side, namely, that process of the nationalisation of capitalist interests which most strikingly empresses the anarchy of capitalist competition with the boundaries of the world economy, a process that leads to the greatest convulsions and catastrophes, to the greatest waste of human energy, and most forcefully raises the problem of establishing new forms of social life."[17]
Another weak flank that BC offers us is the strange discovery according to which:
"When Nixon, then President of the United States, took the historic decision to denounce the Bretton Woods Agreement and declared the dollars inconvertibility he had not the remotest idea that this was making way for one of the most gigantic transformations in the history of the capitalist mode of production, a period of extreme disturbance which in less than twenty years would change the shape of the world and push the relations of imperialist domination to their maximum limits."[18]
One cannot see as a cause (the famous decision in 1971 to declare the none-convertibility of the Dollar) what was nothing more than a simple effect of the aggravation of the capitalist crisis and in no way had enough importance to alter "the dominant imperialist relation", no less! We have already criticised the economism of BC which leads it to attribute effects that have no relevance to the confrontation between the previous imperialist blocs (Soviet and Western).
Nevertheless, the main danger is that they will open to door to the bourgeois mystification about capitalism's ability to "change and transform itself". In the past, BC has had a tendency to be dazzled by the "great transformations" that the bourgeoisie have dangled in front of our noses. It was seduced by the "innovations" of the "technological revolution", and then by the fabulous markets that would be opened up by "liberation" of the Eastern European countries. Today, they have taken at face value all the noise about "globalisation":
"The passing to the centralised management of the economic variables on a continental basis or through monetary zones has forced a change in the distribution of capital in different productive and financial sectors. It is not only small and medium sized businesses, but also large scale groups that are threatened with marginalisation or being taken over with the subsequent decline of their relative position of power. For many countries this could bring with it the danger of the fracturing of its national unity as the events in Yugoslavia or the ex-Soviet bloc have demonstrated. The balance of power between the different fractions of the world bourgeoisie is going to suffer profound mutations and will generate for a long time an aggravation of tensions and conflicts, with effects on the process of economic globalisation reflected that could slow down or even block it".[19]
To our amazement, we discover that imperialist tensions, the collapse of nations, the Yugoslavian conflict, are not explained by capitalism's decadence and decomposition, by the aggravation of the historic crisis of the system, but because they are internal phenomena of the process of "globalisation". Here BC slips away from the Communist Left's framework of analysis (decadence and the historic crisis of capitalism) and towards the bourgeoisie's framework of mystification's based on twaddle about "globalisation".
It is essential that the groups of the Communist Left make no concession to these mystification's and resolutely defend the revolutionary position according to which in decadence, and more concretely in the phase of crisis opened up at the end of the 60's, capitalism's attempts to try and stop its collapse will only aggravate and accelerate it and can produce no real change[20]. In our reply to the IBRP (International Review No 82) we make it clear that the question is not to ignore these attempts but to analysis them within the framework of the Communist Left and not to be hooked by the bait that bourgeois ideology dangles in front of us.
"Globalisation" and the nation state
However, where the contradictions of BC have their most dangerous consequences is in its position on the role of the nation state. BC believes that "globalisation" will profoundly alter the role of the nation state and imply a certain weakening of it. Certainly, they don't claim, as the samurai Kenichi Ohmea does, that the nation state is on the decline, and they recognise several important points:
- the class nature of the nation state has not changed
- the nation state is an active agent of the "changes" that capitalism is undergoing
- the nation state is not in crisis. Nevertheless, the comrades do say: "surely one of the most interesting aspects of the globalisation of the economy is expressed by the tendency to transversal and transnational integration of the great industrial and financial concentrations which, through their size and power, far surpasses that of the national states"[21]
What can be deduced from these "interesting aspects" is that under capitalism the famous "multinationals" can form entities superior to the nation state. This is a defence of the revisionist thesis that negates the Marxist principle according to which the highest and maximum unity of capitalism is the Nation State, the National Capital. Capitalism can never go beyond the framework of the nation state and even less can it be internationalist. As we have previously seen, it is limited to the aim of dominating its rival nations and gaining the largest possible share of the world market.
In the Editorial to Prometeo No 9 this revision of Marxism is confirmed when they say: "The productive and/or financial multinationals due to the economic interests and power they have surpass the different state formations they traverse. The fact that the central banks of the different states are incapable of controlling or counteracting the wave of speculation, that a monstrous handful of financial groups daily unleash, speaks volumes about the profound change in relations between states".
Is it really necessary recall that it is precisely these poor little, impotent national states that own (or at least strictly control) these mastodons of finance? Is it really necessary to show BC that this "monstrous handful" is formed by respectable banking and savings institutions whose responsibilities are designated either directly or indirectly by their respective national states?
BC is not only hooked by the bait about the supposed opposition between nation states and the monstrous multinationals, but goes even further, revealing that: "Thus, ever-larger capitals ... have given birth to those giants which now control the entire world economy. Indicative of this is the change in the so-called Big Three - the world's three largest companies. From the thirties right up until the seventies these were US car companies: General Motors, Chrysler and Ford. Today, they are three pension funds, again from the US: Fidelity Investments, Vanguard Group and Capital Research and Management. The cumulative power of these finance companies is enormous and extends beyond the individual states which have actually lost some of their capacity to control the world economy over recent years."[22]
In the 1970's the myth of the famous multinational oil companies was very fashionable. The Leftists told us that capital was "transnational" and due to this the "main demand" of the workers should be the defence of the national interest against this "stateless handful".
BC certainly rejected this mystification forcefully, nevertheless, they admit its "theoretical" justification, that is, they believed there was a possibility of an opposition, or at least, fundamental differences of interest, between the national state and the monopolies "traversing the national states" (this is their definition).
The multinationals are tools of the nation state. IBM, General Motors, Exxon, etc are tied to the American state by a whole series of channels: an important percentage of their production (40% in the case of IBM) is brought directly by the American state. It directly or indirectly influences the nomination of directors[23]. A copy of all new information technology products are sent straight to the Pentagon.
It is incredible that BC falls for the idea that there is a world superpower constituted by 3 investment funds! In the first place, the investment funds have no real autonomy, they are nothing but instruments of the banks, building societies, or state institutions such as syndicates, etc. Their direct and indirect bosses are their respective national states. Secondly, they are subject to strict state regulations which fix the percentage they can invest abroad in: shares, government bonds, etc.
"Globalisation" and State Capitalism
This brings us to an essential question: that of state capitalism. A fundamental feature of decadent capitalism is the concentration of the national capital in the hands of the state which has been converted into the pole around which the national capital organises its combat as much against the proletariat as other national capitals.
States are not the tools of enterprises, no matter how big they are, in fact, just the opposite has happened in decadent capitalism: the great monopolies, large enterprises, banks etc have submitted to the dictates of the national state and serve its designs as loyally as possible. Therefore, it is an error to think that in capitalism super-national powers exist which "cross" national states and dictate the policies they follow. On the contrary, the so-called multinationals are used by their mother-states as tools in the service of commercial and imperialist interests.
In no way, do we want to say that companies such as Ford or Exxon, are simply the puppets of their respective national states. They try to defend their particular interests, which on occasions clash with those of the national state. However, under "Western" state capitalism the complete fusion of private and state capital is organised in such a way that globally both, apart from the conflicts and contradictions that arise, act coherently in the defence of the national interest of Capital and under the protection of the totalitarian state.
BC says that it is difficult to know which state, for example Shell (Anglo-Dutch capital) or other multinationals which have multiple share capital, belong to. However, even if there are exceptional examples, these do not significantly nullify the reality of world capitalism, which is that property titles don't determine the control of a business. Under state capitalism it is the state that directs and determines the running of business, through whatever means necessary. It regulates prices, collective contracts, export quotes, level of production, etc. It determines the running of business when, as in the majority of productive sectors, it is the principle client. It controls "free trade" through its political, monetary, credit policies.
This essential aspect of the revolutionary analysis of decadent capitalism is not taken into consideration by BC. They prefer to loyally follow a partial aspect of Lenin's, and other revolutionaries of that period, efforts to understand the full magnitude of the problem of imperialism: Lenin's theory on financial capital, takes up that of Hilferding. In his book on imperialism, Lenin clearly sees that proletarian revolution is the order of the day in the epoch of capitalism's decadence. But this epoch is linked to the development of finance capital as a monstrous parasite arising out of the process of the concentration of capitalism, as a new phase in development of monopolies.
However, "many aspects of Lenin's definition of imperialism are inadequate today, and were even at the time he was elaborating it. Thus the period in which capital could be seen to be dominated by an oligarchy of "finance capital" and by "international monopolist combines" was already giving way to a new phase during the First World War- the period of state capitalism, of permanent war economy. In the epoch of chronic inter-imperialist rivalries on the world market, the entire national capital tends to be concentrated around the state apparatus, which subordinates and disciplines all particular fractions of capital to the needs of military/economic survival."[24]
What constitutes an error by Lenin linked to the process of understanding imperialism and all its consequences, is converted into a dangerous aberration by BC. The theory of "concentration in transnational super-monopolies" closes the door, in the first place, to the Marxist position on the concentration of the national capital in the state, the tendency to state capitalism, which subordinates all fractions of the bourgeoisie not matter what links or influence they may have at the international level. Secondly, this theory opens the door to the Kautskyist theory of "super-imperialism". All of which results in BC only criticising this theory as regards the impossibility of overcoming the anarchy of capital and not the crucial point: the selling of the myth that capitalism can unite across national frontiers. This difficulty leads BC to correctly reject the extreme thesis of the "fusion of nations", while at the same time admitting the existence of super-national entities. Thirdly, BC develop a speculation according to which: the nation state, within the framework of "globalisation", will have two aspects: one serving the interests of the multinationals and, the other, subordinated to the service of the national interest: "it is going to become increasingly evident that the state's intervention in the economic world is carried out at two levels: at one level it will offer to the super-national centre the centralised management of the monetary mass and the determination of macro-economic variables according to monetary area and at the other the local control of the comparability of this latter with national variables"[25]. BC turns the world upside down. A quick look at what happens in the European Union shows just the contrary: the interests of the national capital are entirely managed by the national state and no way is it a kind of "subordination" to "European interests", as the ambiguities of BC would lead us to understand.
Mounted on the speculative theory of "transnational" interests, it draws incredible conclusions: imperialist conflicts will not degenerate into generalised imperialist war because: "The ending of the confrontation between the Eastern and Western blocs with the implosion of the former has not clearly delineated the foundations of a new strategic confrontation. Up until now, the strategic interests of the great and real centres of economic power have not been expressed in strategic confrontations between states, because they move transversely to them."
This is a very serious confusion. Imperialist war is no longer a confrontation between national capitals armed to the teeth (as Lenin made clear) but the result of confrontations between transnational groups using national states as their tools. National states are no longer the focus and cause of the conflagration but mere agents of the monstrous transnationals which "cross them". Fortunately, BC don't draw all the conclusions of this aberration, because this would lead them to say that the struggle of the proletariat against imperialist war is no longer the struggle against national states but the struggle "to free them" from submission to the interests of the transnationals. In other words, the vulgar mystifications of the Leftists. If BC wants to be serious it has to cohere to the positions of the Communist Left. It has to make a systematic critique of its speculations about monopolies and financial monsters. It must eradicate its aberrant slogans such as "a new era has been inaugurated characterised by the dictatorship of the financial market" (Prometeo No 9).[26] These weaknesses open up its flank to the penetration of bourgeois mystifications concerning "globalisation" and the supposed opposition between transnational and national interests, between Maastricht and popular interests, between Maastricht and the interests of the oppressed peoples.
This could lead BC to defend certain theses and mystifications of the ruling class, therefore to participate in the weakening of the working class's consciousness and struggle. This is surely not the role to be played by a proletarian revolutionary organisation.
Adalen, 5 June 1996.
[1] See "The impossibility of a "United Europe", in International Review No 73, 2nd Quarter of 1993, where we highlight the aggravation of competition and anarchy in the world market.
[2] "Financial Storms: Madness?", International Review No 81, 2rd Quarter. 1995.
[3] "The Cynicism of a Decadent Ruling Class", International Review No 78, 3rd Quarter, 1994.
[4] The World Annual 1996: "Relocation, Employment and Inequality".
[5] "This means that this economic development cannot but effect the production of the most advanced countries, whose states, increasingly, protest against the "dishonest commercial practices" of these emerging countries" ("International Situation Resolution", International Review No 82, 3rd Quarter 1995.)
[6] Idem.
[7] The World Annual 1996: "What is going to change with the WTO".
[8] "An Economy Undermined by Decomposition", International Review No. 75, 4th Quarter. 1993.
[9] Kenichi Ohmae "The End of the Nation State, The rise of regional economies".
[10] Idem.
[11] The quotes from this article are taken from the English translation of the original Prometeo article (no 9, June 1995) published in Internationalist Communist, No 14. This is the theoretical journal of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party, a joint organisation of BC and the Communist Workers Organisation.
[12] Idem, page.13.
[13] Idem page 14.
[14] Idem page 19.
[15] Idem page 14.
[16] Idem page 14.
[17] N. Bukharin, "Imperialism and the World Economy", page 62.
[18] "Capitals Against Capitalism" page 13.
[19] Prometeo No 10, "Two Dimensions of the State: the globalisation of the economy and the State"
[20] BC's incoherence is made clear when they say "In reality capitalism is the same as ever and is doing nothing other than reorganising itself in the interests of self-preservation along the lines dictated by the tendential fall in the average rate of profit". ("Capitals Against Capitalism", Internationalist Communist No 14).
[21] Prometeo No 10, "The Two Dimensions of the State: the G1obalisation of the economy and
the State".
[22] "Capitals Against Capitalism" Internationalist Communist No 14.
[23] It is common practise that many American politicians after they have left the Senate or their positions in the administration move into the leadership of the large Multinationals. The same takes place in Europe.
[24] "On Imperialism", International Review No 19, 4th quarter 1979.
[25] Prometeo No 10, "The Two Dimensions of the State: the globalisation of the economy and the state".
[26] Prometeo No 9, "Editorial".
In the previous article in this series, we showed how the authentic socialists of the end of the 19th century had envisaged the way that a future communist society would tackle some of mankind's most pressing social problems: the relationship between man and woman, and between humankind and the nature from which it has sprung. In this issue, we examine how the late 19th century revolutionaries foresaw the most crucial of all social transformations - the transformation of "useless toil" into "useful work" - in other words, the practical overcoming of alienated labour. In doing so, we will answer the charge that these visions represent a relapse into pre-marxist utopianism.
In a London of the future, much has been dismantled and replanted; you can pass from Kensington to Trafalgar Square by way of a woodland path. But some familiar buildings are still there: the old Houses of Parliament, now mainly used for storing manure, and the British Museum, which still retains many of its ancient functions. It is here that William Guest, time traveller from the late nineteenth century, meets old Hammond, a former librarian who has a profound historical knowledge and is thus best placed to explain the workings of a communist society which has been established for several centuries. After discussing several aspects of "the way things are managed", ie the methods of social organisation, they turn to the question of work:
"The man of the nineteenth century would say that there is a natural desire towards the procreation of children, and a natural desire not to work".
"Yes, yes", said Hammond, "I know the ancient platitude - wholly untrue; indeed, to us quite meaningless. Fourier, whom all men laughed at, understood the matter better".
"Why is it meaningless to you?" said I. He said: "because it implies that all work is suffering, and we are so far from thinking that, as you may have noticed, whereas we are not short of wealth, there is a kind of fear growing up amongst us that we shall one day be short of work. It is a pleasure which we are afraid of losing, not a pain."
"Yes", said I, "I have noticed that, and I was going to ask you about that also. But in the meantime, what do you positively mean to assert about the pleasurableness of work amongst you?"
"This, that all work is now pleasurable; either because of the hope of gain in honour and wealth with which the work is done, which causes pleasurable excitement, even when the actual work is not pleasant; or else because it has grown into a pleasurable habit, as is the case with what you may call mechanical work; and lastly (and most of our work is of this kind) because there is conscious sensuous pleasure in the work itself; it is done, that is, by artists."
"I see", said I. "Can you now tell me how you have come to this happy condition? For, to speak plainly, this change from the conditions of the older world seems to me far greater and more important than all the other changes you have told me about as to crime, politics, property, marriage."
"You are right there," said he. "Indeed you may say rather that it is this change which makes all the others possible. What is the object of Revolution? Surely to make people happy. Revolution having brought its foredoomed change about, how can you prevent the counter-revolution from setting in except by making people happy? What! Shall we expect peace and stability from unhappiness? ... .And happiness without happy daily work is impossible".
Thus William Morris, in his visionary novel News From Nowhere, seeks to describe the attitude to work that might exist in a developed communist society. The poetic method of this description should not blind us to the fact that he is only defending a fundamental postulate of marxism here. As we have shown in previous articles in this series (see in particular International Reviews 70 and75), Marxism begins with the understanding that labour is "man's act of self-genesis" as Marx put it in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where he credited Hegel with having recognised this, albeit in a formal and abstract way. In 1876, Engels was able to make use of the most recent discoveries in the field of physical anthropology to confirm that "labour created man himself" ('The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man'). The powerful human brain, the dexterous human hand, language and the specifically human consciousness of self and world, are born through the process of tool-making, the shaping of the external environment; in short, through labour, which is the act of a social being working in common. This dialectical approach to human origins, which can only be defended consistently by a labouring class, is opposed both to the idealist view (humanity either as the product of an external supernatural being, or of its own intellectual powers conceived in isolation from practice) and the vulgar materialist view which reduces human intelligence to purely mechanical factors (the size of the brain for example).
But Marx also criticised Hegel because "he sees only the positive, not the negative side of labour. Labour is man's coming to be for himself within alienation, or as alienated man". (EPM, 'Critique of Hegelian Philosophy'). Under conditions of material scarcity, and in particular of class domination, the labour which creates and reproduces man has also resulted in man's own powers escaping his control and ruling over him. Engels again confirms this standpoint in 'The Part Played by Labour', showing that despite man's unique capacity for purposeful and planned action, the material conditions under which he has laboured so far have led to results very different to his plans. The dimension of alienation in this text is covered in Engels' references to the ecological catastrophes of past civilisations, but also to the emergence of religion, "that fantastic reflection of human things in the human mind".
Man's estrangement from himself is situated first and foremost in the sphere through which he creates himself, the sphere of labour. Overcoming the alienation of labour is thus the key to overcoming all the alienations that plague humanity, and there can be no real transformation of social relations - whether the creation of new relationships between the sexes, or a new dynamic between man and nature - without the transformation of alienated labour into pleasurable creative activity. Old Hammond thus stands by Marx - who in turn also defended Fourier on this point - when he insists that happiness is impossible without happy daily work.
Certain modernist sects, not least those like the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste who used to enjoy displaying their knowledge of Marx, have taken this critique of alienated labour to mean that communism means the abolition not only of wage labour - the last form of alienated labour in history - but of labour as such. Such attitudes to labour are typical of the disintegrating petty bourgeoisie and declassed elements who look down on the workers as mere slaves and think that the individual "refusal of work" is a revolutionary act. Indeed, such views have always been used to discredit communism. This charge was answered by August Bebel in Woman and Socialism, when he pointed out that the very starting point of the socialist transformation is not the immediate abolition of work but the universal obligation to do it:
"As soon as society is in possession of all the means of production, the duty to work, on the part of all able to work, without distinction of sex, becomes the organic law of socialist society. Without work society cannot exist. Hence, society has the right to demand that all who wish to satisfy their wants shall exert themselves, according to their physical and mental faculties, in the production of the requisite wealth. The silly claim that the Socialist does not wish to work, that he seeks to abolish work, is a matchless absurdity, which fits our adversaries alone. Non-workers, idlers, exist in capitalist society only. Socialism agrees with the Bible that 'he who will not work, neither shall he eat '. But work shall not be a mere activity; it shall be useful, productive activity. The new social system will demand that each and all pursue some industrial, agricultural or other useful occupation, whereby to furnish a certain amount of work towards the satisfaction of existing wants. Without work no pleasure, no pleasure without work" (chapter VII, p275).
In the initial stages of the revolution, the universal obligation of labour, as Bebel implies, contains an element of restraint. The proletariat in power will certainly rely first and foremost on the enthusiasm and active participation of the mass of the working class, who will be the first to see that they can only rid themselves of wage slavery if they are prepared to labour in common to produce and distribute life's necessities. Already in this phase of the revolutionary process, labour has its own reward, in that it is immediately seen as socially useful - work for a real and observable common good and not for the inhuman demands of the market and of profit. In such circumstances, even the hardest work takes on a liberating and human character, since "in your use or enjoyment of my product I would have the immediate satisfaction and knowledge that in my labour I had gratified a human need ... In the individual expression of my own life. I would have brought about the immediate expression of your life, and so in my individual activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my authentic nature, my human, communal nature" (Marx, 'Excerpts from James Mill's Elements of Political Economy'). Nevertheless, a gigantic social and political upheaval will at first inevitably call for very great material sacrifices, and such feelings alone would not be enough to convince those used to idling and living off the toil of others to voluntarily submit to the rigours and discipline of associated labour. The use of economic constraint - he who will not work, neither shall he eat - is thus a necessary weapon of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Only in a more developed socialist society will it be plain and obvious to all that it is in the interests of every individual to play his full part in social production.
At the same time, it is not at all the goal of the communist movement to remain at a stage where work's only reward is that it is benefiting someone else. If it does not become pleasurable in itself, the counter-revolution will indeed set in, and the proletariat's willing sacrifices for the common cause will become sacrifices for an alien cause - as witness the tragedy of the defeated Russian revolution. This is why immediately after the passage cited above, Bebel adds:
"All being obliged to work, all have an equal interest in seeing the following three conditions of work in force:
First, that work should be moderate, and shall overtax none;
Second, that work shall be as agreeable and varied as possible;
Third, that work shall be as productive as possible, seeing that both the hours of work and fruition depend upon that".
In distinguishing between "Useful Work" and "Useless Toil" William Morris makes a very similar threefold definition:
"What is the difference between them, then? This: one has hope in it, the other has not .... What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes it worth doing?
It is threefold, I think: hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good quality; rest enough and good enough to be worth having; product worth having by one who is neither a fool nor an ascetic; pleasure enough for all of us to be conscious of it while we are at work" ('Useful Work Versus Useless Toil', Political Writings of William Morris, London, 1973, p 87)
In Morris's definition of useful work cited above, and in Bebel's three conditions for work being made pleasant, the element of rest, of leisure and relaxation, is elaborated very concretely: they insisted on the possibility of reducing the working day to a fraction of what it then was (and still is). This is surely because, faced with a capitalist society which stole the best hours, days and years from the worker's life, it was an elementary duty of revolutionaries to demonstrate that the very development of capitalist machinery made this theft historically unjustifiable. This was also the theme of Paul Lafargue's sardonic pamphlet The Right to be Lazy, published in 1883. By then it was already abundantly evident that one of the most striking contradictions in capitalism's development of technology was that while it brought with it the possibility of freeing the worker from drudgery, it seemed to be used only to sweat him more intensively than ever. The reason for this was simple: under capitalism, technology is not developed for the benefits of humanity, but for the needs of capital:
"Our epoch has invented machines which would have appeared wild dreams to the men of past ages, and of those machines we have as yet made no use.
They are called 'labour saving' machines - a commonly used phrase which implies what we expect of them; but we do not get what we expect. What they really do is to reduce the skilled labourer to the ranks of the unskilled, to increase the number of the 'reserve army of labour' - that is, to increase the precariousness of life among the workers and to intensify the labour of those who serve the machines (as slaves their masters). All this they do by the way, while they pile up the profits of the employers of labour, or force them to expend those profits in bitter commercial war with each other. In a true society these miracles of ingenuity would be for the first time used for minimising the amount of time spent in unattractive labour, which by their means might be so reduced as to be but a very light burden on each individual. All the more as these machines would most certainly be very much improved when it was no longer a question as to whether their improvement would 'pay' the individual, but rather whether it would benefit the community" ('Useful Work. . .', p106).
In a similar vein, Bebel cites contemporary calculations by bourgeois scientists that with the technology already existing in his time, the working day could be reduced to one and a half hours! Bebel was particularly optimistic about the possibilities being opened up by the development of technology in that period of startling capitalist expansion. But this optimism was not a blanket apologia for capitalist progress. Writing about the enormous potential contained in the application of electricity, he also argued that "only in socialist society will electricity attain its fullest and most widespread application" (Woman and Socialism, ch. VII, p286). Even if today capitalism has 'electrified' most (though not all) of the planet, the full significance of Bebel's qualification can be grasped when he remarks a little further on that "our water courses, the ebb and tide of the sea, the winds, the sunlight - all furnish innumerable horse-powers, the moment we know how to utilise them in full" (ibid). The methods that capitalism has adopted for generating electricity - the burning of fossil fuels, and nuclear energy - have brought forth numerous harmful side-effects, notably in the form of pollution, while the needs of profit have led to the neglect of 'cleaner', and ultimately more abundant sources - such as the wind, the tides and the sun.
But the reduction of the working day for these socialists would not only be the result of the rational use of machinery. It would also be made possible by eliminating the gigantic waste of labour power inherent in the capitalist mode of production. As early as 1845 Engels, in one of his 'Speeches in Elberfeld' , had drawn attention to this reality, pointing to the way capitalism could not avoid squandering human resources in its employment of profiteers and financial middlemen, of policemen and prison guards to deal with the crimes it inevitably provoked amongst the poor, of soldiers and sailors to fight its wars, and above all in its forced unemployment of millions of labourers denied access to all productive work by the mechanisms of the economic crisis. The socialists of the late nineteenth century were no less struck by this wastefulness and showed the connection between overcoming it and ending the drudgery of the proletariat:
"As things are now, between the waste of labour-power in mere idleness and its waste in unproductive work, it is clear that the world of civilisation is supported by a small part of its people; when all were working usefully for its support, the share of work which each would have to do would be but small, if our standard of life were about on the footing of what well-to-do and refined people now think desirable" ('Useful Work ... ', p 96). Such sentiments are more true than ever today, in a decadent capitalism where waste production (arms, bureaucracy, advertising, speculation, drugs etc) have reached unprecedented proportions, and where mass unemployment has become a permanent fact of life, while the working day is for the majority of employed workers longer than it was for their Victorian ancestors. Such contradictions offer the most striking proof of the absurdity that capitalism has become, and thus of the necessity for the communist revolution.
Describing the pleasures of work to his nineteenth century visitor, old Hammond did not lay much emphasis on the need for rest, for leisure; and yet the subtitle of the novel is 'An epoch of rest'. Evidently, after several generations, the rigid separation between 'free time' and 'labour time' has been superseded, as Marx said it must. For the aim of the revolution is not simply to relieve human beings of unpleasant work: "labour is also to be made pleasant" as Bebel puts it. He then elaborates some of the conditions for this to be the case, echoed by Morris on each point.
The first condition is that work should be carried out in pleasant surroundings:
"To that end practical and tastefully contrived workshops are required; the utmost precautions against danger; the removal of disagreeable odours, gases and smoke - in short of all sources of injury or discomfort to health. At the start, the new social system will carry on production with the old means, inherited from the old. But these are utterly inadequate. Numerous and unsuitable workshops, disintegrated in all directions; imperfect tools and machinery, running through all the stages of usefulness - this heap is insufficient both for the number of the workers and for their demands of comfort and of pleasure. The establishment of a large number of spacious, light, airy, fully equipped and ornamented workshops is a pressing need. Art, technique, skill of head and hand immediately find a wide field of activity. All departments in the building of machinery, in the fashioning of tools, in architecture and in the branches of work connected with the internal equipment of houses have the amplest opportunity" (Woman and Socialism, ch. VII, p284). For Morris, productive activity might be carried out in a variety of surroundings, but he argues that some kind of factory system would "offer opportunities for a full and eager social life surrounded by many pleasures. The factories might be centres of intellectual activity also", where "work might vary from raising food from the surrounding country to the study and practice of art and science". Naturally Morris is also concerned that these factories of the future would not merely be clean and pollution-free, but aesthetic constructions in themselves: "beginning by making their factories, buildings and sheds decent and convenient like their homes, they would infallibly go on to make them not merely negatively good, inoffensive merely, but even beautiful, so that the glorious art of architecture, now for some time slain by commercial greed, would be born again and flourish" ('Useful Work ... ', p 103-4).
The factory is quite often described in the marxist tradition as being a true realisation of hell on earth. And this is true not merely of the ones that it is respectable to abhor - those of the dim distant days of the 'industrial revolution' with its admitted excesses - but equally the modem factory in the age of democracy and the welfare state. But for marxism, the factory is more than this: it is the place where the associated labourers come together, work together, struggle together, and is thus an indication of the possibilities of the communist association of the future. Thus, against the anarchist prejudice against the factory as such, the late nineteenth century marxists were quite correct to envisage a factory of the future, now transformed into a centre of learning, experiment, and creation.
For this to be the case, it is evident that the old capitalist division of labour, its reduction of virtually all jobs to a mind-numbing and repetitive routine, would have to be done away with as soon as possible. "To compel a man to do day after day the same task, without any hope of escape or change, means nothing short of turning life into a prison-torment" ('Useful Work. . .', p 101I). Thus our socialist writers, again following Marx, insist on work being varied, changing, and no longer crippled by the rigid separation of mental from physical activity. But the variety they proposed - based on the acquisition of a number of different skills, on a properly established balance between intellectual activity and bodily exertion - was much more than a mere negation of capitalist over specialisation, more than a simple distraction from the boredom of the latter. In its fullest sense it involved the development of a new kind of human activity which is finally in conformity with mankind's deepest needs:
"An aspiration, deeply implanted in the nature of man, is that of freedom in the choice and change of occupation. As uninterrupted repetition renders the daintiest of dishes repulsive, so with a daily treadmill-like recurring occupation; it dulls the senses. Man then does only mechanically what he must do; he does it without swing or enjoyment. There are latent in all men facilities and desires that need but to be awakened and developed to produce the most beautiful results. Only then does man become fully and truly man. Towards the satisfaction of this need of change, socialist society offers the fullest opportunity" (Woman and Socialism, ch. VII, p288).
This variation has nothing in common with the frenetic search for innovation for its own sake that has become more and more a hallmark of decaying capitalist culture. It is founded on a human rhythm of life where disposable time has become a measure of wealth: "we have now found out what we want, so we make no more than we want; and as we are not driven to make a vast quantity of useless things, we have time and resources enough to consider our pleasure in making them" (News from Nowhere, London, 1970 edition, p82).
Working with swing and enjoyment; the awakening of suppressed facilities and desires. In short, as Morris put it, work as consciously sensuous activity.
Morris did not have access to Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, but his use of this phrase shows that the late 19th century revolutionary movement was familiar with the basic conception of free human activity which Marx developed in these early texts. They knew, for example, that Marx had endorsed Fourier's insistence that labour, to be worthy of human beings, had to be based on "passionate attraction", which is surely another term for the "Eros" later investigated by Freud.
Freud once remarked that primitive man "made his work agreeable, so to speak, by treating it as the equivalent of and substitute for sexual activities" (General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, New York 1953, p 175). In other words, in the first forms of primitive communism, labour has not yet become what Hegel defined it to be in The Phenomenology of Mind: "desire checked and retrained ". In Marxist terms, the alienation of labour does not fully begin until the advent of class society. The communism of the future thus achieves a generalised return to erotic, sensuous forms of labour which in class society have generally been the privilege of the artistic elite.
At the same time, in the Grundrisse, Marx criticises Fourier's idea that work can become play, in the sense of "mere fun or amusement". This is because scientific communism has understood that utopianism is always dominated by a fixation on the past. A man cannot become a child again, as Marx notes in the same work. But then he goes on to emphasise that man can and indeed must recapture the spontaneity of childhood; the labouring, future seeing adult must learn to reintegrate the child's erotic connection to the world. The awakening of the senses described in the EPM requires a return to the lost kingdom of play; but the one who returns is no longer lost within it, like children are, because he has now acquired the conscious mastery of the fully developed, social human being.
We can no further in examining the vision of socialism elaborated by the late 19th century revolutionaries without facing the question: was their strenuous effort to describe the society of the future merely a new variety of utopianism, a kind of wish fulfilment unconnected to the real movement of history?
In the previous article in this series we considered the charge made against Bebel by the feminists - that his approach is indeed utopian because it fails to make the link between the socialist future, where the oppression of women has disappeared along with other forms of oppression and exploitation, and the struggle against this oppression in present day society. We can also hardly ignore the fact that Morris subtitled his News from Nowhere "a utopian romance". Nevertheless we rejected this charge, at least in the manner formulated by the feminists. The idea that any attempt to describe communism in anything but negative terms is equivalent to utopianism is common to most forms of leftism, which is always anxious to conceal the fact that its vision of socialism is nothing but a rejigging of present day exploitation. Of course it's true that communists cannot repeat the error of Fourier, drawing up day to day, even hour to hour prescriptions for what the future society will be like and how life will be lived. But as Bordiga once remarked, the real difference between utopian and scientific socialism resides not so much in the latter's refusal to describe and define communism, but in its recognition that the new society can only come about through the unfolding of a real movement, a real social struggle that is already taking place at the heart of bourgeois society. While the utopians dreamed up their "recipes for the cook books of the future" and appealed to benevolent philanthropists to provide the kitchen space and the cookers, the revolutionary communists identified the proletariat as the force that alone could bring the new society into being by taking its unavoidable struggle against capitalist exploitation to its logical conclusions.
The feminists, in any case, have no right to pass judgment on the 19th century socialists because for them the 'real movement' that leads to the revolutionary transformation is not a class movement at all, but an amorphous, interclassist alliance which can only serve to take the proletariat away from its own terrain of struggle. In this sense there is no utopianism at all in Morris, or Bebel, or the social democratic parties in general, because they based all their work on the clear recognition that it would be the working class and no other social force which would be compelled, by its own historic nature, to overthrow capitalist relations of production.
And yet a problem remains, because in this period, the apogee of capitalist development, the mountaintop that preceded the downward slope, the precise contours of this revolutionary overthrow began to get blurred. The late nineteenth century socialists were certainly able to see the communist potentialities revealed by the tremendous growth of capitalism, but since this growth removed the revolutionary action of the class from the foreseeable horizon, it became increasingly difficult to see how the existing defensive struggles of the class would mature into a full-scale onslaught on capital.
It's true the Paris Commune was not very far away in time, and indeed the socialist parties continued to celebrate its memory every year. The organisational forms that Bebel envisaged for the new society were certainly influenced by the experience of the Commune, and when Morris, in News from Nowhere, describes the transition from the old society to the new, he makes no bones about portraying it as the result of a violent civil war. The fact remains that the lessons of the Commune began to fade very quickly, and while Bebel's great work contains many important elaborations about the socialist future, there is very little clarification about the way that the working class would move towards taking power, or about the initial phases of the revolutionary confrontation with capital. As Victor Serge noted, during this period an "idyllic" vision of the socialist revolution began to take hold of the workers' movement:
"At the end of the last century, it was possible to entertain the great dream of an idyllic social transformation. Broadminded people went in for this, scorning or twisting Marx's science. They dreamed of the social revolution as the virtually painless expropriation of a tiny minority of plutocrats. Why should the proletariat in its magnanimity not break up the old blades and the modern firearms and grant an indemnity to its exploiters of yesterday? The last of the rich would peaceably die out, at leisure, surrounded by an atmosphere of healthy distrust. The expropriation of the treasures accumulated by capitalists, together with the rational organisation of production, would instantly procure well-being and security for the whole of society. All pre-war working class ideologies were to some degree penetrated by these false ideas. The radical myth of progress dominated. In the Second International, a handful of revolutionary marxists alone discerned the great outlines of historical development ..." (What Everyone Should Know about State Repression, chap 4, XI, first written in 1926)
This over-optimistic vision took different forms. In Germany, where the social democratic party grew into a mass party with a commanding presence not only in the trade unions but also in parliament and local councils, this notion of power falling like a ripe fruit into the hands of a movement that had already established its organisational bases inside the old system became more and more prevalent. The revolution was less and less seen as the old mole that erupts to the surface, the act of an outlaw class that has to bring down all the existing institutions and create a new form of power, and more and more understood as the culmination of a patient work of building, consolidating and canvassing inside the existing social and political institutions. And as we shall see when we look at the evolution of this conception in the work of Karl Kautsky, there was no Chinese Wall between this 'orthodox' view and the openly revisionist one of Bernstein and his followers, since if socialism can come about through gradually accumulating its forces inside the shell of capitalism, there may be no need for any final revolutionary overthrow at all.
In Britain, where out and out reformism, 'nothing but' trade unionism and parliamentary cretinism had in any case been more endemic within the workers' movement, the reaction of revolutionaries like Morris was rather one of retreating into a purist sectarianism that poured scorn on the fight for "palliatives" and insisted at all times that socialism was the only answer to the proletariat's problems. But since the defensive struggle was effectively dismissed, all that was left was the task of preaching socialism: "I say for us to make socialists is the business at present, and at present I do not think we can have any ·other useful business" ('Where are we now?', Commonweal, November 15, 1890), as though revolutionary consciousness would spread through society simply by more and more individuals being won over to the logic of socialist arguments. In fact towards the end of his life, Morris began to rethink his reservations about the fight for reforms, since the inability of his Socialist League to deal with this question helped bring about its demise and disappearance; but the sectarian vision continued to weigh heavily on the revolutionary movement in Britain. The Socialist Party of Great Britain, sterile from its very birth in 1903, is a classic embodiment of this trend.
Utopianism emerges in the workers' movement whenever the connection between the present-day struggles of the class and the future communist society disappears from sight. But we can't reproach the revolutionaries of this period too harshly for this. It was above all the objective conditions of the late nineteenth century which interfered with their vision. In the period that followed, the period in which capitalism began its descent down the mountain-side, changes in these objective conditions, and above all in the methods and forms of the class struggle, allowed the best elements in the social democratic movement to see the perspective more clearly. In the next articles in this series, we will therefore examine the debates which animated the social democratic parties in the 1900s, and particularly after the 1905 revolution in Russia - debates which were to centre not so much on the goal to be obtained, but on the means to obtain them.
CDW
(1) We cite this passage partly to refute the oft-repeated charge that Morris was 'anti-technology', which was raised as early as 1902, by Kautsky in his book The Social Revolution. Morris certainly thought that socialist society would witness a return of many of the skills and pleasures of handicraft production, but for him this would be a choice made possible by the fact that advanced machinery would substantially free the producers of repetitive and unattractive forms of labour.
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Morris as a revolutionary militant
William Morris had many political weaknesses. His rejection of parliament as a vehicle for socialist revolution was also accompanied by a refusal to apply any tactic of intervention in the parliamentary arena, which at that time was still on the historic agenda for workers' parties. Indeed, the Socialist League's lack of clarity on the problem of the immediate struggles of the working class led it towards a sectarian dead-end, where it was fully exposed to the destructive intrigues of the anarchists who entered it and soon interred it, with more than a little help from the bourgeois state.
Nevertheless, when the League was constituted, the result of a split with the Social Democratic Federation led by the 'Jingo Socialist' Hyndman, it had been supported by Engels as a step towards the development of a serious marxist current in Britain - and thus as a possible moment in the formation of a class party. And it is this aspect of Morris's socialism that the bourgeoisie most wants us to forget. Here it becomes plain that the attempt to reduce Morris to a kind of 'designer socialist', a harmless purveyor of art to the masses, is itself far from harmless. For Morris the socialist was not an isolated dreamer, but a militant who courageously broke with his class origins and willingly gave the last ten years of his life to the difficult labour of building a revolutionary organisation within the proletariat of Britain. And not only in Britain: the Socialist League saw itself as part of the international proletarian movement which gave birth to the Second International in 1889.
In his own day, Morris's devotion to the cause of socialism was ridiculed by the bourgeoisie who branded him a hypocrite, a fool and a traitor. Today the ruling class is even more determined to prove that committing one's life to the communist revolution is the purest folly. But the 'foolish' revolutionaries the 'crazy' communist organisations, are the only ones who can defend - and have the right to criticise - the political heritage of William Morris.
Amos (extract from 'The many false friends of William Morris' in World Revolution 195)
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/life-icc
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/revolution-internationale
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1919-german-revolution
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/battaglia-comunista
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/polemic
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/globalisation
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1929/communism-and-19th-century-workers-movement
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/august-bebel
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1930/charles-fourier
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1931/william-morris
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1932/paul-lafargue