ICC Introduction
We are publishing the platform of one of the new groups in Russia, which is moving towards the positions of the communist left. The ICU originated as the Kirov Marxist group in 1997 following a strike by teachers in that city. Initially the group attempted to work with the official Communist Party, later with various leftist groups, but more and more found that such activity was a “useless waste of time”. The current title of their paper in Russia is World Revolution.
The platform is followed by extracts from a letter we sent in response, focussing on the contradiction we see between the fundamentally internationalist approach of the ICU text and the concessions to the ideology of ‘national liberation’ that are contained within it. This is a problem for a number of the new Russian groups and we will be returning to it in other articles.
International Communist Union: Our platform
The ICU’s conception of the world and theoretical basis is Marxism.
The historical movement from primitive communism to integral communism is a process that forms the material conditions for the construction of a world communist society. The construction of such a society will lead not to the end of history but to the beginning of the conscious history of humanity.
The present capitalist mode of production is distinct from all preceding modes of production because of its worldwide, generalised character and is characterised by the exacerbation of class contradictions. At the same time capitalism forms the conditions for the construction of communism. Its development necessarily leads to the development of its contradictions and engenders, reinforces and develops the social force whose mission is the destruction of the capitalist system and the construction of communism - the proletariat. The limit of capital is capital itself.
During the course of its development modern capitalism advances more and more destructive means for solving its contradictions. Two world wars have carried off 60 million human lives. The new world war, the military blocs for which are beginning to form today, will not only bring far greater calamities, but will threaten the very existence of humanity. In this situation there is only one alternative: socialism or barbarism, the world communist revolution or the destruction of humanity.
The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first attempt by the proletariat to carry out this revolution in an epoch when the conditions for it were insufficiently mature. The October revolution of 1917 in Russia was the first step of the authentic world communist revolution towards an international revolutionary wave, which put an end to the first imperialist war. The defeat of this revolutionary wave, notably in Germany 1919-23, condemned the revolution in Russia to isolation and rapid degeneration. Stalinism became the gravedigger of the October revolution.
The statified regimes which saw the light of day under the name of ‘socialism’ or ‘communism’ in the USSR, eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea etc. were and remain capitalist countries, which the ruling ideology has painted with ‘marxist’ rhetoric drawn from the communist programme, the better to hide their bourgeois nature.
Where there is wage labour, there is capital.
Our principles
1. We reject any possibility of building socialist society within national boundaries. In continuity with the traditions of the communist movement, we consider that the task of the social liberation of the working class and of all the toilers is the work of the united world working class, and this solution is only possible in the context of a world proletarian revolution. Faced with the globalisation of the world capitalist economy, the working class must fight not for the narrow interests of this or that state but for the unification of the revolutionary struggle of the workers of all countries under the leadership of the international communist party. The goal of the communists’ struggle is not the well being of this or that nation and its state, but the utilisation of the productive forces created by capitalism in order to build a world classless society - communism. The creation of the conditions for communism demands the overturning of capitalist social relations based on wage labour, commodity production and national frontiers. It demands the creation of a world community whose activity will be geared towards the full satisfaction of human needs.
2. The instrument for building such a society is the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat through which the working class will create the conditions for the withering away of classes and the state.
3. The revolutionary political organisation is the vanguard of the proletariat, the active factor in the propagation of class consciousness within the proletariat. Its role consists in organising the diverse forms of working class struggle into a unified revolutionary struggle. What distinguishes the communists is the awareness that they stand for the common class interests of the proletariat and this is expressed in their actions. They are the most consistent organised force given the necessity for the communist movement to have a truly worldwide and centralised leadership.
4. During the course of the 20th century the numerous imperialist wars which have been part of the unremitting struggle between states large and small for the conquest or maintenance of influence in the international arena have more and more brought humanity nothing but death and destruction. The working class can only respond to them through its international solidarity and the struggle against the bourgeoisie in all countries.
5. At the same time a number of revolutionary wars and national liberation struggles have made a considerable contribution to human progress, leading to the independent development of young states and developing national industry and a growing proletariat. However the process of the globalisation of the world economy has considerably changed this process. No country in the world can develop its economy on its own without integrating itself into the process of globalisation. This is why wars of liberation can no longer lead to national independence for any people, and why national liberation movements have become mere puppets of this or that imperialist grouping. In these conditions, there is more truth than ever in the principle that the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination, however just it may be, must not result in the subordination of this or that national detachment of the working class to ‘its own’ bourgeoisie. This right must be used by the revolutionary workers of the imperialist states to wage a struggle against the stifling of the small exploited nations by their own capitalism. The slogan of the working class in all nations large and small is that the main enemy is its own national capital, that victory is only possible through the unity of the workers of all nationalities.
6. All nationalist ideology, such as national ‘independence’ or ‘autonomy’, whatever the pretext - ethnic, historical, religious, etc, is a real poison for the workers. Having the aim of getting the workers to take the side of this or that faction of the bourgeoisie, it sets workers from different nations against each other, leading to their mutual extermination for the wars and ambitions of their exploiters.
7. All factions of the bourgeoisie are equally reactionary. To defend itself from revolutionary attack, the bourgeoisie always resorts to social democratic and leftist factions as the last ramparts of the state. All the so-called ‘working class’, ‘socialist’ or ‘Communist’ parties, the leftist organisations (the Trotskyists, Maoists and anarchists) constitute the left wing of the political apparatus of capital. Any tactic of ‘popular fronts’, by mixing up the interests of the proletariat with those of one or another bourgeois faction, can only serve to obstruct and deform the proletarian struggle.
8. Terrorism is in no sense a means of struggle for the working class. It is the expression of social strata that have no historical future. It always provides a favourable terrain for the manipulations of the bourgeoisie. By advocating secret actions by an insignificant minority, it stands in total contradiction with class violence, which is born out of the massive, conscious and organised actions of the proletariat.
Our historical antecedents
The positions of revolutionary organisations and their activity are the product of the past experience of the working class and the lessons drawn from it. The ICU lays claim to the consistent contributions to this cause by the Communist League of Marx and Engels (1847-1852), the three Internationals (the International Workingmen’s Association, 1864-1872, the Socialist International, 1889-1914, and the Communist International, 1919-24), as well as the left fractions which detached themselves from the Third International in 1920-30 during the course of its degeneration.
ICC reply
Dear comrades,
We are very glad to have made contact with your group and are eager to know more about its history, the discussions within it, the content of its publications, and so on. When we first saw the platform on the left-dis website it was obvious to us that we have much in common. We also salute your effort to respond to the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers from an internationalist standpoint. Concerning the platform, there seems to be a high level of agreement with a number of key positions: the perspective of socialism or barbarism, the capitalist nature of the Stalinist regimes, recognition of the proletarian character of the Russian revolution of 1917, opposition to imperialist war and all fronts with the bourgeoisie, including its left wing. What we’re less sure about is whether you agree with the ICC on the historical framework which gives substance and coherence to many of these positions: the conception that capitalism has, since 1914, been a decadent, declining social system.
To give a precise illustration of the problem we are raising: in your statement you argue against ‘fronts’ with the bourgeoisie on the grounds that all bourgeois factions are equally reactionary. And we agree. But this position has not always been valid for marxists. If capitalism today is a decadent system, i.e. one in which the social relations have become a permanent fetter on the productive forces and thus on human progress, it has, like previous forms of class exploitation, also known an ascendant period when it represented progress in relation to the previous mode of production. This is why Marx did support certain fractions of the bourgeoisie, whether the northern capitalists against the southern slaveholders in the American civil war, the Risorgimento movement in Italy for national unification against the old feudal classes, and so on. This support was based on the understanding that capitalism had not yet exhausted its historical mission and that the conditions for the world communist revolution had not yet fully matured.
Now, although you seem to recognise this latter point when you say that the Paris Commune was “the first attempt of the proletariat to bring about the revolution in an epoch in which conditions for this revolution were not quite mature”, the consequences of not having a clear and consistent view of the general historical period become explicit when you come to the national question.
In your view, national struggles have been a source of considerable progress, and the demand for national self-determination still has validity, if only for the workers of the more powerful capitalist countries in relation to the countries oppressed by their own imperialism. You then appear to argue that national struggles have lost their progressive character since the advent of “globalisation”. These statements demand a number of comments on our part.
Our position on the decadence of capitalism is not our own invention. Based on the fundamentals of the historical materialist method (in particular when Marx talks about “epochs of social revolution” in his Preface to the Critique of Political Economy), it was concretised for the majority of revolutionary marxists by the outbreak of the first world war, which showed that capitalism had already “globalised” itself to the point where it could no longer overcome its inner contradictions except through imperialist war and self-cannibalisation. This was the position of the Communist International at its founding congress, although the CI was not able to draw all the consequences for this as regards the national question: the theses of the second congress still saw a ‘revolutionary’ role of some kind for the bourgeoisie of the colonial regimes. But the left fractions of the CI were later on able to take this analysis to its conclusions, particularly following the disastrous results of the CI’s policies during the revolutionary wave of 1917-27. For the Italian left in the 1930s, for example, the experience of China in 1927 was decisive. It showed that all factions of the bourgeoisie, no matter how ‘anti-imperialist’ they claimed to be, were equally counter-revolutionary, equally compelled to massacre the proletariat when it struggled for its own interests, as in the Shanghai uprising of 1927. For the Italian left this experience proved that the theses on the national question from the second congress had to be rejected. Moreover, this was a confirmation of the correctness of Rosa Luxemburg’s views on the national question as against those of Lenin: for Luxemburg, it had already become clear during the first world war that all states were inevitably part of the world imperialist system. Supporting one nation against another always meant supporting one imperialist constellation against another, and all the national liberation wars of the 20s century have reinforced this view. What the Italian left made absolutely explicit was that this also applied to colonial bourgeoisies, to capitalist factions seeking to establish a new ‘independent’ state: they could only hope to attain their ends by subordinating themselves to the imperialist powers which had already divided up the planet. As you say in your platform, the 20th century has been one of incessant imperialist wars for the domination of the planet: for us, this is both the surest confirmation that capitalism is a senile and reactionary world order, and that all forms of ‘national’ struggle are entirely integrated into the global imperialist game.
Luxemburg also made a very rigorous critique of the slogan of ‘national self-determination’ even before the first world war, arguing that it was an illusion of bourgeois democracy in any capitalist state, it is not the ‘people’ or the ‘nation’ who are ‘self-determined’ but the capitalist class alone. Marx and Engels made no secret of the fact that when they called for national independence, it was to further and support the development of the capitalist mode of production in a period in which capitalism still had a progressive role to play. But even in the ascendant epoch the reality of capitalist class rule could not be abolished by any degree of formal ‘democracy’. In the decadent epoch, national liberation, national self-determination, national independence - these are all aspects of nationalist ideology which as you rightly say is “poison for the proletariat”.
The ICC decided, earlier this year, to change the 15th Congress of its French section into an Extraordinary International Conference.
The fundamental task of this conference was to face up to an organisational crisis the most serious in the history of the ICC that emerged suddenly right after its 14th International Congress in April 2001.
Our readers will have read in our press that an ex-militant, Jonas, has been excluded from the ICC for political unworthiness, consisting, amongst other things, of destroying the fabric of the organisation by circulating in a persistent and underhand way calumny and rumours about comrades of the organisation in order to cause disruptions in several sections of the ICC.
This individual regrouped around him, largely on the basis of these rumours, other militants who were mobilised into an all-out war on the organisation, attempting to unravel its centralised statutory principles of functioning, threatening the very existence of the ICC.
This clique directed by Jonas proclaimed itself a ‘fraction’, even though it had been totally incapable of putting forward the least programmatic divergence justifying such a title. The only ‘principle’ of these elements was destructive hate and an insatiable thirst for vengeance. Because they were put in a minority, and were themselves discredited by being incapable of developing the least political argumentation, their actions consisted of plotting against the central organ of the ICC through secret meetings, then systematically sabotaging the activity of the organisation through manoeuvres, provocations, campaigns of calumny, blackmail and the threat to spread their calumnies to the outside, as testified by the content of their infamous ‘internal bulletins’ which are now sent to certain groups and sympathisers of the communist left.
After a year of destructive behaviour trying to destabilise the organisation (as a member of the ‘fraction’ said explicitly in a secret meeting: ‘we must destabilise them’) and pushing militants to rebellion against the central organs of the ICC, the clique of Jonas carried out its last, most miserable act against the organisation. It refused to attend the International Conference unless the organisation recognised this ‘fraction’ in writing and withdrew the sanctions that it had taken in conformity with its statutes (notably the exclusion of Jonas). Faced with this situation, all the delegations of the ICC, even though ready to hear the appeal of these elements (to this effect, the delegations had formed an international commission of appeal on the eve of the Conference composed of militants of several ICC sections so that the four Parisian members of the ‘fraction’ could present their arguments) had no alternative but to recognise that these elements had put themselves outside the organisation. Faced with their refusal to defend themselves in front of the conference and to make an appeal in front of the commission, the ICC recognised their desertion and could no longer consider them as members of the organisation.
The Conference also condemned unanimously the loutish methods used by the Jonas clique to ‘kidnap’ at the airport two delegates of the Mexican section, members of the ‘fraction’, coming to the Conference to defend their positions (these delegates were complicit in their own ‘disappearance’). While the ICC had paid their airplane tickets so they could come to the Conference to defend the positions of the ‘fraction’, these two Mexican delegates were taken away by two Parisian members of the ‘fraction’ preventing them from attending the Conference. In reply to our protests and our demand to be reimbursed for the tickets if the Mexican delegates (who had received a mandate of their section) did not attend the Conference, one of the two Parisian members of the ‘fraction’ in their ‘welcoming committee’ (an ex-member of the central organ of the ICC) laughed in our face: ‘that’s your problem!’. What incredible cynicism! Faced with the hijacking of the funds of the organisation and the refusal to reimburse the ICC for the two tickets, typical of the gangster methods used by the Jonas clique, all the militants of the ICC expressed their deep indignation by adopting a resolution condemning this behaviour. These methods, which are quite comparable to those of the Chenier Tendency (who stole the material of the organisation in 1981), convinced those last comrades still hesitant about the parasitic and anti-proletarian nature of this pseudo-fraction.
The conference was therefore confronted with two necessities. The first and most pressing need was to continue to defend the ICC and its organisational principles in the most rigorous and intransigent way against the repeated attacks and provocations of this parasitic grouping. The second was to draw the profound lessons of these events: what weaknesses of the organisation allowed the parasitic grouping, instigated by Jonas, to appear and develop so rapidly and destructively? It is the second aspect that the present article proposes to develop. (For the first aspect our readers can refer to the article ‘A parasitic attack aimed at discrediting the ICC [4]’ published on our website).
The defence and construction of a revolutionary organisation is a permanent combat
According to bourgeois propaganda revolutionary organisations of the proletariat are doomed to failure since the communist principles that assure their cohesion proletarian solidarity and mutual confidence inevitably come into conflict with the naturally selfish, competitive motivations of the individuals that compose them. Revolutionary organisations, according to this vision, can only be mirror images of the corruption that reigns in the political parties of the bourgeoisie. The latter, not only incessantly propagates the ideology of ‘everyman for himself’ it also gives this theory a practical support through open repression, when necessary, and by fomenting disunity within revolutionary organisations by directly or indirectly encouraging the work of agents provocateurs, adventurers and parasites.
The exploited nature of the working class makes its revolutionary organisations extremely vulnerable to the destructive pressures of bourgeois society. The construction of revolutionary organisations has always required a permanent effort, a constant vigilance, a critical and self-critical attitude without which they run the risk of being destroyed and losing years of effort, thus setting back the revolutionary process.
The struggle of the Marxists in the First International for centralisation against the destructive intrigues of Bakunin in 1872, the struggle of Lenin and the Bolsheviks against the organisational opportunism and ‘landlord anarchism’ of the Mensheviks in 1903, the struggle of the communist left against the degenerating 3rd International in the twenties and thirties, have all prefigured the series of struggles that the ICC has waged since its inception for the internal application of centralised rules of functioning against the circle spirit and clannism, against individualism and petit-bourgeois democratism.
In the same spirit the ICC, contrary to other groups of the communist left who have also been shaken by splits, has always revealed its internal problems so that the revolutionary movement can draw the lessons and strengthen the whole of the proletarian political milieu. We are perfectly aware that groups and elements of the parasitic milieu will descend like vultures on this organisational crisis of the ICC to feed their malicious gossip about the supposed ‘Stalinist degeneration’ of our organisation. Nevertheless, the ICC must continue to draw the lessons of each crisis that it experiences in order to reinforce itself politically.
Given the difficulty of constructing revolutionary organisations, the idea that they are immunised against opportunist degeneration, whether at the programmatic or organisational level, and that they can develop peacefully and without clashes, is particularly dangerous.
It was precisely the development of such an illusion within the ICC, the idea that henceforth the organisation could construct itself without major political combats within it, that the International Conference stigmatised. Thus the ICC showed a certain naivete and a lack of vigilance faced with the persistence of the circle spirit. We had the illusion that this weakness, coming from the historic circumstances of the foundation of the ICC (marked by the weight of petit-bourgeois ‘68ism’ and its leftist and anarchist components) had been eradicated for ever thanks to its combat of 1993-95.
This illusion not only revealed an amnesia about the history of the Marxist movement, but also a loss of sight of the extremely difficult conditions facing the ICC in the present period of the social decomposition of capitalism.
In fact one of the factors which crystallised the recent crisis of the ICC was a discussion on confidence and solidarity within the organisation which, from the beginning, had been oriented by the majority of the members of the International Secretariat (the permanent commission of the central organ) with a different method to that used previously by the ICC in all its debates. From the opening of this discussion, these members of the International Secretariat began a real campaign aimed at discrediting minority comrades in order to put them ‘outside the ICC’ (according to the actual words of a member of the so-called fraction). They began to introduce a monolithic conception within the central organ, totally foreign to the principles of the ICC, even to the extent of opposing the publication in the internal bulletins of contributions of comrades having divergences with the policy of the majority of the International Secretariat. Faced with this serious deviation, that risked leading to the abandonment of the principles of functioning of the ICC and to an organisational degeneration, the central organ of the ICC took the decision, ratified at the 14th Congress of the ICC, to nominate an Investigation Commission charged with clarifying the disfunctioning within its International Secretariat.
Faced with the disavowal of the policy of the International Secretriat Jonas immediately announced his resignation presenting himself as a victim ‘of an enterprise of demolition of the organisation’. According to Jonas, if the International Secretariat (of which he was a member) was disavowed in this way by the central organ of the ICC, then this could only be the work of a ‘cop’. Just after his resignation, Jonas (who didn’t have the courage to come to the 14th Congress of the ICC to defend his positions) immediately pushed seven of the comrades closest to him to meet secretly to form a ‘fraction’. He said to a delegation of the IB: ‘Since we are no longer in charge, the ICC is lost’. The vision of Jonas (of being ‘in charge’) is not the ICC conception of the role of the central organs. This vision, that of bourgeois cliques, little bureaucrats, adventurers and Stalinists cannot tolerate the least divergence, and, bereft of arguments, uses the method of calumny to create disruption first within the organisation and now within the proletarian political milieu too.
Faced with manoeuvres of Jonas and his supporters, aiming to stifle any divergence in the name of ‘confidence’ toward the majority of the International Secretariat (i.e. calling on the ICC to have a blind, unprincipled faith in it) the debate on confidence and solidarity had to be reoriented by the central organ just after the 14th Congress of the ICC, using an historical and theoretical framework that the clique of Jonas continuously denigrated without - as the Extraordinary Conference noted - any political argumentation. This orientation allowed the Conference to begin to develop a serious and argumented debate, within which all the militants without exception could defend their position, expressing their doubts or disagreements in a constructive and fraternal spirit. Clarifying disagreements with the sole objective of reinforcing the organisation as a unified and thus centralised political body, replaced the goal of denigrating comrades who didn’t share one’s point of view.
The weight of democratic ideology
Among the other weaknesses in which Jonas and his clique found a prop, were not only the weight of the circle spirit but also the pressure of democratist ideology on the organisation. In the ICC, democratism was recently manifested through an opportunist tendency to put in question our principles of centralisation, especially through the idea that confidence can only develop within the organisation in inverse proportion to its centralisation. Once the ICC became conscious of the danger of liquidating our principles of centralisation under the weight of democratic ideology, the Jonas clan persisted in the defence of this revisionist version and took it to its pitiful, liquidationist, conclusion. Thus on the 31 January the so-called fraction addressed a declaration to all the militants of the ICC (published in the fraction’s internal bulletin) renouncing all loyalty to the ICC. In place of a centralised debate, clearly posing the divergences while respecting the statutes of the ICC, this clique demanded that the militants of the ICC take up its own litany of insults and calumnies against the central organs of the ICC and some of its members. In other words the clan of the friends of Jonas demanded a whole series of bourgeois rights: the right to spread the worst lies and calumnies against militants and against the central organs in the name of ‘freedom of expression’, the right to destabilise the organisation by plotting behind its back, the right to flout all the rules of functioning of the ICC, the right to only pay 30% of their dues, the right to desert meetings they should attend, the right to steal address lists of subscribers, the right to steal the notes of the central organs to falsify them, the right to steal money from the ICC and to sequest two delegates of the Mexican section to prevent them attending the Conference (out of fear that it would convince them). All this in the name of the ‘freedom of expression’; in fact the freedom to sabotage and destroy! The Conference clearly revealed that the manoeuvres of Jonas had destroyed militants by transforming them into a gang of impostors and forgers. These militants were naive enough to think that by baptising themselves a ‘fraction’, they would be able to mask their petit-bourgeois democratism and their destructive individualism against our principles of centralisation. In other words the clan of the friends of Jonas followed the slogan of the students of May 68: it took its desires for reality. And when the ICC defended itself, did not let itself be destroyed by their putschist methods, and applied the sanctions called for in the statutes, it was denounced in an hysterical way as a degenerate, Stalinist sect, manipulated by a ‘cop’ and ‘Torquemadas’ (according to Jonas’ own words!) This was the sordid motor force behind the formation of this pseudo-fraction. It was nothing other than the weapon of citizen Jonas against the proletarian political milieu: the most shameful and dangerous clan in the whole history of the ICC.
The analysis of this clan’s ideological and political roots was the task set by the Extraordinary Conference of the ICC. The debates at this conference were very rich and the manner of its conduct underlined that, contrary to the calumnies of the ‘fraction’ and the whole anti-ICC parasitic milieu, our organisation, far from stifling divergences, exhorted all the militants to assume their responsibility and express their disagreements. The political depth and passion which animated the debates of this Conference showed the determination of the ICC to mobilise itself for the defence of the organisation and its principles. Finally the ICC recognised the gravity of the stakes for the proletarian political milieu contained in the methods of the clique of Jonas (which is trying to infiltrate the IBRP in order to drag it into its policy of destroying the ICC).
Even though the ICC, throughout its history, has experienced several splits, it has been able to resist their negative effects. Despite numerical losses, the ICC has been able to maintain and politically reinforce an international centralised organisation, comprising sections in fourteen countries. Even though this crisis has been the most serious in the history of the ICC the manoeuvres of the Jonas clique failed to destroy our sections in the USA and Mexico (just as the Chenier Tendency, in the 1981 crisis, failed to destroy the section of the ICC in Britain). The ICC has been able to limit the damage and our numerical losses have been relatively minor in relation to the ambitions of the Jonas ‘fraction’. We have lost some militants but we have saved the organisation and its principles.
The Conference was deeply dismayed at the destructive and suicidal folly into which Jonas had dragged some ICC militants. Militants who were comrades of struggle for many years, in particular one who had always, up till then, shown the greatest loyalty toward the ICC, the greatest confidence toward the central organ and an exemplary determination in the different struggles for the defence and construction of the organisation. The ICC saved two comrades who had participated actively in the secret meetings of the ‘collective’ (which became the ‘fraction’). Becoming conscious of the particularly destructive and suicidal character of their trajectory, these two comrades reported in detail to the Investigation Commission how they were dragged into this sordid adventure. Two other militants that Jonas presented as ‘centrists’ and who had also participated in the secret meetings of the ‘collective’ preferred to resign rather than join the ‘fraction’ and follow the miserable course of this parasitic regroupment.
We are fully conscious that the ICC’s achievement is modest faced with the capitalist hostility that surrounds us. But that in no way diminishes the work of the defence of the organisation realised by the recent Extraordinary Conference which contained not only important lessons for the reinforcement of the ICC, but also for the development of a wider debate in the proletarian political milieu on the dangers which threaten revolutionary organisations. The whole of the milieu must be capable of resisting the destructive forces of bourgeois society, the opportunist temptation and the sirens of parasitism, today and in the period to come.
ICC.
19.04.02
Le Pen’s score in the first round of the presidential elections was an event of historic and international proportions. For the first time, the Front National is posing a threat to French ‘democracy’.
Under the slogan of ‘shame’, a huge anti-Le Pen campaign was unleashed not only throughout France, but internationally as well. Since the results were announced there have been enormous demonstrations, consisting especially of young people, school and college students, determined to ‘bar the way to fascism’. All the forces of the left - the Communist and Socialist parties, anti-racist groups, trade unions etc have been actively organising the protests: on May Day they brought a million people onto the streets. Meanwhile an even broader political spectrum has been calling on everyone to use their vote in the second round to vote for Chirac in order to keep out Le Pen. The slogan of the young demonstrators has been ‘vote for the crook, not the fascist’.
In a future issue of this paper we will look at some of the factors which led to this unexpected result. But even if Le Pen’s victory shows the difficulties the French bourgeoisie has in controlling its own electoral process, the ruling class has certainly succeeded in using this event to mount a new attack on working class consciousness. It has, in short, put all its energies into trying to convince us that democracy is our most precious gift, and that we have no choice but to mobilise massively to defend it.
All the factions of the bourgeoisie are trying to line up the workers behind the false alternative of democracy or fascism. They are trying to build a holy national union against Le Pen, and so prevent the working class from fighting for its own interests.
As soon as the result was announced, all the pundits were telling us that the FN owes its success in large part to the ‘abstentionists’. They are seeking to put the burden of ‘shame’ on the workers who have shown their disgust at the electoral process and the bourgeois parties who take part in it by staying away from the polling booths. These ‘bad citizens’ have put democracy in danger. The moral? We have to make up for this by going en masse to the polling booths in the second round, not to defend our interests as an exploited class, but to defend capitalist democracy, which is portrayed as a ‘lesser evil’ A very similar message, even if in a lower key, is being put across in Britain with reference to the local elections and the danger of the BNP (see ‘Capitalist democracy uses the fascist bugbear’, p.2).
But the cynicism of bourgeois propaganda doesn’t stop there. The ruling class and its media have also taken advantage of the rise of the FN in towns which have for years been dominated by the CP to unleash a campaign aimed at demoralising the workers, at making them feel guilty and at setting them against each other. Proof of this are the headlines of Le Monde on 25 April: “The workers who voted for Le Pen”, “The lost children of the working class”. By presenting the workers as ‘fachos’, reactionary xenophobes, bourgeois propaganda is trying to discredit the proletariat and sow the illusion that the future of society does not lie in the class struggle of the exploited against their exploiters but in the united front of the ‘people of Republican France’ against the fascist danger.
The working class must not be lured into this trap! It must reject the false alternative between fascism and democracy. It must never forget the lessons of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century: it was thanks to the mobilisation of tens of millions of workers behind the banners of anti-fascism in the 1930s that the parties of the left were able to dragoon the working class into the second imperialist world war. It was in the name of defending democracy against fascism that millions of workers laid down their lives for a cause which was not their own.
Today the historic situation is radically different. The working class has not suffered a massive defeat and is not ready to sacrifice itself for the national flag. But if the current threat is not that it will be drawn into another world war in the name of anti-fascism, there is still a considerable danger in the anti-fascist campaigns � the danger that these campaigns will serve to destroy its class identity and politically dissolve it into an inter-classist movement of ‘citizens’. And that could only prevent it from re-discovering its own revolutionary perspective: the destruction of the bourgeois state, whether ‘democratic’ or ‘totalitarian’.
Workers must never lose sight of the fact that democracy and fascism are two sides of the same coin, the two faces of the implacable dictatorship of capital. It is decadent capitalism which gave birth to fascism. It was the respectable democratic Weimar Republic which, thanks to the treason of social democracy, massacred the revolutionary workers after the first world war and paved the way for Nazism.
It is the same decaying capitalist system which is now creating the conditions for the rise of the FN and similar parties.
On the purely political level, it was Mitterand’s Socialist Party which quite deliberately provided the bases for the FN to develop as a party. It was the SP which originally brought in proportional representation and cynically used the danger of the FN to boost its own democratic credentials.
On a deeper level, however, it is the accelerating decomposition of this society which provides the nutrients for the growth of Le Pen and his kind: crime, mindless violence, terrorism, racism. It is the collapse of whole swathes of the capitalist peripheries under the blows of crisis and war that pushes millions of impoverished human beings to seek shelter in the central countries, creating a refugee problem which the system can only respond to with repression and xenophobic campaigns (which are by no means limited to the ‘fascist’ parties).
The only way out of the nightmare being produced by this dying order is the struggle of the world working class for the overthrow of capitalism and the construction of a new society, a society without exploitation, without national frontiers, without economic crisis and war. A true human community where people will no longer have any need to live in fear of neighbours or strangers. A society based not on the hunt for profit, but on the satisfaction of human needs. Only such a society can free humanity once and for all from all the scars of capitalist barbarism � of which the ideology of the far right is only one expression among many.
And it is certainly not in the polling booths that the working class can affirm its own perspective. Contrary to the excuses of counterfeit ‘revolutionaries’ like the Socialist Alliance or Lutte Ouvriere in France, the working class cannot give any expression to its needs and goals on the electoral terrain.
The only way to fight the extreme right and its national-capitalist programme is to develop the struggle against the capitalist system, against bourgeois democracy, against all the governments, whether of right or left. All of them have one programme to offer us: more exploitation, more unemployment, more barbarism.
Against all the lying campaigns of the bourgeoisie, the working class, which has no choice but to fight for its own interests and with its own methods, is not a reactionary class. On the contrary it is the only revolutionary class in this society, the only force that can take humanity out of the dead-end into which capitalism has led it. The historic alternative is not between fascism and democracy, but between the proletarian revolution and the destruction of the human species.
The democratic game is just a cover for the dictatorship of capital. This is why we do not call on workers to mobilise for Chirac or other crooks; nor do we encourage a purely apathetic attitude to elections. Our slogan is: Workers don’t vote, fight!
ICC.
4/5/02.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/correspondance-other-groups
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left-influenced
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/253_parasites.html
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-resolutions
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/france
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/20/parliamentary-sham
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/anti-fascismracism