The bourgeoisie recently celebrated the end of the First World War. Obviously, there have been many emotional declarations about the terrible tragedy of this war. But in all these commemorations, in the declarations of the politicians and in the newspapers and on the TV, the events which actually led the governments to put an end to the war are never mentioned. Reference is made to the military defeat of the central empires, Germany and its Austrian ally, but the decisive element which led the latter to ask for an armistice is carefully avoided: the revolutionary movement which developed in Germany at the end of-1918. Neither has there been any question of identifying the real responsibilities for this butchery - and this is quite understandable. Of course, the "specialists" have pored over the archives of the different governments to conclude that it was Germany and Austria who pushed hardest for war. The historians have also shown that the war aims of the Entente were quite specific. However, in none of their "analyses" is the real cause of the war pointed out: the capitalist system itself. And this is again perfectly understandable: only marxism can explain why it wasn't the "will" or the "rapacity" of this or that government which lay at the root of the war, but the very laws of capitalism. For our part, the anniversary of the end of the First World War is an occasion to return to the analyses made by revolutionaries at the time, and to the struggle they waged against the war. We will base ourselves in particular on the writings and attitude of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, for we are also commemorating the 80th anniversary of their murder by the bourgeoisie. This is the best homage we can give to these two magnificent fighters for the world proletariat[1] at a time when the bourgeoisie is seeking in all sorts of ways to kill their memory.
The war which broke out in Europe in August 1914 had been preceded by numerous other wars on this continent. We can recall, for example (if we limit ourselves to the 19th century) the Napoleonic wars and the war between Prussia and Prance in 1870. However there are fundamental differences between the conflict of 1914 and all the previous ones. The most obvious one was the carnage and barbarity it inflicted on the continent of "civilisation", Today, after the much greater barbarity of the Second World War, what happened in World War I appears almost modest. But in the Europe of the turn of the century, when the last military conflict of any importance had been in 1870, and when there was still a glow from the last embers of the "belle époque", the epoch of the zenith of the capitalist mode of production which had allowed the working class to make significant improvements in its living conditions, the brutal plunge into mass slaughter, into the daily horror of the trenches and a poverty not seen for half a century, was seen as an incomparable summit of barbarism, especially by the exploited. On both sides, among the main belligerents, Germany and France, the soldiers and the population had heard from their forebears about the war of 1870 and its cruelty. But what they were going through had little in common with that episode. The conflict of 1870 had only lasted a few months, and had involved a far smaller number of victims (some hundred thousand); neither did it result in the ruin of either victor or vanquished. With the First World War, the numbers of the dead, mutilated and wounded had to be counted in millions[2]. The daily hell suffered at the front and at the rear lasted more than 4 years. At the front, this horror took the form of an underground existence, of living in mud and filth, with the stench of corpses, in permanent fear from shells and machine gun fire, and of the spectacle that awaited the survivors: mutilated corpses, the wounded lying for days in shell craters. At the rear, the majority faced backbreaking labour to supply the troops and produce ever more weapons; they faced price rises which slashed their wages two or five times, interminable queues in front of empty shops; hunger; the permanent anguish of learning of the death of a husband, a brother, a father or a son; the pain and despair, the broken lives, when the terrible news arrived, as it did millions of times.
The other clear and unprecedented feature of this war, and which explains its massive barbarism, is that it was a total war. The whole power of industry, the entire workforce was subjugated to a single goal: the production of armaments. All males from the end of adolescence to the beginning of old age were mobilised. It was also total from the point of view of the damage it did to the economy. The countries which had been the actual fields of battle were destroyed; the economies of the European countries were ruined by the war; it was the end of their centuries-old power and the beginning of their decline to the benefit of the USA. It was total, finally, because it was not restricted to the original belligerents: practically all the European countries were dragged in and it swept over other continents, with war fronts in the Middle East, with the mobilisation of the colonial troops and with the entry into the war on the Allied side of Japan. the USA, and several countries of Latin America.
In fact, the scale of the barbarism and the destruction that it provoked itself shows the 1914-18 war was a tragic illustration of what marxists had foreseen: the entrance of the capitalist mode of production into its period of decline. of decadence. It strikingly confirmed the alternative predicted Marx and Engels in the previous century: socialism or a collapse into barbarism.
But it is also the task of marxism and marxists to give a theoretical explanation of this new phase in the life of capitalist society.
The fundamental causes of the World War
The aim of the book that Lenin wrote in 1916, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism was to identify the fundamental causes of the war; but it fell to Rosa Luxemburg, in her book The Accumulation of Capital, written in 1912, two years before the world war broke out, to make the most profound analysis of the conditions that were about to hit capitalism in this new period of its existence.
"Imperialism is the political expression of the accumulation of capital in its competitive struggle for what remains still open of the non-capitalist environment ... With the high development of the capitalist countries and their increasingly severe competition in acquiring non-capitalist areas, imperialism grows in lawlessness and violence, both in aggression against the non-capitalist world and in ever more serious 'conflicts among the competing capitalist countries. But the more violently, ruthlessly and thoroughly imperialism brings about the decline of non-capitalist civilisations, the more rapidly it cuts the very ground from under the feet of capitalist accumulation. Though imperialism is the historical method for prolonging the career of capitalism, it is also a sure means of bringing it to a swift conclusion. This is not to say that capitalist development must be actually driven to this extreme: the mere tendency towards imperialism of itself takes forms which make the final phase of capitalism a period of catastrophe" (ibid, 'Protective Tariffs and Accumulation', p 446).
"The more ruthlessly capital sets about the destruction of non-capitalist strata at home and in the outside world, the more it lowers the standard of living for the workers as a whole, the greater also is the change in the day to day history of capital. It becomes a string of political and social disasters and convulsions, and under these conditions, punctuated by periodical economic catastrophes or crises, accumulation can go on no longer.
But even before this natural economic impasse of capital 's own creating is properly reached it becomes a necessity for the international working class to revolt against the rule of capital.
Capitalism is the first mode of economy with the weapon of propaganda, a mode which tends to engulf the entire globe and to stamp out all other economies, tolerating no rival at its side. Yet at the same time it is also the first mode of economy which is unable to exist by itself, which needs other economic systems as a medium and soil. Although it strives to become universal, and, indeed, on account of this tendency, it must break down - because it is immanently incapable of becoming a universal form of production. In its living history it is a contradiction in itself, and its movement of accumulation provides a solution to the conflict and aggravates it at the same time. At a certain stage of development there will be no other way out than the application of socialist principles. The aim of socialism is not accumulation hut the satisfaction of toiling humanity's wants by developing the productive forces of the entire globe. And so we find that socialism is by its very nature an harmonious and universal system of economy" (ibid, 'Militarism as a province of accumulation', p 467).
After the outbreak of the war, in the Anticritique, written in 1915 in response to the criticisms her book had provoked, Luxemburg updated her analysis:
"What distinguishes imperialism as the last struggle for capitalist world domination is not simply the remarkable energy and universality of expansion but - and this is the specific sign that the circle of development is beginning to close - the return of the decisive struggle for expansion from those areas which are being fought over back to its home countries. In this way, imperialism brings catastrophe as a mode of' existence back from the periphery of capitalist development to its point of departure. The expansion of capital, which for four centuries had given the existence and civilisation of all non-capitalist peoples in Asia, Africa, America and Australia over to ceaseless convulsions and general and complete decline, is now plunging the civilised peoples of Europe itself into a series of catastrophes whose final result can only be the decline. of civilisation or the transition to the socialist mode of production " (in Monthly Review Press, 1972, p 147).
At the same time Lenin's book, in defining imperialism, insisted on one of its particular aspects - the export of capital from the developed countries to the backward countries in order to counter-act the tendency for the rate of profit to fall, the result of the rise in the proportion of constant capital (machines, raw materials) in relation to variable capital (wages), which is alone able to create profit.
For Lenin, the rivalries between the industrialised countries to grab hold of the less developed zones and export their capital there had led to the confrontation between the great powers.
However, even if there are differences in the analyses elaborated by Luxemburg, Lenin and other revolutionaries of the day, they all converged on an essential point: this war was not the result of the bad policies or the ill will of this or that governing clique; it was the ineluctable consequence of the development of the capitalist mode of production. In this sense, these two revolutionaries denounced with the same energy any "analysis" which sought to make the workers think that there was an "alternative" to imperialism, militarism and war within capitalism. Thus Lenin demolished Kautsky's thesis about the possibility of a "super-imperialism" which could establish an equilibrium between the great powers and eliminate their military conflicts. He also destroyed all the illusions about "international arbitration" which men of "good will" and the pacifist sectors of the bourgeoisie presented as the means to reconcile the antagonists and put an end to the war. This is exactly what Luxemburg put forward in her book:
"Seen in this light, the position of the proletariat with regard to imperialism leads to a general confrontation with the rule of capital. The specific rules of its conduct are given by that historical alternative [ie between the ruin of civilisation and the arrival of socialist production].
According to official 'expert' marxism, the rules are quite different. The belief in the possibility of accumulation in an 'isolated capitalist society', the belief that capitalism is conceivable even without expansion, are the theoretical formula of a quite distinct tactical tendency. The logical conclusion of this idea is to look to imperialism not as a historical necessity, as the decisive conflict for socialism, but as the wicked invention of a small group of people who profit from it. This leads to convincing the bourgeoisie that, even from the point of view of their capitalist interests, imperialism and militarism are harmful, thus isolating the alleged small group of beneficiaries of this imperialism and forming a bloc of the proletariat with broad sections of the bourgeoisie in order to 'moderate' imperialism, starve it out by 'partial disarmament' and 'draw its claws '! ... The final confrontation between proletariat and capital to settle their world-historic contradiction is converted into the utopia of a historical compromise between proletariat and bourgeoisie to 'moderate' the imperialist contradictions between capitalist states" (ibid, p147-8).
Finally, Luxemburg and Lenin used the same terms to explain why it was Germany which played the role of sparking off the World War (the big idea of those who are looking for the country responsible for the war) while at the same time treating the two camps in exactly the same way:
of the policies of the two colossi which, well before the present hostilities, had extended the tentacles of their financial exploitation all over the world and had divided it up economically. They had to clash with each other, because from the capitalist point of view, a new division of the world had become inevitable" (Lenin, The war and the revolution).
This unity in the analysis of the causes of the war coming from revolutionaries originating from countries in opposing camps also applied to the policy they put forward for the proletariat and to their denunciation of the social democratic parties who had betrayed the class.
The role of revolutionaries during the war
However difficult it was for the revolutionaries to carry out their propaganda at a time when the bourgeoisie had installed a real state of siege, preventing any expression of a proletarian voice, this action by Rosa and her comrades was an essential preparation for the future. Although she was imprisoned in April 1915 she wrote The Crisis in German Social Democracy which was "the spiritual dynamite to turn the bourgeois order upside down" as Clara Zetkin, a close comrade of Rosa, wrote in her preface of May 1919.
This book is pitiless charge-sheet against the' war itself and against every aspect of bourgeois propaganda; the best homage we can render to Rosa Luxemburg today is to publish a few (too) short extracts from it.
At a time when in all belligerent countries, all the different mouthpieces of bourgeois propaganda were trying to outdo each other in their nationalist frenzy, she began the book by denouncing the chauvinist hysteria which had seized hold of the population.
"The excesses of a spy-hunting populace, the singing throngs, the coffee-shops with their patriotic songs ... the violent mobs, ready to denounce, ready to persecute women, ready to whip themselves into a delirious frenzy over every wild rumour ... the atmosphere of ritual murder, the Kishinev (pogrom) air that left the policeman at the comer as the only remaining representative of human dignity" (Junius Pamphlet, p4).
Then, she exposes the reality of this war:
"Shamed, dishonoured, wading in blood and dripping with filth, thus capitalist society stands. Not as we usually see it, playing the roles of peace and righteousness, of order, of philosophy, of ethics - but as a roaring beast, as an orgy of anarchy, as a pestilential breath, devastating culture and humanity - so it appears in all its hideous nakedness" (ibid, p5). Thus, from the very start, Rosa goes to the heart of the question: against the pacifist illusions which pined for a bourgeois society "without its excesses", she pointed the finger at the real guilty party: capitalism as a whole. And immediately she took care to denounce the role and content of capitalist propaganda, whether it came from the traditional bourgeois parties or from Social-Democracy:
"War is methodical, organised, gigantic murder. But in normal human beings this systematic murder is possible only when a state of intoxication has been previously created. This has always been the tried and proven method of those who make war. Bestiality of action must find a commensurate bestiality of thought and senses; the latter must prepare
and accompany the former" (p 20).
"The world war that began officially on 4th August 1914 was the same world war toward which German imperialism had been driving for decades, the same war whose coming the social democracy had prophesied year after year. This same war has been denounced by social democratic parliamentarians, newspapers and leaflets a thousand times as a frivolous imperialistic crime, as a war that is against every interest of culture and against every interest of the nation" (ibid, p 67).
Obviously, she made a particularly sharp critique of German Social-Democracy, which had been the beacon of the Socialist International, and whose treason had made the work of enrolling the proletariat so much easier for the government, in Germany but also in the other countries. She concentrated her fire against the social-democrat argument that on the German side the aim of the war was to defend "civilisation" and the "freedom of the peoples" against Tsarist barbarism.
In particular she denounced the justifications of Neue Zeit, the theoretical organ of the party, which appealed to the old analysis of Marx and Engels which had stigmatised Russia as the "prison-house of peoples" and the main bulwark of reaction in Europe.
"After the Social-Democratic [parliamentary] group had stamped the war as a war of defence of the German nations and European culture, the Social-Democratic press proceeded to hail it as the 'saviour of the oppressed nations '. Hindenberg became the executor of Marx and Engels" (ibid, p72).
In denouncing the lies of social democracy, Rosa pointed out the real role it was playing:
"In refuting the existence of the class struggle, the Social-Democracy has denied the very basis of its own existence.. It has thrown aside the most important weapon it possessed, the power of criticism of the war from the peculiar point of view of the working class. Its only mission now is to play the role of gendarme over the working class under a state of military rule" (ibid, p87).
Finally, one of the most important aspects of Rosa's book is the perspective it puts forward for the proletariat: putting an end to the war through revolutionary action. Just as she affirmed (and she cited bourgeois politicians who were very clear about this) that the only force that could have prevented the outbreak of the war bad been the struggle of the proletariat. So she went back to the resolution of the 1907 congress of the International, confirmed by the 1912 congress (the extraordinary congress held in Basle):
"Should war nevertheless break out, it shall be the duty of the social democracy to work for a speedy peace, and to strive with every means in its power to utilise the industrial and political crisis to accomplish the awakening of the people, thus hastening the overthrow of capitalist class rule".
Rosa based herself on this resolution to denounce the treason of social democracy, which did exactly the opposite to what it had committed itself to do. She called for the united action of the world proletariat to put an end to the war while underlining the danger that the war represented for the future of socialism.
"But here is proof also that the war is not only grandiose murder, but the suicide of the European working class. The soldiers of socialism, the workers (if England, of France, of Germany, of Italy, of Belgium are murdering each other at the bidding of capitalism, are thrust in cold, murderous irons into each other's breasts, are toile ring over their graves, grappling in each other's death-bringing arms ...
This madness will not stop, and this bloody nightmare of hell will not cease until the workers of Germany, of France, of Russia and of England will wake up out their drunken sleep; will clasp each other's hands ill brotherhood and will drown the bestial chorus of war agitators and the hoarse cry of capitalist hyenas with the mighty cry of labour: "Workers of the world, unite!"" (ibid, pI34) .
It should be noted that in her hook, Rosa Luxemburg, like the rest of the left or the party which firmly opposed the war (unlike the "marxist centre" animated by Kautsky, which with all sorts of contortions justified the policy of the leadership) did not draw all the consequences of the Basle resolution by putting forward the slogan which Lenin expressed very clearly: "turn the imperialist war into a civil war". And it was for this reason that at the Zimmerwald conference of September 1915, the representatives of the current around Luxemburg and Liebknecht were on the "centrist" position represented by Trotsky and not the position of the left around Lenin. It was only at the Kienthal conference in April 1916 that this current joined the Zimmerwald left.
However, even with these insufficiencies, there is no question that Luxemburg and her comrades carried out a considerable work in this period, which was to bear fruit in 1918.
But before going on to this last period, we must highlight the extremely important role played by Rosa's comrade, assassinated on the same day by the bourgeoisie: Karl Liebknecht.
While sharing her political positions, Liebknecht lacked the theoretical depth of Rosa and her talent for writing articles (this is why, for lack of space, we haven't cited his writings here). But his determined and courageous attitude, his extremely clear denunciations of the imperialist war, of all those who justified it, whether openly or in a roundabout way, as well as his denunciation of pacifist illusions, made Liebknecht during this period the symbol of the proletarian struggle against the imperialist war. Without going into details about his activities (see our article "Revolutionaries in Germany during the First World War", in International Review no.81), we will recall here a significant episode: his participation, on 1 May 1916, in a demonstration in Berlin of 10,000 workers against the war, where he made a speech and raised the slogan "Down with the war, down with the government", which led to his immediate arrest. This in turn resulted in the first political mass strike in Germany, which broke out at the end of May. We should also note that before the military tribunal which sat in judgement over him on 28th June, he fully defended his action, knowing that this attitude could only make his punishment more severe, and he used the platform of the tribunal to make another denunciation of the imperialist war, of capitalism which was responsible for it; and he once again called the workers to the struggle. From then on, in all the countries of Europe, the name and example of Liebknecht became one of the rallying flags of all those who were fighting against the imperialist war and for the proletarian revolution, not least Lenin himself.
The proletarian revolution and the end of the war
The perspective outlined in the Basle resolution was concretised for the first time in February 1917 in Russia, with the revolution that overthrew the Tsarist regime. After three years of nameless butchery and misery, the proletariat began to raise its head, overturning the old regime and advancing towards the socialist revolution. We will not go back over the events in Russia which we have examined recently in this Review[4]. But it is important here to say that it was not only in Russia that the year 1917 saw the workers in uniform revolting against the barbarism of the war. Not long after the February revolution massive mutinies broke out in a number of armies at the front. Thus, the three other main countries of the Entente - Britain, France and Italy - faced major mutinies which led their governments to exert a ferocious repression. In Prance, around 40,000 troops collectively disobeyed orders and a part of them even attempted to march on Paris where there were workers' strikes going on in the arms factories. This convergence between the class struggle in the rear and the revolt of the soldiers is probably one of the reasons why the repression carried out by the French bourgeoisie was relatively moderate: out of 554 condemned to death by military courts martial, only 50 were shot. This "moderation" had no place in the British and Italian armies, where there were 306 and 750 executions respectively.
Last November, during the celebrations of the end of the First World War, the bourgeoisie. and the particularly the social-democratic parties which form the government in the majority of European countries today, have given us a new angle on their hypocrisy about the mutinies of 1917, new proof of their desire to destroy the memory of the working class. In Italy, the minister of defence made it known that we should "render honour" to the shot mutineers, and in Britain they have been paid "public homage". As for the chief of the French "Socialist" government, he decided to "fully reintegrate into the collective national memory" those who had been "shot as an example". "Comrade" Jospin is a front runner in the hypocrisy stakes, for who were the ministers of munitions and of war at the time the mutineers were shot? The "Socialists" Albert Thomas and Paul Painleve.
In fact, what these "Socialists" who make all kinds of pacifist speeches and who are so moved by the atrocities of the First World War forget to say is that in 1914, in the main European countries, they were in the front lint' for the task of mobilising the workers and sending them to the slaughter. By trying to reintegrate the mutineers of the First World War "into the collective national memory", the left wing of the bourgeoisie is trying to make us forget that they really belong to the memory of the world proletariat[5].
As for the official interpretation of the politicians and tame historians, that the revolts of 1917 were only directed against an incompetent command, it does not stand up to the fact that these movements took place in both camps all along the different fronts. Are we to believe that World War I was entirely led by incompetents'} Moreover, these revolts began when the first news of the Russian revolution reached the other countries[6]. In fact, what the bourgeoisie is trying to hide is the undeniably proletarian content of the mutinies and the fact that the only real opposition to the war came from the working class.
During the same period, the mutinies hit the country with the most powerful proletariat and whose soldiers were in direct contact with the Russian soldiers on the eastern front: Germany. The events in Russia were greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm among the German troops and there were frequent outbreaks of fraternisation on this front[7]. The mutinies began in the fleet during the summer of 1917. The fact that it was the sailors who led these movements is significant: nearly all of them were workers in uniform (whereas there were a lot more peasants among the footsoldiers). The revolutionary groups, especially the Spartakists, had an important influence on the sailors and this was growing. The Spartakists put forward a clear perspective for the whole working class:
"Only through revolution and the conquest of the people's republic in Germany can the genocide be ended and generalised peace installed. And this is also the only way that the Russian revolution can succeed. Only the world proletarian revolution can liquidate the world imperialist war" (Spartakus letter no. 6, August 1917).
And it was this programme that was to come alive through the growing struggles of the working class in Germany. In the framework of this article we cannot go into these struggles in detail (see our series in the International Review, beginning with 11.0.81), but it is necessary to recall that one of the reasons that pushed Lenin and the Bolsheviks to consider in October 1917 that the conditions were ripe for the seizure of power by the proletariat in Russia was precisely the development of the struggle amongst the workers and soldiers in Germany.
What we have to highlight is how the intensification of the workers' struggles and the soldiers' revolts on a proletarian terrain was the decisive element that pushed the German ruling class to ask for an armistice, and so brought the war to an end.
"Spurred on by the revolutionary developments in Russia and in the wake of several precursory movements, a mass strike broke out in April 1917. In January 1918 about a million workers threw themselves into a new strike movement and formed a workers' council in Berlin. Under the influence of the Russian events the military fronts crumbled more and more throughout the summer of 1918, the factories were at boiling point: more and more workers gathered in the streets to strengthen the response to war ... " ("The German Revolution, Part II", International Review no.82).
In October 1918, the bourgeoisie changed the Chancellor. Prince Max von Baden replaced Count Georg Hertling, and brought the Social-Democratic Party (SPD) into government. The revolutionaries immediately understood the role that social-democracy was to play. Rosa Luxemburg wrote: "By entering the ministry, government socialism is putting itself forward as capitalism's defender and is barring the way to the mounting proletarian revolution".
During this same period the Spartakists held a conference with other revolutionary groups which launched an appeal to the workers:
"We must support in every way the mutinies of the soldiers, go on to the armed insurrection, broaden the armed insurrection into a struggle to transfer power to the workers and soldiers and ensure victory through the workers' mass strikes. This is the task of the coming days and weeks".
"On 23rf October Liebknecht was freed from prison. More than 20,000 workers came to greet him when he arrived in Berlin ...
On 28th October there began in Austria, in the Czech and Slovak provinces as well as in Budapest, a wave of strikes which led to the overthrow of the monarchy. Workers' and soldiers' councils in the image of the Russian soviets sprang up everywhere ...
When on 3rd November the fleet in Kiel was to go to sea to continue the war, the sailors mutinied. Soldiers' councils were created and workers' councils followed in the same wave ...
The Spartakists produced an appeal to the workers of Berlin on 8 November which went as follows:
"Workers and soldiers! What your comrades have managed to do in Kiel, Hamburg, Bremen, Lubeck, Rostock, Flensburg, Hanover, Magdeburg, Brunswick, Munich and Stuttgart you too must do. Because the victory of your brothers there, and the victory of the proletariat of the whole world, depends on the height that your struggle is able to Teach, its tenacity and success ... Workers and soldiers! The immediate aims of your struggle must be ...
- the election of workers and soldiers councils, the election of delegates in all factories and all military units
- the immediate establishing of relations with other workers' councils in Germany
- the government to be controlled by the commissars of the workers' and soldiers' councils
- immediate liaison with the international proletariat and particularly with the Russian workers' republic.
Long live the socialist republic!
Long live the International!"
On the same day, a Spartakist leaflet called on the workers to come out onto the streets:
"Come out of the factories! Come out of the barracks! Hold out your hands! Long live the socialist republic!"
That evening, the revolutionary workers and soldiers occupied the printing press of a bourgeois newspaper and published the first issue of Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), the daily paper of the Spartakists, which immediately warned against the SPD: "There is no community of interests with those who have betrayed you for the last four years. Down with capitalism and its agents! Long live the International!".
On the same day, faced with the rising tide of revolution, the bourgeoisie took steps. It forced the abdication of Kaiser Wihelm II, proclaimed the Republic, and named a Social-Democrat leader, Ebert, as chancellor. The latter also received the blessing of the executive committee of the councils which contained a number of social democratic functionaries. A "Council of People's Commissars" was nominated, composed of members of the SPD and the USPD (ie the "centrists" expelled from the SPD in February at the same time as the Spartakists). In fact, behind this very "revolutionary" title (the same as that of the soviet government in Russia) hid a perfectly bourgeois government which was to do everything it could to prevent the proletarian revolution and to prepare the massacre of the workers.
The first measure taken by the government was to sign the armistice the day after it was set up (and while German troops were still occupying enemy territory). After the experience of the revolution in Russia, where the continuation of the war had been a decisive factor in the mobilisation of the proletariat and the development of its consciousness up to the point where it overthrew the bourgeois regime in October 1917, the German bourgeoisie knew quite well that it had to stop the war immediately if it did not want to end up like the Russian bourgeoisie.
Although today the spokesmen of the ruling class carefully hide the role of the proletarian revolution in putting an end to the war, it is a reality which has not escaped serious and scrupulous historians (whose writing is reserved for a small minority):
"Having decided to continue negotiations despite Ludendorff, the German government was soon forced to do so. First of all, the capitulation of Austria had created a new and terrible threat to the south of the country. Then, and most importantly, the revolution broke out in Germany (...) [the German delegation] signed the armistice on 11th November, at 05:20, in Foch's famous railway carriage. It signed in the name of the new government, which was urging it to make haste (...) The German delegation won some meagre advantages, which according to Pierre Renouvin, "all had the same aim: to leave the German government with the means to fight Bolshevism ". In particular, the army gave up 30,000 machine guns instead of 25,000. It was allowed to remain in occupation of the Ruhr, the heart of the revolution, instead of it being "demilitarised?" (Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, in Le Monde, 12th November 1998[8]).
Once the armistice was signed; the social democratic government developed a whole strategy to hold back the proletarian movement and to smash it. In particular, it worked on the divisions between the soldiers and the advanced workers, since the majority of the soldiers saw no need to carry on the struggle once the war" was over. At the same time, the social democracy was to rely on the illusions which a good pan of the working class still had in it, in order to isolate the Spartakists from the great majority of the workers.
We will not go into details here about the period from the armistice to the events which led to the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht (this period is examined in nos 82 and 83 of our Review). However, the public writings a few years later by general Groener, commander in chief of the army from the end of 1918 to the beginning of 1919 are extremely edifying as regards the policies carried out by Ebert, who was in daily contact with him:
influence with the people and the masses and able to reconstruct a governing force along with the military command (...) In the first place the issue was to take the power out of the hands of the workers' and soldiers' councils of Berlin. An enterprise was undertaken with this aim. Ten divisions were to enter Berlin. Ebert agreed (...) We elaborated a programme which envisaged, after the entry of the troops, the cleaning up of Berlin and the disarmament of the Spartakists. This was also agreed with Ebert, whom I recognised for his absolute love of his country (...) This alliance was sealed against the Bolshevik danger and the council system" (October-November 1925, Zeugenaussage).
In January 1919 the government delivered a decisive blow against the revolution. Having amassed 80,000 soldiers around Berlin, on 4th January it launched a provocation by dismissing the prefect of police, Eichorn, a member of the USPD. Huge demonstrations responded to this provocation. Although the founding congress of the Communist Party of Germany, led by Luxemburg and Liebknecht, had four days earlier estimated that the situation was not yet ripe for insurrection, Liebknecht allowed himself to be drawn into the trap and took part in an Action Committee which called precisely for the insurrection. This was a real disaster for the working Class. Thousands of workers, and particularly the Spartakists, were massacred. Luxemburg and Liebknecht, who did not want to leave Berlin, were arrested on 15th January and coldly executed without trial by the soldiery, on the pretext of "trying to escape". Two months later, Leo Jogisches, Rosa's former partner and also a leader of the Communist Party, was murdered in jail.
Today we can understand why the bourgeoisie, and especially its "socialist" parties, try to throw a veil over the events which put an end to the World War.
In the first place, the "democratic" parties, and above all the "socialists", have no wish to have their role in the massacre of the working class exposed, a role which today is supposed to be only carried out by "Fascist or Communist dictatorships" .
Fabienne
[1] We should recall that, a few weeks after their murder, the first session of the first congress of the Communist International began by paying homage to these two militants and that afterwards the organisations of the workers' movement have regularly saluted their memory.
[2] For a country like France, 16.8% of those mobilised were killed. The proportion is not much lower for Germany: 15.4%, but it goes up to 22% for Bulgaria, 25% for Romania, 27% for Turkey, 37 % for Serbia. Certain categories of combatants went through an even more terrible decimation: thus, for France, 25 % of the infantry were killed and a third of the young men who were 20 in 1914. In this country, it was not until 1950 that the population return to its August 1914 level. Moreover, we should not forget the human tragedy of all those injured and mutilated. Some mutilations were particularly atrocious: on the French side alone there were some 20,000 gueules cassees (lit., "broken faces "). soldiers so hideously disfigured that they were incapable of reintegrating into society and ended their days in the ghetto of special institutions. Then there were the hundreds of thousands of young men who returned from war completely insane, and whom the authorities generally preferred to treat as malingerers.
[3] On both sides, the lies of the bourgeois press competed in grossness and infamy. "In August 1914, the Allies were already denouncing the "atrocities" committed by the invaders against the populations of Belgium and northern France: children's hands cut off rape, hostages shot and villages burned "to set an example" (...) Meanwhile, the German press published daily accounts of the "atrocities" committed by Belgian civilians against German troops: eyes put out, fingers cut off prisoners burnt alive" ("Realite et propagande: la barbarie allemande", in L'Histoire, November 1998).
[4] See nos. 88-91 of the International Review.
[5] The French prime minister cited in his speech a verse from the "Chanson de Craonne" composed after the mutinies. But he carefully avoided citing the passage which says:
"Ceux qu'ontle pognon, ceux la reviendront,
Car c'est pour eux qu'on creve.
Mais c'est fini, car les troujjions
Vont tous se mettre en greve"
("Those with the money will return/we're getting killed for them but it's all finished, for the infantry/ will all go out on strike")
[6] Following the mutinies in the French army, ten thousand Russian soldiers who had been fighting on the western front alongside the French soldiers were withdrawn from the front and spent the rest of the war in the camp of La Courtine. It was vital that the enthusiasm they were expressing for the revolution evolving in their country should not contaminate the French soldiers.
[7] It should be noted that fratemisation on the front began only a few months after the beginning of the war, and the first departures for the front with flowers in the guns and the slogans "A Berlin!" or "Nach Paris!". "25th December 1914: no enemy activity. During the night and the day of the 25", communication established between the French and Bavarians, from trench to trench (conversations, cigarettes and flattering notes sent by the enemy ... , even visits by some soldiers to the German trenches)" (Log book of the 139th Brigade). One general writes to another on 1st January 1915: "It should be noted that when the men stay too long in the same place, they end up too familiar with their neighbours opposite; the result is conversations and sometimes even visits which usually have inconvenient consequences". This continued throughout the war, especially in 1917. In a letter written in November 1917 and intercepted by the postal censorship, a French soldier writes to his brother-in-law: "We are only 20 metres from the Boches, but they are pretty decent since they send us cigars and cigarettes, and we send them our bread" (quotations taken from L'Histoire, January 1998).
[8] Jean-Baptiste Duroselle and Pierre Renouvin are widely respected historians who specialise in this period.
In the last article in this series (International Review no.95), we examined in some detail the 1919 programme of the Communist Party of Russia, considering it to be an important gauge of the highest levels of understanding that the revolutionaries of those days had reached about the forms, methods, and goals of the communist transformation of society. But any such examination would be incomplete if we ignored that period's most serious effort to elaborate, alongside the practical measures outlined in the RCP programme, a more general and theoretical framework for analysing the problems of the transition period. This, like the Programme itself, was the work of Nikolai Bukharin, whom Lenin considered to be "the most valuable and most prominent theoretician of the party"; and the text in question is the Economics of the Transformation Period (henceforward ETP), written in 1920. According to the editor of the 1971 English edition of this book, "Up until the introduction of the Five-year plan, in 1928, which coincided with Bukharin's downfall as the leader of the Comintern, Economics of the Transformation Period was considered as an achievement of Bolshevik theory next in importance to Lenin's State and Revolution"(Bergman Publishers, New York, and Pluto Press, p 212)
As we will show, Bukharin's book contains some fundamental weaknesses which have not allowed it to pass the test of time in the way that State and Revolution has. It nevertheless remains an important contribution to marxist theory.
Bukharin had risen to prominence during the great imperialist war, when along with Piatakov and others, he was active in a group of Bolshevik exiles in Switzerland (the so-called 'Baugy group'), which was situated on the, extreme left of the party. In 1915 he published Imperialism and World Economy, in which he showed that capitalism, precisely by becoming a global system, a world economy, had created the conditions for its own superseding; but that far from evolving peacefully into a harmonious world order, this 'globalisation' had plunged the system into the throes of violent collapse. This line of thought paralleled the work of Rosa Luxemburg. In her book The Accumulation of Capital (1913) Luxemburg, with a more profound reference to the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, had demonstrated why capitalism's period of expansion was now at an end. Like Luxemburg, Bukharin showed that the concrete form of capitalism's decline was the exacerbation of inter-imperialist competition, culminating in the World War. Imperialism and World Economy was also a landmark in the marxist analysis of state capitalism, the totalitarian political and economic regime required by the sharpening of both imperialist antagonisms 'externally' and of social antagonisms 'internally'. The relative subordination of competition within each capitalist country had, Bukharin emphasised only been the corollary of the accentuation of conflict between national "state capitalist trusts" for the domination of the world market.
In his article 'Towards a Theory of the Imperialist State' (1916), Bukharin went further into the implications of these developments. The rise of this national state capitalist kraken, which was spreading its tentacles into all aspects of social and economic life, led Bukharin (as Pannekoek had done a few years earlier) to revisit the classics of marxism and to return defending the view that the proletarian revolution could not conquer such a state but would have to fight for its "revolutionary destruction" and the creation of new organs of political power. Another equally radical conclusion drawn from his analysis of the new stage in capitalism was summarised in the theses that the Baugy group presented to the Berne Bolshevik conference in 1915. Here, Bukharin and Piatakov, in line with the arguments put forward by Rosa Luxemburg at the same time called for the party to reject the slogans of 'national self-determination' and 'national liberation':
"The imperialist epoch is an epoch of the absorption of small states by the large states units ... It is therefore impossible to struggle against the enslavement of nations otherwise than by struggling against imperialism, ergo - by struggling against finance capital, ergo against capitalism in general. Any deviation from that road, any advancement of 'partial' tasks, of the 'liberation of nations' within the realms of capitalist civilisation, means a diverting of proletarian forces from the actual solution of the problem" (quoted in D Gluckstein, The Tragedy of Bukharin, Pluto Press, 1994, p15).
Initially, Lenin was furious with Bukharin on both counts. But whereas he never changed his mind on the national question, he was step by step converted to what he had initially termed Bukharin's "semi-anarchist" position on the state - and of course was in turn accused of "semi-anarchism" when he expounded his new vision in State and Revolution in 1917.
It is thus clear that at this stage in the germination and flowering of the proletarian revolution provoked by the World War, Bukharin was at the very spearhead of the marxist effort to understand the new conditions brought about by the decadence of capitalism; and a number of his most important theoretical contributions not only appear in the ETP, but are further elaborated within it.
In the first place, Bukharin's book has to be seen alongside such seminal works as Lenin's The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky and Trotsky's Terrorism and Communism, which led the Bolsheviks' response to the bastardised marxism of Karl Kautsky, who had passed from a position of centrism and pacifism to one of out and out defence of the bourgeois order against the threat of revolution - but who still claimed the crown of marxist orthodoxy in doing so. Lenin had mainly replied to Kautsky's advocacy of bourgeois democracy against the proletarian democracy of the soviets, while Trotsky's book focussed on the problem of revolutionary violence. For his part, Bukharin had already seen Imperialism and World Economy and similar works as a polemic against Kautsky's theory of 'ultra-imperialism', which pretended that capitalism was advancing towards a unified world order in which war could only be an aberration. Now, in the ETP, Bukharin set about re-establishing the marxist conception of social change in opposition to the Kautskyite idyll of a peaceful and orderly transition to socialism. Echoing Marx, Bukharin insists that for any new social order to emerge, the old one has to pass through a phase of profound crisis and collapse - and that this is more than ever true of the passage from capitalism to communism: " ... the experience of all revolutions, which from the very point of view of the development of productive powers had a powerful, positive influence, shows that this development was bought at the price of an enormous plundering and destruction of these powers. (...) If that is so ... then it must be a priori evident that the proletarian revolution is inevitably accompanied by a strong decline of productive powers, for no revolution experiences such a broad and deep break in old relationships and their rebuilding in a new way" (p105-6). ETP is to a very large extent a defence of the Russian revolution despite the considerable "costs" it involved, and against all those who pointed to those costs in order to counsel the workers to be good law-abiding citizens whose only hope for social change lay with the ballot box.
Secondly, ETP reiterates the argument that, although it has effectively established itself as a world economy, capitalism is incapable of organising humanity's productive forces as a unified, conscious subject, since it is precisely upon reaching this stage that capitalist competition is pushed to its most extreme and catastrophic conclusions. But here Bukharin goes further and arrives at a number of brilliant anticipations about capitalism's mode of functioning in its decadent epoch, i.e. its obligation to survive through the sterilisation and outright destruction of the productive forces, above all through the war economy and war itself. This is where Bukharin introduces his concept of "expanded negative reproduction" - a term that may be open to question, but which certainly grapples with a fundamental reality, as where Bukharin shows that despite the apparent growth it brings about, war production actually signifies not an expansion but a destruction of capital: "War production has a completely different meaning: a cannon does not transform itself into an element of the new cycle of production; powder is shot into the air and in no way appears in a new shell in the following cycle. On the contrary. The economic effect of these elements in actu is of purely negative quality ... Let us observe the means of consumption with which the army is supplied. Here we perceive the same thing. The means of consumption do not produce labour powers, for the soldiers do not figure in the process of production; they are eliminated from it, they are outside of the process of production ... the process of reproduction assumes with the war a 'deformed', regressive, negative character, namely: with every successive production cycle, the real base of production grows narrower and narrower, the 'development' is carried out not in a widening but in a continually narrowing spiral" (p44-45). In decadent capitalism, this ever-narrowing spiral is the essential reality of economic activity even outside of periods of open global warfare, both because of the tendency towards a permanent war economy and because more and more capitalism finances its 'growth' through the totally artificial stimulus of debt. Bukharin's insights offer an excellent rebuttal to all those worshippers of economic growth who scoff at the notion of capitalism being decadent because they cannot see the decadent, fictitious essence of this growth.
Again, on the question of state capitalism, ETP repeats previous formulations about state capitalism, showing it to be the characteristic form of capital political organisation in the epoch of decay. Bukharin recalls its dual function: both to limit economic competition within each national capital, the better to a e economic and above all military competition on the world arena; and to preserve social peace in a situation where the miseries provoked by economic crisis and war tend to push the proletariat towards a confrontation with the bourgeois regime. Of particular interest is Bukharin's recognition that the most important way that state capitalism guards the existing order is through the annexation of the old workers' organisations, their incorporation into the state Leviathan: "The method of restructuring was the same method as the subordination to the all-encompassing bourgeois state. The betrayal of the socialist parties and the unions expressed itself in the very fact that they entered into the service of the bourgeois state, that they were actually nationalised by this imperialist state, that they transformed themselves into labour departments of the military machine" (p41).
This lucidity about the characteristics and forms of capitalism in decay was accompanied by a genuine grasp of the methods and aims of the proletarian revolution. ETP shows that a revolution which aims to replace the blind laws of the commodity with the conscious regulation of social life by a liberated humanity can only be conscious revolution, founded on the self-activity and self-organisation of the proletariat through its new organs of political power such as the soviets and the factory committees. At the same time, the revolution engendered by the collapse of the capitalist world economy can only be a world-wide revolution, and it can only arrive at its ultimate goals on the scale of the entire globe. Bukharin's concluding paragraphs summarise the authentic, internationalist hopes of the day, anticipating a future in which "for the first time since humanity existed, a system arises which is constructed harmonically in all its parts; it knows neither social hierarchy nor hierarchy of production. It annihilates once and for all the struggle of people against people and welds the entire human race into a community which rapidly seizes the countless riches of nature" (p173. The French edition of the text uses the word "anarchy" rather than "hierarchy" in the above passage. We are not sure how the original Russian text put it).
The recognition of the authentic means and goals of the revolution cannot, however, remain at the level of generality; it has to be applied and concretised in the revolutionary process itself - an extremely difficult task which, in the case of the Russian revolution, required much painful experience and many years of reflection. Globally, this work of drawing and deepening the lessons of the Russian revolution was carried out by the communist left in the wake of the revolution's defeat. But even in the heat of the revolution, and within the Bolshevik party itself, critical voices emerged who were already laying the bases for future reflection. However, although Bukharin's name is generally connected to the Left Communist opposition in the party in 1918,the Bukharin of ETP had by 1920 embarked on a trajectory that was to take him away from the communist left as a whole; and the book reflects this in that, alongside its significant contributions to marxist theory, it has a deeply 'conservative' side, in which the author slides away from the radical critique of the status quo - even the 'revolutionary' status quo - towards an apologia for things as they were. To be more exact, Bukharin - and in this he was by no means alone, but merely provided the theoretical underpinning of a more widespread illusion - tends to conflate the methods and exigencies of 'war communism' with the actual emergence of communism itself; he looks at a contingent - and extremely difficult situation - for the revolution, and deduces from this certain 'laws' or norms which are universally applicable to the transition period as a whole. Before going further with this line of argument, it is necessary to point out that Bukharin was quick to defend himself against it. In December 1921, he wrote an 'afterword' to the German edition which begins: "Since this book was written, some time has elapsed. Since then in Russia the so-called 'new direction in economic policy' has been adopted, which for the first time brought socialised industry, petit-bourgeois economy, private-capitalist business, and the 'mixed' enterprises into correct economic relation to each other. This specifically Russian change, the deepest precondition of which is the peasant-agrarian character of the country, caused some of my ingenious critics to remark that I must rewrite my work from the beginning. This view rests on the total illiteracy of these clever ones, who in their sacred simplicity do not grasp the difference between an abstract examination, which depicts things and processes in their 'ideal cross-cut' - according to the expression used by Marx - and the empirical reality, which is always and under all circumstances infinitely more complicated than its abstract representation. 1 have not written an economic history of Soviet Russia but rather a general theory of the transition period, for which the powers of comprehension of the journalists par excellence and of the narrow 'practical men' who are unable to comprehend the general problems, are no match" (p202)[1].
Bukharin's strictures against his bourgeois critics are no doubt valid. The fact remains that Bukharin himself, throughout the ETP, also fails to grasp the difference between general theory and empirical reality. A number of examples could be given in support of this contention; we will restrict ourselves only to the most significant.
One of the great illusions of the war communism period was precisely that it was indeed communism; and one of the main sources of this illusion was the apparent disappearance of capitalist categories such as money and wages. It was this same illusion - together with war communism's statification of vast swathes of the economy - which later gave rise to the idea that the NEP of 1921 represented a step back towards capitalism because it restored a considerable amount of formal private ownership and brought the commodity economy back into the open. In fact, the disappearance of money and wages in the period 1918-20 was by no means the result of a deliberate, pre-planned policy by the soviet power; rather it directly expressed the catastrophic collapse of the economy in the face of economic blockade, imperialist invasion and internal civil war. It went hand in hand with widespread famine and disease, the depletion of the cities, and the physical and social decimation of the working class. Of course, this very heavy 'cost' of the revolution was imposed on it by the furious class hatred of the entire world bourgeoisie; and the Russian proletariat paid it willingly, making the most gigantic and heroic sacrifices to ensure the military crushing of the forces of counter-revolution. But, as we shall see later on, the biggest 'cost' of this struggle was the very rapid political enfeeblement of the working class and of its real dictatorship over society. To confuse this terrible situation with the conscious construction of communist society is a very serious error; and as the following passage shows, Bukharin did make this error:
"This phenomenon (the tendency towards the disappearance of value) is for its part also tied to the collapse of the money system. Money represents the real social tie, those knots, in which the entire developed commodity system is entangled. It is conceivable that in the transition period, in the process of the annihilation of the commodity system as such, a process of 'self-negation' of money occurs. It is expressed at first in the so-called 'money devaluation', second, in the fact that the distribution of money symbols become dependent on the distribution of products, and vice versa. Money ceases to be a universal equivalent and becomes a conventional - and thereby highly imperfect - symbol of the circulation of products.
Wages become an illusory quantity which has no content. As long as the working class is the ruling class, wage labour disappears. In socialised production there is no wage labour, and insofar as there is no wage labour, there are also no wages as the price of the labour power sold to the capitalists. Only the outer shell remains of wages - the money form, which together with the money system approaches self-annihilation. In the system of the proletarian dictatorship, the 'worker' receives a social share (in Russian, 'payok'), but no wages" (p147).
It is evident that Bukharin is confusing a number of different things here. First, he confuses the period of the civil war - the period of life and death struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie - with the real transition period, which can only begin its proper, constructive work once the civil war has been won on a world scale. Secondly, and consequently, he confuses the collapse of the money system as a result of economic breakdown - devaluation, dire scarcity - with the real overcoming of the commodity economy, which can only be completed through the communist unification of global society and the emergence of a society of abundance. Otherwise, any 'abolition' of money or wages in a given region remains under the overall domination of the law of value and in no way guarantees an automatic movement towards communism. And yet Bukharin clearly gives the impression that in Russia this desirable stage has already been reached - there is even a Russian word for it, and the worker has got inverted commas around himself, implying that he is no longer part of the exploited. And this is the most dangerous error in this passage: the idea that once the proletariat has won political power, established its political dictatorship, and got rid of private ownership of the means of production, there is no wage labour, no more exploitation. Bukharin states this even more explicitly elsewhere, when he says that "capitalist production relations are absolutely inconceivable under the political rule of the working class" (p50). In appearance very radical, such formulations actually came to justify the increasing exploitation of the working class.
Before going further into this point, it is instructive to give another example of Bukharin's methodological error. War communism was also characterised by the application of military solutions to more and more areas of the revolution's life - most perniciously, to areas where it is vital that political aspects take precedence over military ones. One of the most important of these concerns the international extension of the revolution. A proletarian bastion that has established itself in one region cannot extend the revolution by imposing it militarily on other sectors of the world working class; the revolution extends itself above all by political means, by propaganda, by example, by calling on the workers of the world to rise up against their own bourgeoisies. And indeed, at the height of the revolutionary wave that began in 1917, this was exactly how the revolution did extend. By 1920, however, the Russian revolution was already experiencing the deadly consequences of isolation, of the defeat of the revolutionary assaults in other countries. In this situation - which was coupled with a growing military success in the internal civil war - many Bolsheviks began to put their hopes in spreading the revolution at bayonet point. The Red Army's advance on Warsaw was fuelled by these hopes - and the failure of this 'experiment', which merely pushed the Polish workers into a common front with their own bourgeoisie, was to confirm how misplaced these hopes had been. Bukharin, on the other hand, had been a fervent advocate of "revolutionary war" during the 1918 debates over the Brest-Litovsk treaty; and his 1920 work contains strong echoes of this position. Once again, he takes a contingent reality of the Russian situation - the necessity for a war of fronts across the huge territory of Russia, and the unavoidable formation of a standing army - and turns it into a 'norm' of the entire civil war period: "With the growth of the revolutionary process into the revolutionary world process, the civil war is transformed into a class war, which is led by a regular 'red army' on the part of the proletariat" (p109). In fact the opposite is more likely to be true: the more the revolution spreads worldwide, the more it will be led directly by the workers' councils and their militias, the more the political aspects of the struggle will predominate over the military, the less there will be a need for a 'red army' to lead the struggle. A war of fronts is not at all the proletariat's strong point. In purely military terms, the bourgeoisie will always have the best weapons. The proletariat's strength resides in its capacity to organise, to spread its struggles, to win over more and more sectors of the class, to undermine the armed forces of the enemy through fraternisation and the development of class consciousness. In another passage, Bukharin shows even more clearly that he has turned things on their head by identifying class war with military conflict between states:
"Socialist war is class war, which must be distinguished from simple civil war. The latter is not war in the true sense of the word, for it is not war between two state organisations. In class war, on the other hand, both sides are organised as state powers - on the one side the state of finance capital, on the other side the state of the proletariat". This idea is even more dangerous than the position Bukharin put forward in 1918, where he largely envisaged a defensive war of resistance by partisan units; here, the world revolution itself becomes an apocalyptic battle between two kinds of state power. It is significant that Lenin, who had firmly opposed Bukharin in the Brest-Litovsk debate, but whose marginal notes on the ETP rarely raise substantial criticisms, has no patience with this argument, which he calls a "total confusion" (p213).
One of the ironies of the ETP is that Bukharin, who had expressed such a high point of clarity in the understanding of state capitalism, completely fails to recognise the danger of state capitalism emerging out of the degeneration of the revolution. We have already noted that Bukharin insists that capitalist relations cannot exist under the political dictatorship of the proletariat. In another passage, Bukharin says explicitly that "since state capitalism is a growing together of the bourgeois state with capitalist trusts, it is evident that one can speak of no kind of 'state capitalism' in the dictatorship of the proletariat, which in principle excludes such a possibility" (p116). And he elaborates this further with the following argument: "In the system of state capitalism, the economically active subject is the capitalist state, the collective total capitalist. In the dictatorship of the proletariat, the economically active subject is the proletarian state, the collectively organised working class, 'the proletariat organised as state power'. In state capitalism, the production process is a process of production of surplus value which falls into the hands of the capitalist class, with the tendency to transform this value into surplus product. In the proletarian dictatorship, the production process serves as a means of systematic satisfaction of social needs. The system of state capitalism is the most perfect form of exploitation of the masses by a handful of oligarchs. The system of proletarian dictatorship makes any kind of exploitation whatsoever inconceivable, for it transforms the collective capitalist property and its private capitalist form into collective proletarian property '. Therefore, according to its essence, in spite of the formal similarity, the diametrical opposite is provided" (p117). And finally: "If one does not - as the representatives of bourgeois science do - regard the state apparatus as all organisation of neutrally mystical nature, then one must comprehend that all functions of the state also bear a class character. It follows that one must keep strictly separate bourgeois nationalisation and proletarian nationalisation. Bourgeois nationalisation leads to a system of state capitalism. Proletarian nationalisation leads to a state form of socialism. Just as the proletarian dictatorship. is the negation, the antipode of bourgeois dictatorship, proletarian nationalisation is the negation, the complete opposite of bourgeois nationalisation" (p120).
Of the numerous flaws in these arguments, two stand out most clearly. To begin with, we have, once again, Bukharin's confusion between the period of civil war, where proletarian bastions can exist temporarily in individual countries or regions, and the period of transition proper, which commences once the proletariat has won power on a global scale. The whole experience of the Russian revolution teaches us that the appropriation by the state of the means of production, even by the soviet state, does not do away with exploitation. This would be true in a proletarian dictatorship operating under 'optimal' conditions (an expanding world revolutionary process, maximum workers' democracy, etc), since the worldwide exigencies of the law of value would still exert their pitiless pressure on the workers. It is even more true in a proletarian bastion suffering from isolation and extreme material deprivation: in such circumstances, a tendency towards degeneration would appear straight away, as it did in Russia. The workers would be faced with the' imminent danger of losing their political authority and independence, while on the economic front they would be subjected to ever more draconian demands on their living and working conditions. To talk in such circumstances of the 'impossibility of exploitation', simply because the private capitalists have been expropriated, can only weaken the efforts of the proletariat to defend itself on both the political and economic fronts.
Secondly, history has indeed confirmed that the organ through which this process of degeneration expresses itself most readily is precisely the 'proletarian' state. Bukharin's simplistic definition of ' the state as a mere 'tool' of the ruling class ignores the more profound marxist understanding that the state, in its historic origins, was not the ex nihilo creation of a ruling class, but "arose" out of a situation of growing class antagonisms that threatened to pull society apart. This does not mean that is "mystically neutral": it arises to defend a divided order and can thus only operate on behalf of the economically dominant class. But neither does it mean that the state no more than a passive tool of such a class. In fact, state capitalism is precisely the expression of the fact that, in its epoch of decline, capital has had to function more and more 'without capitalists'. Even in the so-called mixed economies, it is the private capitalist, the 'finance capitalists' and the rest, who have had to subordinate their particular interests to the impersonal and general needs of the national capital, which are imposed above all by the state.
In the period of instability that follows the destruction of the old bourgeois state, a new state emerges, once again out of the need to hold society together, to prevent class antagonisms from tearing it asunder. But this time, there is no 'economically dominant' class: the new ruling class is also an exploited class which does not own any means of production. Consequently, there is even less reason for assuming that the new state automatically operates on behalf of the proletariat. It will only do so if the working class is organised and conscious, and imposes its revolutionary direction on the new state power. The moment the revolution enters into retreat, the forces of social conservation will tend to gather around the state and make it their instrument against the interests of the proletariat. And this is why state capitalism remains a profound danger even under the dictatorship of the proletariat.
For the proletariat to guard against such dangers, it needs to maintain its own class organs as intact and as vibrant as possible both its unitary organs (councils, factory committees, etc) and its political vanguard, the party. But the ETP, far from seeing the need for these organs to avoid entangling themselves with the state, calls for the authentic class organs of the proletariat to fuse themselves into the state - to subordinate themselves entirely to it:
"Now we must raise the question as to the general principle of the system of the proletarian apparatus, i. e. as to the interchanging relationships between different forms of the proletarian organisations. It is clear that the same method is formally necessary for the working class as for the bourgeoisie at the time of state capitalism. This organisational method exists in the coordination of all proletarian organisations with one all-encompassing organisation, i.e. with the state organisation of the working class, with the soviet state of the proletariat. The 'nationalisation' of the trade unions and the effectual nationalisation of all mass organisations of the proletariat result from the internal logic of the process of transformation itself. The minutest cells of the labour apparatus must transform themselves into agents of the general process of organisation, which is systematically directed and led by the collective reason of the working class, which finds its highest and most all-encompassing organisation in its state apparatus. Thus the system of state capitalism dialectically transforms itself into its own inversion, into the state form of workers' socialism" (p 79).
By the same "dialectic", Bukharin explains elsewhere that the system of one-man management, of appointment from above in the running of industry - a practice which became almost universal in the war communism period and was in reality a set-back resulting from the break-down of the industrial proletariat and the loss of its self-organisation -actually expresses a higher phase of revolutionary maturation. This is because it "does not rest on the principal change of relations of production but in the discovery of such a form of administration which guarantees maximum efficiency. The principle of far-reaching eligibility from below upward (usually even by the workers within the factories) is replaced by the principle of painstaking selection in dependence on technological and administrative personnel, on the competence and the reliability of the candidates" (p 130). In other words, since capitalist relations have already been abolished by the 'proletarian state', the military principle of "maximum efficiency" can replace the political principle of the self-education of the proletariat through its direct and collective participation in the running of the economy and the state.
And by the same dialectic, state coercion of the proletariat becomes the highest form of class self-activity: "It is obvious that this element of compulsion, which is here the self-compulsion of the working class, grows from the crystallised centre towards the significantly more amorphous and dispersed periphery. This is the conscious power of cohesion of the little parts of the working class, which, power represents for some categories, subjectively, an external pressure, which constitutes, for the entire working class, objectively, its accelerated self-organisation" (p156-7). By the "amorphous periphery", Bukharin means not simply the other, non-exploiting strata of society, but "the less revolutionary" strata of the working class itself, for whom there is "the necessity of compulsory discipline, the compulsory character of which is that much more tangible the less the internal voluntary discipline"(p156). It is certainly true that the working class, in a revolution, will have to practice a gigantic self-discipline, and that it will have to ensure that majority decisions are adhered to. But there can be no question of 'compelling' the more backward layers of the class to adhere to the communist project; and the experience of the Kronstadt tragedy has taught us that settling even the most acute conflicts within the class by violence can only weaken the proletariat's hold on society. Bukharin's dialectics, by contrast, already appear as an apology for an increasingly intolerable militarisation of the proletariat. Taken to their logical conclusion, they lead straight to the terrible error committed at Kronstadt, herein the "crystallised centre" - the party- state apparatus, which had increasingly divorced itself from the masses - imposed "compulsory discipline" on what it judged to be the "amorphous periphery", the "less revolutionary" layers of the proletariat - who were actually calling for the very necessary regeneration of the soviets and an end to the excesses of war communism.
After initially criticising the NEP, Bukharin soon became its most enthusiastic advocate. Just as the ETP tended to see war communism as the 'finally discovered' road to the new society, Bukharin's later writings more and more presented the NEP, with its pragmatic, cautious approach, as the exemplary model of the transition period. His sudden conversion to a kind of 'market socialism' has provoked a revival of interest in Bukharin among latter day bourgeois economists, repentant Stalinists and others, but naturally not in the authentically revolutionary writings of his earlier period. By 1924 Bukharin had gone even further: the NEP had already achieved socialism - socialism in a single country. At this point, Bukharin had begun to operate as Stalin's ally against the left, as his tame theoretician - even though, within a few years, Bukharin himself was to be crushed under the Stalinist juggernaut.
This rapid about-face is not quite so startling as it might appear. The apologia for war communism and NEP alike were based on significant concessions to the idea that some kind of socialism was being built within the confines of Russia, or at the very least that a "primitive socialist accumulation" (a term used in the ETP) was taking place. From here to the conclusion that socialism had already arrived was not altogether too dizzying a leap - although it needed the counter-revolution to act as a stepping stone.
Nonetheless, Bukharin's trajectory from the extreme left of the party in the 1915-19 period, to the extreme right after 1921, does need some explaining. In The Tragedy of Bukharin (1994), Donny Gluckstein approaches the question from the standpoint of the Trotskyist SWP. This is an extremely sophisticated work, and contains many criticisms of Bukharin's thought, including the ETP, which are formally identical to those made by the communist left. But the fundamentally leftist approach of Gluckstein's book reveals itself when, in answering the question about Bukharin's trajectory, it focuses on the question of Bukharin's 'philosophical' method, its tendency towards scholasticism, towards formal logic, towards posing rigid 'either/or' alternatives, as well as its penchant for Bogdanov's 'monist' philosophy and for amalgamating marxism with sociology. Thus, the jump from uncritical advocacy of war communism to the equally uncritical embracing of the NEP betrays a lack of dialectical thinking, an inability to see the complex and ever-changing nature of reality. By the same token, Bukharin's call for revolutionary war in the Brest-Litovsk debate is also based on a set of methodological errors, since it assumes that the Russian revolution was faced with an absolute and immediate choice between 'selling out' to German imperialism, or making a heroic if doomed gesture in front of the world proletariat; and just as the ETP had reduced the extension of the world revolution to little more than a concluding flourish, an afterthought to the creation of communist relations in Russia, so the Bukharin of 1918 had been prepared to sacrifice the entire proletarian bastion in Russia for a world revolution which was not yet an immediate reality and was thus treated as a kind of abstract ideal. Certainly, both Lenin and Trotsky made a number of incisive criticisms of Bukharin's method - some of Lenin's appear in his marginal notes to the ETP. But behind his emphasis on this point, Gluckstein has another agenda - proving that Bukharin's rigid either/or method was fundamentally that of left communism. The book's critique of Bukharin is thus a 'warning' against what happens when you mess around with left communist positions and politics.
We do not intend to refute Gluckstein's attack on the "theoretical roots of left communism" here. While there is undoubtedly a connection between Bukharin's political errors and some of his underlying 'philosophical' conceptions, the latter are by no means identical with left communism and are more often antithetical to it. In any case, it is much more instructive to consider Bukharin's over-all trajectory as a reflection of the course of the revolution in general. It is often the case that the 'personal' trajectory of a revolutionary has an almost symbolic relationship to the more general one. Trotsky, for example, was expelled from Russia in the wake of the defeat of the 1905 revolution, returned to lead the October victory, and was expelled again in 1929 when the counter- revolution had swept all before it. Bukharin's trajectory is different, but equally significant: his best contributions to marxism were in the years 1915-19, when the revolutionary wave was either building up or reaching its high point, and the Bolshevik party was acting as a real laboratory of revolutionary thought. But although, as we have mentioned, Bukharin's name was closely associated with the Left Communist group in 1918, he followed a different road from that of the other leading left communists after 1919. Bukharin's main bone of contention in 1918 had been the Brest-Litovsk treaty. Once this debate was closed, other committed 'lefts' trained their attention on the internal problems of the regime, particularly the danger of opportunism and bureaucratism in the party and the state. Some of these elements - such as Sapranov and V Smirnov - maintained and elaborated their criticisms throughout the period of degeneration and even into the depths of the counter-revolution. Bukharin, on the other hand, was to more and become a 'man of the state' - one might say, the 'theoretician of the state'. Certainly this trajectory explains the ambiguities and inconsistencies of the ETP, with its melange of radical theory and conservative apologia for the status quo, for at this point the Russian revolution itself had reached a watershed where both the upward movement and the downward movement were in contention. After 1921, the downward movement clearly predominated, and now Bukharin more and more became the spokesman and rationaliser of the process of degeneration, even though he became yet another of its victims in the end. Behind this personal history of intellectual decline lies the history of the Bolshevik party, which, the more it fused itself with the state, the more it became unable to play the role of a real political and theoretical avant-garde. The story of how the most far-seeing elements of the Bolshevik party, and of the international communist movement, resisted this course will have to be told in future articles in this series.
CDW
[1] In this same afterword, Bukharin also says that his work has been wrongly taken as a justification for the theory of the "offensive under all circumstances", which had a considerable following in the German party and which had contributed to the disaster of the March Action in 1921.
Nevertheless, there are certain connections, notably in the way that the ETP tends to present the decline of capitalism not as a whole epoch but as a final, once and for all death crisis, from which a "restoration of industry, of which the utopians of capitalism dream, is impossible" (p57). The theory of the offensive was based precisely on the idea that there was no prospect of any capitalist reconstruction and that the open crisis could only get worse and worse.
Perhaps more to the point, Bukharin's apocalyptic view of the crisis also lends support to his tendency to equate the collapse of capitalism with the emergence of communism. In the face of the bourgeoisie, Bukharin was right to insist that the proletarian revolution inevitably involved a certain level of social anarchy, of breakdown in the productive activities of society. But there is in the ETP a definite underestimation of the dangers posed to the proletariat if this process of breakdown goes too far - dangers that were very real in the Russia of 1920, where the working class had been decimated and to a certain extent decomposed by the ravages of the civil war. Certain passages of the book give the impression that the more the economy disintegrates, the more salutary this is, the more it is hastening the development of communist social relations.
The ruling class' speeches about the "good health" and perpetuity of its system of exploitation have been increasingly exposed by the numerous economic convulsions over the last 30 years: the recessions of 1974-75, of 1980-82 or the especially acute one of 1990-93; cataclysms on the stock market like that of October 1987, or the "Tequila effect" of 1994 etc. However, the swelling stream of bad economic news since August 1997 - the collapse of the Thai currency, the debacle of the Asiatic "tigers" and "dragons", the brutal purge of world stock markets; the bankruptcy of Russia, the fragile situation of Brazil and other "emerging" economies in Latin America, and above all the serious state of the world's second economy, Japan - constitutes the most serious episode in the historic crisis of capitalism. It clearly confirms the analysis of marxism and demonstrates the necessity for the overthrow of capitalism through the world proletarian revolution.
The form taken by the crisis over the last 30 years, above all in the main industrialised countries, has not been that of the brutal depression that occurred in the 1930's. What we have seen is a slow and progressive descent into the hell of unemployment and poverty, through successive recessions. At the same time, the worst ravages have been most concentrated in the countries of the periphery: Africa, South America, Asia that have sunk irremediably into a total morass of barbarism and decomposition.
For the bourgeoisie of the main industrialised countries, where the most important proletarian masses are concentrated, this hitherto unknown form taken by the historic crisis of capitalism has the advantage of concealing the death agony of capitalism and creating the illusion that its convulsions will be transitory, and that they will correspond to the cyclical crises typical of the previous century, which were followed by periods of intense development.
As a weapon in the struggle against such mystifications we are publishing a study of the last 30 years. On the one hand, it will demonstrate that the slow and escalating rhythm of the crisis has been the result of the state's "managing" the crisis by cheating the laws of the capitalist system (notably through the recourse to astronomical levels of debt, the likes of which have never been seen in the history of humanity) and on the other hand, that these policies are not any kind of solution to capitalism's incurable disease. The price of deferring its most catastrophic expressions in the most important countries is: increasingly explosive contradictions and the aggravation of the incurable cancer of world capitalism.
Crash or progressive collapse?
Marxism has made clear that capitalism has no solution to its historic crisis, a crisis that goes back to the First World War. Nevertheless, the form and causes of this crisis have been the object of discussion amongst the revolutionaries of the Communist Left[1]. Is the form that of the deflationary depression typical of the cyclical crisis of the ascendant period (between 1820 and 1913)? Or rather, is it one of a process of progressive degeneration during which the whole world economy collapses into an increasingly acute state of stagnation and decomposition?
In the 1920s, some tendencies in the KAPD put forward the "Theory of the crash" according to which the historic crisis of capitalism would take the form of an irreversible brutal collapse that would impose on the proletariat the need to make the revolution. Some Bordigist currents who think that a sudden crisis will force the proletariat to resort to revolutionary action also express this vision.
We cannot enter here into a detailed analysis of this theory. However, it is to clear that the evolution of capitalism since 1914 has disproved it at the political as much as at the economic level. Historical experience has confirmed that the bourgeoisie is capable of moving mountains to prevent the spontaneous and sudden crash of its system of production. The problem of the outcome of the historic crisis of capitalism is not strictly economic but above all and essentially political, dependent on the evolution of the class struggle:
* Will the proletariat develop its struggles towards the imposition of its revolutionary dictatorship which will rescue humanity from the present morass and lead to communism as a new mode of production that overcomes and resolves the insoluble contradictions of capitalism?
* Will the survival of the system plunge humanity into barbarity and definitive destruction, be it through generalised world war, or through the slow agony of progressive and systematic decomposition[2]?
The bourgeoisie has responded to the permanent crisis of its system with the universal tendency of state capitalism. State capitalism is not only an economic response, but also a political one, as much a necessity for the carrying out of imperialist war as for confronting the proletariat. From the economic point of view, state capitalism constitutes an effort not so much at overcoming or solving this crisis, but at managing and slowing it[3].
Just as the proletariat's international revolutionary wave of 1917-23 made clear the threat to its system at the decisive political level, so the brutal depression of 1929 demonstrated to the bourgeoisie the grave dangers that its historical crisis contained at the economic level. The bourgeoisie did not give up on either of these two fronts. It developed the totalitarian form of its state to serve as a defensive bastion against the proletarian threat and against the economic contradictions of its system of exploitation. This totalitarian state expressed itself on the economic level as the general tendency to state capitalism, which took different forms: Nazi, Stalinist, and "democratic".
In the la 30 years, marked as much by the open reappearance of the historic crisis of capitalism as by the rebirth of the proletarian struggle, we have seen the bourgeoisie perfect and generalise its state mechanisms for managing the economic crisis in order to avoid its abrupt and uncontrolled explosion, at least in the main industrial concentrations (Europe, North America, Japan) which is where the historic outcome of the incurable crisis of capitalism will be determined[4].
At its formation, our Current stated that "At given moments, the confluence of some of these indicators could trigger a massive slump in a given national capital such as Britain, Italy, Portugal, or Spain. This is a possibility that we don't dismiss. However, although such a collapse would give an irreparable blow to the world economy (British assets and investments abroad alone amount to £20 billion), the world capitalist system could still drag on as long as a modicum of production were maintained in some advanced countries such as the US, Germany, Japan and the Eastern European countries. All such events of course lend 10 engulf the whole system, and crises are inevitably world crises today, But for the reasons we have outlined above, we have reason to believe that the crisis will be drawn-out - extremely convulsive and with jagged curves, but more like a snowballing effect than a steep sudden fall. Even the disintegration of a national economy will not necessarily send all the capitalists to hang themselves, as Rosa Luxemburg remarked in a slightly different context. For this to happen, the personification of national capital, the state, must be strangled by none other than the revolutionary proletariat"[5].
Similarly, after the violent economic events of the 1980s we showed that "the capitalist machine has not completely collapsed. Despite the record number of bankruptcies, despite the increasingly frequent and serious cracks in the system, the profit machine continues to junction, concentrating new and gigantic fortunes - the product of the carnage among different capitals - and boasts with cynical arrogance of the benefits of ‘liberalism'".[6]
A ruling class does not commit suicide or lock up shop and give the keys to the class that is replacing it. We can see this with the feudal class which after a furious resistance made a pact with the bourgeoisie that gave it a place in the new order. It will be even less the case with the bourgeoisie which knows full well that it can expect nothing but its own disappearance from the social order represented by the proletariat.
As much for the mystification and defeat of the proletariat as to keep its economic system afloat, it is necessary that members of the bourgeoisie do not become demoralised and throw in the towel. This means that the state has to maintain at all costs the economic edifice, to give it the best possible appearance of normality and effectiveness, in order to assure the minimum of confidence and credibility in the economy.
At all events, the crisis is the best ally of the proletariat for the completion of its revolutionary mission. However, this is not something spontaneous and mechanical, but takes place through the development of its struggle and its consciousness. If the proletariat is to develop its reflection on the fundamental causes of the crisis the groups of the Communist Left have to carry out a tenacious and obstinate struggle to show the reality of the death agony of capitalism and denounce all the efforts of state capitalism to avoid the crisis through, slowing it down, hiding it, deflecting it from the nerve centres of world capitalism on to the more peripheral regions where the proletariat has less social weight.
Managing the crisis
The notion of "managing the crisis" to use the terms of the Report from our last International Congress[7], is crucial. Since 1967, world capitalism has responded to the open reappearance of its historic crisis through a policy of managing the crisis, which is central to understanding both the course of economic evolution over this period, and the success the bourgeoisie has had until now in hiding the gravity and magnitude of the crisis from the proletariat.
This policy of managing the crisis constitutes the most finished expression of the general historical tendency to state capitalism. In reality over the last 30 years the Western states have developed a practice of manipulating the law of value, of massive and generalised debt, of authoritarian state intervention towards economic agents and the productive process, of tricks with money, foreign trade and public debt, which make the state planning methods of the Stalinist bureaucracies look like child's play. All of the Western bourgeoisie's chatter about the "market economy", the "play of free market forces", the "superiority of liberalism" and the like is in reality an enormous mystification. For the last 70 years, as the Communist Left has affirmed, there have not been two "economic systems", one of them "a planned economy" and the other a "free economy", but one system: capitalism, which in its long drawn out death agony is sustained by increasingly enveloping and totalitarian state intervention.
This state intervention to manage the crisis, that seeks to adapt itself to it and seeks to slow it down and postpone it, has allowed the main industrial countries to avoid a brutal collapse, a general disintegration of the system. However, it has neither solved the crisis nor resolved any of its most acute expressions such as unemployment or inflation. The only achievement of 30 years of "managing the crisis" is a kind of organised descent towards the abyss, a chance for the planned fall through successive recessions whose only real result has been to indefinitely prolong the suffering insecurity and desperation of the working class and the immense majority of the world's population. On the one hand, the working class of the great industrial centres has been subjected to a systematic policy of gradual but progressive cuts in its wages, its living conditions, its stability of employment, its very survival. On the other hand, the great majority of the world's population, which lives in misery in the enormous periphery that surrounds the nerve centres of capitalism, has been submerged in a situation of barbarity, hunger and death that could well be classed as the greatest genocide ever suffered by humanity.
This policy of managing the crisis however, is the only one possible for the whole of world capitalism, the only one that can keep it afloat even if it is at the price of leaving increasingly large parts of its own economic body to fall into the abyss. The most important and decisive countries from the imperialist and economic point of view, but above all for the confrontation between the classes, concentrate all their efforts on deflecting the crisis onto the weaker countries, with less resources faced with its devastating effects and with less importance in the struggle against the proletariat. Thus, in the 1980's, a large part of Africa, a good slice of South and Latin America and a series of Asian countries collapsed. Since 1989, it has been the turn of the countries of Eastern Europe, Central Asia etc, which until then had been subject to the domination of that giant with feet of clay called Russia. Now it is the turn of the former Asian "dragons" and "tigers", that in the case of Indonesia is confronted with the most brutal and rapid fall of any country's economy for 80 years.
We have had a lot of talk from politicians, union leaders, or "experts" in "economic models", about "appropriate economic policies" and "solutions to the crisis". The harsh reality of the crisis over the last 30 years has shown up all this talk for what it is: unutterable stupidity, or the vulgar tricks of mountebanks. The "Swedish model of the social market economy" is no longer heard about, the "Japanese model" has been hurriedly withdrawn from the propaganda catalogues, the "German model" has been discreetly consigned to the museum, the endlessly repeated scratched record of the "success" of the Asian "tigers" and "dragons" has been dropped from the ideological jukebox in the course of a few months. In practice the only possible policy for all governments, be they Right wing, Left wing, dictatorial or "democratic", "liberal" or "interventionist", is to manage the crisis, the planned and most gradual possible descent into the inferno.
This policy of managing and accompanying the crisis cannot have the effect of keeping world capitalism in a static situation, where the brutal contradictions of the regime of exploitation can be perpetually contained and limited. Such "stability" is impossible because of the nature of capitalism itself, the dynamism of its internal contradictions that unceasingly push it to seek the valorisation of capital, to compete for the re-division of the world market. For these reasons, the policy of palliatives, of slowing the crisis has the perverse effect of aggravating, making more violent and profound capitalism's contradictions. The "success" of capitalism's economic policies over the last 30 years can be reduced to the avoiding of the worst of the crisis but, meanwhile, the time-bomb has increased in size, it has become more explosive, more dangerous, more destructive:
* Thirty years of debt have increased the overall fragility of the financial mechanisms that make their use for managing the crisis much more difficult and dangerous.
* Thirty years of generalised overproduction has meant successive amputations of the industrial and agricultural apparatus of the world economy that reduces the size of the market and makes this overproduction much more serious and burdensome.
* Thirty years of postponement and dosage of unemployment mean that today it is much more serious and causes an endless chain of lay-offs, the casualisation of work, underemployment etc.
All of capitalism's cheating of its own economic laws means that the crisis has not taken the form of a sudden collapse of production as happened in the cyclical crisis of ascendant capitalism last century or as we saw in the depression of 1929. Nevertheless, the crisis has taken a more widespread form, more destructive for the living conditions of the proletariat and the whole of humanity: a descent by successive, progressively more brutal, stages towards a situation of increasingly generalised stagnation and decomposition.
The convulsions that have been taking place since August 1997 mark a new stage in the descent towards the abyss. We can have no doubt that this is the worst episode of the last 30 years, the biggest step that capitalism has taken in this descent. In order to better grasp its effects on the living conditions of the proletariat and on the aggravation of the capitalist crisis it seems to us necessary to go back over the entire period.
In International Review no.8 (article on "The international political situation"), we showed that capitalism's policy of "managing and accompanying the crisis" has three axes: "Deflecting the crisis onto other countries, the intermediate classes, and the proletariat". These three axes have marked the policy of managing the crisis and had been defined in the different stages of the collapse of the system.
The policy of the 1970s
In 1967, the devaluation of the pound sterling was one of the first clear signs of a new open crisis of capitalism after the years of relative prosperity granted by the reconstruction of the world economy following the enormous destruction of the Second World War. There was the first shock of unemployment that rose to 2 % in some European countries. Governments responded with policies of increased public spending which rapidly hid the situation and allowed a recovery of production during 1969-71.
In 1971, the crisis took the form of violent monetary storms concentrated around the world's main currency: the dollar. The Nixon government was able to postpone the problem temporarily, but this had serious consequences for the future evolution of capitalism: it dismantled the Bretton Woods Agreement adopted in 1944, and which since then had regulated the world economy.
Bretton Woods itself definitively abandoned the gold standard and replaced it with the dollar standard. At the time, this already marked a step towards the weakening of the world monetary system and a stimulus to the policy of debt. In its 'ascendant period capitalism tied currencies to the reserves of gold and silver, which established a more or less coherent correspondence between the extension of production and the monetary mass in circulation avoiding or at least alleviated the uncontrolled recourse to credit. Linking currencies to the dollar standard eliminated this control mechanism and, leaving aside the substantial advantage it gave to American capitalism over its competitors, it involved a considerable risk of monetary and credit instability.
This threat remained latent as long as reconstruction provided the room for the sale of continually expanding production. However, it exploded from 1967 when this margin for manoeuvre was dramatically reduced. The abandoning of the dollar standard and its replacement by IMF Special Drawing Rights allowed each state to issue its currency without any guarantee beyond itself. The threat of instability and the uncontrolled growth of debt became more tangible and dangerous.
The 1972-73 "boom" not only hid these problems but brought with it one of the illusions which capitalism has used to disguise its mortal crisis: in these two years production reached record levels. These were essentially based on the unleashing of consumption.
Drunk with this ephemeral "success", capitalism boasted about overcoming the crisis and the failure of marxism in its assertion of the system's mortal collapse. These proclamations were soon unmasked by the so-called "oil crisis" of 1974-75, the worst since the Second World War: levels of production in the industrialised countries fell by between 2% and 4%.
The response to this new convulsion was based around two axes:
* the striking growth of public deficits in the industrialised countries, especially in the United States;
* but above all, the enormous growth of debt in the Third World and the countries of the East. The years between 1974-1977 saw what the biggest wave of lending in history was then: $78 billion were loaned to Third World countries, not including those that belonged to the Russian bloc. To give some idea of the unprecedented nature of the level of these loans one only bas to compare them to those issued to European countries between 1948-53 under the Marshall Plan: a total of $15 billion which was already a record for the time.
These measures brought about a recovery of production although this never reached the levels of 1972-73. However, the cost was the explosion of inflation which in some central countries surpassed 20% (in Italy it reached 30%). Inflation is a characteristic feature of decadent capitalism[8], due to the immense mass of unproductive spending that the system bears in order to survive: war production, hypertrophy of the state apparatus, gigantic financial costs, advertising etc. These costs are incomparably greater than the costs of circulation and growth typical of the ascendant period. However, in the mid-1970s, this permanent and structural inflation became galloping inflation because of the accumulation of public deficits brought about by the uncontrolled emission of money without any counter-part.
The evolution of the world economy in the second half of the 1970s oscillated between recovery and recession. Each effort to revive the economy lead to the outburst of inflation (which the capitalists called "overbeating"), which meant that governments bad to impose a "freeze" on growth by increasing interest rates, sudden reductions in the rate of circulation of money, etc, which led to recession. This clearly demonstrated the general impasse of the capitalist economy due to over-production.
The balance-sheet of the 1970s
After this brief description of economic evolution during the 1970s, we can draw some conclusions at two levels:
* the economic situation,
* the decline in working class living conditions .
The general economic situation
1. Levels of production were high. The average level of growth in production during the decade in the 24 countries of the OECD was 4.1 %. During the 1972-73 boom it reached 8%, and even 10% in Japan. Nevertheless, it is possible to see a clear tendency towards decline in comparison to the previous decade:
Average levels of production in the countries of the OECD
1960-70 | 5.6% |
1970-73 | 5.5% |
1976-79 | 4% |
2. Massive lending to the Third World allowed the exploitation and incorporation into the world market of the last, although very small, pre-capitalist vestiges. We can thus say that the world market underwent a very limited expansion, as it bad during the reconstruction period after 1945.
3. The whole productive sector grew, including the traditional sectors such as ship-building, mining, iron and steel that experienced a great expansion between 1972-78. However, this expansion was their swan song: from 1978 the signs of increasing market saturation led to the infamous "restructuring" (euphemism concealing massive lay-offs) that began in 1979 and made their mark in the following decade.
4. The phases of recovery affected the whole world economy more or less evenly. With a few exceptions (a significant example was the decline in production in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay) all countries benefited from the increase of production. There were no countries "disconnected" from recovery, such a we saw in the 1980s.
5.The price of raw materials maintained a constant tendency to increase, which peaked with the speculative oil boom (between 1972 and 19 after which the tendency began to reverse.
6. Armaments production took off in relation to the 1960 and increased spectacularly from 1976.
7. From 1975 levels of debt accelerated strongly. although in comparison to what was to come they were minuscule. They were characterised by:
* fairly moderate growth in the central countries (although from 1977 there was a spectacular . e in the United States during the Carter administration);
* but a massive increase in the countries of the Third World.
"Underdeveloped" countries' debts
(source: World Bank)
1970 | $70,000 M |
1975 | $170,000 M |
1980 | $580,000 M |
8. The banking system was solid: loans (for consumption and investment, to families, businesses, and institutions) were subject to a series of very rigorous controls and guarantee .
9. Speculation was still a limited phenomenon although the feverish speculation in oil (the famous petrodollars) heralded a tendency towards its generalisation in the following decade.
The situation of the working class
1. Unemployment remained relatively limited although it grew constantly from 1975. In the 24 OECD countries, there were 7 million unemployed in 1968; by 1979, the figure had risen to 18 million.
2. There were significant nominal increases in wages (these reached 20-25 %) and in countries like Italy sliding wage scales index-linked to inflation were introduced. This growth in wages was misleading since globally wages lost ground faced with galloping inflation
3. Permanent jobs massively predominated and in the most important countries there was a strong growth in public sector jobs.
4. Social spending, subsidies, social security systems, housing, health and education benefits, all grew significantly.
5. During the decade, the decline in living conditions was real but fairly smooth. The bourgeoisie, alerted by the historic rebirth of the class struggle and enjoying considerable room for manoeuvre on the economic terrain, preferred to concentrate its attacks on the weakest sectors of the national capital rather than on the working class. The decade of the 1970's was the "years of illusion" characterised by the political dynamic of "the left in power".
In the next part of this article we will draw a balance-sheet of the 1980s and 1990s which will allow us on the one hand to evaluate the violent degradation of the economy and the situation of the working class and on the other to comprehend more clearly the sombre perspectives of the new descent towards the inferno, that the period opened up by August 1997 contains.
Adalen
[1] There are essentially two theories as to the cause of the crisis: the saturation of the world market and the tendency for the rate of profit to fall. See in relation to this question the articles in International Review nos. 13, 16, 23, 29, 30,76 and 83.
[2] See International Review no.62 "The decomposition of capitalism".
[3] See International Review no.21 "On state capitalism" and International Review No 23 "The proletariat in decadent capitalism".
[4] See International Review no.31 "The proletariat of Western Europe at the centre of the class struggle".
[5] See the article on the international situation in International Review no. 1.
[6] See International Review no.56.
[7] See the Report we published in International Review no.92.
[8] See our pamphlet The decadence of capitalism
Ever since the end of the 1960s and the formation of the groups which were to create the ICC in 1975, we have been subjected to a dual criticism. For some - generally the various organisations that go under the name of “International Communist Party”, directly descended from the Italian Left - we are idealists on the question of class consciousness and organisational anarchists. For others - usually from anarchism or the councilist current which reject, or at least under-estimate the need for political organisation and a communist party - we are supposed to be “partyists” and “Leninists”. The former base their assertions on our rejection of the “classical” position of the workers’ movement on the seizure of power by the communist party during the dictatorship of the proletariat, and our non-monolithic view of the functioning of a political organisation. The latter reject our rigorous conception of the revolutionary militant, and our constant efforts to build a united, centralised international organisation.
Today, another criticism of the councilist variety, but more virulent, has made its appearance: the ICC is degenerating, has become a “Leninist”[1] [14] sect, and is on the point of abandoning its own platform and political principles. We defy anyone to prove this lie, which cannot be justified by anything in our publications or our programmatic texts. The outrageousness of this denunciation - we are no longer in the realm of criticism - cannot be doubted by anybody who reads the ICC’s press seriously and without bias. However, the fact that this lie is put about by ex-militants of the organisation, might lead the inattentive or inexperienced reader to conclude that “there is no smoke without fire”. In fact, these ex-militants have joined the milieu of what we call “political parasitism”.[2] [15] This milieu is opposed to our constant fight for the international regroupment of revolutionary forces, and for the unity of the proletarian political movement in the historic struggle against capitalism. Consequently, it tries to undermine and weaken both our fight against informalism and dilettantism in militant activity and our ardent defence of an internationally united and centralised organisation.
Have we become Leninists as our critics and denouncers claim? This is a serious accusation, and we cannot just run away from it. But to answer it seriously, we must first know what we are talking about. What is “Leninism”? What has it represented in the history of the workers’ movement?
“Leninism” and the cult of Lenin appeared at the same time, just after Lenin’s death in 1924, following two years of illness which drastically reduced his political activity. The ebb of the international revolutionary wave which had put an end to World War I and the isolation of the proletariat in Russia are the fundamental causes for the rising power of the counter-revolution. The main signs of this process were the annihilation of the power of the workers’ councils, and of all proletarian life within them, the bureaucratisation and the rise of Stalinism within Russia itself, and especially within the Bolshevik Party. Dramatic political mistakes - in particular, for example, the identification of the party and the proletariat with the Russian state which justified the repression of Kronstadt - played a major part in the development of both the bureaucracy and Stalinism. Lenin is not exempt from criticism, even though he was often the one best able to oppose the process of bureaucratisation, as he did in 1920 (against Trotsky and many of the Bolshevik leaders who advocated the militarisation of the trades unions), and at the end of his life when he denounced Stalin’s growing power and proposed to Trotsky to form an alliance, or a bloc as he said, “against bureaucratism in general, and against the organisation bureau [under Stalin’s thumb] in particular”.[3] [16] Only once death had ended his political authority did the counter-revolutionary bureaucratic tendency develop the personality cult of Lenin:[4] [17] Petrograd was rechristened Leningrad, his body mummified, and above all an ideology of “Leninism” and “Marxism-Leninism” was developed. The troika of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev thus aimed to appropriate Lenin’s “legacy” as a means of struggle against Trotsky within the Russian party, and of seizing power within the Communist International. The Stalinist offensive to take control of the different communist parties was based around the “Bolshevisation” of these parties and the exclusion of militants who refused to accept the new policy.
In his 1939 biography of Stalin, Boris Souvarine emphasises the opposition between Lenin and “Leninism”: “There is no continuity, properly speaking, between the old Bolshevism and the new “Leninism”.[5] [18] This is how he defines “Leninism”: “Stalin made himself its first classical author, with his pamphlet Foundations of Leninism, an anthology of lectures to the “red students” of the Sverdlov communist university at the beginning of April 1924. In this laborious compilation, where uninspired sentences alternate with quotations, we search in vain for the critical thought of Lenin. Everything living, relative, conditional, and dialectic in his work, becomes passive, absolute, catechising, and littered moreover with contradictions”.[6] [19]
“Leninism” is the “theory” of Socialism in one country, utterly opposed to Lenin’s internationalism.
The advent of “Leninism” marks the victory of the opportunist course charted by the Communist International since its 3rd Congress, in particular with the tactic of the United Front and the slogan of “going to the masses”, as isolation weighed more and more heavily on revolutionary Russia. The errors of the Bolsheviks were a negative factor that encouraged this opportunist course. It is worth recalling here that the incorrect position on “the party holding power” was shared by the whole revolutionary movement of the time, including Rosa Luxemburg and the German Left. It was only in the early 1920s that the KAPD began to point out the contradiction inherent in a revolutionary party taking power and identifying itself with the new state created by the victorious insurrection.
Various oppositions began to develop against this opportunist, then frankly counter-revolutionary gangrene. The most coherent were the left oppositions in Russia, Italy, Germany and Holland, which remained faithful to internationalism and October 1917. They fought against the increasing opportunism of the CI, and were expelled one after the other during the 1920s. Those of them that managed to maintain an organised existence opposed the practical implications of “Leninism”, in other words the policy of “Bolshevisation” of the communist parties. Especially, they fought against the replacement of organisation in local sections, in other words on a territorial, geographical basis, by organisation in factory cells, which ended up by regrouping militants on a corporatist basis and helped to empty the parties of any really communist life, dependent as it is on general political debate and discussion.
The propagation of “Leninism” sharpened the struggle between Stalinism and the left oppositions. It was accompanied by the development of the theory of “socialism in one country”, which is a complete break with Lenin’s intransigent internationalism, and with the experience of October. This rise of opportunism marked the definitive victory of the counter-revolution. By abandoning internationalism and adopting “socialism in one country” as a part of its programme, the CI died - as an International - at its 6th Congress in 1928.
In 1925, the adoption by the CI’s 5th Congress of the “Theses on Bolshevisation” revealed the Stalinist bureaucracy’s increasing grip on both the CI and the Communist Parties. Itself a product of the Stalinist counter-revolution, Bolshevisation became the main organisational vector of the CI’s member parties’ accelerated degeneration. The increasing use of repression and state terror in Russia, and the expulsions from the other parties, show how bitter and fierce was the struggle. For Stalinism, there still existed a serious danger of the formation of a strong international opposition around Trotsky, who alone would have been able to regroup the major part of the surviving revolutionary forces. This opposition stood against the policy of opportunism, and had every chance of success in wresting the party leaderships from Stalinism, as we can see from the examples of Italy and Germany.
One of the aims of “Bolshevisation” was thus to erect an opposition between Lenin and the other great figures of communism from the other left currents - between Lenin and Trotsky, of course, but also between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg: “A real Bolshevisation is impossible without overcoming the errors of Luxemburgism. “Leninism” must be the unique compass for the communist parties throughout the world. Anything that is distanced from “Leninism” is also distanced from marxism”.[7] [20]
Stalinism thus tore apart the unity between Lenin and Luxemburg, between the Bolshevik tradition and the other lefts that emerged from the 2nd International. In the wake of Stalinism, the social-democratic parties also helped to erect a water-tight barrier between the “good democratic” Rosa Luxemburg, and the “bad dictatorial” Lenin. Nor does this belong solely to the past. The unity between these two great revolutionaries is still subject to attack. Hypocritical praise is heaped on Luxemburg’s “farsightedness” for her criticism of the Bolsheviks and the Russian revolution, as often as not by the direct political descendants of her social-democrat assassins, in other words by today’s socialist parties. Especially by the German socialist party, doubtless on the grounds that Rosa Luxemburg was... German!
This is yet another confirmation of the alliance and common interests of the “classic” forces of capitalism, and the Stalinist counter-revolution. In particular, it confirms the alliance between Stalinism and social-democracy to falsify the history of the workers’ movement and to destroy marxism. We can bet that the bourgeoisie will not miss the opportunity to celebrate - in its own way - the 80th anniversary of the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and the Spartakists in Berlin in 1919.
“It is a painful spectacle for revolutionary militants to see the assassins of those who made the October Revolution allied to the assassins of the Spartakists and daring to commemorate the death of these proletarian leaders. Those who have heaped betrayal on betrayal to lead the international counter-revolution have no right to talk of Rosa Luxemburg, whose life was one of intransigence, struggle against opportunism, and revolutionary firmness”.[8] [21]
Today, most of the elements of the parasitic milieu find it all the easier to contribute to these falsifications of history, in that they hang about with the anarchists, another milieu which specialises in attacking Lenin and everything he represents.
Unfortunately, most of the truly proletarian groups and currents are lacking in political clarity. By its theoretical weaknesses and political mistakes, councilism makes its own little contribution to the wall that the ruling class would like to erect between the Bolshevik party and the Dutch and German lefts, between Lenin on the one hand, Luxemburg on the other. In the same way, their political weaknesses - or aberrations, when it comes to the theory of “invariance” dear to the Bordigists - mean that the Bordigist Groups and even Battaglia Comunista (PCInt) do not understand the importance of defending Lenin, Luxemburg, and all the left fractions that came out of the Communist International.
It is important that we remember the unity and continuity of the struggle waged not just by the individuals Lenin and Luxemburg, but by the Bolshevik party and the other lefts within the 2nd International. Despite their debates and disagreements, they were always on the same side of the barricades when the working class was confronted with decisive events. Lenin and Luxemburg were the leaders of the revolutionary left at the Stuttgart Congress of the Socialist International (1907), when together they successfully put forward an amendment to the resolution on the attitude of socialists to war, calling on them “by every means possible to use the economic and political crisis provoked by the war to awaken the people and thereby to hasten the overthrow of capitalist domination”; Lenin even entrusted Rosa Luxemburg with the Russian party’s mandate in the discussion on this question. Faithful to their internationalist struggle within their respective parties, they stood against the imperialist war. Luxemburg’s Spartakist current took part, with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, in the internationalist conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal (1915 and 1916). With all the lefts, they were wholeheartedly enthusiastic in their support for the Russian revolution:
“The Russian Revolution is the mightiest event of the World War (...) That the Bolsheviks have based their policy entirely upon the world proletarian revolution is the clearest proof of their political farsightedness and firmness of principle, and of the bold scope of their policies (...) The party of Lenin was the only one which grasped the mandate and duty of a truly revolutionary party and which, by the slogan “All power in the hands of the proletariat and peasantry”, ensured the continued development of the revolution (...) Moreover, the Bolsheviks immediately set as the aim of this seizure of power a complete, far-reaching revolutionary programme: not the safeguarding of bourgeois democracy, but a dictatorship of the proletariat for the purpose of realising socialism. Thereby they won for themselves the imperishable historic distinction of having for the first time proclaimed the final aim of socialism as the direct programme of practical politics”.[9] [22]
Does this mean that there were no differences between these great figures of the workers’ movement? Obviously not. Nor does it mean that we should ignore them. But if we are to learn from these differences, then we must first be able to recognise and defend what united them: the class struggle, the consistent revolutionary struggle against capitalism, the bourgeoisie, and all its political forces. Luxemburg’s text, that we have quoted above, is an unsparing criticism of the policy of the Bolshevik party in Russia. But she is careful to establish the framework within which her criticisms are to be understood: solidarity and common struggle with the Bolsheviks. She violently denounces the opposition by Kautsky and the Mensheviks to the proletarian insurrection. And to avoid any ambiguity as to her class position, or any distortion of her words, she ends thus: “In Russia the problem could only be posed. It could not be solved in Russia. And in this sense, the future everywhere belongs to “Bolshevism””.
The defence of these comrades, and their class unity, is a task bequeathed to us by the Italian Left, and one which we intend to continue. Lenin and Luxemburg belong to the revolutionary proletariat. Here is how the Italian fraction of the communist left understood the defence of this legacy against Stalinist “Leninism” and social-democracy:
“But alongside this brilliant proletarian leader [Lenin], stand the equally imposing figures of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. These products of an international struggle against revisionism and opportunism, expression of the German proletariat’s revolutionary will, belong to us and not to those who want to make Rosa a standard-bearer against Lenin and the Party, or to make Liebknecht the standard-bearer for an anti-militarism which in reality finds expression in votes for arms spending in the different “democratic” countries”.[10] [23]
We have not yet answered the accusation that we have changed position on Lenin. However, the reader can already see clearly and concretely that we are resolutely opposed to “Leninism”, and that we remain faithful to the tradition of the left fractions from which we spring, and in particular of the Italian fraction of the 1930s. We try to apply the method which struggles for the defence of the historic unity and continuity of the workers’ movement, against “Leninism”, and against all the attempts to divide and oppose its different marxist fractions. Against abstract and mechanical oppositions made from quotations taken out of context, we situate the positions adopted by different currents, their debates and polemics, within their real historical context, inside the workers’ movement - in other words within the same camp. This is the method that marxism has already tried to apply. This is the very opposite of “Leninism”, which indeed is completely rejected by those who really follow Lenin’s example today. It is amusing to see that those who continue at least this aspect of the Stalinist “method” today, include precisely those who accuse the ICC of becoming “Leninist”!
The contemporary adepts of the “method” of “Leninism”, at least in this respect, can easily be identified in different milieus. It is fashionable among the anarcho-councilists, and amongst the parasitic elements, to try - fraudulently - to appropriate the Dutch Left, and to oppose it to the other left fractions, and of course to Lenin. Just as Stalin and his “Leninism” betrayed Lenin, so these elements betray the tradition of the Dutch Left and its great figures like Anton Pannekoek - hailed with respect and admiration by Lenin in State and Revolution - or like Herman Gorter, who was swift to translate this marxist classic as early as 1918. Before becoming a councilist theoretician during the 1930s, Pannekoek was one of the foremost elements of the marxist wing of the 2nd International, alongside Luxemburg and Lenin. Because of his councilist critiques of the Bolsheviks from the 1930s onwards, it is easier to distort Pannekoek’s place in the workers’ movement than it is, for example, with Bordiga. Today, Pannekoek is the object of particular attention aimed at eradicating any memory of his membership of the Communist International, or of his enthusiastic and resolute support for the October Revolution. The Dutch and German Left, as much as the Russians and Italians within the CI, belong to the proletariat and to communism. In identifying our origins with all the left fractions that emerged from the CI, we are also using the method of the Dutch Left, like all the Lefts:
“The World War and the revolution which it has engendered have shown that there is only one tendency in the workers’ movement which really leads the workers towards communism. Only the extreme left of the social-democratic parties, the marxist fractions, the party of Lenin in Russia, of Bela Kun in Hungary, of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in Germany, have found the one correct path.
The tendency which always aimed at the violent destruction of capitalism, which in the evolutionary period used the political struggle and parliamentary action for revolutionary propaganda and to organise the proletariat, is today using state power for the revolution. The same tendency has also found the means to break the capitalist state, to transform it into a socialist state, and to build communism: the workers’ councils, which contain within themselves all political and economic forces; the same tendency, finally, has discovered and established forever what the class did not know until now: the organisation by which the working class can overthrow and replace capitalism”.[11] [24]
Even after the KAPD was excluded from the CI in 1921, it tried to remain faithful to its principles, and in solidarity with the Bolsheviks:
“Despite the exclusion of our tendency from the Moscow Congress, we remain in complete solidarity with the Russian Bolsheviks (...) We remain in solidarity not just with the Russian proletariat, but also with its Bolshevik leaders, even though we must vigorously criticise their behaviour within international communism”.[12] [25]
In defending the unity and continuity of, and tracing our origins “to the successive contributions of the Communist League of Marx and Engels (1847-52), the three Internationals (the International Workingmen’s Association, 1864-72, the Second International, 1889-1914, the Communist International, 1919-28), the left fractions which detached themselves from the degenerating Third International in the years 1920-30, in particular the German, Dutch and Italian Lefts”,[13] [26] the ICC is remaining faithful to the marxist tradition within the workers’ movement. In particular, it is part of the constant and unified struggle of the “tendency” defined by Gorter: the left fractions within the Second and Third Internationals. In this sense, we are faithful to Lenin, to Rosa Luxemburg, to Pannekoek and Gorter, and to the tradition of the left fractions during the 1930s, Bilan first and foremost.
Faithful to the left fractions who fought Stalinism in the most difficult conditions, we reject any accusation of “Leninism”. And we also denounce our accusers: they use the same method as Stalin to identify “Leninism” with Lenin. Ever armed with the Stalinist “method”, they do not even try to base their accusations on real, concrete evidence - such as our written or verbal positions - but rather on hear-say and lies. They claim that our organisation has become a sect, and is degenerating, in order to drive away all those elements who are trying to find a consistent revolutionary political perspective. The accusation is all the more slanderous, in that behind “Leninism” hides the accusation of Stalinism, when it is not declared outright.
The denunciation of our supposed “Leninism” is essentially based on tittle-tattle concerning our internal functioning, in particular on the claimed impossibility of debate within the organisation. We have already answered these accusations,[14] [27] and will not return to them here. Suffice it to return the compliment, after we have shown who are the real followers of the non-marxist, falsely revolutionary, “Leninist” method.
Once we have rejected the accusation of “Leninism”, a much more serious accusation remains: have we abandoned our critical spirit towards Lenin on the question of political organisation? Has the ICC changed position on Lenin, specifically as far as the role and functioning of the political organisation and the party is concerned? For our part, we see no discontinuity in the ICC’s position on Lenin and the organisational question between our beginnings in the 1970s, and 1999.
We stand alongside Lenin in the struggle against economism and Menshevism. This is nothing new. We are in agreement with the method used and the critique developed against economism and the Mensheviks. And we consider that we agree also with most of the different points developed by Lenin. There is nothing new here.
We maintain our criticism of some of Lenin’s positions on the organisation question: “Some of the ideas defended by Lenin (notably in One step forward, two steps back) on the hierarchical and “military” nature of the organisation, which have been exploited by Stalinists to justify their methods, are to be rejected”.[15] [28] We have not changed position on these criticisms either. However, the question deserves an answer in greater depth, both to understand the real extent of Lenin’s mistakes and to understand the historical significance of the debates within the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).
This question is a central one for revolutionaries, and to treat it seriously - including Lenin’s errors - we must remain faithful to the method and lessons of the different communist lefts, as we have emphasised in the first part of this article. We refuse to pick out the bits we like in the workers’ movement and ignore the bits we dislike. Such an attitude is a-historical, and worthy only of those who presume to judge, 100 years on, a historical process made of hesitations, successes and failures, numerous debates and contributions, at the price of immense sacrifice and difficult political struggle. This is true for theoretical and political questions. It is equally true for questions of organisation. The fact that Plekhanov turned chauvinist in World War I and ended as a Menshevik, that Trotsky ended up in “Trotskyism”, or that Pannekoek ended in councilism, deprives their political and theoretical contributions of none of their richness, relevance, or militant interest. The shameful deaths of the Second and Third Internationals, the Bolshevik party’s end in Stalinism, in no way diminish either their role in the history of the workers’ movement, or the validity of their organisational gains.
Have we changed our opinion on this? Not in the least: “There exist organisational gains just as there are theoretical gains, and one conditions the other in a permanent way”.[16] [29]
Just as Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism of the Bolsheviks in The Russian Revolution must be situated within the context of the class unity between her and the Bolsheviks, so our criticisms of Lenin on the organisational question must be placed in the framework of our unity with Lenin in his struggle - both before and after the formation of the Bolshevik fraction, for the construction of the party. This position is not new, and there is nothing surprising about it. Today, as we “repeated” in 1991, “we reaffirm[17] [30] that “the history of the fractions is the history of Lenin”[18] [31] and that only on the basis of the work that they accomplished will it be possible to reconstruct tomorrow’s world communist party”.[19] [32]
Does this mean that our understanding of the revolutionary organisation has remained unchanged since the formation of the ICC? Does it mean that our understanding has not been enriched, deepened, during the debates and organisational struggles that the ICC has been through? If this were the case, then the ICC could stand accused of being a lifeless organisation without internal debate, a sect content with reciting the holy texts of the workers’ movement. This is not the place to go back over all the ICC’s organisational debates and struggles since its formation. On each occasion - if the ICC were not to be weakened or even liquidated - we have had to return to the study of the “organisational gains” of the workers’ movement, to reappropriate, sharpen, and enrich them.
But the reappropriation and enrichment that we have accomplished on the organisational question does not mean that we have changed our general position on this question, nor even our position on Lenin. The work we have done lies in continuity with history, and with the organisational legacy of the workers’ movement. We defy anyone to show that there has been a break in our position. The organisational question is as political as any other. Indeed, we consider that it is the central question which, in the final analysis, determines the ability to deal with all other theoretical and political questions. In this, we are in accord with Lenin. In this, our position remains the same one that we have always defended. We have always maintained that it was greater clarity on the organisational question, especially on the role of the fraction, that made it possible for the Italian Left not only to survive as an organisation, but even to be able to draw the clearest and most coherent theoretical and political lessons - including by taking up and developing the initial contributions of the Dutch and German Lefts - on the trades unions, state capitalism, and the state in the transitional period.
The ICC has always identified with the struggle of the Bolsheviks on the organisational question. Their example lay behind our insistence that “The idea that a revolutionary organisation builds itself voluntarily, consciously, with premeditation, far from being a voluntarist idea is on the contrary one of the concrete results of all marxist praxis”.[20] [33]
In particular, we have always declared our support for Lenin’s fight against economism. In the same way, we have always supported his struggle against those who were to become the Mensheviks at the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP. This is not new. Nor is it new that we consider What is to be done? (1902) as an essential work in the fight against economism, and One step forward, two steps back (1903) as a vital text in understanding what was at stake and along what lines the RSDLP split. It is nothing new for us to affirm that these two texts are classics of marxism, and that the main lessons that Lenin draws in them are still relevant today. To say that we agree with the struggle, the method used, and many of the arguments given in both texts in no way diminishes our criticism of Lenin’s errors.
What was essential in What is to be done? in the context of the time, in the Russia of 1902? What made it possible to take a step forward for the workers’ movement? What side should we have taken? The side of the economists, because Lenin repeats Kautsky’s incorrect conception of class consciousness? Or Lenin’s side, against the economist obstacle to the formation of a coherent organisation of revolutionaries?
What was essential in One step forward, two steps back? To side with the Mensheviks because Lenin, in the heat of the polemic, defended false ideas on certain points? Or to side with Lenin for the adoption of rigorous membership criteria, for a unified and centralised party against the continued existence of autonomous circles?
In this case, to pose the question is to answer it. Lenin himself corrected his mistakes on consciousness and the vision of a “militarised” party, especially after the experience of the 1905 mass strike in Russia. The existence of a Bolshevik fraction and a rigorous organisation gave the Bolsheviks the means to draw the most fruitful political lessons from 1905, although they were less clear at the outset on the dynamic of the mass strike, especially in comparison to Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, or even Plekhanov. It allowed them to overcome their previous mistakes.
What were Lenin’s mistakes? Some were linked to his polemics. Others were concerned with theoretical questions, especially on class consciousness.
Lenin’s defects were those of his qualities. A great polemicist, he would “twist the bar” (exaggerate) by taking up his opponents’ arguments and turning them around against their authors. “We all know now that the economists twisted the bar one way. To straighten it, I had to twist it in the opposite direction, which I did”.[21] [34] But this method, which is very effective in polemic and in clearly polarising the argument - vital in any debate - also has its limitations, and can become a weakness. By “twisting the bar”, Lenin exaggerated and deformed his real positions. What is to be done? illustrates the point, as he himself recognised:
“At the 2nd Congress, I had no notion of setting up my formulations in What is to be done? as special principles or “programmatic points”. On the contrary, I used the expression “straightening what has been twisted”, which was to be so extensively quoted afterwards. In What is to be done? I said that we had to correct everything that had been distorted (“twisted”) by the “economists” (...) The meaning of these words is clear: What is to be done? corrects economism polemically, and it would be wrong to judge the pamphlet from any other standpoint”.[22] [35]
Unfortunately, there are many today who judge What is to be done? and One step forward, two steps back “from another standpoint”, concerned more with the letter of the text than its spirit. There are many who take Lenin’s exaggerations literally. First, there were his contemporary critics, amongst them Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg who answered the second work in The organisation question in Russian social-democracy (1904). Twenty years later, the Stalinists used these words to justify “Leninism” and the Stalinist dictatorship, on the basis of these unfortunate formulations used in the heat of the polemic. When Lenin is accused of being dictatorial, bureaucratic, of Jacobinism, or preaching military discipline and a conspiratorial vision, out of a narrow spirit of party struggle, he takes up his opponents’ terms and develops them, “twisting the bar” in his turn. He is accused of having a conspiratorial view of the organisation when he defends the need for strict membership criteria, and for discipline in the conditions of repression and illegality? This is his response, as a polemicist:
“According to its form a strong revolutionary organisation of that kind in an autocratic country may also be described as a “conspirative” organisation, because the French word “conspiration” means in Russian “conspiracy”, and we must have the utmost conspiracy for an organisation of that kind. Secrecy is such a necessary condition for such an organisation that all the other conditions (number and selection of members, functions, etc) must all be subordinated to it. It would indeed be extremely naïve, therefore, to fear the accusation that we Social-Democrats desire to create a conspirative organisation. Such an accusation would be as flattering to every opponent of Economism as the accusation of being followers of Naro-dovolism[23] [36] would be”.[24] [37]
In his reply to Rosa Luxemburg (1904), which Kautsky and the German SPD leadership refused to publish, he denied being the source of the formulations that he adopted:
“Comrade Luxemburg says that according to me, “The Central Committee is the only active nucleus of the Party”. In reality, this is not exact. I have never defended such an opinion (...) Comrade Luxemburg writes that I preach the educational value of the factory. This is inexact: it was not me, but my adversary who claimed that I identify the Party with a factory. I derided my opponent appropriately by using his own words to demonstrate that he confused two aspects of factory discipline, which is unfortunately also the case with comrade Luxemburg”.[25] [38]
By contrast, it is much more important to criticise a theoretical error by Lenin in What is to be done?. According to Lenin, “We said that there could not yet be Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without”.[26] [39] We will not here go back over our criticism and our position on the question of consciousness.[27] [40] It is obvious that this position - which Lenin adopted from Kautsky - is not only false but extremely dangerous. It was to justify the party’s exercise of power in the place of the working class after October 1917. It was later to serve as an effective weapon of Stalinism, in particular in justifying the putschist uprisings in Germany in the 1920s, and above all in justifying the bloody repression of the working class in Russia.
Do we really need to point out that our position on this question remains unchanged?
Lenin had to confront much criticism after the RSDLP’s 2nd Congress and the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Plekhanov and Trotsky were the only ones to reject explicitly the position that class consciousness “could only be brought from without”. The best-known critique was Rosa Luxemburg’s Organisation question in Russian social-democracy, which is used by today’s detractors of Lenin to... set the two great militants against each other and prove that the Stalinist worm was already present in the “Leninist” fruit. This, in other words, is the Stalinist lie turned on its head. In fact, Luxemburg deals mainly with the exaggerated positions (the “twisted bar”), and develops ideas which although correct in themselves remain abstract and detached from the real, practical struggle that took place at the Congress.
“Comrade Luxemburg sublimely ignores our party struggles, and discourses at length on questions which it is impossible to treat seriously (...) The comrade does not want to know what positions I upheld at the Congress, nor against whom my theses were directed. She prefers to treat me to a lesson on opportunism... in the countries of parliamentary democracy!”.[28] [41]
One step forward, two steps back clearly highlights what was at stake at the Congress, and in the struggle that took place there: the struggle against the continued existence of circles in the party, and for a clear and rigorous demarcation between the working class and the political organisation. Although she failed to appreciate the way they were posed concretely, Luxemburg remained clear as to the general aims:
“How to effect a transition from the type of organisation characteristic of the preparatory stage of the socialist movement - usually featured by disconnected local groups and clubs, with propaganda as a principal activity - to the unity of a large, national body suitable for concerted political action over the entire vast territory ruled by the Russian state? That is the specific problem which the Russian social-democracy has mulled over for some time”.[29] [42]
When we read this passage, it is clear that Luxemburg shared Lenin’s aims, and stood on the same ground. Considering the “centralist”, “authoritarian” even, position of both Luxemburg and Leo Jogisches in the Polish social-democracy - the SDKPiL - there can be no doubt that had she been a member of the RSDLP, she would have taken part in the fight against the circles and the Mensheviks. Lenin would surely have been obliged to rein in her energy, perhaps even her excesses.
As for us, today almost a century later, our position on the precise distinction between the political and unitary organisations of the working class comes to us from the Socialist International, and especially from the advances achieved by Lenin. In effect, he was the first - in the particular situation of Tsarist Russia - to pose the conditions for the development of a small minority organisation, whereas the replies of both Trotsky and Luxemburg were still governed by the idea of the mass party. Similarly, it is from Lenin’s struggle against the Mensheviks on Point 1 of the Statutes at the RSDLP’s 2nd Congress that we draw our rigorous and clearly defined position on membership of the communist organisation. Finally, we consider that this Congress and Lenin’s activity in it represent a high point in the theoretical and political development of the organisation question, especially on the issue of centralisation against federalist, individualist, and petty-bourgeois ideas. While recognising the positive part played by the circles in the initial regroupment of revolutionary forces, this is the point where it was necessary to go beyond this stage, and to form real unified organisations, to develop political relationships based on fraternity and mutual confidence among all the militants.
We have not changed our position on Lenin. Our basic organisational principles, especially our Statutes, which are based on and synthesise the experience of the workers’ movement on the question, are extensively inspired by the contributions made by Lenin in his struggle for the organisation. Without the experience of the Bolsheviks on the organisational question, there would be a large gap in the ICC’s organisational foundations, and in those of the communist party of tomorrow.
In the second part of this article, we will return to what is said, and what is not said, in What is to be done?, whose aim and contents have been and are largely ignored, or intentionally distorted. We will show that Lenin’s work is a real classic of marxism, and a historical contribution to the workers’ movement, on the level of both consciousness and organisation. In short, how far the ICC identifies also with What is to be done?.
RL
[1] [43] See for example, the text Prise de position sur l’évolution récente du CCI by RV, one of our ex-militants, which we have published in our pamphlet La prétendue paranoia du CCI.
[2] [44] See our “Theses on political parasitism” in International Review no.94.
[3] [45] Quoted by Trotsky in My Life.
[4] [46] It is worth recalling once again Lenin’s own words on the attempts to recuperate the great revolutionary figures: “After their death, they are turned into inoffensive icons, canonised we might almost say, and their “name” enrobed in a certain glory to “console” and mystify the oppressed classes; their revolutionary doctrine is thus stripped of its “content”, its revolutionary edge is blunted, it is debased (...) Germany’s bourgeois savants, who only yesterday specialised in the demolition of marxism, today talk more and more of a “national-German” Marx”. And the Stalinists talk about a “national Great-Russian” Lenin, we might add.
[5] [47] Boris Souvarine, Staline, Editions Gérard Lebovici 1985, p.311.
[6] [48] idem, p.312.
[7] [49] Thesis 8 on Bolshevisation, 5th Congress of the Communist International.
[8] [50] Bilan no.39, the theoretical bulletin of the Italian fraction of the Communist Left, January 1937.
[9] [51] “The Russian Revolution”, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press, 1970.
[10] [52] Bilan no.39, 1937.
[11] [53] Herman Gorter, “The victory of marxism”, published in Il Soviet 1920, and reprinted in Invariance no.7, 1969.
[12] [54] Anton Pannekoek in Die Aktion no.11-12, quoted in our book on the Dutch Left.
[13] [55] From the Basic Positions published on the back of every one of our publications.
[14] [56] See the article on our 12th Congress: “The political strengthening of the ICC” in International Review no.90.
[15] [57] “Report on the structure and functioning of the organisation of revolutionaries” to the International Conference of the ICC, January 1982, in International Review no.33.
[16] [58] “Report on the question of the organisation of our International Communist Current”, International Review no.1, April 1975.
[17] [59] We cannot resist the temptation to quote one of our ex-militants who today accuses us of being “Leninist”: “By contrast, we should salute Rosa Luxemburg’s lucidity (...) and the Bolsheviks’ ability to organise as an independent fraction with its own means of intervention within the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. This is why they were in the proletariat’s vanguard in the revolutionary struggles at the end of World War I” (RV, “Continuity of the proletariat’s political organisations”, in International Review no.50, 1987).
[18] [60] Intervention by Bordiga at the 6th extended Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1926.
[19] [61] Introduction to our article on “The relationship between fraction and party in the marxist tradition”, Part III, International Review no.65.
[20] [62] “Report on the question of the organisation of our International Communist Current”, International Review no.1, April 1975.
[21] [63] Proceedings of the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, Edition Era, 1977.
[22] [64] Lenin, “Preface to the anthology On 12 Years”, September 1907, Edition Era, 1977.
[23] [65] From “Narodnaya Volya”, one of the secret organisations of the Russian terrorist movement in the 1870s.
[24] [66] In One step forward, two steps back.
[25] [67] What is to be done?, Lenin’s emphasis, chapter on “Conspirative” Organisation and “Democracy”, in Essential Works of Lenin, Bantam Books, 1971.
[26] [68] What is to be done?, chapter on “The beginning of the spontaneous revival”
[27] [69] See our pamphlet Communist organisations and class consciousness.
[28] [70] Lenin’s answer to Rosa Luxemburg, op. cit.
[29] [71] “Organisational question of social-democracy”, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, Pathfinder Press, 1970.
Between 16th and 19th December 1998, Iraq was hit by more cruise missiles than during the entire 1991 Gulf War. After threats which were not followed up in February and November 1998, the US has unleashed a new hell on an Iraqi population which has already been subjected to the terrible war of 1991 and the sanctions that followed, bringing in their wake famine, disease, and an intolerable poverty. When the Russian bloc collapsed in 1989, US President Bush announced "a new world order of peace and prosperity". Since then, we have seen increasing chaos, still more war, and an unprecedented chaos, still more war, and an unprecedented spread of poverty throughout the world. The recent bombing of Iraq has only added to the list. They also confirm what we wrote in the following article, which was completed before the last bombardment: "A bloody spiral of destruction in which the force employed by the US in defence of its authority tends to become more frequent and massive, the political results of these efforts more questionable, the generalisation of chaos and militarism more certain, the abandonment of common rules of the game more pronounced".
As the article demonstrates, the US is increasingly forced to act on its own account, without bothering to obtain the agreement of the UN, supposedly the guardian of "international law". This time, the bombing began during TV prime time in America, while the Security Council was still in session to examine the report drawn up by Richard Butler, head of UNSCOM, which was supposed to have been the pretext for the US intervention. This report is now notorious for being stuffed with lies, completely in contradiction with another report examined at the same time, drawn up by the International Atomic Energy Commission and which came to the conclusion that Iraq had complied with the UN�s decisions (1). The decidedly unenthusiastic reaction of the USA�s "allies" (with the exception of Britain (2)), including in particular Kofi Annan, to the US coup is a clear illustration that the American government has come rounund to a position long since adopted by a substantial part of the US bourgeoisie, represented especially by the Republican Party: undertaking unilaterally those interventions considered necessary to uphold US hegemony, rather than trying to obtain the agreement of other powers or of the UN (in order to hold them hostage). This disagreement within the US bourgeoisie as to the best means to uphold an increasingly beleaguered US hegemony in the world allows us to explain the "Monicagate" affair. In this sense, the abundance of "analyses" published in the press of other countries, explaining US strikes by Clinton�s desire to put off his impeachment, is solely intended to discredit US foreign policy by presenting it as sowing death and destruction to serve the president�s own sordid self-interest. In fact, Clinton did not launch unilateral strikes on Iraq because of Monicagate, rather there was a Monicagate because Clinton failed to adopt this line earlier, notably in February 1998. However, as the article that follows demonstrates, this new orientation of US policy will not be able to alter the essential given of international relations: growing chaos, and repeated use of armed force by the US to enforce its continually declining authority. Already, we can see that the only real success achieved by the American government is to have sabotaged the military rapprochement between Britain and the other European countries. As for the rest, the US strikes have only strengthened Saddam Hussein, while the diplomatic failure of Clinton�s journey to Israel and Palestine only highlights the limited success of the Wye Plantation agreement.
According to the bourgeois media, the year 1998 ended with an important strengthening of peace, international collaboration and the defence of human rights in the world. In the Persian Gulf, the threat of American and British force - backed up this time by the "international community" - imposed on Iraq the continuation of arms inspections aimed at removing weapons of mass destruction from the "irresponsible hands" of the bloody dictator Saddam Hussein. In the Middle East, the American sponsored "peace process" - on the verge of collapse - was salvaged by the Wye Plantation Agreement, through which US President Clinton, thanks to "endless hours of patient persuasion" pushed Arafat and Netanyahu to begin implementing parts of the "Oslo Agreement" based on the celebrated formula "land for peace". In the Balkans, NATO - again through the threat of violence - put an end to open, large scale military operations between Serbian and Kosovo-Albanian forces and imposed a fragile cease fire to be patrolled by international "observers for peace". And at the end of the year, U.S. and South African diplomacy launched a new offensive claimed to be capable of ending the war in the Congo, while the French President Chirac was even reready to shake the hand of the "Congolese dictator" Kabila at the Francophone African Summit in Paris, allegedly in pursuit of the same goal.
Has the bourgeoisie - at the end of a century during which it smashed the Communist International and turned the world into a gigantic imperialist slaughterhouse - begun to rule society according to the peace keeping charter of the United Nations and the humanitarian principles of Amnesty International? The propaganda of the ruling class, whether concerning the democratic crusade against Pinochet or the alleged peace established in The Middle East or in the Balkans, does all it can to place the imperialist conflicts of the present in this deceptive light. But the reality of these conflicts reveals exactly the opposite: the aggravation of the militarist barbarism of a capitalist system in agony, the continuing explosion of the imperialist struggle of each against all, the growing necessity for the USA to employ military force in defence of its global authority.
Behind the imposition of the "authority of the United Nations" (UN) on Iraq, the imposition of "negotiations" between Serbia and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), or of "land for peace" on the Israeli and Palestinian bourgeoisie, there lies the counter-offensive of American imperialism, against the global undermining of its authority. In reality, America has imposed itself in Iraq and in Kosovo precisely througrough a demonstrative disregard for the "rules" and "authority" of the United Nations, which in the past years has been increasingly employed against American interests.
This in turn marks an important turning point in American policy towards the rest of the world, towards a more aggressively "unilateral" pursuit of its national interests. It was the USA itself which, in preparing a new military strike against Iraq in November, threw in the dustbin of history the charade of "unity" and "international legality" of the UN so dear to the heart of bourgeois propaganda. This was not always the US position. After the collapse of the world order of Yalta with the disintegration of the Russian imperialist bloc, it was the USA itself- at the height of its authority as the sole remaining world power - which used the UN and its Security Council to force the Gulf War on the rest of the world. By luring Saddam into invading Kuwait, Washington was able to present this war as a necessary defence of "international law" (which in class society has always been the right of the strongest), legitimised by the "international community". Saddam was trapped: he could not pull out of Kuwait without a fight, as this might have led to the fall of his regime. But with Saddam, the rest of the imperialist world, and above all the other main powers of the now the now defunct Western bloc were also trapped: obliged to take part in or pay for a war aimed in reality at crushing their ambitions towards a greater independence from the USA.
A year ago Iraq, having drawn the lessons of the Gulf War, turned the tables by itself using the UN and its Security Council against America. As opposed to the question of the occupation of Kuwait, Saddam now placed at the centre of the new Gulf crisis the obstruction of the UN armaments inspections: a secondary question which made it difficult for Washington to justify a common military action, and easy for Iraq to back down at any moment. This time the US, not Iraq was trapped, enabling the allies and advisors of Baghdad in the Security Council, France and Russia, and the UN Secretary General Annan to implement a "diplomatic solution", the main result of which was to prevent the deployment of American and British armed force, and thus humiliate the world�s leading power. This was the high point to date in the undermining of the authority of the sole remaining super-power, which already became manifest soon after the Gulf War when a recently re-united Germany sponsored the independence of Croatia and Slovenia and thus the break-up of Yugoslavia, against the will of Washington.
It is in response to this undermining of its leadership that the American counter-offensive is now responding, shaking off the shackle represented by the UN iUN in the process. In an attempt to shake off the embargo against Iraq and profit from the conflict of interest within the UN Security Council, Saddam again deployed the obstruction of the arms inspections in order to provoke a crisis, and again backed down at the last moment to prevent an American military strike. But this time Saddam had to back down so fast and under such humiliating circumstances, that the outcome of this crisis was undoubtedly a strengthening of America�s authority world wide. The difference this time was that the US, as opposed both to the Gulf War and to the crisis a year ago, no longer gave a damn about getting permission to strike from the UN. The "sympathy" and "understanding" which the other major powers showed for Washington�s "impatience with Saddam" - presented by bourgeois propaganda as a revival of the spirit of unity among the "great democracies" - is explained solely by the fact that the US was visibly no longer in the mood to be stopped by anybody. Openly criticising the aggressive American policy under such circumstances, while lacking the concrete means to obstruct it, would for the other powers have been equivalent to publicly sharing in the humiliation imposed on Saddam.
Long before the Iraq crisis of last year, the use of the UN against Washington was already clearly demonstrated by the different military conflictconflicts in ex-Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. Here already, the principle big power backers of Serbia - Britain, France and Russia - used the UN in order to prevent the United States, for as long as possible, from playing a leading role, especially in the Bosnian conflict. And this is why, when the USA finally succeeded (momentarily) in imposing its authority on its European rivals in Bosnia via military strikes and the Dayton Agreement, this was done, not through the UN but through NATO, once the specific military organisation of the US imperialist bloc, and the one which Washington is still able to dominate. Alongside its show of might in the Gulf, the threat of a NATO military intervention in Kosovo and the rest of Serbia under US leadership constituted the second pillar of the American counter-offensive in defence of its leadership. The principle American success was not that it obliged Milosevic to withdraw troops from Kosovo: in reality Washington allowed the Serb army to remain there long enough to severely weaken the German backed Kosovo-Albanian KLA. Its success lay above all in obliging its pro-Serb NATO ex-Allies Britain and France to line up in support of its intervention threat against Serbia - a repetition of its success in Bosnia and, as far as France is concerned, during the Gulf War. Just like Saddam, Milosevic had to back down on time to prevent American missiles raining on his head. And here again (as with Iraq), the anti-American strategy of demanding a UN Security Council mandate for the use of military force against Serbia, a card openly played in the Kosovo crisis above all by Russia, was foiled by Washington�s newly pronounced "unilateralism". In view of the coming winter and the homelessness of the war refugees in Kosovo, declared Clinton, there could no longer be any question of the world�s leader waiting for "permission" to strike from the UN, Russia or anybody else.
The United Nations, like its predecessor the League of Nations, is not a peace-keeping organisation uniting the capitalist powers under a common international law, but an imperialist den of thieves, the role of which is completely determined by the balance of power between the main capitalist rivals. It is precisely for this reason that the evolution of the policy of the USA towards the UN is not without significance. During the Cold War the UN, strictly divided between the two imperialist blocs, mainly served bourgeois pacifist propaganda, although it could sometimes be used by the Western bloc with its clear majority among the permanent members of the Security Council (composed of the winning powers from World War II). After 1989, the capacity of the USA to exploit the UN for its own interests was to prove short-lived. Tlived. The Gulf War, that dramatic demonstration of the superiority of the US over the rest of the imperialist world, was quickly followed by the explosion of "every man for himself" in the relations between capitalist states, and thus the undermining of US leadership. Since, in a world without imperialist blocs, chaos and "every man for himself" inevitably became the dominant tendency in the world, the UN itself inevitably began to be used to undermine American authority. This is why the American bourgeoisie, throughout the 1990s, has taken an increasingly hostile stance towards that organisation, regularly refusing to pay its membership fees. Nevertheless, until the present American offensive, the Clinton Administration hesitated to write off the United Nations as a possible instrument for the mobilisation of other powers behind itself. Indeed, the dissatisfaction of important parts of the American bourgeoisie in the face of these hesitations partly explains the recent pressure on Clinton through the Lewinsky Affair. Present US policy towards Iraq and Serbia shows that the US has indeed been obliged to pursue much more of a "go it alone" policy than at the time of the Gulf War or even Dayton. In reality, this policy is the admission by the world�s super-power itself that the dominant trend is towards every man for himself, not American leadership. Of course, when the United States sets its armed forces in motion, there is no power in the world capable of opposing it. But in so doing the US, while enhancing its status as first power, will only undermine its own leadership, and increase international chaos.
By tossing aside the rules of the game of the UN, Washington has effectively rendered this dinosaur from the end of the last World War more or less irrelevant. But this development will benefit not only America, but also its most important rivals: the vanquished powers of World War II, Germany and Japan, both excluded from the Security Council. More important: from now on NATO itself will become the most important political body within which the rivalries between the ex-allies of the Western Bloc will be fought out. It was not least in response to the imposition of US policy towards Kosovo via the NATO that Germany�s new foreign minister Fischer called for a renunciation of the alliance�s first strike nuclear strategy (3), and that Blair at the summit meeting with the French government in St. Malo officially committed Britain to what is called "strengthening the European pillar of NATO" - at the expense of America of course. This represents a raising of the stakes in the conflict between the great powers. NATO, like the UN, is a left over from a past world order. But it is a much more important remnant, still representing the main instrument of America�s military presence in Europe.
But if the threat of war against Saddam and Milosevic is an expression, not of unity but rivalry between the great powers, surely the Wye Plantation Agreement between Clinton, Netanyahu and Arafat is a triumph of peaceful persuasion, warmly welcomed in Europe? In reality Wye, however modest and fragile the agreement between Israel and the PLO, is another victory for US imperialism, not least because the CIA has officially been charged with implementing part of it. Nor was the "persuasion" exercised by the USA quite so peaceful: the American military mobilisation in the Gulf at the same moment was intended, indirectly, as a warning to Netanyahu and Arafat as much as to Saddam. Above all, it was a warning to the European rivals of America not to poke their noses too closely into one of the strategically most important and explosive zones of the world, where America intends to maintain its dominance at all costs.
Such warnings are more than necessary. Despite the present US offensive, the struggle of the other powers to shake off American domination can only sharpen. Precisely because the US is militarily able to impose its interests at the expense of any other existing power, none of these other imperialisms have a basic interest in a further strengthening of the American position. This also goes for Britain, which has common interests with America in relation to Iraq, but oppos opposed interests in Europe, Africa, and not least in the Middle East. The other powers are condemned to contest the USA, whether they want to or not, thus plunging the world into barbarism. The US, as the sole possible representative of capitalist world order, is condemned to impose its order, thus plunging the world into barbarism. The basis of this contradiction is the absence of blocs. When blocs exist, the strengthening of the leader enforces the position of the other bloc members against the rival bloc. In the absence of such a rival, and thus of imperialist blocs, the strengthening of the leader contradicts the interest of the others. This is why the explosion of each for himself, as well as the counter-offensives of the US, are a given of the present historical situation. Today, as during the Gulf War, the US is on the offensive. Although no American missiles were fired against Iraq or Serbia this time, today�s situation represents not a repetition of the early 90s, but an escalation. A bloody spiral of destruction in which the force employed by the US in defence of its authority tends to become more frequent and massive, the political results of these efforts more questionable, the generalisation of chaos and militarism more certain, the abandonment of common rules of the game more pronounced. The rivalry between the "western democracies", the alleged "vanquishers of Communism" is at the very heart of this barbarism, which in the long term threatens the survival of humanity even without a Third World War. Understanding the essence of this imperialist barbarism must become part of the proletariat�s class consciousness and its determination to destroy the capitalist system.
6 December 1998
1)In fact, we have since learnt that the report was written in close collaboration with the US government. Nor is this the first time that the latter has produced falsified evidence to justify military action. For example, the 5th August 1964 attack on two US destroyers by the North-Vietnamese fleet, which served as the pretext for beginning the bombardment of North Vietnam, turned out afterwards to have been a pure fabrication. The technique is as old as war itself, and one of its best-known cases was the famous "Ems telegram" of 13th July 1870, which allowed Bismarck to push France into declaring war on Prussia - a war which the latter was sure of winning.
2)Although we should note that Blair�s support for US action was not unanimously approved by the British bourgeoisie, being severely criticised by much of the press.
3)Existing NATO strategy envisages being the first to use nuclear strikes.
From the Left Opposition's debate within the CI to the rejection of national liberation struggles by the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left.
However, the situation in China was also one of the questions which allowed the "Left Opposition" to structure itself, and the "Italian Left" (which published the review Bilan) to affirm itself politically as one of the most important currents within the international opposition, a current which in the years that followed developed an activity and a political reflection of inestimable value.
The mid-1920s were a crucial period for the working class and its revolutionary organisations. Could the revolution still develop and advance on a world level? If not, could the Russian revolution survive for long in its isolation? These were questions that preoccupied the communist movement, and the whole CI was hanging on the possibilities of the revolution in Germany. Since 1923, the policy 0 the CI had been to push for insurrection. Zinoviev, who was still its president, had totally underestimated the scale of the defeat in Germany[2]. He declared that it was merely an episode and that new revolutionary assaults were on the agenda in several countries. The CI clearly had a feeble political compass, and in trying to make up for the ebb of the revolutionary wave, it fell into an increasingly opportunist strategy. From 1923 onwards, Trotsky and the first Left Opposition denounced its grave errors and showed their tragic consequences, but did not go so far as to speak of treason. The degeneration of the CI gathered pace; at the end of 1925 the Zinoviev-Kamenev-Stalin triumvirate came apart, and the CI was then under the leadership of Stalin and Bukharin. The "putschist" policy which had prevailed under Zinoviev was replaced by a policy based on the view that capitalism had entered a long phase of "stabilisation". This was the right wing course, which in Europe centred round the united front with the "reformist" parties[3]. In China the CI adopted a policy which went beyond even what the Mensheviks had advocated for the economically undeveloped countries. From 1925 onwards, it put forward the idea that what was on the agenda was the Kuomintang's policy and the bourgeois revolution: the communist revolution would have to come afterwards. This position ended up leading the Chinese workers to the slaughter.
In fact it was during the ultra-leftist, putschist period that the CI harassed the CCP into entering into the Kuomintang, which at the CI's 5th Congress was declared a "sympathising party" of the International (Pravda, 25 June 1924). It was a "sympathising" party that would be the gravedigger of the proletariat!
The Stalinised CI "considered the Koumintang to be an organ of the Chinese national revolution. The communists went en masse under the name and banner of the Kuomintang. This policy led to the communists entering the national government in March 1927. They were given the portfolios of Agriculture (after the party declared itself opposed to any agrarian revolution and in favour of "stopping the overly vigorous actions by the peasants"), and of Labour, in order to channel the working masses towards a policy of compromise and treason. The CCP July plenum also pronounced itself to be against the seizure of the land, against the arming of the workers and peasants - in other words, for the liquidation of the party and the class movements of the workers and for subjecting them totally to the Kuomintang, in order to avoid a break with the latter at any cost. All were in agreement with this criminal policy. From the right under Peng Chou Chek, to the centre under Chen Duxiu and the so-called left under Tsiou Tsiou-Bo" (Bilan no. 9, July 1934).
This opportunist policy, so brilliantly analysed by Bilan a few years later, having pushed the CCP to more or less dissolve into the Kuomintang, resulted in a terrible defeat for the Chinese workers: "on 26'h March, Chiang Kai-Chek began his coup by arresting a number of communists and sympathisers ... These facts were hidden from the Executive Committee of the CI, whereas much noise had been made about Chiang Kai-Chek's anti-imperialist speech at the Congress of Labour in 1926. The Kuomintang troops began their march towards the north. This would serve as a pretext for stopping the strikes in Canton, Hongkong, etc ... As the troops approached there was an uprising in Shanghai, the first between 19 and 24 February; the second, on 21 March, was victorious. Chiang Kai-Chek's troops only entered the city on 26 March. On 3 April, Trotsky wrote a warning against the 'Chinese Pilsudski'[4]. On 5 April Stalin declared that Chiang Kai-Chek had accepted discipline, that the Kuomintang was a kind of revolutionary bloc or parliament"[5].
"Following these events, the delegation of the Communist International, on 17 April, gave its support at Hunan to the 'left Kuomintang'[6], in which the communist ministers participated. There, on 15 July, there was a re-edition of the Shanghai coup. The victory of the counter-revolution was ensured. A period of systematic massacre followed: it was estimated discretely that 25, 000 communists were killed". And, in September 1927 "the new leadership of the CP ... fixed the insurrection for 13 December ... A soviet was set up from above. The uprising was brought forward to the 10 December. On the 13th, it was totally repressed. The second Chinese revolution had been definitively crushed"[7].
The defeat of the Chinese revolution represented the most severe condemnation of the strategy of the CI after the death of Lenin, and above all of the Stalinised CI.
In his letter to the VIth Congress of the CI, July 1928 (see The Third International After Lenin, Pathfinder Press, 1970), Trotsky wrote that the opportunist policy of the CI had first weakened the proletariat in Germany in 1923, then deceived it and betrayed it in Britain and finally in China. "Here are the immediate and indisputable causes of the defeats". And he went on "In order to grasp the significance of the present left turn[9], we have to have a complete view not only of the slide towards the general right-centrist line which was totally unmasked in 1926-27, but also of the previous ultra-left period of 1923-25 in preparing this slide".
In effect, the CI leadership had repeated over and over again in 1924 that the revolutionary situation was still developing and that "there would be decisive battles in the near future". "It was on the basis of this fundamentally false judgement that the Vth Cngress established its whole orientation, around the middle of 1924"[10]. The Opposition expressed its disagreement with this vision and "sounded the alarm"[11]. "In spite of the political reflux, the Vth Congress demonstrably oriented itself towards insurrection ... 1924 became the year of adventures in Bulgaria[12] and Estonia[13]". This ultra-leftism of 1924-25, "completely disoriented in front of the situation, was replaced by a right deviation"[14].
The Left Opposition stood against the line of a "bloc with the Kuomintang", maintained by Stalin and theorised by Bukharin and the ex-Menshevik Martynov. The problems debated were the role of the national bourgeoisie, of nationalism and the class independence of the proletariat.
This text was followed on 14th April by Zinoviev's Theses addressed to the Politburo of the CP of the USSR[17]. Here he reaffirmed Lenin's position on national liberation struggles, in particular that a Communist Party must not subordinate itself to any other party and that the proletariat must not stray onto the terrain of interclassism. He also reaffirmed the idea that "the history of the revolution has shown that any bourgeois democratic revolution, if it does not transform itself into a socialist revolution, inevitably lakes the path of reaction".
However, even if was defeated, the Opposition's combat within the CI was fundamental. It had an enormous international echo, in all the CPs. Above all, it is certain that without it, the present-day left communist currents would not exist. In China itself, where the Stalinists imposed a black-out on the texts of the Opposition, Chen Duxiu managed to send his Letter to all members of the CCP (he was excluded from the party in August 1929; his letter is dated 10 December of the same year), in which he took position against Stalin's opportunism on the Chinese question.
There was finally a regroupment after Trotsky was expelled from the USSR, a regroupment which took the name International Left Opposition (ILO), but this also failed to make use of many of the energies of the time.
pronounced in favour of the positions defended by Trotsky then those developed in his Letter to the VIth Congress of the CI in 1928. They even signed a joint declaration "To the communists of China and the whole world" (12 December 1930). Candiani[19] signed it in the name of the Italian Fraction.
While the ILO had been moving towards a clear understanding of the tasks of the hour, very quickly its uncritical political attachment to the first four congresses of the CI made it tilt towards opportunist positions as soon as the revolutionary tide patently went into retreat. This was not the same with the Italian Fraction which clearly differentiated itself on the three issues under debate concerning the colonial countries (national liberation struggles, democratic slogans and wars between imperialists in these countries).
Contrary to the theses of the IInd Congress of the CI, the Fraction adopted a Resolution on the Sino-Japanese conflict (February 1932), in which it posed this question in a radically new way for the workers' movement. It make a break with the classic position on national liberation struggles[20]:
It goes on: "The role of the proletariat is to struggle for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat ...
During the course of the 1930s, the Fraction's position became even more precise, as can be seen from the Resolution on the Sino-Japanese conflict, December 1937 (Bilan 45):
Democratic Slogans
With the question of democratic slogans the same problem was being posed - that of national liberation struggles. Could there still be different programmes for the proletariat of the developed countries and for those where the bourgeoisie had not yet carried out its revolution?
"We said that in countries where capitalism had not established its economic and political leadership over society (the example of the colonies), the conditions existed - for a certain period - for a struggle by the proletariat for democracy. But we also insisted that this should not be defined in a vague way, that we had to be precise about the class basis for this struggle ... In the present situation of the mortal crisis of capitalism, this would be destined to precipitate the dictatorship of the party of the proletariat ...
To the second point belong above all the tasks of social transformation in the countryside.
... the political disagreement between our Fraction and the Russian left has expressed itself more clearly. But we have to be definite that this disagreement remains in the realm of tactics, as has been proved by a meeting between Bordiga and Lenin ..."
In Spain, the fact that the Opposition has adopted the political position of supporting the so-called democratic transformation of the state, has removed any possibility of a serious development in our section of the questions that relate to the resolution of the communist crisis.
Democratic slogans and the agrarian question
(...) A transformation (the liberation of the agrarian economy from the social relations of feudalism) of the economy of a country like Spain into an economy like the ones in the more advanced countries will coincide with the victory of the proletarian revolution. But this does not mean at all that capitalism cannot set out on the road towards this transformation ... The communist programmatic position must continue to fully reaffirm the demand for the 'socialisation of the land'":
"The institutional slogans of the colonial question
We want to deal here with the colonial countries, where, despite the industrialisation of an important part of the economy, capitalism still does not exist as a governing class in power"
The partial demands of the working class
The bourgeois parties and above all the social democracy insist particularly on the need to guide the masses towards the defence of democracy. They demand - and because of the lack of a communist party, have obtained this - that the workers abandon the struggle for the defence of wages and in general of the masses' living standards, as is now happening in Germany".
The imperialist war and the Chinese Trotskyists
In this domain, Trotsky ended up reneging on the positions he had defended in 1925-27, the ones he had defended in The International After Lenin (as well as in his declaration 'To the communists in China and the whole world' in 1930). At that time he had stood by the idea that the bourgeois solution of imperialist war must be opposed by the proletariat's struggle for its own revolutionary interests, since "the bourgeoisie has definitively gone over to the camp of the counter-revolution". In addressing the members of the Chinese Communist Party, he had added: "Your coalition with the bourgeoisie was correct up until 1924, even up to the end of 1927, but now it has no value".
Bilan violently attacked Trotsky's position in its Resolution on the Sino-Japanese conflict in February 1932.
The Fraction even published an article, in Bilan no. 46, January 1938, which was entitled "A great renegade with a peacock's tail: Leon Trotsky"[24].
At the end of this article it is important to note that only the Italian Fraction was able to develop the arguments which showed why national liberation struggles were no longer 'progressive' but had become counter-revolutionary in the present phase of the development of capitalism. It was the Gauche Communiste de France, and later on the ICC, who were to strengthen this position by giving it a solid theoretical foundation.
MR
[1] Zinoviev's Theses for the Politburo of the CP of the USSR, 14 April 1927.
[2] Cf. the articles in recent issues of the International Review on the German revolution. Trotsky wrote that the failure in 1923 in Germany was "a gigantic defeat" (The International after Lenin).
[3] The name given to the socialist or social democratic parties which had betrayed during the First World War.
[4] The Polish dictator who had just crushed the Polish working class: a founding member of the Polish Socialist Party which was a reformist and nationalist tendency.
[5] Trotsky in The International after Lenin.
[6] The existence of a "Left Koumintang" was a fable invented by the Stalinised CI.
[7] Harold Isaacs. The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution 1925-27
[8] Bilan no. 9 July 1934
[9] This was the term for the course followed by the CI after 1927
[10] Underlined by Trotsky himself
[11] idem, Trotsky
[12] An uprising which took place from the 19 to the 28 September before being crushed
[13] In December 1924 an uprising was organised involving 200 CP members. It was smashed in a matter of hours.
[14] ibid Trotsky
[15] At the end of 1925, the Stalin-Zinoviev-Kamenev triumvirate fell apart. An oppositional 'bloc' was formed called the United Opposition.
[16] We know today that this slogan wasn't adequate: Trotsky himself questioned its validity since the course was no longer favourable to revolution
[17] Theses which were to have been discussed at the future 7th Plenum of the CI and the 15th Congress of the CP of the USSR.
[18] This was what the opposition called "The Thermidor of the Russian revolution".
[19] Enrico Russo (Candiani), a member of the Executive Committee of the Italian Fraction
[20] Even today the Bordigist component has trouble taking up the position of the Fraction: for example it accuses the lCC's position of being "indifferentist".
[21] The only tendency which took up the same position as Italian and Belgian Fractions of the Communist Left was constituted by the Revolutionary Workers' League (known after the name of its representative, Oelher) and the Grupo de Trabajadores Marxistas (also known after its representative Eiffels).
[22] This referred to the "Aventin " tactic in which the CP withdrew from the parliament dominated by the fascists and regrouped at Aventin with the centrists and social-democrats. This policy was denounced as opportunist by Bordiga.
[23] This refers to the Stalinised CI and CPs.
[24] For our part, we consider that Trotsky did not betray the working class since he dies before the generalisation of the world war. This doesn't apply to the Trotskyists (Cf our pamphlet Le Trotskyisme contre la Classe Ouvierre).
The plunge into an open recession which will be still deeper than its predecessors - some are even talking of "depression" - is silencing the "experts’" talk about lasting economic growth. If the latter are to be believed, the domino collapse of the South-East Asian economies since summer 1997 should have been no more than a blip, without any great effect on the economies of the developed countries. Since then, a tidal wave has passed over countries from Russia to Brazil, from Venezuela to Japan, to strike the heart of the great capitalist powers: "the time has come for an agonising reappraisal". has come for an agonising reappraisal".
Perspectives for the main countries - Annual GDP in %
|
1997 |
1998 |
1999 |
|||
OECD |
3.2 |
2.0 |
1.2 |
|||
US |
3.9 |
3.3 |
1.0 |
|||
Japan |
0.9 |
-3.0 |
-1.0 |
|||
Germany |
2.3 |
2.6 |
1.5 |
|||
France |
2.2 |
2.2 |
2.8 |
|||
Italy |
1.5 |
1.4 |
2.0 |
|||
UK |
3.3 |
2.3 |
0.8 |
|||
Spain |
3.0 |
3.6 |
3.1 |
|||
Holland |
3.3 |
3.3 |
2.4 |
|||
Belgium |
2.7 |
2.7 |
1.9 |
|||
Switzerland |
0.7 |
1.8 |
1.9 |
Between July and December 1998, at least $3.5 trillion have gone up in smoke as the stock markets collapsed: the equivalent to 12% of annual world production has been lost, half in the USA, the rest in Europe and Asia. In Japan, the state has decided to inject $520 billion "into its banks, in order to save them from sinking and to reanimate the world’s second economy". Everywhere, "analysts are revising abruptly downwards forecast company profits, just as the first massive redundancies are being announced". The self-satisfaction among the West European ruling classes at the launch of the euro can barely hide their deep anxiety. They are talking less and less about Europe’s supposedly "sheltered" status from the rest of the world economy. Everywhere, "the forecast of 2% growth for 1999, originally considered too pessimistic, may well turn out, on the contrary, very difficult to achieve".
All this would be laughable, were it not that the first to suffer the cost of this new and dramatic acceleration in the crisis will be the hundreds of millions of workers and unemployed, who willemployed, who will be plunged into growing poverty with no hope of a way out. The African continent has already been virtually abandoned to its fate, prey to the ravages of famine, disease, massacres, and constant "local" wars. Now it is the turn of the South-East Asian countries to be dragged down in the spiral of social decomposition sweeping all before it. In the USA, the losses on the stock exchange directly affect millions of workers whose savings and pension funds are invested in the stock market. In the developed countries, despite all the reassuring talk, the ruling class is unleashing new attacks against working class living conditions: cuts in wages and in all kinds of social benefits, "flexibility", lay-offs, "job cuts", savage cuts in health service budgets, housing and education; the list of measures being concocted in the "democratic" countries is a long one, as the bourgeoisie tries to save its profits in the world financial storm.
What is happening is neither a "healthy purge" nor a "readjustment", in the face of excessive speculation, which need simply be regulated to stave off disaster. Unbridled speculation is only a symptom of the dead-end in which the world economy finds itself. It is the result of the impossibility of countering the shrinking world market and the falling rate of profit. In a merciless trade war between all the world’s capitalists, the capital that cannot be invested in production because the inanadequacy of the market means that it would make a loss, takes refuge in a financial speculation which is all the more hazardous in that it corresponds, not to any production in the real economy, but simply to massive and generalised debt. The shattering failure of the Long Term Capital Management hedge fund is a striking illustration: "Although this speculative fund only had $4.7 billion of capital, its debt had risen to $100 billion. According to some estimates, its total commitments on the market represented $1.3 trillion, almost the value of France’s GDP! A giddy rise in commitments involving some of the great names in world finance". We are certainly confronted with unbridled speculation. But those who today are outraged at "such practices" neglect, above all, to mention that these are the "normal" functioning of capitalism today. "All the great names of world finance" - banks, companies, private and state financial institutions - behave in the same way, following the instructions of the states which fix the rules of the game, and the advice of international organisms like the World Bank, the IMF, the OECD and others, which can be summed up as "reduce the cost of labour by every means possible!".
With disaster at the heart of the industrialised world, the "experts" seem to have discovered the "damage" done by the "reduction in the state" and "globalisation" that for almost 20 years have been the main themes of p propaganda for a "rich, free, and prosperous" capitalism. During the same 20 years, the working class has learned to its cost what this propaganda is worth: a mystification to justify the attacks on workers’ living conditions, and a proliferation of measures intended to maintain the competitiveness of each national capital against its rivals in the economic war. Apart from its use against the working class, the defence of "less state" and "globalisation" has above all been a weapon of the powerful against the weak. The "less state" and the denunciation of "protectionism" by the North American bourgeoisie has not stopped the US increasing from 20% to 35% the proportion of imports subjected to draconian controls in the name of "safety" or "pollution", or any other alibi to hide its own protectionism. While the state has disposed of a whole series of responsibilities in the management of large companies, through privatisation, this does not mean that it has given up its prerogative of political control over the national capital, or that the framework of capitalist economic management has gone beyond national frontiers. Quite the contrary: "less state" was nothing but the form of each national capital’s necessary adaptation to the intensification of an economic war in which the state has always played the commanding role, hand in hand with the major companies. "Globalisation" was nothing but the imposition of rules for the same economic war, to give the great capitalist powers as much of a free hand as possible to pillage their rivals on the battleground of the world market. Today, the idea of "more state" is making a comeback in the bourgeoisie’s propaganda, especially on the part of Western Europe’s social-democratic governments, because the new acceleration of world capitalism’s inexorable bankruptcy has once again brought to the fore the elementary demands of capital: close ranks against each national capital to confront the competition and attack the living conditions of the working class.
After 30 years of descent into the abyss of economic crisis (whose main characteristics and moments of acceleration since the 1970s we summarise in the article that follows), today the heart of the capitalist "world economic order" is unsteady. Behind the international solidarity put forward to confront the "Asian crisis", and the apparent common desire to "rethink the international monetary system", or to "reinvent Bretton Woods", the bourgeoisie of the main industrialised countries has in fact been drawn into an ever sharper struggle of "each against all", a considerable reinforcement of state capitalism as the policy of determined defence of each national capital, whose main target in every country is the working class, and a flight into conflict as we can see from the sharpening imperialist tensions that we also deal with in this issue.
4 January 1999
Note: Sources for this article include L’Expansion [78], December 1998; World Bank [79], December 1998; Le Monde Diplomatique [80], "Anatomie d’une crise financière", November-December 1998.
Links
[1] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/ww-i
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/14/proletarian-revolution
[3] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[4] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[5] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/war
[6] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1937/communist-programme-revolutions-1917-1923
[7] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/third-international
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/34/communism
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/lenin
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/bukharin
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2048/donny-gluckstein
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/period-transition
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/economic-crisis
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn1
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn2
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn3
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn4
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn5
[19] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn6
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn7
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn8
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn9
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn10
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn11
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn12
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn13
[27] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn14
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn15
[29] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn16
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn17
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn18
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn19
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn20
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn21
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn22
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn23
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn24
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn25
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn26
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn27
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn28
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftn29
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref1
[44] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref2
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref3
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref4
[47] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref5
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref6
[49] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref7
[50] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref8
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref9
[52] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref10
[53] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref11
[54] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref12
[55] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref13
[56] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref14
[57] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref15
[58] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref16
[59] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref17
[60] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref18
[61] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref19
[62] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref20
[63] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref21
[64] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref22
[65] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref23
[66] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref24
[67] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref25
[68] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref26
[69] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref27
[70] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref28
[71] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/96/leninists#_ftnref29
[72] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/110/party-and-fraction
[73] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/5/59/iraq
[74] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/recent-and-ongoing/war-iraq
[75] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/china
[76] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/22/national-question
[77] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[78] https://www.lexpress.fr/economie/
[79] https://www.worldbank.org/en/home
[80] https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr
[81] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/30/economics