In Britain 52,000 firefighters are pitched against a government determined to hand out a defeat that will be held up as an example to the rest of the working class. The stakes are plain: defeat for the firefighters will not only mean they won't have caught up on all the years their pay has lagged behind, but also draconian attacks on their working conditions in the name of modernisation and a 20% cut in the workforce. This struggle has important implications for the rest of the working class because the defeat of the firefighters will have a powerful impact on the whole working class's confidence in its ability to defend itself. This is all happening at a time when massive lay-offs and attacks in the manufacturing and financial sectors are spreading throughout the working class.
The Labour government has made no bones about its resolve to defeat the firefighters and portray them as enemies of the people. As Tony Blair insisted: "This is a strike they cannot succeed in. The consequence of succeeding is not a defeat for the Government. It would be a defeat for the country."
Blair and Co have also has unleashed a torrent of attacks on the firefighters. Ministers portray them abusing their shift system (which involves doing 4 day and night shifts together), because some have a second job in order to make ends meets. Firefighters are accused of being sexist and racist because there are only a few black and women firefighters. There is also a never ending comparison of the 'brave' soldiers 'gallantly' struggling to save lives, and the workers on the picketlines.
This open abuse of the firefighters and the government's determination to 'take them on' has been compared to Thatcher 'taking on' the miners in 1984/85. And indeed there are comparisons. As in 84, today the government has planned for a showdown with an important section of the working class. They want to inflict a crushing defeat on a group of workers who are respected and supported in the working class in order to deliver a message to the whole working class: struggle does not pay. As with the NUM, the Fire Brigades Union is presented as the enemy. Now, as in 84, there is a second prong to the attack: to boast the image of the unions as defenders of the working class. However, in 1984 the working class in Britain and internationally was in a period of rising class struggle, whereas today the working class is still trying to overcome a decade of disorientation and loss of confidence in itself as a class, something that the ruling class is seeking to reinforce. The less the self-confidence of the workers, the more they feel constrained to turn to the unions to defend them against the attacks they face.
The ruling class know that the deepening world recession is going to mean it will not be able to disguise its growing attacks behind the mask of a so-called economic boom. It sees that there is a growing discontent in the working class: council workers, teachers, college lecturers, health workers, and transport workers have all been involved in disputes at the same time as the fire strike. The government - and union - have prepared the ground to take on the firefighters by ensuring that these disputes have either been settled, like the health workers, or been worn down by a series of one-day strikes, like the teachers and council workers in London. In addition the tube workers' ballot around safety issues directly linked to the fire strike has been called off. This is intended to further isolate the firefighters and undermine class solidarity, again making the union appear to be the only defence workers have. Ideological division of labour
The government and 'rightwing' parts of the media have certainly demonised the FBU and Gilchrist, its leader. There have been warnings about a new 'winter of discontent' and comparisons between the FBU to the NUM - Blair describing Gilchrist as a 'Scargillite'. The Sun accused the FBU and other 'militant' unions of wanting to go back to the 70s. Such attacks reinforce their radical image. This campaign also promotes the myth that in the 70s and 80s the unions were militant and helped the working class hold the government over a barrel, when in reality it was the unions which held the workers in check for the ruling class.
On the other hand, the 'leftwing' of the media: the Mirror, Guardian and Independent pretend to support the firefighters, more or less critically. They give out the message that moderation and negotiation are the way forwards, but "Tony Blair doesn't want to listen. Doesn't want to negotiate. Doesn't want a settlement. He is after total victory. That is no way to treat any group of decent workers" (The Mirror, 26.11.02).
In their different ways all the forces of the ruling class are seeking to push the firefighters and the working class into the arms of the unions. FBU plays its part in the attack
As with the NUM in 84, for all its 'radical' image the FBU is playing its full part in this attack. It pushes the idea that the firefighters can win on their own if they are determined enough and if they can keep 'public support'. This illusion played an important part in the defeat of the miners' strike, in circumstances that were much more favourable than those faced by the firefighters today. No section of the working class can win on its own. 'Public opinion' is a trap. It is the solidarity of the working class that matters, which is not a question of financial help but of seeing that firefighters are part of the working class with the same interests and demands as other workers.
The FBU has also carefully manipulated its 'militant' image to isolate the firemen. For months Gilchrist has defended the need for a 40% rise, based on the premise that firefighters are professionals, separate from the rest of the class. This has made it appear that the FBU is determined to defend its members' interests. Once the strikes began the 40% demand disappeared into thin air, to be replaced by the acceptance of a 16% rise over 3 years (essentially the original 4% offered by the employers plus the next 2 years pay increases added on), this being largely financed by modernisation, that is to say attacks on conditions and jobs. The government rejection of this deal was not due to its determination to defeat the union, but in order to further strengthen the FBU's hold over the workers. The government's intransigence makes the union look militant and the strike seems to be about the defence the FBU.
The firefighters have been set up by the government and unions. What all workers need to understand is that the unions are as much the enemy of the working class as the government and media. This does not mean workers should not struggle, but that we have to learn the lessons of all our defeats in order to avoid them in the future.
Phil, 30/11/02.
In October the ICC held a public meeting in Moscow to present our pamphlet on the decadence of capitalism, recently published in the Russian language.
This meeting and the publication of the pamphlet in Russian are an expression of the emerging revolutionary milieu in Russia, which the ICC has written about extensively (see for example International Review 111).
The understanding that capitalism entered its phase of decline at the beginning of the 20th century was and is a crucial question for revolutionary marxists. It was this understanding that underpinned Rosa Luxemburg's Junius Pamphlet (1915) when she wrote:
"� ours is the necessity of Socialism. Our necessity receives its justification with the moment when the capitalist class ceases to be the bearer of historic progress, when it becomes a hindrance, a danger, to the future development of society. That capitalism has reached this stage the present world war has revealed."
(Rosa Luxemburg, Junius Pamphlet - The crisis in the German social democracy, February -April 1915, Merlin Press, p 130).
And she continues:
"This brutal triumphant procession of capitalism through the world, accompanied by all means of force, of robbery, and of infamy, has one bright phase: it has created the premises for its own final overthrow, it has established the capitalist world rule upon which, alone the socialist revolution can follow" (Ibid).
From this method Rosa Luxemburg makes an historical analysis of the national question:
"Imperialism is not the creation of any one or of any group of states. It is the product of a particular stage of ripeness in the world development of capital, an innately international condition, an indivisible whole � From this point of view only is it possible to understand correctly the question of 'national defence' in the present war" (Ibid).
This is the same method that was used by other revolutionary marxists at the time of the outbreak of the first imperialist war. The 3rd International also adopted this method in 1919, with its notion of an epoch of wars and revolutions.
It is this method that the ICC is carrying on in its pamphlet on the decadence of capitalism. The main aim of the presentation by the ICC at the public meeting in Moscow was to show how this concept of decadence is a cornerstone of communist positions of yesterday and today. Only from this point of view is it possible to understand the changing conditions which inevitably influence the positions of communists, on the national question, on the unions question, on the question of parliamentarism, on the general conditions of the workers' struggle, on the role of revolutionary minorities, etc.
But although the understanding of decadence is a cornerstone of marxist positions today, it is not shared by all the groups and elements of the proletarian political milieu today or in the past (Bordigist groups and councilist groups have both tended to reject the concept of decadence).
We are also seeing today a tendency within the proletarian political milieu to abandon the concept of decadence - recent statements by the IBRP are highly significant in this respect. It is no wonder that the same questioning appears in the Russian milieu. We have already taken up this question in the International Review 111 in answer to the MLP (Marxist Labour Party) and the International Communist Union.
Although these doubts about decadence were not expressed openly at the meeting, a number of questions posed and positions expressed, particularly on the national question and the question of war, revealed a lack of understanding of the concept of decadence; and if there is an understanding of decadence it is placed not at the beginning of 20th century, as Rosa Luxemburg (and the ICC) put it, but at the end of the 20th century with 'globalisation' or the introduction of the microprocessor.
One question posed after the introduction to the ICC was the difference between Lenin's concept of imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism and the concept of decadence. Our reply was that there were differences at the time between Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin and Bukharin, although all of them began from a proletarian point of view. Rosa Luxemburg was the clearest and showed the underlying link between the tendency to overproduction and the imperialist quest for new markets and fields of investment. Bukharin in his Imperialism and World Economy was able to show the development of state capitalism and its consequences. Both Rosa Luxemburg and Bukharin had the same basic method: to view capitalism as a totality and so to draw out its most global implications for the proletarian movement:
"Just as it is impossible to understand modern capitalism and its imperialist policy without analysing the tendencies of world capitalism, so the basic tendencies in the proletarian movement cannot be understood without analysing world capitalism" (Imperialism and world economy, N. Bukharin, Merlin Press, 1976, p 161).
Several of the participants at the meeting stated that they still supported the position of Lenin on the right to national self-determination. The ICC showed with the examples of China, Turkey and Finland how the mistaken policy of Lenin led to massacres of the proletariat, although is was Stalin who directed the policy in China and for very different reasons.
The example of Finland, which was one of the few countries to be 'liberated' by the October revolution, is interesting. Granting national independence to Finland only resulted in boosting democratic illusions within the Finnish workers' movement, and thus delayed the revolutionary preparation of the Finnish proletariat for the inevitable confrontation with the bourgeoisie. We should also note that as soon as it was let loose from the grip of the tsarist regime, the Finnish bourgeoisie rallied to German imperialism to get help to crush the coming proletarian revolution in Finland. The crushing of the revolution in Finland was extremely brutal and the next congress of the Communist International passed a resolution condemning the white terror of the bourgeoisie.
Another important question discussed was the position of the communist left on democracy. The ICC developed the left communist position against the united front, the imperialist nature of the second world war, the trap of democracy of Spain 1936, and in general the false alternative between fascism and anti-fascism. It is obvious that there are deep confusions in the milieu in Russia on this question, especially on the nature of the second world war, where the Stalinist myth of the Great Patriotic War still exerts an influence. There were some participants that defended the idea of a war of 'humanity against barbarism' or of a war to 'defend civilisation'. Against these illusions comrades from both the Group of Revolutionary Proletarians-Collectivists (GRPC) and the Revolutionary Anarcho-Syndicalists (RAS) group in Moscow, together with the ICC, strongly criticized this subtle defence of the 2nd world war and clearly declared it to be an imperialist war.
A more heated debate occurred in relation to the war in Chechnya. At the meeting there were participants who were involved in the work of giving humanitarian aid to the Chechnyan population. One argument was that it was a way to come closer to the Chechnyan workers, to 'create an audience'. There was much focus on 'what to do today, concretely'. On this there were several replies by comrades from the RAS and GRPC as well as the ICC. Although not against expressing human solidarity as such, these interventions criticised the illusion that this is a means for the revolutionary struggle. Firstly because capitalism will continue to create more and more misery and barbarism and no amount of humanitarian aid can counter-act that; and secondly because the only real help to the Chechnyan workers and population is the development of the struggle by the Russian workers against their own bourgeoisie, and ultimately the taking of power by workers in Russia and world wide to stop the imperialist slaughter. As Lenin said "turn the imperialist war into a civil war".
There is an illusion among many elements in this milieu, who want to take an internationalist position on the war, but who tend to weaken this by using humanitarian aid as a means to struggle, and so confuse the task of revolutionaries and dilute the internationalist position on the imperialist nature of the war in Chechnya. This is an expression of opportunism, a tendency to capitulate to the immediate fact, to seek immediate and false victories and solutions to problems that can only be solved on a world historic level.
The meeting in Moscow was a long and very animated meeting, showing the interest and militant attitude and concern among the emerging proletarian elements in Russia to better grasp the positions of the communist left. But this milieu is also very heterogeneous and dispersed, facing great difficulties both materially and ideologically, and confronted with the weight both of the Stalinist counter-revolution and the 'modern' period of decomposition. It is important that a framework is created for the systematic spreading and confrontation of positions within this milieu, to overcome the dispersion and weaknesses.
The tasks confronting this new milieu are of considerable importance. Its emergence is a confirmation of an international tendency towards the development of new revolutionary forces, but it is of particular significance that it is taking place in the 'motherland' of the world revolution.
Anders, 1/11/02.
In its number 463 (August-September 2002), the newspaper Le Proletaire, organ of the Parti Communiste International (PCI) [1] published an article entitled: 'In connection with the crisis in the ICC' which deserves a certain number of corrections. Initially, the article affirms that one of the members of the so-called 'Internal Fraction' ('IFICC') which had been constituted in the ICC [2] "is denounced ... as a probable 'agent provocateur'." Here is what we wrote in World Revolution 252 concerning the exclusion of Jonas (to which Le Proletaire refers implicitly):
"One of the most intolerable and repugnant aspects of his behaviour is the veritable campaign that he promoted and carried out against a member of the organisation, accusing them in the corridors and even in front of people external to the ICC of manipulating his followers and the central organs on behalf of the police force. Today, Jonas has become a keen enemy of the ICC and is behaving in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur. We don't know what his underlying motivations are, but what we are quite sure that he represents a danger for the proletarian political milieu."
It is clear that the behaviour of Citizen Jonas is more than disconcerting and all the militants of the ICC are convinced that his actions aim at destroying our organisation or at least at causing it as much damage as an agent provocateur could have done [3]. However, all readers will have been able to read that "We don't know what his underlying motivations are" and will be able to thus note that we have never said that Jonas is a "probable agent provocateur". Such a charge, even in the form of assumption, is extremely serious and even if the revolutionary organisations can be moved to bear it against one their former members, it can be only following a very thorough investigation. It is because of that, moreover, that our Extraordinary Conference, which took place last spring, elected a special Commission to continue investigations regarding Jonas. As for the PCI, we think that it would have done better to limit itself strictly to what we really wrote so far, rather than devoting itself to extrapolations which lead to a falsification of our claims.
In addition, the PCI says to us that: "It is obviously out of the question that, as we have been asked to do, we give an opinion for one or the other camp - whether for the dissidents in the name of democracy, or for the majority in the name of the 'defence of the organisations of the proletarian milieu'" This sentence calls for several remarks. Initially, as it is formulated, it makes you think (even if it is not said explicitly) that the ICC, like the 'IFICC' , has asked the PCI to take its side. Nothing is more false. The 'IFICC' actually demanded of the PCI, in a letter that it addressed to it at the same time as to other groups of the communist left, on 27 January 2002, to take a position in its favour against the ICC:
"Today we see only one solution: for us to address you so that you ask our organisation to open its eyes and to rediscover its sense of responsibility Because we are in disagreement, today the ICC has done everything it can to marginalise us and demolish us morally and politically." [4]. However, on 6 February 2002, we actually sent a letter to the PCI, as to other organisations of the communist left (IBRP [5], PCI Il Programma Comunista, PCI Il Partito) concerning the 'IFICC'. But contrary to what is alleged by 'the Fraction', our letter by no means asks the recipient groups to give an opinion for one camp against the other; its objective is to rectify a certain number of lies and calumnies against our organisation which were contained in the letter of the 'Fraction' of 27 January. That said, the principal remark that we should make about the PCI's assertion that "it is obviously out of the question" for it to give an opinion for one or the other camp, is that it is contradicted immediately afterwards. Indeed, one can read some lines further on:
"That however does not prevent us from raising the methods employed by the ICC in response to its current dissidents, which undoubtedly do not go back to yesterday and are unfortunately too well known: 'criminalising' opponents by defamatory charges in order to isolate them completely, to counter any possible doubt or any request for political explanation on behalf of the militants by the creation of a climate of a 'fortress under siege' which makes it possible to mobilise them 'in defence of the organisation' against opponents who end up being depicted as being in the service of the bourgeoisie. These processes of sinister memory were never employed either by Marx or by Lenin; they are in fact characteristic of organisations gangrened by opportunism and/or beset by serious contradictions between their analyses and reality. They would be deadly in a revolutionary party because they inevitably destroy the political homogeneity which constitutes its cement. Whatever might be believed, a system of militarist bureaucratism can only end up choking internal political life. This tends to prevent one from facing and solving the political problems that cannot help but be posed to revolutionary militants, and transforms them into simple parrots. The political questioning that is driven back, however, inevitably continues to act underground and finishes up sooner or later reappearing with all the more virulence, in the form of destructive organisational crises."
In fact, the PCI, which claims to have read "the material published by the two sides", espouses almost to the letter the libellous theses spread by the 'IFICC' and thus clearly takes position in favour of the latter against the ICC.
The internal regime of communist organisations
We should salute the fact that today the PCI affirms that "a system of militarist bureaucratism can only end up choking internal political life, this tends to prevent one from facing and solving the political problems that cannot help but be posed to revolutionary militants, and transforms them into simple parrots"
This is an idea that our current has never tired of repeating in answer to the conceptions of the PCI. In 1947, our comrades of the Gauche Communiste de France (Communist Left of France - political ancestor of the ICC) had the following to say about the organisational ideas of the PCI:
"On this common basis [the criteria of class and the revolutionary programme] tending towards the same goal, many divergences always emerge along the road. These divergences always express either the absence of all the elements for an answer, or the real difficulties of the struggle, or the immaturity of thought. They can neither be conjured away nor prohibited, but on the contrary must be resolved by the experience of the struggle itself and by the free confrontation of ideas. The regime of the organisation, therefore, consists not in stifling divergences but in creating the conditions for their solution. That is to say, to promote, to bring them into the light of day, instead of allowing them to develop clandestinely. Nothing poisons the atmosphere of an organisation more than when divergences remain hidden. Not only does the organisation thereby deprive itself of any possibility of resolving them, but it slowly undermines its very foundations. At the first difficulty, at the first serious reverse, the edifice that one believed was as solid as a rock cracks and collapses, leaving behind a pile of stones. What was only a tempest is transformed into a decisive catastrophe" (Internationalisme 25, 'Discipline our principal strength', republished in International Review 34).
At the beginning of 1983, we used the same language in response to the crisis which the PCI had just undergone:
"Where then is this famous 'monolithic bloc' of a party? This party without faults? This 'monolithism', asserted by the ICP [PCI], has only ever been a Stalinist invention. There never were 'monolithic' organisations in the history of the workers' movement. Constant discussion and organised political confrontation within a collective and unitary framework is the condition for the true solidarity, homogeneity and centralisation of a proletarian political organisation. By stifling any debate, by hiding divergences behind the word of 'discipline', the ICP has only compressed the contradictions until an explosion was reached. Worse, by preventing clarifications both outside as inside the organisation, it has numbed the vigilance of its militants. The Bordigist sanctification of hierarchical truth and the power of leaders has left the militants bereft of theoretical and organisational weapons in the face of the splits and resignations. The ICP seems to recognise this when it writes:
'We intend to deal [with these questions] in a more developed way in our press, by placing the problems which are being posed to the activity of the party before our readers'" ('The International Communist Party (Communist Programme) at a turning point in its history', International Review No. 32).
When we defended these ideas, the PCI did not have enough scornful words to stigmatise our 'democratism' [6] but by comparing what we wrote 50 years and 20 years ago with what the PCI says to us now, one can only be struck by the similarity of the ideas. In fact, it is almost a carbon copy. One can at least deduce one thing from this: the comrades of the PCI, in spite of their great speeches on 'invariance', were able to hear our arguments. We will not ask them for any royalties. However, we think that, more than our own arguments, it is the lasting reality of the facts, and particularly the dramatic collapse of the PCI in 1982, which is the decisive element that has allowed a handful of militants reclaiming the positions of Bordiga to understand the nonsense of certain 'invariant' dogmas about the alleged 'monolithism' of the party [7].
However, we maintain today what we say 20 or 50 years ago and we categorically reject the charges of the PCI concerning our alleged "methods in response to our current dissidents". Today, like yesterday, we consider that the political dissensions which emerge in the organisation must be regulated by wide-ranging centralised debate and not by administrative or 'bureaucratic' measures. Just like 20 years ago, we make and apply the following rules in the face of the divergences which can emerge in our organisation:
"- having regular meetings of the local sections, and putting on the agenda of these meetings the main questions being discussed in the organisation: in no way must this debate be stifled; - the widest possible circulation of various contributions within the organisation through the appropriate instruments [the internal bulletins]; - rejection of any disciplinary or administrative measure on the part of the organisation with regard to members who raise disagreements" ('Report on the Structure and Functioning of the Revolutionary Organisation', adopted by the Extraordinary International Conference of January 1982, published in International Review No. 33).
However, like 20 years ago, we consider respect for the following rules to be indispensable: "- rejection of secret and bilateral correspondence which, far from allowing debate to be more clear, can only obscure it by giving rise to misunderstandings, distrust and the tendency towards the constitution of an organisation within the organisation; - respect by the minority of the indispensable organisational discipline.
While the organisation must prohibit the use of any administrative or disciplinary means in the face of disagreements, that doesn't mean that it cannot use these means in any circumstances. On the contrary, it is indispensable that it resorts to measures such as temporary suspension or definitive exclusion, when it is confronted with attitudes, behaviours or actions which constitute a danger to the existence of the organisation, to its security and its capacity to carry out its tasks.
Moreover, it is important that the organisation takes all the measures necessary to protect itself from attempts at infiltration or destruction by agents of the capitalist state, or by elements who, without being directly manipulated by these organs, behave in a way likely to facilitate their work. When such behaviour comes to light, it is the duty of the organisation to take measures not only in defence of its own security, but also in defence of the security of other communist organisations." (ibid.).
The exclusion of Jonas and the sanctions against members of the 'Fraction'
It is thus in strict application of these principles, and not to "criminalise opponents by defamatory charges in order to isolate them completely" that the ICC decided in early 2002 to exclude the element Jonas and to publish a communiqué in the press about it. We acted in exactly the same way in 1981 with regard to the individual Chenier, who had entered our organisation a few years before. Only a few months after being expelled, Chenier began an official career in a trade union and the Socialist Party (i.e. in the party that was running the government at this time), for whom he had probably been working secretly for a long time. It is clear that the communiqué that we published in our press about this person from then on prevented him from continuing the destructive work he had been doing for several years in the ICC and other organisations he had passed through, notably the PCI. If the latter had taken the trouble to make public its own decision to expel Chenier and the reasons for doing so (which we only learned about from a militant of the PCI after Chenier had been expelled from the ICC), it is obvious that we would never have allowed such an element to enter into our organisation. It was precisely for this reason that we put our readers on their guard against Jonas, who "represents a danger for the proletarian political milieu" just like Chenier had done, even if his motivations may have been different.
Similarly, the disciplinary measures we took towards other members of the 'IFICC' had nothing to do with a will to stifle debate. The opposite is the case: it was because these militants had since the beginning of the debate refused to engage in the discussion (because they knew they did not have serious arguments that could have convinced the militants of the ICC) that they systematically violated the statutes of the organisation. The disciplinary measures that the ICC could not help but impose served as a pretext to create scandals and loud claims that "The ICC is doing everything it can to marginalise us and demolish us morally and politically".
The PCI should say whether it is an example of 'militarist bureaucratism' to take disciplinary measures when militants, among many other infractions: - refuse to be present at meetings in which they have a responsibility to participate; - violate decisions adopted unanimously by the organisation (including by themselves); - organise secret correspondence and meetings with the aim, explicitly recognised among themselves, of plotting against the organisation and waging campaigns of slander against certain of its militants; - refuse to pay their dues in full; - steal the list of our subscribers' addresses, the notes of meetings of the central organs (in order to use them in a fraudulent way), as well as the money of the organisation.
It was not because a 'liquidationist leadership' (to use the terms of the IFICC) has created "a climate of a 'fortress under siege' which makes it possible to mobilise the militants 'in defence of the organisation' against opponents", as the PCI puts it, that our Extraordinary Conference unanimously ratified the sanctions against Jonas and the other members of the so-called 'Fraction'. It was quite simply because ALL the militants of the ICC, apart from the members of this 'Fraction' had been convinced of the necessity for such sanctions faced with an accumulation of evidence of deliberately destructive activity by these elements. The militants of the ICC are neither parrots nor zombies. If some amongst us have decided to trample on the principles which they had hitherto defended by blindly following a particular individual (for reasons of affinity, wounded pride, attempts to settle personal scores, or because of a loss of conviction), all the others rejected such behaviour and were able to make up their minds about this without anyone forcing their hand.
In the second part of this article, which will appear in the next issue of WR, we will see that the PCI has let itself be dragged by the 'IFICC' into also throwing out ant-ICC slanders.
ICC.
Notes
1. This is the PCI which also publishes Il Comunista in Italy, not to be confused with the PCI which publishes Il Programma Comunista and Cahiers Internationalistes in France, nor with the PCI which publishes Il Partito Comunista and La Gauche Communiste. Each of these three PCIs claims to be the true one, representing the current of the communist left of Italy animated by Amadeo Bordiga after the Second World War.
2. See on this subject our articles 'The International Extraordinary Conference of the ICC', 'Public Meetings on the Defence of the Revolutionary Organisation' and '"Internal Fraction" of the ICC: Serving the Bourgeoisie Admirably' in WR 254, 255 and 258 respectively, as well as 'The Fight for Organisational Principles' in International Review No. 110.
3. See on this subject our article 'Revolutionary Organisations Struggle against Provocation and Slander' in WR 252.
4. In spite of this letter, the IFICC has the gall to write in its Bulletin No. 13: "we want to affirm that, on our part, we never asked anybody to take sides between the ICC and Fraction". It is indeed a new shameless lie of the 'IFICC' in the tradition of this regroupment which seems to have endorsed the motto of Goebbels, head of Nazi propaganda: "a lie a thousand times repeated becomes a truth".
5. The IBRP (International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party): a group laying claim to the Italian communist left, consisting of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in Italy and the Communist Workers' Organisation in Britain.
6. It should be noted that these attacks were primarily carried our in a verbal way by the militants of the PCI and that one finds very few examples of it in its publications. Indeed, at that time, whereas the PCI represented the most significant organisation laying claim to the communist left on an international scale and while it affected a transcendental disdain with regard to the ICC, its press did not condescend to polemicise with ours, unless in an exceptional way. This is not the case any more today, which obviously we salute, except when this polemic is based on unfounded rumours and not on realities.
7. Nevertheless, the comrades of the PCI always seem to themselves assert this 'monolithism', resulting in the exclusion of 'dissidents'. Evidence of this can be found in the article that Le Proletaire published recently, 'In memory of Suzanne Voute': "Marginalised in the Party, Suzanne consequently ceased her participation in the press and the central bodies. Increasingly reticent in the activity which was undertaken, she fell into open opposition at the end of the sixties, when the first signs of a new political crisis started to appear, accusing the Party of having fallen into activism and the leadership of having become the agent of opportunist influences. The divergences were such that they pushed Suzanne and the comrades who followed her to constitute a kind of fractional group inside the Party. The impossibility of joint work and the wish on her part and by the militants who shared her views not to leave the organisation in spite of the political rupture led to the decision to exclude them in 1981." (Le Proletaire 461, March-April 2002). We want to raise the point here that, even according the statements Le Proletaire, the exclusion of Suzanne Voute was based on the fact that she expressed dissensions with the view of the PCI at that time and not on her behaviour within the organisation. Le Proletaire could, however, tell us whether Suzanne, for example, said in the corridors or outside the organisation that such and such a PCI militant was a 'cop', etc. As for the ICC, the only exclusions which it has pronounced have followed the description of "behaviour unworthy of a communist militant" (Chenier in 1981, Simon in 1995, Jonas at the beginning of 2002). Concerning the exclusion of Jonas, that we pronounced only recently (since, as opposed to what they say, the other members of the 'Fraction' were not excluded), the criterion selected had nothing to do with 'political divergences' which they never expressed in any case, but on the fact, as stated above, that he was "behaving in a manner worthy of an agent provocateur".
We are publishing below some extracts from a letter to our publication Révolution Internationale in France. The writer of the letter is very preoccupied with the question of the emancipation of women. It is followed by our response.
"(...) In the country of the 'Rights of Man', as perhaps in certain other states, all of social organisation centres around the man (...) The spaces for women, feminine style clubs or women's assemblies of yesteryear or of the time of Rosa Luxemburg have been suppressed (...) Under the pretext of a generalised mixture, women have been put out to pasture because when they change towns or countries and when they don't have work, the spaces for women which would allow them to regain confidence in themselves are practically non-existent. A good number of women have had to 'accommodate themselves' to this fact as well as they can and have ended up by hiding their condition (...) One could say that the woman remains the proletarian of the man even if the bourgeois institution of marriage has gone out of fashion. One escapes the conjugal duty which is synonymous with conjugal prostitution for a dissolution where the communion between beings can no longer exist as long as inequalities of all kinds have not been abolished and therefore as long as human relations are relations of possession and slavery. To rid ourselves of this it is necessary perhaps (...) for women to again find the space for women; without that we will never reach a true communism. Does capitalism have a masculine origin? I don't think so, but some have had every interest in exploiting the desire for domination of one sex over another in order to maintain themselves in power."
Our Response
Our reader raises a question which has preoccupied the workers' movement since its origins; but it can only be understood as a problem of humanity, and not as a particular question. In the Paris Manuscripts of 1844, Marx posed the question like this: "The immediate relation of man to man is the relation of the man to the woman (...) It allows a judgement on the whole degree of human development. From the character of this relationship, one can conclude up to what point man has become for himself a species being, human and conscious of his destiny." This vision was taken up and developed in the whole evolution of marxist thought and through revolutionaries in the 19th century who took an interest in the question of the oppression of women in capitalist society (Bebel, Engels, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollontai and Lenin).
Close to two centuries after marxists had posed this question of the oppression of women, it still remains topical. Witness its particular barbarous forms in the Islamic states, inflicting on women the obligation to wear a veil (even forbidding women to work or get an education) or in numerous countries where they are the victims of the worst sexual mutilations. And the intervention of the great western democracies will certainly not resolve this problem, as we were supposed to think from the outburst of bourgeois propaganda at the time of the fall of the Taliban and the 'liberation' of Kabul by the civilised world. In these same countries of the 'civilised' West, with the proliferation of networks of prostitution, a growing number of young girls hardly out of infancy (often of African origin or from the countries of the old eastern bloc) are forced, due to the lack of work, to sell their bodies in order to survive and escape poverty. Although today, with the development of capitalism, women have been integrated into production, although they have acquired the right to participate in the management of public affairs (and even take the reins of government), the oppression of women still remains a reality. But this reality doesn't find its source in the 'natural' and 'biological' domination of one sex over the other.
Only marxism with its scientific, historical materialist and dialectical method can explain the origin of this oppression; and above all it alone provides a way of resolving this problem.
As Marx and Engels showed, the institutions and foundations of bourgeois order have a history. They emerged through a long and tortuous process linked to the evolution of human society. They found their sources in the basic economics of the social relations of production and in the appearance of private property. In the framework of this response we can't lay out all the arguments developed by marxism in the 19th century. We refer our readers to Engels' book The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State which analyses very thoroughly this historical evolution, as well as two articles from our series on communism, in International Review 81 and 85.
Although our reader raises what has been a fundamental question for the workers' movement, the approach she takes in order to respond to it, is, with a certain naivety, identical to that of the 'feminist' movement which flourished at the end of the 60s, notably in the United States. According to feminist ideology, the oppression of women in bourgeois society (as in all class societies) finds its origins in the "desire for domination of one sex over the other". This is not only false but dangerous. Such a vision leads her to put forward a totally erroneous response: women must claim "spaces for women, without which we will never reach a true communism". For marxism, the history of humanity is the history of the class struggle and not the struggle of the sexes. Contrary to the feminist vision (which is nothing other than a variant of leftism, not unlike anti-racism) marxism has always fought all the divisions that the bourgeoisie is permanently trying to impose on the only class capable of building a real communist society on a world scale: the proletariat. Because what constitutes the strength of the working class, and will determine its capacity to overthrow bourgeois order, is first and foremost its capacity to defend its class unity and fight the divisions (racial, national, sexual) that the bourgeoisie tries to introduce into its ranks.
In other respects, our reader correctly recalls the existence of assemblies and clubs at the time of Rosa Luxemburg. First of all we should specify that it's not a question of inter-classist associations indiscriminately regrouping the worker and the wife of the boss, but organisations of 'socialist women' (1). But what was still valid at the end of the 19th century, in the ascendant period of capitalism, is no longer so today. At a time when capitalism could still accord significant reforms to the exploited class, it was legitimate for revolutionaries to put forward immediate demands for women, including the right to vote, while warning against any inter-classist illusions (2). It is in this context that the social democratic parties had to support the specific claims of women, inasmuch as they did not immediately liberate them from capitalist oppression but strengthened the proletariat by integrating women workers into the general struggle against exploitation and for the overthrow of capitalism.
So, even in this epoch where the demands of women had a meaning from the point of view of the proletarian struggle, and contributed to the strengthening of the workers' movement, marxists were always opposed to bourgeois feminism. Far from contributing to the unification of the working class, it could only sharpen divisions within it while favouring inter-classist ideology and leading it off its class terrain.
With the entry of capitalism into its period of decadence all struggles for reform were rendered obsolete and a specifically women's movement could only be recuperated by the dominant class and play into the hands of the bourgeois state.
In the final analysis, the "spaces for women" wished for by our reader risk being a new ghetto isolating those workers from the rest of the proletariat, just like 'immigrant movements' tend to cut off immigrant workers from the general combat of their class. Marxism alone provides a response to the problem of the oppression of women
Our reader also affirms that in capitalist society "the woman remains the proletarian of the man even if the bourgeois institution of marriage has gone out of fashion". This affirmation contains a correct idea that Marx and Engels had put forward as early as 1846 in The German Ideology: "The first division of labour is that of the man and woman for procreation". Subsequently, Engels added that "the first class opposition which manifests itself in history coincides [our emphasis] with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in the conjugal relation, and the first class oppression with the oppression of the feminine sex by the masculine sex".
And it is precisely from the fact of this historic coincidence that he tried to understand the link between the antagonism of the sexes in the monogamous marriage and the appearance of a society divided into classes. The discovery of private property constituted the key to the whole marxist vision, which is the sole method that allows an understanding of the material and economic roots of the oppression of women. In his study on the origins of the family, Engels writes: "The modern conjugal family is based on the domestic slavery, acknowledged or hidden, of the woman, and modern society is a mass which is composed exclusively of conjugal families, like so many molecules. In our days, the man in the great majority of cases must be the supporter of the family and must feed it, at least in the possessing classes; and that gives him a sovereign authority that no juridical privilege needs to support. In the family, the man is the bourgeois; the woman plays the role of the proletariat."
But this formulation of Engels, that our reader takes up (and that feminist ideology deprives of its context in order to exploit and distort it) has nothing to do with a 'sexist' approach. What Engels is trying to show is that, essentially with the appearance of private property, the individual, monogamous family became the prime economic entity of society; in other words, the sexual division of labour contained the germ of the future antagonisms between the classes. Thus Marx could affirm that the patriarchal family came out of the "great historical defeat of the feminine sex"; the overthrow of maternal right "contained in miniature all the antagonisms which, subsequently, developed throughout society and its state".
Marx and Engels thus clearly demonstrated that the oppression of the feminine sex made its appearance in the history of humanity with the rise of monogamy (and its corollaries, adultery and prostitution). This constituted the prime form of family based not on natural conditions, but on economic conditions, that's to say the victory of private property over primitive and spontaneous common property: "Sovereignty of the man in the family and the procreation of children which can only be his and who were destined to inherit his fortune, such was frankly proclaimed by the Greeks as the exclusive objective of conjugal marriage (...) Monogamy is born from the concentration of important riches in one hand - the hand of a man, and from the desire to bequeath these riches to the children of this man and no other. For that, the monogamy of the woman is necessary, not that of the man" (Engels). Thus, contrary to the approach of our reader and of feminist ideology, marxism shows that the inequality of the sexes that we have inherited from previous social conditions is not the cause, but the consequence of the economic oppression of the woman; this oppression emerged with the appearance of private property. This came first of all within archaic societies which, through the accumulation of riches and the development of the means of production, subsequently gave way to a society divided into classes. If woman thus became "the proletarian of the man", it's not because of the will power of the masculine sex, but because, with the patriarchal family (which appeared as a historical necessity allowing humanity to pass from the savage state to 'civilisation'), and more so with the individual, monogamous family, the control of the household lost the public character that it had in the old domestic economy of primitive communism. Whereas in these archaic societies the domestic economy was a "public industry of social necessity" entrusted to women (in the same way that procuring basic necessities was left to men), in the monogamous, patriarchal family it became an "individual service". From here on, the woman was removed from social production and became an "early servant" (Engels). And it was only with the appearance of large-scale industry in capitalist society that the door to production could again be open to the woman. It's for this reason that marxism has always proposed that the condition for the emancipation of woman is to be found in her integration into social production as a proletarian. It is in her place within the relations of production, and in her active participation, as a proletarian, in the united struggle of the whole of the exploited class, that the key to the problem is to be found. It is solely by posing the question in terms of classes and from a class point of view that the proletariat can provide an answer.
By overthrowing capitalism and constructing a truly world communist society, the proletariat will have, amongst other things, to re-establish the socialisation of domestic life by developing it on a universal scale (notably through the taking charge of the education of children by the whole of society and not through the family cell conceived as the prime economic entity). Only the world proletariat, by breaking the shackles of the means of production as private property, will be able to initiate a gigantic leap in the productive forces, definitively put an end to scarcity, and take humanity from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom. Thanks to the building of a new society based on abundance, the proletariat will thus achieve its historic mission as the gravedigger of capitalism by finally realising the old dream of humanity that primitive communism was not capable of achieving.
Contrary to the erroneous vision of our reader, the emancipation of women will not be the work of the struggle of women, with their specific claims, but of the whole working class. Forced to sell its labour or prostitute itself in order to survive (and in decadent capitalism prostitution is not moreover only the 'prerogative' of women), the proletarian, man or woman is, in a system based on the search for profit, nothing other than a commodity.
The oppression of women is an integral part of the exploitation and oppression of a social class deprived of all means of production; it will be ended by the revolutionary action of this class, which can only liberate itself by liberating the whole of humanity from the yoke of capitalist exploitation.
Louise
(1) We should also point out that, contrary to her friend Clara Zetkin who was the president of the socialist women's movement and editor-in-chief of the socialist women's newspaper Die Gleichheit (Equality), Rosa Luxemburg was never herself involved in this activity. All her energy was devoted to the combat for revolutionary marxism against reformism. As to Clara Zetkin herself, her name in history, much more than her 'feminist' activity, remains attached to her combat, notably at the side of Rosa, Karl Liebknecht and Leo Jogisches, against the imperialist war of 1914 and for the foundation of the Communist Party in Germany.
(2) In this same epoch, certain countries were the theatre of bourgeois campaigns for the right of women to vote. In Britain, the country most affected by this movement, this demand was supported from the beginning by the bourgeois philosopher John Stuart Mill and the Conservative Prime Minister, Disraeli. The wife of Churchill was an also an old suffragette: that tells you that there was nothing specifically proletarian about this demand!
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/britain
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/class-struggle
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/russia-caucasus-central-asia
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left-influenced
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/bordigism
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/parasitism
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/internal-fraction-icc
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/33/alienation
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism