"A spectre is haunting Europe: the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe has entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: the Pope and the Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police spies."
These opening lines of the Communist Manifesto, written exactly 150 years ago, are today more true than ever before. A century and a half after the Communist League adopted its famous declaration of war of the revolutionary proletariat against the capitalist system, the ruling class is still busy with the spectre of communism. The Pope, along with his Stalinist friend Fidel Castro, still crusades in defence of the God given right of the ruling class to live from the exploitation of wage labour. The Black Book of Communism, the latest monstrosity of the "French Radicals", falsely blaming marxism for the crimes of its Stalinist foe, is presently being translated into English, German and Italian[1]. As for the German police, mobilised as ever against revolutionary ideas, they are presently being officially granted, through an alteration of the bourgeois democratic constitution, the right to electronically survey and eavesdrop on the proletariat at anytime, anywhere[2].
1998, the year of the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, represents in fact a new climax of the historical war of the propertied classes against communism. Still benefiting enormously from the collapse of the eastern European Stalinist regimes in 1989, which it presents as the "end of communism", and in the aftermath of the 80th anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917 last year, the bourgeoisie is attaining new production records for anti-communist propaganda. One might have imagined that the question of the Communist Manifesto would have offered a new opportunity to intensify this propaganda.
The opposite is true. Despite the evident historical significance of the date January 1998 - alongside the bible, the Communist Manifesto is worldwide the most frequently published book of the 20th century - the bourgeoisie has chosen to almost completely ignore the anniversary of the first truly revolutionary communist programme of its class enemy. What is the reason for this sudden deafening silence?
On January 10 1998, the German bourgeoisie published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung a statement on the Communist Manifesto. After claiming that the workers of the east had "shaken off their chains of communism", and that the "dynamic flexibility" of capitalism will continue to overcome all crises, thereby disproving Marx, the statement concludes "A hundred and fifty years after the appearance of the Manifesto, we no longer have to fear any ghosts."
This article, hidden away on page 13 in the economics and stock exchange supplement, is a not very successful attempt of the ruling class to reassure itself. Alongside it, on the same page, there is one article on the terrible economic crisis in Asia, and another on the new German official post-war unemployment record of almost 4.5 million. The pages of the bourgeois press themselves disprove daily the alleged refutation of Marxism by history. In reality there is no document existing today which troubles the bourgeoisie more profoundly than the Communist Manifesto - for two reasons. Firstly because its demonstration of the temporary historical character of the capitalist mode of production, of the insoluble nature of its own internal contradictions, confirmed by present day reality, continues to haunt a deeply anxious ruling class. Secondly because the Manifesto, already at that time, was specifically written to dispel working class confusions about the nature of communism. From a present day point of view, it can be read as a modern denunciation of the lie that Stalinism had anything to do with socialism. But this lie is today one of the principle ideological cards of the ruling class against the proletariat.
For these two reasons, the bourgeoisie has a vital interest in avoiding any kind of publicity which could draw too much attention to the Communist Manifesto and what is actually written in this famous document. In particular, it wants nothing to be said or done which might make workers curious enough to go and read it themselves. Basing itself on the historic impact of the collapse of stalinism, the bourgeoisie will go on claiming that history has refuted marxism. But it will be careful to avoid any close public examination of the communist goal identified by marxism, or of the historical materialist method employed to that end. Since Stalin's bourgeois "socialism in one country" is refuted in advance by the Communist Manifesto, and since its claims to overcome the capitalist crisis have worn thin, it will go on as long as possible ignoring the overpowering argumentation of this document. It will feel safer combating the "spectre" of Stalin's bourgeois "socialism in one country" presented as the horrible "fulfilment" of marxism and the October Revolution.
For the proletariat, on the contrary, the Communist Manifesto is the compass towards the future of humanity, showing the way out of the lethal dead end in which decadent capitalism has trapped humanity.
The bourgeois "spectre of communism"
The Communist Manifesto was written at a decisive moment in the history of the class struggle. The moment when the class representing the communist project, the proletariat, began to constitute itself as an independent class in society. To the extent that the proletariat developed its own struggle for its conditions of existence, communism ceased to be an abstract ideal elaborated by utopian currents, to become the practical social movement leading to the abolition of class society, and the creation of an authentic human community. As such, the principle task of the Manifesto was the elaboration of the real nature of the communist goal of the class struggle, as well as the principle means to achieve that goal. This also explains the gigantic importance of the Manifesto today in face of the bourgeois denigrations of communism and the class struggle. A relevance which the bourgeoisie today seeks to hide.
Thus, it is today not generally realised what is meant by the famous opening reference of the Manifesto to the "spectre of communism". It meant that at the time - as today - not the communism of the proletariat, but the false and reactionary "communism" of other social layers, including that invented by the ruling classes, dominated public attention. It meant that the bourgeoisie, not daring to openly combat, and thus publicly recognise, the communist tendencies already existing within the proletarian class struggle itself, benefited from this confusion in order to combat the development of an autonomous working class struggle. "Where is the opposition which has not been accused of communism by its opponents in power?" asks the Manifesto. "Where the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?"
Already in 1848, to a certain extent, it was this fake "spectre of communism" at the centre of public controversy which made it particularly difficult for the young proletariat to realise that communism, far from being something separate from and opposed to its daily class struggle, is nothing but the very nature, the historic meaning, and the final goal of that struggle. That, as the Manifesto wrote: "The theoretical conceptions of communism ... are but the general expression of real conditions of an existing class struggle, of an historic movement unfolding before our very eyes."
Herein lies the dramatic actuality of the Communist Manifesto. One and a half centuries ago, just as today, it shows the way forward by cutting through the anti-proletarian distortions of the nature of communism. In face of entirely new historical phenomena - mass unemployment and mass pauperisation in industrialised Britain, the shaking of a still semi-feudal Europe by periodic trade crises, the international spread of mass revolutionary discontent on the eve of 1848 - the most conscious sectors of the working class were already groping towards a clearer understanding that, by creating a new class of dispossessed producers, internationally bound together in associated labour by modern industry, capitalism had created its own potential grave diggers. The first major collective workers' strikes in France and elsewhere, the appearance of a first proletarian political mass movement in Britain (Chartism), and the socialist programmatic efforts above all of German workers' organisations (from Weitling to the Communist League) expressed these advances. But to establish the proletarian movement on a solid class basis, it was above all necessary to throw light on the communist goal of that movement, and thus consciously combat the "socialism" of all other classes. The clarification of this question was urgent since Europe in 1848 stood on the verge of revolutionary movements which, in France, were to reach their summit with the first head on, mass confrontation between bourgeoisie and proletariat.
This is why the Communist Manifesto devotes a whole chapter to exposing the reactionary character of non-proletarian socialism. These included in particular the very expressions of dominant classes directly opposed to the working class:
- Feudal Socialism partly aimed at mobilising the workers behind the reactionary resistance of the nobility against the bourgeoisie;
- Bourgeois Socialism, the expression of a "part of the bourgeoisie in search of remedies for social anomalies, in order to consolidate bourgeois society ".
It was thus first and foremost in order to combat these "spectres of communism" that the Communist Manifesto was written. As the foreword declares: "It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself."
The essential elements of this exposition were the materialist conception of history, and the classless communist society destined to replace capitalism. It is the brilliant solution of this historic task which makes the Manifesto today the indispensable point of departure of the proletarian struggle against the bourgeois ideological rubbish left behind by the Stalinist counter-revolution. The Communist Manifesto, far from being the out dated product of a past age, was far ahead of its time in 1848. At the time of its publication, it mistakenly believed the demise of capitalism arid the victory of the proletarian revolution to be close at hand. It is not until the 20th century that the realisation of the revolutionary vision of marxism is placed on the agenda of history. Reading it today, one has the impression that it has only just been written: so precise are its formulations of the contradictions of present day bourgeois society, and of their necessary resolution through the proletarian class struggle. This almost overpowering actuality is the proof that it is the genuine emanation of a truly revolutionary class carrying the future of humanity in its hands, equipped with an at once gigantic and realistic long term vision of human history.
The Manifesto: an invaluable weapon against Stalinism
Of course it would be wrong to compare the naive feudal and bourgeois "socialism" of 1848 with the Stalinist counter-revolution of the 1930s, which in the name of marxism destroyed the first victorious proletarian revolution in history, physically liquidated the communist working class vanguard, and subjected the proletariat to the most barbarous capitalist exploitation. Nevertheless, the Communist Manifesto already uncovered the common denominator of the "socialism" of exploiting classes. What Marx and Engels wrote about "conservative or bourgeois socialism" at the time applies fully to 20th century Stalinism.
"Under transformation of the material conditions of life, this socialism does not at all understand the abolition of the bourgeois relations of production, which is only possible through revolutionary means, but only the realisation of administrative reforms on the basis of those very bourgeois productive relations, reforms which, consequently do not at all change the relation between wage labour and capital, but at best reduce for the bourgeoisie the price of its rule and simplify the state budget."
Stalinism proclaimed that despite the persistence of what it called "socialist" wage labour, the product of this labour belonged to the producing class, since the personal exploitation by individual capitalists had been replaced by state ownership. The Manifesto, as if in reply, asks "Does wage labour, the labour of the proletarian, create property for him?" and replies: "Certainly not. It creates capital, in other words the property which exploits wage labour, and which can only increase on condition that it produces still more wage labour, in order to exploit it anew. Property in its present form moves within the opposition between capital and wage labour ...To be a capitalist is to occupy not only a purely personal, but above all a social position in production. Capital is a collective product: it cannot be brought into motion except through the common activity of many members, and even in the last analysis of all the members of society. Capital is therefore not a personal power; it is a social power."
This fundamental understanding of the Manifesto, that the juridical replacement of individual capitalists by state ownership in no way - contrary to the Stalinist lies - alters the capitalist nature of the exploitation of wage labour, is formulated even more explicitly by Engels in Anti-Duhring:
"But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces (...) The modem state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more it actually becomes the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers - proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head."
But it is above all by defining the fundamental difference between capitalism and communism that the Manifesto reveals clearly the bourgeois character of the former Stalinist countries:
"In bourgeois society living labour is merely a means of multiplying accumulated labour. In communist society, accumulated labour is but the means towards the enlargement, enrichment and embellishment of the existence of the worker. In bourgeois society, the past dominates the present; in communist society the present dominates the past."
This is why the industrialisation successes of Stalinism in Russia in the 1930's at the expense of a savage reduction in the living conditions of the workers is the best proof of the bourgeois nature of this regime. The development of the productive forces to the detriment of the consumption power of the producers is the historic task of capitalism. Humanity had to go through this inferno of capital accumulation in order that the material preconditions for a classless society could be created. Socialism, on the contrary, and each and every real step towards that goal, is characterised first and foremost by the quantitative and qualitative growth in consumption, in particular of foodstuffs, clothing and housing. This is why the Manifesto identified the relative and absolute pauperisation of the proletariat as the main characteristic of capitalism, which becomes "incapable of ruling, because it is incapable of securing the existence of its slaves within their slavery, because it is obliged to let it sink to the point of having to feed it instead of being fed by it. Society can no longer live under its domination."
And this in a double sense: because impoverishment drives the proletariat to revolution; and because this mass impoverishment means that the extension of capitalist markets cannot keep pace with the extension of capitalist production. The result: the mode of production rebels against the mode of exchange; the productive forces rebel against a mode of production which they have outgrown; the proletariat rebels against the bourgeoisie; living labour against the rule of dead labour. The future of humanity affirms itself against the domination of the present by the past.
The Manifesto: the marxist demolition of "socialism in one country"
Capitalism has indeed created the preconditions of classless society, giving humanity for the first time the possibility of overcoming the struggle for survival, of man against man, by producing an abundance of the principal means of subsistence and human culture. It is for this reason alone that the Manifesto sings the praises of the revolutionary role of bourgeois society. But these preconditions - in particular the world market and the world proletariat itself - only exist on a world scale. The highest form of capitalist competition (itself but the modem version of the age old struggle of man against man for survival under the rule of scarcity) is the economic and military struggle for survival between bourgeois nation states. This is why the overcoming of capitalist competition, and the establishment of a truly collective human society, is only possible through the overcoming of the nation state, through a world proletarian revolution. The proletariat alone can assume this task since, as the Manifesto declares, "the workers have no country." The rule of the proletariat, we are told, will make national demarcations and antagonisms between peoples disappear more and more. "Its common action, at least in the civilised countries, is one of the first conditions of its emancipation."
Already before the Manifesto, in Principles of Communism Engels answered the question if the socialist revolution can be restricted to one country, as follows:
"No. Big industry already through the creation of the world market has placed all the peoples of the earth, and particularly the most civilised ones, in such an intercourse with one another, that each nation is dependent on what happens to the others (...) The communist revolution will therefore be no mere national affair, it will be a revolution incorporating simultaneously all the civilised countries i.e. at least England, America, France and Germany."
Here we have the final deadly blow of the Manifesto against the bourgeois ideology of the Stalinist counter-revolution: the so-called theory of socialism in one country, The Communist Manifesto was the compass guiding the world revolutionary wave of 1917-23. It was the glorious slogan of the Manifesto "workers of the world, unite!" which guided the Russian proletariat and the Bolsheviks in 1917 in their heroic struggle against the imperialist war 01 the capitalist fatherlands, in the proletariats seizure of power to begin the world revolution. It was the Communist Manifesto which formed the point of reference of the famous programmatic speech of Rosa Luxemburg at the founding congress of the KPD, at the heart of the German revolution, and of the founding Congress of the Communist International 1919. It was equally the uncompromising proletarian internationalism of the Manifesto, of the whole Marxist tradition, which inspired Trotsky in his struggle against "socialism in one country", which inspired the Communist Left in its over half a century of struggle against the Stalinist counter-revolution.
The Communist Left honours the Manifesto of the Communist Party of 1848 today, not as a leftover from a distant past, but as a powerful weapon against the lie that stalinism was socialism, and as an indispensable guide towards the necessary revolutionary future of humanity.
Kr
[1] Le livre noir du communisme: crimes, terreur, repression.
[2] The so-called "grosse Lauschangriff" (great eavesdropping attack) of the German bourgeoisie, allegedly aimed against organised crimes, but which specifies 50 different offences, including different forms of subversion, as its target.
The ruling class cannot entirely bury the memory of the October 1917 revolution in Russia, where for the first time in history an exploited class took power at the level of an entire and immense country, Instead, as we have shown on numerous occasions in this International Review[1], it uses all the considerable means at its disposal to distort the meaning of this epochal event by conjuring up a great fog of lies and slanders. It is rather different with the German revolution of 1918-23. Here it has applied the policy of the historical blackout. Thus, casting a glance at the standard school history books, we will find that the October revolution is dealt with up to a point (with a hefty stress on its Russian peculiarities). The German revolution, however, is normally restricted to a few lines about "hunger riots" at the end of the war, or, at most, about the efforts of a shadowy band called the "Spartacists" to seize power here and there. This silence will probably be all the louder during the 80th anniversary of the outbreak of revolution in the Kaiser's Germany. The majority of the world's working class has probably never heard that there was a revolution in Germany at this time, and the bourgeoisie has very good reasons for maintaining this ignorance. Communists, on the other hand, the heirs of those "Spartacist fanatics", have no hesitation in saying loud and clear that these "unknown" events were so crucial that they determined the entire subsequent history of the 20th century.
When the Bolsheviks urged the Russian proletariat to take power in October 1917, it was not at all with the intention of making a purely "Russian" revolution. They understood that if revolution was possible in Russia, it was only because it was the product of a world-wide movement of the working class against the imperialist war, which had opened up an epoch of social revolution. And the insurrection in Russia could only prevail if it was the first act of the world-wide proletarian revolution.
The German revolution, then, was proof that the revolution was and could only be worldwide. The ruling class itself understood this very well: if Germany fell to "Bolshevism", the terrible disease would spread rapidly throughout Europe. It was proof that the working class struggle not only knows no national boundaries, but is the only antidote to the nationalist, imperialist frenzy of the bourgeoisie. Its "least" achievement was that it ended the slaughter of the first world war, because as soon as the revolutionary movement broke out, the world bourgeoisie recognised at once that it was time to stop its bickering and unite against a far more dangerous enemy, the revolutionary working class. The war was rapidly terminated and the German bourgeoisie - though almost stripped naked by the terms of the peace treaty - obtained from the other bourgeoisies all the means it required to deal with the enemy within.
Communism was possible and it was necessary in 1917. If the communist movement had been successful then, the world proletariat would still no doubt have faced gigantic tasks in constructing a new society. It would no doubt have made many mistakes that later generations of the working class can avoid thanks to bitter experience. But at the same time, it would not have had to undo the accumulating effects of capitalist decadence, with its dreadful legacy of terror and destruction, of material and ideological poisoning.
Founding Congress of the KPD: revolution, not reform
The grandeur and tragedy of the German revolution is in many ways encapsulated in Rosa Luxemburg's speech to the founding congress of the Communist party of Germany (KPD) in late December 1918.
In our on-going series on the German revolution[2], we have already written about the importance of this congress from the point of view of the organisational questions facing the new party - above all, the necessity for a centralised organisation capable of speaking with one voice throughout Germany. We have also touched upon some of the general programmatic issues which were hotly debated at this congress, in particular the parliamentary and trade union questions. We have seen that while Luxemburg and the Spartacus group - the real nucleus of the KPD - did not always defend the clearest position on questions of the latter type, she did tend to embody marxist clarity on the problem of organisation, as opposed to some of the more left wing strands who often expressed a distrust of centralisation. And in her speech - on the adoption of the party's programme - this same clarity shines through despite the secondary weaknesses that can be found within it. The profound political content of this speech was a reflection of the strength of the proletariat in Germany as a vanguard in the worldwide movement of the class. And at the same time, the fact that this towering speech was also her last, that the young KPD was soon to be decapitated following the failure of the Berlin uprising a mere two weeks later, also expresses the tragedy of the German proletariat, its inability to assume the gigantic historical tasks imposed upon it.
The reasons for this tragedy are, however, beyond the scope of this article. Our aim in this series is to show how the historical experience of our class has deepened its understanding both of the nature of communist society and the road towards it. In other words, it is to trace a history of the communist programme. The programme of the KPD, generally known as The Spartacus Programme, since it was originally published under the title ''What does Spartacus want?" in Die Rote Fahne, 4 December 1918[3] was a highly significant landmark in this history, and it was certainly no accident that the task of introducing it to the congress was conferred upon Luxemburg, given her unrivalled status as a marxist theoretician. Her opening words plainly affirm the importance of the adoption by the new party of a clear revolutionary programme in a historical juncture which was nothing if not revolutionary:
"Comrades: our task today is to discuss and adopt a programme. In undertaking this task we are not actuated solely by the consideration that yesterday we founded a new party and that a new party must formalise a programme. Great historical movements have been the determining causes of today's deliberations. The time has arrived when the entire socialist programme of the proletariat has to be established upon a new foundation "("On the Spartacus Programme", published as a pamphlet along with "What does Spartacus want?" by Merlin Press, London, 1971).
In order to establish what this new foundation has to be, Luxemburg then reviews the previous efforts of the workers' movement to formalise its programme. Arguing that "We are faced with a position similar to that which was faced by Marx and Engels when they wrote the Communist Manifesto seventy years ago ", she recalls that, at that moment, the founders of scientific socialism had considered the proletarian revolution to be imminent, but that the subsequent development and expansion of capitalism had proved them wrong - and, because their socialism was scientific, Marx and Engels had realised that a long period of organisation, of education, of fighting for reforms, of building the proletarian army was necessary before the communist revolution could be put on the agenda of history. From this realisation came the period of social democracy, in which a distinction was established between the maximum programme of social revolution and the minimum programme of reforms attainable within capitalist society. But as social democracy gradually accommodated itself to what appeared to be an eternally ascending bourgeois society, the minimum programme first detached itself from the maximum, and then more and more began to replace it altogether. This divorce between the immediate and the historical goals of the class was to a large extent already embodied in the Erfurt Programme of 1891, and - precisely at the time when the material possibility of winning durable reforms from capitalism was beginning to wear thin - reformist illusions of various shades increasingly took hold over the workers' party. Indeed, as we have seen in a previous article in this series[4], it is in this very speech that Luxemburg demonstrates that even Engels was not immune to the growing temptation to believe that with the conquest of universal suffrage, the working class could come to power through the bourgeois electoral process.
The imperialist war and the outbreak of proletarian revolution in Russia and Germany had definitively put paid to all illusions in a gradual, peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism. These were the "great historical movements" that required the socialist programme to be "established upon a new foundation". The wheel had gone full circle:
The onset of capitalist decadence, signalled by the great imperialist war, and the proletariat's revolutionary rising against the war, necessitated a definitive break with the old social democratic programme; "Our programme is deliberately opposed to the leading principle of the Erfurt programme; it is deliberately opposed to the separation of the immediate and so-called minimum demands formulated for the political and economic struggle, from the socialist goal regarded as the maximal programme. It is in deliberate opposition to the Erfurt programme that we liquidate the results of seventy years' evolution; that we liquidate, above all, the primary results of the war, saying we know nothing of minimal and maximal programmes; we know only one thing, socialism; this is the minimum we are going to secure ".
In the remaining part of her speech, Luxemburg does not go into details about the measures put forward in the draft programme. Instead, she focuses on the most urgent task of the hour: the analysis of how the proletariat can bridge the gap between its initial spontaneous revolt against the privations of war and the conscious implementation of the communist programme. This requires above all a ruthless critique of the weaknesses of the revolutionary mass movement of November 1918.
This critique was not at all tantamount to dismissing the heroic efforts of the workers and soldiers who had paralysed the imperialist war machine. Luxemburg recognised the crucial importance of the formation of workers' and soldiers' councils across the length and breadth of the land in November 1918. "That was the key notion in this revolution which ... immediately gave it the stamp of a proletarian socialist revolution." And since the "alphabet" of this revolution, the call for workers' and soldiers' councils was learned from the Russians, its international and internationalist nature was also established from the fact that "the Russian revolution created the first watchwords for the world revolution ". But contrary to so many of her critics, even some of her "friendliest", Luxemburg was far from being a worshipper of the instinctive spontaneity of the masses. Without a clear class consciousness, the first spontaneous resistance of the workers cannot help but succumb to the wiles and manoeuvres of the class enemy. "It is characteristic of the contradictory aspects of our revolution, characteristic of the contradictions which attend every revolution, that at the very time when this great, stirring and instinctive cry was being uttered, the revolution was so inadequate, so feeble, so devoid of initiative, so lacking in clearness as to its own aims, that on November 10th our revolutionists allowed to slip from their grasp nearly half the instruments of power they had seized on November 9th ". Luxemburg denounced above all the workers' illusions in the slogan of "socialist unity" - the idea that the SPD, the Independents and the KPD should bury their differences and work together for the common cause. This ideology obscured the fact that the SPD had been placed in government by the German bourgeoisie precisely because it had already demonstrated its loyalty to capitalism during the war, and was now in fact the only party that could deal with the revolutionary danger; it also obscured the treacherous role of the Independents, who served mainly to provide a radical cover to the SPD and prevent the masses from making a clear break with it. The net result of these illusions was that the councils were almost immediately handed over to their worst enemies - the Ebert-Noske-Scheidemann counter-revolution, which garbed itself in the red robes of socialism and claimed to be the councils' surest defender.
The working class would have to wake up from such illusions and learn to soberly distinguish its friends from its enemies. The repressive, strike-breaking policies of the new "socialist" government would certainly educate it in this regard, opening the door to an open conflict between the working class and the pseudo-workers' government. But it would be another illusion to think that merely toppling the social democratic government at its focal point could secure the victory of the socialist revolution. The working class would not be ready to take and hold political power until it had passed through an intensive process of self-education by its own positive experience - through the tenacious defence of its economic interests, through mass strike movements, through the mobilisation of the rural masses, through the regeneration and extension of the workers' councils, through a patient and systematic combat to win them away from the nefarious influence of social democracy and over to the understanding that they were true instruments of proletarian power. The development of this process of revolutionary maturation would be such that, "the overthrow of the Ebert-Scheidemann or any similar government will be merely the final act in the drama ".
This part of Luxemburg's perspective for the German revolution has frequently been criticised for making concessions to economism and gradualism. These charges are not entirely without foundation. Economism - the subordination of the political tasks of the working class to the struggle for its immediate economic interests - was to prove itself a real weakness of the communist movement in Germany[5], and it can already be discerned in certain passages of Luxemburg's speech, as for example when she claims that as the revolutionary movement develops, "strikes will become the central feature and the decisive factors of the revolution, thrusting purely political questions into the background". Luxemburg was of course right to argue that the immediate politicisation of the struggle in November had not been a guarantee of its real maturity, and that the struggle would certainly have to flow back onto the economic terrain before it could reach a higher political level. But the experience in Russia had also shown that once the movement did begin to reach the point where the question of power was really being posed in the most important battalions of the working class, then strikes tended to be "thrust into the background" in favour of "purely political questions". It appears at this point that Luxemburg is forgetting her own analysis of the dynamic of the mass strike, in which she argues that the movement passes from economic to political questions and vice-versa in a continuous ebb and flow.
More serious is the charge of gradualism: In his text Allemagne: de 1800 aux "annees rouges" (1917- 23), December 1997, Robert Camoin writes that "the programme (of the KPD) seriously evades the question of the insurrection; the destruction of the state is formulated in localist terms. The conquest of power is presented as a gradual action, little by little wresting parcels of state power "(P63). And he quotes that section of Luxemburg's speech which argues that "for us, the conquest of power will not be affected at one blow. It will be a progressive act, for we shall progressively occupy all the positions of the capitalist state, defending tooth and nail each one that we seize ".
What Spartacus wanted
A revolutionary party needs a revolutionary programme. A small communist group or fraction, which does not have a decisive impact on the class struggle, can be defined around a platform of general class positions. But while a party certainly requires these class principles as the foundation stone of its politics, it also needs a programme which translates these general principles into practical proposals for the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, the establishment of the proletarian dictatorship, and for the initial steps towards a new society. In a revolutionary situation, the immediate measures for the establishment of proletarian power obviously take on a primary importance. As Lenin wrote in his "Greetings to the Bavarian Soviet Republic", in April 1919:
"We thank you for your message of greeting and in turn we heartily salute the Soviet Republic of Bavaria. We would immediately like you to inform us more often and more concretely about the measures you have taken in your struggle against the bourgeois executioners, Scheidemann and Co: if you have created soviets of workers and household servants in the districts of the town; if you have armed the workers and disarmed the bourgeoisie; if you have made use of the warehouses of clothes and other articles as widely and as immediately as possible, to help the workers and above all the day-labourers and small peasants; if you have expropriated the factories and goods of the Munich capitalists as well as the capitalist agricultural enterprises in the surrounding area; if you have abolished the mortgages and rent of small peasants; if you have tripled the wages of day-labourers and workmen; if you have confiscated all the paper and print-works in order to publish leaflets and newspapers for the masses; if you have instituted the six hour day with two or three hours dedicated to the study of the art of state administration; if you have crowded the bourgeoisie together in order to immediately install workers in the rich apartments; if you have taken overall the banks; if you have chosen hostages from among the bourgeoisie; if you have established a food ration which gives more to workers than to members of the bourgeoisie; if you have mobilised all the workers at once for defence and for ideological propaganda in the surrounding villages. The most rapid and widespread application of these measures as well as other similar measures, carried out on the initiative of the soviets of workers and day-labourers and, separately, of small peasants, must reinforce your position."
The document "What does Spartacus want", offered as the draft programme for the new KPD, goes in the same direction as Lenin's recommendations. It is presented by a preamble which reaffirms the marxist analysis of the historic situation facing the working class: the imperialist war has confronted humanity with the choice between world proletarian revolution, the abolition of wage labour and the creation of a new communist order, or a descent into chaos and barbarism. The text does not underestimate the magnitude of the task facing the proletariat: "the establishment of the socialist order of society is the greatest task that ever fell to the lot of a class and of a revolution in the course of human history. This task involves the complete reconstruction of the state and an entire change in the social and economic foundations of society ". This change cannot be accomplished "by a decree issued by some officials, committee, or parliament". Previous revolutions could be carried through by a minority, but "the socialist revolution is the first revolution which can secure victory for and through the great majority of the workers themselves ". The workers, organised in their councils, had to take this whole immense social, economic, and political transformation into their own hands.
Furthermore, while calling for the "iron hand" of an armed and self-organised working class to put down the plots and resistance of the counter-revolution, the preamble argues that terror is a method alien to the proletariat: "the proletarian revolution requires no terror for the realisation of its aims: it looks upon manslaughter with hatred and aversion. It has no need for such means because the struggle it conducts is not against individuals but against institutions ". This critique of the "Red Terror" has itself been much criticised by other communists then and now. Rosa Luxemburg, who wrote the draft, and who made similar criticisms of the actual Red Terror in Russia, has been accused of pacifism, of advocating policies that would disarm the proletariat in the face of the counter-revolution. But the preamble shows no naive illusions in the possibility of making the revolution without encountering and indeed suppressing the ferocious resistance of the old ruling class, who "will sooner turn the country into a smoking heap of ruins than voluntarily relinquish its power to exploit the working class ". What the draft programme does do, however, is enable us to make the distinction between class violence - based on the massive self-organisation of the proletariat - and state terror, which is necessarily carried out by specialised minority bodies and always contains the danger of turning against the proletariat. We will return to this question later on, but we can certainly say here, in line with the arguments put forward in our text "Terrorism, terror and class violence"[6], that the experience of the Russian revolution has indeed confirmed the validity of this distinction.
The immediate measures that follow the preamble are the concretisation of its general perspective. We reprint them in full here:
"I. As Immediate Means for Making the Revolution Secure.
The disarming of the entire police force, of all officers, as well as of the non-proletarian soldiers.
The seizure of all supplies of arms and ammunition, as well as of all war industries, by the workers' and soldiers' councils.
The arming of the entire adult male population as the workers' militia. The formation of a red guard of the workers as the active part of the militia, for the effective protection of the revolution against counter-revolutionary plots and risings;
The removal of all officers and ex-officers from the soldiers' councils.
Substitution of authorised representatives of the workers' and soldiers' councils for all political organs and authorities of the old regime.
Creation of a revolutionary tribunal to try the men chiefly responsible for the war and its prolongation, namely, the two Hohenzollems, Ludendorff, Hindenberg, Tirpitz, and their fellow criminals, as well as all conspirators of the counter-revolution.
Immediate seizure of all means of subsistence to secure provisions for the people.
Abolition of all separate states; a united German Socialist Republic.
Removal of all parliaments and municipal councils, their functions to be taken over by the workers' and soldiers' councils and by the committees and organs of the latter bodies;
Election of workers' councils all over Germany by the entire adult working population of working people, of both sexes, in cities and rural districts, along the lines of industries, and election of soldiers' councils by the soldiers, excluding the officers and ex-officers. The right of workers and soldiers to recall their representatives at any time;
Abolition of all class distinctions, titles, and orders; complete legal and social equality of the sexes.
Radical social legislation, reduction of working hours to avoid unemployment and to conform to the physical exhaustion of the working class occasioned by the world war; limitation of the working day to six hours.
Immediate, thorough change of the policy with regard to food, housing, health, and education in the spirit of the proletarian revolution.
Further Economic Demands.
Annulment of the state debts and other public debts, as well as all war loans, except those subscribed within a certain limited amount, this limit to be fixed by the Central Council of the workers' and soldiers' councils.
Expropriation of the land held by all large and medium sized agricultural concerns; establishment of socialist agricultural cooperatives under a uniform central administration all over the country. Small peasant holdings to remain in possession of their present owners, until they voluntarily decide to join the socialist agricultural cooperatives.
Nationalisation by the Republic of Councils of all banks, ore mines, coal mines, as well as all large industrial and commercial establishments.
Confiscation of all property exceeding a certain limit, the limit to be fixed by the Central Council.
Election of administrative councils in all enterprises, such councils to regulate the internal affairs of the enterprises in agreement with the workers' councils, regulate the conditions of labour, control production, and, finally, take over the administration of the enterprise.
Establishment of a Central Strike Committee which, in constant cooperation with the industrial councils, shall secure for the strike movement throughout the country uniform administration, socialist direction, and most effective support by the political power of the workers' and soldiers' councils.
International Problems.
Immediate establishment of connections with the sister parties abroad in order to place the socialist revolution upon an international basis and to secure and maintain peace through international brotherhood and the revolutionary rising of the international working class."
arming the workers and disarming the counter-revolution. Equally important is its insistence on the fundamental role of the workers' councils as organs of proletarian political power, and on the centralised character of this power. In calling for the power of the councils and the dismantling of the bourgeois state, the programme is already the fruit of the gigantic proletarian experience in Russia; at the same time, on the question of parliament and municipal councils, the KPD takes one step further than the Bolsheviks had in 1917, when there was still confusion in the party about the possible coexistence of the soviets with the Constituent Assembly and municipal dumas. In the KPD programme, all these organs of the bourgeois state are to be dismantled without delay. Similarly, the KPD programme sees no role at all for the trade unions: alongside the workers' councils and red guards, the factory committees are the only other workers' organs it mentions. Although there were differences in the party on these latter two questions, the clarity of the 1918 programme was a direct expression of the revolutionary élan that animated the class movement at that time.
Inevitably, some of the elements in the programme were specific to the form that this collapse took in 1918: the imperialist war and its aftermath. Hence the importance of the questions of soldiers' councils, the reorganisation of the army, and so on - questions that would not have the same significance in a situation where the revolutionary situation is the direct result of the economic crisis, as is most likely in the future. More importantly, it was inevitable that a programme formulated at the commencement of a great revolutionary experience should contain weaknesses and lacunae precisely because so many crucial lessons. could only have been learned by living through that very experience; and it is worth noting that these weaknesses were common to the whole international workers' movement and were not, as is so often claimed, limited to the Bolshevik party which, because it alone faced the concrete
problems of the organisation of the proletarian dictatorship, suffered most cruelly from the consequences of these weaknesses.
This passage is imbued with the same proletarian spirit that runs through the work of Lenin between April and October 1917: the rejection of putsch ism, the absolute insistence that the party cannot call for the seizure of power until the mass of the proletariat has been won to its programme. But along with the Bolsheviks, the Spartacists also held the mistaken view that the party which has a majority on the councils then becomes the governing party - a conception that was to have very serious consequences once the revolutionary tide went into reflux.
But perhaps most striking of all is the paucity of the section dealing with the international revolution. The section "International Problems" almost has the air of being tacked on as an afterthought, and is extremely vague about the proletarian attitude to imperialist war and to the international extension of the revolution, even though without such an extension, any revolutionary rising in one country is doomed to defeat[8].
For all their importance, none of these weaknesses were critical, and could have been overcome if the revolutionary dynamic had continued to advance. What was critical was the immaturity of the German proletariat, the chink in its armour which rendered it vulnerable to the sirens of social democracy, and thus to be picked off in a series of isolated uprisings rather than concentrate its forces for a centralised assault on bourgeois power. But that is a story that we have taken up elsewhere.
The next article in this series takes us to the year 1919, the zenith of the world revolution, and to an examination of the platform of the Communist International and of the programme of the Communist Party in Russia, where the dictatorship of the proletariat was not merely a demand but a practical reality.
CDW
[1] See the article "The great lie: communism = Stalinism = Nazism in International Review 92
[2] For our series on the German revolution, see International Review nos 81-86 and 88-90 and this issue.
[3] The text was presented as a draft to the founding congress, and was adopted formally at the Berlin congress of December 1919.
[4] "1895-1905: Parliamentary illusions hide the perspective of revolution", International Review 88)
[5] see for example our book on the German and Dutch communist left)
[6] International Review 15
[7] For an analysis both of the strengths and the historically conditioned limitations of the Communist Manifesto see the article in the first volume of this series, International Review 72.
[8] It is worth pointing out that this weakness, along with some others, was substantially rectified in the 1920 programme of the KAPD: its section of revolutionary measures begins with the proposal that a council republic in Germany should immediately fuse with Soviet Russia.
The offensive the ruling class has launched against communism and against the dispersed revolutionary minorities which are around today is a question of life or death. The survival of a system that is prey to even more profound internal convulsions depends on the elimination of any possibility of a revolutionary movement maturing out of the revival of proletarian struggles - a movement consciously aimed at destroying this system and establishing a communist society. In order to attain this objective, the bourgeoisie has to discredit, isolate and thus politically, if not physically, annihilate the revolutionary vanguards which are so indispensable to the success of the proletariat's mission.
At this level, there have been in the last few months some important and significant advances made by different political formations. We will only cite two of them as examples, ones already mentioned in our press:
- the denunciation by all the main components of the proletarian milieu of the bourgeoisie's campaign of mystification against the International Communist Party's pamphlet Auschwitz or the Great Alibi, which is accused of denying the reality of the Nazi gas chambers, whereas in fact this pamphlet denounces both democracy and Nazism as two sides of the same coin[1];
- the common defence of the Russian revolution and its lessons in the public meeting held jointly by the Communist Workers Organisation and the ICC in November 1997[2].
Even if the groups who claim continuity with the work of Amadeo Bordiga, and whom we refer to as Bordigists[3], don't recognise the existence of a proletarian political milieu - though they do sometimes in an implicit way[4] - they are an important part of it because of the tradition they come from. This part of the revolutionary camp, the major part up until the beginning of the 1980s, was hit in 1982 by an explosion unprecedented in the history of the workers' movement, giving rise to new Bordigist formations alongside the splits that already existed, all of them claiming to be the true heirs and most of them calling themselves the International Communist Party. This situation, the result of the fact that the various groups who came out of the explosion have never made a serious re-examination of the causes of the crisis of 1982, has represented an important weakness for the whole proletarian milieu.
In this article, we will not be entering into all the elements of a debate which promises to be rich and interesting, and which even includes a group outside the Bordigist milieu like the Partito Comunista Internazionalista (Battaglia Comunista) to the extent that such a debate goes back to the very formations of the party in 1943-5, i.e. before the 1952 split between the Bordigist wing and the group led by Onorato Damen which has kept the name of their publication Battaglia Comunista to this day[5]. It is however important to point to certain elements which confer such value to this debate.
The first aspect is that the organisational question is at the heart of the discussion: if one reads the different articles of the groups involved, one can see how much this concern runs through them. Leaving aside for the moment the basic polemic between II Comunista, Le Proletaire and Programma Comunista, which to be honest we are not at this stage in a position to make any categorical statements about, the two groups, when they talk about what happened in the old Programme Communiste before 1982, both analyse a confrontation between an immediatist and voluntarist component on the one hand[6], and, on the other hand, a component more connected to the long term maturation of the class struggle. And both also show the central importance of the question of organisation: of a "partyist" type organisation against any "movementist" idea that the movement of the class is in itself sufficient for a successful revolution.
In its January 1997 issue, Programma Comunista refers to the necessity to understand the importance of patience, of not being immediatist, a general principle which we can but share.
The second aspect which gives value to this debate is the tendency to finally confront the question of the political roots of the crisis:
"We have to get down to work on the balance sheet of the crisis of the party, to draw up a balance sheet of all the questions which the last explosive crisis left unresolved: we will list them - the union question, the national question, the question of the party and its relations with other political regroupments as well as with the class, the question of the internal organisation of the party, the question of terrorism, the question of the revival of the class struggle and the immediate organisations of the proletariat ... the question of the course of imperialism" (Ibid.).
On this level, the group Le Proletaire-Il Comunista, in an article on the Kurdish question published in the French theoretical review Programme Communiste, devotes a long article to the critique of Programma Comunista (the Italian group) concerning an article the latter had written in 1994 which gives critical support to the PKK: "This fantasy recalls the illusions into which numerous comrades fell, including the international centre of the party, at the time of the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and which led to the outbreak of the crisis which blew our organisation apart ... Programma thus manages to fall into the same error committed yesterday by the liquidators of our party, EI Oumami and Combat. Perhaps if it had agreed to draw a serious balance sheet of the crisis of the party and its causes, instead of taking flight into beliefs about always being right, Programma would have been able to make a real qualitative leap and overcome its theoretical, political and practical disorientation, to find the correct orientation so that such a misadventure would not have happened to it" (Programme Comuniste 95).
This polemic is particularly important because beyond the fact that it represents a clear position on national liberation struggles, it seems to have finally recognised that this question was at the basis of the explosion of Programme Communiste in 1982[7]. This recognition augurs well for the future because as the nature of the debate shows, it will no longer be possible for Bordigism to begin again as if nothing had happened: the lessons of the past will have to be drawn. And this past can't be arbitrarily fixed at a given period.
We have already made allusion to the fact that, in the polemic, the different groups have gone all the way back to the constitution of the first organisation in the years 1943-45. Thus, Programme Communiste 94 raised the question as follows: "the reconstituted party ... did not remain immune from the influence of the positions of the anti-fascist Resistance and of a rebellious anti-Stalinism ... these weaknesses were to lead to the split of 1951-2, but this was a beneficial crisis, a crisis of political and theoretical maturation". We can find this kind of criticism of the party of the 1950s within the other branch of the split, i.e. Battaglia Comunista (see our article on the history of Battaglia in International Review 91).
In the same issue, Programme Communiste also makes a reference to the difficulties encountered by this group after May 1968:
"the negative effects of post-68 touched our party ... to the point of leading to its break-up ... The party was assaulted by positions which were a melange of workerism, guerrillarism, voluntarism, activism ... There was a widespread illusion that, after 1975, Bordiga's predicted date of a 'revolutionary crisis, the party would soon emerge from its isolation and acquire a certain influence ".
Programma Comunista goes further, and in a remarkable effort of reflection on its past difficulties, it goes back over the same period[8]: "The more the party found itself facing political and practical problems that varied in their nature, their dimension and their urgency (such as the woman question, questions like housing, unemployment, the appearance of new organisations outside the big traditional unions or the problems raised by the weight of national factors in certain countries), the more there was a tendency to entrench oneself in a fixed declaration of principles, to stiffen ideologically".
This observation has to be welcomed: it is a sign of political and revolutionary vitality to try to find answers to new problems posed by the class struggle. This reflection on the past of the old International Communist Party, and notably on the organisation question, by comrades who have maintained an activity after the explosion of the early 80s, is very important for the communist left.
We won't take things any further in this article. We simply want to welcome and underline the importance of this debate developing in the Bordigist camp. In previous articles we have tried to analyse the origins of the political currents which constitute the present proletarian political milieu, by raising two fundamental questions - 'The Italian Fraction and the Communist Left of France' (IR 90) and 'The formation of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista' (IR 91). We are convinced that the whole political milieu must go into these historical questions and come out of the retreat imposed by the counter-revolution in the 1950s, the future of the construction of the class party, of the revolution itself, depends strongly on this.
Ezechiele
[1] See for example 'Bourgeois attacks against the communist left: we support the response of the Parti Communiste Internationale (Le Proletaire) in World Revolution 200 and Internationalism 97.
[2] See 'Joint public meeting of the communist left: In defence of the October revolution', in WR 209, Internationalism 102 and in the CWO's own publication Revolutionary Perspectives 9.
[3] The main Bordigist formations which exist today and to whom we refer in this article are, with their publications: the International Communist Party which published Le Proletaire and Programme Communiste in France; and Il Comunista in Italy; the International Communist Party which publishes Programma Comunista in Italy, Cahiers Internationalistes in France and Internationalist Papers in English; the International Communist Party which publishes Il Partito Comunista in Italy and Communist Left in Britain.
[4] Programme Communiste 95 for example takes the defence of the communist left against the criticisms of our book The Italian Communist Left by a British Trotskyist journal Revolutionary History (vol. 5 no. 4).
[5] There is a pamphlet by Battaglia on the 1952 split and a more recent one called Among the shadows of Bordigism and its epigones which intervenes explicitly in the recent debate between Bordigist groups.
[6] Two of these groups which were to some extent representative of this component of the old Programme Communiste ended up in leftism - in Italy Combat and in France EI Oumami - and both have happily disappeared from the social and political scene.
[7] See the articles we devoted to the crisis of Programme Communiste in 1982 and which the ICC analysed as the expression of a more general crisis in the proletarian political milieu, in particular the articles in IRs 32-36.
[8] Programme Communiste 94 'In memory of a comrade of the old guard, Ricardo Salvador'.
Thirty years ago in France, nearly 10 million workers were engaged for a month in a great movement of struggle. For young comrades coming towards revolutionary positions today, it is very difficult to know what happened during that far-off month of May 1968. And this is not their fault. The bourgeoisie has always deformed the profound importance of these events, and bourgeois history (right or left, it is all the same) has always presented them as a "student revolt", when in reality it was the most important phase in a class movement which spread to Italy, the United States, and throughout the industrialised world. It is not surprising that the ruling class should try to hide the proletariat's past struggles. When unable to do so, it distorts them, presents them as something other than the signs of the historic and irresolvable antagonism between the main exploited class of our epoch, and the ruling class responsible for this exploitation. Today the bourgeoisie continues its work of mystifying history by trying to present the October revolution as a coup d'état by bloodthirsty, power-hungry Bolsheviks, the opposite to reality: the greatest attempt in history by the working class to "storm the heavens", to seize political power in order to begin transforming society into communism, in other words to abolish the exploitation of man by man. The bourgeoisie is trying to exorcise the danger of historical memory as a weapon of the working class. And precisely because the knowledge of its own past experience is vital to the working class in preparing the battles of today and tomorrow, it is up to the revolutionaries, the class' political vanguard, to recall this past experience.
On the 3rd May thirty years ago, a meeting of several hundred students was held in the courtyard of the Sorbonne in Paris, called by the UNEF (student union) and the "22nd March Movement" (formed a few weeks previously at the faculty of Nanterre in the Paris suburbs). There was nothing particularly exciting in the theorising speeches by the leftist "leaders". But there was a persistent rumour: the Occident will attack". This far-right movement gave the police an excuse to intervene to "separate' the demonstrators. The aim above all was to smash the student agitation which had been going on for several weeks at Nanterre. This agitation was simply an expression of student frustration, driven by such diverse motives as the contestation of academic mandarins or the demand for greater individual and sexual freedom in the daily life of the University.
And yet, "the impossible happened": agitation continued for several days in the Latin Quarter. It stepped up a level every evening: each demonstration, every meeting, attracted a few more people than the day before: ten, then thirty, then fifty thousand people. Clashes with the police became more violent. In the street, young workers joined the fight. Despite the open hostility of the PCF (Parti Communiste Francais), which slandered the "enrages" (literally, "the angry ones") and the "German anarchist" Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the CGT (the Stalinist-controlled union) was forced to avoid losing control of the situation by "recognising" the strikes, which had broken out unofficially and were spreading rapidly: ten million strikers disturbed the torpor of the 5th Republic, and marked the reawakening of the world proletariat.
The strike begun on 14th May at Sud-Avia-tion, and spread spontaneously. It was from the outset a radical departure from the "actions" organised hitherto by the unions. In the vital engineering and transportation sectors, the strike was almost total. The unions were overtaken by a movement which set itself apart from their traditional policies. The movement went beyond the control of the unions, marked from the start by an extended and often imprecise character, and often inspired by a profound, even if "unconscious" anxiety.
The unemployed, labelled as "declassed" by the bourgeoisie, played an important part in the confrontations. In fact, these "declassed", "misled" individuals were entirely proletarian. The proletariat consists, not just of workers and those who have already held down a job, but also of those who have not yet been able to work, and are already unemployed. They are the pure products of capitalism's decadent epoch. In mass youth unemployment, we can see one of the historic limits of capitalism, which because of generalised overproduction has become incapable of integrating new generations into the productive process. The unions, however, were to do everything in their power to regain control of this movement, which had started without them, and to some extent against them.
On Friday 17th May, the CGT distributed a leaflet which made quite clear the limits it intended to impose on its action: on the one hand, traditional demands coupled with agreements like those of Matignon in June 1936, guaranteeing the rights of union sections in companies; on the other, they called for a change of government, in other words for elections. Although they had been suspicious of the unions before the strike, had started the movement over the unions' heads, and had extended it on their own initiative, the workers behaved during the strike as if it was normal that it should be taken to its conclusion by the unions.
After being forced to follow the movement so as not to lose control of it, the unions finally pulled off a double coup with the precious help of the PCF: on the one hand, conducting negotiations with the government, while on the other calling the workers to stay calm, so as not to upset the serene holding of the new elections demanded by the PCF and the Socialists; at the same time they discreetly circulated rumours about the possibility of a coup d'état, and troop movements around the capital. In reality, although surprised and alarmed by the movement's radicalism, the bourgeoisie had no intention of using military repression. It knew very well that this could start the movement off again, forcing the union "conciliators" out of the game, and that a bloodbath would only have been much more expensive later on. It was not so much the CRS (Compagnie Republicaine de Securite, riot police) who attacked the demonstrations and dispersed demonstrators, but the much more skilful and dangerous union cops within the factories, who carried on their dirty work of dividing the workers.
The unions carried out their first police operation by encouraging the factory occupations, succeeding in shutting the workers up in their work place, thus preventing them from meeting, discussing, confronting each other in the street.
On the morning of the 27th May, the unions appeared before the workers with a compromise signed with the government (the Grenelle agreements). At Renault, the biggest company in the country and "barometer" of working class feeling, the CGT general secretary was shouted down by workers, who considered that their struggle had been sold out. Workers adopted the same attitude elsewhere. The number of strikers went on rising. Many workers tore up their union cards. This was when the unions and the government shared out the job of breaking the movement. The CGT, which had immediately disowned the Grenelle agreement - which it had itself signed - declared that "negotiations should be opened branch by branch in order to approve [the agreement)". The government and the bosses played along, making major concessions in some industries, which made it possible to begin a move back to work. At the same time, on 30th May, De Gaulle gave in to the demands of the left-wing parties: he dissolved parliament and called new elections. The same day, hundreds of thousands of his supporters marched down the Champs Elysees, It was a motley gathering of all those with a gut hatred for the working class and the "communists": the inhabitants of the wealthy districts, retired military men, nuns and concierges, shopkeepers and pimps. All this good society marched behind De Gaulle's ministers, led by Andre Malraux (the anti-fascist writer, well-known since his participation in the war in Spain in 1936).
The unions divided the work up amongst themselves: the minority CFDT took on a "radical" look, in order to keep control of the most combative workers. The CGT distinguished itself as a strike-breaker. In mass meetings, it would propose to bring the strike to an end, on the grounds that workers in neighbouring factories had already gone back to work: this was a lie. Above all, along with the PCF, it called for "calm" and a "responsible attitude" (even bringing up the bogey of civil war and repression by the army), so as not to disturb the elections to be held on 23rd and 30th June. The elections, when they came, resulted in a right-wing landslide, only adding to the disgust of the most combative workers who had continued their strike until they were held.
Despite its limitations, the general strike's immense élan helped the world-wide recovery of the class struggle. Coming after an uninterrupted series of retreats following the revolutionary events of 1917-23, the events of May 68 were a decisive turning point not only in France but in the rest of Europe and throughout the world. The strikes shook not only the state power, but also its most effective rampart, and the one most difficult to break: the left and the unions.
A "student" movement?
Once it had recovered from its surprise and its initial panic, the bourgeoisie set to finding explanations for these events which had disturbed its peace. It is therefore hardly surprising that the left used the student agitation to exorcise the real spectre that rose before the gaze of a frightened bourgeoisie - the proletariat - and that it limited the social events to a mere ideological quarrel between generations. May 68 was presented as the result of youthful boredom in the face of the modern world's dysfunctional changes. It is obvious that May 68 was marked by a definite decomposition of the values of the dominant ideology, but this "cultural" revolt was not the real cause of the conflict. In his preface to the Critique of Political Economy Marx showed that "with the change of the economic foundations the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, the distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production which can be determined with the precision of natural science and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical - in short ideological - forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out".
All the expressions of the ideological crisis have their roots in the economic crisis, not the other way round. It is this state of crisis which determines the course of things. The student movement was thus indeed an expression of the general decomposition of bourgeois ideology. It was a straw in the wind announcing a more fundamental social movement. But because of the very place of the university in the system of production, it is only very exceptionally that it has any connection with the class struggle.
May 68 was not a movement of students and young people, it was above all a movement of the working class which was raising its head after decades of counter-revolution. The radicalisation of the student movement was precisely the result of this presence of the working class.
Students are not a class, still less a revolutionary social stratum. On the contrary, they are specifically the vehicles of the worst kind of bourgeois ideology. If in 1968 thousands of young people were influenced by revolutionary ideas, it was precisely because the only revolutionary class of our epoch, the working class, was in the streets.
This resurgence put an end to all the theories about the "bourgeoisification" of the working class, its "integration" into the capitalist system. How else can one explain how all these theories, which had been so dominant in the university milieu where they had been elaborated by the likes of Marc use and Adorno, melted away like snowdrops in the sun and that the students turned towards the working class like moths to a flame? And how else can one explain that, in the following years, while continuing to agitate in the same way, the students stopped proclaiming themselves revolutionaries?
No, May 68 was not a revolt of youth against the "inadequacies of the modern world", it was not merely a mental revolt; it was the first symptom of social convulsions whose roots lay much deeper than the superstructure, in the crisis of the capitalist mode of production. Far from being a triumph for the theories of Marcuse, May 68 was their death sentence, sending them back to the world of chimeras whence they had come.
No, the beginning of the historic resurgence of the class struggle
The general strike of 10 million workers in a country at the heart of capitalism meant the end of a period of counter-revolution that had opened up with the defeat of the revolutionary wave of the 1920s, and had continued and deepened through the simultaneous action of fascism and Stalinism. Just before this, the middle of the 1960s had marked the end of the period of reconstruction following the Second World War and the beginning of a new open crisis of the capitalist system.
The first blows of this crisis hit a generation of workers who had not known the demoralisation of the defeat that came in the 20s and who had grown up during the "economic boom". At that point the crisis was only touching them lightly, but the working class began to feel that something was changing:
"A feeling of insecurity about tomorrow is developing among the workers and above all among the younger ones. This feeling is all the sharper for having been unknown to the workers in France since the war ... More and more the masses feel that all this fine prosperity is coming to an end. Attitudes of indifference and 'I couldn't care less' among the workers, so characteristic and so widely decried, are giving away to a growing disquiet ... It has to be admitted that an explosion of this kind is based on a long accumulation of discontent in the masses about their economic situation, even if a superficial observer might have noticed nothing (Revolution Intemationale, 2, old series, 1969).
And indeed a superficial observer can grasp nothing of what's happening in the depths of the capitalist world. It's no accident that a radical group with no solid Marxist basis like the Situationist International could write about the events of May 68 " You could not observe any tendency towards economic crisis ... the revolutionary eruption did not come out of an economic crisis ... what was frontally attacked in May was a capitalist economy functioning well" (Enrages and Situationists in the Occupations Movement, Situationist International, 1969).
Reality was very different and the workers were beginning to feel it in their bones.
After 1945, US aid made it possible to get production going again in Europe, which paid back a part of its debts by ceding its enterprises to American companies. But after 1955 the US stopped their "free" aid. The commercial balance of the US was positive while that of most of the other countries was negative. American capital continued to be invested more rapidly in Europe than in the rest of the world, which assisted the balance of payments in these countries, but soon unbalanced it for the US. This situation led to growing debts for the American Treasury, since the dollars invested in Europe or the rest of the world constituted debts for the latter towards the holders of all this money. From the 1960s, this external debt went beyond the gold reserves of the US Treasury, but this inability to cover the dollar did not yet put the US in difficulty as long as the other countries were indebted to the US. The US could thus continue to appropriate capital from the rest of the world by paying in paper. This situation only turned around with the end of the reconstruction in the European countries. The European economies were now able to launch products onto the world market in competition with those of the US: towards the middle of the 60s, the trade balance of most of the countries that had been assisted by the US became positive while after 1964 that of the US deteriorated more and more. This marked the completion of the reconstruction of the European countries. The productive apparatus now faced a saturated market obliging the national bourgeoisies to intensify the exploitation of their proletariats in order to confront the exacerbation of international competition.
France did not escape this situation and in 1967 France had to undertake unavoidable measures of restructuration: rationalisation, improved productivity, leading to an increase in unemployment. Thus, at the beginning of 1968, the number of unemployed went beyond 500,000. Partial unemployment appeared in many factories and led to reactions from the workers. A lot of strikes broke out, limited and still controlled by the unions, but expressing a certain malaise. The growth of unemployment was received badly by a generation produced by the demographic explosion that followed World War Two, and which was accustomed to full employment.
In general the bosses sought to reduce workers' living standards. The bourgeoisie and its government were mounting a growing attack on living and working conditions. In all the industrial countries, there was a tangible development of unemployment, economic perspectives were becoming more sombre, international competition sharper. At the end of 1967 Britain made its first devaluation of the pound in order to make its products more competitive. But this measure was annulled by the devaluations that took place in all the other countries. The austerity policies imposed by the Labour government of the day were particularly severe: massive cuts in public spending, withdrawal of British troops from Asia, wage freezes, the first protectionist measures.
The US, main victim of the European offensive, could only react severely and, from the beginning of January 1968, President Johnson announced a number of economic measures, while in March 1968, in response to devaluations of rival currencies, the dollar also fell.
These were the essentials of the economic situation prior to May 68.
A movement for immediate demands, but not just that
It was in this situation that the events of May 68 took place: a worsening economic situation which engendered a reaction in the working class.
Certainly, other factors contributed to the radicalisation of the situation: police repression against the students and the workers' demonstrations, the Vietnam War. Simultaneously all the post-war capitalist myths entered into crisis: the myths of democracy, economic prosperity, peace. This situation created a social crisis to which the working class gave its first response.
It was a response on the economic level, but not only on that level. The other elements of the social crisis, the discredit suffered by the unions and the traditional left forces, led thousands of young people and workers to pose more general questions, to look for answers about the underlying cause of their discontent and disillusionment.
Thus was produced a new generation of militants who were approaching revolutionary positions. They began to re-read Marx, Lenin, to study the workers' movement of the past. The working class not only rediscovered the dimension of its struggle as an exploited class but also began to reveal its revolutionary nature.
These new militants for the most part got derailed by the false perspectives of the different leftist groups and so were soon lost. While trade unionism was the weapon which allowed the bourgeoisie to block the mass movement of the workers, leftism was the weapon which broke the majority of militants formed in the struggle.
But many others managed to find authentically revolutionary organisations, those which represented the historic continuity with the past workers' movement - the groups of the communist left. While none of the latter were able to fully grasp the significance of the events, remaining on the side lines and thus leaving the field free to the leftists, other small nuclei were able to gather these new revolutionary energies together, giving rise to new organisations and a new effort towards the regroupment of revolutionaries, the basis for the future revolutionary party.
A long and tortuous historic resurgence
The events of May 68 represented the beginning of the historic resurgence of the class struggle, the break with the period of counter-revolution and the opening of a new historic course towards a decisive confrontation between the antagonistic classes of our time: the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
It was a striking debut, which found the bourgeoisie momentarily unprepared; but the ruling class recovered quickly and was able to get the better of an inexperienced generation of workers.
This new historic course was confirmed by the international events which followed May 68.
In 1969, there broke out in Italy the great strike movement known as the Hot Autumn, a season of struggle which was to continue for several years during which the workers tended to unmask the unions and build their own organs for the direction of the struggle. A wave of struggles whose main weakness was to remain isolated in the factories with the illusion that a "hard" struggle in the factories was enough to make the bosses retreat. These limitations were to enable the unions to get their place back in the factories by presenting themselves in their new guise of "base organs", drawing in all the leftist elements who, in the ascendant phase of the movement, had played at being revolutionaries and who now found jobs as union hacks.
The 1970s saw other movements of struggle all over the industrial world: in Italy (the unemployed, the hospital workers); in France (LIP, Renault, the steelworkers of Longwy and Denain), in Spain, in Portugal and elsewhere. The workers were increasingly coming up against the unions who, despite their new "rank and file" garments, continued to look like the defenders of capitalist interests and saboteurs of workers' struggles.
In 1980 in Poland, the working class drew profit from the bloody experience it had been through in the previous confrontations of 1970 and 1976, organising a mass strike which blocked the whole country. This formidable movement of the workers in Poland, which showed the entire world the strength of the proletariat, its capacity to take control of its struggles, to organise itself through general assemblies and strike committees (the MKS) in order to extend the struggle across an entire country, was an encouragement for the working class everywhere. It was the trade union Solidarnosc, created by the bourgeoisie (with the aid of the western unions) to contain, control and derail the movement, which finally handed the workers over to the repression of the Jaruzelski government. This defeat led to a deep disarray in the world proletariat. It took it more than two years to digest this defeat.
During the 1980s, however, the workers began to draw on all the experience of union sabotage from the previous decade. New struggles broke out in the main countries and the workers began to take charge of their struggles, creating their own organs of struggle. The railway workers in France, the school workers in Italy, waged struggles based on organs controlled by the workers through strikers' general assemblies.
Faced with this maturation of the struggle, the bourgeoisie was forced to renew its own union weapons: it was in these years that a new form of "base unionism" was developed (the coordinations in France, the COBAS in Italy), disguised unions which copied the forms of the organs which the workers had created for the struggle, in order to drag the workers back into the union corral.
We have only touched upon what happened in these two decades after the French May. We think that it is enough to show that the latter was no mere passing incident, something specifically French, but really was the beginning of a new historic phase in which the working class had broken with the counter-revolution and had again appeared on the scene of history, starting out on the long road towards the confrontation with capital.
A difficult historic resurgence
If the new post-war generation of the working class managed to break with the counter-revolution because it had not directly known the demoralisation of defeat in the 1920s, it was lacking in experience and this historic resurgence of the struggle was to prove long and difficult. We have already seen the difficulties of settling scores with the unions and their role as defenders of capital. But an important and unforeseen historic event was to make this resurgence all the longer and more difficult - the collapse of the eastern bloc.
An expression of the erosion produced by the economic crisis, this collapse led to a reflux in the consciousness of the proletariat, a reflux which has been amply exploited by the bourgeoisie which has been trying to make up the ground it lost in the preceding years.
By identifying Stalinism with communism, the bourgeoisie presents the collapse of Stalinism as the death of communism, aiming a simple but powerful message at the working class: "the workers' struggle has no perspective, because there is no viable alternative to capitalism. It's a system with many faults, but it is the only one possible".
The reflux provoked by this campaign has been much more profound than the ones which took place in the previous waves of struggles. This time it was not a question of a movement that finished badly, of union sabotage succeeding in blocking a movement of struggle. This time, what was in question was the very possibility of having any long term perspective for the struggle.
However, the crisis which had been the detonator of the historic revival of the class struggle is still with us, resulting in ever more violent attacks on the workers' living standards. This is why in 1992 the working class was compelled to return to the fight, with the movement of strikes against the Amato government in Italy, followed by other struggles in Belgium, Germany, France, etc. A revival of combativity in the class which has not yet overcome the reflux in consciousness. This is why this revival has not yet gone back to the level it had reached at the end of the 80s.
Since then the bourgeoisie has not stood around with its arms folded. It has not allowed the proletariat to get on with its struggles and regain confidence through them. With even more strength and capacity to manoeuvre, the bourgeoisie organised the public sector strike in the autumn of 1995 in France: through a massive international press campaign, this strike was used to prove that the unions can organise the struggle and defend the interests of the proletariat. Similar manoeuvres took place in Belgium and Germany, resulting in a boosting of union credibility on an international scale, providing them with a renewed capacity to sabotage workers' militancy.
But the bourgeoisie does not only manoeuvre on this terrain. It has launched a series of campaigns aimed at keeping the workers stuck behind the defence of democracy (and thus of the bourgeois state): the "dirty hands" campaign in Italy, the Dutroux affair in Belgium, anti-racism in France - all these events had a lot of media publicity in order to convince the workers of the whole world that their problem was not the vulgar defence of their economic interests, that they should pull in their belts within their respective national states and rally to the defence of democracy, justice and other inanities.
But during these last two years, the bourgeoisie has also been trying to destroy the historic memory of the working class, discrediting the history of the working class and the organisations which refer to it. The communist left itself has been under attack, presented as the main inspiration for "negationism".
The bourgeoisie has equally been trying to distort the real meaning of the October revolution, which it presents as a Bolshevik coup, thus seeking to wipe out the memory of the great revolutionary wave of the 1920s in which the working class, though defeated, showed that it is capable of attacking capitalism as a mode of production and not only of defending itself against exploitation. In two enormous books originally written in France and Britain, but already translated into other languages, they are carrying on with the mystification that communism equals Stalinism, and is in fact responsible for all of Stalinism's crimes (see International Review 92).
But the future still belongs to the proletariat
If the bourgeoisie is so preoccupied with undermining the struggle of the working class, with distorting its history, with discrediting the organisations which defend the proletariat's revolutionary perspective, it is because it knows that the proletariat is not defeated; that, despite all its current difficulties, the road is still open to massive confrontations in which the working class will once again put the power of the bourgeoisie into question. And the bourgeoisie also knows that the aggravation of the crisis and the sacrifices it imposes on the workers will more and more force them to embark upon the struggle. It is through this struggle that the workers will rediscover confidence in themselves, that they will learn the real nature of the unions and find their own autonomous forms of organisation.
A new phase is opening up in which the working class will rediscover the road that was opened up 30 years ago by the great general strike of the French May.
Helios
In the previous article in this series, dealing with the Kapp Putsch in 1920, we underlined that having been through the defeats of 1919, the German working class returned to the offensive. But at the international level, the revolutionary wave was about to go into decline.
The ending of the war had already, in a number of countries, cooled revolutionary ardour, and above all had allowed the bourgeoisie to exploit the division between the workers of the "victorious" countries and those of the "defeated" countries. Furthermore, the forces of capital were succeeding in isolating more and more the revolutionary movement in Russia. The victories of the Red Army over the Whites - who had been strongly supported by the western democracies - did not prevent the ruling class from pursuing its offensive on an international scale.
In Russia itself the isolation of the revolution and the growing integration of the Bolshevik party into the state were making their effects felt. In March 1921 came the revolt of the workers and sailors of Kronstadt.
Against this background, the German proletariat was exhibiting a much stronger combativity than in other countries. Everywhere revolutionaries were facing the question: how to react to the offensive of the bourgeoisie when the world revolutionary wave is entering into reflux?
Within the Communist International (Cl), a political turnaround was taking place. The 21 Conditions for admission adopted by the Second Congress of the CI in the summer of 1920 expressed this clearly. In particular they imposed work within the trade unions and participation in parliamentary elections. The CI was thus returning to the old methods used during the ascendant period of capitalism, with the hope of reaching wider layers of the working class.
This opportunist turn was manifested in Germany particularly through the "Open Letter" addressed to the KPD in January 1921 to the trade unions and the SPD as well as to the anarcho-syndicalist FAUD, the KAPD and the USPD proposing "that all the socialist parties and trade union organisations should wage common actions to impose the most urgent economic demands of the working class". This appeal, which was addressed most particularly to the unions and the SPD, was to give rise to the "united front in the factories": "The VKPD wants to set aside the memory of the bloody responsibility of the majority of Social Democratic leaders. It wants to set aside the memory of the services rendered by the union bureaucracy to the capitalists during the war and in the course of the revolution." (Die Rote Fahne, 8 January 1921). Through this kind of opportunist flattery, e Communist Party was trying to draw the parties of Social Democracy to its side.
Simultaneously it theorised, for the first time, the necessity for a proletarian offensive: "If the parties and the unions to whom we are addressing ourselves refuse to initiate the struggle, the Unified Communist Party of Germany will then be forced to wage it alone, and it is convinced that the masses will follow" (ibid).
The unification between the KPD and the USPD, in December 1920, gave rise to the VKPD and had brought back the conception of the mass party. This was reinforced by the fact that the party now had 500,000 members. The VKPD also allowed itself to be blinded by the percentage of votes it won in the elections to the Prussian Landtag in February 1921 (almost 30%)[1].
Thus the party increasingly thought that it could "heat up" the situation in Germany. Many of its members dreamed that another right-wing putsch, like the one that had happened the year before, would provoke a workers' uprising with the perspective of taking power. Such ideas were to a large extent due to the increased influence of the petty bourgeoisie in the party since the Unification between the KPD and the USPD. The USPD, like any centrist current within the workers' movement, was strongly influenced by the conceptions and behaviour of the petty bourgeoisie. Moreover, the numerical growth of the party tended to accentuate the weight of opportunism as well as petty bourgeois impatience and immediatism.
It was in this context of a retreat in the international revolutionary wave, and of deep confusions in the revolutionary movement in Germany, that the bourgeoisie launched a new offensive against the proletariat in March 1921. The main target of this attack was the workers of central Germany. During the war a huge proletarian concentration had been formed in this area around the Leuna factories in Bitterfeld and in the Mansfeld basin. The majority of the workers there were relatively young and militant but had no great experience of organisation. The VKPD alone had 66,000 members there, the KAPD 3,200. In the Leuna factories 2,000 out of the 20,000 workers were members of the Workers' Unions.
Seeing that, following the confrontations of 1919 and the Kapp Putsch, many workers were still armed, the bourgeoisie badly wanted to pacify the region.
The bourgeoisie tries to provoke the workers
On 19 March 1919 a powerful military police force arrived in Mansfeld with the aim of disarming the workers.
This order did not come from the extreme right wing of the ruling class (the right parties and their forces within the army) but from the democratically elected government. Once again it was democracy which played the role of executioner to the working class, using any means necessary.
For the bourgeoisie, the aim was to disarm and defeat a relatively young and militant fraction of the German proletariat in order to weaken and demoralise the working class as a whole. More particularly, the ruling class wanted to strike a crucial blow at the proletariat's vanguard, its revolutionary organisations. By forcing the workers into a decisive but premature struggle in central Germany, the state would have the opportunity to isolate the communists from the rest of the working class. It wanted to discredit them first in order to then subject them to repression. In particular, it aimed to prevent the newly formed VKPD from consolidating itself and to prevent the growing rapprochement between the VKPD and the KAPD. In doing so, German capital was acting in the name of the world bourgeoisie in order to increase the isolation of the Russian revolution and weaken the CI.
At the same moment the International was impatiently waiting for the movements of struggle that would support the Russian revolution from outside. In a way it was waiting for the bourgeoisie to launch an offensive so that the working class, placed in a difficult situation, would react in strength. A number of violent minority actions -like the KAPD's blowing up of the Victory Column in Berlin on 13 March - had the explicit aim of provoking workers' combativity.
Paul Levi made this report of the intervention of the Moscow envoy, Rakosi, at a meeting of the VKPD Centrale: "The comrade explained that Russia was in an extraordinarily difficult situation. It was absolutely necessary for Russia to be relieved by movements in the west, and on this basis, the German party had to push for immediate action. The VKPD now had 500,000 members and it could count on of allowing of 1,500,000 workers, which was enough to overthrow the government. It was thus necessary to immediately engage in the battle with the slogan of overthrowing the government" (Levi, Letter to Lenin, 27 March 1921 ).
"On 17 March the KPD Central Committee held a meeting in which the directives of the comrade sent by Moscow were adopted as orientation theses. On 18 March Die Rote Fahne took up a new resolution and called for armed struggle without first saying what its objectives were, and it maintained the same tone for several days" (ibid)
The long awaited government offensive took place the next day with the entry of police troops into central Germany.
Can you force the revolution?
The police forces sent to central Germany on March 19 by the Social Democratic minister Horsing had been ordered to search houses in order to ensure that the workers were disarmed. The experience of the Kapp Putsch had dissuaded the government from using Reichswehr troops.
The same night a general strike for the region was decided, to begin on 21 March. On 23 March the first clashes took place between the Reich security police (SiPo) and the workers. The same day the workers of the Leuna factory in Merseburg proclaimed a general strike. On 24 March the KAPD and the VKPD launched a joint appeal for a general strike throughout Germany. In response to this there were sporadic demonstrations and exchanges of fire between strikers and police in several towns. In the whole country, about 300,000 workers came out on strike.
On the initiative of the KAPD and the VKPD there were dynamitings in Dresden, Freiberg, Leipzig, Plauen and elsewhere. The newspapers Hallische Zeitung and Saale Zeitung, which were being particularly provocative against the workers, were reduced to silence by explosives.
Although the repression in central Germany had pushed workers into spontaneous armed resistance, they were not able to fight the government forces in a coordinated way. The combat organisations set up by the VKPD and led by H Eberlein were militarily and organisationally ill-prepared. Max Holz, who led a workers' combat troop of 2,500 men, managed to get to within a few kilometers of the Leuna factory besieged by the government troops and tried to reorganise the workers' forces. But his troops were wiped out on 1 April, two days after the taking of the Leuna factories. Although there was little fighting spirit in other cities, the VKPD and the KAPD called for an immediate armed response against the police forces:
"The working class is called upon to enter into active struggle for the following objectives:
1. the overthrow of the government;
2. the disarming of the counter-revolution and the arming of the workers"
(Appeal dated 17 March 1921).
In another appeal on 24 March the VKPD wrote: "Remember that last year you defeated in five days the white guards and the scum of Baltikum's Freikorps thanks to the general strike and the armed uprising. Fight with us, like last year, to beat the counter-revolution! Begin the general strike everywhere! Break the violence of the counter-revolution with your own violence! Disarming of the counter-revolution, formation and arming of local militia on the basis of cells of workers, employees and functionaries!
Immediate formation of local proletarian militia! Take power in the factories! Organise production through factory councils and trade unions! Create work for the unemployed!"
However, locally the combat organisations of the VKPD as well as the workers who had armed themselves spontaneously were not only poorly prepared, but the local organs of the party were not in contact with the Centrale. The different combat groups, the best known of which were those under Max Holz and Karl Plattner, fought in different places in the zone of the uprising, isolated from each other. Nowhere were there any workers' councils to coordinate their actions. On the other hand, the government's troops were in close contact with the headquarters which directed them.
After the fall of the Leuna factories, the VKPD withdrew on 31 March its call for a general strike. On 1 April, the last armed workers' groups in central Germany dissolved themselves.
Bourgeois order reigned once more! Once again repression was unleashed. Once again workers were subjected to police brutality. Hundreds were shot, more than 6,000 arrested.
The hopes of the great majority of the VKPD and the KAPD - that provocative action by the apparatus of state repression would produce a dynamic response from the workers - crashed to the ground. The workers of central Germany had remained isolated.
The VKPD and the KAPD had quite clearly pushed for the battle without taking the whole of the situation into account. They thus found themselves completely isolated from the hesitant workers who were not ready to go into action, and they created divisions within the working class by adopting the slogan "Whoever is not with me is against me" (Die Rote Fahne, editorial of 20 March).
Instead of recognising that the situation was not favourable, Die Rote Fahne wrote:
"It's not only on the head of your leaders but on the head of each of you that bloody responsibility lies, when you tolerate in silence or protest without acting against the terror and the white justice unleashed on the workers by Ebert, Severing, Horsing and Co ... Shame and ignominy to the worker who is still not at his post".
In order to artificially provoke combativity, there were attempts to use the unemployed as a spearhead: "The unemployed were sent forward like assault troops. They occupied the gates of factories. They forced their way into the factories, lit fires here and there and tried to force the workers outside with cudgels ... it was a terrible spectacle to see the unemployed themselves getting chased out of the factories, weeping under the blows they received, and then fleeing from those who had sent them there" (Levi, ibid).
The fact that the VKPD, from before the beginning of the struggle, had had a false appreciation of the balance of forces, that afterwards it was incapable of revising its analyses, all this was tragic enough, but it did even worse by launching the slogan "Life or Death" according to the false principle that communists never retreat:
"In no case can a communist, even if he is in a minority, return to work! The communists have left the factories. In groups of 200, 300 men, sometimes more, sometimes less, they left the factories: the factory continued to operate. They are now unemployed, since the bosses seized the opportunity to purge the factories of communists at a time when a large part of the workers were on their side" (Levi, ibid).
What was the balance sheet of the March Action?
Although this struggle was forced on the working class by the bourgeoisie, and it was impossible to avoid it, the VKPD "committed a series of errors, the main one being that instead of clearly bringing out the defensive character of this struggle, through its call for an offensive it provided the most unscrupulous enemies of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, the Social Democratic Party, the Independents, a pretext for denouncing the Unified Party as a maker of putsches. This error was further exacerbated by a certain number of party comrades who represented the offensive as the essential method of struggle for the Unified Party in the current situation" (Theses on Tactics, Third Congress of the CI, June 1921).
For communists to intervene to reinforce the workers' combativity is an elementary duty. But they don't do this at any price.
"The communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the proletariat the advantage of clearly understanding the line of march, the conditions, and the ultimate general results of the proletarian movement" (Marx-Engels, The Communist Manifesto of 1848). This is why communists have to be characterised vis-a-vis the working class by their capacity to analyse correctly the balance of forces between the classes. To push a weak or insufficiently prepared class into decisive struggles, to lead it into the traps laid by the bourgeoisie, is the height of irresponsibility, for revolutionaries. Their first responsibility is to develop their capacity for analysing the level of consciousness and combativity within the class as well as the strategy being used by the ruling class. This is the only way that revolutionary organisations can really take up their leading role in the class.
Immediately after the March Action, violent debates developed within the VKPD and the KAPD.
False organisational conceptions: an obstacle to the party's ability to make a self-critique
In an orientation article on 4-6 April 1921, Die Rote Fahne affirmed that "the VKPD has inaugurated a revolutionary offensive" and that the March Action constituted "the beginning, the first episode of decisive struggles for power".
On 7 and 8 April its Central Committee met and instead of making a critical analysis of the intervention, Heinrich Brandler sought above all to justify the party's policy. For him the main weakness resided in a lack of discipline among the local militants of the VKPD and in the failures of military organisation. He declared that "we have not suffered any defeat. It was an offensive".
In response to this analysis, Paul Levi made the most virulent criticism of the party's attitude during the March Action.
Having resigned from the Central Committee in February 1921 along with Clara Zetkin, for, among others, divergences over the foundation of the Communist Party of Italy, Levi once again showed himself unable to take the organisation forward through criticism. The most tragic thing about this was that "Levi is basically right on many points in criticising the March Action in Germany" (Lenin, Letter to German Communists, 14 August 1921, Collected Works, Vol. 32). But instead of making his critique in the framework of the organisation, on 3 and 4 April he wrote a pamphlet which he published on the outside on 12 April without first submitting it for discussion within the party[2].
In this pamphlet, Levi not only spat at organisational discipline, he exposed all kinds of details about the internal life of the party. He thus broke a proletarian principle and put the organisation in danger by publicly revealing its mode of functioning. He was excluded from the party on 12 April for behaviour threatening the security of the organisation.[3]
As we showed in our previous article on the Heidelberg Congress of October 1919, Levi tended to see any criticism as an attack on the organisation, but also as an attack on his own person. He thus sabotaged any possibility of collective functioning. His point of view clearly expressed this: "Either the March Action was valid, which means that I should be excluded from the party. Or the March Action was an error and my pamphlet was justified" (Levi, letter to the VKPD Centrale). This attitude was harmful to the organisation and was repeatedly criticised by Lenin. After Levi's resignation from the VKPD Centrale in February, he wrote "And the resignation from the Central Committee? That is quite simply the greatest of errors. If we tolerate a state of affairs where members of the Central Committee resign as soon as they find themselves in a minority, the development and purification of the Communist Parties will never follow a normal course. Instead of resigning, it would have been better to have had a number of discussions about the litigious questions with the Executive Committee ... It is indispensable to do everything possible, and even the impossible - but, at all costs, to avoid resignations and not to exaggerate divergences" (Lenin, Letter to Clara Zetkin and Paul Levi, 16 April 1921, CW, Vol. 45).
The partly exaggerated charges which Levi made against the VKPD (which was virtually seen as the only one at fault, thus ignoring the responsibility of the bourgeoisie in provoking the March struggles) were based on a rather distorted view of reality.
After being expelled from the party, Levi edited for a short period the review The Soviet which became the mouthpiece of those who opposed the direction taken by the VKPD.
Levi tried to expound his criticisms of the VKPD's tactics in front of the Central Committee but it refused to let him into its meetings. Clara Zetkin did it in his place. He argued that "communists are not able to undertake actions in place of the proletariat, without the proletariat, and, in the final analysis, even against the proletariat" (Levi, ibid).
Clara Zetkin then proposed a counter-resolution to the position taken up by the party. The session of the Central Committee, in its majority, rejected the criticisms and underlined that "to avoid this action ... was impossible for a revolutionary party and would have meant a pure and simple renunciation of its calling to lead the revolution". The VKPD "must, if it is to fulfil its historic mission, hold firmly to the line of the revolutionary offensive which was at the basis of the March Action and march with determination and confidence in this direction" ('Leitsatze uber die Marzaktion', Die Internationale 4, April 1921).
The Centrale persisted with the tactic of the offensive and rejected all the criticisms, In a proclamation of6 April 1921, the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) approved the party's attitude and declared: "The Communist International says to you: 'you acted well ' ... Prepare yourselves for new combats" (published in Die Rote Fahne, 14 April 1921).
It was at the Third Congress of the CI that the disagreements about the events in Germany began to be expressed. The group around Zetkin in the VKPD was strongly attacked in the first part of the discussion. But the interventions and the authority of Lenin and Trotsky led to a turnaround in the debates and cooled the hotheads.
Lenin, absorbed by the Kronstadt events and the affairs of state, had not had the time to follow the events in Germany or the debates about the balance sheet to be drawn. He had only just begun studying the situation more closely. On the one hand he very firmly rejected Levi's breach of discipline; on the other, he announced that the March Action, because of "its international importance and significance, must be submitted to the Third Congress of the Communist International". Lenin's concern was that discussion in the party should be as broad and unhindered as possible.
W Koenen, the VKPD's representative in the ECCI, was sent to Germany to ensure that the Central Committee of the German party would not take a definitive decision against the opposition. In the party press, it became possible for criticisms of the March Action to appear. Discussions on tactics opened up.
However, the majority of the Central Committee continued to defend the position adopted in March. Arkady Maslow called for a new approval of the March Action. Guralski, an envoy the ECCI, even declared that "we are not concerned with the past. The coming political struggles of the party are the best response to the attacks of the Levi tendency". At the Central Committee meeting of 3-5 May, Thalheimer intervened to call for unity in action by the workers. F Heckert pleaded for strengthening work in the trade unions.
On 13 May Die Rote Fahne published theses which developed the objective of artificially accelerating the revolutionary process. The March Action was cited as an example. The communists "must, in particularly grave situations where the essential interests of the proletariat are threatened, take a step ahead of the masses and seek by their initiative to draw them into the struggle, even at the risk of not being followed by a part of the working class". W Pieck, who in January 1919 had, against the decisions of the party, thrown himself along with Karl Liebknecht into the Berlin uprising, thought that confrontations within the working class "would take place more and more frequently. Communists must turn against the workers when they don't follow our appeals".
The reaction of the KAPD
While the VKPD and the KAPD had taken a step forward by carrying out joint actions, unfortunately these took place in unfavourable circumstances. The common denominator of the approach of the VKPD and the KAPD in the March Action was the desire to come to the aid of the working class in Russia. At this time the KAPD was still defending the revolution in Russia. The councilists who were to emerge from it took up an opposing position.
However the KAPD's intervention was beset by internal wrangling. On the one hand the leadership launched a joint appeal for a general strike with the VKPD and sent two representatives of the Centrale to central Germany, F Jung and F Rasch, to support the coordination of combat actions; on the other hand the local leaders of the KAPD, Utzelmann and Prenzlow, on the basis of their knowledge of the situation in the industrial region of central Germany, considered that any attempt at an uprising was insane and did not want to go any further than a general strike. They also intervened towards the Leuna workers, calling them to stay in the factory and prepare for a defensive struggle. The KAPD leadership acted without consulting the local party organs.
As soon as the movement was over, the KAPD timidly began a critical analysis of its own intervention. This analysis was also contradictory. In a reply to Levi's pamphlet, it highlighted the fundamentally erroneous approach of the VKPD Centrale. Hermann Gorter wrote:
"The VKPD has, through parliamentary activity - which in the conditions of bankrupt capitalism has no other meaning than the mystification of the masses - diverted the proletariat from revolutionary action. It has gathered up hundreds of thousands of non-communists and become a 'mass party '. The VKPD has supported the trade unions by the tactic of creating cells within them ... When the German revolution, having become more and more powerless, began to retreat, when the best elements of the VKPD became more and more dissatisfied and began calling for action, suddenly the VKPD decided on an grand enterprise for the conquest of political power. This is what it consisted of before the provocation by Horsing and the SiPo, the VKPD decided on an artificial action from above, without the spontaneous impulse of the broad masses; in other words it adopted the tactics of the putsch.
The Executive Committee and its representatives in Germany had for a long time been insisting that the party should strike out and show that it was a true revolutionary party. As if the essential aspect of a revolutionary tactic consisted simply of striking with all one's forces! On the contrary, when instead of affirming the revolutionary strength of the proletariat, a party undermines this same strength and weakens the proletariat by supporting parliament and the trade unions, and then after such preparations suddenly resolves to hit out by launching a great offensive action in favour of the same proletariat it has just been weakening, this can be nothing other than a putsch. That is to say, action decreed from above, having no source in the masses themselves, and thus doomed to failure from the start. And this attempt at a putsch has nothing revolutionary about it: it is opportunist in exactly the same way as parliamentarism or the tactic of union cells. Yes, this tactic is the inevitable other side of the coin of parliamentarism and the tactic of union cells, of collecting up non-communist elements, of the policy of leaders substituting for the policy of the masses, or, more precisely, the policy of the class. This weak and intrinsically corrupt tactic must inevitably lead to putsches" (Gorter, 'Lessons of the March Action', Afterword to the Open Letter to Comrade Lenin, Der Proletarier, May 1921).
This text by the KAPD puts its finger on the contradiction between the tactic of the United Front, which reinforced workers' illusions in the unions and social democracy, and the simultaneous and sudden call for an assault on the state. But at the same time, we find contradictions in the KAPD's own analysis: while on the one hand it talks about a defensive action by the workers, on the other it characterises the March Action as "the first conscious offensive by the revolutionary German proletarians against bourgeois state power" (F Kool, Die Linke gegen die Parteiherrschaft). In this respect, the KAPD even noted that "large masses of workers remained neutral, if not hostile, towards the combative vanguard". At the extraordinary congress of the KAPD in September 1921, the lessons of the March Action were not examined any further.
It was against this background of virulent debates within the VKPD and contradictory analyses by the KAPD, that the Communist International held its Third Congress, at the end of June 1921.
The International's attitude towards the March Action
Within the International, different tendencies had begun to form. The ECCI did not have a unified position on the events in Germany and did not speak with one voice. For a long time the ECCI had been divided on the analysis of the situation in Germany. Radek had developed many criticisms of the positions and behaviour of Levi and other members of the Centrale had seized upon them. However, these criticisms were not publicly and openly expressed within the VKPD at congresses or elsewhere.
Instead of publicly debating the analysis of the situation, Radek did a lot of damage to the functioning of the party. Often criticisms were not expressed openly and fraternally, but in a covert manner. Often debates were not centred round political errors but around the individuals responsible for them. The tendency towards the personalisation of political positions developed. Instead of building unity around a position and a method, instead of struggling as a body that functions collectively, the organisational tissue was destroyed in a completely irresponsible manner.
More generally the communists in Germany were themselves profoundly divided. On the one hand, at this moment, the two parties, the VKPD and the KAPD, which was also part of the CI, began to clash violently on the orientation to be followed.
Vis-a-vis the CI, before the March Action, parts of the VKPD had kept quiet about certain information about the situation; at the same time, divergences of analysis were not brought to the knowledge of the CI in all their breadth.
Within the CI itself, there was no real common reaction or unified approach to this situation. The Kronstadt uprising completely monopolised the attention of the Bolshevik party leadership, preventing it from following the situation in Germany in more detail. The way in which decisions were made in the ECCI was often not very clear and it was the same with the mandates given to the delegations. Certainly the mandates given to Radek and other ECCI delegates to Germany do not seem to have been decided with much clarity[4].
Thus, in this situation of growing divisions, notably within the VKPD, the ECCI members - in particular Radek - officiously entered into contact with tendencies within the two parties, unbeknownst to the central organs of the two organisations, with the aim of preparing for putschist actions. Instead of pushing the organisations towards unity, mobilisation and clarification, divisions were exacerbated and the tendency to take decisions outside the responsible organs was accelerated. This attitude, taken in the name of the ECCI, fuelled within the VKPD and the KAPD behaviour that could only damage the organisation.
Levi criticised this approach: "More and more frequently the envoys of the ECCI are overstepping their powers, and it is being shown later that these envoys have not been given such far-reaching powers" (Levi, Unser Weg, wider den Putschismus, 3 April 1921).
The structures of functioning and decision-making, as defined in the statutes both of the VKPD and the KAPD, were being bypassed. At the time of the March Action, in both parties, the appeal for the general strike was made without the whole organisation being involved in the reflection and decision. In reality it was the comrades of the ECCI who made contact with elements or certain tendencies within each organisation and who pushed for taking action. In this way the party as such was being bypassed.
Thus it was impossible to arrive at a unified approach by each party, still less at real joint action between the two parties.
To a large extent activism and putschism gained the upper hand in both organisations, accompanied by individual behaviour that was very destructive for the party and for the class as a whole. Each tendency began to carry out its own policies and to create its own informal, parallel channels. The concern for party unity, for a functioning in conformity with the statutes, was to a considerable extent lost.
Although the CI was weakened by the growing identification between the Bolshevik: party and the interests of the Russian state, and by the opportunist turn towards the tactic of the United Front, the Third Congress of the International still contained a collective and proletarian critique of the March Action.
For the Congress, the ECCI, with a correct political concern under Lenin's impulsion, ensured that there was a delegation representing the opposition within the VKPD. While the delegation from the VKPD Centrale was still trying to muzzle any criticism of the March Action, the Political Bureau of the Russian Communist Party, on Lenin's proposition, decided that "as a basis to this resolution it is necessary to examine in precise detail, to bring to light the concrete errors committed by the VKPD during the March Action and to even more energetically be on guard against repeating them".
What attitude to adopt?
In the introductory report to the discussion on 'The world economic crisis and the new tasks of the Communist International', Trotsky underlined that "Today, for the first time, we don't see and feel ourselves so immediately close to our goal, the conquest of power. In 1919, we said: 'It's a question of months'. Today we are saying: 'It's perhaps a question of years '". The combat may last a long time, it will not progress so feverishly as we would have liked, it will be excessively difficult and will demand numerous sacrifices".
Lenin: "This is why the Congress must make a clean sweep of leftist illusions that the development of the world revolution will continue at the same mad pace as it did in the beginning, that without any interruption it will be carried along by a second revolutionary wave and that victory depends solely on the will of the party and its action" (Zetkin, Memories of Lenin).
The VKPD Centrale, under the responsibility of Thalheimer and Bela Kun, sent to the Congress draft theses on tactics which called on the CI to embark upon a new phase of action. In a letter to Zinoviev of 10 June 1921, Lenin considered that "the theses of Thalheimer and Bela Kun are radically false on the political level" (Lenin, Letters, Vol. 7).
The Communist Parties had nowhere conquered the majority of the working class, not only at the level of organisation, but also at the level of communist principles. This is why the tactic of the CI was the following:
"We must ceaselessly and systematically struggle to win over the majority of the working class, first of all inside the old unions" (ibid).
In discussion with the delegate Heckert, Lenin thought that "the provocation was as clear as day. And instead of mobilising the working masses behind defensive aims in order to push back the attacks of the bourgeoisie and prove that you had the right to do this, you invented your 'theory of the offensive', an absurd theory which provides all the reactionaries and police authorities with the opportunity of presenting you as aggressors against whom the people had to be defended!" (Heckert, 'My encounter with Lenin', Lenin as he was, Vol. 2).
The VKPD delegation and the specially invited delegation from the opposition within the VKPD clashed at the Congress.
The Congress was aware of the danger to the unity of the party. This is why it pushed for a compromise between the leadership and the opposition. The following arrangement was obtained: "The Congress considers that any splintering of the forces within the Unified Communist Party of Germany, any formation of fractions, without even talking about splits, would constitute the greatest danger for the whole movement". At the same time the resolution adopted warned against any vengeful attitudes: "the Congress expects the leadership of the Unified Communist Party of Germany to have a tolerant attitude towards the old opposition, provided that it loyally applies the decisions taken by the Third Congress" (Resolution on the March Action and the Unified Communist Party of Germany, Third Congress of the CI).
During the debates at the Third Congress, the KAPD delegation hardly expressed any self-criticism about the March Action. It seemed to be concentrating its efforts on the questions of work in the trade unions and parliament.
Although the Third Congress managed to be very self-critical about the putschist dangers that appeared at the time of the March Action, to warn against them and to eradicate this "blind activism", it unfortunately embarked upon the tragic and pernicious path of the United Front. While it rejected putschism, the opportunist turn inaugurated by the adoption of the 21 Conditions was confirmed and accelerated. The grave errors identified by Gorter for the KAPD, i.e. the CI's return to work in the unions and parliament, were not corrected.
Encouraged by the results of the Third Congress, from the autumn of 1921 the VKPD involved itself in the policy of the United Front. At the same time, this Congress posed an ultimatum to the KAPD: either fuse with the VKPD or be excluded from the CI. In September 1921, the KAPD left the CI. Part of the KAPD rushed into the adventure of immediately founding the Communist Workers' International. A few months later it was rent by a split.
For the KPD (which again changed its name in August 1921), the door towards opportunism was wide open. As for the bourgeoisie, it had obtained its objectives: thanks to the March Action it had managed to continue its offensive and weaken the working class still further.
While the consequences of the putschist attitude were devastating for the working class as a whole, they were even more so for the communists. Once again they were the main victims of the repression. The hunt for communists was stepped up. A wave of resignations hit the KPD. Many militants were deeply demoralised after the failure of the uprising. At the beginning of 1921, the VKPD had between 350-400,000 members. By the end of August it had only 160,000. In November it had no more than 135-150,000.
Once again the working class had fought in Germany without a strong, consistent communist party.
DV
[1] At the elections to the Prussian parliament in February 1921, the VKPO won 1.1 million votes; the USPD 1.1 million; the SPD, 4.2 million. In Berlin, the VKPD and the USPD put together obtained more votes than the SPD.
[2] Clara Zetkin, who agreed with Levi's criticisms, exhorted him in several letters to avoid behaviour that would damage the organisation. Thus on 11 April she wrote to him: "You must withdraw the personal note from the preface. It seems to me politically beneficial for you not to make any personal judgement on the Centrale and its members, whom you declare to be fit for a lunatic asylum and whose revocation you demand, etc. It would be more reasonable to keep solely to the politics of the Centrale and leave aside the people who are only its mouthpieces". Only the personal excesses should be suppressed". Levi would not be convinced. His pride and his penchant for always wanting to be right, as well as his monolithic conception of organisation, were to have grim consequences.
[3] "Paul Levi did not inform the party leadership of his intention to publish a pamphlet nor did he bring to its knowledge the main elements of its content. He had his pamphlet printed on 3 April, at a time when the struggle was still going on in several parts of the Reich and when thousands of workers were being hauled before special tribunals. so that his writings could only excite them to pronounce the most bloody sentences. The Centrale fully recognises the right to criticise the party before and after the actions that it leads. Criticism on the terrain of the struggle and complete solidarity in the combat is a vital necessity for the party and a revolutionary duty. Paul Levi's attitude does not go towards the strengthening of the party but towards its dislocation and destruction" (VKPD Centrale, 16 April 1921).
[4] The ECCI delegation was composed of Bela Kun, Pogany and Guralski. Since the foundation of the KPD Radek had played the role of "liaison" between the KPO and the CI. Without always having a clear mandate, he above all practiced the politics of informal and parallel channels.
"The USA is faced with a world dominated by 'every man for himself', where its former vassals are trying to withdraw as much as possible from the tight grip of the world cop, which they had to put up with as long as the threat from the rival bloc existed. In this situation, the only decisive way the US can impose its authority is to resort to the area in which they have a crushing superiority over all other states: military force. But in doing so, the US is caught in a contradiction:
- on the one hand, if it gives up using or extending the use of its military superiority, this will only encourage the countries contesting its authority to contest even more;
- on the other hand, when it does use brute force, even, and especially when this momentarily obliges its opponents to rein in their ambitions towards independence, this only pushes the latter to seize on the least occasion to get their revenge and squirm away from America's grip" (Resolution on the international situation from the 12th ICC congress, International Review 90).
In trying to repeat the Gulf war of 1990-91, the American bourgeoisie found itself isolated. Except for Britain, none of the important world powers fully supported the US initiative[1]. In 1990, the invasion of Kuwait provided the perfect argument for forcing all these countries to support them in the war. In 1996, the US again succeeded in launching missiles against Iraq, despite the opposition of most of the other powers and of the main Arab countries. In 1998, the threats and preparations for massive bombardments appeared to be completely out of proportion to the Iraqi action of limiting the scope of the UN inspectors. The pretext was thus easy to reject. But in addition to this, Clinton's hands were tied and - in contrast to 1990 - this time he gave a considerable margin of manoeuvre both to Sad dam Hussein and to the rival imperialisms. Taking advantage of America's isolation, Hussein was able to accept the reimposition of the UN inspections at the time, and under the conditions, most convenient to him. Even before the signing of the agreement between the UN and Iraq, significant factions of the US bourgeoisie had begun to realise what a mistake Clinton had made. As the American press pointed out after the accord "President Clinton didn't really have any choice" (International Herald Tribune, 25.2.98).
Saddam Hussein didn't inflict this set-back on the US all by himself. Without the support and advise proffered to Hussein by Russia and France, without the approval of the anti-American policy of these two powers by most of the European countries and by China and Japan, the Iraqi population - which suffers daily not only from Saddam's terrible yoke, but also from the effects of the economic embargo which ensures that a child dies every six minutes (see Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1998) - would once again have been subjected to the terror of US and British bombs.
The official and media reactions were very revealing about this set-back for the Americans. Instead of hearing exalted proclamations about the "saving of the peace" and the "triumph of civilised values", we heard two types of speeches: triumphal and satisfied from Russia and France, disappointed and vengeful from the American bourgeoisie. France's self-satisfaction was expressed in diplomatic terms by the former Gaullist minister Peyrefite, who considered that France "had helped Clinton to avoid a terrible faux pas by leaving the diplomatic option open to him "(Le Figaro cited by International Herald Tribune, 25.2.98). To this the Americans responded with bitterness and threats: "while the accord was a success to the extent that the French drew benefits from it, the latter have a particular responsibility to ensure that it is strictly adhered to in the weeks ahead" (ibid).
So this time the Americans had to retreat and call off "Desert Storm II": "The negotiations with the general secretary of the UN. Kofi Annan, makes it impossible for Clinton to go ahead with the bombing. This is why the US didn't want Annan to go to Baghdad" (Daily Telegraph, 24.2.98). And this is why France and Russia pushed for and sponsored the general secretary's trip. A number of significant and highly symbolic facts testify to this: Kofi Annan's trips between New York and Paris in the French Concorde; between Paris and Baghdad in Chirac's presidential plane; and above all, both before and after going, the "preferential" interviews between the general secretary of the UN and the latter. The conditions under which this whole journey took place were a slap in the face for the US and a failure for the US bourgeoisie.
This situation can only aggravate imperialist tensions, because the US is not going to allow its authority to be flouted like this without reacting.
What has just happened is the latest demonstration of the tendency towards "every man for himself' which typifies the present historical phase of decadent capitalism - its phase of decomposition. Saddam Hussein's ability to set a trap for the Americans in contrast to 1990 and 1996, is due essentially to the growing difficulty of the US to maintain its authority and a certain discipline behind its imperialist policies. This applies both to the small local imperialisms - in this case the Arab countries (Saudi Arabia for example refused the use of its air bases to American troops), or Israel which is challenging the whole Pax Americana in the Middle East - and America's big imperialist rivals.
The American bourgeoisie can't let this affront go. At stake is its hegemony in all continents, particularly the Middle East. It is already preparing the "next crisis" in Iraq:
"Very few in Washington believe that the last chapter in this story has been written" (New York Times, quoted by International Herald Tribune, 25.2.98). The rivalries between the major imperialisms over Iraq will centre around the question of the UN inspections, of who will control them, and around whether the embargo against Iraq is to continue or not. On this latter point, Russia and France are being opposed fiercely by the US, which is maintaining its armada in the Persian Gulf - a real pistol pointing at the Iraqis' heads. It has also made it quite clear that it will not tolerate the Europeans, especially France and Germany, getting mixed up in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The American bourgeoisie is preparing the "next crisis" in Africa and ex-Yugoslavia as well. It has clearly announced that it is carrying on its offensive in Africa, aimed at undermining the presence of France and European influence in general. It has also announced that it will maintain its military presence in Macedonia at a time when military tensions are growing in neighbouring Kosovo. In this province, it is clear that the recent confrontations between the Albanian populations and the Serbian police forces have a significance which goes well beyond the limits of the region. Behind the Albanian nationalist cliques stands Albania of course, and to a certain extent other Muslim countries like Bosnia and also Turkey, which has been the traditional bridgehead for German imperialism in the Balkans. Behind the Serbian forces we find the Russian "big brother" and, more discretely, the traditional allies of Serbia, France and Britain; meanwhile America has addressed a solemn warning to Serbia. Thus, despite the Dayton agreements of 1995, there is no definitive peace in the Balkans. This region remains a powder keg, where the different imperialisms and notably the most powerful amongst them will not give up pressing forward their strategic interests as we saw them do between 1991 and 1995.
The US reverse over Iraq is therefore the harbinger of sharpening imperialist tensions in every part of the world, bringing in their wake more massacres, more terror for the populations of the planet.
Capitalism's historic impasse is the cause of the bloody conflicts multiplying everywhere today, and of the continuation and dramatic deepening of those which are already there. All the great tirades about peace and the virtues of democracy are just a way of reassuring the population, and above all, of hindering the international proletariat from becoming aware of the warlike reality of capitalism. This reality is that every imperialism is merely preparing itself for the future conflicts that are bound to arise.
RL, 14 March
[1] The fact that Kohl at the Munich "Security Conference" in early February announced that Germany would put its air bases at the disposal of the US (something which would have gone without saying a few years ago) should not be seen as a sign of real German support for the US. On the one hand, sending planes from Germany to bomb Iraq is far from the best strategy given the distance and the number of "neutral" countries they would have to fly over. Thus Germany's proposal was a highly platonic one. At the same time, the policy of German imperialism is to move its pawns without overtly defying the US. Having opposed the big boss at the conference by supporting the French position on the question of the European arms industry (towards which the Americans are hostile), German diplomacy then had to show some "good will" on a question which didn't bother them that much.
Several times during the winter, Europe's two largest countries have witnessed mobilisations around the question of unemployment. In France, street demonstrations and occupations of public buildings (especially the offices of the unemployment agencies, the ASSEDIC) took place over several months in the country's main towns and cities. In Germany on 5th February, unemployed organisations and trades unions called a series of demonstrations across the country. The mobilisation was less extensive than in France, but it was reported at length by the media. Should we see these demonstrations as expressions of workers' combativity? We will see later that this is not the case.
However, the question of unemployment is fundamental for the working class, since it is one of the most important attacks to which it is subjected by a capitalism in crisis. At the same time, the rise of permanent unemployment is one of the best proofs of the bankruptcy of the capitalist system. And it is precisely the importance of this question which lies behind the mobilisations that we have seen lately.
Before we go on to analyse the meaning of these demonstrations, we must understand the importance of unemployment for the world working class, and its future perspectives.
Unemployment today and its perspectives
Today, unemployment affects enormous sectors of the working class, in most countries of the world. In the Third World, the proportion of the population without a job often varies between 30% and 50%. Even in a country like China, which in recent years has been presented by the "experts" as one of the great champions in the race for growth, there will be 200 million unemployed in two years[1]. In the East European countries of the ex-Russian bloc, economic collapse has thrown millions of workers onto the streets, and although some countries like Poland have been able to limit the damage, thanks to fairly sustained growth and wretched wage levels, in most of them, and especially in Russia, huge masses of workers have been reduced to utter penury, forced to survive in sordid "little jobs" like selling plastic bags in the corridors of the Metro[2].
In the more developed countries, the situation is less tragic. Nonetheless, mass unemployment has become a running sore in the social fabric. For the European Union as a whole, the official figure for "job seekers" relative to the population of working age is around 11 %. In 1990, just as the Russian bloc disintegrated and the American President George Bush promised an "era of peace and prosperity", the figure was 8%.
The following figures give some idea of the extent of the scourge of unemployment today:
Country | 96 rate | 97 rate |
Germany | 9.3 | 11.6 |
France | 12.4 | 12.3 |
Italy | 11.9 | 12.3 |
Britain | 7.5 | 5.0 |
Spain | 21.6 | 20.5 |
Holland | 6.4 | 5.3 |
Belgium | 9.5 |
|
Sweden | 10.6 | 8.4 |
Canada | 9.7 | 9.2 |
USA | 5.3 | 4.6 |
Source: OECD, UN
The figures are in need of some commentary.
In the first place, these are official figures, calculated according to criteria which hide a considerable part of the problem. They do not take into account (amongst other things): young people who are still in education because they cannot find work;
-the unemployed who are forced to accept underpaid jobs or lose their benefits;
-those who are sent on "training" schemes supposed to introduce them to the labour market, but which in fact are useless;
-older workers who are forced to accept early retirement.
Similarly, these figures take no account of partial unemployment, in other words all those workers unable to find stable full-time work (for example, temporary workers whose numbers have grown uninterruptedly for the last 10 years).
All these facts are well-known to the "experts" of the OECD who are obliged to admit, in their review for specialists, that: "The classic rate of unemployment... does not measure the totality of underemployment"[3].
Secondly, we need to understand the meaning of the figures for the "top of the class": the USA and Britain. For many experts, these figures prove the superiority of the "Anglo-Saxon model" over other models of political economy. And so today they din into our ears the fact that unemployment in the US has reached its lowest point for 25 years. It is true that the American economy currently enjoys higher growth rates than those of other developed countries, and that it has created 11 million jobs during the last five years. However, it should be clear that most of these new jobs are "MacDonalds jobs", in other words all sorts of precarious and very badly paid jobs, which keep poverty at levels unknown since the 1930s, with hundreds of thousands of homeless and millions of poor, deprived of all social insurance.
All this is clearly admitted by someone who can hardly be suspected of denigrating the USA, since he was Secretary for Labour in Clinton's first administration, and is a long-standing personal friend of the President: "For 20 years, a large part of the American population has seen real wages stagnate or fall, as a result of inflation. For the majority of workers, the decline has continued despite the recovery. In 1996, the average real wage was lower than in 1989, before the previous recession. Between mid-1996 and mid-1997, it rose by just 0.3%, while the lowest incomes continued to decline. The proportion of Americans considered as poor, according to the official definition and statistics, is higher today than it was in 1989"[4].
of 16 and 55, the official rate of unemployment only includes 37% of the unemployed as being without a job; the 63% that remain are classed as being "outside the working population ", despite being of working age"[6].
Similarly, the official publication of the American Department of Labour explained:
"The official rate of unemployment is convenient and well-known; nonetheless, if we focus too much on this measure alone, we can get a distorted view of the economies of other countries compared to the United States ... Other indicators are necessary if we want to interpret intelligently the respective situations on the different labour markets"[7].
In reality, on the basis of studies like these - hardly the products of some terrible "subversives" - we can estimate that the rate of unemployment in the USA is much closer to 13% than to the 5% which is put forward as the proof of the "American miracle". How could it be otherwise, when (according to the criteria of the International Labour Bureau), only the following are considered as unemployed:
- those who have worked for less than an hour during the week in question;
- those who have actively sought employment during the week
- those who are immediately available for work.
Thus in the USA, most youngsters who have some kind of casual job, someone who had mowed their neighbours' lawns or looked after their children for a few dollars, would not be considered as unemployed. The same is true for the man who has given up looking for work after months or years of rejections from hypothetical employers, or the single mother who is not "immediately available" because of the lack of creches.
The British "success story" is still more deceitful than that of its trans-Atlantic cousin. The naive observer is confronted with a paradox: between 1990 and 1997, the level of employment fell by 4%, and yet during the same period the rate of unemployment fell from 10% to 5%. In fact, as one thoroughly "serious" international financial institution puts it: "the fall in British unemployment seems to be due entirely to the increase in the proportion of the inactive"[8].
And to understand the mystery of this transformation of the unemployed into the "inactive", we can read the words of a journalist on the Guardian, a British newspaper which is hardly classified as a revolutionary publication: "When Margaret Thatcher won her first election, in 1979, there were officially 1.3 million unemployed in Britain. If the method of calculation had remained the same, there would today be just over 3 million. A recently published report by the Midland Bank even estimated the number at 4 million, or 14% of the working population - more than in France or Germany.
(...) the British government does not count the unemployed, but only those entitled to an increasingly targeted unemployment benefit. Having changed the method of calculation 32 times, it decided to exclude hundreds of thousands of unemployed from the statistics thanks to the new roles on unemployment benefit, which ends the right to benefit after 6 months instead of 12.
The majority of the jobs created are part time, which for many is not a choice. According to the work inspectorate, 43% of jobs created between winter 1992-93 and autumn 1996 were part time. Almost a quarter of the 28 million workers taken on, were for jobs of this kind. In France and Germany, the proportion is only one in six"[9].
The large-scale trickery which has allowed the bourgeoisie of the two Anglo-Saxon "employment champions" to give themselves such airs encounters a silence of complicity amongst the numerous "specialist" economists and politicians, and especially among the mass media (the deception is revealed only in confidential publications). The reason is simple: the aim is to anchor the idea that the policies applied with particular brutality during the last decade in these countries - reduction in wages and social protection, development of "flexibility" - are effective in limiting the damage of mass unemployment. In other words, the aim is to convince the workers that sacrifice "payoff", and that they have every interest in accepting the dictates of capital.
And since the ruling class never puts all its eggs in one basket, and since it wants to sow confusion in the working class by consoling them with the idea that a "capitalism with a human face" exists, some of its ideologues are now referring to the "Dutch model"[10]. We need therefore to say a word about the "good student" of the European class: the Netherlands.
Here again, official unemployment figures are meaningless. As in Great Britain, a fall in unemployment goes hand in hand with ... a fall in employment. Thus the rate of employment (i.e. the proportion of the working population actually in work) fell from 60% in 1970 to 50.7% in 1994.
The mystery disappears when we consider that: "In 20 years, the number of part time jobs as a proportion of the total has risen from 15% to 36%. And the phenomenon is accelerating, since (...) nine tenths of the jobs created in the last ten years total between 12 and 36 hours per week"[11]. Moreover, a considerable proportion of the surplus labour force has disappeared from the unemployment statistics to reappear in the still higher ones for invalidity. This is noted by the OECD, when it writes that: "The estimates of the number of unemployed hidden in the invalidity statistics vary widely, from a little over 10% to nearly 50%"[12].
As the article cited above from Le Monde Diplomatique says, "Unless we imagine a genetic weakness that only affects the Dutch, how else are we to explain that this country has more people unable to work than unemployed?". Obviously this method, which allows the bosses to "modernise" on the cheap by getting rid of their older and "inflexible" personnel, was only possible thanks to one of the world's most "generous" systems of social security. But as this system is more and more radically called into question (as it is in all the advanced countries), it will be more and more difficult for the bourgeoisie to go on hiding unemployment in this way. Moreover, the new law requires that it is companies that pay the first five years of in validity benefit, which will singularly discourage them from declaring the employees they want to get rid of "unable to work". In fact, the myth of the Low Countries' "social paradise" has already taken a serious knock from a European study cited in The Guardian (28/04/97), which found that 16% of Dutch children live in poor families, compared to 12% in France. As for Britain, the "miracle" country, the figure is 32%!
There are thus no exceptions to the rise of mass unemployment in the developed countries. In these countries, the real rate of unemployment (which needs to take account in particular of all the unwanted part-time jobs, and those who have given up looking for work) ranges from 13% to 30% of the working population. These figures are getting closer and closer to those experienced during the great depression of the 1930s: 24% in the USA, 17.5% in Germany, and 15% in Britain. Apart from the case of the USA, we can see that other countries are not far from reaching these sinister "records". In some, the rate of unemployment has even overtaken that of the 1930s. This is true in particular for Spain, Sweden (8% in 1933), Italy (7% in 1933), and France (5% in 1933), although this figure is probably an under-estimate[13].
Finally, we should not be deceived by the slight fall in unemployment rates for 1997, which appear in the table above. As we have seen, the official figures are highly misleading, and above all this small drop is due to the "recovery" in world production in recent years. It will soon be reversed as soon as the world economy again faces an open recession, as we have seen in 1974, 1978, at the beginning of the 1980s and the 1990s. The recession is inevitable, since the capitalist mode of production is absolutely incapable of overcoming the cause of all the convulsions it has undergone for the last 30 years: generalised over-production, a historic inability to find adequate markets to absorb its output[14].
Moreover, Bob Reich, Clinton's friend who we have already met above, is quite clear on the subject: "Expansion is a temporary phenomenon. For the moment, the USA benefits from a very high growth rate, which is pulling a large part of Europe with it. But the disturbances in Asia, with the increasing debt of us consumers, lead us to think that the vitality of this phase of the cycle cannot last much longer".
This "specialist", without of course daring to take his reasoning to its logical conclusion, has indeed put his finger on the fundamental elements in the world economy's present situation:
- capitalism has only been able to continue its "expansion" during the last 30 years, at the cost of an ever more astronomical debt on the part of every possible purchaser (especially households and companies; the under-developed countries in the 1970s; states, and especially the United States, during the 1980s;
the "emerging" Asian countries at the beginning of the 1990s ... );
- the bankruptcy of the latter, which became known at the beginning of the summer 1997, has a significance that extends well beyond their frontiers; it expresses the bankruptcy of the entire system, and will make it still worse.
Mass unemployment, which is the direct result of capitalism's inability to overcome the contradictions imposed on it by its own laws, is not going to disappear, nor even decline. It can only get inexorably worse, whatever tricks the ruling class tries to hide it with. It will continue to hurl growing masses of proletarians into the most intolerable poverty.
The working class faced with the question of unemployment
Unemployment is a scourge for the whole of the working class. It affects not just those without a job, but all workers. On the one hand, it is a serious blow to the increasing numbers of families with one or even several unemployed members. On the other, its effects are distributed through taxes on wages to pay for unemployment benefit. Finally, the capitalists use unemployment to blackmail workers over their wages and working conditions. In fact, during the decades since the open crisis put an end to capitalism's illusory "prosperity" of the thirty years of reconstruction, it is largely through employment that the ruling class has attacked the living conditions of the exploited. Ever since the strikes that shook Europe and the world in the wake of 1968, it has known that open wage reductions could only provoke extremely massive and violent reactions from the proletariat. Its attacks have thus been concentrated on reducing the indirect wage paid by the Welfare State and reducing social services, all in the name of "solidarity with the unemployed"; and at the same time, has reduced the cost of wages by throwing millions of workers on the street.
But unemployment is not just the spearhead of the attacks that a capitalism in crisis is forced to make on those it exploits. Once it has become massive and lasting, and has irrevocably thrown immense proportions of the working class out of wage labour, it becomes the most obvious sign of the definitive bankruptcy of a mode of production whose historic task was precisely to transform a growing proportion of the world's population into wage workers. In this sense, although for tens of millions of workers unemployment is a real tragedy, combining economic and moral distress, it can become a powerful factor in developing the class' consciousness of the need to overthrow capitalism. Similarly, while unemployment prevents workers from using the strike as a means of struggle, it does not necessarily condemn them to impotence. The proletariat's class struggle against the attacks of crisis-ridden capital is the essential means whereby it can regroup its forces and develop its consciousness with a view to overthrowing the system. The street demonstration, where workers come together despite their division into different companies and industrial branches, are an important means of struggle, which has been widely used in revolutionary periods. This is one place where unemployed workers can play a full part. As long as they are able to regroup outside the control of bourgeois organs, the unemployed can mobilise in the street to prevent evictions or the cutting off of electricity, they can occupy town halls and public buildings in order to demand the payment of emergency benefits, As we have often said, "when they lose the factory, the unemployed gain the street", and they can therefore more readily overcome the divisions into branches that the bourgeoisie maintains within the working class, notably through the trades unions. This is not abstract conjecture, but comes from the real experience of working class, especially during the 1930s in the USA, where many unemployed committees were set up outside the control of the unions.
This being said, despite the appearance of mass unemployment during the 1980s, nowhere have we seen the formation of significant unemployed workers' committees (apart from a few embryonic attempts, quickly stripped of their content by the leftists and long since defunct), still less mass mobilisations of unemployed workers. And yet, important workers' struggles developed during these years, where the workers proved more and more able to disengage themselves from the unions' grip. Several reasons explain why, unlike the 1930s, we have not yet seen a real mobilisation of unemployed workers.
For one thing, the rise in unemployment since the 1970s has been much more gradual than it was during the Great Depression. Then, the beginning of the crisis was like a rout, and witnessed an unparalleled explosion in unemployment (in the US, for example, unemployment rose from 3% in 1929 to 24% in 1932). In today's acute crisis, although we have seen periods of rapidly increasing unemployment (especially in the mid-1980s and in recent years), the bourgeoisie's ability to slow down the rhythm of economic collapse has allowed it to spread out the attacks against the proletariat, especially in the form of unemployment. Moreover, in the advanced countries the bourgeoisie has learned to confront the problem of unemployment much more adroitly than in the past. For example, by replacing abrupt redundancies with "social plans" (sending workers for a time of "retraining" before they find themselves out in the street, or giving them temporary pay-offs which help them to survive at first), the ruling class has largely succeeded in defusing the unemployment bomb. In most of today's industrialised countries, a laid-off worker often has 6 months before finding himself completely without any resources. Once he has already found himself isolated and atomised, it is much more difficult for him to regroup with his class brothers to act collectively. Finally, the fact that even massive sectors of the unemployed working class have proven unable to regroup, springs from the general context of capitalism's social decomposition, which encourages despair and an attitude of "looking after number one":
That said, the ICC has never considered that the unemployed could never join the struggle of their class. In fact, as we wrote in 1993:
"The massive workers' combats will constitute a powerful antidote against the noxious effects of decomposition, allowing the progressive surmounting, through the class solidarity that these combats imply, of atomisation, of "every man for himself", and all the divisions which weigh on the proletariat: between categories, branches of industry, between immigrants and indigenous workers, between the unemployed and workers with jobs. In particular, although the weight of decomposition has prevented the unemployed from entering the struggle (except in a punctual way) during the past decade, and contrary to the 30s, and while they will not be able to playa vanguard role comparable to that of the soldiers in Russia in 1917 as we had envisaged, the massive development of proletarian struggles will make it possible for them, notably in demonstrations on the street, to rejoin the general combat of their class, all the more so in that the numbers of unemployed who already have an experience of associated labour and of struggle at the workplace, can only grow. More generally, if unemployment is not a specific problem of those without work but rather a real question affecting and concerning all of the working class, notably as a clear and tragic expression of the historic weakness of capitalism, it is this same combat to come that will allow the proletariat to become fully conscious of if"[16].
It is precisely because the bourgeoisie has understood this threat that today it is promoting the mobilisation of the unemployed.
The real meaning of the "unemployed movements"
To understand the events of the last few months, we need first to highlight a crucial element: these "movements" were in no way an expression of a real mobilisation of the proletariat on its class terrain. We need only consider how the bourgeois media have given these mobilisations maximum coverage, even puffing up their size on some occasions. This held true, not just in the countries where they took place, but internationally. Since the beginning of the 1980s, experience - especially at the beginning of the struggles in autumn 1983, with the public sector strikes in Belgium - has shown that whenever the working class takes to the struggle on its own terrain, and really threatens the interests of the bourgeoisie, then a media blackout is applied. When we see the TV news devoting a considerable part of its time to cover the demonstrations, when the German television shows French unemployed marching, while French TV returns the compliment for the German unemployed marches shortly afterwards, we can be sure that the bourgeoisie has an interest in giving these events maximum publicity. In fact, what we had this winter was a small-scale "remake" of the events in France during the autumn of 1995, which received extensive world-wide media coverage. The aim was to set up an international manoeuvre to renew the trades unions' credibility before they were called on to intervene as "social firemen" with the outbreak of massive new workers' struggles. Just how much of a manoeuvre this was, appeared clearly when the Belgian unions organised a carbon copy of the French strikes, referring explicitly to "the French example". This was confirmed again a few months later, in May-June 1996, when the German union leaders openly called workers to "follow the French example" as they prepared ''the biggest demonstration since the war" on 15th June 1996[17]. This year, the German unions and unemployed organisations once again referred explicitly to "the French example", by coming to the 6th February demonstration carrying tricolour flags.
The question is thus not whether the unemployed movements in Germany and France correspond to a real workers' mobilisation, but rather what is the aim of the bourgeoisie in organising and publicising them.
The bourgeoisie is certainly behind the organisation of these movements. Evidence? In France, one of the demonstrations' main organisers was the CGT (Confederation Generale du Travail), the union run by the French "Communist" Party, which has three ministers in the government whose responsibility is to manage and defend the interests of the national capital. In Germany, the traditional unions, which cooperate openly with the bosses also took part. Alongside the unions, there are more "radical" organisations: for example in France, the AC group (Action contre le Chomage) largely led by the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire, a Trotskyist organisation which sees itself as a sort of "loyal opposition" to the Socialist government.
What was the ruling class' aim in promoting these movements? Was it to forestall an immediate threat of mobilisation by unemployed workers? In fact, as we have seen, such mobilisations are not on the agenda today. In reality, the bourgeoisie had a double objective.
On the one hand, the aim was to create a diversion among the employed workers, whose discontent can only increase with the more and more brutal attacks to which they are subjected, and to make them feel guilty towards workers "who aren't lucky enough to have a job". In France, the agitation around unemployment was an excellent means of trying to interest workers in the government's proposal to introduce the 35-hour week, which is supposed to allow the creation of numerous jobs (and which will, above all, make it easier to freeze wages and increase work rates).
On the other hand, the bourgeoisie aimed, as in 1995, to forestall a situation which it will have to confront in the future. Although today we are not witnessing mobilisation and struggle by unemployed workers, as in the 1930s, this does not mean that the conditions of proletarian struggle are less favourable now than they were then. Quite the contrary. In the 1930s (for example in May-June 1936 in
The ruling class is very well aware of this. It knows that it will have to confront new class struggles against more and more brutal attacks on the workers. It knows that these future struggles by those in work, are likely to draw in increasing numbers of unemployed workers. And to date, the union organisations have only exercised a feeble degree of control over the unemployed. It is important for the bourgeoisie that when the unemployed join in the struggle, in the wake of the employed, they should not escape from the control of those organisations whose task is to regiment the working class and sabotage its combat: the trades unions of every description, including the most "radical". In particular, it is important that the unemployed workers' formidable combative potential, and their lack of illusions in capitalism (which today are expressed as despair) should not "contaminate" those in work when they launch themselves into the struggle. The mobilisations this winter began the bourgeoisie's policy of developing its control over the unemployed through the trades unions and the organisations like AC.
Even if they were the result of bourgeois manoeuvres, these mobilisations are thus a further indication that not only the ruling class itself has no illusions as to its ability to reduce unemployment, still less to overcome the crisis, but that it expects to engage in increasingly powerful struggles with the working
class.
Fabienne
[1]"... surplus labour in the countryside oscillates between 100 and 150 million people. In the cities, there are between 30 and 40 million people wholly or partially unemployed. Not to mention, of course, the crowds of young people about to enter the labour market" ("Paradoxale modernisation de la Chine", in Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1997).
[2] Unemployment statistics in Russia mean absolutely nothing. The official figure was 9.3% in 1996, when the country's GNP had fallen by 45% between 1986 and 1996. In reality, large numbers of workers spend their days at the workplace doing nothing (for lack of any orders for the company's goods), in return for pitiful wages (comparatively much lower than unemployment benefit in the Western countries), which force them to hold down a second job in the black economy just to survive.
[3] Perspectives de l'emploi, July 1993.
[4] Robert B. Reich: "Une economie ouverte peutelle preserver la cohesion sociale?", in Bilan du Monde 1998.
[5] "Unemployment and non-employment" in American Economic Review, May 1997.
[6] "Les sans-emploi aux Etats-Unis", L 'etat du monde 1998, Editions La Decouverte, Paris.
[7] "International Comparisons of Unemployment Indicators", Monthly Labor Review, Washington, March 1993.
[8] Bank of International Settlements, Annual Report, Basle, June 1997.
[9] Seamus Milne, "Comment Londres manipule les statistiques", Le Monde Diplomatique, May 1997.
[10] "France should take the Dutch economic model as its inspiration" (Jean-Claude Trichet, governor of the Bank of France, quoted in Le Monde Diplomatique of September 1997). "The example of Denmark and Holland show that it is possible to reduce unemployment while maintaining relative wages fairly stable" (Bank of International Settlements, Annual Report, Basle, June 1997).
[11] "Miracle ou mirage aux Pays-Bas?", Le Monde Diplomatique, July 1997.
[12] "The Netherlands 1995-96", Economic Studies of the OECD, Paris 1996.
[13] Sources: Encyclopaedia Universalis, article on the economic crises, and Maddison, Economic Growth in the West, 1981.
[14] See the International Review no.92, "Report on the Economic Crisis, 12th ICC Congress".
[15] "Decomposition, final phase of the decadence of capitalism", in International Review no.62.
[16] "Resolution on the International Situation", point 21, no.74.
[17] See our articles in International Review nos. 84-86.
[18] See the article on May 1968 in this issue.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1848-civil-wars-europe
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/communist-manifesto
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1937/communist-programme-revolutions-1917-1923
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1919-german-revolution
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/kpd
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/german-communist-party
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/bordigism
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1968-may-france
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/1921
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/march-action
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/50/united-states
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/59/iraq
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/unemployment