After West Africa,1we begin a second series on the history of the African workers’movement with a contribution on the class struggles in South Africa. A country famous mainly for two reasons: on the one hand, its mineral wealth (gold, diamonds, etc.) due to which it is relatively well developed; and on the other, its monstrous apartheid system, the aftermath of which we still see today.At the same time, apartheid gave birth to a huge “icon”, namely Nelson Mandela, considered its principal victim but above all the product of this system of another age, who with his titles of “hero of the anti-apartheid struggle”and man of“peace and reconciliation of the peoples of South Africa”was revered throughout the capitalist world.Mandela’s media image veils everything else to the point where the history and struggles of the South African working class before and during apartheid are either completely ignored or distorted by being systematically categorised under the rubric of “anti-apartheid struggles” or “national liberation struggles”.Of course, for bourgeois propaganda, all struggles can be incarnated in Mandela, even though it is public knowledge that since coming to power, Mandela and his party, the African National Congress (ANC), have not exactly been kind to the strikes of the working class2.
The main purpose of this contribution is to restore the historical truth about the struggles between the two fundamental classes, namely the bourgeoisie (for whom apartheid was only one means of domination) and the proletariat of South Africa that, for most of the time, was left to struggle for its own demands as an exploited class, from the epoch of the Dutch-British colonial bourgeoisie and then under the Mandela/ANC regime.In other words, a South African proletariat whose struggle fits perfectly with that of the world proletariat.
According to some historical sources, this area was originally occupied by the Xhosa, Tswana and Sotho people who settled there between 500 and 1000AD. In this regard, the historian Henri Wesseling tells us the following:
“South Africa was not a virgin land when European ships landed for the first time in 1500 at the foot of Table Mountain. It was populated by different ethnic groups, mostly nomads. Dutch settlers divided them into Hottentots and Bushmen. They regarded them as two totally distinct peoples from a physical and cultural point of view. Bushmen were smaller than the Hottentots and they spoke a different language. Moreover, they were more ‘primitive’, practicing hunting and gathering, while the Hottentots had reached the level of pastoral peoples. This traditional dichotomy has long dominated the historiography. Today, we no longer use these terms, but those of Khoikhoi or Khoi for Hottentots and San for the Bushmen, the term Khoisan serving to designate the ethnic group they form together. In fact, currently, one emphasizes less the distinction between these people, mainly because they are both very different from neighboring ethnic groups speaking Bantu languages and formerly known as Kaffirs, from the Arabic kafir (infidel). This term has equally fallen into disuse.”3
It can be noted how the Dutch settlers considered themselves the first inhabitants of this region, as colonial ideology established rankings between “primitive” and “advanced”. Furthermore the author indicates that the term South Africa is a (recent) political concept and that many of its populations are historically from neighboring countries in southern Africa.
As far as European colonization is concerned, the Portuguese were the first to set foot in South Africa in 1488 followed by the Dutch who landed in the area in 1648.The latter decided to settle there permanently from 1652, markingthe beginning of the permanent “white”presence in South Africa.In 1795, Cape Town was occupied by the British, who 10 years later took possession of Natal, while the Boers (Dutch) led the Transvaal and Orange Free State in winning recognition of their independence from Britain in 1854. As for the various African states or groups, through prolonged warfare they resisted the presence of European settlers on their soil before finally being defeated by the dominant powers.At the end of the wars against the Afrikaners and the Zulus, the British proceeded in 1920 to unify South Africa under the name “Union of South Africa”, which it remained until 1961 when the Afrikaner regime decided to simultaneously leave the Commonwealth (the English-speaking community) and change the name of the country.
Apartheid was officially established in 1948 and abolished in 1990.We will return to this later in more detail.
Concerning imperialist rivalries, South Africa played the role of “delegated policeman”for the Western imperialist bloc in southern Africa, and it was in this role that Pretoria intervened militarily in 1975 in Angola which was supported by the Eastern imperialist bloc with Cuban troops.
South Africa is considered today as an “emerging”member of the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China), and is looking to make its entry into the arena of the great powers.
Since 1994, South Africa has been governed principally by the ANC, the party of Nelson Mandela, in company with the Communist Party and the COSATU trade union federation.
The South African working class emerged at the end of the 19th century and constitutes today the largest and most experienced industrial proletariat on the African continent.
Finally, we think it useful to explain two related but nevertheless distinct terms, that we will use often in this contribution, namely the terms “Boer” and “Afrikaner”, which have Dutch roots.
Those called Boers (or Boertrekkers) were originally Dutch farmers (predominantly small peasants) who in 1835-1837 undertook a vast migration in South Africa due to the abolition of slavery by the British in the Cape Colony in 1834.The term is still used today for descendants, direct or not,of these farmers (including factory workers).
Concerning the definition of the term Afrikaner, we refer to the explanation given by the historian Henri Wesseling: “The white population that settled in the Cape was of different origins.It consisted of Dutch, but also many Germans and French Huguenots.This community gradually adopted a different way of life.One could even say that a national identity was formed, that of the Afrikaners, who considered the British government as a foreign authority.”4
We can therefore say that the term refers to a kind of identity claimed by a number of European migrants of the time, a notion that is still used in recent publications.
The birth of capitalism in each region of the world like South Africa has been marked by specific or local characteristics. Nevertheless it developed in general in three different phases, as by described by Rosa Luxemburg:
“(In its development) we must distinguish three phases: the struggle of capital against natural economy, the struggle against commodity economy, and the competitive struggle of capital on the international stage for theremaining conditions of accumulation.
The existence and development of capitalism requires an environment of non-capitalist forms of production, but not every one of these forms will serve its ends. Capitalism needs non-capitalist social strata asa market for its surplus value, as a source of supply for its meansof production and as a reservoir of labour power for its wage system.”
In South Africa, capitalism followed these three phases. In the 19th Century there was a natural economy, a market economy and a workforce sufficient to develop wage labour.
“In the Cape Colony and the Boer Republics, pure peasant economy prevailed until the sixties of the last century. For a long time the Boers had led the life of animal-tending nomads; they had killed off or driven out the Hottentots and Kaffirs with a will in order to deprive them of their most valuable pastures. In the eighteenth century they were given invaluable assistance by the plague, imported by ships of the East India Company, which frequently did away with entire Hottentot tribes whose lands then fell to the Dutch immigrants.
(…)Boer economy in general and on the whole remained patriarchal and based on natural economy until the sixties. But their patriarchal attitude did not deter the Boers from extreme brutality and harshness. It is well known that Livingstone complained much more about the Boers than about the Kaffirs.
(…)In fact, peasant economy and great capitalist colonial policy were here competing for the Hottentots and Kaffirs, that is to say for their land and their labour power. Both competitors had precisely the same aim: to subject, expel or destroy the coloured peoples, to appropriate their land and press them into service by the abolition of their social organisations. Only their methods of exploitation were fundamentally different. While the Boers stood for out-dated slavery on a petty scale, on whichtheir patriarchal peasant economy was founded, the British bourgeoisie represented modern large-scale capitalist exploitation of the land and the natives.”5
We should note the fierceness of the struggle engaged in by Boers and the British for conquest and the establishment of capitalism in this zone which emerged, as elsewhere,“mired in blood and filth”. In the end it was British imperialism that dominated the situation and concretized the advent of capitalism in South Africa, as related in her own way by the researcher Brigitte Lachartre:
“British imperialism, when it manifested itself in the south of the continent in 1875, had other aims: citizens of the leading economic power of the time, representatives of the most developed mercantile and capitalist society in Europe, the British imposed on their colony in southern Africa a much more liberal native policy than that of the Boers.Slavery was abolished in the areas they controlled, while the Dutch settlers fled into the interior of the country to escape the new social order and the administration of the British settlers.After defeating the Africans by arms (a dozen ‘Kaffir’wars in a century), the British devoted themselves to ‘liberating’ the labour force: the defeated tribes were regrouped in tribal reserves whose limits were more and more restricted; Africans were prevented from leaving without authorisation and their pass in order.But the true face of British colonization appeared with the discovery of diamonds and gold in 1870.A new era began which brought about a profound transformation of all social and economic structures of the country: mining led to industrialization, urbanization, disruption of traditional African societies, but also of the Boer communities, immigration of new waves of Europeans (...).”6
Clearly, this statement can be read as a concrete continuation of the process described by Rosa Luxemburg, by which capitalism emerged in South Africa. In its struggle against the “natural economy”, British economic power had to break the old tribal societies and violently get rid of the old forms of production such as slavery, incarnated by thethe Boers who were forced to flee to escape the modern capitalist order. This was at the root of the wars between the proponents of the old and the new economic order by which the country passed so rapidly to modern capitalism, thanks to the discovery of diamonds (1871) and gold (1886). The “gold rush” translated itself into a lightning acceleration of industrialization of the country as a result of the exploitation and commercialisation of precious materials, which hugely attracted capitalist investors from the developed countries. It was therefore necessary to recruit engineers and skilled workers,and in this way thousands of Europeans, Americans and Australians came to settle in South Africa. And the City of Johannesburg came to symbolize this emerging dynamism by its rapid development. On 17 July 1896, a census showed that the city had had 3,000 inhabitants in 1887 and 100,000 ten years later. A little over ten years later the white population had grown from 600,000 to over a million. In the same period the gross domestic product (GDP) rose from £150,000 to nearly £4 million. This is how South Africa became the first and only African country to be relatively developed on an industrial scale – something which was not slow to whet the appetites of rival economic powers:
“The economic and political center of South Africa was no longer in the Cape, but in Johannesburg and Pretoria.Germany, Europe’s biggest economic power, was established in South West Africa and had expressed an interest in South East Africa.If the Transvaal showed itself unwilling to submit to the authority of London, the future of England would be challenged in the whole of South Africa.”7
At this time you can see that behind the economic issues lurked imperialist issues between the major European powers vying for control of this region. Moreover, British power did everything to limit the presence of its German rival to the west of South Africa, which is today called Namibia (colonised in 1883), after neutralising Portugal, the other imperialist presence with far more limited means.The British Empire could therefore boast that it was the sole master in command of the booming South African economy.
But the economic development of SouthAfrica, powered by mineral discoveries, very quickly ran into a series of problems which in the first place were social and ideological:
“Economic development, stimulated by the discovery of minerals, will soon face the white settlers with a profound contradiction (...).On the one hand the introduction of the new economic order required the creation of a waged labour force; on the other, the release of the African workforce from the reserves and out of their traditional subsistence economy put in jeopardy the racial balance of the whole territory.At the end of the last century (the 19th), the African populations were therefore subject to a multitude of laws with often contradictory effects.Some aimed to make them migrate to areas of white economic activities to submit to wage labor.Others tended to keep them partly on the reserves.Among the laws intended to make manpower available, there were some which penalized vagrancy in order to ‘tear the natives away from this idleness and laziness, teach them the dignity of work, and to contribute to the prosperity of the state.’There were others to submit Africans to taxation.(…) Among other laws,those on passes were intended to filter the migrations, to steer them according to the needs of the economy or stop them in the event of a flood.”8
We see here that the British colonial authorities found themselves caught up in contradictions related to the development of the productive forces. But we can say that the strongest contradiction here was ideological, when British power decided to consider the black labour force on segregationist administrative criteria, in particular with the laws on passes and the penning of Africans. In fact, this policy was in flagrant contradiction with the liberal orientation that led to the abolition of slavery.
Difficulties also related to the colonial wars. After suffering defeats and winning the wars against its Zulu and Afrikaner opponents between 1870 and 1902, the British Empire had to digest the extremely high cost of its victories, especially that of 1899-1902, both in human and economic terms. Indeed, the “Boer War” was a real butchery:
“The Boer War was the greatest colonial war of the modern imperialist era.It lasted more than two and a half years (11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902).The British engaged around half a million soldiers, 22,000 of whom were killed in South Africa.Their total losses, that is to say killed, wounded, and missing, rose to more than 100,000 men.The Boers, meanwhile, mobilized nearly 100,000 men.They lost more than 7,000 soldiers and nearly 30,000 died in the camps.An unknown number of Africans fought alongside one or the other side.The losses they suffered are also undetermined.Tens of thousands of them probably lost their lives.The British War Office also calculated that 400,346 horses, donkeys and mules died during the conflict, as well as millions of cattle belonging to the Boers.This war cost the British taxpayer £200 million, or ten times the annual budget of the army or 14% of national income in 1902.If the subjugation of the future British subjects of Africa cost on average fifteen pennies per head,the submission of the Boers however cost £1000 per man.”9
In other words, an open pit of warfare inaugurated the entry of British capitalism into the 20th century. Furthermore, we can see in the details of this horrible butchery that the Nazi concentration camps found a source of inspiration. British capitalism developed a total of forty four camps destined for the Boers where about 120,000 women and children were imprisoned. At the end of the war in 1902 it was found that 28,000 white detainees had been killed, including 20,000 children under the age of 16.
Yet it was without remorse that the commander of the British Army, Lord Kitchener, justified the massacres in speaking of the Boers as “a species of savages born from generations leading a barbarous and solitary existence.”10
This is rich coming from a major war criminal. Certainly we must note that in this butchery, Afrikaner troops were not to be outdone in terms of mass killings and atrocities, and that the Afrikaner leaders were later allies of the German army during the Second World War,above all to settle accounts with British power.
“Defeated by British imperialism,submitted to the capitalist system, humiliated in their culture and traditions, the Afrikaner people (...)organized from 1925 to 1930 a strong movement to rehabilitate the Afrikaner nation.Its vengeful, anti-capitalist, anti-communist and profoundly racist ideology designated Africans, mestizos, Asians and Jews as a threat to the Western civilization they claimed to represent on the African continent.Organized at all levels, school, church, union and terrorist secret societies (the best known is the Broederbond), Afrikaners later proved fervent partisans of Hitler, Nazism and its ideology.”11
The fact that the Afrikaner workers were dragged into this same movement shows the immensity of the obstacle to be crossed by the working class of this country to join the struggles of workers of other ethnicities.
This conflict permanently shaped relationships between the British and Afrikaner colonialisms on South African soil until the fall of apartheid. To divisions and ethnic hatred between British and Afrikaner whites, can be added those between on the one hand these two categories and on the other blacks (and other people of colour) that the bourgeoisie systematically used to destroy all attempts at unity in the workers’ ranks.
The birth of capitalism led to the dislocation of many traditional African societies. From the 1870s, the British Empire began a liberal colonial policy by abolishing slavery in areas it controlled, in order to “liberate” the labour force then consisting of Boer and African farm workers. We have noted that the Boer settlers themselves continued to exploit black farmers under the old form of slavery before being defeated by the British. But ultimately it was the discovery of gold which accelerated sharply the birth of capitalism and the emergence of the working class:
“There was no shortage of capital. Exchanges in London and New York willingly supplied the necessary funds.The global economy, which was growing, demanded gold.Workers streamed in too.Mining attracted crowds in the Rand.People went there not in their thousands, but tens of thousands.No city in the world knew a development as rapid as Johannesburg.”12
In the space of 20 years the European population of Johannesburg grew from a few thousand to 250,000, the majority of whom were skilled workers, engineers and other technicians. These are the ones who gave birth to the South African working class in the marxist sense of the term, that is to say, those who, under capitalism, sell their labour in exchange for a wage. Capital had a strong and urgent need for a more or less skilled labour force which it could not find on the spot whithout recourse to migrants from Europe, including the British Empire. But gradually, as economic development progressed, the industrial apparatus was driven to recruit more and more unskilled African workers from the interior of the country or from outside, including Mozambique and Zimbabwe. From then the workforce of the South African economy truly “internationalized” itself.
As a result of the massive arrival in South Africa of British-born workers, the working class was immediately organized and supervized by the British trade unions and in the early 1880s there were numerous companies and corporations which were created on the “English model” (the trade union). This meant that workers of South African origin, as groups or individuals without organisational experience, could only with difficulty organize outside of the pre-established unions13. Certainly, there were dissensions within the unions as well as in parties claiming to defend the working class, with attempts to develop an autonomous union activity on the part of radical proletarian elements who could no longer put up with the “treachery of the leaders.” But these were in a tiny minority.
Everywhere in the world where there are conflicts between the classes under capitalism, the working class always secretes revolutionary minorities defending, more or less clearly, proletarian internationalism. This was also the case in South Africa. Some elements from the working class were at the origin of struggles but also initiated the formation of proletarian organizations. We propose to introduce three figures from this generation in the form of a short summary of their trajectories.
So here are three “portraits” of the trajectories of union and political militants which are quite similar despite being of different ethnic origin (European, African and Indian). Above all they share an essential common characteristic: proletarian class solidarity, an internationalist spirit and a great combativity against the capitalist enemy. It is they and their comrades in struggle who are the precursors of the current working class fighters in South Africa.
Other organizations, of different origins and nature, were active within the working class. These are the main parties and organizations16claiming more or less formally at their origins to be working class or to defend its “interests”, excluding the Labour Party which remained faithful to its bourgeoisie since its active participation in the first world slaughter. More precisely, we give here an overview17 of the nature and origin of the ANC and of the South African CP as part of the forces of the ideological containment of the working class since the 1920s.
– The ANC. This organization was created in 1912 by and for the indigenous petty bourgeoisie (doctors, lawyers, teachers and other functionaries, etc.), individuals who demanded democracy, racial equality and defended the British constitutional system, as illustrated in the words of Nelson Mandela:
“For 37 years, that is to say, until 1949, the African National Congress fought with scrupulous respect for the law (...) It believed that the grievances of the Africans would be considered after peaceful discussions and that we would move slowly towards full recognition of the rights of the African nation.”18
In this sense, since its birth up until the 1950s,19far from seeking to overthrow the capitalist system, the ANC led peaceful actions respectful of the established order, and was therefore very far from seeking to overthrow the capitalist system. This same Mandela boasted of his “anti-communist”struggle, as outlined in his autobiography A Long Walk to Freedom. But its Stalinist orientation, suggesting an alliance between the (“progressive”) bourgeoisie and the working class, allowed the ANC to rely on the CP to gain a foothold in the ranks of the workers, especially in the base of the unions that these two parties together control even today.
– The South African Communist Party. The CP was created by elements claiming to defend proletarian internationalism and as such a member of the Third International (1921). In its beginnings it advocated the unity of the working class and put forward the perspective of the overthrow of capitalism and the establishment of communism. But by 1928 it became simply an executive arm of Stalinist policies in the South African colony. The Stalinist theory of “socialism in one country” was accompanied by the idea that the underdeveloped countries were required to go through “a bourgeois revolution” and that, in this vision, the proletariat could fight against colonial oppression but not establish any proletarian power in the colonies at this time.
The South African CP took this orientation to absurd lengths, becoming the faithful lapdog of the ANC in the 1950s, as this quote illustrates: “The CP made offers of service to the ANC. The Secretary General of CP explained to Mandela: “Nelson, what do you have against us? We are fighting the same enemy. We are not talking about dominating the ANC; we are working in the context of African nationalism.” And in 1950 Mandela accepted that the CP would put its militant apparatus in the service of the ANC, thus giving him control over a good part of the labour movement and a significant advantage allowing the ANC to take hegemony over the whole of the anti-apartheid movement. In exchange the ANC would provide a legal front for the prohibited CP apparatus.”20
Thus, both openly bourgeois parties have become inseparable and are now at the head of the South African government for the defence of the interests of national capital and against the working class which they oppress and massacre, as in the strike of the miners at Marikana in August 2012.
This barbaric word is hated today worldwide even by its former supporters as symbolizing and incarnating the most despicable form of capitalist exploitation of the layers and classes belonging to the South African proletariat. But before going further, we propose one definition among others of this term: in the “Afrikaans” language spoken by the Afrikaners, apartheid more precisely means “separation.” This includes all kinds of separation (racial, social, cultural, economic, etc.). But behind this formal definition of apartheid lies a doctrine promoted by the “primitive”capitalists and colonialistswhich combines economic and ideological objectives:
“Apartheid is derived from both the colonial system and the capitalist system; in this dual capacity, it stamps on South African society divisions of racial characteristics in the first place and inherent divisions of class in the second.As in many other parts of the globe, there is almost perfect coincidence between the black races and the exploited class. At the other extreme, however, the situation is less clear. Indeed, the white population cannot be regarded as a dominant class without further ado. It is, certainly, constituted by a handful of owners of the means of production, but also from the mass of those who are dispossessed: agricultural and industrial workers, miners, service workers, etc. So there is no identity between the white race and the dominant class. (…) But, nothing like this has ever happened [the white workforce rubbing shoulders with the black workforce on an equal footing] or will ever happen in South Africa as long as apartheid is in effect. Because this system is designed to avoid any possibility of the creation of a multiracial working class.This is where the anachronistic system of South African power, its mechanisms dating from another era,come to the aid of the capitalist system which generally tends to simplify relationships within society. Apartheid - in its most comprehensive form- came to consolidate the colonial edifice, at the moment when capitalism was at risk of bringing down the entire power of the Whites. The means was an ideology and legislation aiming to annihilate class antagonisms within the white population, to extirpate the germs, to erase the contours and replace them with racial antagonisms.
By replacing the contradictions of a terrain difficult to control (division of society into antagonistic classes) with ones more easily manageable, the non- antagonistic division of society between races, white power has almost achieved the desired result: to constitute a homogeneous and united block on the basis of white ethnicity- a bloc all the more solid because it feels historically menaced by black power and communism - and on the other side, to divide the black population within itself, by different tribes or by social groups with different interests.
Dissonances, class antagonisms that are minimized, ignored or erased on the white side are encouraged, emphasized and provoked on the black side. This enterprise of division - facilitated by the presence on South African soil of populations of diverse origins- has routinely been conducted since colonization: detribalization of one part of the African population, the retention in traditional structures of another; evangelization and training of some, denial of any possibility of education of others, establishing small elites of leaders and officials, pauperisation of the great masses; and finally, the putting in place, to great fanfares,of an African, Mestizo, Indian, petty bourgeoisie - a buffer ready to interpose itself between their racial brothers and their class allies.”21
We generally agree with this author’s framework for defining and analyzingthe system of apartheid. We are particularly in agreement when it states that apartheid is above all an ideological instrument in the service of capital against the unity (in struggle) of different members of the exploited class; in this case the workers of all colours. In other words, the apartheid system is primarily a weapon against the class struggle as the motor of history, the only one capable of overthrowing capitalism. Also, if apartheid was theorized and fully applied from 1948 by the most backward Afrikaner fraction of the South African colonial bourgeoisie, it was the British, bearers of the “most modern civilization”, who laid the foundations of this despicable system.
“Indeed, it is from the early nineteenth century that the British invaders took legislative and military measures to group part of the African population in ‘reserves’, allowing or forcing the other part to leave them to be employed across the country in diverse economic sectors. The area of these tribal reserves was fixed in 1913 and slightly enlarged in 1936 to offer the (black) population only 13% of the national territory. These tribal reserves,fabricated in every way by white power (...) were named Bantustans (...),’national homelands for the Bantus’, each theoretically to regroup members of the same ethnicity.”22
Thus, the idea of separate races and populations was initiated by the British colonialism which methodically applied its famous strategy of “divide and rule” by implementing ethnic separation, not only between blacks and whites but even more cynically between black ethnic groups.
However, the proponents of the system could never prevent the breakdown of their own contradictions, inevitably generating the confrontation between the two antagonistic classes. Clearly under this barbaric system, many workers’ struggles were conducted by white workers as well as black workers (or mestizo and Indian).
Certainly the South African bourgeoisie was remarkably successful in rendering workers’ struggles powerless by permanently poisoning the class consciousness of the South African proletariat. This was reflected in the fact that some groups of workers often fought at the same time against their exploiters but also against their comrades of a different ethnic group, and fell into the deadly trap set by the class enemy. In sum, rare were the struggles uniting workers of different ethnic origins. We also know that many so-called “workers’” organizations, namely unions and parties, facilitated the task of capital by endorsing this policy of the “racial division “of the South African working class. For example, the unions of European origin along with the South African Labour Party, defended first (or exclusively) the “interests” of white workers. Similarly, the various black movements (parties and unions) struggled first of all against the system of exclusion of the blacks by claiming equality and independence. This orientation was incarnated principally by the ANC. We should note the particular case of the South African CP which, at first (in the early 1920s), tried to unite the working class without distinction in the fight against capitalism but was soon to abandon the terrain of internationalism by deciding to focus on “the black cause.” This was the beginning of its definitive “Stalinization”.
First workers’struggle in Kimberley
By coincidence the diamond that symbolically gave birth to South African capitalism was also the origin of the first movement of proletarian struggle. The first workers’ strike broke out in Kimberley, the “Diamond Capital”, in 1884, when British-born miners decided to fight against the decision of the mining companies to impose the so-called “compound” system (ie. forced labour camps) reserved up until then for black workers. In this struggle the miners organized strike pickets to impose a balance of power enabling them to win their demands, while to break the strike the employers on the one hand engaged “scabs” and on the other troops armed to the teeth who were not slow to fire on the workers.There were 4 deaths among the strikers,who nevertheless continued the struggle with a vigour which forced the employers to meet their demands. This was the first movement of the struggle between the two historical forces in South African capitalism that ended in blood but also victory for the proletariat. Therefore we can say that it was here that the real class struggle began in capitalist South Africa, laying the foundations for future confrontations.
Strike against wage cuts in 1907
Not content with the work rates which they imposed on the workers to improve performance, the Rand employers23 decided in 1907 to reduce salaries by 15%, in particular those of British-born miners who were considered to be “privileged.” As in the Kimberley strike, employers recruited strike breakers(very poor Afrikaners) who, without being in solidarity with the strikers, nevertheless refused to do the dirty work they were ordered to. Despite this the employers were eventually able to wear the strikers down. We should note that the sources we have to hand talk about the strike’s extent but do not give a total for the number of participants in the movement.
Strikes and demonstrations in 1913
Faced with massive wage cuts and deteriorating working conditions, miners entered massively into struggle. During 1913 a strike was launched by mine workers against the additional hours the company wanted to impose on them. And it did not take much to generalise the movement to all sectors, with mass demonstrations which nevertheless were violently broken up by the forces of order. In the end twenty dead and a hundred wounded were counted (officially).
Railway and coal miners’strike in 1914
At the beginning of the year a series of strikes broke out among both coal miners and railway workers against the degradation of working conditions. But this movement of struggle was in a particular context; that of the preparations for the first generalized imperialist slaughter. In this movement we can see the presence of the Afrikaner fraction, but set apart from the British fraction. Although both were well supervised by their respective unions, each defending its own “ethnic clients.”
Accordingly the government hastened to impose martial law to physically break the strike and its initiators, imprisoning or deporting a large number of strikers, the exact number of whom is still unknown. In addition, we want to emphasize here the particular role of unions in this strike movement. It was in this same context of the repression of the struggles that the union and Labour Party leaders voted for “war credits” by supporting the entry of the Union of South Africa into the war against Germany.
Labour unrest against the war in 1914 and attempts to organize
If the working class was generally muzzled during the 1914-1918 war, some proletarian elements did however try to oppose it by advocating internationalism against capitalism. Thus:
“(...)In 1917, a poster appears on the walls of Johannesburg, convening a meeting for July 19: ‘Come and discuss issues of common interest between white and indigenous workers.’ This text is published by the International Socialist League (ISL), a revolutionary syndicalist organization influenced by the American IWW (...) and formed in 1915 in opposition to the First World War and the racist and conservative policies of the South African Labour Party and craft unions. Comprising at the beginning mostly white activists, the ISL moves very quickly towards black workers, calling in its weekly newspaper International, to build ‘a new union that overcomes the limitations of trades, skin colors, races and of sex to destroy capitalism by a blockade of the capitalist class.’”24
By 1917, the ISL was organizing coloured workers. In March 1917, it founded an Indian workers’ union in Durban. In 1918, it founded a textile workers’ union (also later formed in Johannesburg) and a horse drivers’ union in Kimberley, the diamond mining town. In the Cape, a sister organization, the Industrial Socialist League, founded in the same year a sweets and confectionery workers’ union.
The July 19 meeting was a success and formed the basis of weekly meetings of study groups led by members of the ISL (including Andrew Dubar, founder of the IWW in South Africa in 1910). These meetings discussed capitalism, the class struggle and the need for African workers to unionize in order to obtain wage increases and to abolish the pass system. On 27 September, the study groups were transformed into a union, the Industrial Workers of Africa (IWA), modelled on the IWW. Its organizing committee was composed entirely of Africans. The demands of the new unions were simple and uncompromising in a slogan: SifunaZonke! (“We want everything!”).
Finally, here is the expression of the birth of proletarian internationalism. An internationalism taken up by a minority of workers but of great importance at the time, because it was the moment when many proletarians were bound and dragged into the first world imperialist slaughter by the traitor Labour Party in the company of the official unions. Another aspect that illustrates the strength and dynamic of these small internationalist groups is the fact that elements (including the International Socialist League and others) were able to emerge from them in order to form the South African Communist Party in 1920. It was these groups, seemingly dominated by supporters of revolutionary syndicalism, which could actively promote the emergence of radical unions especially among black and coloured workers.
A wave of strikes in 1918
Despite the harshness of the time with martial law suppressing any reaction or protest, strikes could occur:
“In 1918, an unprecedented wave of strikes against the cost of living and for salary increases, bringing together white and coloured workers, overwhelms the country. When the judge McFie imprisons 152 African municipal workers in June 1918, urging them to continue to “do the same job as before” but now from prison under the supervision of an armed escort, progressive whites and Africans are outraged. The TNT (Transvaal Native Congress, forerunner of the ANC) called for a mass rally of African workers in Johannesburg on June 10.”25
An important or symbolic fact should be noted here: this is the only (known) involvement of the ANC in a movement of the class struggle in the first sense of the term. This is certainly one of the reasons explaining the fact that this nationalist fraction as a result had an influence within the black working class.
During 1919 a radical union (the Industrial and Commercial Workers Union), consisting of black and mixed race employees but without white workers, launched a massive strike especially among the dockworkers of Port Elizabeth. But once again this movement was crushed militarily by the police backed by armed white groups, causing over 20 deaths among the strikers. Here again the strikers were isolated which ensured the defeat of the working class in an unequal battle on a military terrain.
In 1920, this time it was African miners who sparked one of the biggest strikes in the country affecting some 70,000 workers. The movement lasted a week before being crushed by the forces of order who, armed with guns, liquidated a large number of strikers. Despite its massiveness, this movement of African workers could not count on any support from the white unions, which refused to call a strike or aid the victims of the bullets of the colonial bourgeoisie. Unfortunately this lack of solidarity promoted by the unions became systematic in each sturggle.
In 1922 an insurrectionary strike crushed by a well-equipped army
At the end of December 1921, the coal mine bosses announced massive wage cuts and layoffs aimed at replacing 5000 European miners with indigenous workers. In January 1922, 30,000 miners decided to fight against the attacks of the mining employers. Faced with the procrastination of the unions, a group of workers took the initiative by establishing a committee to fight and declaring a general strike. In this way the miners forced the union leaders to follow the movement, but this strike was not quite “general” because it concerned only the “whites”.
Faced with the pugnacity of the workers, the united state and employers then decided to use the utmost military means to defeat the movement. In order to deal with the strike the government declared martial law and mobilised some 60,000 thousand men with machine guns, cannons, tanks and even airplanes.
For their part, seeing the extent of their enemy’s forces, the strikers began to arm themselves by purchasing weapons (guns, etc.) and organizing themselves into commandos. We therefore witnessed a veritable military battle as in a conventional war. At the end of the fight on the workers’ side there were more than 200 dead, 500 injured, 4,750 arrests, 18 death sentences. Clearly, this was a real war, as if South African imperialism,which took active part in the first world butchery,wished to extend its activity by bombing the miners as if it was facing German troops. By this gesture the British colonial bourgeoisie was demonstrating its absolute hatred of the South African proletariat, but also its fear of it.
In terms of lessons learned from this movement, it must be said that despite its military character, the bloody confrontation was above all a real class war, of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, with, however, unequal means. This only underlines the fact that the main power of the working class is not military but resides above all in its greatest possible unity. But instead of seeking the support of all the exploited, the miners (whites) fell into the trap set by the bourgeoisie with its plan to replace the 5,000 European workers by indigenous workers. This was shown tragically by the fact that throughout the battle between the European miners and the armed forces of capital, other workers (black, coloured and Indian), some 200,000 of them, were working or idle. It is also clear that, from the outset, the bourgeoisie was clearly aware of the weakness of the workers who went into battle deeply divided. The abject recipe of “divide and rule”was applied here with success well before the formal establishment of apartheid (whose main purpose as we recall was to contain the class struggle). But above all the bourgeoisie took advantage of its military victory over the South African proletarians to reinforce its grip on the working class. It organized elections in 1924 from which emerged victorious the populist parties defending“white interests”, namely the National Party (Boer) and the Labour Party, which formed a coalition government. It was this coalition government that passed the laws establishing racial divisions, as far as considering a breach of work contract by a black worker as a crime; or again imposing a system of passes for blacks and establishing compulsory residence zones for natives. Similarly there was a “colour bar”aimed at reserving skilled jobs for whites, providing them with a much higher salary than blacks or Indians. To this were added other segregationist laws including one entitled “The Industrial Conciliation Act” to ban non-white organizations. It was on the basis of this ultra repressive apartheid system that the Afrikaner government legally established apartheid in 1948.
In this way the bourgeoisie succeeded in permanently paralyzing all expressions of proletarian class struggle and it was not until the eve of the Second World War that we see the working class get its head above water by taking the path of the class struggle. In fact, between late 1920 and 1937, the field of struggle was occupied by nationalism: on the one hand, by the South African CP, the ANC and their unions, and on the other, by the Afrikaner National Party and its satellites.
Lassou (To be continued)
1 See the series “Contribution to a history of the workers’ movement in Africa”, on Senegal in particular, in the International Review nos.145, 146, 147, 148 and 149.
2In August 2012, the police of the ANC government massacred 34 strikers at the Marikana mines.
3See Henri Wesseling, Le partage de l’Afrique, Editions Denoel, 1996, for the French translation.
4 Ibid.
5Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, Section 3, Chapter 27, “The Struggle Against Natural Economy”,https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/ch2... [1]
6Brigitte Lachartre, Luttes ouvrières et libération en Afrique du Sud, Editions Syros, 1977.
7Henri Wesseling, ibid.
8BrigitteLachartre,ibid.
9Wesseling, ibid.
10Cited inWesseling, ibid.
11Lachartre, ibid.
12Wesseling, ibid.
13 The South African government certainly contributed to this with laws against all non-white organization.
14The IWW was at the time one of the few trade union movements to organize white and non-white workers, not only in the same union but in the same union branches, regardless of race. See our articles in International Review nos. 124, 125: https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200601/1609/iww-fail... [2]
15 Lucien van der Walt (Bikisha collective media), https://www.zabalaza.net [3]
16 We will return later to the unions claiming to defend the working class.
17In the next article we will we will develop on the role of the parties/unions active within the working class.
18Quoted by Brigitte Lachartre, ibid.
19It is after the formal establishment of apartheid in 1948 that the CP and the ANC enter into armed struggle.
20Circle Leon Trotsky, Presentation 29/01/2010, website www.lutte-ouvri [4]ère.org
21Lachartre, ibid.Our emphasis.
22Lachartre, ibid.
23The Rand is the common name for the Witwatersrand (White Waters Ridge) region which saw the first discoveries of gold and the first industrialisation of the country.
24Une histoire du syndicalisme révolutionnaire en Afrique du Sud [5].(See also 1816-1939: Syndicalism in South Africa [6])
25https://www.pelloutier.net [7], cited above.
The creation of the world market is capitalism’s great historical achievement. For the first time in history, the whole of humanity has been brought together in a single network of commerce and industry; for the first time in history also, the revolutionary class is a worldwide class. This means that the historical evolution of any country is no longer determined by local or even by regional conditions, but fundamentally by the overall development of world capitalism.
That said, the local and national forms that this development takes are always strongly influenced by the specific history that predates capitalism, and by geography. The case of the Philippines is no exception to this general rule, and to understand the development of Filipino unionism we must therefore understand something of Filipino history.
Geographically, the Philippines is a vast archipelago of over 7000 islands, of which some 2000 are inhabited.1 Prior to the beginning of colonization by Spain from 1521 onwards, the archipelago – unsurprisingly – was not united in a single political or even cultural entity. To this day, some 150 languages and dialects are spoken in the Philippines and at least 20% of the population does not speak the national language (Filipino, a derivative of Tagalog which is spoken by 29% of the population).
Situated on the eastern flank of the South China Sea, with China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Indonesia as its immediate maritime neighbors, the archipelago was integrated as much as 2000 years ago into a vast trading network which brought Indian, Chinese, and even Persian influences to the islands: Islam in particular made its appearance from 1200 CE onwards and remains dominant in the southern island of Mindanao.
Despite the emergence of various kingdoms (whose rulers often took the Indian title of "rajah") and sultanates, the majority of the archipelago was divided into fiefdoms of varying sizes known as barangays: the word continues to designate the Philippines' smallest administrative unit. The barangays' rulers – the datus – owed their position in part to their membership of an aristocratic caste, but also and largely to their own personal power. Rulers could lose power or prestige, or even be overthrown if they failed to live up to their promises.
Spanish colonialism profoundly modified this traditional social structure: the fluid system of barangays and power based on personal prestige and tribute was transformed into one based on land ownership and debt servitude. Power was divided between Spanish overlords placed in authority over encomiendas (settlements created for the purposes of tax collection), local chiefs whose authority was guaranteed by the Spanish in exchange for cooperation with the colonial power, and the Catholic Church, which became a major landowner in its own right: "dependency and indebtedness characterized this multifaceted relationship [between rulers and ruled]. At best it gave way to a paternalistic relationship, at worst it created an exploitative set up".2 It could be argued that this form of political domination based on a mixture of wealth, family connections, personal prestige and the ability to mobilize groups of supporters, has simply mutated with the arrival of capitalism and survives to this day in the form of domination of the Filipino bourgeoisie, strongly marked by clientelism.
Spanish colonization during the 16th century was by no means a mere extension to the Philippines of the feudal social structure which still largely dominated Spain itself. On the contrary, the driving force behind Spanish and Portuguese expansion to the Far East was the desire of the merchant classes, and of the crown which stood to profit from the undertaking, to break into the immensely lucrative spice trade with the East, and to shatter the monopoly exercised by Ottoman, Arab, and to an extent Venetian merchants. By tying the Philippines into a Spanish imperial economy that already existed on the other side of the Pacific, colonization extended the world market of an emerging capitalism from Europe all the way to China, where an embryonic monetary and capitalist economy was already developing under the Ming dynasty. By the beginning of the 17th century, Manila was thus – together with Macao under Portuguese rule – one of the main points of contact between Europe and Asia, and the lynch-pin of trade between Asia and the Americas. Silver was in huge demand by Chinese merchants, and "When the Manila galleon established the link across the Pacific with New Spain, Chinese junks rushed to meet it. Goods were traded in Manila solely for Mexican silver, to a volume of around a million pesos every year".3 From the outset, Filipino workers were involved in this worldwide commercial network: "European ships of the 'country trade' were worked, even in the early days of the Portuguese, by mixed crews with a majority of local sailors. Even ships from the Philippines employed 'few Spaniards, many Malays, Hindus, and Filipino mestizos'".4
Another important factor in Filipino history is the role of religion, and especially of the Catholic Church, introduced by the Spanish colonizers as a justification of their rule and a means of eliminating rival religions which could serve as a rallying point for opposition to the colonial power.
In Europe, ever since its establishment as an official state religion by the Byzantine Emperor Constantine in the 4th century CE, the Catholic Church in particular has had to accommodate a constant contradiction between the biblical ideal of poverty and service to the poor,5 and the material reality of the Church's enormous wealth and social position as temporal overlord. In general, the Catholic Church tried to incorporate the ideal of poverty into its own structures of power and wealth, for example through the creation of monastic orders like the Cistercians or the Franciscans. In the Philippines, this contradiction was given an added twist by the fact that "It was not even until the 19th century that select members of the Chinese mestizo ["mixed blood"] and Filipino illustrado [ie educated] class were for the first time admitted into the priesthood".6 As a result of these material and ideological contradictions, the Church in the Philippines included both corrupt and ruthless exploiters of Filipino labor (especially on the monastic estates, which by the end of the 19th century owned some 171,000 hectares of prime agricultural land7), and courageous and dedicated defenders of the rights of the labouring population (after the 1872 Cavite revolt, for example, three priests – Fathers Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora – were garrotted to death for their supposed part in the conspiracy).
Conflict within the Catholic Church between Filipino nationalism and attempts to defend the poor on the one hand, and the Church's role as landlord and defender of the colonial power on the other, led in 1902 to the creation of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente with the Catholic priest Gregorio Aglipay as its first "Obispo Maximo" (see below). Paradoxically, this came just as the Catholic Church's role as defender of the colonial power ended with Spain's eviction from the Philippines by the United States.
Our very brief consideration of some important features of the history of the Philippines prior to the 20th century would be incomplete without a look at its geography. The Philippines' position in the South China Sea has always been, and continues to be, crucial, both commercially and militarily. For the Spaniards, as we have seen, the Philippines were the commercial gateway to China, and this was even more true for the USA. In the first decades of the 20th century, the increasing importance of China as a region of competition and conflict between rival imperialist powers, and the rise of Japan as a formidable industrial power in its own right,8 increased the military significance of the Philippines: their defense played an important part in slowing the Japanese advance towards Australia in World War II, and their reconquest by the American army was a key moment in Japan's military defeat. Following World War II, the Philippines served as a rear base for the American military effort in Vietnam, and the US naval base at Subic Bay remained one of the US' key military installations throughout the Cold War,9 until its closure in 1992 by the Filipino government. The closure was of short duration: increasing fears of Chinese expansionism led to the signature in 1999 of a "Visiting Forces Agreement" which allowed US ships to use Subic Bay during the joint US-Filipino Balikatan military exercises, and to a reported 2012 agreement for a permanent US military presence in the base.
Despite the backwardness of the Spanish economy, and the weakness of the Spanish bourgeoisie, the 19th century saw an ever-tighter integration of the Filipino economy into the world capitalist market. The low-volume, high-value trade of the Manila galleon with the Americas was replaced by farming for cash crops, notably logging, tobacco and sugar. Simultaneously, and as a direct consequence, there emerged a new ruling stratum of wealthy landowners and merchants including in particular Chinese mestizos linked to the trading families of Fukien and Kwantung, and members of what became known as the principalia: leading Filipino or Spanish mestizo families who had successfully accumulated landed wealth, but who were also often linked to their share-cropping tenants by family or tribal ties. These wealthy families often sent their children to Spain for their education, thus encouraging the development of a Spanish language but specifically Filipino culture borne by Filipino intellectuals known as illustrados. The development of this intellectual class, linked to an emerging bourgeoisie and strongly imbued with radical democratic ideals, found expression in 1888 with the creation of the journal La Solidaridad and what became known as the Propaganda Movement. It is striking that La Solidaridad was founded only forty years after the national revolutions of 1848 in Europe, and that its nationalist democratic program is broadly similar to that of Hungarian, Polish, and even Irish nationalists of the same epoch: far from being hopelessly mired in feudal backwardness, the Filipino bourgeoisie followed the same path trodden by its European counterparts only a few decades earlier.
It is therefore unsurprising that the birth of the Filipino labor movement should have many features in common with the movement in Europe, although a lack of documentation makes its beginnings difficult to follow.
The earliest seeds of the labor movement were formed in the 1850s. These were secret organizations for mutual aid and benefits of workers, similar in aim to the Friendly Societies formed by workers in Britain. Among the earliest were the Gremio de Obrero de Sampaloc, the Gremio de Escultores del Barrio Sta.Cruz, the Gremio de Carpinteros and the Gremio de Impresores y Litograficos. The Filipino labor movement can even claim to be one of the oldest in Asia.
The working class in the Philippines appeared at a time of the zenith of world capitalism, the stage of expanding imperialism. Furthermore, it appeared at a time of the victorious bourgeois revolution in Spain itself. In other words, it appeared on the ruins of feudalism on a world scale and in Spain in particular. The feudal remnants are only remnants, nothing more.
The first recorded mass working class action was conducted by members of the Gremios de Impresores in 1872 when they walked out of a government printing press in San Fernando, Pampanga on account of abuse and maltreatment by Spanish foremen and to demand better terms and conditions of work and higher wages.
The emerging Filipino workers' movement suffered not only from the relatively less developed condition of Filipino industry, but perhaps still more from their geographical isolation from the proletariat's European core. Marx in the Manifesto describes the ease with which, thanks to the railways, European workers could organize, travel, and develop their political culture. But the enormous distances involved made this less an option for Filipino workers, and this inevitably meant that the 19th century workers' movement was strongly influenced by an illustrado leadership.
These first mass actions coincided with the proletarian struggles in Europe that culminated in the first attempt of the class to seize power in Paris, France in 1871, although there is no evidence that the Filipino movement was directly aware of the momentous events of the Commune.
Since at that time the Philippine proletariat was still regrouping and learning to struggle as a class, the early workers' struggles were closely connected to Filipino nationalism, to the struggle for independent nationhood, and against colonialism. And one of the prime movers of this sense of nationalism was the Filipino clergy who were discriminated against by the Spanish-controlled Catholic Church. This is why both religion and nationalism had great influence on the early proletarian movement – an influence which survives to this day. This is an expression of the way that the consciousness of the revolutionary class lags behind the changes of objective conditions.
The close ties between unionism, nationalism, and religion, which have severely handicapped the ability of the Filipino workers to develop a revolutionary class consciousness, are exemplified by Isabelo delos Reyes, often considered the founding father of Filipino unionism. Born in 1864, delos Reyes was an illustrado nationalist journalist (in 1889 he founded El Ilocano, said to be the first newspaper written solely in a Filipino language) who was exiled to Spain in 1897 for his nationalist activities. While in Spain – such are the strange contradictions to which capitalism could give rise in those days – he was employed as Consejero del Ministerio del Ultramar (Counsellor of the Ministry for the Colonies) while at the same time taking in the influence of the radical and revolutionary thinkers of the age: on his return to the Philippines he brought with him books by Marx, Engels, Proudhon, Bakunin and other European anarchists and socialists, as well as literary works. While in Spain he wrote articles attacking the United States and its war to strip Spain of its colonies (see below), which is doubtless one of the reasons that the Spanish government allowed him to return to the Philippines in 1901.10
In February 1902, delos Reyes, together with the print union leader Herminigildo Cruz, Dominador Gomez and Lope Santos brought together more than 85 unions to found the Union Obrera Democratica (UOD), the first labor federation in the country. Its members included unions of printers, lithographers, cigar makers, tailors, mechanics, and others in various trades and occupations. At least some of these unions were apparently organized along industrial lines similar to the International Workers of the World (IWW).
In the same year, delos Reyes played a key role in founding the Philippine Independent Church11 together with the Catholic priest Gregorio Aglipay, who became the church’s first “Obispo Maximo”.12
In 1892, the rise of Filipino nationalism led to the formation of the gradualist Liga Filipina by the novelist Jose Rizal, and of the Katipunan ("The worshipful association of the sons of the people") by Andres Bonifacio, an admirer of Rizal who hoped to draw the latter into an active involvement in agitation for independence. By 1896, the Katipunan had grown to be a substantial force with between 100,000 and 400,000 members, and was strong enough to launch a nationalist revolt against Spain under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo. This first attempt ended in a negotiated stalemate which left Spain in control, but Aguinaldo and his cadres free to continue organising from their exile in Hong Kong.
It was in this context that in 1898 the United States declared war on Spain following the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana harbor (Cuba belonging to Spain at the time).13 This war allowed the US to carry off a land grab on the Philippines, which had obviously been prepared in advance and which combined brutality and hypocrisy to a truly startling degree.14
At the beginning of the war, the US presented itself as the champion of Filipino independence. The American naval commander Commodore Dewey organised Aguinaldo's return to the Philippines: the war with Spain came to an end in 1898 with American troops in Manila, while the Filipino nationalists controlled most of the rest of the country and had already declared a Filipino Republic with its provisional capital in Malolos and Aguinaldo as President. The peace was of short duration: in February 1899, US troops in Manila provoked the outbreak of a new war, this time against the fledgling Filipino Republic, which was to end in 1902 after the defeat of the Filipino army by a vastly superior American force, and a protracted and brutal guerilla campaign that left 22,000 Filipino soldiers and more than 500,000 civilians dead. The Philippines was thus given a taste of the delights of "civilisation" and "democracy": in just three years, the USA killed more Filipinos that the Spaniards had done in 300.15
All the more remarkable, in this context, is the third recorded strike of March 1899 by the printers union led by Herminigildo Cruz, demanding increased wages and an end to the abuses of a press superintendent. The mass action was directed at the management of the nationalist government’s printing press in Malolos, Bulacan, where the La Independencia was printed. Editor and General Antonio Luna intervened and arranged for a 25% pay raise to workers.
We can appreciate the symbolism of this strike, at the turn of the century, being directed not against the old or new colonial power but against the rising national democratic bourgeoisie that was supposed to be a "reliable ally" of the workers' movement. Filipino labor was confronted from the outset by national government, nationalist movements, and brutal repression by the colonial power.
Given its own anti-imperialist ideology (which for America meant the opposition to the fully colonial structures set up by the old European empires, especially the British), the USA could hardly transform the Philippines into a colony in the old style. Hence alongside US military occupation under the authority of an American Governor-General, the 1902 Philippine Bill adopted by the US Congress provided for the creation of an elected legislature: the first elections were held in 1907 and led to a resounding victory for the Nacionalista Party.16
The American ruling class was united in its desire to preserve its commercial, industrial, and military strategic interests in the Philippines, but was divided on how best to do so: by continual direct rule and military occupation, or through nominal independence, with client status ensured by treaties and the maintenance of US military bases in the country. By 1934, following the election of Roosevelt's Democrat "New Deal" administration in 1933, the second option was chosen and the Tidings-McDuffie Act of that year created the Philippine Commonwealth, which was to become fully independent after a ten-year transition period. Manuel Quezon was elected as the first President of the Philippines under the Act, in 1935.
Returning to August 1902 and the beginning of the American occupation, when Isabelo delos Reyes was arrested and imprisoned for charges of sedition and rebellion, Dominador Gomez took over and changed the name of UOD to Union Obrera Democratica de Filipinas (UODF). But Gomez was also arrested for sedition and illegal association in 1903 after thousands of workers marched on May 1, 1903 demanding national independence.
Gomez articulated the orientation of Philippine unionism in a speech delivered as leader of the Union Obrera Democratica:
“The banner of UOD is dynamic nationalism against any form of imperialism, against oppression.”
And on May 1, 1903, in a workers rally of Union Obrera Democratica de Filipinas Gomez declared:
“We are not against capitalists (…) What we are against is the practice of the capitalists robbing the workers of the product of their sweat by not giving what is due to them…”17
If the nationalist unions were not against capitalism, then neither was the American colonial regime against trades unions as such, provided that they were tightly controlled by the state, and inspired by the most conservative forces of the workers’ movement in the United States. This two-pronged strategy led to the entry of the American Federation of Labor led by Samuel Gompers into the Philippines, where it gave support to the Union del Trabajo de Filipinas (UTF), set up by Lope K. Santos.18
At the same time, the Bureau of Labor (BOL) was set up (June 10, 1908) to organize the legalization and regulation of trade unionism throughout the country. The Bureau, under the Department of Commerce and Police, was tasked to regulate and provide information on the labor force and market, and to settle disputes between labor and employers. The US also gave the go-ahead for the Philippine Assembly to recognize May 1st as a national holiday, to appease the class anger of the workers.
The US attempt to control the union movement was not completely successful, and some unions continued to have close ties to the nationalist cause. This was notably the case with the Union de Impresores de Filipinas (UIF) which participated in the UODF; when the UODF was dissolved in 1903 and reorganised as the Congreso Obrero de Filipinas (COF), the UIF's president Crisanto Evangelista went on to play a leading role in the new federation. As a leader of COF, he was included in the Independence Mission sent to the USA in 1919 along with the then rising leader of the Nacionalista Party, Manuel Quezon. While in the US, Evangelista was ignored by the AFL, but did attend a convention of the International Workers of the World.19
The Philippines thus entered the last phase of capitalism’s ascendant period with a development of workers’ struggles taking the union form, but with the first signs of the unions’ integration into the state apparatus. Given the Philippines' relative isolation from the heart of world capitalism, it does not seem to have been immediately affected either by World War I, or by the betrayal of the Social Democracy (which had no presence in the country) and its consequences.
The labor movement continued to gain strength and experience in the legal battle and strikes became common. There were stoppages in many cigarette factories, at the harbor in Iloilo, in Negros logging companies and in the sugar mills of Negros, Pampanga and Laguna. There were also strikes on the railroads, at the copra factory of Franklin Baker, at the Manila Gas Company, in the rice mills of Nueva Ecija, and in the embroidery firms of Manila. In addition, Filipino workers who were working abroad at this time also participated in workers’ struggles in their country of emigration, thus showing that they are part of an international class.20
Despite its growing strength and militancy, the Filipino labor movement remained unable to establish its own political identity distinct and separate from the bourgeois forces of colonial politics. As we have just seen, the union movement remained politically dominated either by radical anti-American nationalism, or by US imperialism in the form of the AFL. One can perhaps draw an analogy with the situation in Britain at the turn of the 20th century where, in different circumstances and for different reasons, the workers' movement had no distinct mass political expression of its own, and remained substantially under the influence of the Liberal Party.
Whereas in Europe and the US, the union question was posed starkly in 1914 by the unions' betrayal of the workers in war,21 in the Philippines it was only posed gradually and as a result of the unions' inability to disentangle themselves either from bourgeois nationalism or from imperialism.
The Russian revolution of 1917 aroused immense hope and enthusiasm amongst workers all over the world: the Philippines was no exception.
In 1922, with Evangelista and Antonio Ora at the helm, the Progressive Workers' Party (also known as the Partido Obrero) was formed. Contacts with labor movements of other countries were intensive. The classic works of Marx and Engels found their way to the Philippines. Through the Workers’ Party, the COF became a member of the Pacific Secretariat of Trade Unions set up by the Red International of Labor Unions,22 and in 1924, Crisanto Evangelista was elected its president. The RILU invited the radical union leaders of the Philippines to its Pacific Conferences held in Canton, China on June 18-24, 1924, and in 1928 Evangelista represented the COF at both the 4th RILU Congress and the 6th Comintern Congress in Moscow.
After the Canton Conference, the American and Chinese communists were in regular communication with the radical nationalist unions in the Philippines.
Conflict between pro- and anti-Moscow tendencies within the COF led to a split in 1929 when Evangelista's grouping left, to form the following year the Proletarian Congress of the Philippines: Katipunan ng mga Anak-Pawis ng Pilipinas, or KAP. The KAP also formed the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines (Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas, or PKP), founded in 193023 and whose existence was announced publicly to a mass meeting of some 6000 workers in Tondo, Manila.24
While there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of Evangelista and his comrades, the impetus of the movement in the Philippines towards proletarian internationalism was derailed by two factors: first, neither the movement as a whole nor its key leaders had really broken with the national perspective with which they had entered political activity; second, and perhaps more importantly, the Communist International even in 1922 had begun the process of degeneration which was to transform it from the centre of world revolution to a mere tool in the service of the Russian state's imperialist interests. As we have already shown in relation to Turkey,25 the isolation of the revolution and the increasing consolidation of the capitalist powers led the Russian state to subject the political activity of the communist parties in Eastern countries to the demands of the USSR's alliances with bourgeois nationalist movements or even bourgeois governments.26 Significantly, 1922 – the year the Partido Obrero was founded – was also the year of the Congress of the Toilers of the East, held in Moscow and attended by representatives of both the Chinese CP and Sun Yat-sen's bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang, which was followed by the CI's insistance that the CCP should enter the Kuomintang. The massacre of the Shanghai workers by the Kuomintang in 1927 was the last gasp of the revolutionary upsurge that had begun ten years earlier in Russia, and by 1928 the counter-revolutionary process was completed with the adoption of Stalin's slogan of "Socialism in one country".
As the Comintern degenerated, the tendency was increasingly to put responsibility for the activity of the Communist parties in the colonies under the authority of the parties in the corresponding imperialist power, so that for example Algeria came under the responsibility of the French CP. This fitted perfectly with the general movement towards integration of the USSR – and therefore of the Comintern – into the system of imperialist alliances, since it meant that the orientation of the activity of militants in the colonies would be determined above all by the USSR's alliances or rivalry with the colonial power rather than by the needs or the possibilities of the class struggle internationally or locally. The Philippines was no exception: in April 1925, the Comintern's first resolution on the Philippines gave the American CP the responsibility of supporting both the national liberation movement, and the formation of a Communist Party.27 This corresponded to Russian policy in the Far East, which was to work with the local bourgeoisie (China being the classic case) in order to weaken the encirclement of Russia by other imperialist powers.28 This position was to change, as we shall see, with the rise of Japan to threaten Russia.
The formation of the PKP thus created, not an independent working class party, but on the contrary a basically nationalist organization under the domination of Russian imperialism.
In May 1, 1931, The Quezon government tried to suppress the organized forces of PKP. The military dispersed the marching workers in Caloocan with water cannons and attacked a worker’s meeting held by the laborers. Evangelista was arrested and accused of sedition, rebellion and illegal assembly.
American military authorities raided the KAP (Association of the Toilers) Congress. Several KAP leaders were arrested and the Court of First Instance declared the PKP and the KAP illegal. The Supreme Court upheld the decision.
The nationalist Filipino bourgeoisie once again showed its fangs against the working class. The “anti-American” Quezon allied with its “enemy” to suppress the working class. While the US ruling class still feared the USSR as an expression of a “communist threat”, the USSR was already integrated into the world wide system of imperialist conflicts and alliances: in reality, the repression of the PKP thus had nothing to do with socialism but on the contrary, the intensification of the rivalry between two imperialist powers – the USA and the Stalinist USSR.
Hand in hand with the iron fist of the bourgeoisie went regulation and control of the unions. In December 1933, the Department of Labor (DOL) was established. In succeeding years, many laws were enacted to integrate the unions to the state.
During the 1930s, three federations – influencing over 300 affiliated and independent unions – dominated the labor scene with the launching of the President Quezon’s Social Justice Program. There were the Collective Labor Movement (CLM), Confederated Workers Alliance (CWA), and National Federation of Labor (NFL); the CWA and the NFL were right-wing organizations which had emerged after the 1929 split in the COF, the NFL in particular being led by Ruperto Cristobal, the private secretary of the Secretary of Labor in the Quezon government. The CLM's leaders,29 on the contrary were all identified with pro-USSR "socialism".30 The CLM was the biggest labor center uniting 76 unions, but it did not prosper as a formal organization because personal and ideological conflicts prevented its transformation into a coherent organization.
In a period when it is no longer possible for workers to gain meaningful reforms within the capitalist system, and where every mass movement of the class immediately comes up against the repressive forces of the state, trade unions are inevitably integrated into the capitalist state apparatus and take on the characteristics of bourgeois organizations.31
Like the Filipino bourgeoisie, trade unionism in the Philippines in the decadent stage of capitalism is riddled with internal rivalries. It has no capacity to unify even its organized forces because unions are divided between imperialist rivalries. This is the lesson of 20th century history which so many obstinately refuse to learn.
In every workers' struggle the unions tied the class struggle into union and nationalist struggles. Thus, workers’ demands become demands to defend the unions and the “right to organize unions” and for national independence from US imperialism.
By the mid-1930s, the world situation was changing: the rise of Nazi Germany and militaristic Japanese imperialism led the USSR to seek an accommodation with the "democratic" powers against the emerging fascist bloc. As a result, the policy of the American CP towards Roosevelt changed from opposition to support in the 1936 US elections, and the PKP was now urged to support the "democratic camp". The first step was the formation of a "popular front": “On September 20, 1936 the PKP Central Committee issued a manifesto entitled, “Forward for the Formation of the Popular Front”. It called for an alliance of all labor, peasant and middle class organizations and political and social groups who were in opposition to the policies of the Commonwealth government, particularly the Quezon-Osmeña coalition and were willing to work for better social conditions and absolute national independence. It announced as the aim of the Popular Front “to save the Filipino people from the danger of imperialist war, dictatorship and fascism, to improve the conditions of the masses and obtain independence””.32
As James Allen, the American CP's emissary to the Philippines, wrote "By June of 1937, I was conveying to my correspondents anxiety over the ominous state of affairs and particularly concern about Japan's aggressive intentions in Southeast Asia. To safeguard the cause of independence, I suggested, the Philippines would need to place itself on the anti-fascist side and also recognize that the United States was the major power in the Pacific able to confront the Japanese military-fascists".33 The American CP also advocated a switch to supporting the government of Manuel Quezon.
As a result, when Allen made a second visit to the Philippines in 1938 it was with the blessing of Roosevelt's New Deal government. He encountered a changed political situation. Evangelista, who had lived in semi-clandestinity since the banning of the PKP, was allowed to go to Moscow for medical treatment and received by Quezon in Malacanang (the presidential palace) before his departure. Allen was given an official invitation by Quezon, and the PKP was once again legalised. A 1938 PKP convention was held in public, with invited representatives from the Quezon government and the Kuomintang: the PKP could hardly hope for more official endorsement from the nationalist ruling class!
Together with his changed attitude to the PKP, Quezon also relaxed restrictions on workers' demonstrations, and in June 3, 1939, Commonwealth Act. No. 444 or the Eight-Hour Workday Law was enacted. What in the 19th century had been an object of workers' struggle, was offered as a gift on the eve of World War II, not as a result of a strong independent workers movement but to dragoon the Filipino workers for the 2nd imperialist war. As we know, the Philippine Commonwealth Government was allied with American imperialism.
The policy of bringing the PKP into the "democratic camp" of US imperialism was to pay off as soon as the war began. The Japanese bombardment of Pearl Harbor was quickly followed by that of the Philippines in December 1941. The PKP immediately decided to begin organising a guerilla movement, and informed the Quezon government and US administration of its "pledge of all-out support to national unity around an anti-Japanese United Front and of loyalty to the existing government, declaring that 'All people and all strata of the population must organize, secretly if necessary, to assist the Philippine and American government to resist Japan' (…) Over 50,000 workers and peasants were organized by the PKP and put at the disposal of the US Corps of Engineers".34 This United Front policy was the same as that followed by Stalin in Europe, and by Mao in China.
Despite this the speed of the Japanese invasion caught the PKP by surprise and its entire top leadership was captured in January 1942 when the Japanese troops entered Manila. This included Crisanto Evangelista, who was tortured and killed. This led, in March, the formation of a fullscale guerilla movement, the Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon ("People's army against Japan"), better known as the Hukbalahap or just "the Huks".35
We do not propose here to go into the history of the Japanese occupation, during which the Hubalahap was undoubtedly the most effective fighting force on the American side in the occupied areas.
Even before the end of World War II in Asia, the USA “used nuclear weapons against Japan in August 1945, even as that country sent out feelers for a negotiated surrender”36 principally as a warning to Russian imperialism that the US had both the will and the means to prevent any extension of Russian influence in the East.
With the end of the war, US imperialism was the world's dominant imperialist power,37 and immediately began to prepare for a confrontation with the other major victor of the war and new imperialist superpower – Russia.
Naturally, the USSR resisted this policy of "containment". As a result, the years following the war were marked by a whole series of proxy wars as the USA (sometimes with its allies Britain and France) and the USSR tested each other's positions: in Greece, in Vietnam, in Korea, in Malaysia – and in the Philippines. This is why – predictably – the USA and its Filipino puppets set out to destroy the (pro-USSR) Hukbalahap immediately after the war.
The PKP's betrayal of proletarian internationalism by supporting the American war effort was paid for in blood by the Filipino workers and peasants. Its cadres and mass sympathizers were suppressed and arrested (many were killed) by the forces led by the democratic USA following the defeat of Japanese imperialism in the Philippines.38
Thus began the intense and armed rivalries between the two imperialist powers in Philippine soil using national liberation in post-war confrontations. In March 1945, the labor movement under the influence of Russian imperialism was reconstituted as the Committee of Labor Organizations and later organized as the Congress of Labor Organizations (CLO), the first national labor center.39 The CLO fought for the rights of the working class within the legal framework of Filipino capitalism, but was essentially a nationalist organization aiming at “genuine” national independence on the “socialist” (ie state capitalist) model as the way of the future.
Since in decadent capitalism national independence is impossible and the “independence” of the Philippines was just part of the American imperialist policy to contain the expansionism of Stalinist Soviet imperialism.40 To prevent the nationalist Filipino bourgeoisie to change master, US imperialism made a smart move: Grant political independence to its colony.
On the other hand, imperialist powers realized also after two world wars that the colonies are no longer beneficial to them unlike in the 19th century. These colonies “could no longer serve as the basis for the enlarged reproduction of global capital, having themselves become capitalist, that they lost their importance for the major imperialisms (in fact it was the more backward colonial powers like Portugal which clung most tenaciously to their colonies).41
On 4th July 1946, the Philippines gained its formal independence from the United States:42 the latter however continued to maintain a powerful and growing military presence, with Subic Bay and Clark Air Base becoming the US' largest installations in the Far East or indeed the world: the Philippines was now in the front line of the confrontation between the USA and the USSR in Asia. The US also maintained a substantial industrial and commercial presence in the country, certain sectors of the US bourgeoisie being closely allied to Filipino industrialists.
Quezon having died in exile during the war, a period of parliamentary rivalry began between parties whose politics were indistinguishable and who were differentiated only by personal allegiances and rivalries. Nor was collaboration with the Japanese quisling government considered an obstacle to participation in power either by the Filipino bourgeoisie or their American mentors. From the outset, the political life of the Filipino bourgeoisie has been marked by violence, fraud, and corruption.43
This characteristic of political life is not of course unique to the Philippines. It is a general feature of life under decadent capitalism, that countries which did not develop a national unity during capitalism's rise, and which moreover are economically under-developed, have great difficulty in creating a unified ruling class. In many cases, as we have pointed out elsewhere, the only really united body in the state is the army, which explains why the army or even outright military dictatorship, has been the only force able to give some political stability to the ruling class.
Apart from the Marcos dictatorship, which lasted for 21 years from 1965 to 1986, the Filipino bourgeoisie has exercised its political domination through an apparently democratic system, where power is in fact divided between ruling clans who fight for domination on an electoral battleground. To give just one particularly violent example, in the 2009 elections 21 politicians and journalists were abducted and murdered on the island of Mindanao. According to the BBC's Asia analyst "Every election period features assassinations of rivals, particularly in provincial areas where the forces of law and order are often tightly connected to local clans. Every local politician has some form of personal security which, in some areas, balloons to private armies of scores or hundreds of well-armed, unregulated gunmen".44
Given that the "labor movement" was never able to shake itself free from its roots in nationalism, it comes as no surprise that in the Philippines, it merely mirrors the clientelism and factionalism of the wealthier fractions of the ruling class. In 1986, Rolando Olalia (later murdered) declared that "about 85% of today's supposed leaders of the working class are engaged in racketeering".45 As leader himself of the Kilusang Mayo Uno (KMU, see below), Olalia presumably knew what he was talking about.
The PKP and the Huks at first thought they could make a deal with the ruling parties to participate in normal political life, and even worked in coalition with the Democratic Alliance and the Nacionalista Party.46 On the face of it this was not unreasonable, since these parties were essentially nationalist and posed no threat to the continued domination of capitalism or of the bourgeoisie. Moreover – and ironically given future events – the American OSS47 had supported not only the Huks during the war with Japan, but also Mao's regime in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. Indeed the Vietminh nationalists were initially helped into power by the OSS, against the returning French colonizers. However, the independence of the Philippines was an illusion, not so much because of continued American military occupation as because the division of the world into two rival imperialist blocs meant that political life in any country was determined by its position within the system of the blocs. In 1950, General Douglas MacArthur as commander of the US occupying forces in Japan, and Dean Acheson as Secretary of State, "defined the new American 'defensive perimeter' in the Pacific as running along a line connecting the Aleutians, Japan, Okinawa, the Ryukyus, and the Philippines".48 This was a public declaration that the Philippines, like Japan, was firmly within the US sphere of interest and that for the USA, it was no more acceptable to see the PKP in power in the Philippines than it would have been to let the Italian CP into government in Italy.
The Huks therefore found themselves increasingly under aggressive military pressure, and it was decided to continue the guerilla war by reorganizing the movement as the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB, People's Liberation Army) which acted as the military arm of the Communist Party. The Americans tried to stop the rebellion and destroy the peasant organizations by developing agrarian services and support projects, alongside military aid to the government. The Americans and the government launched operations in Central Luzon and Manila. Many HMB leaders were captured while others, including Luis Taruc, surrendered. By 1955 the military defeat was complete, and Jesus Lava ordered the HMB to disband. Thousands of lives and properties had been sacrificed in these inter-imperialist armed confrontations.
At the same time, “Economic assistance was supplemented by a policy of fostering pro-Western (i.e. pro-Washington) institutions and organizations, creating anti-Communist trade unions and political organizations, with American Federation of Labor (AFL) operatives working hand in glove with the CIA”49 like the Federation of Free Workers (FFW)50 to counter the PKP-led CLO.
The militant workers organized by CLO were dragged into the “war for national liberation” waged by the HMB. Basically, the unions were used as cannon-fodder in the imperialist rivalries as they were fought out between the USSR and the USA in the post-war period. The suppression of pro-USSR unions and establishing pro-USA unions was part of the consolidation of US imperialist control in the Philippines.
On April 1951, President Quirino banned the CLO after declaring it a communist organization with ties to the Huk armed movement. Its leader, Amado Hernandez51, was arrested and charged with rebellion and murder. He was later convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, but finally acquitted by the High Court.
As the workers’ resistance against the attacks of capitalism and against the suppression by the state intensified, the government tried to regulate these by enacting the Industrial Peace Act (Republic Act No. 875) in 1953. This promoted collective bargaining and guaranteed the right to organize in unions. It also introduced mediation and conciliation as new modes of dispute settlement. This act was supported and funded by US imperialism and bourgeois institutions.52
Collective bargaining imprisons the workers in the bureaucracy of union organizations and diverts their struggles into fights for government mediation and conciliation. With these maneuvers of the capitalist state, the unions from Right to Left called it a “victory” for the workers’ struggle. The result is intense rivalries between different union federations for collective bargaining rights that deepen the division within the Filipino working class: the number of unionized workers increased, and the more they were unionized the more they were divided.53
With the Philippines under the unambiguous domination of the United States, remnants of the banned communist party set up the Workers’ Party54 (Lapiang Manggagawa) in 1963 with some of the country's major labor federations.
On the other hand, unions led by the Philippine Labor Center (PLC) of Democrito Mendoza pushed the one-union-one industry system.55 Because of this, union rivalries and workers’ division further intensifies. PLC itself split into factions leading to the creation of Pinagbuklod na Manggagawang Pilipino (PMP) led by Roberto S. Oca Sr. and the Philippine Congress of Trade Unions (PHILCONTU) led by Mendoza.
It is particularly striking that the rise and fall of the Marcos dictatorship was roughly contemporaneous with the rise of Maoism and its integration into the mechanisms of Filipino politics. These two apparently opposing currents were to a large extent determined by the broader conditions of inter-imperialist conflict in South-East Asia: the war in Vietnam, and the rivalry between the USSR and China.
We do not have the space here to give a full account of the Marcos dictatorship, however some indicators are necessary if we are to understand the evolution of Filipino unionism and politics during the 1970s and 1980s.
It is said that during the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt remarked of the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza: “He may be a bastard, but he’s our bastard”, and this epithet perfectly summarizes the US bourgeoisie’s attitude to the plethora of vicious military dictatorships that it has supported over the years.56 American willingness to sponsor these dictatorships – not least, of course, that of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam – which did so much to discredit US claims to defend “democracy” around the world, can be explained essentially by two factors.
The first, was the context of the Cold War with the USSR. The USSR’s efforts to gain footholds within the underdeveloped countries of the American bloc by sponsoring trades unions, “leftist”, “pro-peasant” movements meant that the USA tended to supported their opponents on the right, in other words the military and the wealthy élite.
In addition, the economic interests of the wealthy élite tended to coincide with those of their American counterparts in ways that could sometimes be very explicit: the CIA coup which overthrew the Guatemalan regime in 1954, for example, also allowed the American United Fruit Co to recover land that had been nationalized by the elected government. Countries outside the capitalist heartlands in effect found themselves in an impossible contradiction. On the one hand, the fraction of the bourgeoisie which best understood and expressed the needs of an independent national capital in the decadent period necessarily tended to adopt the policies of a left-wing, nationalist state capitalism which inevitably drew them towards the “Russian model”; as the old European colonial regimes dismantled their empires during the 1950s and 1960s, these left-wing regimes were also the best placed to canalize, absorb, and profit from the accompanying rise of nationalist sentiment allied to radical social protest.57 On the other hand, the United States evidently could not permit its client states to install governments which threatened to adopt a “Soviet” model which would tend to draw them into the Russian bloc. Given the weakness of the national capitals and therefore the lack of a well-established bourgeois class, the US inevitably was forced to rely on the corrupt local elites and the army to maintain its power over its clients.
Ferdinand Marcos, who ruled as president from 1965 until he was overthrown by the “People Power Revolution” in 1986, is a perfect expression of this situation. At first sight, Marcos was nothing more than the usual corrupt politician of the Filipino elite: he had been suspected of involvement in the assassination of a political rival shortly after the war, and came to power by switching parties shortly before the presidential elections. His second term electoral victory in 1969 was achieved thanks to massive fraud and bribery.58 His third term, and continuation in office, was ensured by the equally fraudulent declaration of martial law in 1972.
But 1965 was also the year that the US Army began its direct involvement in the Vietnam war. This meant a build-up of US bases in the Philippines. To ensure stability in the country hosting these critical military installations, the US government was ready to pay handsomely, with the result that the Marcos regime was awash with cash that it could use to bribe its opponents, and to maintain a military dictatorship.
In the period prior to 1972, the rising militancy of the Filipino workers was easily dragged into inter-factional struggles of the ruling class led by the unions. The workers were hoodwinked by bourgeois nationalist slogans like those of the Maoist CPP: "Tunay, Palaban, Makabayan" (Genuine, Militant and Nationalist Trade Unionism).
Marcos thus declared martial law not against a rising independent Filipino working class movement but on the contrary because the movement had been temporarily defeated by the triumph of the counter-revolutionary ideology of Maoism within the militant workers movement in the 60’s. The bourgeois theory of “protracted people’s war” dragged the workers onto the terrain of its class enemy.
Corruption is endemic in the Filipino ruling class, but Marcos took it to new heights, using government power to take over for his own and his family’s benefit, profitable companies and land holdings. As a result, by the beginning of the 1980s Marcos not only faced the growing anger of the workers engaged in the wave of struggles that swept across the world in the wake of the massive French strike movement of May 1968, he had also forfeited the support of the wealthy elite.59
When Mao Zedong's new regime came to power in China, its leaders were well aware that a ruined country in a world dominated by two great power blocs had no choice but to "lean to one side", to use Mao's expression. The US' support for the Kuomintang regime in Taiwan, and its intense suspicion of "communism" meant that China had no choice but to "lean" to the USSR. But although Stalin's USSR provided economic help and expertise to rebuild the shattered Chinese economy, including military assistance during the Korean War, the two sides never really trusted each other, especially since Stalin forced Mao to accept the "independence" (in reality a Russian tutelage) of Outer Mongolia.
When Khruschev took over the leadership of the USSR following Stalin's death in 1953, his efforts to find some kind of stable understanding with the USA led to increasing (and not unfounded) suspicion on the Chinese side, that they were about to be abandoned by the Russians. The rift between the two countries found concrete expression in the withdrawal of Russian technical experts in 1960, and in 1969 their armies clashed bloodily along the Ussuri River.60
China therefore embarked on a policy of asserting its own claim to leadership of the "anti-imperialist" movement of "national liberation" around the world, partly as a means of building up its own prestige against the USSR's claims to be the "bastion of socialism", and partly to prevent the creation of a stable anti-Chinese bloc in South-East Asia (the South-East Asia Treaty Organisation had been formed in 1954 for precisely that purpose).
Given this orientation, it is hardly surprising that the new generation of student youth that emerged during the 1960s, radicalised by the first renewed onset of the capitalist crisis and by the Vietnam War, should turn to China and to Maoist nationalism for inspiration. Hence in the Philippines the young university professor José Maria Sison founded, in 1964, the Kabataang Makabayan (Patriotic Youth) movement to oppose the Vietnam War and in 1968 he effectively infiltrated the almost moribund PKP and set up an alternative Central Committee with his idealistic student activists. From this time on the PKP becomes the pro-China, nationalist Communist Party of the Philippines.
Thus, Maoism, the counter-revolutionary ideology of the bourgeois Left spread in the Philippines from the germs of the petty-bourgeois student activism using nationalism and anti-imperialism. Once again, with the open crisis of world capitalism following the post-World War II boom, nationalism had been used as bait to chain the new generation of Filipino revolutionaries to support for nationalism. From then on until now, national freedom and democracy and anti-US imperialism have been the battle cry of the militant Filipino workers.
Whereas in the period leading up to World War II and in its immediate aftermath, the labor movement in the Philippines had divided workers between two great rival imperialisms, with China's increasing assertion of its independence from the USSR, they were subjected to a three-way split between the two world imperialisms and the newly assertive regional power of China.61
China’s support for Sison’s CPP has to be seen in the context of China’s own imperialist interests, and it was to be shortlived. By the end of the 1960s, Mao’s rift with Moscow was already leading towards military confrontation, as Russian troops built up on China’s northern border. China badly needed new and powerful friends against the Russian threat: the way was open to Nixon’s visit in 1972, which in effect was to bring the Vietnam war to a conclusion with China switching camps from Russia to the USA.
Insofar as he had a political program, Marco aimed at strengthening his regime by entangling workers’ class action in a forest of legal restrictions which would tie the workers to the state through the unions. In May 1974, the Labor Code was enacted with the promulgation of PD 442. This overhauled the labor relations framework in the country and introduced a restructuring plan to govern the one-union-one industry system. It created the National Labor Relations Commission to replace the Court of Industrial Relations.
This did not stop a resurgence of class struggle during the 1970s.
The first great wave of strikes that hit Metro Manila after Martial Law made strikes illegal came in late 1975, and was triggered by the workers from La Tondeña, a distillery factory against capitalist attacks and against the barbarism of the state.
The workers’ defiance of the state’s ban on strikes was a combative action aimed at taking their fate into their own hands. But this was prevented by the mentality of unionism.
The strike in La Tondeña was triggered by the issue of regularization. The workers who staged the strike were contractuals working for many years in the company. However, the regular workers had a union and a collective bargaining agreement with the management. This divided the workers between regular and contractual and seasonal.
The La Tondeña struggle did not really win its demands for regularization, but instead, through the instigation of unionization, fell into the trap of union recognition and collective bargaining as contractual workers.62
Worse, the union’s “victory” further divided the workers between regulars and contractuals and so weakened workers’ unity and resistance: “Meanwhile, the regular employees’ union feels that the regularization demand is a threat to the permanency of the positions held by regulars (…) This attitude was obvious to their indifference to the KMM [contractuals'] activities, particularly during the strike…".63
Nevertheless, the La Tondeña strike served as an inspiration to other workers by popularising the idea that united, we can defy the repressive laws of the state.
During the 1980s political and economic labor unrest in the Philippines intensified. Even the export processing zones where the government had tried to suppress strikes were experiencing waves of strikes, particularly the Bataan Export Processing Zone.64 The Filipino workers again showed their solidarity with their international class, many workers following attentively and drawing inspiration from the struggles in Poland. But unfortunately, the Maoists profited from the workers' efforts in struggle to establish the Kilusang Mayo Uno65 (KMU) as a labor center under the domination of the CPP.
However, these labor alliances were mainly composed of unions from different labor federations that were united against the Marcos dictatorship. Initiated by the Maoist KMU, but supported by the “pro-Moscow” unions affiliated with the World Federation of Trade Unions. Ultimately, many of these alliances were transformed into Maoist unions. The non-unionized workers who organized themselves to struggle were later converted into unions under the KMU as part of “consolidating” the workers.
The KMU was established by Felixberto Olalia of the National Federation of Labor Unions (NAFLU), Cipriano Malonzo of NFL, and Crispin Beltran of PANALO. As a labor center on capitalism's left wing, it advocated “genuine, militant and nationalist unionism” supporting the CPP's guerilla struggle. The inter-connection between the unions, the CPP and its guerrilla war, and the "bourgeois opposition",66 is illustrated by the case of Alex Boncayao, a union leader attracted to Maoism, who ran as assemblyman under the coalition with the bourgeois opposition during 1979-80; defeated in the elections, he went to the countryside and died as a guerrilla.
The suppression of strikes was evident between 1973 and 1975, as there were no actual strikes recorded. From 1976 through 1980, the number of strikes decreased to an average of 48 per year. From 1981 to 1985, the yearly average was 245. In 1986, there were 581 recorded strikes; the highest in country’s history with 3.6 million man-days lost in which 21% of these strikes were wildcat or without legal notices as prescribed by capitalist law.
There were several factors that explained this dramatic increase: the worsening international economic condition, the resurgence of international working class movement initiated by the Polish workers, the growing dissatisfaction of the people against the Marcos administration, and other factors inside the Philippines which were under the effects of renewed crisis of decadent capitalism in 1980s.
The inability of the Marcos regime to suppress the rise in workers’ struggles coincided with a change in the international situation. From 1980 onwards, China's attitude towards its Philippine client, the Maoist CPP, also changed. Following Mao Zedong's death in 1976, a new leadership under Deng Ziaoping ousted Mao's successor Hua Guofeng and eliminated the "Gang of Four" which had opposed any opening to the West. Deng intended to open the country to foreign capital and trade in order to gain access to the foreign technology necessary for the country’s economic survival, which necessarily meant normalizing relations with its neighbors. This led to China cutting off relations with Sison's party.67
Upon the failure of the Maoist CPP to import arms from China for its protracted “people’s war”, its “communist” guru Sison called for a united front with the anti-Marcos factions of the ruling class against the dictator. Thus, the “anti-fascist” united front was formed under the leadership of the Maoist CPP with the battle cry of “overthrow the fascist dictatorship”.
In 1983, Benigno Aquino, the popular figure of the anti-Marcos bourgeois opposition was assassinated by Marcos' henchmen. Workers' resistance succumbed to the inter-classist movement led by the maoist KMU. Thousands of workers participated in inter-classist protest actions drowned in the "Filipino people oppressed by Marcos dictatorship”.
Any attempt by the Marcos regime to suppress and control the strike wave ended in futility because the militant workers did not heed to these laws.68 In October 1983, workers of the US Military Bases went on strike. Although this was led by the union it demonstrated the readiness of Filipino workers to defend their welfare and interests.
In the "People Power Revolution" in 1986 that toppled the Marcos dictatorship, the Filipino workers actively participated not as an independent class movement but as atomized citizens.
As with the “anti-fascist popular front” during World War II, the Filipino proletariat, thanks to the Stalinist tactics of the maoist CPP, was once again disarmed in 1986 and caught up in the conflict between different factions of the national capital. The democratic bourgeois faction of Corazon Aquino which had been brought to power by the "People Power Revolution" unleashed attacks against the proletariat and even against the left factions which had previously supported her. The democratic Aquino regime undertook total war against the anti-US faction of the bourgeoisie led by the Maoist CPP.
Upon Corazon Aquino's arrival in power, unions in the Philippines fragmented into many labor centers and federations each defending its own bailiwick against its rivals. One reason for this is that democracy was re-established in the country and the unifying factor of opposition to the Marcos regime no longer existed. Once again, the mystification of democracy effectively disarmed the working class.69
After the fall of Marcos the Filipino workers continued to struggle against the attacks of capital.70 But these struggles were imprisoned in the framework of leftism, and legal trade unionism.
In August 1987, Filipino workers launched a general strike against an oil price hike. Unions under the Labor Advisory Coordination Council (LACC) and TUCP led this general strike asking the Aquino government to take control of the oil industry. In 1988, Filipino workers were again in the forefront of struggles asking for a legislated Php10.00 – Php 15.00 wage increase and demanded a Php1.00 – Php1.50 oil price reduction. In March 29, more than 500,000 workers joined the general strike led by LACC to demand a Php30.00 wage increase. The wave of protest and the sensation of workers' strength even led to a strike by women working in bars serving US troops from Subic Bay, who were being forced into degrading "boxing displays" by the bars owners.
In September 17-21, 1988 thousands of school teachers led by ACT71 and MPSTA72 went on strike due to unpaid allowances. Classes were completely paralyzed, prompting Education Secretary Cariño to dismiss and suspend 3,000 teachers. This struggle was “led” by the CPP. Instead of generalizing the struggle of the teachers, CPP isolated it, leading to its failure. This took place as the workers’ movement in general was on the wane.
These struggles led by the unions ended in defeat. Prices of oil products were only decreased by 0.50 centavos and the government did not heed the legislated wage increase but instead created a law R.A. No. 6727, or Wage Rationalization Act. This law contained the last legislated wage increase under the Aquino administration and created the Regional Tripartite Wage and Productivity Boards (RTWPB), which divided the workers by region in their struggles for wage increases, leaving them at the mercy of government, management and union representatives to decide any wage increase.
The years 1987-1988 were the last expression of the generalization of workers’ struggles. Attempts of the militant workers to generalize their struggles were marred by union sabotage of sectoral and industry by industry struggles of the unions.
Since the government successfully integrated the unions into its structure, it created more laws to appease and control the labor movement through the unions. As the union leaders were committed to participating in elections73, the workers' participation in militant struggles waned. The numbers taking part in “people’s strikes” spearheaded by the Maoists dwindled considerably. They were launched in some regions where the Maoists still had a considerable mass base.
As the militant mobilizations led by the ultra-leftists dwindled, the state also accelerated its integration of the union leaders to parliamentarism and legalized activity. In January 1993, under the Ramos administration, sectoral representatives for labor74 were appointed to the Ninth Congress.75 From then on, the so-called “communists” in the left of capital followed the road of parliamentarism.
In 1992, the CPP was marked by splits because of the vanguardism and absolutism of its leadership. Its regional organization in National Capital Region (NCR), led by Filemon Lagman declared autonomy and started to reorient towards “Marxism-Leninism” against Maoism.76 After the split, the Lagman group seized control of the KMU-NCR and transformed it into the Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP).
As in the past, the leftists tried to unify the different unions to make their presence felt as a bargaining power within the state apparatus. In September 1993, three major federations (NFL, NAFLU and UWP) announced their disaffiliation from KMU due to ideological infighting within the organization. These federations became the core of the National Confederation of Labor of the Philippines (NCLP). In October of the same year, the Labor Alliance for Wage Increase of P35 (LAWIN 35) was formed to spearhead the call for a Php35 hourly wage increase for the private sector and a Php2,000 across-the-board salary hike for public sector employees. This campaign was supposed to usher in a new era in labor cooperation as LMLC, TUCP, FFW, BMP, KATIPUNAN, NFL, NAFLU, TUPAS, and CIU joined forces. But these alliances did not last.
The last attempt at union unification was the Katipunan ng mga Pangulo ng Unyon sa Pilipinas (KPUP) or Brotherhood of Union Presidents of the Philippines set up by the group of Filemon ‘Popoy’ Lagman. But this also failed since the different union federations did not want their rivals entering their own unions.
In February 1998, the Social Accord for Industrial Harmony and Stability was signed by representatives from the LACC, TUCP, ECOP, PCCI, DOLE and DTI. This accord was in essence the same as the Social Justice Program promoted by Manuel Quezon in the 1930s. Once again, the unions are to be found acting as accomplices of the state to imprison the consciousness of the class.
In May 1998, Joseph Ejercito Estrada was elected as the 13th President of the Philippine Republic. He was dubbed as the “president of the masses”.
In May 2000, the Labor Solidarity Movement (LSM) was launched in a massive rally at the Araneta Coliseum with a clear anti-Erap (Estrada) stance. It was composed of four national labor centers namely: Trade Union Congress of the Philippines (TUCP), the Federation of Free Workers (FFW), the Alliance of Progressive Labor (APL) and the National Confederation of Labor (NCL). They claimed to constitute about 60% of the organized labor. LSM’s "impeachment or resign position" followed its early analysis and judgment on the Estrada administration and it promptly allied itself with the Kongreso ng Mamamayang Pilipino 2 (KOMPIL 2), a coalition of the anti-Estrada "bourgeois opposition". In reply, the pro-Estrada faction formed its own Labor Reform Bloc (LRB) under the leadership of Roberto Oca, Jr., who is a childhood friend of Erap and Attorney Roberto Padilla, a vice-president of TUCP and the brother of Congressman Roy Padilla of LAMP. Two labor representatives known for their left-wing politics from the National Anti-Poverty Commission (NAPC) also signed. Even the NAFLU - the former KMU union that formed the NCL - joined this new formation.
This only showed how the unions work as appendages of the different factions of the ruling class in their internecine power struggles.
In January 2001, an inter-classist “People Power” movement ousted Joseph Estrada as president and brought Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to power as the 14th President of the Republic of the Philippines.
Once again the workers had been led by the unions and the Leftists to support a faction of the ruling class.
In May 1, 2001, Estrada supporters, mostly urban poor led a violent attack on Malacanang Palace. The uprising was labeled as a “poor man’s revolt” due to the mobilization of many die-hard Erap supporters from the lower income bracket of the society. It was crushed by the state led by Gloria Arroyo.
This was an indication how the non-proletarian exploited strata – the urban poor and informal sector – in the absence of a strong and independent working class movement can be used by the bourgeoisie in its own interests.
In May 2001, the second party-list elections saw the failure again of “labor” parties to win a seat in the House of Representatives. Nine parties based on a working-class electorate joined this round and the highest ranking party within the labor sector in Partido ng Manggagawa (PM), a “Marxist-leninist” front of the Partido ng Manggagawang Pilipino of late Filemon Lagma. Labor leader Crispin Beltran of KMU won a party list Representative under the Bayan Muna Party. This completed the absorption of the ultra-left maoist organizations into “classical” bourgeois parliamentary politics. The “victory” of the Leftist labor leaders in the bourgeois parliament only increased their opportunistic appetites.
Over and over again, the Filipino workers have demonstrated their unbreakable courage and their ability to organize in their own defense. They have taken part in every wave and phase of struggles of their international class.
Filipino workers have been forced to emigrate all over the world, and have taken part directly in the class struggle world wide.77 This has the potentiel to contribute a precious experience to the rest of their class.
Yet for all their courage and their combativeness, the workers in the Philippines remain mired in the morass of bourgeois politics, used and abused by an ever-changing, bewildering kaleidoscope of unions, "socialist", "communist", and "worker" parties whose only interest is their struggle for petty advantage in the endless factional warfare of the Filipino ruling class.
As we have tried to show in this article, if workers in the Philippines have been unable, in the final analysis, to assert their own independent organization as a class, outside the structure of the state and all its factions, whether of the "bourgeois" or the "workers'" opposition, this is fundamentally for two inter-related reasons: first, their inability to break with nationalism, and second their belief that revolutionary opposition to capital can only be national and nationalist.
The mentality of militant, nationalist unionism is still very strong in the minds of Filipino workers. For these workers, only unions with a “revolutionary” leadership could defeat capitalism. Furthermore, this militant unionist line entraps the workers behind the prison walls of nationalism, parliamentarism, guerilla warfare, democracy and reformism.
We have aimed here to highlight some of the many historical factors responsible for this situation:
1. The experience of colonization; first by Spain from the 1500s to late 1800s and then by American capitalism from 1900s up to 1940s (with a short interregnum under Japanese rule during World War II). Thus, nationalism (ie, anti-foreign domination) is very strong even among militant workers.
2. The Filipino bourgeoisie together with their foreign patrons effectively utilize unions by dividing them between “purely economistic”, nationalist, radicals and moderate; dividing the workers and putting the “radicals” in the opposition so as to sow false hope that there are “bad” and “good” unions, “pro-worker” and “anti-worker” unions.
The generally anti-union sentiment of the capitalists in the Philippines strongly contributed to the illusion that unions are really pro-worker and that their constant betrayals are just a problem of “good” and “bad” leadership.
3. The effectiveness of bourgeois propaganda that Stalinism and Maoism are “communist” ideologies. This propaganda has never been refuted for more than 80 years. And lately, those leftist organizations that claim to be “anti-Stalinism” and “anti-Maoism”, instead of giving clarification only spew more confusion since their behavior is identical to the Stalinists and Maoists before them.
These factors are exacerbated by the decomposition of decadent capitalism since the end of the 1980s. The sabotage of the Leftists created demoralization and pushed many workers to submissiveness and a loss in self-confidence, the fertile ground for the penetration of bourgeois ideology of “every man for himself” and “one against all” within the working class.
4. In more than 100 years history of unionism, the state adapted the “militancy” of unions by making laws regulating and controlling them. After the unions effectively sabotage the struggles, the state made suppressive laws restricting the struggles. When the workers showed “uncontrollable” militance, the state “liberalizes” its laws so that the unions could again imprison the class in their structure.
The workers will never be strong until they learn to stand alone, outside and inevitably against the whole capitalist class, whether left or right, whether private capitalist or state capitalist. And when the union bosses come, yet again, to dragoon them into another futile struggle on behalf of this or that senator or presidential hopeful, then let the Filipino workers remember these words of the great 19th century French revolutionary Auguste Blanqui, that still echo to us down the years: "Those proletarians who allow themselves to be amused by ridiculous street demonstrations, by the planting of liberty trees, by the grand words of lawyers, will be met first with priestly blessings, then with insults, and finally with bullets, and with famine and poverty always".
Talyo/Jens
2Wilfredo Fabros, The Church and its social involvement in the Philippines, 1930-72, cited in Kathleen Nadeau, History of the Philippines.
3Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme, XVe – XVIIIe siècle, Vol 1, Editions Livre de Poche, p515. According to a contemporary observer, Father Sebastian Maurique, cited by Braudel, the Chinese "would go down to hell to find new merchandise to exchange for the reales they so passionately desire. They go so far as to say, in their pidgin Spanish, 'plata sa sangre' [silver is blood]".
4 Braudel, op.cit., Vol 3, p612.
5In one Bible story, a rich young man asks how to enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus replies "give all your worldly goods to the poor and follow me", adding that "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God".
6 Kathleen Nadeau, History of the Philippines, Greenwood Press, 2008, Kindle edition, location 605.
7Nadeau, op.cit., loc 705
9Subic Bay and the nearby Clark Air Force Base were the United States' two largest military installations abroad.
10See Ildefonso Runes, The First Three Filipino Marxists. Delos Reyes' concept of radicalism was more influenced by bourgeois nationalism and religious radicalism than by the socialist thinkers.
11The Independent church at first adopted a curious form of "materialist" Christianity. According to the American CP emissary James Allen, who knew Aglipay, "The altars I have seen bear the inscription: 'Bible and Science, Love and Liberty'. In the sermons and discourses of the Obispo Maximo and in the official literature of his church the supernatural, the miracles, and myths in the Bible and in the Roman dogma have been eliminated. 'The advance of scientific truth', the head bishop holds, 'rendered the old dogmas obsolete'". The ideas of Jesus were seen as a "mixture of holiness and subversion". According to Aglipay, "we relegate the miracles to the category of 'candid creations of popular imagination'. We have produced instead a real Jesus, patriot, iconoclast, reformer, defender of the oppressed and lover of mankind". The church today continues to criticise government corruption, but it has long since abandoned its embrace of science and condemnation of miracles.
12“Returning to the Philippines early in 1901, delos Reyes campaigned relentlessly for the establishment of a Filipino Church. In July in the same year, he founded the first labor union in Philippines: Union Obrera Democratica (Democratic Labor Union). Its founding is significant, for it gave a broad basis to the religious movement to which the masses were favorably disposed." (Teodoro Agoncillo, History of the Filipino People.)
13The USS Maine's explosion has never been satisfactorily explained. However, the US government's immediate use of the opportunity to declare war, and its evident preparedness for the same, lends credence to the suspicion that the explosion was deliberately engineered as a pretext to start the war.
14For a brief appreciation of US imperial expansion, see this article from an ICC internal debate on economics: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/2009/136/war-economy [21]
15Here is Arthur MacArthur, military governor of Manila in 1898, on the eve of the massacre: "The future of the Philippine Islands is now in the hands of the American people, and the Paris Treaty commits the free and Franchised Filipinos to the guiding hand and the liberalizing influences, the generous sympathies, the uplifting agitation, not of their American masters, but of their American emancipation. No imperial designs lurk in the American mind. They are alien to American sentiment, thought, and purpose. Our priceless principles undergo no change under a tropical sun. They go with a fiat: 'Why read ye not the changeless truth, the free can conquer but to save'" (quoted in Robert Harvey, American Shogun).
16Since all politicians had to subscribe to full independence if they hoped to be elected, ideological differences between them were minimal. According to the historian Renato Constantino (cited by Nadeau, op.cit.), "affiliation was based on affinities of blood, friendship, and regionalism, as well as on personal expedience. Under these circumstances, patronage was vital to the retention of a personal following, a fact which induced the party leaders time and again to barter the country's long-term interests for short-term bonuses for the party of power".
17Dante Guevarra, History of the Philippine Labor Movement, 1995.
18Lope K. Santos had already in 1908 organized a union among the workers of the Katabusan Cigar and Cigarette Factory, which was also the country’s first workers’ cooperative.
19James S Allen, The Philippine Left on the eve of World War II, MEP Publications, 1985 and 1993. The IWW was a revolutionary syndicalist union, strongly internationalist and opposed to the reformism of the more established unions in the United States. It attempted to organise outside the USA and, strikingly, was the only union in the USA at the time to fight race discrimination uncompromisingly, organising white and negro workers in the same union branches. The IWW maintained an internationalist position during World War I and was crushed by state repression as a result. See the two articles on the IWW published in our series on revolutionary syndicalism [22]. According to Jose Ma. Sison, Impact of the Communist International on the Founding and Development of the Communist Party of the Philippines, Evangelista at this point was actually a member of the Nacionalista Party.
20An example of this was the participation of Filipino sugar workers in the strikes in Hawaii from 1920-34.
21See our publication Trade Unions against the working class, in particular Chapter 3 [23], on the struggle in capitalism's decadence.
22The Red International of Labor Unions (RILU, also known by its Russian abbreviation Profintern) which was organized in 1921 and the Peasants’ International (or Krestintern) in 1923 were the vehicles for the Russian state to enter the territory of its rival enemy. Subsequently, subsidiary offices of these were established in China in order to cover the Far East and Pacific area. See Jose Ma. Sison, op.cit.
23The exact date, significantly, was 26th August, anniversary of Andres Bonifacio's “Cry of Balintawak” that launched the national liberation guerrilla war against Spain.
24Allen, op.cit., p26
26As we have pointed out in the article on Turkey, the communists on the spot were often clearer, in its early days, of the catastrophic effects of these policies than the Comintern leadership, Lenin included. This was true for China, for example, where in July 1921 the First Congress of the Chinese CP "adopted a resolution declaring that the new party should 'stand up on behalf of the proletariat, and should allow no relationship with the other parties or groups'" (see Carrère d'Encausse and Schram, Marxism in Asia, Penguin Press 1969, p51).
27Jose Ma. Sison, op.cit. Sison took over the Communist Party of the Philippines from 1968 and turned it into a Maoist nationalist organization: his historical assessment of events is thus to be treated with a good deal of caution.
28This led to some strange positions being adopted notably with regard to Turkey and Germany. For example, in 1922 Ts'ai Ho-sen, an intimate friend of Mao Zedong, could write about Turkey "General Kemal, a great man endowed with a great revolutionary spirit, led his nationalist party and started an insurrection in Ankara (…) [The Turkish people's] nationalist party has already led them along the path of great victories! We admire them, and even more than that we want to imitate their great example" (Kemal Ataturk's army went on to carry out the ethnic cleansing of the Greek population in Turkey, ruthlessly suppress workers' struggles, and massacre the militants of the Communist Party). In 1923, after the French occupation of the Ruhr, an article by Kao Chün-yü could describe Germany as a "small and weak country", going on to say that "these acts of France prompt us all – the popular masses of China and not only the workers – to side with Germany, which is oppressed like us" (Carrère d'Encausse and Schram, op.cit., pp216-218).
29Crisanto Evangelista, Jose Nava, Jacinto Manahan, Pedro Abad Santos, Juan Feleo and Mateo Castillo
30Kenneth K Kurihara, Labor in the Philippine economy, Stanford University Press, 1945, p70.
31See our publication on The trade unions against the working class [25].
32Jose Ma. Sison, op.cit.
33James Allen, op.cit., p60
34William J Pomeroy, The Philippines: colonialism, collaboration, and resistance!, International Publishers Co, 1992, p124
35“Labor activities were suppressed during the Japanese occupation but the communists under the leadership of the scientist Vicente Lava were prepared. They channeled their efforts into guerilla resistance activities against the Japanese Imperial Army. Under the Hukbalahap, they established a merger with the socialist/nationalists (Abad Santos and Luis Taruc) and allied with the conservative Filipino dynastic and middle class elites (led by Quezon) and the American colonial administration (led by McArthur).” Jorge V. Sibal, A Century of the Philippine Labor Movement
36ICC, History of US Foreign Policy Since WW II [26].
37ICC, History of US Foreign Policy Since WW II.
38“When, on February 5 [1945], the American entered Manila in force they promptly disarmed the Huk squadrons that had entered the city ahead of them….the Huks in Obando and Maykawayan, Bulakan, were also disarmed for no reason at all. Further dignity was heaped upon the Huks when Squadron 77, while passing through Malolos on their way to Pampanga was… seized, thrown to jail, and shot to death with the knowledge of American MP’s". Teodoro A. Agoncillo, History of the Filipino People, p. 449.
39The organization was led by Felixberto Olalia, Guillermo Capadocha, Amado Hernandez and Cipriano Cid, CLO’s first president.
40The doctrine was called “containment,” and it was designed to resist the further spread of Russia imperialism’s tentacles in Europe and the Near East. (ICC, History of US Foreign Policy since WW II)
41ICC, History of US Foreign Policy since WW II
42Later, the “independence day” of the Philippines was changed to June 12 and July 4 was named “Filipino-American Friendship Day” to make it appear that Philippine “independence” was not given by American imperialism.
43The 1949 election, held after the death of President Manuel Roxas, were typical. Vice-President Quirino who had succeeded Roxas, was opposed by Jose Laurel, who had accused Roxas of collaboration with the Japanese but who had himself been the president of the Japanese-sponsored republic during the war. The election was marked by the violence and fraud.
45Lois A West, Militant Labor in the Philippines, Temple University Press, 1997, p37.
46William J Pomeroy, op.cit., p174.
47Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.
48Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China, Norton, 1999, p502.
49ICC, History of US Foreign Policy since WW II
50Federation of Free Workers (FFW, 1950) was inspired mainly by the teachings of the Catholic encyclicals through Fr. Walter Hogan, S.J. and organised by young Ateneans headed by Juan C. Tan. (Asper, 2002) Jorge V. Sibal, A Century of the Philippine Labor Movement
51Amado Hernandez was a nationalist petty-bourgeois intellectual who became the CLO president in 1947 and a member of the Stalinist PKP. According to his biography: “When the Japanese invaded the Philippines, Amado joined the resistance movement and became an intelligence operative of the Marking and Anderson guerrilla outfit whose operations covered Hagonoy, Bulacan, and the mountain fastnesses of the Sierra Madre.” The Filipino bourgeoisie made him “two-time awardee in the Commonwealth Literary Contest; four-time winner of the Palanca Literary Memorial Awards; winner of four consecutive years of journalism awards in the NPC-ESSO sponsored contest.” (source: "Amado V. Hernandez (1903-1970)", Filipinos in History, National Historical Institute, 1989.)
52To support the collective bargaining system in the Philippines and Asia, the Asian Labor Education Center (ALEC) of the University of the Philippines (now called UP School of Labor and Industrial Relations or UP SOLAIR) was set up in May 1954 by the National Economic Council (NEC) and the International Cooperation Administration (ICA), forerunners of the National Economic Development Authority (NEDA) and the US Agency for International Development (US AID) respectively. See Jorge V. Sibal, op.cit.
53The number of unions increased three-fold from 1953 to 1956 and collective bargaining agreements concluded increased by four times. From 1953 to 1966, the number of unions registered increased from 836 to 2,522. (Jorge V. Sibal, op.cit.)
54Worker’s Party was organised to field candidates for elections in Manila. Their candidates lost which once again showed the lack of solidarity in labor through a unified labor vote. (Jorge V. Sibal, A Century of the Philippine Labor Movement)
55This concept of one federation-one industry was patterned after the US system. (Jorge V. Sibal, A Century of the Philippine Labor Movement)
56A far from exhaustive list can serve to illustrate the point: the Somoza regime in Nicaragua, the CIA-sponsored coups against elected governments in Guatemala (1954), Iran (1953), etc.
57One example is that of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime in Egypt, established by a military coup, and which not only looked to the USSR for inspiration but turned to the Russian bloc for material and military support against Israel and the United States.
58According to Nadeau, he spent $50 million of government money in a campaign that was “the most fraudulent in local history”.
59This is analogous to the situation in Iran, where the Shah’s kleptomaniac rule turned the whole of Iranian society, even including its wealthy elite, against him, leaving him bereft of any political support against the uprising that brought Khomeini to power.
60See the article on China's military ambitions. [28]
61To try to avoid confusion, from this point on the Maoist “Communist Party of the Philippines” is called the CPP, while the pro-Moscow rump is called the PKP-1930. The PKP-1930 survived the martial law era as pro-government supporters, after being pardoned by Marcos. They supported the government in its land reform program, including its so-called “Land Collectivisation”, and the “Democratic Revolution from the centre” envisioned by Marcos. The Maoist faction, led by Jose Maria Sison (comfortably installed in exile in the Netherlands), to this day maintains a guerrilla force of several thousand essentially in Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao. The PHP-1930 has survived as a minor party engaged in parliamentary activity; it publishes Ang Komunista, and is organized mainly in Metro Manila. In the late 1980s, when the Maoist CPP was courting the Gorbachov regime in USSR, the USSR’s first condition for a “fraternal” relation with the Maoist CPP was that the former integrate with the PKP-1930.
62After the “victorious” strike, only 300 out of 1,200 contractuals (total workforce is 1,400) underwent the process of regularization and in the end, only 80 were subjected to yearly “non-rotation basis, ie, they would not be subjected to the regular lay-offs as the other casuals” (Linda A. Kapunan, ‘La Tondeña strike of 1976’, Philippine Journal of Industrial Relations, Vol II no. 2, 2nd semester, 1979-80).
63Ibid.
64June 5-7, 1981 - The first general strike after Martial Law was held in the Bataan Export Processing Zone, leading to the formation of Alyansa ng Manggagawa sa Bataan - Bataan Labor Alliance (AMBA-BALA).
65KMU - May First Movement, a maoist CPP led labor center
66In the Philippines, the term "bourgeois opposition" is used to refer to opposition groups which do not claim to be "socialist", "communist", or in any way connected to the workers' movement. The ruling faction can become a “bourgeois opposition” when it is out of power, and vice versa.
67See this article in Global Nation [29].
68In May 1982, BP 130 was promulgated restricting trade union rights and freedoms. It prohibited strikes in industries “affecting the national interest”. It also required a two-thirds vote before a union may stage a strike. It stipulated that law enforcement agencies could assist in ensuring the compliance of return-to-work orders or injunctions. In August of the same year, BP 227 was enacted. This was later popularly known as the Free Ingress-Egress Law that allowed management to enter company premises and to bring in or out all company equipment, materials or goods during a strike.
69Efren Aranzamendez, FFW Vice-President, broke away from FFW and formed his own federation called the Confederation of Free Workers (CFW). Pinag-isang Diwang Manggagawang Pilipino (PDMP) was organized by the PTGWO-Oca Wing, PSSLU (led by Tony Diaz) and PLAC (led by Jack Tamayo).
70In 1986, the Philippines experienced over 580 strikes nationally, the highest ever recorded.
71ACT – Association of Concerned Teachers
72MPSTA – Manila Public School Teachers Association
73March 18, 1992, the first election-based coalition called the Kongreso ng Malayang Manggagawang Pilipino (KMMP) was formed by Antonio Diaz of PDMP and Jesus Diamonon, formerly of TUCP, to the presidential bid of the big capitalist Eduardo Cojuangco, of the Nationalist People’s Coalition. Another election-based alliance called the Manggagawang Kaisa ni Salonga-Pimentel (MAKISAPI) was launched by about 400 trade union leaders. Only Ernesto Herrera of TUCP made it to the Senate out of five senatorial candidates from labor. The others who failed to make it to the Senate were Ruben Torres, Israel Bocobo, Bonifacio Tupaz and Amado Inciong. Crispin Beltran of KMU also run for senator in 1987.
74The Filipino electoral system includes parliamentary representation of different “sectors” of the population: peasants, industrial workers, etc.
75Alejandro Villaviza, Zoilo dela Cruz and Andres Dinglasan of TUCP composed the first batch. They were later joined by Ramon Jabar and Ernesto Verceles of FFW, Temistocles Dejon of TUCP and Paterno Menzon of ILAW-LACC. The group of Popoy Lagman fielded “communist” candidates in the party-list election in 1998 and the Maoists followed in the coming years.
76For an analysis of Lagman's positions, see our "critique of Filemon 'Ka Popoy' Lagman [30]".
77For example, in October 2007 Filipino nurses were part of the biggest nurses' strike in California in nearly a decade, reports Philippine News. More than 5,000 registered nurses went on strike in fifteen mostly San Francisco Bay Area hospitals operated by the Sutter Health Corporation. (New America Media, October 12, 2007)
The outbreak of the world war in 1939 was a shattering blow to the small revolutionary movement which had survived the first storms of the counter-revolution in the 20s and 30s. The Italian communist left in exile, which had been so lucid about the build-up to war for most of its existence, had succumbed to the consolations of the ‘theory of the war economy’, whose defenders insisted that world war, if it came, would be motivated by the need to contain the incipient world revolution, only to switch over to the theory of the ‘social non-existence of the proletariat’ during the war, a formula for liquidating the Fraction. Like the council communists, those comrades in Belgium or France who rejected these theories and wanted to maintain revolutionary activity soon faced the terrors of the Nazi occupation or the repression of collaborationist regimes. Scattered internationalist anarchist groups and individuals held firm to their principles, but many more had already capitulated to the ideology of anti-fascism1. And the most resounding betrayal of all was embodied by the Trotskyist current, the overwhelming majority of which signed up for the imperialist war under the banners of anti-fascism, the defence of democracy and of the USSR. The debates about the form and content of the future revolution, which had led to real theoretical advances in the 1930s, were inevitably put on a back burner.
But after a short period of disarray, the revolutionary movement began to recover, despite the enormous challenge posed by clandestine work and the isolation of the communist minority from a working class which had to a large extent been convinced that this war was different, that it was a war for the defence of civilisation against barbarism. In France, a small group active mainly in the Vichy-controlled south, having firmly opposed the liquidationist tendency in the Italian Fraction, formed itself into a French Fraction of the Communist Left in 19422. In Holland, survivors of the council communist current and in particular the ‘MLL’ group around Sneevliet were able to maintain an organised activity, including an intervention into the heroic 1941 strike of shipyard and other workers against both the deportation of work comrades to Germany and the persecution of the Jews3. In the Trotskyist milieu, a number of groups came out against the treason of the ‘official’ organisations: the Stinas group in Greece, the group around the Spanish revolutionary Munis, the RKD (Revolutionary Communists of Germany), composed mainly of Austrian revolutionaries exiled to France4. In Italy, in 1943, a powerful wave of strikes swept the big factories of the north and revived the hopes of many comrades that the second imperialist war would end in the same way as the first: with a wave of proletarian revolutions. This surge of optimism quickly led to the constitution of the Partito Comunista Internazionalista in Italy, made up of elements of the Italian left returning from exile and those who had remained in Italy, either (periodically) in jail, like Damen, or under house arrest, like Bordiga5.
And it was not long before theoretical reflection and debate about the goals of revolution also revived in this re-emerging movement. In occupied Holland, Anton Pannekoek secretly began writing his book Workers’ Councils6, which reaffirmed the perspective of revolution and investigated the forms and methods of struggle needed to overthrow capitalism and create a communist society. In the French Fraction, there were intense discussions about the class nature of ‘Soviet’ Russia and the characteristics of a genuine proletarian regime. And when the end of the war freed the various organisations from the restraints of underground activity, there was, for a time, a flourishing of debate within and sometimes between the different organisations, such as the conference of internationalists held in Holland in 19477. The post war period thus saw the formation of the Spartacusbond in Holland, which rejected the anti-organisational conclusions drawn by most of the Dutch groups in the 1930s; it also brought key texts by Bordiga on dictatorship and violence, and in particular a significant theoretical examination of the nature of the state in the period of transition by the group which succeeded the French Fraction in 1946, the Gauche Communiste de France.
We are publishing the latter here because it represents both continuity with and an advance on the work on the problems of the transition period published by Bilan and republished earlier in this series. In our opinion, it was the most enduring contribution on the problem of the transition to communism that emerged from the post-war period.
This doesn’t mean at all that there is nothing to be gained from studying the contributions by other currents in the revolutionary movement at the time.
Pannekoek’s Workers’ Councils for example is an excellent presentation of his understanding of the dynamic of the class struggle, and the way in which its fundamental characteristics – the development of solidarity, organisation and consciousness, above all in the tendency towards the mass strike – were taken onto a new level with the appearance of workers’ councils, the finally discovered organisational form that would enable the proletariat to overthrow capitalism and reconstruct society on communist foundations. Any discussion of the forms of class organisation in the epoch of the proletarian revolution needs to assimilate this work.
And yet, as our book on the Dutch and German left points out, the essay suffers from certain key weaknesses8.
Regarding the period of transition, this work was in critical continuity with the GIC’s Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution, focussing on the issue of labour time vouchers and ‘social’ book-keeping as the means for the working class to maintain control of the productive process in the construction of the new society. In other words, the central issue for Pannekoek, as for the GIC, is located in the sphere of the economy, even if he recognises that for the working class the economic and the political cannot be rigidly separated, and that the workers’ councils will certainly take on political tasks in the movement towards the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. And yet these political tasks remain vague in the extreme. The collective power of the working class in its councils, elected by workplace assemblies, is seen as the expression of Marx’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, but the problem of a transitional state – its inevitable appearance, and the dangers this entails, as put forward in the classics of Marxism such as Engels’ Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State - is simply absent from his considerations; and this underestimation of the political dimension of the revolution is equally expressed in Pannekoek’s abandonment of the notion of a communist party which he had defended in the ascendant phase of the revolutionary wave in the early 20s.
Bordiga’s ‘Force, Violence and Dictatorship in the Class Struggle’ (1946)9 seems in many ways to fall into symmetrical errors to those of Pannekoek. The strength of the work is to re-affirm, against the pacifist hypocrisy of a post-war ‘democratic’ consensus which included the Stalinist Communist Party – a consensus which had emerged on the basis of the greatest slaughter in human history – the class basis of the revolution which was on the historical agenda, and the necessity for the proletariat to use organised violence in the overthrow of the capitalist regime and in the establishment of its own political dictatorship. Bordiga emphasised the inevitability of a civil war, of a transitional state to crush the resistance of the ruling class, and of a communist party to express and defend the goals of communism against the inevitable confusions and hesitations existing in the class.
Bordiga also understood the historic importance of soviet or council type organs:
“Soviets in their essence are actual class organisations and are not, as some believed, conglomerations of trade or craft organisations. Consequently they do not suffer from the narrowness of the purely economic organisation. For us their importance lies above all in the fact that they are organs of struggle. We do not try to view them in terms of ideal structural models but in terms of the history of their real development.
Thus it was a decisive moment in the Russian Revolution when, shortly after the election of the Constituent Assembly, the soviets rose up against the latter as its dialectical opposite and Bolshevik power dissolved the parliamentary assembly by force. This was the realisation of the brilliant historical slogan “All Power to the Soviets”.
At the same time Bordiga warned against making a fetish out of democratic majorities in such organs:
“However, all this was not sufficient for us to accept the idea that once such a form of class representation is born (and leaving aside here the fluctuations, in every sense, of its representative composition which we are not able to examine here), a majority vote, at whatever moment and turn in the difficult struggle waged by the revolution both domestically and externally is a reliable and easy method for solving every question and even avoiding the counter-revolutionary degeneration.
We must admit that the soviet system, due to the very complexity of its historical evolutionary cycle (which incidentally must end in the most optimistic hypothesis with the disappearance of the soviets along with the withering away of the state), is susceptible of falling under counter-revolutionary influence just as it is susceptible of being a revolutionary instrument. In conclusion, we do not believe that there is any constitutional form which can immunise us against such a danger – the only guarantee, if any, lies in the development of the domestic and international relations of social forces.
It is certainly true that a majority vote, or mere “constitutional forms”, is no guarantor of class consciousness and no automatic barrier against opportunism or degeneration. This criticism of what might be termed ‘democratism’ had already been elaborated in previous works on the transitional period by the Italian Fraction, such as Vercesi’s articles ‘Party-State-International’10. But Bordiga seemed totally unaware of the Fraction’s critical work on the problem of the post-revolutionary state - of those writings which, drawing on the experience of the degeneration of proletarian power in Russia, argued against ignoring the negative aspects even of the ‘semi-state’. Bordiga by contrast saw no distinction between the “proletarian state” and the real exercising of power by the proletariat, and even saw the state as the lever for the transformation of society; and where the Fraction had seen that there was a real problem with the party identifying itself with the state, that it had made a significant contribution to the inner degeneration of the revolution in Russia, Bordiga denied outright that this was a serious factor in the liquidation of proletarian political power. For him, the party was the principal instrument both of proletarian insurrection and of post-insurrectional rule. As he put it in a 1951 text, ‘Proletarian Dictatorship and Class Party’11
“The communist party unleashes and wins the civil war, it occupies the key positions in a military and social sense, it multiplies its means of propaganda and agitation a thousand-fold through seizing buildings and public establishments. And without losing time and without procedural whims, it establishes the "armed bodies of workers" of which Lenin spoke, the red guard, the revolutionary police. At the meetings of the Soviets, it wins over a majority to the slogan: "All power to the Soviets!". Is this majority a merely legal, or a coldly and plainly numerical fact? Not at all! Should anyone - be he a spy or a well-intentioned but misled worker - vote for the Soviet to renounce or compromise the power conquered thanks to the blood of the proletarian fighters, he will be kicked out by his comrades' rifle butts. And no one will waste time with counting him in the "legal minority", that criminal hypocrisy which the revolution can do without and which the counterrevolution can only feed upon.......
......In conclusion the communist party will rule alone, and will never give up power without a physical struggle. This bold declaration of not yielding to the deception of figures and of not making use of them will aid the struggle against revolutionary degeneration”.
The idea of delegating power to the party was to be challenged within the PCInt by Damen and others, and was an element in the 1952 split in the party, but in our view it was the GCF which went furthest in assimilating the real theoretical enrichments made by the Fraction in the previous decade. The GCF was the successor to the French Fraction following a split over the constitution of the party in Italy. A nucleus of comrades in France had been opposed to the hasty dissolution of the Italian Fraction and recognised that the hopes of a proletarian revival raised in 1943 had proved unfounded: the war’s outcome had strengthened the defeat of the proletariat and consequently the task of the hour was not the formation of a new party but essentially the continuation of the work of the Fraction. An element of this stance was the GCF’s commitment to continuing and developing the more general theoretical patrimony of the Fraction, and it applied this method to the question of the transition period.
Like the Fraction, the GCF text renewed the links with the most profound critiques of the state contained in the writings of Marx and Engels, showing that the relationship between the proletariat and the state – including the post-revolutionary state – was very different from that of previous revolutionary classes whose mission was to introduce a new form of class exploitation. But while the Fraction had taken up, in the light of the degeneration of the Russian revolution, Engels’ prescient warnings that even the transitional state should be treated as a “scourge”, and insisted that the proletariat could not identify with it, the GCF went a step further, because they concluded logically from this that if the proletariat cannot identify with the transitional state, it makes no sense to define the latter as proletarian.
“The historic necessity for the proletariat to make use of the state must not lead to the fatal theoretical and political error of identifying this instrument with socialism. The state, like a prison, is not a symbol of socialism, nor of the class whose mission is to create it: the proletariat.
The dictatorship of the proletariat, expressing the will of the revolutionary class to crush the resistance of the enemy and to ensure the movement towards a socialist society, also expresses its fundamental opposition to the idea of the proletarian nature of the state, the error of identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the utilisation by the proletariat of this instrument of coercion, the state....
...History and the Russian experience, in particular, have demonstrated that there is no such thing as a proletarian state as such, but only a state in the hands of the proletariat, a state whose nature remains anti-socialist. If the political vigilance of the proletariat weakens, the state will become the stronghold, the rallying point and the expression of the dispossessed classes of a re-born capitalism”
Again, while the Fraction had begun to develop an understanding of the general tendency towards state capitalism in the decadent period of bourgeois society, the GCF text makes this much more explicit, while at the same time rejecting Bilan’s ambiguities about the survivals of a ‘proletarian economy’ in the USSR of the 1930s, embodied in the collectivisation of the means of production. The GCF text is quite clear that capitalism is in no way dependent on ‘private’ individual ownership and is indeed perfectly compatible with state ownership even in an extreme and totalitarian form: therefore the system in the USSR, based as it was on the extraction of surplus value from the proletariat by a minority of state bureaucrats, was entirely capitalist. The GCF text even rejects the very idea of a ‘proletarian economy’, and instead sees the transitional period not as a stable mode of production but as a battleground between capitalism and the movement towards socialism.
In some areas, the GCF of 1946 had not yet gone beyond some of the weaker points of Bilan’s position:
The notion that the economic tasks of the transition period centre round the development of the productive forces towards a point where abundance can be achieved, conceived as a process of “accumulation of values”, albeit one marked by a proportional increase of variable capital as opposed to constant capital, by a fundamental switch from the production of capital goods to the production of consumer goods. This approach underestimates the necessity to struggle against the wage labour form from the beginning, even if both the Fraction and the GCF were right to understand that the law of value would not disappear overnight. Moreover, it is more than ever evident today, more than half a century after the GCF’s text was written, that the primary economic task of the proletariat will not be to ‘develop’ technology to the point where abundance becomes possible, but to reorganise and transform the social relations of production in order to release the already-existing potential for abundance;
The text still talks, as the Fraction did, about the party exercising the dictatorship of the proletariat, even though both warned against any identification between party and state. With the GCF, this is perhaps even more contradictory, since the 1946 text shows a greater understanding of the central role to be played by the workers’ councils in the process of economic and social transformation, and makes it quite explicit that the party can only ‘lead’ the councils through its political role, its capacity to convince the mass of workers:
“In the councils, the proletarians will for the first time learn the art of administering society for themselves. The party will not impose its economic policies on the councils through decrees or by claiming some divine right. It will have to make its conceptions and policies prevail by proposing them, defending them, and submitting them to the approval of the masses organised in the councils or soviets, relying on the councils of workers and on the workers’ delegates to the central councils to bring its class policies to a successful conclusion”.
Equally explicit is the rejection of any relation of violence within the class, and even between the working class and other non-exploiting classes, who will be integrated into the new state through participation in soviet type organisations. Violence, while necessary and inevitable in the struggle against the exploiting class, is rejected as a method of social transformation because it is inconsistent with the goals of communism; and this position is further reinforced by the observation that the capitalist state, above all in its decadent epoch, has evolved from an instrument of violence on behalf of the ruling class to an instrument which tends to perpetuate violence for its own sake.
Given these contradictions, it is not surprising that the idea of the party exercising the dictatorship was to be definitively and quite rapidly rejected, partly as a result of the GCF’s capacity to assimilate the contribution of other left fractions, in particular the German-Dutch left. Thus in June 1948 (Internationalisme no 38), the GCF published a programmatic text ‘On the nature and function of the political party of the proletariat’, which states:
“During the insurrectionary period of the revolution, the role of the party is not to demand power for itself, nor to call on the masses to ‘have confidence’ in it. It intervenes and develops its activity in favour of the self-mobilisation of the class, inside of which it aims for the triumph of its principles and the means for revolutionary action.
The mobilisation of the class around the party to which it ‘confides’ or rather abandons leadership is a conception reflecting a state of immaturity in the class. Experience has shown that in such conditions the revolution will find it impossible to triumph and will quickly degenerate, resulting in a divorce between class and party. The latter would find itself forced to resort more and more to coercive methods to impose itself on the class and would end up as a redoubtable obstacle to the forward march of the revolution.
The party is not an organism of direction and execution – these are the functions that belong to the unitary organisation of the class. If militants of the party participate in these functions, it is as members of the great community of the proletariat”12
The emphasis on the councils – which the Italian Left of the 30s hesitated to generalise from the Russian experience - is also in contradiction with another weakness in the text: its expectation that the trade unions (or rather a renewed form of the trade unions) will play a key role in the defence of class autonomy in the transition period. This was based on the idea that the trade unions, despite their tendency towards bureaucratisation and entanglement with the bourgeois state, remained class organs. Again this idea would soon be dropped, partly in the light of direct experience of the class struggle (e.g. the Renault strike of 47) and partly, again, through debates with currents like the German-Dutch left who had been quicker to recognise that the unions had been irreversibly integrated into capitalism.
The GCF would never have seen their text as the last word on the problem of the period of transition. But the Theses are a shining example of the theoretical method needed to approach this and all other genuine questions: basing ourselves solidly on the acquisitions of the past, but ready to criticise and transcend those aspects of the work of our predecessors which have proved to be invalid or which history has left behind.
CDW
1) The state appears in history as the expression of antagonistic interests which divide human society; it is the product and result of antagonistic economic relations. Although the state has played an active role in history, it is above all directly determined by the process of economic development.
It appears to stand above classes but in reality it is the juridical expression of the dominant economic system; it is the super-structure, the political dressing of the economic rule of a given class in society.
The economic relationships between men, the formation of classes, and the place they occupy in society are determined by the development of the productive forces at a given moment. The state’s only reason for being is to codify and sanction an already existing economic state of affairs, to give it a legal force which all members of society are obliged to accept. Thus, the state seeks to maintain an equilibrium, a stabilisation of the relations between classes, relations which flow from the economic process itself. At the same time the state seeks to prevent any attempt of the suppressed classes to put society into question by engaging in agitation and disturbances. Thus the state fulfils an important function in society, ensuring the security and order indispensable for the maintenance of production. But it can only do this through its essentially conservative character. In the course of history, the state has appeared as a CONSERVATIVE and REACTIONARY factor of the highest order, a fetter which the evolution and development of the productive forces has constantly had to confront.
2) In order to fulfil its dual role as an agent of security and an agent of reaction, the state bases itself on material force, on violence. Its authority resides in its coercive capacities. It posses an exclusive monopoly of all the existing forces of violence: police, army and prisons.
In the struggle between classes, the state, while being the representative of the ruling class, tends to develop a certain independence. As the bourgeoisie develops its national formations, its huge concentrated democratic and political units; as the antagonism between the classes reaches higher and higher levels; as the rivalry between the great capitalist states intensifies, the state is forced to develop its coercive forces to the very limit in order to maintain order. Internally it forces the proletariat and other labouring classes to put up with capitalist exploitation while formally and juridically recognising the freedom of the individual; externally it guarantees the frontiers of the area of economic exploitation against the greed of other capitalist groupings and enlarges them at the expense of other states.
Thus, in the decadent epoch of capitalism when the horizontal and vertical division of society and the struggles engendered by this division have reached a culminating point in human history, the state has also reached a zenith in its development as an organism of coercion and violence.
Having its origin in the historic necessity for violence (the use of coercion being the precondition of its growth), the state tends to resort independently to violence as a means of preserving its own existence. From being a means, violence becomes an end in itself, undertaken and cultivated by the state, which thus negates by its very nature any form of society which goes beyond violence as a way of regulating relations between men.
3) In the complexity of the contradictions which blossom and grow with the development of the capitalist economy, the state is constantly obliged to involve itself in every area of life: economic, social cultural, political; in the private life of each individual and in his relations with society on a local, national or world-wide scale.
In order to cope with its immense social obligations, the state has to call upon the services of an ever-growing mass of people, removing them from productive activity and creating a social spectrum apart, with its own interests, whose speciality and responsibility is the maintenance of the governmental state machine.
An important section of society (10% and perhaps more) thus constitutes an independent social stratum (politicians, the judiciary, the police and the army) with its own economic interests, living parasitically off society, their exclusive sphere of interest being the state apparatus.
This social stratum, beginning as servants of society in the hands of the ruling class, tends, because of its size and above all because of its place in society at the head of the state machinery, to free itself more and more and to put itself forward as the master of society, assimilating the ruling class into this tendency. It has an exclusive monopoly of the public finances, the right to dictate and interpret laws, and the material force of violence with which to apply these laws in its own interests.
Thus we can see the emergence of a new privileged social stratum which derives its material existence from the existence of the state, a parasitic and essentially reactionary stratum concerned with the perpetuation of the state, relatively independent, but always associated with the class whose economic system is based on the exploitation of man by man and whose main principle is the perpetuation of human exploitation and the protection of its economic and social privileges.
4) The development of technology and of the productive forces can no longer be imprisoned in the bourgeois principle of the private ownership of the means of production. Even capitalist production is obliged to violate the sacrosanct principle of private ownership and have recourse to the capitalist nationalisation of certain branches of the economy, such as the railways, the post, and to some extent aviation, the merchant marine, metallurgy and the mines. State intervention increasingly makes itself felt throughout the economy and this is obviously done to safeguard the capitalist system as a whole. Moreover, in the class struggle between conflicting forces in society, between classes and economic groupings, the state can only play its role as a representative, mediating force by supporting itself on a material, economic, independent, solid base.
In this historic evolution of capitalist society, the state takes on a new character, a new role – that of the state as boss. While maintaining and even accentuating its political functions, the capitalist state has evolved on the economic terrain towards state capitalism. Either the state levies part of the surplus-value generated in the sectors where private ownership of the means of production still exists, just like any other capital (bank or finance); or it directly exploits state-owned sectors as a single collective employer in order to create surplus value. This surplus value is shared out among the functionaries of the state (except for the part which is capitalised by being reinvested in production) according to the ranks and privileges they have obtained.
The economic tendency towards state capitalism, while being unable to reach complete socialisation and collectivisation within capitalist society, is nevertheless a very real tendency which, to some extent, frees the state from playing a strictly instrumental role and gives it a new economic character as a collective, anonymous employer which collectively extracts surplus-value.
Although the private ownership of the means of production was the fundamental basis of the economic system of capitalism and remains so today, it can, in the final phase of capitalism, undergo profound modifications without threatening the basic principles of capitalist economy. Far from signifying the end of the system, the more or less large-scale statification of the means of production is in perfect accord with the system and can even be the condition for the system’s survival, providing that the fundamental principle of capitalism still exists: that is to say the extraction of surplus value from the working class for the benefit of a powerful and privileged minority. The fundamental opposition between the capitalist economy and the socialist economy does not therefore reside in the private possession of the means of production. While socialism is incompatible with the private ownership of the means of production, the absence of private ownership (although an indispensible precondition for the creation of a socialist economy) is by no means in itself identical to socialism, since reality has demonstrated how capitalism can accommodate itself to the statification of the means of production by moving towards state capitalism.
The fundamental opposition between the capitalist economy and socialism is to be found:
in the motive force and aim of production. Under capitalism this is the quest for a greater and greater amount of surplus value; the aim of socialism, on the other hand, is the satisfaction of the needs of society and its members;
in the fact that under capitalism, in the immediate redistribution of the products and values created, a smaller and smaller fraction of the values created are given over to consumption, the largest part being reinvested in order to expand production. Under socialism an increasing proportion of the values created is immediately consumed by the producers. That part of the values produced which is directly consumable must tend to increase in relation to the part which is invested in production in order to contribute to the process of reproduction.
Thus, far from representing any weakening of capitalist society, the state’s growing tendency towards economic and political independence merely serves to transform the economic power of capitalism to the state by elevating the latter until it becomes the real seat of power in capitalism. In reaction to the proletariat and its historic mission of creating a socialist society, the capitalist state takes on the appearance of a Goliath. By its very nature the state represents the whole past history of humanity, of all the exploiting classes and reactionary forces in history. Its very character, as we have shown, being one of CONSERVATISM, VIOLENCE, BUREAUCRACY, THE DEFENCE OF PRIVILLEGES AND OF ECONOMIC EXPLOITATION, it is the incarnation of the principle of oppression and is irreconcilably opposed to the principle of liberation, incarnated by the proletariat and socialism.
5) Up until now all new classes have simply substituted their domination and privileges for that of other classes; the economic development of the new class unfolded slowly and over a long period prior to the establishment of its political hegemony. Because their economic interests (which coincided with the development of the productive forces) were the interests of a minority, of a single class, their power developed within the old society, first of all on the economic level. It is only after reaching a certain degree of economic development, after economically supplanting or partially absorbing the old ruling class, that the political power, ie the state and the juridical system, came to sanctify the new state of affairs. The bourgeoisie developed its economic domination over a long period, strengthening the power of merchant capital. It was only when the bourgeoisie had achieved its economic domination over the old feudal society that it carried out its political revolution. The bourgeois revolution had to break the resistance of feudalism and its ideological superstructure because feudal law had became a fetter on the development of the productive forces; but it did not destroy the state. Because the underlying principle of the state is the defence of exploitation of man by man, the bourgeoisie merely had to seize hold of the state machine and continue to use it in its own class interests. The revolutionary process in previous class societies was, thus, as follows:
a) the economic rise and strengthening of the new class within the old society;
b) its economic domination, a peaceful economic revolution;
c) a violent political revolution sanctifying the economic state of affairs;
d) the maintaining of the state apparatus in order to use it in the interests of the new class;
e) the gradual absorption of the old ruling classes who live on within the new ruling class.
6) However, unlike the other classes in history, the proletariat does not possess any wealth, any instrument of labour, any material property. It cannot build any economic system inside capitalist society. Its position as a revolutionary class resides in the objective evolution of society, which makes the existence of private property incompatible with the development of the productive forces, makes the continued production of surplus value an impossibility. Capitalist society is faced with an insufficient market for the realisation of the surplus value it creates. The objective necessity for a socialist society, insofar as socialism is the dialectical solution to the internal contradictions of the capitalist system, finds in the proletariat the only class whose interests coincide with the needs of historical evolution. This last class in history, possessing nothing, having no privileges to defend, complies with the historic necessity for the suppression of all privileges. The proletariat is the only class which can carry out this revolutionary task of suppressing every privilege, all private property, of liberating the productive forces from their capitalist fetters and developing them in the interests of humanity. The proletariat does not and cannot have any economic policy inside the capitalist system.
The proletariat has no class economy to set up before or after the revolution. In contrast to other classes, and for the first time in history, the revolution of the proletariat begins as a political revolution which precedes and creates the conditions for a social-economic transformation. The economic liberation of the proletariat is an economic liberation from the fetters of all class interests; it is the disappearance of all classes. The proletariat liberates itself by liberating the whole of humanity, by dissolving itself into the latter.
The state, the incarnation of class rule and economic oppression, cannot be conquered by the proletariat in the classic sense. On the contrary, the first step towards the proletariat’s emancipation is the revolutionary destruction of the state. Not having any economic power, nor any economic property, the proletariat draws its strength from the consciousness which it acquires from the objective historical laws of the economic process. Its strength lies exclusively in its CONSCIOUSNESS and its capacity for ORGANISATION. The class party, which crystallises the consciousness of the class, represents the indispensible precondition for the realisation of the proletariat’s historic mission, just as its unitary organs of struggle represent its practical material capacity for action.
Because other classes in history had economic power in society, they could more or less do without a party; they were themselves hardly conscious of where their actions were leading and they identified themselves with the state, the incarnation of privilege and oppression. But at every moment of its activity as a class, the proletariat comes up against the state – the proletariat is the historical antithesis of the state.
The conquest of the state by an EXPLOITING class in a given country marked the end of an historical process and was the last revolutionary act of that class. THE DESTRUCTION OF THE STATE by the proletariat is simply THE FIRST REVOLUTIONARY ACT OF THE CLASS, which opens the way for the proletariat and its party towards a whole revolutionary process, leading at first to the WORLD REVOLUTION and then on the economic terrain to the creation of a SOCIALIST SOCIETY.
7) There is a great historical gulf between, on the one hand, the level attained by the productive forces, which have entered into conflict with the capitalist system, and which have to go beyond the framework of that system and, on the other hand, the level of development necessary for the advent of socialist society, for the full satisfaction of the needs of everyone in society. This gulf cannot be wiped out by a simple programmatic declaration, as the anarchists believe, but must be bridged on the economic terrain by an economic policy, the economic policy of the proletariat. This is why theory posits the inevitability of a historic period of transition between capitalism and socialism – a transition period in which political power, and not economic power, is in the hands of the revolutionary class. This is the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The development of the economic foundations of socialism is the political task of the proletariat and its party and cannot be undertaken on a national terrain, but only on a world-wide scale. Capitalism is a world system. The world domination of capital ensures that the economic development of the different sectors of the world economy and of different branches of industry can only take place within the limits imposed by the interests of capital.
In other words, the development of different sectors and branches of the world economy is being severely handicapped. Socialism, on the other hand, is based on a very high economic development of all sectors of the world economy. The liberation of the productive forces from their capitalist fetters by the proletarian revolution is, therefore, the first precondition for the economic evolution of society towards socialism.
The economic policy of the proletariat develops on the basis of the generalisation of the revolution onto the world scale; its content resides not in a one-sided affirmation of the development of production, but essentially in the establishment of a harmonious rhythm between the development of production and a proportional rise in the living standards of the producers.
The period of transition expresses an economic continuity with the pre-socialist epoch in the sense that it cannot yet satisfy all the needs of society and contains within it the necessity of continuing accumulation. But any policy which bases itself on the maximum accumulation in order to expand production has no proletarian content and is simply the continuation of the capitalist economy. There economic policy of the proletariat, therefore, is based on a necessary accumulation which is compatible with, and conditioned by, the improvement of the workers’ living standards, with a relative and progressive increase in variable capital.
After its victory over the bourgeoisie, the proletariat on the one hand becomes the politically dominant class, which with its class party assures its class dictatorship throughout the period of transition in order to lead society towards socialism; on the other hand, the proletariat remains a class in production which has particular immediate economic interests to defend and it must, therefore, continue to make these interests prevail through its own economic organisations – the unions – and its own methods of struggle – the strike – throughout the period of transition.
8) The revolutionary destruction of the capitalist state, the instrument of class domination, does not mean that the economic power of the enemy class has been destroyed or that it has disappeared. The expropriation and socialisation of the key sectors of production are the first, indispensible measures of the proletariat’s economic policy. The existence of backward sectors of the economy, particularly in agriculture, does not permit an immediate transition to a socialist economy or a total abolition of private property. Socialism cannot be built by mere decrees; it is the fruit of a long economic process in which the methods of socialism have to combat and defeat the methods of capitalism on an economic terrain.
The existence of these backward economic sectors, the inevitable survival of private property, represents a real danger: the soil of economic conservatism, of the consolidation and regeneration of those social forces which stand in the way of the movement towards socialism.
The period of transition is a period of bitter struggle between capitalism and socialism; in this struggle the proletariat will have the advantage of having won political power but this is not an automatic guarantee of its final victory.
The outcome of the struggle, the guarantee of the proletariat’s final victory resides exclusively in the strength of consciousness in the class and its ability to translate this consciousness into practical politics.
Any political mistake, any tactical error, will strengthen the position of the class enemy. The elimination of the political formations of the class enemy, of its organisations and press, is an indispensible measure for breaking its resistance. But this is not enough. The proletariat must above all safeguard the independence of its own class organisations, preventing them from being deformed by taking up tasks and functions which do not correspond to their real nature. The party, which represents the consciousness of the historic mission of the class and of its final goal, exercises the dictatorship in the name of the proletariat; the trade union, the unitary organ of the class which expresses its economic position and which has to defend the immediate interests of the class, must not identify with the state or become integrated into it.
9) The state, insofar as it is reconstituted after the revolution, expresses the immaturity of the conditions for a socialist society. It is the political superstructure of an economic base which is not yet socialist. By its nature it is opposed to and hostile towards socialism. Just as the period of transition is an historically inevitable stage which the proletariat has to go through, so the state is for the proletariat an unavoidable instrument of violence which it must use against the dispossessed classes, but with which it cannot indentify itself. “AND THE LEAST ONE CAN SAY IS THAT THE STATE IS A NECESSARY EVIL WHICH IS INHERITED BY THE PROLETARIAT IN ITS STRUGGLE FOR CLASS DOMINATION” (Engels, Preface to The Civil War in France).
As a social institution, the state set up after the victory of the proletarian insurrection remains alien and hostile to socialism.
Expropriation and nationalisation, the problems of managing the economy, the historic unpreparedness of the labouring classes and the proletariat to direct the economy, the need to have recourse to technical specialists, to men who come out of the ranks of the exploiting classes and their servants, the disastrous state of the economy following the civil war, all these are historical factors which will tend to strengthen the state machine and its fundamental characteristics of conservatism and coercion. The historic necessity for the proletariat to make use of the state must not lead to the fatal theoretical and political error of identifying this instrument with socialism. The state, like a prison, is not a symbol of socialism, nor of the class whose mission is to create it: the proletariat.
The dictatorship of the proletariat, expressing the will of the revolutionary class to crush the resistance of the enemy and to ensure the movement towards a socialist society, also expresses its fundamental opposition to the idea of the proletarian nature of the state, the error of identifying the dictatorship of the proletariat with the utilisation by the proletariat of this instrument of coercion, the state.
10) When the proletariat becomes master of society through the victory of the revolution against the bourgeoisie, it will be faced with a social situation which is not yet ripe for socialism but which can only attain this ripeness under the proletariat’s leadership. In every sphere – economic, political, cultural, social – the proletariat will inherit remnants of nations and all kinds of backward superstructures, institutions and ideologies which the proletariat cannot abolish by a simple act of will. It will have to take them into account, to fight against them, to attenuate their most pernicious effects. Violence is not the essential means for doing this; it can only be used strictly in proportion to the violence used by the class enemy in order to crush him. Violence must absolutely and categorically be rejected in the relations between the proletariat and other labouring classes, and within itself. In a general way, the methods used to move towards socialism are closely related to the goal that is being sought after, in other words, to socialism itself.
In the beginning of the transition period, the proletariat will be forced to make use of instruments bequeathed to it by the whole past history of violence and class rule. The state is such an instrument; it is the very symbol of violence, plunder and oppression. The proletariat inherits this instrument and can only use it on the condition that:
it recognises and proclaims the anti-socialist nature of the state and at no time indentifies itself with it; it must constantly stand against the state with its own class organs, the party and the unions, ensuring that the state is under the perpetual vigilance and control of the whole class;
It attenuates the pernicious effects of the state as far as possible, as in the Paris Commune (Engels, Preface to The Civil War in France).
The Russian experience has amply vindicated Marx and Engels’ warnings concerning the dangers of the state and the need to take measures against these dangers.
These measures include: the working masses electing representatives who are revocable at any time; destruction of any armed force separate from the people and its replacement by the general armament of the proletariat and the toiling classes; the widest possible democracy for the working class and its organisations; vigilant and permanent control by the whole class over the functioning of the state; state functionaries to be paid no more than a workman’s wage. Such measures must cease to be mere formulae; they must be carried out to the letter and strengthened as far as possible by complementary social and political measures.
History and the Russian experience, in particular, have demonstrated that there is no such thing as a proletarian state as such, but only a state in the hands of the proletariat, a state whose nature remains anti-socialist. If the political vigilance of the proletariat weakens, the state will become the stronghold, the rallying point and the expression of the dispossessed classes of a re-born capitalism.
THE TRADE UNIONS AFTER THE REVOLUTION
11) The trade unions, unitary organs for the defence of the proletariat’s economic interests, have their origins in the mechanisms of production. They arise out of the necessity for the proletariat to struggle against economic exploitation, against the extraction of an ever-growing mass of surplus value, i.e. an increase in unpaid labour-time.
By increasing productivity the development of technology diminishes the labour-time necessary for the reproduction of labour power. Under capitalism greater productivity does not tend to reduce labour-time nor create a proportional amelioration of the workers’ living standards. On the contrary, the capitalists’ search for greater productivity is carried out purely and simply to increase the production of surplus value.
The conflict between capital and labour, constant capital and variable capital, capitalism and the proletariat, is centred round an economic problem; the role of the two forces in production is based on a fundamental antagonism which gives rise to a continuous class struggle. In this struggle against capitalism, the proletariat organises for the defence of its immediate interests through an association of all those who are exploited: the trade union.
However much the trade unions have come under the influence of the agents of the bourgeoisie, i.e. the reformist bureaucracy, whose policies sabotage and deflect the role of the unions, they remain organs of the class as long as they maintain their independence from the capitalist state.
12) The proletarian revolution will not immediately do away with classes and with relations of production between different classes. The victorious revolution is simply “the organisation of the proletariat as the ruling class” which through its party opens up an historic path, an economic tendency which begins from the existence of classes and of exploitation and ends up in a classless society.
This period of transition between capitalism and socialism under the political dictatorship of the proletariat expresses itself on the economic terrain in an energetic policy which aims to diminish class exploitation, to constantly increase the proletariat’s share of the national income, to alter the relationship between variable and constant capital in favour of the former. This policy cannot simply be based on programmatic declarations of the party; still less is it the prerogative of the state, the organ of coercion and of management. This policy can only find a guarantee and a real expression in the working class itself, through the pressure which the class exerts over society, through its opposition to, and struggle against, all other classes.
Trade union organisation under capitalism represents a tendency towards the regroupment of the class against exploitation, which is constantly being held back and blocked by the influence and repression of the ruling bourgeoisie. It is only after the revolution that the trade union organisations will really become the unitary organs of the class, regrouping all the workers without exception. Only then will the unions really be able to undertake the defence of the proletariat’s immediate economic interests.
13) The role of trade union organisations after the revolution does not derive simply from the fact that they are the only organisations that can undertake the defence of the proletariat’s immediate interests, even though this in itself is enough justification for complete freedom and independence for the trade unions and for the rejection of any subordination or integration of the unions into the state. But more than this, the trade union organisations are an extremely sensitive living barometer which can quickly show whether the main trend in society is towards socialism (through the proportional increase of variable capital) or towards capitalism (through a much larger proportional growth of constant capital). When there is any oscillation in economic administration towards capitalist policies (as a result of economic pressures which come from immature conditions and from surviving non-proletarian classes), the proletariat, by means of its independent union and its specific struggles, will have to react and intervene thereby providing a social counterweight which will push economic policy back onto a socialist path.
To give trade unions the role of managing the economy will not eliminate the essential problems that arise out of this economic situation. This would not solve the difficulties which are engendered by a real lack of maturity in the economy, but such a role would deprive the proletariat and its organisations of their freedom. It would destroy the proletariat’s capacity to exert the pressure necessary both for the defence of its immediate interests and for guaranteeing a socialist policy for the economy.
14) Under capitalism, the trade unions provide a very imperfect reflection of the level of class consciousness. This consciousness can only be fully acquired by the proletariat after the revolution when it is free from all the shackles imposed on it by the bourgeoisie and its agents, the reformist leaders.
After the revolution, the trade unions will reflect much more clearly the level of consciousness that the whole class has reached and will provide a milieu for the political education of the masses. Communists draw their inspiration from the conception that that the defence of the revolution and the building of socialism cannot be achieved by the will of a small elite, but finds its strength only in the political maturity of the proletarian masses. Violence exerted against the proletarian masses, even if it aims at guaranteeing progress towards socialism, can in no way provide such a guarantee.
Socialism cannot be a rape of the proletariat, created against its will. Socialism can only be based on the consciousness and will of the working class. Communists reject all methods of violence within the proletariat because such methods stand in the way of any movement towards socialism, because they obstruct the class from attaining an understanding of its historic mission. Within the unions communists will fight for full freedom of expression and political criticism. It is among the proletariat organised in the unions that communists will fight for their political positions, against all the tendencies which reflect the persistence of bourgeois and petty bourgeois influences within the proletariat and within certain backward strata of the class. Freedom for fractions and tendencies within the unions, freedom of speech and of the press for all the currents inside the unions: these are the conditions which will enable the class party to recognise and evaluate the level of consciousness in the masses, to guarantee the movement towards socialism through the political education of the masses, to verify its own policies and correct them when necessary.
The relationship between party and class is simply the relationship between the party and the unions.
15) Any tendency to reduce the role of the trade unions after the revolution; any pretence that the existence of a ‘workers’ state’ means the end of freedom to engage in union activity or strikes; any advocacy of fusing the unions with the state through the theory of handing economic administration over to the unions, which seems revolutionary but which in fact leads to an incorporation of the unions into the state machine; any position which, however revolutionary in its intentions, calls for violence within the proletariat and its organisations; any attempt to stand in the way of the broadest workers’ democracy and the free-play of political struggle and of fractions within the unions: any such policies are anti-working class. They falsify the relationship between party and class and weaken the proletariat’s position during the transition period. The duty of communists will be to energetically denounce and fight against all these tendencies and to work for the full development and independence of the trade union movement, which is an indispensible condition for the victory of socialism.
MANAGEMENT OF THE ECONOMY
16) The management of the economy after the civil war is the most difficult and complex problem which the proletariat and its party will have to face. It would be puerile to try to provide a priori solutions to all the practical aspects of this problem. It would transform marxism into a system of rigid precepts, valid and applicable at any time regardless of the various concrete and circumstantial situations which could arise in different countries and sectors of the economy.
It is only through practical study that we will be able to find the necessary solutions to any situation that may arise. Following Marx and Engels, we can today only give a broad outline, provide the general principles of economic management during the transitional period, basing ourselves mainly on the experience of the Russian revolution.
17) The achievement of socialism demands a very advanced development of technology and of the productive forces. Following the victory of the revolution, the proletariat will not have a fully developed technology at its disposal. This is not because the revolution is premature; on the contrary, the development of the productive forces has reached its limit under capitalism. This fact justifies the assertion that the objective conditions for revolution are present. Capitalism has become a fetter on the development of the productive forces and must be destroyed. It is up to the proletariat to conduct a policy which will allow a full development of the productive forces so that socialism can become an economic reality.
The development of technology and of the productive forces is the basis of the economic policy of the proletariat. This requires an accumulation of part of the values produced in order to improve, intensify and ensure an expanded reproduction. But socialism is not simply a result of the speed with which the productive forces develop; the rhythm of the movement towards socialism will be subordinated to, and limited to, the concrete possibilities given by the real economic and political situation.
18) The management of the economy can at no time be separated from the development of the political struggle of the class, and this means on an international scale. A revolution that is victorious in one country cannot simply seek to develop its own economy, independently from the struggle of the proletariat in other countries. The Russian revolution has given us historic proof of the fact that the attempt to develop the economy in Russia outside of an ascendant movement of the revolution in other countries led Russia into a policy of compromises with world capitalism, a policy of external pacts and economic agreements and internal concessions. These compromises turned out to be just so many ways of economically propping up a capitalist system in open crisis, saving it from collapsing. But at the same time, these compromises had a deeply disturbing effect on a proletariat which was in the throes of a revolutionary struggle (the secret Rapallo Treaty of 1922 between the Soviet state and German militarism, for example).
The economic agreements which were aimed simply at achieving a partial strengthening of the country of the revolution in fact led to a political and economic reinforcement of capitalism, an overturn in the balance of class forces in favour of capitalism. Thus the country of the victorious revolution accentuated its isolation and lost its only ally, the only guarantee of its ultimate development: the international revolution. It ended up as a political and economic force diverted by the growing pressure of its historic enemy and was reabsorbed into the capitalist system.
The economic policy of the proletariat in one country cannot aim at the resolution of that country’s economic difficulties or the overcoming of underdevelopment within the narrow framework of one country. The future of that economy is indissolubly linked and directly subordinated to the development of the international revolution. Any internal economic policy must be of a provisional character and essentially aimed at helping the international revolution.
19) The Russian experience has also shown that the attempt to accelerate the rhythm of production beyond a proportionate development of consumption will lead to the production of goods destined for destruction. This is in line with the general tendency of world capitalism in its decadent phase which can only ensure the continuation of production by setting up a war economy.
Against this policy of speeding up industrial development as much as possible, of sacrificing the immediate interests of the proletariat in order to build a war economy, a genuine proletarian economic policy will be based on a rate of growth which is proportionate to the consumption requirements of the producers, and will therefore aim at the production of consumer goods immediately necessary for the satisfaction of workers’ needs.
Accumulation will not be based on the criterion of developing industry as quickly as possible, but will be fixed at a rate which is compatible with the progressive satisfaction of immediate needs. The fundamental principles of economic management will be the production of basic necessities, and the gradual harmonisation of the various branches of production, particularly between town and country, industry and agriculture.
20) As long as the productive forces have not reached a level of development which can do away with small-scale production in every branch of the economy, there can be no question of the complete and immediate disappearance of intermediary classes, of the artisans and small peasants.
After the revolution the proletariat will only be able to collectivise the developed and concentrated sectors of industry, the key industries: transport, banking, big landed property. It will expropriate the big bourgeoisie. But small private property will continue to exist and will only be abolished through a long economic process. Alongside the socialist sector of the economy there will still be a private sector of small producers. The economic relations between these sectors will probably take many forms, from socialist relations to co-operative ones and to the free exchange of commodities between the state and the small-holders and even between the individual, isolated producers themselves. Problems of production, of exchange prices, markets and money will also take many different forms. The economic policy of the proletariat will have to take this situation into account, rejecting bureaucratic violence as a way of regulating economic life and basing itself solely on the real possibilities of absorbing private production through the development of technology. It will aim at the elimination of private property and the isolated producer through the incorporation of these strata into the great family of the proletariat.
21) The management of economic and social life requires a centralised organism. The theory which would give each group of producers the task of managing their own enterprises is a reactionary petty bourgeois utopia. The development of technology requires the participation of the great mass of the workers, their cooperation in the productive process.
Production in each branch of the economy is linked to the whole of national and international production. It calls for the setting in motion of immense forces and for systematic planning, and only a centralised administration can ensure this. Otherwise one would have to transform each member and group of society into so many small proprietors, each with their own antagonistic interests, which would mean a return to the epoch of simple commodity production long since wiped out from history by the development of industry. Socialist society will engender its own organs of social and economic administration. In the period of transition, the function of economic management can only be undertaken by the political power which emerges from the revolution and which, under the control of the entire working population, will manage and direct the economy.
The broadest, most effective and most direct participation of all the workers at every level of the new power will be the only way of ensuring that the economy is under the management of the workers themselves. The Paris Commune gave us the first example of this new kind of state, while the Russian revolution reaffirmed this first attempt and gave it its definitive form in the organs of representation of all the workers at their workplace and in their localities: the councils or soviets.
22) Everyone who works will participate in the elections to organs of direction and management. Only those who do not work or who live off the labour of others will be excluded. The interests of all the working masses will be expressed in the councils, including those of the non-proletarian strata. The proletariat, because of its consciousness, its political strength, the place it occupies at the industrial heart of the economy, because of its concentration in the towns and factories, having acquired a sense of organisation and discipline, will play a preponderant role in the whole life and activity of the councils and will give leadership and direction to the other strata of the labouring population.
In the councils, the proletarians will for the first time learn the art of administering society for themselves. The party will not impose its economic policies on the councils through decrees or by claiming some divine right. It will have to make its conceptions and policies prevail by proposing them, defending them, and submitting them to the approval of the masses organised in the councils or soviets, relying on the councils of workers and on the workers’ delegates to the central councils to bring its class policies to a successful conclusion.
23) Just as the relationship between party and class is expressed through the trade unions, so the relationship the proletariat and its party have with other labouring classes is expressed through the councils or soviets. Just as violence within the class can only falsify its relationship with the party, so there must be a rejection of violence in the relations between the proletariat and the other labouring classes and strata. These relations must be based on full freedom of expression and criticism within the councils of workers’ and peasants’ delegates.
In a general sense, violence as a method of activity in the hands of the proletariat will be indispensable for destroying the rule of capitalism and its state, and for guaranteeing the victory of the proletariat against the resistance and violence of the counter-revolutionary classes during the civil war. But apart from this, violence can play no part in the constructive task of building socialism. On the contrary, it contains the risk of deviating the proletariat’s activity, of falsifying its relationship with other labouring strata, and of distorting its capacity to find class solutions to the problems which confront it, solutions which can only be based on the development of the political maturity of the masses.
Gauche Communiste de France.
First published in Internationalisme, no 9 (April 1946). Reprinted in Bulletin d’Etudes et de discussion of Révolution Internationale, no.1 and first published in English in the ICC pamphlet The period of transition from capitalism to socialism
1 Anarchism, and anarcho-syndicalism in particular, had of course been subjected to a very severe test in the war in Spain between 1936-39. We intend to return to this episode in the context of this series, since some revolutionaries consider that the collectivisation of the farms and factories in the first phase of the war went further in the direction of communism than anything seen before or since, including the revolution in Russia. For the fractions of the communist left, on the other hand, the political framework in which these collectivisations took place was dominated by what was in essence an imperialist war. Nevertheless, this question deserves a more detailed and in-depth examination.
2 See our book The Italian Communist Left, p 146f
3 See our book The Dutch and German Communist Left, p 316-19
4 Italian Communist Left, p148-9
5 Ibid, p 160f
8See Dutch and German Communist Left, pp 253-56. The book notes that Pannekoek’s treatment of the problems that will face the proletariat in the immediate aftermath of a revolution is more realistic than the somewhat idyllic picture painted in the GIK’s Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution. This is not surprising given that Pannekoek was looking at a Europe that was being ruined by the clash of imperialist states. See the two previous articles in this series [46]:
9 https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1946/violence.htm [47]. Bordiga –in a curious parallel with Pannekoek(see Dutch and German Communist Left p 312....) – abstained from formally joining the organisation whose formation he helped to inspire, but his texts automatically became official documents of the Party.
12 The text on the party, the Theses on the state, and a number of other seminal works of the GCF, were written by our comrade Marc Chirik. In the next article in this series, we will try to explain more about how we see Marc’s role in the proletarian political movement and in particular in the debate about the nature of the communist revolution, which again become a subject of passionate argument in the early 70s, when the revolutionary minorities arising from the new generation of 1968 began to organise themselves in a more considered and deliberate manner.
The document we are publishing below first appeared in 1947 in the pages of Internationalisme, the press of the small group “Gauche Communiste de France” (Communist Left of France), to which (amongst others) the ICC has traced its origins since its foundation in 1975. It was reprinted at the beginning of the 1970s in the Bulletin d’études et de discussion published by the French group “Révolution Internationale”, later to become the section in France of the newly formed International Communist Current. The Bulletin was itself the precursor of the ICC’s theoretical organ, the International Review, and its aim was to give the young group – and its very young militants – a more solid anchorage, through theoretical reflection and a better knowledge of the workers’ movement, including the history of the movement’s confrontation with new theoretical questions posed by history1.
The text’s main object is to examine the historical conditions which determine the formation and the activity of revolutionary organisations. The very idea of such determination is fundamental. Although the creation and survival of a revolutionary organisation is the fruit of a militant will, aiming to be an active factor in history, the form that this will takes does not come out of the blue, independently of social reality and independently above all of the consciousness and fighting spirit present in the broad masses of the working class. The conception that the creation of a class party depended only on the “will” of the militants has been characteristic of Trotskyism since the 1930s, but also – at the end of World War II – of the newly formed “Partito Comunista Internazionalista”, the precursor of the various Bordigist groups and of today’s International Communist Tendency (ex-IBRP). Internationalisme’s article insists, rightly in our view, that we have here two fundamentally different conceptions of political organisation: the one, voluntarist and idealist; the other, materialist and marxist. At best, the voluntarist conception could only engender congenital opportunism – as was the case for the PCInt and its descendants; at worst, as with the Trotskyists, it led to conciliation with the bourgeoisie and going over to the enemy camp.
For the young post-68 generation, the importance of historical and theoretical reflection on this issue is obvious. It was to preserve the ICC (though it did not immunise us, far from it) from the worst effects of the frenzied activism and impatience which were typical of this period, and were to lead so many groups and militants to abandon political activity.
We are deeply convinced that this text remains wholly relevant to this day for a new generation of militants, and especially in its insistence that the working class is not just a sociological category, but a class with a specific role to play in history: to overthrow capitalism and build a communist society2. The role of revolutionaries is equally dependent on the historical period: when the situation of the working class means that it is impossible to influence the course of events, the role of revolutionaries is not to ignore reality and pretend that their immediate intervention can change things, but to get down to an apparently much less spectacular task: preparing the theoretical and political conditions for an intervention which will be determinant for the class struggle of the future.
Internationalisme 38, October 1948
Our group has taken on the task of re-examining the major problems posed by the need to re-constitute a new revolutionary workers’ movement. It has had to consider the evolution of capitalist society towards state capitalism, and of the old workers’ movement which for some time has served to support the capitalist class and help drag the proletariat behind the latter; it has also had to look at what, in this old workers’ movement, provided material which the capitalist class could use to this end, and how. Then we have been led to reconsider what, within the workers’ movement, remains given and what has become outdated since the Communist Manifesto.
Finally, it was quite normal for us to have studied the problems posed by the revolution and socialism. It was with this in mind that we presented a study on the state after the revolution3, and that we are now presenting for discussion a study of the problem of the revolutionary party of the proletariat. We should remember that this is one of the most important questions in the revolutionary workers’ movement. This question opposed Marx and the marxists to the anarchists, to certain social democratic tendencies and, finally to the revolutionary syndicalist tendencies. It was at the centre of Marx’s concerns, and he always retained a critical attitude towards the different organisms which called themselves ‘workers’’ or ‘socialist’ parties, Internationals and so on. Marx, although at given moments he participated actively in the life of certain of these organs, always saw them as political groups within which, following the expression of the Communist Manifesto, communists could express themselves as the “vanguard of the proletariat”. The goal of the communists was to push forward the activity of these organisations while maintaining the capacity for autonomous criticism and activity. Then came the split within the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party between the Menshevik tendency and the Bolsheviks around the ideas developed by Lenin in What is to be done? Amongst the marxist groups which had broken from Social-Democracy to form the Communist International, the same problem was at the basis of the opposition between the council communists and the KAPD, and the Third International. It was also in this order of thinking that you have the divergence between the Bordiga group and Lenin around the subject of the ‘United Front’ advocated by Lenin and Trotsky and adopted by the Communist International. The same problem remains one of the major disagreements among the different oppositional groups: between ‘Trotskyists’ and ‘Bordigists’, and indeed it was a subject of discussion among all the groups of the time.
Today, we must critically re-examine all these expressions of the revolutionary workers’ movement. We hope to draw out of this process – i.e. in the expression of different currents of thought on this question – a current which, in our view, will best express the revolutionary standpoint, and thus try to pose the problem for the future revolutionary workers’ movement.
We also need to reconsider critically the points of view which have been brought to bear on this problem, to determine what remains constant in the revolutionary expression of the proletariat, but also what has become obsolete and what new problems have been posed.
It is evident that such work can only bear fruit if it is the object of discussion between and within the groups that aim to reconstitute a new revolutionary workers’ movement.
The study presented here is thus a means to participate in this discussion; it has no other pretension, even though it is presented in the form of theses. Its goal is above all to stimulate discussion and criticism and not to provide definitive solutions. It is a work of research which aims less at acceptance or rejection pure and simple than at stimulating other works of this kind.
The essential focus of this study is the expression of revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat. But there are a number of programmatic questions related to the party which are only touched on here; organisational problems, problems of the relationship between the party and organisms like the workers’ councils, problems relating to the attitude of revolutionaries faced with the formation of several groups claiming to be THE revolutionary party and trying to build it, the problems posed by the pre- and post-revolutionary tasks, etc.
Therefore militants who understand that the task of the hour is to examine these various problems should intervene actively in this discussion, either through their own papers or bulletins, or in this bulletin, for those who for the time being don’t have such a possibility of expressing themselves.
Internationalisme
1. The idea of the necessity for a political organism acting inside the proletariat for the social revolution seemed to be a given in the socialist workers' movement.
It is true that the anarchists have always protested against the term "political" which is given to this organism. But this anarchist protest comes from the fact that they understand the term political action in a very narrow sense, since it is synonymous for them with action for legislative reforms: participation in elections and bourgeois parliaments, etc. But neither the anarchists nor any other current in the workers' movement deny the necessity for the regroupment of revolutionary socialists in associations which, through action and propaganda, take on the task of intervening in and orienting workers' struggles. And any grouping which gives itself the task of orientating social struggles in a certain direction is a political regroupment.
In this sense, the struggle of ideas around the political or non-political character given to these organisations is only a debate about words, hiding at root, under general phrases, concrete divergences on the orientation and on the aims and the means to achieve them. In other words, precise political divergences.
If new tendencies are emerging today that call into question the necessity for a political organisation of the proletariat, this is a consequence of the degeneration of the parties which were once organisations of the proletariat and of their passage into the service of capitalism: the Socialist and Communist parties. Political terms and political parties are today suffering from discredit, even within the bourgeois milieu. However, what has led to these resounding weaknesses is not politics but SPECIFIC KINDS of politics. Politics is nothing other than the orientation that men adopt in the organisation of social life; to turn away from this action means renouncing any determination to give a direction to social life and, consequently, to transform it. It means accepting and submitting to society as it stands.
2. The idea of class is essentially historico-political, not merely an economic classification. Economically, all humans are part of one and the same system of production in a given historical period. The division based upon the distinct positions that men occupy in the same system of production and distribution, and which doesn't go beyond the framework of this system, cannot become the basis of the historic necessity for overcoming it. Division into economic categories is thus only a moment in the constant internal contradictions that develop with the system but remain circumscribed by its own limitations. Historic opposition is, so to speak, external, in the sense that it is opposed to all of the system taken as a whole, and this opposition is manifested in the destruction of the existing social system and its replacement by another based on a new mode of production. Class is the personification of this historic opposition at the same time as being the social-human force for its realisation.
The proletariat exists as a class in the full sense of the term only in the orientation that it gives to its struggles, not with a view to improving its conditions of life within the capitalist system but in its opposition to the existing social order. The passage from category to class, from the economic struggle to the political, is not an evolutionary process, a continual and inherent development, so that a historic class opposition emerges automatically and naturally after being contained for a long time in the economic position of the workers. There is a dialectical leap one to the other. It consists in the coming to consciousness of the historical necessity for the disappearance of the capitalist system. This historic necessity coincides with the aspiration of the proletariat for liberation from its condition of exploitation and is contained within it.
3. All social transformations in history have, as a fundamentally determining condition, the fact that the development of the productive forces has become incompatible with the restricted structures of the old society. Capitalism’s demise, and the reason for its collapse, lies in its inability to dominate any longer the productive forces that it has developed. This is also the historic justification of its transcendence by socialism.
Apart from this condition, however, the differences between previous revolutions (including the bourgeois revolution) and the socialist revolution remain decisive and demand a profound study on the part of the revolutionary class.
For the bourgeois revolution for example, the condition for the development of productive forces incompatible with those of feudalism still lay within a system based on the property of a possessing class. As a result, capitalism developed its economic foundation slowly and over a long period inside the feudal world. The political revolution followed the economic fact and consecrated it. Also as a result, the bourgeoisie has no imperious necessity to acquire an awareness of economic and social movement. Its actions are directly propelled by the pressures of the laws of economic development which act upon it as blind forces of nature and determine its will. Its consciousness remains a secondary factor. It comes after the fact. It records events rather than giving direction to them. The bourgeois revolution is situated in this prehistory of humanity where the still undeveloped productive forces dominate man.
Socialism, on the contrary, is based upon the development of productive forces which are incompatible with all individual or social property of a class. From this, socialism cannot be based upon the economic foundations within capitalist society. The political revolution is the condition of a socialist orientation of the economy and of society. And from this, socialism can only be realised through the consciousness of the movement’s final goals, the consciousness of the means for realising them and the conscious will for action. Socialist consciousness precedes and conditions revolutionary class action. The socialist revolution is the beginning of history where man is called upon to dominate the productive forces which have already been strongly developed, and this domination is precisely the purpose adopted by the socialist revolution.
4. For this reason, all attempts to establish socialism on realisations achieved within capitalist society are by their very nature destined to fail. Socialism demands, in terms of time, an advanced development of the productive forces, and in terms of space, the entire earth: its precondition is the conscious will of men. In the best of cases, the experimental demonstration of socialism within capitalist society cannot go beyond the level of a utopia. And persisting along this route leads to a position of conservation and the strengthening of capitalism4. Socialism within a capitalist regime can only be a theoretical demonstration, its materialisation can only take the form of an ideological force, and its realisation can only take place by the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat against the existing social order.
And since the existence of socialism can only find expression first of all in socialist consciousness, the class which bears it and personifies it has a historic existence only through this consciousness. The formation of the proletariat as a historic class is nothing other than the formation of its socialist consciousness. These are the two aspects of the same historic process, inconceivable separately because one cannot exist without the other.
Socialist consciousness does not flow from the economic position of the workers, it is not a reflection of their condition as wage-earners. For this reason, socialist consciousness is not simply and spontaneously formed in the head of every worker, or in the heads of workers alone. Socialism as an ideology appears separately from and in parallel with the economic struggles of the workers. They do not engender each other although they influence each other, and the development of each conditions that of the other; both are rooted in the historic development of capitalist society.
5. If the workers only become "a class in itself and for itself" (according to the expression of Marx and Engels) through socialist consciousness, one can say that the process of the constitution of the class is identified with the process of the formation of groups of revolutionary socialist militants. The party of the proletariat is not a selection or a "delegation" of the class, it is the mode of existence and life of the class itself. No more than one can understand matter apart from its movement, one cannot understand the class apart from its tendency to constitute itself into political organisms: "The organisation of the proletariat into a class and thus into a political party" (Communist Manifesto) is no chance formula, but expresses the profound thought of Marx and Engels. A century of experience has masterfully confirmed the validity of this way of seeing the notion of class.
6. Socialist consciousness is not produced by spontaneous generation but is constantly reproduced; once it has appeared it becomes, in its opposition to the existing capitalist world, the active principle determining and accelerating its own development in and through action. However this development is conditioned and limited by the development of the contradictions of capitalism. In this sense, Lenin’s thesis of ‘socialist consciousness injected into the workers by the Party’ is certainly more precise than Rosa’s thesis of the ‘spontaneity’ of the development of consciousness, engendered during the course of a movement that starts with the economic struggle and culminates in a revolutionary socialist struggle. The thesis of ‘spontaneity’, despite its democratic appearances, reveals at root a mechanistic tendency, a rigorous economic determinism. It is based on a cause and effect relationship, with consciousness as merely an effect, the result of an initial movement, i.e., the economic struggle of the workers which gives rise to it. In this view, consciousness is seen as fundamentally passive in relation to the economic struggles which are the active factor. Lenin’s conception restores to socialist consciousness and the party which materialises it the character of an essentially active factor and principle. It does not detach itself from life and the movement but is included within it.
7. The fundamental difficulty of the socialist revolution lies in this complex and contradictory situation: on the one hand the revolution can only be made through the conscious action of the great majority of the working class; on the other hand the development of this consciousness comes up against the conditions to which all workers in capitalist society are subjected, and which endlessly hinder and destroy the workers’ consciousness of their revolutionary historic mission. This difficulty can absolutely not be overcome solely through theoretical propaganda independent of the historic conjuncture. But still less than through pure propaganda will the solution be found in the economic struggles of the workers. Left to their own internal development, the workers’ struggles against the conditions of capitalist exploitation can lead at most to the explosion of revolts, in other words negative reactions which are absolutely insufficient for the positive action of social transformation; the latter is made possible only through a consciousness of the aims of the movement. This factor can only be this political element of the class which draws its theoretical substance, not from the contingencies and particularities of the economic position of the workers, but from the unfolding of historic possibilities and necessities. Only the intervention of this factor will make it possible for the class to rise from the level of purely negative reaction to that of positive action, from revolt to revolution.
8. But it would be entirely wrong to want to substitute these organisms, which are expressions of the consciousness and existence of the class, for the class itself and to consider the class as merely a shapeless mass destined to serve as material for these political organisms. That would be to substitute a militarist conception for a revolutionary one in relations between being and consciousness and between the party and the class. The historic function of the party is not to be a General Staff leading the action of a class which is seen as an army ignorant both of the final aim and the immediate objective of operations. That would be to see its movement as a sum total of manoeuvres.
The socialist revolution is not at all comparable to military action. Its realisation is conditioned by the workers’ consciousness that dictates their decisions and actions.
The party does not, then, act in place of the class. It does not demand "confidence" in the bourgeois sense of the word, in other words to have delegated to it the fate and destiny of society. Its sole historic function is to act with a view to allowing the class itself to acquire the consciousness of its mission, of its aims and of the means which are the foundations of its revolutionary action.
9. Just as we must combat this conception of the party as General Staff, acting on behalf of the working class, we must with equal vigour reject the other conception which, on the basis that "the emancipation of the workers is the work of the workers themselves" (Inaugural Address of the First International) denies any role to the militant and the revolutionary party. Under the very praiseworthy pretext of not imposing their will on the workers, these militants shirk their tasks, run from their responsibility and leave revolutionaries tailing the workers' movement.
The former puts itself outside the class by denying it and substituting for it, the latter similarly puts itself outside the class by denying the specific function of the class organisation, i.e., the party, by denying their own existence as a factor of revolution and excluding themselves by forbidding themselves any action of their own.
10. A correct understanding of the conditions of the socialist revolution must start from and embody the following elements:
a. Socialism is a necessity only because the development reached by the productive forces is no longer compatible with a society divided into classes.
b. This necessity can only become a reality through the will and conscious action of the oppressed class whose social liberation is tied up with the liberation of humanity from its alienation from the forces of production, to which it has hitherto been subjected.
c. Socialism, being both an objective necessity and a subjective will, can only be expressed in revolutionary action that is conscious of its aims.
d. Revolutionary action is inconceivable without a revolutionary programme. Similarly, the elaboration of the programme is inseparable from action. It is because the revolutionary party is a "body of doctrine and a will to action" (Bordiga) that it is the most thorough concretisation of socialist consciousness and the fundamental element for its realisation.
11. The tendency towards the constitution of the party of the proletariat appears right from the birth of capitalist society. But as long as the historic conditions for socialism are not sufficiently developed, the ideology of the proletariat regarding the construction of the party can only remain at an embryonic stage. It is only with the "Communist League" that this accomplished form of the political organisation of the proletariat appears for the first time.
When one looks closely at the development of the formation of class parties, it is immediately obvious that the organisation into parties does not follow a constant progression, but on the contrary happens in periods of major development, alternating with others during which the party disappears. Thus the organic existence of the party does not appear to depend solely on the will of the individuals who compose it. Objective conditions determine its existence. The party, being essentially an instrument of revolutionary class action, can only exist in situations where the action of the class comes to the surface. In the absence of the conditions for workers’ class action (such as in periods of the economic and political stability of capitalism or following decisive defeats of the workers’ struggles) the party cannot continue to exist. Organically it breaks up or else if it wants to exist, in other words to continue to exercise an influence, then it must adapt to the new conditions which deny revolutionary action; inevitably, the party takes on a new content. It becomes conformist, that is to say it ceases to be a party of the revolution.
Marx understood the conditions of the existence of the party better than most. Twice he undertook the dissolution of a great organisation: first in 1851, following the defeat of the revolution and the triumph of the reaction in Europe, and secondly in 1873 after the defeat of the Paris Commune, he was quite openly for the dissolution of the party. The first time it was the Communist League, and the second, the First International.
12. The experience of the Second International confirms the impossibility of maintaining the party of the proletariat during a prolonged period marked by a non-revolutionary situation. The participation of the parties of the Second International in the imperialist war of 1914 only revealed the long corruption of the organisation. The permeability and penetrability of the political organisation of the proletariat to the ideology of the reigning capitalist class, which is always possible, can in long periods of stagnation and reflux of the class struggle assume such an extent that the ideology of the bourgeoisie ends up substituting itself for that of the proletariat, so that inevitably the party is emptied of all its original class content and becomes instead an instrument of the enemy class.
The history of the Communist Parties of the Third International has again shown the impossibility of safeguarding the party in a period of revolutionary reflux and its inevitable degeneration during such a period.
13. For these reasons, the formation of parties, such as the Trotskyist International from 1935, or more recently the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy, is not merely artificial: these can only be enterprises of confusion and opportunism. Instead of being moments in the constitution of the future class party, these formations are obstacles and discredit it by the caricature that they present. Far from expressing a maturation of consciousness and an advance on the old programme that they have transformed into dogmas, they only reproduce the old programme and are imprisoned by these dogmas. Nothing surprising about the fact that these formations take up out of date and backward positions of the old party and worsen them still further, as with the tactics of parliamentarism, trade unionism, etc.
14. But the break in the party’s organisational existence does not mean a break in the development of class ideology. In the first place the revolutionary reflux signifies the immaturity of the revolutionary programme. Defeat is a signal for the necessity to critically re-examine previous programmatic positions and the obligation to go beyond them on the basis of the living experience of the struggle.
This positive critical work of programmatic elaboration is pursued through the organisms coming from the old party. They constitute, in the period of retreat, the active element for the constitution of the future party in a new period of revolutionary upsurge. These organisms are the left groups or fractions coming out of the party after its organisational dissolution or its ideological alienation. Such were: the fraction of Marx in the period between the dissolution of the League and the formation of the First International, the left currents in the Second International (during the First World War) which gave birth to the new Parties and International in 1919; also the Left Fractions and groups who continued their revolutionary work following the degeneration of the Third International. Their existence and their development is the condition which has enriched the programme of the revolution and the reconstruction of the party of tomorrow.
15. The old party, once it has passed into the service of the enemy class, definitively ceases being a milieu in which revolutionary thought can be elaborated and in which militants of the proletariat can be formed. Expecting currents coming from social democracy or Stalinism to serve as material for the construction of a new class party thus means ignoring the very foundation of the idea of the party. The Trotskyists’ adherence to the parties of the Second International, or their pursuit of the hypocritical practice of burrowing within these parties with the idea of cultivating, inside this anti-proletarian milieu, "revolutionary" currents with whom they could set up the new party of the proletariat, merely demonstrates that they themselves are a dead current, an expression of the past movement and not that of the future.
Just as the new party of the revolution cannot be set up on the basis of a programme which has been overtaken by events, neither can it be built with elements who remain organically attached to organisms which have forever ceased to be working class.
16. The history of the workers' movement has never known a period which is more sombre and more marked by such a profound retreat in revolutionary consciousness than the present. If the economic exploitation of the workers appears as an absolutely insufficient condition for assuming a consciousness of their historic mission, it turns out that the development of this consciousness is infinitely more difficult than revolutionary militants had previously thought. Perhaps, for the proletariat to recover, humanity will have to undergo the nightmare of a Third World War with the horror of a world in chaos, and the proletariat will have to face a very tangible dilemma: die or save yourself by revolution before it can find the conditions for recovering both itself and its consciousness.
17. It is not for us here in the framework of this thesis to look for the precise conditions that will allow the re-emergence of proletarian consciousness, nor what will be the conditions for the formation of the unitary organisation that the proletariat will adopt for its revolutionary combat. What we can say categorically, based on the experience of the last thirty years, is that neither economic demands, nor the whole range of so-called "democratic" demands (parliament, rights of peoples to self-determination, etc...) can be of use to the historic action of the proletariat. Concerning forms of organisation, it appears as still more evident that it cannot be the unions with their vertical and professional, corporatist structures. All these forms of organisation belong to a past workers' movement and will have to be relegated to the museum of history. But they will have to be abandoned and overtaken in practice. The new organisations will have to be unitary, that is to say inclusive of the great majority of the workers, and go beyond the particular divisions of professional interests. Their basis will be on the social level, their structure the locality. Workers' councils, like those that appeared in 1917 in Russia and 1918 in Germany, were a new type of unitary organisation of the class. It is in these types of workers' councils, and not in the rejuvenation of the unions, that the workers will find the most appropriate form of their organisation.
But whatever the new unitary forms of organisation of the class it changes nothing regarding the problem of the necessity for the political organism which is the party, nor regarding the decisive role that it has to play. The party remains the conscious factor in the action of the class. It is the ideologically vital motor force of the proletariat’s revolutionary action. In social action it plays a role similar to that of energy in production. The reconstruction of this organism of the class is conditioned by the appearance of a tendency within the class to break with capitalist ideology as it engages in practice in the struggle against the existing regime, while at the same time this reconstruction is a condition for the acceleration and deepening of this struggle and the decisive condition for its triumph.
18. The absence of the conditions required for the construction of the party should not lead to the conclusion that any immediate activity by revolutionary militants is useless or impossible. The militant has not to choose between the hollow "activism" of the party builders and individual isolation, between adventurism and an impotent pessimism: both must be fought, as being equally foreign to the revolutionary spirit and harmful to the cause of the revolution. We must reject both the voluntarist idea of militant action presented as the sole factor determining the movement of the class, and the mechanical conception of the party as a mere passive reflection of the movement. Militants must consider their action as one of the factors which, in interaction with others, conditions and determines the action of the class. This conception provides the foundation for the necessity and value of the militant’s activity, while at the same time setting the limits of its possibilities and impact. Adapting one’s activity to the conditions of the present conjuncture is the only means of making this activity efficient and fruitful.
19. The attempt to construct the new class party in all haste and at any cost, despite unfavourable objective conditions springs from both an infantile and adventurist voluntarism and a false appreciation of the situation and its immediate perspectives, as well as, moreover, a totally wrong appreciation of the idea of the party and the relationship between party and class. Thus all such attempts are fatally destined to fail and only manage, in the best of cases, to create opportunist groupings trailing in the wake of the big parties of the Second and Third Internationals. Their existence is henceforth justified solely by the development within them of the spirit of the chapel and the sect.
Thus all these organisations are not only caught up, in their positivity, in the cogs of opportunism through their immediate "activism", they also, in their negativity, produce a narrow spirit typical of the sect, a parochial patriotism, as well as a fearful and superstitious attachment to "leaders", a caricature of the bigger organisations, a deification of organisational rules and submission to a "freely consented" discipline that becomes all the more tyrannical and intolerable in inverse proportion to the numbers involved in them.
In this dual outcome, the artificial and premature construction of the party leads to the negation of the construction of the political organism of the class, to the destruction of cadres and the more or less rapid, but still inevitable, loss of militants, used up, exhausted, in the void, and completely demoralised.
20. The disappearance of the party, either through its contraction and its organisational dislocation as was the case in the First International, or, through its passage into the service of capitalism, as was the case for the parties of the Second and Third Internationals, expresses in both cases the end of a period of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat. The disappearance of the party is thus inevitable and neither voluntarism nor the presence of a more or less brilliant leader is able to prevent it.
Marx and Engels twice saw the organisation of the proletariat, in whose life they both played a major part, break up and die. Lenin and Luxemburg looked on powerlessly at the betrayal of the great parties of social democracy. Trotsky and Bordiga could do nothing to alter the degeneration of the Communist parties and their transformation into the monstrous capitalist machines that we have been faced with ever since.
These examples tell us not that the party is futile, as a fatalist and superficial analysis would have it, but only that the necessary party of the class has no existence along a uniformly continuous and rising line, that its very existence is not always possible, that its existence and development are in correspondence with and closely linked to the class struggle of the proletariat which gives birth to it and which it expresses. That's why the struggle of revolutionary militants within the party during the course of its degeneration and before its death as a workers' party has a revolutionary meaning, but not the vulgar meaning given to it by various Trotskyist oppositions. For the latter, it is a matter of setting the party right, and to this end it is above all necessary that the organisation and its unity is not put in peril. For them it is a question of maintaining the organisation in its past splendour, when in fact this is impossible precisely because of the objective conditions, so that the organisation’s original splendour could only be maintained at the price of a constant and growing alteration of its revolutionary and class nature. They look to organisational measures and remedies in order to save the organisation without understanding that organisational collapse is always the reflection of a period of revolutionary reflux and is often a far better solution than its survival; and in any case what revolutionaries have to save is not the organisation but its class ideology which is at risk of going down with the organisation.
Without understanding the objective causes of the inevitable loss of the old party, one cannot understand the task of militants in this period. Some came to the conclusion that, because they had failed to preserve the old party of the class, it was necessary to construct a new one straight away. This incomprehension can only result in adventurism, the whole being based on a voluntarist conception of the party.
A correct study of reality makes clear that the death of the old party clearly implies the immediate impossibility of constructing a new one; it means that the necessary conditions for the existence of any party, old or new, do not exist in the present.
In such a period only small revolutionary groups can survive, assuring a continuity which is less organisational than ideological. These groups concentrate within themselves the past experience of the class struggle, providing a link between the party of yesterday and that of tomorrow, between the culminating point of the struggle and the maturation of class consciousness in a period of past upsurge and its re-emergence on a higher level in a new period of upsurge in the future. In these groups the ideological life of the class carries on through the self-criticism of its struggles, the critical re-examination of its past ideas, the elaboration of its programme, the maturation of its consciousness and the formation of new cadres, new militants for the next stage of the revolutionary assault.
21. The present period that we are living in is on the one hand the product of the defeat of the first great revolutionary wave of the international proletariat which put an end to the First World War and which reached its high point in the October 1917 revolution in Russia and in the Spartacist movement of 1918-19 and, on the other, of the profound transformation that has taken place in the politico-economic structure of capitalism, which has been evolving towards its ultimate and decadent form: state capitalism. What is more, a dialectical relationship exists between this evolution of capitalism and the defeat of the revolution.
Despite their heroic fighting spirit, despite the permanent and insurmountable crisis of the capitalist system and the unprecedented aggravation of the conditions of the working class, the proletariat and its vanguard have not been able to hold out against the counter-offensive of capitalism. They were not confronted with classic capitalism and were surprised by its transformations, which have posed problems for which they were unprepared, either theoretically or politically. The proletariat and its vanguard, which had for a long time generally identified capitalism with private property of the means of production and socialism with statification, were baffled and disorientated by modern capitalism’s tendencies towards the statified concentration of the economy and planning. The great majority of workers were left with the idea that this evolution presented a new transformation of society from capitalism towards socialism. They associated themselves with this idea, abandoned their historic mission and became the most staunch partisans of the conservation of capitalist society.
It is these historic reasons that give the proletariat its present physiognomy. As long as these conditions prevail, as long as state capitalist ideology dominates the heads of workers, there can be no question of the reconstruction of the class party. Only through the course of the bloody cataclysms which mark out the phase of state capitalism will the proletariat grasp the abyss which separates socialist liberation from the present monstrous state capitalist regime, only thus will it develop a growing capacity to detach itself from this ideology which currently imprisons and annihilates it. Only then will the way again be opened for "the organisation of the proletariat into a class and thus into a political party". This stage will be reached all the more quickly if its revolutionary nuclei have made the theoretical effort needed to respond to the new problems posed by state capitalism and to help the proletariat recover its class solution and the means for its realisation.
22. In the present period, revolutionary militants can only survive by forming small groups undertaking a patient work of propaganda, of necessity limited in scope, at the same time as making strenuous efforts of research and theoretical clarification.
These groups will only be able to fulfil their tasks through looking for contact with other groups on the national and international levels on the basis of criteria demarcated by class frontiers. Only such contacts and their multiplication, with the aim of confronting positions and the clarification of problems, can allow these groups and militants to physically and politically resist the terrible pressure of capitalism in the present period and allow all these efforts to be a real contribution to the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.
23. The party will not be a simple reproduction of that of yesterday. It cannot be rebuilt on an old model drawn from the past. As well as its programme, its structure and the relations it has established between itself and the whole of the class are founded on a synthesis of past experience and the new, more advanced conditions of the present stage. The party follows the evolution of the class struggle and at each stage of the latter's history corresponds to a particular form of the political organism of the proletariat.
At the dawn of modern capitalism, in the first half of the 19th century, a working class still in its phase of constitution undertook local and sporadic struggles and could only give birth to doctrinal schools, sects and leagues. The Communist League was the most advanced expression of this period, while at the same time its Manifesto with its call "proletarians of all countries – unite" heralded the period to come.
The First International corresponded to the proletariat’s effective entry onto the stage of social and political struggle in the principal countries of Europe. It thus grouped together all the organised forces of the working class, its diverse ideological tendencies. The First International brought together both all the currents and all the contingent aspects of the workers' struggles: economic, educational, political and theoretical. It was the highest point of the working class’ unitary organisation in all its diversity.
The Second International marked a stage of differentiation between the economic struggle of wage labour and the social, political struggle. In this period of the full flourishing of capitalist society, the Second International was the organisation of the struggle for reforms and of political conquests, for the political affirmation of the proletariat, and at the same time it marked a higher stage in the ideological demarcation of the proletariat by clarifying and elaborating the theoretical foundations of its historic revolutionary mission.
The First World War revealed the historic crisis of capitalism and opened up the period of its decline. The socialist revolution evolved from the theoretical level to one of practical demonstration. In the heat of events the proletariat in some ways found itself forced to hastily construct its revolutionary organisation of combat. The immense programmatic contribution of the first years of the Third International nonetheless proved inadequate faced with the huge problems posed by this ultimate phase of capitalism and by the tasks of revolutionary transformation. At the same time, living experience quickly demonstrated the general ideological immaturity of the class as a whole. Faced with these two dangers and under the pressure of events, piled on in rapid succession, the Third International was left to respond through organisational measures: iron discipline of militants, etc.
The organisational aspect had to compensate for the inadequacy of the programme, and the party for the immaturity of the class As a result, the party ended up substituting itself for the action of the class itself, with a resulting alteration of the idea of the party and its relations with the class.
24. On the basis of this experience, the future party will be founded on the re-establishment of this truth: although the revolution contains a problem of organisation, it is not however a problem of organisation. Above all, the revolution is an ideological problem of the maturation of consciousness among the broad masses of the proletariat.
No organisation, no party can substitute for the class itself and it remains true more than ever that "the emancipation of the workers will be the task of the workers themselves". The party, which is the crystallisation of class consciousness, is neither different from nor synonymous with the class. The party necessarily remains a small minority; it has no ambition to be a great numerical force. At no moment can it separate from nor replace the living action of the class. Its function remains that of ideological inspiration within the movement and action of the class.
25. During the insurrectionary period of the revolution, the role of the party is not to demand power for itself, nor to call on the masses to “have confidence” in it. It intervenes and develops its activity in favour of the self-mobilisation of the class, within which it aims for the triumph of its principles and the means for revolutionary action.
The mobilisation of the class around the party to which it “entrusts” or rather abandons leadership is a conception reflecting a state of immaturity in the class. Experience has shown that in such conditions the revolution will find it impossible to triumph and will degenerate quickly, resulting in a divorce between the class and the party. The latter finds itself forced to resort to more and more coercive methods in order to impose itself on the class, and this ends up as a serious obstacle to the forward march of the revolution.
The party is not an organisation of direction and execution; these functions belong to the unitary organisation of the class. If militants of the party take part in these functions they do so as members of the greater community of the proletariat.
26. In the post-revolutionary period, the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the party is not the Single Party that is the classic hallmark of totalitarian regimes. The latter are characterised by their identification and assimilation with the state power of which they hold the monopoly. On the contrary, the class party of the proletariat characterises itself by being distinguished from the state, which is its historic antithesis. The Totalitarian Single Party tends to bloat and incorporate millions of individuals, making this a physical element of its domination and oppression. The party of the proletariat, on the contrary, by its nature, remains a strict ideological selection whose militants have no advantages to gain or defend. Their privilege is only to be the clearest combatants and the most devoted to the revolutionary cause. Thus the party doesn't aim to incorporate large numbers, because as its ideology becomes that of greater masses, the necessity for its existence tends to disappear and the hour of its dissolution will begin to sound.
27. The problem of the organisational rules which constitute the internal regime of the party is just as decisive as that of its programmatic content. Past experience, and most particularly that of the parties of the Third International, has shown that the conception of the party makes up a unitary whole. Organisational rules are an aspect and an expression of this conception. The question of organisation is not separate from the idea that one has of the party’s role and function and of its relationship with the class. None of these questions exist in themselves, rather they make up elements that are constitutive and expressive of the whole.
The parties of the Third International had the rules or the internal regimes they had because they were set up in a period of evident immaturity of the class which led to the substitution of party for class, organisation for consciousness, discipline for conviction.
The organisational rules of the future party will thus have to be based on a very different conception of the role of the party in a much more advanced stage of the struggle, resting on a much greater ideological maturity of the class.
28. The questions of democratic or organic centralism which occupied a major place in the Third International have lost their sharpness for the future party. When the action of the class relies on the action of the party, the question of the maximum practical efficacy came to dominate the party which, moreover, could only provide partial solutions.
The effectiveness of the party’s action does not consist in its practical action of leadership and execution, but in its ideological action. Thus the strength of the party lies not in the submission of its militants to discipline, but in their knowledge, their greater ideological development and their solid conviction.
The rules of the organisation do not come from abstract notions raised to the level of immanent or immutable principles, democratic or centralist. Such principles are empty of meaning. If the settlement of decisions taken by the (democratic) majority has to be maintained in the absence of a more appropriate method, that doesn't in any way mean that by definition the majority has the monopoly on truth and correct positions. Correct positions flow from the greatest knowledge of the object, from the closest grip on reality.
Thus the organisation’s internal rules must correspond to its objectives and so to the role of the party. Whatever the importance of the efficiency of its practical immediate action, which can provide it with the basis for exercising a wider discipline, it still remains less important than the maximum flourishing of the thinking of its militants, and as a consequence is subordinate to it.
As long as the party remains the crucible where class ideology is elaborated and deepened, its guiding principle must not only be the greatest freedom of ideas and disagreement in the framework of its programmatic principles: an even more fundamental concern must be to ceaselessly maintain and facilitate the combustion of thought, by providing the means for discussion and the confrontation of ideas and of tendencies inside the organisation.
29. Looking at the conception of the party from this angle, nothing is more foreign to it than the monstrous idea of a homogeneous, monolithic and monopolist party.
The existence of tendencies and fractions within the party is not just something to be tolerated, a right to be accorded and thus subject to discussion.
On the contrary, the existence of currents in the party – in the framework of acquired and verified principles – is one of the manifestations of a healthy conception of the idea of the party.
Marco. June 1948
1Today we share all the key ideas presented in this text and in most cases can support them to the letter. This is especially true for its insistence on the fundamental and irreplaceable role of the political party of the proletariat for the victory of the revolution. However, the following expression in the text does not provide the best way of understanding the dynamic of the development of the class struggle and the relations between party and class: . “Left to their own internal development, the workers’ struggles against the conditions of capitalist exploitation can lead at most to the explosion of revolts”. In fact, historical experience has shown the revolutionary capacities of the class, in particular the fact that the combination of the economic with the political dimensions of the struggle can mutually dynamise each other. To be more precise about the role of revolutionaries, it is not to bring consciousness to the workers but to accelerate, to extend and deepen, the development of consciousness within the class. For more elements relating to our position on this subject, we refer readers to the following articles: ‘The mass strike opens the door to the proletarian revolution’, International Review 90 (part of the series on communism), and ‘Questions of organisation: have we become ‘Leninists’?’ in IR 96 and 97.
2 The same theoretical reflection underlies another article, ‘The tasks of the hour’, published in Internationalsme in 1946 and re-published in IR 32.
3 Republished, with a new introduction, under the title “In the aftermath of World War II...” (see recommended links)
4This is what happened to all the currents of utopian socialism which, having become schools, lost their revolutionary aspect and were transformed into actively conservative forces. Consider the examples of Proudhonism, Fourierism, the co-operatives, reformism and state socialism.
At the beginning of May the ICC convoked an Extraordinary International Conference. For some time a crisis had been developing within the ICC. It was judged necessary to call this Conference in addition to the regular International Congresses of the ICC, in view of the urgency of fully understanding the crisis, and developing the means to overcome it. Extraordinary Conferences have been convened before by the organisation in 1982 and 2002 according to the statutes of the organisation which allow for them when the fundamental principles of the ICC are called into question in a dangerous manner1.
All the international sections of the ICC sent delegations to this third extraordinary Conference and participated very actively in the debates. The sections which were not able to come physically (because of the Schengen fortress around Europe) sent statements to the conference on the different reports and resolutions submitted for discussion.
Contacts and sympathisers of our organisation maybe alarmed by this news, just as the enemies of revolutionary organisation will receive a frisson of encouragement. Some of the latter have already assumed that this crisis is a harbinger of our demise. But this was also predicted in previous crises of our organisation. In the wake of the 1982 crisis - 32 years ago - we replied, as we do now, with the words of Mark Twain: news of our death is greatly exaggerated!
Crises are not necessarily a guarantee of impending collapse and failure. On the contrary, the existence of crises can be an expression of a healthy resistance to an underlying tendency towards failure that had hitherto been developing peacefully. And therefore crises can be the sign of reacting to danger and struggling against signs of collapse. A crisis is also an opportunity: to understand the root causes of serious difficulties that will enable the organisation to ultimately strengthen itself and temper its militants for future battles.
In the Second International (1889-1914) the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party was well known for undergoing a series of crises and splits, and for this reason was held in contempt by the leaders of the larger parties of the International like the German Social Democracy (SPD) who presented an appearance of going from success to success, steadily increasing their membership and electoral votes. However the crises of the Russian Party, and the struggle to overcome and learn from them by the Bolshevik wing, steeled the revolutionary minority in preparation for standing against the imperialist war in 1914 and for leading the October Revolution of 1917. By contrast the facade of unity of the SPD (challenged only by ‘trouble-makers’ like Rosa Luxemburg) completely and irrevocably collapsed in 1914 with the complete betrayal of its internationalist principles in face of the First World War.
In 1982 the ICC recognised its own crisis - brought about by a growth of leftist and activist confusions that enabled Chenier2 to create havoc in its British section - and drew the lessons of its setback to re-establish at a deeper level the principles of its function and functioning3. The Bordigist Internationalist Communist Party (Communist Programme) which was at that time the largest group of the communist left, was invaded even more seriously by similar tendencies, but this party seemed to carry on as normal - only to collapse like a house of cards with the loss of the majority of its members4.
In addition to the recognition of its own crises ICC thus follows another principle learned from the Bolshevik experience: to make known the circumstances and details of its internal crisis in order to contribute to a more widespread clarification. We are convinced that the internal crises of the revolutionary organisation can bring into sharper relief general truths about the struggle for communism.
In the preface to One step forward, two steps back, in 1904, Lenin wrote:
"They [our adversaries] exult and grimace at the sight of our discussions; obviously, they will try, to serve their own purposes, to brandish my pamphlet devoted to the defects and weaknesses in our Party. The Russian social-democrats are sufficiently tempered in battle not to be troubled by such pinpricks, and to continue in spite of everything with their task of self-criticism, mercilessly unveiling their own weaknesses, which will be overcome necessarily and without fail by the growth of the workers' movement. Let our adversaries try to give us an image of the situation in their own 'parties' which comes close to that presented by the minutes of our 2nd Congress!".
We believe, like Lenin, that whatever superficial pleasure our enemies gain from learning about our problems, genuine revolutionaries will learn from our mistakes and emerge the stronger for it.
That is why we are publishing here, albeit briefly, an account of the evolution of this crisis in the ICC and the role that the Extraordinary Conference has played in responding to it.
The epicentre of the present crisis of the ICC was the existence in the section in France of a campaign of denigration, hidden from the organisation as a whole, of a comrade, who was demonised to such an extent that her very presence in the organisation was supposed to constitute a barrier to its development. Naturally the existence of such scapegoating - blaming a particular comrade for the problems of the whole organisation - is anathema in a communist minority which rejects the bullying which is endemic to capitalist society and flows from its morality of ‘everyman for himself’ and ‘devil take the hindmost’. The problems of the organisation are the responsibility of the whole organisation according to its ethic of ‘all for one, and one for all’. The covert campaign of ostracism of one comrade put in question the very concept of communist solidarity that the ICC is founded on.
We could not be content to simply put a stop to this campaign once it had come into the open. We had to go to the roots and explain why and how such a blatant betrayal of a basic communist principle could develop once again in our ranks. The task of the Extraordinary Conference was to reach a common agreement on this explanation and the perspective for eradicating it in the future.
The organisation had already agreed to the maligned comrade’s request for a Jury of Honour. One of the tasks of the Extraordinary Conference was to hear and pronounce on the final report of the Jury. It was not enough for everyone to agree that the comrade had been subjected to slanders and denigrations - it had to be proven wrong in facts. The allegations and denigrations had to be brought into the open in order to remove any ambiguity and prevent any recurrence of slanders in the future. After a year of work, the Jury of Honour (made up of comrades from four ICC sections) systematically refuted, as devoid of any foundation, all the accusations (and particularly certain shameful slanders developed by one militant).5 The Jury was able to show that this campaign of ostracism had, in reality, been based on the infiltration into the organization of obscurantist prejudices spread by the circle spirit, and a certain ‘gossip culture’, inherited from the past and from which certain militants had not really broken free.
In devoting its resources to this Jury the organisation was following another lesson of the history of the revolutionary movement: that any militant who is the object of suspicions, of unfounded accusations or slanders has the duty to call for a Jury of Honour. To reject such an approach means implicitly recognizing the validity of the accusations.
The Jury of Honour is also a means of “preserving the moral health of a revolutionary organization”, as Victor Serge insisted in his book What every revolutionary should know about state repression, since distrust among its members is a poison which can rapidly destroy a proletarian organization.
This is a fact well known by the police who historically have tried to use this most favoured method to destroy revolutionary organisations from within. We saw this in the 1930s with the plots of the Stalinist GPU against the Left Opposition in France and elsewhere. Indeed singling out particular individuals for denigration and slander has been a principle weapon of the bourgeoisie as a whole in fomenting distrust of the revolutionary movement.
That’s why revolutionary Marxists have traditionally devoted every effort to unmasking such attacks on communist organisations.
At the time of the Moscow Trials in the 1930s, the exiled Leon Trotsky demanded a Jury of Honour (known as the Dewey Commission) to clear his name of the repulsive slanders made against him by the prosecutor Vishinsky at the Moscow Trials6. Marx broke off his writing of Capital for a year in 1860 in order to prepare an entire book systematically refuting the calumnies against him by ‘Herr Vogt’.
Concurrently with the work of the Jury of Honour the organisation looked to the underlying roots of the crisis. After the crisis in the ICC in 2000-2 the ICC had already embarked on a long term theoretical effort to understand how a secret ‘fraction’ could emerge within the organisation that behaved like thugs and informers: secretly circulating rumours that one of our militants was a state agent, stealing money and material from the organization (notably the list of addresses of militants and subscribers), blackmail, death threats towards one of our militants, publication on the outside of internal information that deliberately did the work of the police etc. This ignoble ‘fraction’ with its gangster behavior (recalling that of the Chenier tendency during the 1981 crisis) became known as the ‘Internal Fraction of the ICC’ (IFICC)7
In the wake of this experience the ICC began to examine from a historical and theoretical angle the problem of morality. In International Review 111 and 112 we published the Orientation Text on ‘Confidence and solidarity in the proletarian struggle’8 and in IR 127 and 128 another text ‘Marxism and Ethics’9 was published. Linked to these theoretical explorations there was also historical research into the phenomenon of ‘pogromism’ - that complete antithesis of communist values that was displayed by the FICCI. It was on the basis of these earlier texts and theoretical work on aspects of communist morality that the organisation elaborated an understanding of its current crisis. Superficiality, slidings towards workerism and opportunism, a neglect of reflection and of theoretical discussions in favour of activist, left-type intervention in immediate struggles, impatience and the tendency to lose sight of our activity in the long term, facilitated this crisis within the ICC. This crisis was thus identified as an “intellectual and moral crisis” and was accompanied by a loss of sight, and transgressions of, the ICC’s statutes10
At the Extraordinary Conference we returned in further depth to a Marxist understanding of morality in the interests of preparing the theoretical core of our activity in the coming period. We will continue to discuss and explore this question as the main weapon of our regeneration from the current crisis. Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary organisation.
Contained within the communist project, and inseparable from it, is an ethical dimension. And it is this dimension which is particularly menaced within a decomposing capitalist society that thrives on exploitation and violence, “oozing blood and filth from every pore” as Marx wrote in Capital. This threat is already particularly developed in capitalism’s decadent phase when the bourgeoisie progressively abandons even the moral tenets that it held in its expanding liberal period. The final episode of capitalist decadence - the period of social decomposition that begins approximately with the landmark of the collapse of the Eastern Bloc in 1989 - accentuates this process still further. Today society is more and more openly, even proudly, barbaric. In every aspect of life we see it: the proliferation of wars whose main objective seems to be to humiliate and degrade its victims before slaughtering them; the widespread growth of gangsterism - and its celebration in film and music; the launching of pogroms to find a scapegoat for capitalism’s crimes and for social suffering; the rise of xenophobia towards immigrants and bullying at the workplace (“mobbing”); the development of violence towards women, sexual harassment and misogyny, including in schools and among the youth of city housing estates. Cynicism, lying and hypocrisy are no longer seen as reprehensible but are taught in “management” courses. The most elemental values of social existence - let alone those of communist society - have been desecrated as capitalism putrefies.
The members of revolutionary organisations cannot escape this environment of barbaric thought and behaviour. They are not immune to this deleterious atmosphere of social decomposition, particularly as the working class today remains relatively passive and disorientated and thus unable to offer an alternative en masse to the accelerating demise of capitalist society. Other classes in society close to the proletariat however provide an active vector of rotten values. The traditional impotence and frustration of the petit bourgeoisie - the intermediate strata between bourgeoisie and proletariat - becomes particularly exaggerated and finds an outlet in pogromism, in onscurantism and witch-hunts which provide a sense of cowardly empowerment to those hounding ‘trouble-makers’.
It was particularly necessary to return to the problem of morality at the 2014 Extraordinary Conference because the explosive nature of the crisis of 2000-2002, the odious and clearly repulsive actions of the IFICC, the behavior of certain of its members as nihilist adventurers, had tended to obscure the deeper underlying incomprehensions that had provided the soil for the pogromist mentality at the origin of the formation of this so-called “fraction”11.
Because of the dramatic nature of the IFICC scandal a decade ago, there had been a strong trend in the organisation in the intervening period to want to ‘return to normal’ - to try find an illusory breathing space. There was a mood to avert attention away from a deep theoretical and historical treatment of organisational questions to more ‘practical’ issues of intervention and to a smooth, but superficial, ‘building’ of the organisation. Despite devoting a considerable effort to the work of theoretically overcoming its previous crisis, this was more and more seen as a side issue rather than a life or death question for the future of the revolutionary organisation.
The slow and difficult revival of class struggle in 2003 and the greater receptivity within the political milieu to discussion with the communist left tended to reinforce this weakness. Parts of the organisation began to ‘forget’ the principles and acquisitions of the ICC, and develop a disdain for theory. The statutes of the organisation which encapsulate internationalist centralised principles tended to become ignored in favour of the habits of local and circle philistinism, of good old common sense and the “religion of daily life”, as Marx put it in volume one of Capital. Opportunism began to grow in an insidious manner.
However there was a resistance to this tendency to theoretical disinterest, political amnesia and sclerosis. One comrade in particular was outspoken in criticising this opportunist trend and as a consequence became increasingly seen as an obstacle to a ‘normal’ machine-like functioning of the organization. Instead of providing a coherent political answer to the comrade’s criticism, opportunism expressed itself by an underhand personal vilification. Other militants, notably in the ICC sections in France and Germany, who shared the comrade’s point of view against the opportunist deviations also became the “collateral damage” of this campaign of defamation.
Thus the Extraordinary Conference showed that today, as in the history of the workers movement, campaigns of denigration and opportunism go together. Indeed the former appears in the workers’ movement as the extreme expression of the latter. Rosa Luxemburg, who, as spokeswoman of the Marxist left was unsparing in her denunciations of opportunism, was systematically persecuted and denigrated by the leaders of German Social Democracy. The degeneration of the Bolshevik Party and Third International was accompanied by the unending persecution of the Bolshevik old guard, and in particular of Leon Trotsky.
The organisation had thus to also reprise the classical concepts of organisational opportunism from the history of the Marxist left that includes the lessons of the ICC’s own experience.
The need to reject both opportunism, and its conciliatory expression as centrism, was to be the motto of the Extraordinary Conference: the crisis of the ICC demanded a protracted struggle against the identified roots of the problems, which took the form of certain tendency to treat the ICC as a cocoon, a to turn the organization into a “club” of opinions and to try to find slot inside decomposing bourgeois society. In fact the very nature of revolutionary militancy means a permanent fight against the weight of the dominant ideology and of all the ideologies alien to the proletariat which can insidiously infiltrate revolutionary organisations. It is this combat which has to be understood as the ‘norm’ of the life of communist organisation and each of its members.
The struggle against superficial agreement, the courage to express and develop differences and the individual effort to speak one’s mind in front of the whole organisation, the strength to take political criticism - these were the qualities that the Extraordinary Conference insisted on. According to the Activities Resolution which was agreed at the Conference:
“5d) The revolutionary militant must be a fighter, for the class positions of the proletariat and for his own ideas.
This is not an optional condition of militancy, it is militancy. Without it there can be no struggle for the truth which can only arise out of the clash of ideas and of each militant standing up for what he believes in. The organisation needs to know the positions of all comrades, passive agreement is useless and counter-productive,… Taking individual responsibility, being honest is a fundamental aspect of proletarian morality.”
On the eve of the Extraordinary Conference the publication on the internet of an ‘Appeal to the proletarian camp and the militants of the ICC’, announcing the “final crisis” of the ICC, strongly underlined the importance of this necessity to fight for the defence of the communist organization and its principles, in particular against all those who try to destroy it. This particularly nauseating ‘Appeal’ emanates from the so-called ‘International Group of the Communist Left’, in reality a disguise for the infamous former IFICC thanks to its marriage with elements from Klasbatalo in Montreal. It’s a text dripping with hatred and calls for a pogrom against certain of our comrades. This text announces grandly that the ‘IGCL’ is in possession of internal documents of the ICC. Its intention is clear: to try to sabotage our Extraordinary Conference, to sow trouble and discord within the ICC by spreading suspicion in its ranks on the very eve of the Extraordinary Conference – sending out the message that ‘there is a traitor inside the ICC, an accomplice of the IGCL who is sending us the ICC’s internal bulletins’12.
The Extraordinary Conference immediately took position on the IGCL’s ‘Appeal’. To all our militants it was clear that the IFICC was once again, and in an even more pernicious manner, doing the work of the police in the manner so eloquently described in Victor Serge’s book What every revolutionary should know about state repression (written on the basis of the archives of the Czarist police discovered after the October revolution13).
But instead of turning the comrades of the ICC against each other, the unanimous disgust for the methods the ‘IGCL’, worthy of the political police of Stalin and of the Stasi, served to make plain the wider stakes of our internal crisis that the ICC was engaged in, and tended to reinforce the unity of the militants behind the slogan of the workers’ movement: “All for one and one for all!” (recalled in the book The Nature of Human Brain Work by Joseph Dietzgen, who Marx called “the philosopher of the proletariat”). This police-type attack by the IGCL made it clearer to all the militants that the internal weaknesses of the organisation, a lack of vigilance towards the permanent pressure of the dominant ideology within revolutionary organisations, had made it vulnerable to the machinations of the class enemy whose destructive intent is unquestionable.
The Extraordinary Conference saluted the enormous and extremely serious work of the Jury of Honour. It also saluted the courage of the comrade who and called for it and who had been ostracized for her political disagreements14. Only cowards and those who know they are completely guilty would refuse to clarify things in front of such a commission, which is an inheritance of the workers’ movement. The cloud hanging over the organisation had been lifted. And it was timely: the need of every comrade to fight together was more imperative than ever.
The Extraordinary Conference could not complete the struggle of the ICC against this “intellectual and moral crisis” - this struggle is necessarily ongoing - but it did provide an unambiguous orientation: the opening of a theoretical debate on the ‘Theses on Morality’ proposed by the central organ of the ICC. Obviously we will eventually publish the debates and divergences around this text when the discussion has reached a sufficient level of maturity.
Some of our readers may feel that the polarisation of the ICC around its internal crisis and on fighting against the police-type attacks aimed at us is the expression of a kind of narcissistic lunacy or of a collective paranoid delirium. The concern for the intransigent defence of our organisational, programmatic and ethical principles is, from this point of view, a diversion from the practical, common-sense task of developing our influence in the immediate struggles of the working class. This point of view in fact a repetition, in essence although in a different context, of the arguments about the opportunists comparing the smooth functioning of German social democracy with that the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which was shaken by crises throughout the period leading up to the First World war. The approach which seeks to avoid differences, to reject the confrontation of political arguments in order to preserve ‘unity’ at any price will sooner or later lead to the disappearance of organised revolutionary minorities.
The defence of fundamental communist principles, however distant this may seem from the current needs and consciousness of the working class, is nonetheless the primordial task of revolutionary minorities. Our determination to wage a permanent combat for the defence of communist morality – which is at the heart of the principle of solidarity – is key to preserving our organisation faced with the miasma of capitalism’s social decomposition which inevitably seeps through into all revolutionary organisations. Only by politically arming ourselves, by strengthening our work of theoretical elaboration, will we be able to face up to this deadly danger. Furthermore, without the implacable defence of the ethics of the class which is the bearer of communism, the possibility that the developing class struggle will lead to the revolution and the construction of a real world community will be continually smothered.
One thing became clear at the 2014 Extraordinary Conference: there would be no ‘return to normal’ whether in the internal or external activities of the ICC.
Contrary to what happened in the crisis of 2001, we can already rejoice in the fact that comrades who had got drawn into a logical of irrational stigmatisation and scapegoating were able to see the gravity of what they had been involved in. These militants have freely decided to remain loyal to the ICC and its principles and are now engaged in our combat for the for consolidating the organisation. As with the rest of the of the ICC, they are now taking part in the work of theoretical reflection and deepening which had been largely underestimated in the past. By appropriating Spinoza’s formula “neither laugh nor cry but understand”, the ICC is trying to return to a key idea of marxism: that the proletariat’s struggle for communism not only has an “economic” dimension (as the vulgar materialists imagine) but also and fundamentally an “intellectual and moral” dimension (as Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg in particular argued).
We must therefore regretfully inform our detractors that within the ICC there is no immediate perspective of a new parasitic split as was the case with previous crises. There is no perspective for the formation of a new “fraction” susceptible to joining up with the IGCL’s ‘Appeal’ for a pogrom against our own comrades - an appeal frenetically relayed by various ‘social networks’ and the so-called ‘Pierre Hempel’ who takes himself for a representative of the “universal proletariat”. On the contrary: the police methods of the IGCL (sponsored by a ‘critical’ tendency inside a bourgeois reformist party, the NPA15) have only succeeded in strengthening the indignation of the militants of the ICC and their determination to fight for the strengthening of the organisation. The news of our death is thus both exaggerated and premature….
International Communist Current
1 As at the time of the Extraordinary Conference of 2002 (see the article in International Review no.110, ‘Extraordinary Conference of the ICC: the struggle for the defence of organisational principles’, the one in 2014 partially replaced the regular congress of our section in France. So certain sessions were devoted to the extraordinary international conference and others to the congress of the section in France which our paper Révolution Internationale will write about at a later date
2 Chenier was a member of the section in France excluded in the summer of 1981 for having waged a secret campaign of denigration against the central organs of the organisation and certain of its most experienced militants with the aim of setting one against the other, activities which curiously enough recalled the work of GPU agents within the Trotskyist movement during the 1930s. a few months after his expulsion, Chenier took up a responsible post within the apparatus of the Socialist Party, then in government
3 See International Review No29 ’Report on the functioning of the revolutionary organisation’ en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR029_function.htm [62], and IR33 ‘Report on the structure and functioning of the revolutionary organisation, en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR033_functioning.htm [63].
4 See IR 32 ‘Convulsions in the revolutionary milieu’, en.internationalism.org/node/3123 [64]
5 Parallel to this campaign, in informal discussions in the section in France, certain militants of the ‘old’ generation, spread some scandalous gossip about our comrade Marc Chirik, a founding member of the ICC and without whom our organisation would not have existed. This gossip was identified as an expression of the weight of the circle sprit and the influence of the decomposing petty bourgeoisie which profoundly marked the generation that came out of the student movement of May 68, with all its anarcho-modernist and leftist ideologies.
6 The ICC’ s Jury of honour based itself on the scientific method of investigation and verification of the facts by the Dewy Commission. All of its work (documents, verbal proceedings, recordings of interviews and testimonies etc) is carefully conserved in the ICC’s archives.
7 See in particular our articles ‘15th Congress of the ICC: Today the Stakes Are High—Strengthen the Organization to Confront Them’ ; https://en.internationalism.org/ir/114_congress.html [65]; ‘The police-like methods of the ‘IFICC’, https://en.internationalism.org/262_infraction.htm [66]; "Calomnie et mouchardage, les deux mamelles de la politique de la FICCI envers le CCI" (https://fr.internationalism.org/icconline/2006_ficci [67])
8 en.internationalism.org/ir/111_OT_ConfSol_pt1 [68]; https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200301/1893/orientat... [69]
9 en.internationalism.org/ir/127/marxism-and-ethics [70]; https://en.internationalism.org/ir/128/marxism-and-ethics-pt2 [71]
10 The central organ of the ICC, as well as the Jury of Honour, clearly showed that it was not the ostracised comrade who had not respected the statutes of the ICC but on the contrary the militants who had engaged in this campaign of denigration
11 The resistance in our ranks to developing a debate on the question of morality had its origin in a congenital weakness of the ICC (and which actually affects all the groups of the communist left): the majority of the first generation of militants rejected this question which could not be integrated into our statutes, as our comrade Marc Chirik had hoped. Morality was seen by these young militants at the time as a prison, a “product of bourgeois ideology”, to the point where some of them, coming out of the libertarian milieu, demanded to live “without taboos”! Which reveals a gross ignorance of the history of the human species and the development of its civilisation.
12 See ‘Communique to our readers: the ICC under attack by a new agency of the bourgeois state [72]’.
13 As if to confirm the class nature of the attack, a certain Pierre Hempel published on his blog further internal documents of the ICC that the ex-IFICC had given to him. He volunteered the comment that “if the police had passed such a document to me, I would have thanked them in the name of the proletariat”!This Holy Alliance of the enemies of the ICC, to a large extent made up of a “Friendly Society of Old ICC Combatants”, know which camp they belong to!
14 This had also been the case at the beginning of the crisis of 2001: when this same comrade had expressed a political disagreement with a text written by the International Secretariat of the ICC (on the question of centralisation), the majority of the IS put up the shutters and instead of opening a debate to reply to the comrade’s political arguments, stifled this debate and embarked on a campaign of slander against this comrade (holding secret meetings and spreading rumours in the sections in France and Mexico that this comrade, because of her political disagreements with members of the central organ of the ICC, was a “shit-stirrer” and even a “cop”, to cite the two members of the ex-IFICC, Juan and Jonas, who were at the origin of the formation of the IGCL.
15 We should point out that to this day the IGCL has given no explanation for its relations and convergence with this tendency which wrks inside the New Anti-Capitalist party, NPA, of Olivier Besancenot. Silence means assent!
The first part of this article looked at the process which led to the integration of the official anarcho-syndicalist organisation, the CNT, into the bourgeois Republican state in Spain in 1936-37, and sought to link these betrayals to the underlying programmatic and theoretical weaknesses of the anarchist world-view. Certainly these capitulations did not go unopposed by proletarian currents inside and outside the CNT. The Libertarian Youth, a left tendency in the POUM around Rebull,1 the Bolshevik Leninist (Trotskyist) group around Munis, the Italian anarchist Camillo Berneri who edited Guerra di Classe, and in particular the Friends of Durruti, animated by Jaime Balius and others.2 To a greater or lesser extent all these groups were made up of working class militants who fought in the heroic struggles of July ‘36 and May ‘37, and without ever reaching the clarity of the Italian communist left, which we highlighted in the first part, opposed the official CNT/POUM policy of participation in the bourgeois state and the strike breaking role of the CNT and the POUM during the May days.
The Friends were perhaps the most important of all these tendencies. They greatly outweighed the other groups numerically, and were able to carry out a significant intervention in the May days, distributing the famous leaflet which defined their programmatic positions:
“CNT-FAI ‘Friends of Durruti’ group. Workers! A revolutionary Junta. Shoot the culprits. Disarm the armed corps. Socialise the economy. Disband the political parties which have turned on the working class. We must not surrender the streets. The revolution before all else. We salute our comrades from the POUM who fraternised with us on the streets. Long live the social revolution! Down with the counter-revolution!”
This leaflet was a shorter version of the outline list of demands which the Friends had published in the form of a wall poster in April 1937:
“From the Group of the Friends of Durruti. To the working class:
Attention, workers: our group is opposed to the advancing counterrevolution. The decrees on public order, sponsored by Aiguadé, will not be implemented. We demand that Maroto and the other imprisoned comrades be released.
All power to the working class. All economic power to the trade unions. Against the Generalitat, the Revolutionary Junta.”
The other groups, including the Trotskyists, tended to look to the Friends of Durruti as a potential vanguard: Munis was even optimistic that they would evolve towards Trotskyism. But perhaps the most significant aspect of the Friends was that, despite emerging from inside the CNT, they recognised the inability of the CNT to develop a revolutionary theory and thus the revolutionary programme which they considered was demanded by the situation in Spain. Agustin Guillamon draws our attention to a passage in the pamphlet Towards a Fresh Revolution, published in January 1938, where the author, Balius, writes:
“The CNT was utterly devoid of revolutionary theory. We did not have a concrete programme. We had no idea of where we were going. We had lyricism aplenty: but when all is said and done, we did not know what to do with our masses of workers or how to give substance to the popular effusion which erupted inside our organisations. By not knowing what to do, we handed the revolution on a platter to the bourgeoisie and the Marxists who support the farce of yesteryear. What is worse, we allowed the bourgeoisie a breathing space: to return, to re-form and to behave as would a conqueror.”3
As pointed out in our article “The Friends of Durruti: lessons of an incomplete break with anarchism” in IR nº 102, the CNT did in fact have a theory of sorts at this stage – a theory justifying participation in the bourgeois state, above all in the name of anti-fascism. But the Friends were correct in the more general sense that the proletariat cannot make the revolution without a clear and conscious understanding of the direction in which it is heading, and it is the specific task of the revolutionary minority to develop and elaborate such an understanding, based on the experience of the class as a whole.
In this quest for programmatic clarity, the Friends were obliged to question some fundamental assumptions of anarchism: the necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat and for a revolutionary vanguard to fight within the working class for its implementation. The advance made by the Friends at this level is clearly recognised by Guillamon, particularly in his analysis of the articles Balius wrote from exile,
“After a reading of these two articles, it has to be acknowledged that the evolution of Balius’s political thinking, rooted in analysis of the wealth of experience garnered during the civil war, had led him to confront issues taboo in the anarchist ideology: 1) the need for the proletariat to take power. 2) the ineluctability of the destruction of the capitalist state apparatus to clear the way for a proletarian replacement. 3) the indispensable role of a revolutionary leadership.”4
Aside from Balius’s reflections, the notion of a revolutionary leadership was more implicit in the practical activity of the group than explicitly formulated, and was not really compatible with the Friends’ definition of itself as an “affinity group”, which at best implies a temporary formation limited to specific ends, rather than a permanent political organisation based on a definite set of programmatic and organisational principles. But the group’s recognition of the need for an organ of proletarian power is more explicit. It is contained in the idea of the “revolutionary junta”, which the Friends admitted was a kind of innovation for anarchism, “we are introducing a slight variation in anarchism into our programme. The establishment of a Revolutionary Junta.”5 Munis, in an interview with the French Trotskyist paper Lutte Ouvrière, equates the junta with the idea of the soviet and has no doubt that “This circle of revolutionary workers (the Friends of Durruti) represented a beginning of anarchism’s evolving in the direction of Marxism. They had been driven to replace the theory of libertarian communism with that of the ‘revolutionary junta’ (soviet) as the embodiment of proletarian power, democratically elected by the workers”.6
In his book Guillamon recognises this convergence between the “innovations” of the Friends and the classic positions of marxism, although he is at pains to refute any idea that the Friends were directly influenced by the marxist groups that they were in contact with, such as the Bolshevik-Leninists. Certainly the group itself, as we can see from the passage in the Balius pamphlet above, would have angrily repudiated the charge that they were heading in the direction of marxism, which they were barely able to distinguish from its counter-revolutionary caricatures. But if marxism is indeed the revolutionary theory of the proletariat, it is not surprising that revolutionary proletarians, reflecting on the lessons of the class struggle, should be drawn towards its fundamental conclusions. The question of the specific influence in such a process of this or that political group is not unimportant, but it is a secondary element.
Nevertheless, despite these advances, the Friends never succeeded in making a profound break with anarchism.
The Friends remained powerfully attached to anarcho-syndicalist traditions and ideas. To be eligible to join the group, you had to also be member of the CNT. As can be seen from the April wall poster and other documents, they still considered that workers’ power could be expressed not only through a “revolutionary junta” or through the workers committees’ created in the course of the struggle, but simultaneously through union control of the economy and through “free municipalities”7– formulae which reveal a continuity with the Zaragoza programme whose severe limitations we examined in the first part of this article. Thus the programme elaborated by the Friends had not succeeded in drawing out the real experience of the revolutionary movements of 1905 and 1917-23, where the practice of the working class had seen workers going the beyond the union form, and where the Spartacists, for example, had called for the dissolution of all existing organs of local government in favour of the workers’ councils. It is significant in this respect that in the columns of the group’s paper, El Amigo del Pueblo, which tried to draw the lessons of the events of 36-37, a major historical series was written on the experience of the French bourgeois revolution, not the proletarian revolutions in Russia or Germany.
The Friends certainly saw the “revolutionary junta” as the means for the proletariat to take power in 1937, but was Munis right that the “revolutionary junta” was equivalent to the soviet? There is an area of ambiguity here, no doubt precisely because of the Friends’ apparent incapacity to connect with the experience of the workers’ councils outside Spain. For example, it is not clear how they saw the junta as being formed. Did they see it as the direct emanation of general assemblies in the factories and the militias, or was it to be the product of the most determined workers on their own? In an article in nº 6 of El Amigo, they “advocate that the only participants in the revolutionary Junta should be the workers of city and countryside and the combatants who have shown themselves at every crucial juncture in the conflict to be the champions of social revolution.”8 Guillamon is in no doubt about the implication of this: “The evolution of the Friends of Durruti’s political thinking was by now unstoppable. After the necessity of a dictatorship of the proletariat had been acknowledged, the next issue to arise was: And who is to exercise that dictatorship of the proletariat? The answer was: the revolutionary Junta, promptly defined as the vanguard of revolutionaries. And its role? We cannot believe that it be anything other than the one which Marxists ascribe to the revolutionary party.”9 But from our point of view, one of the fundamental lessons of the revolutionary movements of 1917-23, and the Russian revolution in particular, was that the revolutionary party cannot exercise its role if it identifies itself with the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here Guillamon seems to theorise the Friends’ own ambiguities on this question; we shall return to this shortly.
In any case, it is difficult to avoid the impression that the junta was a kind of expedient, rather than the “finally discovered form of the dictatorship of the proletariat” as marxists like Lenin and Trotsky had viewed the soviets. In Towards a fresh revolution, for example, Balius argues that the CNT itself should have taken power “When an organisation’s whole existence has been spent preaching revolution, it has an obligation to act whenever a favourable set of circumstances arises. And in July the occasion did present itself. The CNT ought to have leapt into the driver’s seat in the country, delivering a severe coup de grace to all that is outmoded and archaic. In this way, we would have won the war and saved the revolution”10 Apart from severely underestimating the deep process of degeneration that had been gnawing away at the CNT well before 1936,11 this again reveals an inability to assimilate the lessons of the whole 1917-23 revolutionary wave, which had made it clear why the soviets, and not syndicalist unions, were the indispensable form of the proletarian dictatorship.
The Friends’ attachment to the CNT also had major implications at the organisational level. In their manifesto of 8th May, the role played by the CNT’s upper echelons in undermining the May 1937 uprising was characterised without hesitation as treason; those it denounced as traitors had already attacked the Friends as agents provocateurs, echoing the habitual slanders of the Stalinists, and threatened their immediate expulsion from the CNT. This fierce antagonism was without doubt a reflection of the class divide between the political camp of the proletariat and forces that had become an agency of the bourgeois state. But faced with the necessity to make a decisive break with the CNT, the Friends drew back and agreed to drop the charge of treason in exchange for the lifting of the call for expulsion, a move which undoubtedly undermined the capacity of the Friends to continue functioning as an independent group. The sentimental attachment to the CNT was simply too strong for a large part of the militants, even if many – and not only members of the Friends or other dissident groups - had torn up their membership cards on being ordered to dismantle the barricades and return to work in May ‘37. This attachment was summed up in the decision of Jaoquin Aubi and Rosa Muñoz to resign from the group under threat of expulsion from the CNT: “I continue to regard the comrades belonging to the ‘Friends of Durruti’ as comrades: but I say again what I have always said at plenums in Barcelona: ‘The CNT has been my womb and the CNT will be my tomb.”12
In the first part of this article, we showed that the CNT programme was stuck in a narrowly national framework, one which saw “libertarian communism” as being possible in the context of a single self-sufficient country. The Friends certainly had a strong internationalist attitude at an almost instinctive level – for example, in their appeal to the international working class to come to the aid of the insurgent workers in May ‘37 – but this attitude was not informed theoretically either by a serious analysis of the balance of class forces on a global and historical scale, or in a capacity to develop a programme on the basis of the international experience of the working class, as we have already noted in discussing the imprecision of their notion of the “revolutionary junta”. Guillamon is particularly scathing in his criticisms of this weakness as revealed in a chapter of Balius’s pamphlet:
“The next chapter in the pamphlet tackles the subject of Spain's independence. The entire chapter is replete with wrong-headed notions which are short-sighted or better suited to the petit bourgeoisie. A cheap and vacuous nationalism is championed with limp, simplistic references to international politics. So we shall pass over this chapter, saying only that the Friends of Durruti subscribed to bourgeois, simplistic and/or backward-looking ideas with regard to nationalism”13
The influences of nationalism were particularly crucial in the Friends’ incapacity to understand the real nature of the war in Spain. As we wrote in our article in IR nº 102:
“In fact the Friends of Durruti's considerations on the war were made on the basis of anarchism's the narrow and ahistorical nationalist thinking. This led them to a vision of the events in Spain as the continuation of the bourgeoisie's ludicrous revolutionary efforts against the Napoleonic invasion of 1808. Whilst the international workers' movement was debating the defeat of the world proletariat and the perspective of a Second World War, the Anarchists in Spain thought about Fernando VII and Napoleon:
‘What is happening today is a re-enactment of what happened in the reign of Ferdinand VII. Once again in Vienna there has been a conference of fascist dictators for the purpose of organising their invasion of Spain. And today the workers in arms have taken up the mantle of El Empecinado. Germany and Italy need raw materials. They need iron, copper, lead and mercury. But these Spanish mineral deposits are the preserves of France and England. Yet even though Spain faces subjection, England does not protest. On the contrary - in a vile manoeuvre, she tries to negotiate with Franco (...) It is up to the working class to ensure Spain's independence. Native capitalism will not do it, since international capital crosses all frontiers. This is Spain's current predicament. It is up to us workers to root out the foreign capitalists. Patriotism does not enter into it. It is a matter of class interests’ (from Towards a fresh revolution).
As we can see, it takes a clever piece of work to turn an imperialist war into a patriotic war, a ‘class’ war. This is an expression of Anarchism's political disarming of such sincere worker militants as the Friends of Durruti. These comrades who wanted to struggle against the war and for the revolution, were incapable of finding the point of departure for an effective struggle. This would have meant calling on the workers and peasants, enlisted in both gangs - the Republic and the Franquistas - to desert, to turn their guns on the officers who oppressed them and to return to the rear and struggle through strikes and demonstrations, on a class terrain, against the whole of capitalism.”
And this takes us to the most crucial question of all: the Friends’ position on the nature of the war in Spain. Here there is no doubt that the group’s name signified more than a sentimental reference to Durruti,14 whose bravery and sincerity was much admired by the Spanish proletariat. Durruti was a militant of the working class but he was completely unable to make a thorough critique of what had happened to the Spanish workers after the July ‘36 uprising – of how the ideology of anti-fascism and the transfer of the struggle from the social front to the military fronts was already a decisive step which dragged the workers into an imperialist conflict. Durruti, along with many sincere anarchists, was a “jusqu’au boutiste”15 when it came to the war, arguing that the war and the revolution, far from being in contradiction with each other, could reinforce each other as long as the struggle on the fronts was combined with the “social” transformations in the rear, which Durruti identified with the establishment of libertarian communism. But as Bilan insisted, in the context of a military war between capitalist blocs, the self-managed industrial and agricultural enterprises could only function as a means of further mobilising the workers for the war. This was a “war communism” that was feeding an imperialist war.
The Friends never challenged this idea that the war and the revolution had to be fought simultaneously. Like Durruti, they called for the total mobilisation of the population for the war, even when they analysed that the war was being lost.16
For Guillamon, summing up, the events in Spain were “the tomb of anarchism as a revolutionary theory.”17 We can only add that despite the heroism of the Friends and their laudable efforts to develop a revolutionary theory, the anarchist soil on which they attempted to grow this flower proved inhospitable.
But Guillamon himself was not free from ambiguities about the war in Spain and this is evident in his criticisms of the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left that published Bilan.
On the central question of the war, Guillamon’s position, as summarised in his book, seems clear enough:
This looks very much like a reprise of the positions defended by the communist left. But Guillamon actually rejects some of the most important positions of Bilan, as we can see from another document, “Theses on the Spanish civil war and the revolutionary situation created on July 1936” published in 2001 by the group Balances.19 Despite his acknowledgment that there were brilliant aspects of Bilan’s analysis of the events in Spain, he makes some fundamental criticisms both of this analysis and the political conclusions drawn from it:
1. Bilan failed to recognise that there was a “revolutionary situation” in July ‘36. “On the one hand, Bilan acknowledges the class character of the struggles of July and May, but on the other hand not only denies their revolutionary character, but even denies the existence of a revolutionary situation. This viewpoint can only be explained by the distance of an absolutely isolated Parisian group, which placed a higher priority on its analyses than on the study of the Spanish reality. There is not even one word in Bilan about the real nature of the committees, or on the struggle of the Barcelona proletariat for socialization and against collectivization, or on the debates and confrontations within the Militia Columns concerning the militarization of the Militias, or a serious critique of the positions of The Friends of Durruti Group, for the simple reason that they are practically totally unaware of the existence and the significance of all these matters. It was easy to justify this ignorance by denying the existence of a revolutionary situation. Bilan’s analysis fails because in its view the absence of a revolutionary (Bordigist) party necessarily implies the absence of a revolutionary situation.”
2. Bilan’s analysis of the May events is incoherent: “The incoherence of Bilan is made evident by its analysis of the May Days of 1937. It turns out that the ‘revolution’ of July 19th, which one week later ceased to be a revolution, because its class goals had been turned into war goals, now reappears like the Phoenix of history, like a ghost that had been hiding in some unknown location. And now it turns out that in May 1937 the workers were once again ‘revolutionary’, and defended the revolution from the barricades. Was it not the case, however, that, according to Bilan, a revolution had not taken place? Here, Bilan gets all tangled up. On July 19 (according to Bilan) there was a revolution, but one week later, there was no longer a revolution, because there was no (Bordiguist) party; in May 1937 there was another revolutionary week. But how do we characterize the situation between July 26th 1936 and May 3rd, 1937? We are not told anything about this. The revolution is considered to be an intermittent river [“Guadiana”: a river in Spain that runs on the surface, then underground, then reappears on the surface— libcom Translator’s note] that emerges onto the historical stage when Bilan wants to explain certain events that it neither understands, nor is capable of explaining”.
3. Bilan’s position on the party and its idea that it’s the party, not the class that makes the revolution, is based on a “Leninist, totalitarian and substitutionist concept of the party.”
4. Bilan’s practical conclusions about the war were “reactionary”:“According to Bilan the proletariat was immersed in an antifascist war, that is, it was enrolled in an imperialist war between a democratic bourgeoisie and a fascist bourgeoisie. In this situation, the only appropriate positions were desertion and boycott, or to wait for better times, when the (Bordigist) party would enter the stage of history from the wings where it had been biding its time” Thus: denying the existence of a revolutionary situation in ‘36 led Bilan to “reactionary political positions such as breaking up the military fronts, fraternization with the Francoist troops, cutting off weapons to the republican troops.”
To respond in depth to Guillamon’s criticisms of the Italian Fraction would take a separate article but we want to make a few remarks in reply:
It’s not true that Bilan were totally unaware of the real class movement in Spain. It is true that they didn’t appear to know about the Friends, but they were in touch with Camillo Berneri, so despite their stringent criticisms of anarchism they were quite capable of recognising that a proletarian resistance could still emerge within its ranks. More important, they were able, as Guillamaon accepts, to see the class character of the July and May events and it’s simply false to claim that they said not one word about the committees that emerged from the July uprising: in part one of this article we cited an extract from their text “Lessons of the events in Spain” in Bilan nº 36 which mentions these committees, sees them as proletarian organs but then also recognises the rapid process of recuperation via the “collectivisations”. Bilan do imply in that same article that power was within the workers’ grasp and that the next step was the destruction of the capitalist state. But they had a historic and international framework which enabled them to have a clearer view of the overall context which determined the tragic isolation of the Spanish proletariat - one of triumphant counter-revolution and a course towards world imperialist war, for which the Spanish conflict was a dress rehearsal. This is something which Guillamon hardly deals with, just as it was more or less absent from the analyses of the Spanish anarchists at the time;
the May events confirmed Bilan’s analysis rather than showing its confusions. The class struggle, like class consciousness itself, is indeed rather like a river that can go underground only to resurface: the most important example being the revolutionary events of 1917-18, which followed a terrible defeat of the class on the ideological level in 1914. The fact that the initial proletarian impetus of July 1936 was stymied and diverted did not mean that the fighting spirit and class consciousness of the Spanish proletariat had been utterly smashed, and they re-appeared in a last rearguard action against the unending attacks on the class, imposed above all by the republican bourgeoisie; but this reaction was crushed by the combined forces of the capitalist class from the Stalinists to the CNT, and this was a blow from which the Spanish proletariat did not recover;
it is an example of lazy thinking, surprising in a historian normally as rigorous as Guillamon, to dismiss Bilan’s view of the party as “Leninist and substitutionist”. Guillamon implies that Bilan had the view that the party is a deus ex machina, which waits in the wings till the time is ripe. This could be said about today’s Bordigists who claim to be The Party, but Guillamon totally ignores Bilan’s conception of the fraction, which is based on the recognition that the party cannot exist in a situation of counter-revolution and defeat precisely because the party is the product of the class and not the other way round. It’s true that the Italian left had not yet broken with the substitutionist idea of the party that takes power and exercises the proletarian dictatorship –but we have already shown that Guillamon himself is not entirely free of this conception, and Bilan were beginning to provide a framework that would make it possible to break with the whole notion.20 In Spain ‘36 they explained the absence of the party as a product of the world-wide defeat of the working class, and although they did not discount the possibility of revolutionary upsurges, they saw that the cards were stacked against the proletariat. And as Guillamon himself acknowledges, a revolution which does not give birth to a revolutionary party cannot succeed. Thus, Bilan’s position was not, as was so often falsely asserted, the idealist “there is no revolution in Spain because there is no party”, but the materialist “there is no party because there is no revolution”;
Guillamon’s own incoherence is shown most clearly in his rejection of Bilan’s “revolutionary defeatist” position on the war. Guillamon accepts that the war was very rapidly transformed into a non-revolutionary war, and that this was in no way altered by the existence of armed militias, collectivisations, etc. But this idea of a “non-revolutionary war” is ambiguous: Guillamon seems reluctant to accept that this was an imperialist war and that the class struggle could only revive by returning to the class terrain of the defence of the material interests of the proletariat, against the labour discipline and sacrifices imposed by the war. This would have certainly undermined the military fronts and sabotaged the republican army – precisely the reason for the savage repression of the May events. And yet when push comes to shove Guillamon argues that the classic proletarian methods of struggle against imperialist war – strikes, mutinies, desertions, fraternisations, strikes in the rear – were reactionary, even though this is a “non-revolutionary war”. This is at best a centrist position which aligns Guillamon with all those who fell for the siren calls of participation in the war, from the Trotskyists to the anarchists and sections of the communist left itself.
As for Bilan’s isolation, they recognised that this was a product not of geography but of the dark times they were going through, when all about them were betraying the principles of internationalism. As they wrote in an article entitled precisely “The isolation of our Fraction faced with the events in Spain” in Bilan nº 36, October-November 1936.
“Our isolation is not fortuitous. It is the consequence of a profound victory by world capitalism which has managed to infect with gangrene even those groups of the communist left whose spokesman up until now was Trotsky. We do not claim that at the present moment we are the only group whose positions have been confirmed by every turn of events, but what we do claim categorically is that, good or bad, our positions have been based on a permanent affirmation of the necessity for the autonomous class activity of the proletariat. And it is on this question that we have seen the bankruptcy of all Trotskyist and semi-Trotskyist groups”.
It was the strength of the Italian marxist tradition that it was able to give to give rise to a fraction as clear sighted as Bilan. It was a severe weakness of the Spanish workers’ movement, characterised by the historical predominance of anarchism over marxism, that no such fraction was able to emerge in Spain.
In the manifesto produced in response to the crushing of the workers’ revolt in May 1937 in Barcelona, the Italian and Belgian Fractions of the Communist Left paid homage to the memory of the Camillo Berneri,21 whose murder at the hands of the Stalinist police was part of the general repression doled out by the republican state to all those, workers and revolutionaries, who had played an active part in the May Days and who, either by words or by action, came out in opposition to the CNT-FAI policy of collaboration with the capitalist state.
This is what the Left Fractions wrote in Bilan nº 41, June 1937:
“The proletariat of the whole world salutes Berneri as one of its own, and his martyrdom for the ideal of anarchism is yet another protest against a political school which has met its downfall during these events in Spain. It was under the direction of a government in which the anarchists participated that the police have done to the body of Berneri what Mussolini did to the body of Matteotti!”
In another article in the same issue, “Antonio Gramsci –Camillo Berneri”, Bilan noted that these two militants, who had died with a few weeks of each other, had given their lives to the cause of the proletariat despite the serious weaknesses of their ideological standpoints.
“Berneri, a leader of the anarchists? No, because even after his murder, the CNT and the FAI are mobilising the workers around the danger that they will be kicked out of the government which is dripping with Berneri’s blood. The latter thought that he could count on the school of anarchism to contribute to the task of the social redemption of the oppressed, and it was a ministry made up of anarchists which launched the attack on the exploited of Barcelona!
“The lives of Gramsci and Berneri belong to the proletariat which will be inspired by their example to continue its struggle. And the communist victory will enable the masses to honour the two of them with all due dignity, because it will also enable them to better understand the errors to which they were victims and which certainly added, along with the action of the enemy class itself, the torment of seeing events tragically contradicting their convictions, their ideologies.”
The article ends by saying that more would be written on these two figures of the workers’ movement in the next issue of Bilan. There is indeed a specific article devoted to Gramsci in that issue (Bilan nº 42, July-August 1937), which though of considerable interest is outside the focus of this essay. Berneri himself was mentioned in the editorial to the issue, “The repression in Spain and in Russia”, which examines the tactics the police had used to assassinate Berneri and his comrade Barbieri.
“We know how Berneri was murdered. Two policemen presented themselves at his house. ‘We are friends’ they said. Why had they come? They had come to check on where two rifles were kept. They came back, to make a simple requisition, and they took the two weapons away. They came back a last time and it was for the final blow. Now they were sure that Berneri and his comrade were disarmed, that they had no possibility of defending themselves, they arrested them on the basis of a legal order drawn up by the authority of a government of which Berneri’s political friends , the representatives of the CNT and the FAI, are a part. The wives of Berneri and Barbieri were then informed that the bodies of their two comrades were in the morgue.
“We know, finally, that in the streets of Madrid and Barcelona, this is standard practice from now on. Armed squads, controlled by the centrists, are wandering the streets killing workers suspected of subversive ideas.
“And all this without the edifice of socialisations, militias, trade union control of production, being wiped out by a new reorganisation of the capitalist state.”
In fact there are to this day different accounts of the murder: Augustin Souchy’s contemporary account, “The tragic week in May”, originally published in Spain and the World and republished in The May Days Barcelona 1937 (Freedom Press, 1998) is very similar to Bilan’s; on the other hand the short biography on libcom written by Toni22 has it that he was gunned down in the street after going to the offices of Radio Barcelona to speak about the death of Gramsci; and there are other variations in descriptions of the details. But the key issue, as Bilan said, was that in the general repression that followed the defeat of the May revolt it was now standard practice to proceed to the physical elimination of troublesome elements like Berneri who had the courage to criticise the social democratic/Stalinist/anarchist government, and the counter-revolutionary foreign policy of the USSR. The Stalinists, who had a tight grip over the police apparatus, were in the vanguard of these assassinations. Despite the continuing use of the term, “centrists” to describe the Stalinists, Bilan clearly saw them for what they were: violent enemies of the working class, cops and assassins with whom no collaboration was possible. This was in marked contrast to the Trotskyists who continued to define the CPs as workers’ parties with whom a united front was still desirable, and the USSR as a regime that should still be defended against imperialist attack.
If some of the facts about Berneri’s murder are still rather hazy, we are even less clear about the relationship between the Italian Fraction and Berneri. Our book on the Italian left informs us that, following the departure of the minority of Bilan to fight in the militias of the POUM, the majority sent a delegation to Barcelona to try to find elements with whom a fruitful debate might be possible. Discussions with elements in the POUM proved fruitless, and “only a discussion with the anarchist teacher Camillo Berneri had any positive results” (p 98). But the book isn’t precise about what these positive results were.
At first sight, there is not an obvious reason why Bilan and Berneri should find common ground.
If for example we look at one of his better known texts, the open letter written to Frederica Montseny after she had become a minister in the Madrid government, dated April 1937,23 we don’t find a lot to distinguish Berneri’s position from that of many other “left” antifascists of the day. Underlying his approach – which is more a dialogue with an erring comrade than a denunciation of a traitor - is the conviction that there is indeed a revolution in progress in Spain, that there was no contradiction between deepening the revolution and prosecuting the war till victory, provided that revolutionary methods were used – but such methods did not preclude calling on the government to take more radical action, such as immediately granting political autonomy to Morocco to weaken the grip of the Francoist forces over their North African recruits. Certainly the article is very critical of the decision of the CNT-FAI leaders to enter the government, but there is much in this article to support Guillamon’s contention that “The Friends of Durruti’s criticism was even more radical than that of Berneri, because Berneri was critical of CNT participation in the Government, whereas the Group was critical of the CNT’s collaboration with the capitalist state.”24 So why was the Italian Fraction able to hold positive discussions with him? We suspect that it was because Berneri was, like the Italian left, committed first and foremost to proletarian internationalism and a global outlook, whereas, as Guillamon himself has noted, a group like the Friends of Durruti still showed signs of bearing the heavy baggage of Spanish patriotism. Certainly Berneri had taken a very clear position during the First World War: when he has still a member of the Socialist Party, he had worked closely with Bordiga in expelling the “interventionists” from the Socialist paper L’Avanguardia.25 His article on the imperialist rivalries behind the conflict, “Burgos and Moscow”,26 published in 'Guerra di Classe' nº 6, 16th December 1936, despite leaning towards calls for intervention by France in defence of its national interests,27 is at the same time rather clear about the anti-revolutionary and imperialist designs of all the big powers, fascist, democratic and “Soviet”, towards the conflict in Spain. Souchy in fact argues that it was in particular this denunciation of the USSR’s imperialist role in the situation which became Berneri’s death warrant.
In our text “Marxism and Ethics”, we wrote: “Characteristic of moral progress is the enlarging of the radius of application of social virtues and impulses, until the whole of humanity is encompassed. By far the highest expression of human solidarity, of the ethical progress of society to date, is proletarian internationalism. This principle is the indispensable means of the liberation of the working class, laying the basis for the future human community.”28
Behind the internationalism that united Bilan and Berneri, there lies a profound commitment to proletarian morality – the defence of fundamental principles no matter what the cost: isolation, ridicule, and physical threat. As Berneri put it in the last letter he wrote to his daughter Marie-Louise:
“One can lose one's illusions about everything and about everyone, but not about what one affirms with one's moral conscience.”29
Berneri’s stand against the “circumstantialism” adopted by so many in the anarchist movement of the day – “principles are well and good, but in these particular circumstances we have to be more realistic and practical” - would certainly have struck a chord among the comrades of the Italian left, whose refusal to abandon principles in face of the euphoria of anti-fascist unity, of the opportunist immediatism that swept through almost the entire proletarian political movement at that time, had obliged them to furrow a very lonely path indeed.
As we have noted elsewhere,30 Camillo Berneri’s daughter Marie-Louise Berneri, and her partner, the Anglo-Italian anarchist Vernon Richards, were among the few elements within the anarchist movement, in Britain or internationally, who carried on an internationalist activity during the Second World War, through their publication War Commentary. The paper “strongly denounced the pretence that the war was an ideological struggle between democracy and fascism, and the hypocrisy of the democratic allies’ denunciations of Nazi atrocities after their tacit support for the fascist regimes and for Stalin’s terror during the 1930s. Highlighting the hidden nature of the war as a power struggle between British, German and American imperialist interests, War Commentary also denounced the use of fascist methods by the ‘liberating’ allies and their totalitarian measures against the working class at home.”31 Marie Louise and Richards were arrested at the end of the war on the charge of fomenting insubordination among the armed forces; although Marie-Louise did not stand trial on the basis that spouses cannot be considered to be conspiring together, Richards went to prison for nine months. Marie-Louise gave birth to a still-born child and died not long afterwards in April 1949 as a result of a viral infection contracted during childbirth, a tragic loss for Vernon Richards and the proletarian movement.
Richards also published a very influential book, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, based on articles published in Spain and the World during the 1930s. This book, first published in 1953 and dedicated to Camillo and Marie-Louise, is quite unstinting in its exposure of the opportunism and degeneration of “official” anarchism in Spain. In his introduction to the first English edition, Richards tells us that some in the anarchist movement had “suggested to me that this study provides ammunition for the political enemies of anarchism”, to which Richards responds: “Apart from the fact that the cause of anarchy surely cannot be harmed by an attempt to establish the truth, the basis of my criticism is not that anarchist ideas were proved unworkable by the Spanish experience, but that the Spanish anarchists and syndicalists failed to put their theories to the test, adopting instead the tactics of the enemy. I fail to see, therefore, how believers in the enemy, i.e. government and political parties, can use this criticism against anarchism without it rebounding on themselves.”32
During the Second World War, large parts of the anarchist movement had succumbed to the seductions of anti-fascism and the Resistance. This was particularly true of important elements in the Spanish movement, who have bequeathed to history the image of armoured cars festooned with CNT-FAI banners leading the “Liberation” parade into Paris in 1944. In his book Richards attacks the “combination of political opportunism and naivety” which resulted in CNT-FAI leaders adopting the view “that every effort should be made to prolong the war at any cost until the outbreak of hostilities between Germany and Britain, which everyone knew to be inevitable sooner or later. Just as some hoped for victory as a result of the international conflagration, so many Spanish revolutionaries gave their support to World War II because they believed that a victory of the ‘democracies’ (including Russia!) would result in Spain’s automatic liberation from the Franco-fascist tyranny.”33
And again, this loyalty to internationalism is integrally linked to a powerful ethical stance, expressed both at the intellectual level and in Richard’s obvious indignation at the repellent behaviour and hypocritical self-justifications of the official representatives of Spanish anarchism.
In a response to the arguments of the anarchist minister Juan Peiro, Richards puts his finger on the mentality of “circumstantialism”: “every compromise, every deviation, it was explained, was not a ‘rectification’ of the ‘sacred principles’ of the CNT, but simply actions determined by the ‘circumstances’ and that once these were resolved there would be a return to principles.”34 Elsewhere, he denounces the CNT leadership for being “prepared to abandon principles for tactics”, and for their capitulation to the ideology of “the end justifies the means”: “The fact of the matter is that for the revolutionaries as well as for the Government all means were justified to achieve the ends of mobilising the whole country on a war footing. And in those circumstances the assumption is that everybody would support the ‘cause’. Those who do not are made to; those who resist are hounded, humiliated, punished or liquidated.”35
In this particular example, Richards was talking about the CNT’s capitulation to traditional bourgeois methods for the disciplining of prisoners, but the same anger is lucidly expressed at the political betrayals of the CNT in a whole series of areas. Some of these are evident and well-known:
The rapid abandonment of the traditional critique of collaboration with government and political parties in favour of anti-fascist unity. Most famously this included the acceptance of ministerial posts in the central government and the infamous ideological justification of this step by the anarchist ministers, who claimed that it signified that the state was ceasing to be an instrument of oppression. But Richards also castigates anarchist participation in other state organs such as the regional government of Catalonia and the National Defence Council - which Camillo Berneri had himself recognised as part of the government apparatus, despite its “revolutionary” label, rejecting an invitation to serve on it.
CNT participation in the capitalist normalisation of all the institutions that had emerged out of the workers’ uprising in July 1936: the incorporation of the militias into a regular bourgeois army, and the institution of state control of the enterprises, even though masked by the syndicalist fiction that the workers were now masters in their own house. His analysis of the Extended National Economic Plenum of January 1938 (chapter XVII) shows how totally the CNT had adopted the methods of capitalist management, with its obsession with increasing productivity and punishing idlers. But the rot had certainly set in much earlier than that, as Richards shows by exposing what it meant for the CNT to sign the “Unity of Action” pact with the Socialist UGT union and the Stalinist PSUC – acceptance of militarisation, of nationalisation of the enterprises with a thin veneer of “workers control” , and so on.36
The CNT’s role in sabotaging the May Days of 1937. Richards analysed these events as a spontaneous and potentially revolutionary rising by the working class, and as the concrete expression of a growing divide between the rank and file of the CNT and its bureaucratic apparatus, which used all its capacities for manoeuvring and outright deceit to disarm the workers and get them back to work.
But some of Richards’ most revealing exposés are of the manner in which the CNT’s political and organisational degeneration necessarily involved a growing moral corruption, above all of those most in the forefront of this process. He shows how this was expressed both in the statements of the anarchist leaders and in the CNT press. Three expressions of this corruption in particular aroused his fury:
A speech by Federica Montseny to a mass meeting on August 31st, 1936, which says of Franco and his followers that they were “this enemy lacking dignity or a conscience, without a feeling of being Spaniards, because if they were Spaniards, if they were patriots, they would not have let loose on Spain the Regulars and the Moors to impose the civilisation of the fascists, not as a Christian civilisation, but as a Moorish civilisation, people we went to colonise for them now come and colonise us, with religious principles and political ideas which they wish to impose on the minds of the Spanish people.”37 Richards comments acidly: “Thus spoke a Spanish revolutionary, one of the most intelligent and gifted members of the organisation (and still treated as one of the outstanding figures by the majority section of the CNT in France). In that one sentence are expressed nationalist, racialist and imperialist sentiments. Did anyone protest at the meeting?”
The cult of leadership: Richards cites articles in the anarchist press which, almost from the beginning of the war, aim to create a semi-religious aura around figures like Garcia Oliver: “the lengths to which the sycophants went is displayed in a report published in Solidaridad Obrera (August 29th, 1936) on the occasion of Oliver’s departure to the front. He is variously described as ‘our dear comrade’, ‘the outstanding militant’, ‘the courageous comrade’. ‘our most beloved comrade’”, and so on and so forth. Richards adds further examples of this sycophancy and ends with the comment: “It goes without saying that an organisation which encourages the cult of the leader, cannot also cultivate a sense of responsibility among its members which is absolutely fundamental to the integrity of a libertarian organisation.”38 Note that both Montseny’s speech and the canonisation of Oliver come from the period before they became government ministers.
The militarisation of the CNT: “Once committed to the idea of militarisation, the CNT-FAI threw themselves wholeheartedly into the task of demonstrating to everybody that their rank and filers were the most disciplined, the most courageous members of the armed forces. The Confederal Press published innumerable photographs of its military leaders (in their officers’ uniforms), interviewed them, wrote glowing tributes on their elevation to the exalted ranks of colonel or major. And as the military situation worsened so the tone of the Confederal Press became more aggressive and militaristic. Solidaridad Obrera published daily lists of men who had been condemned by the military Tribunals in Barcelona and shot for ‘fascist activities’, ‘defeatism’ or ‘desertion’. One reads of a man sentenced to death for helping conscripts to escape over the frontier...” Richards then quotes an item in Solidaridad Obrera of 21st April 1938 about another man executed for leaving his post, “to set a greater example. The soldiers of the garrison were present and filed past the body cheering the Republic”, and he concludes: “this campaign of discipline and obedience through fear and terror…did not prevent large-scale desertions from the fronts (though not often to Franco’s lines) and a falling output in the factories.”39
These examples of Richards’ outrage at the total betrayal of class principles by the CNT are an example of the proletarian morality which is an indispensable foundation to any form of revolutionary militancy. But we also know that anarchism tends to distort this morality with ahistorical abstractions, and this lack of method underlines some of the key weaknesses in the book.
This can be illustrated by Richards’ approach to the union question. Behind the question of the unions there is an “invariant” element of principle: the necessity for the proletariat to equip itself with forms of association to defend itself from the exploitation and oppression of capital. Anarchism historically has usually accepted that trade unions (or industrial unions of the IWW type, or anarcho-syndicalist organisations) are one such form of association while maintaining an opposition to all political parties. But because it rejects the materialist analysis of history, it cannot understand that these forms of association can change profoundly in different historical epochs. Hence the position of the marxist left that with capitalism’s entry into its epoch of decadence, the trade unions and the old mass parties lose their proletarian content and are integrated into the bourgeois state. The growth of anarcho-syndicalism at the beginning of the 20th century was a partial response to this process of degeneration in the old unions and parties, but it lacked the theoretical tools to really explain the process, and therefore got trapped into new versions of the old unionism: the tragic fate of the CNT in Spain was proof that in the new epoch, it would not be possible to maintain permanent mass organisations which retained their proletarian, let alone their overtly revolutionary, character. Influenced by Errico Malatesta40 (as was Berneri), Richards41 was aware of some of the limitations of the anarcho-syndicalist idea: the contradiction involved in constructing an organisation which both proclaims itself to be for the defence of the workers’ day-to- day interests, and is thus open to all workers, and which at the same time is committed to the social revolution, a goal which at any given time inside capitalist society will only be espoused by a minority of the class. This would inevitably foster tendencies towards bureaucratism and reformism, both of which exploded to the surface in the events of ‘36-‘39 in Spain. But this view doesn’t go far enough in explaining the process whereby all permanent mass organisations, which had been possible in the past as expressions of the proletariat, are now directly incorporated into the state. Thus Richards, despite some intuitions that the treason of the CNT was not simply a matter of the “leaders”, is unable to recognise that the apparatus of the CNT itself had, at the culmination of a long process of degeneration, become part of the capitalist state. This inability to understand the qualitative transformation of trade unions is also seen in his view about the Socialist union federation, the UGT: for him, while collaboration with the political parties and the government was a betrayal of principle, he was positively in favour of a united front with the UGT, which in reality could only have been a more radical version of the popular front.
The key weakness in the book, however, is the one shared by overwhelming majority of the dissident anarchists and oppositional groups of the day: that there had actually been a proletarian revolution in Spain, that the working class had indeed come to power, or had at least established a dual power situation which lasted well beyond the initial days of the July uprising. For Richards, the organ of dual power was the Central Committee of the Anti-fascist Militias, even though he was aware that the CCAM later on became an agent of militarisation. In fact, as we noted, following Bilan, in the previous article, the CCAM was crucial to preserving capitalist rule almost from day one of the uprising. From this fundamental error, Richards is unable to break from the notion, which we have already noted in the positions of the Friends of Durruti, that the war in Spain was in essence a revolutionary war which could have simultaneously beaten back Franco on the military front and established the bases for a new society, instead of seeing that the military fronts and the general mobilisation for war were in themselves a negation of the class struggle. Although Richards makes some very lucid criticisms of the concrete manner in which the mobilisation for war led to the forced militarisation of the working class, the crushing of its autonomous initiative, and the intensification of its exploitation, he remains ambiguous about questions like the necessity to increase the pace and hours of work in the factories in order to ensure the production of arms for the front. Lacking a global and historical view of the conditions of the class struggle in this period, which was one of defeat for the working class and preparation for a new imperialist re-division of the world, he does not grasp the nature of the war in Spain as an imperialist conflict, a general rehearsal for the coming world holocaust. His insistence that the “revolution” made a key error in not using Spain’s gold reserves to buy weapons from abroad shows (as did Berneri’s more or less open call for intervention by the democracies) a deep underestimation of the degree to which the very rapid shift from the terrain of class struggle to the military terrain also flung the conflict into the world-wide inter-imperialist pressure-cooker.
For Bilan, Spain 1936 was to anarchism what 1914 was to social democracy: a historical act of treason which marked a change in the class nature of those who had betrayed. It did not mean that all the various expressions of anarchism had passed to the other side of the barricade, but – as with the survivors of the shipwreck of social democracy – it did call for a process of ruthless self-examination, of profound theoretical reflection precisely on the part of those who had remained loyal to class principles. On the whole, the best tendencies within anarchism have not gone far enough in this self-critique, and certainly not as far as the communist left in analysing the successive failures of social democracy, the Russian revolution, and the Communist International. The majority – and this was certainly the case with the Friends of Durruti, the Berneris and Richards - have tried to preserve the core of anarchism when it is precisely this core which reflects the petty-bourgeois origins of anarchism and its resistance to the coherence and clarity of the “Marx party” (in other words, the authentically marxist tradition). Rejection of the historical materialist method prevented them from developing a clear perspective in the period of capitalism’s ascendancy, and then from understanding the changes in the life of the enemy class and of the proletarian struggle in the epoch of capitalist decay. And it still prevents them from reaching an adequate theory of the capitalist mode of production itself – its motor forces and its trajectory towards crisis and collapse. Perhaps most crucially of all, anarchism is unable to develop a materialist theory of the state – its origins, nature, and historical modifications - and of the organisational means the proletariat needs to overthrow it: the workers’ councils and the revolutionary party. In the final analysis, anarchist ideology is an obstacle to the task of elaborating the political, economic and social content of the communist revolution.
CDW
1. See International Review nº 104, “Historical document: Josep Rebull of the POUM, On the 1937 May Days in Barcelona [75]”.
2. The definitive work on this group, and one written from a clearly proletarian standpoint, is by Agustin Guillamon The Friends of Durruti Group 1937-39 (AK Press, 1996), which we shall refer to throughout this part of the article. See also the ICC article on Durrutti [76].
3. Guillamon, The Friends of Durruti Group, p 78.
4. Friends, p 92.
5. Towards a fresh revolution, cited in Friends, p 84.
6. Lutte Ouvrière February 24 and March 3, 1939, quoted in Friends, p 98.
7. Cf Friends, p64.
8. Cited in Friends, p 68.
9. Ibid.
10. Cited in Friends, p79.
11. See our articles on the history of the CNT from the broader series on anarcho-syndicalism: History of the CNT (1910-13): The birth of revolutionary syndicalism in Spain [77], History of the CNT (1914-19): The CNT faced with war and revolution [78], History of the CNT (1919-23): The CNT's syndicalist orientation wrecks its revolutionary impetus [79] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/130/CNT-1919-1923 [79], Anarchism fails to prevent the CNT's integration into the bourgeois state (1931-34) [80]
12. Quoted in the preface to Friends, p vii.
13.Friends, p82.
14. Buenaventura Durruti was born in 1896, the son of a railworker. From the age of 17 he was involved in militant workers’ struggles – first on the railways, then in the mines, and later in the massive class movements that swept through Spain during the post-war revolutionary wave. He joined the CNT around this time. During the reflux of the post-war wave, Durruti was involved in the “pistolero” battles against hired guns of the state and employers, and carried out at least one high-profile assassination. Exiled to South America and Europe during most of the 20s, he was under sentence of death in several countries. In 1931, following the fall of the monarchy, he returned to Spain and became a member of the FAI and of the Nosostros group, both of which were formed with the intention of combating the increasingly reformist tendencies in the CNT. In July 1936, in Barcelona, he took a very active part in the workers’ response to the Franco coup, and then formed the Iron Column, a specifically anarchist militia which went to fight at the front against the Francoists, while at the same time initiating or supporting the agrarian collectivisations. In November 1936 he went to Madrid with a large contingent of militiamen to try to relieve the besieged city, but was killed by a stray bullet. 500,000 people attended his funeral. For these and many more Spanish workers, Durruti was a symbol of courage and dedication to the cause of the proletariat. A short biographical sketch of Durruti can be found here: https://www.libcom.org/library/buenaventura-durruti-peter-newell [81].
15. A term coined during the First World War to describe those who insisted that the war must be fought “to the bitter end”.
16. Cf Friends, p71.
17. Friends, p108.
18. Ibid, p 10.
20. In particular, their insistence that the party could not become entangled with the transitional state, a mistake which they saw as having proved fatal for the Bolsheviks in Russia. See an earlier article in this series: https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/vercesi-period-of-transition [48].
21. Camillo Berneri was born in northern Italy in 1897, son of a civil servant and a school teacher. Berneri himself worked for a while as a teacher and at a teacher training college. He joined the Italian Socialist Party during his teenage years, and during the 1914-18 war, along with Bordiga and others, took an internationalist position against the party’s centrist wavering and against the outright treason of the likes of Mussolini. But by the end of the war he had become an anarchist and was close to the ideas of Errico Malatesta. Driven into exile by the fascist regime, he remained a target of the machinations of the fascist secret police, the OVRA. It was during this period that he wrote a number of contributions on the psychology of Mussolini, on anti-Semitism and the regime in the USSR. On hearing of the workers’ uprising in Barcelona, he went to Spain and fought on the Aragon front. Returning to Barcelona, he was a consistent critic of the opportunist and openly bourgeois tendencies in the CNT, writing for Guerra di Classe and making contact with the Friends of Durruti. As recounted in this article, he was assassinated by Stalinist killers during the 1937 May Days. See the short biographical sketch here: https://www.libcom.org/history/berneri-luigi-camillo-1897-1937 [83].
24. Friends, p 82.
25. “Interventionists” refers to those who were in favour of Italy joining the First World War on the side of the Entente.
26. Also known as “Between the war and the revolution”, https://libcom.org/history/between-war-revolution [86].
27. This dangerous position is even more explicit in other articles: eg “Non-intervention and international involvement in the Spanish civil war [87]”, an article first published in Guerra di Class, 7, July 18 1937.
29. Berneri's last letter [88].
30. Revolutionaries in Britain and the struggle against imperialist war, Part 3: the Second World War [89]; see also our book The British Communist Left, p101
31. ibid.
32. Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, 1995 edition by Freedom Press, p.14.
33. Lessons, p. 153-4.
34. Lessons p. 179-80
35. Lessons p. 213
36. Richards’ concern for the truth also means that the book is far from being an apology for the anarchist collectives, which for some were proof that the “Spanish revolution” far outstripped the Russian in terms of the its social content. What Richards really shows is that while decision-making by assemblies and experiments in money-less distribution lasted longer in the countryside, above all in more or less self-sufficient areas, any challenge to the norms of capitalist management were very quickly eliminated in the factories, which were more immediately dominated by the needs of war production. A union-managed form of state capitalism very soon re-imposed discipline over the industrial proletariat.
37. Lessons, p. 211.
38. Lessons, p. 181.
39. Lessons p 161. Marc Chirik, a founding member of the Gauche Communiste de France and of the ICC, was part of the delegation of the majority of the Fraction that went to Barcelona. In later years he talked about the extreme difficulty of the discussions with most of the anarchists and felt that some of them would be quite capable of shooting him and his comrades for questioning the validity of the anti-fascist war. This attitude was a clear reflection of the calls in the CNT press for the shooting of deserters.
40. See for example “Syndicalism and anarchism [90]”, 1925.
41. See for example Lessons, p. 196.
The previous article in the series took us into the work of the revolutionary movement as it emerged from the catastrophe of the Second World War. We showed how, despite this catastrophe, the best elements in the marxist movement continued to hold on to the perspective of communism. Their conviction in this perspective had not faded even though the world war had not, as many revolutionaries had predicted, provoked a new upsurge of the proletariat against capitalism, and had indeed deepened the already terrible defeat that had descended on the working class during the 1920s and 30s. We focused in particular on the work of the Gauche Communiste de France, which was probably the only organisation to understand that the tasks of the hour remained those of a fraction, of preserving and deepening the theoretical acquisitions of marxism in order to construct a bridge to future proletarian movements which would create the conditions for the reconstitution of a real communist party. This had been the project of the Italian and Belgian left fractions before the war, although a significant part of this International Communist Left had lost sight of this in the short-lived euphoria of the revival of workers’ struggles in Italy in 1943 and the declaration of the Internationalist Communist Party in Italy.
As part of this effort to build on the work of the pre-war left fractions, the GCF had carried on the work of drawing the lessons of the Russian revolution and of examining the problems of the transitional period: the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transitional state, the role of the party, and the elimination of the capitalist mode of production. We therefore republished and introduced the GCF’s theses on the role of the state, which would serve as the basis for future debates on the period of transition within the renascent revolutionary milieu of the early 1970s.
But before proceeding to a survey of those debates, we need to take a historical step back – to a major landmark in the history of the workers’ movement: Spain 1936-37. As we shall argue, we are not among those who see these events as providing us with a model of proletarian revolution which goes far deeper than anything achieved in Russia in 1917-21. But there is no question that the war in Spain has taught us a great deal, even if most of its lessons are negative ones. In particular, it offers us a very sharp insight into the inadequacies of the anarchist vision of the revolution and a striking reaffirmation of the vision that has been preserved and developed by the authentic traditions of marxism. This is particularly important to affirm given the fact that over the last few decades these traditions are frequently derided as being out of date and unfashionable, and that, among the politicised minority of the current generation, anarchist ideas in various forms have gained an undeniable influence.
This series has always been premised on the conviction that marxism alone provides a coherent method for understanding what communism is and why it is necessary, and for mining the historical experience of the working class for evidence that it is also a real possibility and not a mere wish for a better world. This is why such a large part of this series has been taken up with the study of the advances and the errors made by the marxist wing of the workers’ movement in its effort to comprehend and elaborate the communist programme. For the same reason, it is only at certain moments that it has looked at the attempts of the anarchist movement to work out its notion of the future society. In the article ‘Anarchism or communism’ (volume one of the present series, in International Review 79) we pointed out that at the historic origins of the anarchist vision lay the resistance of petty bourgeois strata such as the artisans and small peasants to the process of proletarianisation, which was an inevitable product of the emergence and expansion of the capitalist mode of production. Although a number of anarchist currents are clearly part of the workers’ movement, none of them have succeeded in entirely effacing these petty bourgeois birthmarks. The article in IR 79 demonstrates how, in the period of the First International, this essentially backward-looking ideology was behind the resistance of the clan around Bakunin to the theoretical gains of marxism at three crucial levels: in its conception of the organisation of revolutionaries, which was deeply infected by the conspiratorial methods of outmoded sects; in its rejection of historical materialism in favour of a voluntarist and idealist assessment of the possibilities of revolution; and in its conception of the future society, seen as a network of autonomous communes linked by commodity exchange.
Nevertheless, with the development of the workers’ movement in the latter part of the 19th century, the most important trends in anarchism tended to become more firmly integrated into the struggle of the proletariat and its perspective for a new society, and this was particularly true of the anarcho-syndicalist current (although, simultaneously, the dimension of anarchism as a manifestation of petty bourgeois rebellion was kept alive in the ‘exemplary acts’ of the Bonnot gang and others)1.The reality of this proletarian trend was demonstrated in the capacity of certain anarchist currents to take up internationalist positions faced with the First World War (and to a lesser extent the Second), and in the will to develop a clearer programme for their movement. The period from the late 19th century to the 1930s thus saw various attempts to develop documents and platforms which could be a guide to the establishment of ‘libertarian communism’ through social revolution. An obvious example of this was Kroptotkin’s The Conquest of Bread, which first appeared as an integral work in French in 1892 and was published over a decade later in English2. Despite Kropotkin’s abandonment of internationalism in 1914, this and other writings by him are part of the classical canon of anarchism and deserve a much more developed critique than is possible in this article.
In 1926 Makhno, Arshinov and others published the Platform of the General Union of Anarchists3. This is the founding document of the ‘platformist’ current in anarchism, and it too calls for a more thorough examination, along with an analysis of the historical trajectory of platformism from the late 1920s to the present. Its principal interest lies in the conclusions it draws from the failure of the anarchist movement in the Russian revolution, notably the idea that anarchist revolutionaries need to regroup in their own political organisation, based on a clear programme for the establishment of the new society. It was this idea in particular that drew the fire of other anarchists – not least Voline and Malatesta - who saw it as expressing a kind of anarcho-Bolshevism.
In this article, however, we are most concerned with the theory and practice of the anarcho-syndicalist tendency during the 1930s. And here again there is no dearth of material. In our most recent series on the decadence of capitalism published in this Review, we mentioned the text by the exiled Russian anarcho-syndicalist Gregory Maximoff, My Social Credo. Written in the depth of the Great Depression, it showed a remarkable degree of clarity about the decadence of the capitalist system, something almost never displayed by the anarchists of today4. The text also contains a section outlining Maximoff’s ideas about the organisation of the new society. During this period there were also significant debates about how to get from capitalism to libertarian communism within the anarcho-syndicalist ‘International’ established in 1922, the International Workers’ Association. And probably most relevant of all was Isaac Puente’s pamphlet ‘Libertarian Communism’. Published in 1932, it was to serve as the basis for the CNT’s platform at the 1936 Zaragoza Congress, and can thus be considered as a factor influencing the policies of the CNT during the ensuing ‘Spanish revolution’. We will come back to this, but first we want to look at some of the debates in the IWA, which are brought to light in Vadim Damier’s very informative work Anarcho-syndicalism in the 20th century5
One of the key debates – no doubt in reaction to the spectacular rise of Fordist/Taylorist mass production techniques in the 1920s – was centred on the question of whether or not this kind of capitalist rationalisation, and indeed the whole process of industrialisation, was an expression of progress, making a libertarian communist society a more tangible perspective, or merely an intensification of humanity’s enslavement by the machine. Different tendencies brought different nuances to this discussion, but broadly speaking the split was between the anarcho-communists who took the latter view and connected their stance with a call for an immediate transition to communism; this was seen as being possible even - or perhaps especially – in a predominantly agrarian society. The alternative position was more generally held by tendencies connected to the revolutionary syndicalist tradition, who took a more ‘realistic’ view of the possibilities offered by capitalist rationalisation while at the same time arguing that there would have to be some kind of transitional economic regime in which monetary forms would continue to exist.
These divergences traversed various national sections (such as the German FAUD), but the Argentine FORA6 seems to have had a more unified view which they defended with some conviction, and they were at the forefront of the ‘anti-industrialist’ outlook. They openly rejected the premises of historical materialism, at least as they saw it (for most of the anarchists ‘marxism’ was a catch-all term defining everyone from Stalinism and Social Democracy to Trotskyism and left communism) in favour of a view of history in which ethics and ideas were no less significant than the development of the productive forces. They categorically rejected the idea that the new society could be formed on the basis of the old, which is why they criticised not only the project of building libertarian communism on the foundations of the existing industrial structure, but also the syndicalist project of organising workers in industrial unions that would, come the revolution, take over this structure and wield it on behalf of the proletariat and humanity. They envisaged a new society organised in a federation of free communes; the revolution would be a radical break with all the old forms and would proceed immediately to the stage of free association. A declaration from the 5th Congress of the FORA in 1905 – which according to Eduardo Columbo’s account was to become the basic policy for many years – outlined the FORA’s criticisms of the union form:
“We must not forget that a union is merely an economic by-product of the capitalist system, born from the needs of this epoch. To preserve it after the revolution would imply preserving the system which gave rise to it. The so-called doctrine of revolutionary syndicalism is a fiction. We, as anarchists, accept the unions as weapons in the struggle and we try to ensure that they should approximate as closely as possible to our revolutionary ideals...That is to say, we do not intend to be mentally dominated by the unions; we intend to dominate them. In other words, to make the unions serve the propagation, the defence, and the affirmation of our ideas among the proletariat”7
However, the differences between the ‘Forists’ and the syndicalists on the union form remained rather obscure in many ways: on the one hand, the FORA saw itself as an organisation of anarchist workers rather than a union “for all workers” but at the same time it emerged and developed as a union-type formation that organised strikes and other forms of class action.
Despite the unclear nature of these divergences, they led to heated clashes at the 4th Congress of the IWA in Madrid in 1931, with the two approaches being defended mainly by the French CGT-SR8 on the one hand and the FORA on the other. Damier makes the following remarks about the FORA’s views:
“The conceptions of the FORA contained a critique of the alien and destructive character of the industrial-capitalist system which was brilliant for its time – the FORA’s proposals anticipated by half a century the recommendations and prescriptions of the contemporary ecological movement. Nevertheless their critique had a point of vulnerability – a categorical refusal to elaborate more concrete notions about the future society, how to get to it and how to prepare for it. According to the thinking of the Argentine theoreticians, to do so would be to infringe on revolutionary spontaneity and the improvisations of the masses themselves. The achievement of socialism was not a matter of technical and organisational preparation, but rather the dissemination of feelings of freedom, equality and solidarity – insisted the Argentine worker-anarchists”(pp110-111).
The FORA’s insights into the nature of capitalist social relations – like those into the trade union form – are certainly interesting, but what strikes one most about these debates is their flawed starting point, their lack of method flowing from the rejection of marxism or even any willingness to discuss with the authentic marxist currents of the day. The FORA’s criticism of historical materialism looks more like a criticism of a rigidly deterministic version of marxism, typical of the Second International and the Stalinist parties. Again, they were right to attack the alienated nature of capitalist production and to repudiate the idea that capitalism was progressive in itself - above all in a period where capitalist social relations had already proved themselves to be a fundamental obstacle to human development - but their apparent rejection of industry as such was equally abstract and resulted in a backward-looking nostalgia for localised rural communes.
Perhaps more significant was the lack of any connection between these debates and the most important experiences of the class struggle in the new epoch inaugurated by the mass strikes in Russia in 1905 and the international revolutionary wave of 1917-23. These world-historic developments, which also of course included the first world imperialist war, had already demonstrated the obsolescence of the old forms of workers’ organisation (mass parties and trade unions)and given rise to new ones: the soviets or workers’ councils on the one hand, formed in the heat of the struggle rather than as a pre-existing structure, and the organisation of the communist minority, no longer seen as a mass party acting primarily on the terrain of the struggle for reforms, on the other. The formation of revolutionary or industrial trade unions in the last part of the 19th century and in the decades that followed was to a large extent an attempt by a radical fraction of the proletariat to attempt to adapt to the new epoch without really abandoning the old trade unionist (and even social democratic) conceptions of incrementally building up a mass workers’ organisation inside capitalism, with the ultimate aim of taking control of society in a phase of acute crisis. The FORA’s suspicion of the idea of building the new society in the shell of the old was justified. However, without any serious reference to the experience of the mass strike and the revolution, whose essential dynamic had been brilliantly analysed by Rosa Luxemburg in The Mass Strike, the Political Party and the Trade Unions, written in 1906, or to the new forms of organisation which Trotsky, for example, had recognised as a crucially important product of the 1905 revolution in Russia, the FORA fell back into a diffuse hope of a sudden and total transformation and seemed unable to examine the real links between the defensive struggles of the proletariat and the struggle for revolution.
In the 1931 debates the majority of the Spanish CNT sided with the more traditional anarcho-syndicalists. But ‘communitarian’ ideas persisted and the 1936 Zaragoza programme, based on Puente’s pamphlet, contained elements of both.
Puente’s pamphlet9 clearly expresses a proletarian standpoint and its ultimate aim – ‘libertarian’ communism – is what we would simply call communism, a society based on the principle, as Puente puts it, “from each according to his/her abilities, to each according to his/her needs”. At the same time, it is a rather clear manifestation of the theoretical poverty at the heart of the anarchist world-view.
A long section at the beginning of the text is devoted to arguing against all prejudices which argue that the workers are ignorant and stupid, incapable of emancipating themselves, contemptuous of science, art and culture, that they need an intellectual elite, a “social architect”, or a police power to run society on their behalf. This polemic is perfectly justified. And yet when he writes that “what we call common sense, a quick grasp of things, intuitive ability, initiative and originality are not things that can be bought or sold in the universities”, we are reminded of the fact that revolutionary theory is not simple common sense, that its propositions, being dialectical, are generally seen as outrageous and nonsensical from the viewpoint of the ‘good old common sense’ which Engels ridiculed in Anti-Dühring 10. The working class does not need educators from on high to free itself of capitalism, but it does need a revolutionary theory that can go beyond mere appearance and understand the deeper processes at work in society.
Anarchism’s inadequacies at this level are revealed in all the principal theses put forward in Puente’s text. Regarding the forms that the working class will use to confront and overthrow capitalism, like the debates in the IWA at the time, Puente ignores the whole dynamic of the class struggle in the epoch of revolution, brought to the surface by the mass strike and the emergence of the council form. Instead of seeing that the organisations that will carry out the communist transformation express a radical rupture with the old class organisations that have been incorporated into bourgeois society, Puente insists that “libertarian communism is based on organisations that already exist, thanks to which economic life in the cities and villages can be carried on in the light of the particular needs of each locality. Those organisms are the union and the free municipality”. This is where Puente combines syndicalism with communitarianism: in the cities, the syndicates will take control of public life, in the countryside it will be the traditional village assemblies. The activities of these organs are envisaged mainly in local terms: they can also federate and form national structures where necessary, but Puente sees the surplus product of local economic units being exchanged with that of others. In other words, this libertarian communism can co-exist with value relations, and it is not clear whether this is a transitional measure or something that will exist in perpetuity.
Meanwhile, this transformation takes place through “direct action” and not through any engagement in the sphere of politics, which is entirely identified with the existing state. In a comparative chart between “organisation based on politics, which is a feature common to all regimes based on the state, and organisations based on economics, in a regime which shuns the state”, Puente draws out the hierarchical and exploitative character of the state and opposes to it the democratic life of the unions and free municipalities, based on decisions reached by assemblies and on common needs. There are two fundamental problems with this approach: first of all, it fails entirely to explain that the unions – and this was even to include anarcho-syndicalist unions like the CNT - have never been models of self-organisation or democracy but are subjected to a powerful pressure to integrate themselves into capitalist society, to themselves become bureaucratic institutions that tend to merge with the state. And secondly it ignores the reality of revolution, in which the working class is necessarily faced with a nexus of problems which are unavoidably political: the organisational and theoretical autonomy of the working class from the parties and ideologies of the bourgeoisie, the destruction of the capitalist state, and the consolidation of its own organs of power. These deep lacunae in the libertarian programme were to be brutally exposed by the reality of the war that broke out in Spain soon after the Zaragoza Congress.
But there is another and no less decisive problem: the text’s failure to consider the international dimension, and indeed its narrowly national outlook. It’s true that the first of many “prejudices” refuted in the text is “the belief that the crisis is merely temporary”. Like Maximoff, the Great Depression of the 30s seems to have convinced Puente that capitalism was a system in decline, and the paragraph under this sub-heading at least has something of a global ring to it, mentioning the situation of the working class in Italy and in Russia. But there is no attempt whatever to assess the balance of class forces, a primordial task for revolutionaries after a period of a mere 20 years which had seen world war, an international revolutionary wave, and series of catastrophic defeats for the proletariat. And when it comes to examining the potential for libertarian communism in Spain, it is almost as if the outside world does not exist: there is a long section given over to estimating the economic resources of Spain, down to its oranges and potatoes, its cotton, timber, and oil. The whole aim of these calculations is to show that Spain could exist as a self-sufficient island of libertarian communism. Certainly Puente considers that “the introduction of libertarian communism in our country, alone of the nations of Europe, will bring with it the hostility of the capitalist nations. Using the defence of its subjects’ interests as a pretext, bourgeois imperialism will attempt to intervene by force of arms to crush our system at its birth”. But such intervention will be hampered by the threat that it will provoke either social revolution in the intervening power or world war against other powers. The foreign capitalists might therefore prefer to employ mercenary armies rather than their own armies, as they did in Russia: in either case the workers will have to be ready to defend their revolution arms in hand. But the other bourgeois states might also seek to impose an economic blockade, backed up by warships. And this could be a real problem because Spain lacks some crucial resources, in particular petroleum, and would normally be obliged to import it. The solution to a blockade on imports however, is not hard to find: “it would be vital that we pour all our energies into sinking new wells in search of petroleum...petroleum may (also) be obtained by distilling soft coal and lignite, both of which we have in abundance in this country”.
In sum: to create libertarian communism, Spain must become autarchic. It is a pure vision of anarchy in one country11. This inability to begin from the standpoint of the world proletariat would become another fatal flaw when Spain became the theatre of a global imperialist conflict.
The anarcho—syndicalist model of revolution as expounded in Puente’s text and the Zaragoza programme was to be definitively exposed and refuted by the momentous historic events sparked off by Franco’s military coup in July 1936.
This is certainly not the place to write a blow by blow account of these events. We can only limit ourselves to recalling their overall pattern, with the aim of reaffirming the view of the communist left at the time: that the congenital incoherence of anarchist ideology had now become a vehicle for the betrayal of the working class.
There is no better analysis of the first moments of the war in Spain than the article published in the journal of the Italian Left Fraction, Bilan 36, October-November 1936, and republished in International Review 6. Written almost immediately after the events, and no doubt after sifting through a mass of very confused and confusing information, it is remarkable how the comrades of Bilan managed to slice through the dense fog of mystifications surrounding the ‘Spanish revolution’, whether in the version that was most publicised at the time by the powerful media controlled by democrats and Stalinists– as a kind of bourgeois democratic revolution against the feudal-fascist reaction – or the picture painted by the anarchists and Trotskyists, which, while presenting the struggle in Spain as a social revolution that had gone much further than anything achieved in Russia in 1917, also served to reinforce the dominant view of the struggle as a people’s barrier against the advance of fascism in Europe.
The Bilan article recognises without hesitation that, faced with the attack from the right, the working class, above all in its Barcelona stronghold, responded with its own class weapons: the spontaneous mass strike, street demonstrations, fraternisation with the soldiers, the general arming of the workers, the formation of neighbourhood based defence committees and militias, the occupation of the factories and the election of factory committees. Bilan also recognised that it was the militants of the CNT-FAI who had everywhere played a leading role in this movement, which, however, had embraced the majority of the working class of Barcelona.
And yet it was precisely at this moment, when the working class was on the brink of taking political power into its own hands, that anarchism’s programmatic weaknesses, its theoretical inadequacy, were to prove a deadly handicap.
First and foremost, anarchism’s failure to understand the problem of the state led it not only to quaver at the possibility of a proletarian dictatorship – because anarchism is ‘against all kinds of dictatorship’ – but perhaps even more crucially, it was utterly disarmed in the face of the manoeuvres of the ruling class, which was able to reconstitute a state power with new and ‘radical’ forms, given that its more traditional forces had been paralysed by the proletarian upsurge. Key instruments in this process were the Central Committee of the Anti-Fascist Militias and the Central Council of the Economy:
“The constitution of the Central Committee of the Militias gave the impression that a period of proletarian power had begun; while the setting up of the Central Council of the Economy gave rise to the illusion that the proletariat was now managing its own economy.
However, far from being organs of dual power, these organs had a capitalist nature and function. Instead of constituting a base for the unification of the proletarian struggle – for posing the question of power – they were from the beginning organs of collaboration with the capitalist state.
In Barcelona the Central Committee of the militias was a conglomeration of workers’ and bourgeois parties and trade unions; not an organ of the soviet type arising spontaneously on a class basis and capable of providing a focus for the development of proletarian consciousness. The Central Committee was connected to the Generalidad and disappeared with the passing of a simple decree when the new government of Catalonia was formed in October.
The Central Committee of the militias represented a superb weapon of capitalism for leading the workers out of their towns and localities to fight on the territorial fronts where they are being ruthlessly massacred. It is the organ that established order in Catalonia, not in conjunction with the workers, but against the workers who had been dispersed to the fronts. It is true that the regular army was practically dissolved, but it is gradually being reconstituted within the militia columns whose general staff – Sandino, Villalba and Co. – are clearly bourgeois. The columns are made up of volunteers and this will probably remain the case until the intoxication and illusion in the ‘revolution’ is over and capitalist reality is restored. Then we will soon see the official re-establishment of a regular army and obligatory service”.
The immediate participation of the CNT and the POUM (‘Marxist Party of Workers Unification’, situated somewhere between left social democracy and Trotskyism) in these bourgeois institutions was a blow against the possibility of the class organs created in streets and the factories during the July days centralising themselves and establishing an authentic dual power. On the contrary, the latter were quickly emptied of their proletarian content and incorporated into the new structures of bourgeois power.
Secondly, a burning political question of the day was not confronted and, lacking any analysis of the historic trends at work within capitalist society, the anarchists had no method for confronting: the nature of fascism and what Bordiga called its “worst product”, anti-fascism. If the rise of fascism was one expression of a series of historic defeats for the proletarian revolution, preparing bourgeois society for a second inter-imperialist massacre, anti-fascism was no less a rallying cry for imperialist war, no less a call for workers to give up the defence of their own class interests in the name of a sacred ‘national unity’. It was above all this ideology of anti-fascist unity which enabled the bourgeoisie to avert the danger of proletarian revolution by diverting the class war in the cities into a military conflict at the front. The call to sacrifice everything for the struggle to defeat Franco led even the most passionate advocates of libertarian communism, such as Durruti, to accept this grand manoeuvre. The militias, by being incorporated into an organ like the CCAM, dominated by parties and unions such as the Republican and nationalist left, the Socialists and the Stalinists, which were openly opposed to the proletarian revolution, became instruments in a war between two capitalist factions, a conflict which almost immediately turned into a global inter-imperialist battlefield, a rehearsal for the next world war. Their democratic forms - such as the election of officers – did not fundamentally alter this. It’s true that the leading forces of bourgeois order – the Stalinists and Republicans – were never comfortable with these forms and later insisted on them being fully subsumed into a traditional bourgeois army, as Bilan had predicted. But as Bilan also realised, the fatal blow had already been struck in the first weeks after the military coup.
It was the same with the most obvious example of the bankruptcy of the CNT – the decision of four of its best-known leaders, including the former radical Garcia Oliver, to become ministers in the central Madrid government, and to compound this act of treason with their infamous claim that thanks to their participation in the ministries, the Republican state “had ceased to be an oppressive force against the working class, just as the state no longer represents the organism which divide society into classes. And both will tend even less to oppress the people as a result of the intervention of the CNT”12. This was the final step in a trajectory that had been prepared a long time in advance by the slow degeneration of the CNT. In a series of articles on the history of the CNT, we showed that the CNT, despite its proletarian origins and the deeply held revolutionary convictions of many of its militants, was unable to resist a remorseless tendency in capitalism in its epoch of state totalitarianism – the tendency for all permanent mass workers’ organisations to be integrated into the state. This had already been shown long before the July events , such as during the elections of February 1936, when the CNT abandoned its traditional abstentionism in favour of tactically supporting a vote for the Republic13. And in the period immediately after Franco’s coup, when the central Republican government was in utter disarray, the process of anarchist participation in the bourgeois state accelerated at all levels. Thus well before the scandal of the four anarchist ministers, the CNT had already joined the regional government of Catalonia, the Generalidad, and at the local level – no doubt in line with its rather vague notion of ‘free municipalities’ – anarchist militants became representatives and officials of the organs of local government, i.e. the base units of the capitalist state. As with the betrayal of social democracy in 1914, this was not just a matter of a few bad leaders, but the product of a gradual process of the integration of an entire organisational apparatus into bourgeois society and its state. Certainly within the CNT-FAI, and in the wider anarchist movement inside and outside Spain, there were proletarian voices raised against this trajectory, although as we will see in the second part of this article, few managed to call into question the underlying theoretical roots of the betrayal.
Ah, but what about the collectivisations? Didn’t the most dedicated and courageous anarchists, like Durruti, insist that deepening the social revolution was the best way to defeat Franco? Wasn’t it above all the examples of self-managed factories and farms, the attempts to get rid of the wage form in numerous villages throughout Spain, which convinced many, even marxists like Grandizo Munis14, that the social revolution in Spain reached heights never attained in Russia, with its rapid descent into state capitalism?
But Bilan rejected any idealisation of the factory occupations:
“When the workers went back to work in the factories where the bosses had fled or had been shot by the masses, factory councils were set up as an expression of the expropriation of these companies by the workers.
Here the trade unions intervened very quickly, setting up a procedure that would allow proportional representation in places where the CNT and the UGT had members. Moreover, although the workers returned to work on condition that they would be getting a 36 hour week and a wage increase, the unions intervened to defend the need to work at full output for the war effort, without worrying too much about the regulation of work or about wages.
The factory committees and the committees for the control of industries which were not expropriated (out of consideration for foreign capital or for other reasons) were thus immediately smothered; transformed into organs for stimulating production, they lost their class content. They were not organs created during an insurrectionary strike in order to overthrow the state; they were organs whose function was the organization of the war, and this was an essential precondition for the survival and reinforcement of the state” (ibid).
Damier does not dwell too much on the conditions in the ‘worker-controlled’ factories. It is significant that he gives more space to examining the democratic forms of the village collectives, their deep concern for debate and self-education through regular assemblies and elected committees, their attempts to do away with the wages system. These were indeed heroic efforts but the conditions of rural isolation made it less urgent for the capitalist state to launch a direct assault – by guile or outright force – on the village collectives. In sum these changes in the countryside did not alter the general process of bourgeois recuperation which was focused on the cities and the factories, where work discipline for a state capitalist war economy was imposed in a more ruthless and rapid manner and could not have been imposed without the fiction of ‘union control’ via the CNT
“The most interesting fact here is this. Following the expropriation of companies in Catalonia, their co-ordination through the Council of the Economy in August, and the government decree of October laying down the norms for ‘collectivization’, after each one of these steps came new measures for disciplining the workers in the factories – discipline they would never have put up with under the old bosses. In October the CNT issued an order forbidding defensive struggle of any kind and stating that the workers’ most sacred duty was to increase production. Apart from the fact that we have already rejected the Soviet fraud, which consists of the physical assassination of the workers in the name of “building socialism”, we declare openly that for us the struggle in the factories cannot cease for a moment as long as the domination of the capitalist state continues. Certainly the workers will have to make sacrifices after the proletarian revolution, but a revolutionary will never advocate the cessation of defensive struggles as a way of achieving socialism. Even after the revolution we will not deprive the workers of the strike weapon, and it goes without saying that when the proletariat is not in power – as is the case in Spain – the militarization of the factories is the same as the militarization of the factories in any capitalist state at war” (Bilan, op cit).
Bilan here is basing itself on the axiom that social revolution and imperialist war are diametrically opposed tendencies in capitalist society. Defeat of the working class opens the way to imperialist war – ideological in 1914, physical and ideological in the 1930s. Class war on the other hand can only be waged at the expense of the war economy. Strikes and mutinies do not strengthen the national war effort. It was the revolutionary outbreaks of 1917 and 1918 which forced the warring imperialisms to bring their hostilities to an immediate end.
There is such a thing as revolutionary war. But it can only be waged once the working class is in power – on this Lenin and those who rallied to him in the Bolshevik party were very clear in the period February to October 1917. And even then, the demands of a revolutionary war fought on the territorial fronts do not create the best conditions for the flowering of class power and for a radical social transformation- far from it. Thus between 1917 and 1920 the Soviet state defeated the internal and external counter-revolutionary forces at the military level, but at a very high price: the erosion of political control by the working class and the autonomisation of the state apparatus.
This fundamental opposition between imperialist war and social revolution was doubly confirmed by the events of May 37.
Here again – this time faced with a provocation by the Stalinists and other state forces, who attempted to seize the Barcelona telephone exchange from the workers who controlled it – the Barcelona proletariat responded en masse and with its own methods of struggle: mass strike and barricades. The ‘revolutionary defeatism’ advocated by the Italian left, castigated as insane and traitorous by virtually every political tendency from the liberals to ‘left communist’ groups like Union Communiste – was put into practice by the workers of Barcelona. This was essentially a defensive reaction to an attack by the repressive forces of the Republican state, but it once again pitted the workers against the whole state machine, whose most brazen mouthpieces did not hesitate to denounce them as traitors, as saboteurs of the war effort. And implicitly, this was indeed a direct challenge to the anti-fascist war, no less than the Kiel mutiny of 1918 was a challenge to the war effort of German imperialism and, by extension, to the whole inter-imperialist conflict.
The open defenders of bourgeois order were to respond with brutal terror against the workers. Revolutionaries were arrested, tortured, shot. Camillo Berneri, the Italian anarchist who had openly expressed his criticisms of the CNT policy of collaboration, was among the many militants kidnapped and killed, in the majority of cases by the thugs of the ‘Communist’ party. But the repression really only descended on the workers once they had been persuaded to lay down their arms and go back to work by the spokespeople of the ‘left’ , of the CNT and the POUM, who were above all terrified of a fracture in the anti-fascist front. The CNT – like the SPD in the German revolution 1918 – was indispensable in the restoration of bourgeois order.
C D Ward
In the second part of this article we will look at some of the anarchist tendencies which denounced the betrayals of the CNT during the war in Spain, in particular the Friends of Durruti and Camillo Berneri. We shall try to show that while these were healthy proletarian reactions, they rarely called into question the underlying weaknesses of the anarchist ‘programme’.
1In our article in International Review 120, ‘Anarcho-syndicalism faces a change in epoch: the CGT up to 1914’ we pointed out that this orientation of certain anarchist currents towards the unions was based more on the search for a more receptive audience for their propaganda than a real understanding of the revolutionary nature of the working class.
4 See the article on the Great Depression in International Review 146
5 Black Cat Press, Edmonton, 2009. Originally published in Russian in 2000. Damier is a member of the KRAS, the Russian section of the IWA. The ICC has published a number of its internationalist statements on the wars in the former USSR.
6Federacion Obrera Regional Argentina
7‘Anarchism in Argentina and Uruguay’ in Anarchism Today, edited by David Apter and James Joll,Macmillan, 1971, p 185. Available online at https://www.libcom.org/files/Argentina.pdf [100]
8This organisation – the SR stands for ‘Revolutionary Syndicalist’ – was the result of a split in 1926 with the ‘official’ CGT, which at the time was dominated mainly by the Socialist Party. It remained a rather small group and disappeared under the Petain regime during the Second World War. Its main spokesman at the Zaragoza Congress was Pierre Besnard.
10“At first sight this mode of thinking seems to us very luminous, because it is that of so-called sound common sense. Only sound common sense, respectable fellow that he is, in the homely realm of his own four walls, has very wonderful adventures directly he ventures out into the wide world of research. And the metaphysical mode of thought, justifiable and even necessary as it is in a number of domains whose extent varies according to the nature of the particular object of investigation, sooner or later reaches a limit, beyond which it becomes one-sided, restricted, abstract, lost in insoluble contradictions. In the contemplation of individual things it forgets the connection between them; in the contemplation of their existence, it forgets the beginning and end of that existence; of their repose, it forgets their motion. It cannot see the wood for the trees”. Anti-Dühring, Introduction
11Our article on the CGT cited in footnote 2 makes the same point about a book produced by two leading militants of the French anarcho-syndicalist organisation in 1909: “The book by Pouget and Pataud, which we have already quoted (Comment nous ferons la revolution), is very instructive in this respect, since the revolution that it describes is in fact purely national. The two anarcho-syndicalist authors did not wait for Stalin to envisage the construction of ‘anarchism in a single country’: once the revolution has been successful in France, a whole chapter of the book is devoted to describing the system of foreign trade, which is to continue commercial operations abroad while production is organised on communist principles within French borders”
12Quoted in Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, London, Freedom press1983 (first published in 1953) chapter VI, p 69
13See the series on the history of the CNT in IRs 129-133, in particular the last article, ‘Anti-fascism, the road to the betrayal of the CNT’.
14 Munis was a leading figure in the Bolshevik-Leninist group in Spain which was linked to Trotsky’s tendency. He later broke with Trotskyism over its support for the Second World War and evolved towards many of the positions of the communist left. We have published polemics with the group later founded by Munis, Fomento Obrera Revolucionario, on its view of the Spanish war.
For a century now, humanity has stood at a crossroads in its history. Already in the 19th century the working class starkly outlined this historical watershed in the expression: "socialism or barbarism". The lucid marxist analysis revealed and expressed in this slogan cannot however be reduced to an empty slogan. Hence we want here to insist briefly on its historical importance and depth.
When we look at the human species' distant, obscure beginnings, we cannot help but be astounded at the immense steps forward that have marked mankind's emergence from the animal realm and marked its development since then: language, dance, art, architecture, the production of an immense wealth of material goods, and the ability to create a wealth and diversity of cultural, moral, and intellectual needs – all this represents a historical acceleration which takes the breath away.
Yet, when we focus our attention on the different epochs of human history, we must also acknowledge that mankind's development has never been a smooth progression. Still less has this been the case since the emergence of class society and the first great civilisations, all of which have long disappeared: only a very few of them have been able to transform themselves into something new. History reveals to us many epochs of cultural regression, the loss of skills and knowledge, generally accompanied by moral stultification and a brutalisation of human relationships.
The foundation of man's progress lies in his ability to transform nature with a view to the satisfaction of his own needs, and in the first place of his material needs, through the improvement and development of his tools and techniques – what Marx called "the productive forces". Fundamentally, it is the degree of development of these productive forces, and of the division of labour that they imply, which determine the way that society is organised to put them into operation: the "relations of production". When the framework provided by these relations allows the development of the productive forces, then society flourishes, not just on the material but also on the moral and cultural levels. But when the relations of production become a barrier to the continued development of the productive forces, then society undergoes repeated and worsening convulsions: it is threatened with a return to barbarism. To take just one historical example: one of the pillars of the Roman Empire was the exploitation of slave labour, especially in agriculture. The appearance of new farming techniques which could not be put into operation by producers whose status was lower than cattle was one of the causes of the Empire's decadence and final collapse.
The steps forward achieved by human culture,1 from the Neolithic revolution to the Renaissance, the emergence of humanism, and the Russian revolution, appear to us today as a grandiose prelude to the world revolution. These giant strides of human culture have always been the product of long periods of struggle, where new social relationships overcame and replaced the old. Today, they carry us towards a new leap forward: socialism, the first conscious and worldwide socialisation of the human species! Marxism, the theory that the proletariat adopted to light the way in its struggle against capitalism, is able to study this history with lucidity, free from mystification, and to recognise its major tendencies. This has nothing to do with crystal-ball gazing. We cannot predict when, or even whether, the world revolution will take place. What we can do is to understand in depth – and defend against all comers, including the incomprehension of some revolutionaries – the immense historical importance of capitalism's entry into its decadence. For 100 years, we have been faced with an alternative which can be summed up thus: either we succeed with the next social and cultural leap forward to socialism, or we fall back into barbarism.
The gravity of this alternative is greater than ever before in history, because today the growth in the contradictions between the productive forces and the relations of production has reached a point where it threatens humanity not just with social and cultural decline, but with complete destruction. For the first time in history, a mode of production's decadence is a menace for the very survival of the human species. Yet at the same time, it bears with it immense, historic possibilities for its future development: the beginning of humanity's truly conscious history.
The capitalist model of socialisation is the most successful in human history. Capitalism has absorbed – when it has not simply destroyed – all previous social and cultural milieux, and has for the first time created a worldwide human society. Its basic form of exploitation is wage labour, which makes possible the appropriation and the accumulation of surplus labour, as well as the unpaid appropriation of the enormous productive capacity created by associated, socialised labour. This is what explains the unparalleled technical and scientific explosion which is part and parcel of capitalism's rise. But one of capitalist socialisation's specificities is that it is carried out unconsciously. It is determined by laws which – although they are the expression of given human social relationships based on the exchange of labour power for wages, between the producers and the owners of the means of production – appear to be "natural" and "unchangeable", and so beyond the reach of human will. In this mystified – reified – view of reality, where human beings and the relations between them have become mere objects, the enormous increase in material resources and productive power appears as the product of capital rather than of human labour. Capitalism set out to conquer the world, but it turns out that the world is round. A world market has been created (on the ruins of alternative forms of production, like the textiles of China, India, or the Ottoman Empire for example). The success of the capitalist mode of production is a progressive step in human history; nonetheless for the vast majority of the population at the heart of capitalism the industrial revolution meant the destruction of previous ways of life and ferocious exploitation, while in much of the rest of the world it meant famine, epidemics and slavery. Capitalism is undoubtedly the most modern form of exploitation, but in the end it is every bit as parasitic as its predecessors. To keep the machine of accumulation going, capitalist socialisation demands ever more raw material and markets, and must constantly dispose of a reserve of human beings forced to sell their labour power to survive. This is why its victory over previous modes of production meant the ruin and starvation of the previous producers.
Capitalism presents itself as the aim and apogee of human development. If we are to believe its ideology, there is nothing beyond capitalism. But this means that capitalist ideology must hide two things: first, that historically capitalism is largely dependent on an environment and relations of production outside itself; second, that capitalist socialisation, like all the social forms that have preceded it, is only a stage in the process of humanity's coming to consciousness. The driving force of capitalist accumulation constantly creates internal contradictions which erupt in crises. During capitalism's ascendant phase, these crises were overcome by the destruction of excess capital and the conquest of new markets. With the new equilibrium thus achieved came a further extension of capitalist social relations – but once the world market had been shared out among the central capitalist powers the limits of this extension were reached. At this point, the great nation states can only pursue their world conquest at each other's expense. Since all the cake has been shared out, each can only increase his share by taking from the others.
The nation states plunge into an arms race and hurl themselves at each others' throats in the First World War. In a world wide slaughter, the productive forces chained in by historically obsolete relations of production are transformed into a destructive force of enormous power. With capitalism's entry into decadence, warfare becomes a matter of equipment, and subjects the best part of production to military needs. The blind machine of annihilation drags the whole world down into the abyss.
Well before 1914, the left wing of the Socialist International, the revolutionary forces around Rosa Luxemburg and Lenin, fought with all their strength against the threat of imperialist war. Living marxism – the only real marxism – which is not enclosed in dogmas and formulae supposedly valid for all time, realised that this was not just another war between the nations like those before it, but that it marked the entry of capitalism into its decadent phase. The marxists knew that we were then, as we still are today, at a historical crossroads which threatens for the first time to become a struggle for the very survival of the human species. Capitalism's entry into decadence 100 years ago is irreversible, but this does not mean that the productive forces have come to a halt. In reality, these forces are so enchained and compressed by the logic of capitalist exploitation that society's development is dragged down into an ever more barbaric maelstrom. Only the working class can give history a different direction and build a new society. We have seen just what capitalism's unadulterated brutality is capable of after the defeat of the revolutionary upsurge in the years 1917-23. The course towards a new world war was opened, men reduced to ciphers, shut up in camps destined to murderous exploitation or plain extermination. Stalinist mass murder was surpassed by the annihilating madness of the Nazis; nor did the "civilised" ruling classes intend to miss the festivities of barbarism: the "democratic" atom bombs wiped two Japanese cities from the map and inflicted hideous suffering on the survivors.
The state capitalist machine may have learnt from history to the point of avoiding its own self-destruction – the bourgeois class will not simply commit suicide and abandon the historical stage to the proletariat – but only the return of the working class after 1968 offers any guarantee against a new course towards war. However, if the working class has proven capable of barring the road to a new world holocaust, it has not so far been able to impose its own perspective. In this situation, where neither of its two determining classes are capable of imposing a decisive response to an irreversible and ever deeper economic crisis, society is more and more rotting where it stands; a growing social decomposition makes it ever more difficult for the working class to achieve a clear awareness of its historical perspective – a historical perspective which a century ago was widely shared in the workers' ranks.
One hundred years ago, the working class faced a gigantic historic task, and so it still does today. The class of associated labour as such bears in itself the whole of human history: it is the central class in the struggle for the abolition of classes, and it must rise up against this barbarism. In the struggle against capitalism's nihilistic and amoral barbarity, the working class is the incarnation of a humanity become conscious of itself. It is the productive force of the future still in chains. Within it lies the potential for a new leap forward in human culture.
In the struggle against capitalism's entry into decadence, a whole generation of revolutionaries worldwide stepped forward, to set against capitalism's perverted and reified socialisation the conscious association of the working class, guided by the beacon of the Communist International.
With the Russian revolution, it took in hand the struggle for world revolution. For us today, one hundred years later, this great task of taking up our responsibilities for humanity's future remains an electrifying prospect. Even in the face of general stultification, a moral indignation arises in the heart of the working class, which gives us our bearings today. The working class suffers with the rest of humanity under the burden of decadence. Atomisation and the absence of perspective for the future attack our very identity. In the confrontations to come the working class will show whether it is capable of becoming conscious once again of its historical duty.
In the sweep of history, it is only a short step from moral indignation to the politicisation of an entire generation. A new leap forward in the history of human culture is both possible and vital. This is what living historical experience tells us.
ICC
1It should be clear that when we use the term "culture" here, we do so in the scientific sense, englobing the whole production of human society: technical and material of course, but also artistic, organisational, philosophical, moral, etc.
Even today the war that began in August 1914 goes by the name of the Great War, despite the fact that the Second World War that followed it in 1939 killed more than twice as many people, and despite the fact that the unending worldwide warfare since 1945 has been responsible for even more death and destruction than World War II.
To understand why 1914-18 is still the “Great War”, we need only visit any village in France, even the most isolated lost in its Alpine pastures, and read the roll-call of the dead on the war memorials: whole families are there – brothers, fathers, uncles, sons. These mute witnesses to horror stand not just in the towns and villages of the European belligerent nations, but even on the other side of the world: the memorial in the tiny settlement of Ross on the Australian island of Tasmania bears the names of 16 dead and 44 survivors, presumably of the Gallipoli campaign. Humanity was no stranger to war, but 1914 was the first time it had been involved in World War.
For two generations after the war ended, 1914-18 was synonymous with senseless carnage, driven by the uncaring blind stupidity of an aristocratic ruling caste, and the unbridled greed of imperialists, war profiteers and arms manufacturers. Despite all the official ceremonies, the laying of wreaths and (in Britain) the symbolic wearing of poppies on Memorial Day, this view of World War I passed into popular culture in the belligerent nations. In France, Gabriel Chevalier's autobiographical novel of life in the trenches Fear (La Peur), published in 1930, had an enormous success, to the point where the book was briefly banned by the authorities. In 1937, Jean Renoir's anti-war movie The Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion), played continuously at the Marivaux cinema in Paris from 10 in the morning till two at night, beating every previous box office record: in New York it played for 36 weeks.1
In 1920s Germany, George Grosz’s satirical cartoons lambasted the generals, politicians and profiteers who had done well out of the war. The war veteran Erich Maria Remarque’s All quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen Nichts Neues) was published in 1929 and 18 months later had sold 2.5 million copies in 22 languages; the 1930 film version by Universal Studios was a smash hit in the USA, winning an Oscar for best picture.2
In its disintegration, the Austro-Hungarian empire bequeathed to the world one of the greatest anti-war novels: Jaroslav Hašek's The good soldier Svejk (Osudy dobrélo vojáka Švejk za světové války), published in 1923 and since translated into 58 languages – more than any other work in Czech.
The revulsion at the memory of World War I survived the still greater bloodletting of World War II. Compared to the horrors of Auschwitz and Hiroshima the barbarity of Prussian militarism and Tsarist oppression – not to mention French or British colonialism – which had provided the justification for war in 1914, almost paled into insignificance, making the slaughter in the trenches seem still more monstrous and absurd: World War II could be portrayed as, if not exactly a “good war” then at least as a just and necessary war. Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than in Britain, where a stream of heroic “good war” movies (Dambusters in 1955, 633 Squadron in 1964, etc) filled the cinema screens in the 1950s and 60s, while at the same time the anti-war writings of war poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Robert Graves were required reading for 15-year old school students.3 Perhaps the finest composition of Benjamin Britten, the 20th century's best known British composer, was his War Requiem (1961) which set Owen's poetry to music, while in 1969 two very different films hit the silver screen: Battle of Britain, in the patriotic vein, and the viciously satirical Oh What a Lovely War!, which succeeded in creating a musical denunciation of the First World War using original soldiers' songs from the trenches.
Two generations later, we stand on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of war on 4th August 1914. Given the symbolic importance of round number anniversaries, and still more of centenaries, preparations are under way to commemorate (“celebrate” is perhaps hardly the word) the war. In Britain and France, budgets of tens of millions (euros or sterling) have been set aside; in Germany, for obvious reasons, preparations are more discreet and have no official government benediction.4
“He who calls the piper pays the tune”, so what are the ruling classes getting for the tens of millions they have budgeted to “commemorate the war”?
Look at the websites of the organisations responsible for the commemoration (in France, a special body set up by the government; in Britain – appropriately – the Imperial War Museum) and the answer seems clear enough: they are buying one of history's most expensive smokescreens. In Britain, the Imperial War Museum is devoting itself to bringing together the stories of individuals who lived during the war and turning them into podcasts.5 The Centenary Project's website (1914.org) offers such crucial events as the Museum display of “JRR Tolkien's First World War revolver” (we're not joking – presumably the aim is to cash in on the success of the Lord of the Rings movies); the commemoration of a Surrey war playwright, the London Transport Museum collecting World War I bus stories (seriously!); Nottingham City and County's “major program of events and activities (...) will highlight how the conflict was a catalyst for huge social and economic change in the communities of Nottinghamshire”. The BBC have produced a “groundbreaking” documentary: “The First World War from above” – photos and film footage taken from aircraft and observation balloons. The pacifists will get a look-in with commemorations of conscientious objectors. In short, we are going to be drowned in an ocean of detail, and even of trivia. According to the Imperial War Museum's Director-General “Our ambition is that a lot more people will understand that you can’t understand the world today unless you understand the causes, course and consequences of the First World War”6 and we would agree 100%. But the reality is that everything possible is being done – including by the honourable Director-General – to prevent us from understanding those causes and consequences.
In France, the centenary website carries the impeccably official “Report to the President on commemorating the Great War” dated September 20117 which begins with these words from General de Gaulle's speech at the 50th anniversary in 1964: “On 2nd August 1914, the day mobilisation was announced, the whole French people came to their feet as one. This had never been seen before. Every region, every district, every category, every family, every living being, suddenly found common cause. In an instant, political, social, religious quarrels that had divided the country, disappeared. From one end of the nation to the other, words, songs, tears, and above all the silence, expressed a single resolve”. And in the report itself we read that “While the Centenary will provoke amongst our contemporaries dread at the mass slaughter and the immense sacrifices that were accepted, it will also send a shiver through French society, reminding us of the unity and national cohesion that the French displayed in the face of the trial of World War I”. It seems unlikely then, that the French ruling class intends to tell us anything about the brutal police repression of workers' anti-war demonstrations during July 1914, or about the infamous “Carnet B” (the government's list of socialist and syndicalist anti-militarist militants to be rounded up and interned or sent to the front at the outbreak of war – the British had their own equivalents), and still less about the circumstances in which anti-war socialist leader Jean Jaurès was assassinated on the very eve of the conflict, or about the mutinies in the trenches8...
As ever the propagandists can count on the support of the learned gentlemen of Academe to provide them with themes and material for their talk-shows and TV programmes. We will take just one example which seems to us emblematic: Cambridge University historian Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, first published in 2012, published in paperback in 2013, and already translated into French (Les Somnambules) and German (Die Schlafwandler).9 Clark is an unashamed empiricist, And his Introduction sets out his intentions quite openly: “This book (...) is concerned less with why the war happened than with how it came about. Questions of why and how are logically inseparable, but they lead us in different directions. The question of how invites us to look closely at sequences of interactions that produced certain outcomes. By contrast, the question of why invites us to go in search of remote and categorical causes: imperialism, nationalism, armaments, alliances, high finance, ideas of national honour, the mechanics of mobilisation”. Missing from Clark's list of course is “capitalism”. Could capitalism as such generate war? Could war be not just “politics by other means” (to use von Clausewitz's famous expression), but the ultimate expression of the competition inherent in the capitalist mode of production? Oh no, no, no: perish the thought! Clark sets out then, to lay before us “the facts” on the road to war, and this he does with immense erudition and in enormous detail right down to the colour of the ostrich feathers on Archduke Franz Ferdinand's helmet on the day of his assassination (they were green). Had anyone bothered to note down the colour of his assassin Gavrilo Princip's underwear that day, it too would be in this book.
The book's length, its overwhelming mastery of detail, makes one huge omission all the more striking: despite devoting whole sections to “public opinion”, Clark has nothing whatever to say about the one part of “public opinion” that really mattered – the stand adopted by the organised working class. Clark cites extensively from newspapers like the Manchester Guardian, the Daily Mail, or Le Matin, and others long since deservedly forgotten, but not once does he cite Vorwärts or L'Humanité (the press respectively of the German and French Socialist Parties), nor La Vie Ouvrière, the quasi-official organ of the French syndicalist CGT,10 nor its Bataille Syndicaliste. These were not minor publications: Vorwärts was only one of the SPD's 91 dailies, with a total circulation of 1.5 million (by comparison, the Daily Mail claimed a circulation of 900,000),11 and the SPD itself was the largest political party in Germany. Clark mentions the SPD's 1905 Jena Congress and its refusal to call for a general strike in the event of war, but there is no mention of the anti-war resolutions adopted by the Socialist International's congresses at Stuttgart (1907) and Basel (1912). The only leader of the German SPD to merit a mention is Albert Südekum, a relatively insignificant figure on the right of the SPD who is given a walk-on part reassuring German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg on 28th July that the SPD will not oppose a “defensive” war.
On the struggle between left and right in the socialist and broader working class movement, there is silence. On the political combat of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, Domela Nieuwenhuis, John MacLean, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Pierre Monatte and many others, there is silence. On the assassination of Jean Jaurès there is silence, silence, silence...
Clearly, the proletarians cannot rely on bourgeois historiography truly to understand the causes and consequences of the Great War. Let us then turn instead to two outstanding militants of the working class: Rosa Luxemburg, arguably the finest theoretician of the German Social-Democracy, and Alfred Rosmer, a stalwart militant of the pre-war French CGT. In particular, we will draw here on Luxemburg's Crisis in the German Social-Democracy12 (better known as the “Junius Pamphlet”), and on Rosmer's Le mouvement ouvrier pendant la Première Guerre mondiale13 (The workers' movement during the First World War). The two works are very different: Luxemburg's pamphlet was written in 1916, in prison (no privileged access to libraries and government archives for her, and the power and clarity of her analysis is all the more impressive for that); the first volume14 of Rosmer's work, where he deals with the period leading up to war, was published in 1936, and is the fruit both of his painstaking dedication to historical truth and his passionate defence of internationalist principle.
Some might ask whether it really matters. It was all a long time ago, the world has changed, what can we really learn from these writings from the past?
We would answer that understanding World War I is vital for three reasons.
First, because World War I opened a new historical epoch: we are still living in a world shaped by the consequences of that war.
Second, because the underlying causes of the war are still very much present and operational: there is an all too striking parallel to be drawn between the rise of Germany as a new imperialist power prior to 1914, and the rise of China today.
Finally – and perhaps most importantly, because this is what the government propagandists and the historians really want to hide from us – because there is only one force that can put a stop to imperialist war: the world working class. As Rosmer says: “the governments know very well that they cannot undertake the dangerous adventure of war - this war above all - unless they have behind them the virtually unanimous support of public opinion, and above all of the working class; to get it, they must deceive, dupe, mislead, excite”.15 Luxemburg quotes “the well-known words of [German Chancellor] Bülow: 'They are trying to put off the war chiefly because they fear the Social-Democracy.'”; she also quotes from General Bernhardi's Vom Heutigen Krieg: “when great, compact masses once shake off their leaders (...) then the army becomes not only ineffectual against the enemy, it becomes a menace to itself and to its leaders. When the army bursts the bands of discipline, when it voluntarily interrupts the course of military operation, it creates problems that its leaders are unable to solve”. And Luxemburg continues: “capitalist politicians and military authorities alike believe war, with its modern mass armies, to be a dangerous game. And therein lay for the Social-Democracy the most effectual opportunity to prevent the rulers of the present day from precipitating war and to force them to end it as rapidly as possible. But the position of the Social-Democracy in this war cleared away all doubts, has torn down the dams that held back the storm-flood of militarism (...) And so the thousands of victims that have fallen for months on battlefields lie upon our conscience”.16
The outbreak of generalised, world wide imperialist war (we are not talking here about localised conflicts, even major ones like the Korean or Vietnam wars, but about mass mobilisation of the proletariat in the heart of capitalism) is determined by two opposing forces: the drive toward war, toward a new division of the world among the great imperialist powers, and the struggle to defend their own existence by the working masses who must provide both the cannon fodder and the industrial army without which modern war is impossible. The Crisis in the Social-Democracy, and especially in its most powerful fraction, the German Social-Democracy – a crisis systematically ignored by the tame historians of Academe – is thus the critical factor that made war possible in 1914.
We will look at this in more detail in a later article in this series, but here we propose to take up Luxemburg's analysis of the shifting imperialist rivalries and alliances that drove the great powers inexorably into the bloodbath of 1914.
“Two lines of development in recent history lead straight to the present war. One has its origin in the period when the so-called national states, i.e., the modern states, were first constituted, from the time of the Bismarckian war against France. The war of 1870, which, by the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, threw the French republic into the arms of Russia, split Europe into two opposing camps and opened up a period of insane competitive armament, first piled up the firebrands for the present world conflagration (...) Thus the war of 1870 brought in its wake the outward political grouping of Europe about the axes of the Franco-German antagonism, and established the rule of militarism in the lives of the European peoples. Historical development has given to this rule and to this grouping an entirely new content.
The second line that leads to the present world war, and which again brilliantly justifies Marx’s prophecy,17 has its origin in international occurrences that Marx did not live to see, in the imperialist development of the last twenty-five years”.18
The last 30 years of the 19th century thus saw a rapid expansion of capitalism throughout the world, but also the emergence of a new, dynamic, expanding and confident capitalism in the heart of Europe: the German Empire, which had been declared in Versailles in 1871 after France's defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, which Prussia entered as merely the most powerful of a multitude of German statelets and principalities, and emerged from as the dominant component of a new, united Germany. “It is obvious”, writes Luxemburg, “that this live, unhampered imperialism, coming upon the world stage at a time when the world was practically divided up, with gigantic appetites, soon became an irresponsible factor of general unrest”.19
By one of those quirks of history which allow us to symbolise a shift in the historical dynamic with a single date, the year 1898 witnessed three events which mark one such shift.
The first was the “Fashoda Incident”, a tense face-off between British and French troops for control of the Sudan. At the time, there seemed to be a real risk that France and Britain would go to war for the control of Egypt and the Suez Canal, and for dominance in Africa. Instead, the incident ended with an improvement in Franco-British relations which was formalised in the “Entente Cordiale” of 1904, and a growing tendency for Britain to back France against a Germany that both saw as a threat. The two “Moroccan crises” of 1905 and 191120 showed that henceforth Britain would block German ambitions in North Africa (though it was prepared to leave Germany some titbits: Portugal's colonial possessions).
The second event was Germany's seizure of the Chinese port of Tsingtao (today's Qingdao),21 which announced Germany's arrival on the imperialist stage as a power with world wide, not merely European aspirations – a Weltpolitik as it was called at the time in Germany.
Appropriately, 1898 also saw the death of Otto von Bismarck, the great Chancellor who had guided Germany through unification and rapid industrialisation. Bismarck had always opposed colonialism and naval construction, his main foreign policy concern being to avoid the emergence of anti-German alliances amongst other European powers jealous – or fearful – of Germany's rise. But by the turn of the century Germany had become a world class industrial power second only to the United States, with world class ambitions to match. Luxemburg quotes then Foreign Secretary von Bülow on 11th December 1899: “When the English speak of ‘a greater Britain’, when the French talk of ‘The New France’, when the Russians open up Asia for themselves, we too have a right to aspire to a greater Germany. If we do not create a navy sufficient to protect our trade, our natives in foreign lands, our missions and the safety of our shores, we are threatening the most vital interests of our nation. In the coming century the German people will be either the hammer or the anvil.” And she comments: “Strip this of its coastal defence ornamentation, and there remains the colossal program: greater Germany, as the hammer upon other nations”.
In the early 20th century, having a Weltpolitik meant having a world class navy. As Luxemburg points out very clearly, Germany had no immediate economic need for a navy: nobody planned to seize its possessions in China or Africa. A navy was above all a matter of prestige: to continue its expansion Germany had to be seen as a serious player, a power to be counted with, and for this a “first-class aggressive navy” was a prerequisite. In Luxemburg's unforgettable words, it was “a challenge not only to the German working class, but to other capitalist nations as well, a challenge directed to no one in particular, a mailed fist shaken in the face of the entire world...”.
The parallel between the rise of Germany at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, and that of China 100 years later, is obvious. Like Bismarck, Deng Xiaoping's foreign policy went to great lengths to avoid alarming both China's neighbours and the world hegemon, the United States. But with its rise to the status of second world economic power, China's prestige demands that it should be able, at a minimum, to control its maritime boundaries and protect its sea-lanes: hence its naval build-up, construction of submarines and an aircraft carrier, and recent declaration of an “Air Defence Identification Zone” covering the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.
The parallel between Germany in 1914 and China today is not of course an identity, for two reasons in particular: firstly, Germany in the early 20th century was not only the world's second industrial power after the United States, it was also in the forefront of technical progress and innovation (as can be judged, for example, by the numbers of German Nobel prize winners and German innovation in steel, electrical machinery, and chemical industries); secondly, Germany could project military power globally in a way that China cannot, at least not yet.
And just as the United States today is bound to meet China's threat to its own prestige and to the security of its allies (Japan, South Korea and the Philippines in particular), so Britain could only see Germany's naval build-up as a threat, and an existential threat at that, directed against the vital artery of Channel shipping and its own coastal defences.22
Whatever its naval ambitions, however, the natural direction for a land power like Germany to expand, was towards the East, and specifically towards the decaying Ottoman Empire; this was all the more true when its ambitions in Africa and the Western Mediterranean were blocked by the British and French. Money and militarism went hand in hand, as German capital poured into Turkey,23 fighting for elbow room with its French and British competitors. A large share of this German capital went to financing the Baghdad railway: this was in fact a network of lines intended to link Berlin to Constantinople and then on to the south of Anatolia, Syria, and Baghdad, but also to Palestine, the Hejaz and Mecca. In a day when troop movements depended on railways, this would make it possible for a Turkish army, equipped with German guns and trained by German instructors, to send troops by rail to threaten both Britain's oil refinery at Abadan (Persia, modern Iran),24 and British control of Egypt and the Suez Canal: here again was a direct German threat to Britain's vital strategic interests. During much of the 19th century, the main security threat to the British Empire had been Russian expansion into Central Asia, bringing it to the border of Persia and posing a menace to India; but Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905 had dampened its Eastern ambitions such that an Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907 had – at least for a time – resolved disputes between the two countries in Persia, Afghanistan and Tibet. Germany was now the rival to be opposed.
Germany's Eastern policy necessarily gave it a strategic interest in the Balkans, the Bosphorus, and the Dardanelles. The fact that the route of the Berlin-Constantinople railway was planned to run through Vienna and Belgrade made control over Serbia, or at least Serbian neutrality, a matter of great strategic importance to Germany. This in turn could only bring it into conflict with a country which in Bismarck's day had been a bastion of autocratic reaction and solidarity, and hence Prussia and Imperial Germany's firm ally: Russia.
Ever since the reign of Catherine the Great, Russia had established itself (in the 1770s) as the dominant power on the Black Sea coast, displacing the Ottomans. Russian industry and agriculture's increasingly important Black Sea trade depended on free passage through the Bosphorus straits controlled by Constantinople, and Russian ambition looked to the Dardanelles and control over maritime traffic between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean (Russian designs on the Dardanelles had already led to war with Britain and France in the Crimea in 1853). Luxemburg sums up the dynamics within Russian society driving its imperialist policies: “On the one hand, the traditional tendencies of a conquest-loving Czardom, ruling over a mighty nation whose population today consists of 172 millions of human beings, demand free access to the ocean, to the Pacific Ocean on the East, to the Mediterranean on the South, for industrial as well as for strategic reasons. On the other hand, the very existence of absolutism, and the necessity of holding a respected place in the world-political field, and finally the need of financial credit in foreign countries without which Czarism cannot exist, all play their important part (…) But modern capitalist interests are becoming more and more a factor in the imperialist aims of the Czarist nation. Russian capitalism, still in its earliest youth, cannot hope to perfect its development under an absolutist regime. On the whole it has advanced little beyond the primitive stage of home industry. But it sees a gigantic future before its eyes in the exploitation of the nation’s natural resources (...) It is this hope, and the appetite for foreign markets that will mean increased capitalistic development even at the present time, that has filled the Russian bourgeoisie with imperialistic desires and led them to eagerly voice their demands in the coming division of the world’s resources”.25 Rivalry between Germany and Russia over control of the Bosphorus thus inevitably found its nexus in the Balkans, where the rise of nationalist ideology characteristic of developing capitalism, had created a situation of permanent tension and intermittent bloody warfare between the three new states broken off from the decaying Ottoman Empire: Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. These three countries fought a First Balkan War as allies against the Ottomans, then a Second Balkan War among themselves to re-divide the plunder from the First, especially in Macedonia and Albania.26
The rise of aggressive new nation states in the Balkans could hardly be a matter of indifference to the region's other decaying dynastic empire: Austria-Hungary. “Not the political expression of a capitalist state, but a loose syndicate of a few parasitic cliques, striving to grasp everything within reach, utilizing the political powers of the nation so long as their weakened edifice still stands”,27 Austria-Hungary was under constant threat from the ambitious new nations around it, all of which shared ethic populations with parts of the Empire: hence Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was part of a constant concern to prevent Serbia from gaining access to the Mediterranean.
By 1914, the situation in Europe had developed into a lethal Rubik's cube, its different pieces so interlocked that moving one must necessarily displace all the others.
Does this mean that the ruling classes, the governments, did not know what they were doing? That – as the title of Christopher Clark's book The Sleepwalkers implies – they somehow walked into war by accident, that World War I was just some terrible mistake?
Not a bit of it. Certainly, the historical forces that Luxemburg describes, in what is probably the most profound analysis of the outbreak of war ever written, held society in their grip: in this sense the war was the inevitable result of interlocking imperialist rivalries. But historical situations call forth the men to match them, and the governments that took Europe, and the world, into war not only knew very well what they were doing, they did it deliberately. The years from the turn of the century to the outbreak of war had been marked by repeated war scares, each one more serious than the last: the Tangier Crisis in 1905, the Agadir Incident in 1911, the First and Second Balkan Wars. Each of these incidents brought the pro-war faction in each ruling class more to the fore, heightened the sense that war was anyway inevitable. The result was an insane arms race: German launched its naval construction programme and Britain followed suit; France increased the length of military service to three years; huge French loans financed the modernisation of Russian railways designed to carry troops to the Western Front, as well as the modernisation of Serbia's small but effective army. All the continental powers increased the number of men under arms.
Convinced as they increasingly were that war was inevitable, the question for the governments of Europe became simply a matter of “when?”. When would each nation's military preparedness be at its height compared to that of its rivals? Because this moment would be the “right” moment for war.
If Luxemburg saw a rising Germany as the new “irresponsible element” in the European situation, does this mean that the powers of the Triple Entente (Britain, France, Russia) were the innocent victims of German expansionist aggression? This is the thesis of certain “revisionist” historians today: not only that the struggle against German expansionism was justified in 1914, but that in essence 1914 is nothing but a precursor of the “good war” in 1939. This is undoubtedly the case, but the Triple Entente were anything but innocent victims and the idea that Germany was uniquely “expansionist” and “aggressive” is laughable if we compare the size of Britain's empire – the result of British expansionist aggression – with that of Germany: somehow this never seems to cross the minds of Britain's tame historians.28
In fact, the Triple Entente (Britain, Russia, France) had been preparing for years a policy of encirclement of Germany (just as the US developed a policy of encircling the USSR during the Cold War and is trying to do the same with China today). Rosmer demonstrates this with inexorable clarity, on the basis of the secret diplomatic correspondence among the Belgian ambassadors in the different European capitals.29
In May 1907, the ambassador in London writes that “It is obvious that official Britain is pursuing an underhand and hostile policy which tends towards the isolation of Germany, and that King Edward [ie Edward VII] has unhesitatingly put his own personal influence into the balance in favour of this idea”.30 In February 1909, we hear from the ambassador in Berlin: “The King of England asserts that the preservation of peace has always been his goal; he has repeated this over and over since he began his successful campaign to isolate Germany; but one cannot help remarking that world peace has never been in greater danger than since the King of England set about defending it”.31 From Berlin again, in April 1913 we read: “...the arrogance and contempt with which [the Serbs] receive the protests of the government in Vienna can only be explained by the support they expect from St Petersburg. The Serbian chargé d'affaires said here recently that his government would never have taken such risks, taking no account of Austria's threats, if it had not been encouraged by the Russian ambassador Mr Hartwig...”.32
In France, the conscious development of an aggressive chauvinist policy was perfectly clear to the Belgian ambassador in Paris (January 1914): “I have already had the honour to inform you that it is Messrs Poincaré, Delcassé, Millerand and their friends who have invented and put into practice the nationalist, jingoistic and chauvinist policy whose rebirth we are seeing today (…) I see here the greatest danger for European peace (…) because the attitude adopted by the Barthou government is, in my view, the determining cause of the increasing militarist tendencies in Germany”.33
The re-introduction by France of the three year military service was not a policy of defence, but a deliberate preparation for war. Here is the ambassador in Paris again (June 1913): “The cost of the new law will weigh so heavily on the population, the resulting expenses will be so exorbitant, that the country will soon protest, and France will be faced with the dilemma: either a climb-down which it could not tolerate or war in the short term”.34
Two factors entered into the calculations of statesmen and politicians in the years leading to war: the first was their estimation of their own and their adversaries' military preparedness, but the second – equally important, even in autocratic Tsarist Russia – was the need to appear to the world and their own populations, especially the workers, as the injured party, acting solely in self-defence. All the powers wanted to enter a war that had been started by someone else: “The game consisted in leading one's adversary into committing an act which could be used against him, or making use of a decision he had already taken”.35
The assassination of Franz Ferdinand which provided the spark that set off the war was hardly the work of an isolated individual: Gavrilo Princip fired the fatal shot, but he was only one of a group of assassins, themselves organised and armed by one of the networks organised by the ultra-nationalist Serbian groups “Black Hand” and Narodna Odbrana (“National Defence”), which formed almost a state within a state and whose activities were undoubtedly known to the Serbian government and in particular its Prime Minister Nicolas Pasič. Relations between the Serbian and Russian governments were extremely close, and it is certain that the Serbs would not have undertaken such a provocation had they not been assured of Russian support against an Austro-Hungarian reaction.
For the Austro-Hungarian government, the assassination seemed a chance too good to miss, to bring Serbia to heel.36 The police investigation had little difficulty pointing the finger at Serbia, and the Austrians counted on the shock provoked among Europe's ruling classes to gain support, or at least neutrality, when they attacked Serbia. In effect, Austria-Hungary had no choice but to attack, or humiliate Serbia: anything less would have been a devastating blow to its prestige and influence in the critical region of the Balkans, leaving it completely in the hands of its Russian rival.
The French government saw a “Balkan war” as the ideal scenario for their attack on Germany: if Germany could be forced into war in defence of Austria-Hungary, and Russia came to the defence of Serbia, then French mobilisation could be presented as a precautionary measure against the threat of German attack. Moreover, it was extremely unlikely that Italy, nominally an ally of Germany but with its own interests in the Balkans, would go to war to defend Austria-Hungary's position in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Given the alliance ranged against it, Germany found itself in a position of weakness with Austria-Hungary, that “organised heap of decay” to use Luxemburg's words, as its only ally. The war preparations in France and Russia, the development of their Entente with Britain, led German strategists increasingly to the conclusion that war would have to be fought sooner rather than later, before their adversaries were fully prepared. Hence the remark of the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg that “Should the conflict [between Serbia and Austria-Hungary] spread, then it is absolutely necessary that Russia should bear the responsibility”.37
The British population was hardly likely to go to war to defend Serbia, or even France. Britain too needed “a pretext to overcome the resistance of a large part of its public opinion. Germany provided an excellent one, by launching its armies through Belgium”.38 Rosmer quotes Viscount Esher's Tragedy of Lord Kitchener to the effect that “The German invasion of Belgium, although it made no vital difference to the resolve already taken by [Prime Minister] Asquith and [Foreign Secretary] Grey, preserved the unity of the nation, if not the integrity of the government”. 39 In reality, British plans for an attack on Germany, prepared in concert with the French military for several years, had long intended to violate Belgian neutrality...
All the belligerent nations' governments thus had to deceive their “public opinion” into thinking that the war which they had prepared and deliberately sought for years, had been forced unwillingly upon them. The critical element in this “public opinion” was the organised working class, with its trade unions and Socialist Parties, which for years had stated clearly its opposition to war. The single most important factor that opened the road to war was therefore the betrayal of the Social-Democracy, and its support for what the ruling class falsely portrayed as a “defensive war”.
The underlying causes of this monstrous betrayal of Social-Democracy's most elementary internationalist duty will be the object of a future article. Suffice it to say here that the French bourgeoisie's claim today that the “political, social, religious quarrels that had divided the country, disappeared....in an instant” is a bare-faced lie. On the contrary, Rosmer's account of the days before the outbreak of war is one of constant working-class demonstrations against war, brutally repressed by the police. On 27th July, the CGT called a demonstration, and “from 9 o'clock to midnight (…) an enormous crowd flowed without a break along the Boulevards. Huge numbers of police were mobilised (…) But the workers who came to the city centre from the outskirts were so numerous that the police tactics [of splitting up the workers] led to an unexpected result: there were soon as many demonstrations as there were streets. Police violence and brutality failed to dampen the crowds' combativeness; throughout the evening, the cry of 'Down with war' resounded from Opéra to the Place de la République”.40 The demonstrations continued the following day, and spread to the major towns in the provinces.
The French bourgeoisie was faced with another problem: the attitude of the socialist leader Jean Jaurès. Jaurès was a reformist, at a moment in history when reformism became an untenable middle ground between bourgeoisie and proletariat, but he was profoundly attached to the defense of the working-class (and his reputation and influence among the workers was for this reason very great), and passionately opposed to war. On 25th July, when Serbia's rejection of the Austro-Hungarian ultimatum was reported in the press, Jaurès was due to speak at an electoral meeting in Vaise, near Lyon: his speech was devoted not to the election, but to the terrible danger of war. “Never in forty years has Europe been confronted with a more threatening and tragic situation (…) A terrible danger menaces peace, and the lives of men, against which the proletarians of Europe must make the supreme effort of solidarity of which they are capable”.41
At first, Jaurès believed the French government's fraudulent assurances that it was working for peace, but by the 31st July he was disillusioned and in Parliament was once again calling on the workers to resist war to the utmost. Rosmer takes up the story: “the rumour spread that the article he was shortly to write for the Saturday issue of L'Humanité would be a new 'J'accuse!'42 denouncing the intrigues and lies that had brought the world to the brink of war. In the evening, (…) he led a delegation of the Socialist [parliamentary] group to the Quai d'Orsay43. [Foreign Minister] Viviani was absent, and the delegation was received by under-secretary of state Abel Ferry. After hearing Jaurès out, he asked what the socialists intended to do in the situation. 'Continue our campaign against the war' replied Jaurès. To which Ferry answered: 'That you will never dare, for you will be killed on the next street corner'.44 Two hours later, Jaurès was about to return to his office at L'Humanité to write the dreaded article, when he was shot down by the assassin Raoul Villain; two revolver shots at point-blank range caused his instant death”.45
Decidedly, the French ruling class was leaving nothing to chance in order to ensure “unity and national cohesion”!
So when the wreaths are laid, when the great and the good bow their heads in sorrow during the commemorations that our rulers are buying at the cost of millions of pounds or euros, when the trumpets sound the last call at the end of these solemn ceremonies, when the documentaries unfold on the TV screens and the learned historians discourse on all the reasons for war except the one that really matters, and on all the factors that might have prevented the war except the one that could really have weighed in the balance, then let the proletarians of the world remember.
Let them remember that World War I was caused not by historical happenstance, but by the inexorable workings of capitalism and imperialism, that the world war opened a new period in history, an “epoch of wars and revolutions” as the Communist International called it. This period is still with us today, and the same forces that drove the world to war in 1914 are responsible today for the endless massacres in the Middle East and Africa, for the ever more dangerous tensions between China and its neighbours in the South China Sea.
Let them remember that wars cannot be fought without workers, as cannon fodder and to man the factories. Let them remember that the ruling class must have national unity for war, and that they will stop at nothing to get it, from police repression to bloody assassination.
Let them remember that it is those very same “Socialist” parties that today stand to the forefront of every pacifist campaign and humanitarian protest, who betrayed their forebears' trust in 1914, leaving them unorganised and defenceless to face capitalism's machinery of war.
And finally, let them remember that, if the ruling class had to make such an effort to neutralise the working class in 1914 it is because only the world proletariat can stand as an effective barrier to imperialist war. Only the world proletariat bears within itself the hope of overthrowing capitalism, and the danger of war, once and for all.
One hundred years ago, humanity stood before a dilemma whose solution lies in the hands of the proletariat alone: socialism or barbarism. That dilemma is still with us today.
Jens
1Ironically perhaps, the film's title was taken from a pre-war book by British economist Norman Angell, which argued that war between the developed capitalist powers had become impossible because their economies were too closely integrated and interdependent – precisely the same kind of argument that we hear today in relation to China and the United States.
2Needless to say, like all the other works we have mentioned, All quiet on the Western Front was banned by the Nazis after 1933. It was also banned from 1930 to 1941 by the Australian film censorship.
3In striking contrast, Britain's best-known patriotic war poet Rupert Brooke never actually saw combat, falling sick and dying en route for the assault on Gallipoli.
4 This has been the object of some polemic in the German press.
5A worthy project in its own right, no doubt, but not one that will contribute much to an understanding of why war broke out.
6 www.iwm.org.uk/centenary [114]
7 “Commémorer la Grande Guerre (2014-2020) : propositions pour un centenaire international” by Joseph Zimet of the “Direction de la mémoire, du patrimoine et des archives”.
8It is striking that the great majority of executions for military disobedience in the French army took place during the first months of war, which suggests a lack of enthusiasm which had to be crushed from the outset. See the report presented to the Minister for War Veterans Kader Arif in October 2013: https://centenaire.org/sites/default/files/references-files/rapport_fusi... [115]
9It is worth mentioning here that the title The Sleepwalkers is taken from Hermann Broch’s trilogy of the same name, written in 1932. Broch was born 1886 in Vienna to a Jewish family, but converted in 1909 to Roman Catholicism. In 1938, after the annexation of Austria, he was arrested by the Gestapo. However, with the help of friends (including James Joyce, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann) he was allowed to emigrate to the US where he lived until his death in 1951. Die Schlafwandler is the story of three individuals from 1888, 1905 and 1918 respectively, and examines the questions of the decomposition of values and subordination of morality to the laws of profit.
10Confédération Générale du Travail. See "Anarcho-syndicalism faces a change in epoch: the CGT up to 1914 [116]", in International Review n°120.
11 See Hew Strachan, The First World War, volume 1
12 See The Junius Pamphlet [117] on marxists.org
13 Editions d'Avron, May 1993.
14 The second volume was published after World War II and is much shorter, since Rosmer had to flee Paris during the Nazi occupation, and his archives were seized and destroyed during the war.
15 Rosmer, p84
16 Junius, Chapter 6
17Luxemburg quotes here a letter from Marx to the Braunschweiger Ausschuss: “He who is not deafened by the momentary clamour, and is not interested in deafening the German people, must see that the war of 1870 carries with it, of necessity, a war between Germany and Russia, just as the war of 1866 bore the war of 1870. 1 say of necessity, unless the unlikely should happen, unless a revolution breaks out in Russia before that time If this does not occur, a war between Germany and Russia may even now be regarded as un fait accompli. It depends entirely upon the attitude of the German victor to determine whether this war has been useful or dangerous. If they take Alsace-Lorraine, then France with Russia will arm against Germany. It is superfluous to point out the disastrous consequences”.
18 Junius, Chapter 3 [118]
19Idem.
20The first Moroccan crisis in 1905 was provoked by the Kaiser's visit to Tangier, supposedly to support Moroccan sovereignty but in reality in an attempt to counter French influence in the country. Military tension was extreme: the French cancelled all military leave and advanced troops to the border with Germany, while Germany began to call up reservists. In the end the French backed down and accepted the German proposal of a multi-national conference, held in Algeciras in 1906. Here, the Germans had a shock when they found themselves abandoned by all the participating European powers, especially the British, and could only get the support of Austria-Hungary. The second Moroccan crisis came in 1911 when a rebellion against the Sultan Abdelhafid gave France the pretext for dispatching troops to the country under the pretext of protecting European citizens. The Germans seized on the same pretext to send the gunboat Panther to the Atlantic port of Agadir. This the British saw as a prelude to the installation of a German naval facility on the Atlantic coast directly threatening Gibraltar. Lloyd George's Mansion House speech (cited by Rosmer) was a barely veiled declaration that Britain would go to war if Germany did not back down. In the end, Germany recognised the French “protectorate” in Morocco, in exchange for some swampland at the mouth of the Congo.
21The Germans established the brewery which now produces “Tsingtao” beer.
22The idea put forward by Clark, but also by Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War, that Germany remained far behind Britain in the naval arms race, is absurd: Britain's navy, unlike Germany's, had to protect worldwide shipping, and it is hard to see how Britain could not feel threatened by the construction of at least a major naval force less than 500 miles from its capital city and closer still to its coast.
23Although, in European texts of the period, Turkey is used interchangeably with the term “Ottoman Empire”, it is important to remember that the latter is more accurate: at the beginning of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire covered not only Turkey but also present-day Libya, Syria, Iraq, the Arabian peninsula, a large part of Greece and the Balkans.
24This refinery was important above all for military reasons: Britain's fleet had been converted from coal-fired to oil-fired engines, and while Britain had coal in abundance it had no oil. The search for oil in Persia was prompted above all by the Royal Navy's need to secure a constant oil supply for the fleet.
25Junius, Chapter 4
26The First Balkan War broke out in 1912, when the members of the Balkan League (Serbia, Bulgaria and Montenegro), with the tacit support of Russia, attacked the Ottoman Empire. Although not part of the Balkan League, Greece also joined in the fighting, at the end of which the Ottoman armies had been largely defeated: the Ottoman Empire lost most of its European territory for the first time in 500 years. The Second Balkan War broke out immediately afterwards, in 1913, when Bulgaria attacked Serbia which had occupied, in connivance with Greece, a large part of Macedonia that it had originally promised to Bulgaria.
27Junius
29These documents were seized by the Germans, who published substantial extracts after the war. As Rosmer points out, “The evaluations by Belgium's representatives in Berlin, Paris and London have a special value. Belgium is neutral, and they can thus be more open-minded in evaluating events; moreover they are well aware that should war break out between the two great opposing blocs, their little country will find itself in serious danger, in particular of serving as a battle-field” (ibid, p68).
30Ibid, p69.
31Ibid, p70.
32Ibid, p71.
33Ibid, p73.
34Ibid, p72.
35Rosmer, p87.
36Indeed, the government had already attempted to bring pressure to bear by leaking fake documents purporting to reveal a Serbian plot against Bosnia-Herzegovina to the historian Heinrich Friedjung (cf Clark, loc 1890).
37Quoted by Rosmer, p87, from German documents published after the war.
38Rosmer, p87.
40Rosmer, p102.
41Ibid, p84.
42A reference to Emile Zola's devastating attack on the government during the Dreyfus affair
43The Foreign Ministry
44Rosmer, p91. The conversation is reported in Charles Rappoport's biography of Jaurès, and confirmed in Abel Ferry's own papers. Cf Alexandre Croix, Jaurès et ses détracteurs, Editions Spartacus, p313.
45Jaurès was shot while eating at the Café du Croissant, opposite the offices of L'Humanité. Raoul Villain was in some ways similar to Gavrilo Princip: unstable, emotionally fragile, given to political or religious mysticism – in short, precisely the kind of character that the secret services use as expendable provocateurs. After the murder, Villain was arrested and spent the war in the security, if not the comfort, of prison. At his trial, he was acquitted and Jaurès' widow was ordered to pay costs.
Of all the parties federated in the 2nd International, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) was by far the most powerful. In 1914, the SPD had more than one million members, and had won more than four million votes in the 1912 parliamentary elections:1 it was, in fact, the only mass party in Germany and the biggest single party in the Reichstag – although under the autocratic imperial regime of Kaiser Wilhelm II it had no chance of actually forming a government.
For the other parties of the 2nd International, the SPD was the party of reference. Karl Kautsky,2 editor of the Party's theoretical journal Neue Zeit, was the acknowledged "pope of marxism", the International's leading theoretician; at the 1900 Congress of the International, Kautsky had drawn up the resolution condemning the participation of the French socialist Millerand in a bourgeois government, and the SPD's Dresden Congress of 1903, under the leadership of its chairman August Bebel,3 had roundly condemned the revisionist theories of Eduard Bernstein and reasserted the SPD's revolutionary goals; Lenin had praised the SPD's "party spirit" and its immunity to the petty personal animosities that had led the Mensheviks to split the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) after its 1903 congress.4 To cap it all, the SPD's theoretical and organisational supremacy was clearly crowned by success on the ground: no other party of the International could claim anything close to the SPD's electoral success, and when it came to trade union organisation only the British could rival the Germans in the numbers and discipline of their members.
“In the Second International the German ‘decisive force’ played the determining role. At the [international] congresses, in the meetings of the international socialist bureaux, all awaited the opinion of the Germans. Especially in the questions of the struggle against militarism and war, German Social Democracy always took the lead. ‘For us Germans that is unacceptable’ regularly sufficed to decide the orientation of the Second International, which blindly bestowed its confidence upon the admired leadership of the mighty German Social Democracy: the pride of every socialist and the terror of the ruling classes everywhere”.5
It was obvious therefore, as the storm clouds of war began to gather in the month of July 1914, that the attitude of the German Social Democracy would be critical in deciding the outcome. The German workers – the great masses organised in the Party and the unions, which the workers had fought so hard to build – were placed in a position where they alone could tip the scales: towards resistance, the fighting defence of proletarian internationalism, or towards class collaboration and betrayal, and years of the bloodiest slaughter humanity had ever witnessed.
“And what did we in Germany experience when the great historical test came? The most precipitous fall, the most violent collapse. Nowhere has the organization of the proletariat been yoked so completely to the service of imperialism. Nowhere is the state of siege borne so docilely. Nowhere is the press so hobbled, public opinion so stifled, the economic and political class struggle of the working class so totally surrendered as in Germany.”6
The betrayal of German Social Democracy came as such a shock to revolutionaries that when Lenin read in Vorwärts7 that the SPD parliamentary fraction had voted in favour of war credits, he at first took the issue for a fake, black propaganda put out by the Imperial government. How was such a disaster possible? How, in a matter of days, could the proud and powerful SPD renege on its most solemn promises, transforming itself overnight from the jewel in the crown of the workers’ International to the most powerful weapon in the armoury of the war-mongering ruling class?
As we try, in this article, to answer this question, it might seem paradoxical to concentrate in large part on the writings and actions of a relatively small number of individuals: the SPD and the unions were after all mass organisations, capable of mobilising hundreds of thousands of workers. It is justified however, because individuals like Karl Kautsky or Rosa Luxemburg represented, and were seen at the time to represent, definite tendencies within the Party; in this sense, their writings gave voice to political tendencies with which masses of militants and workers – who remain anonymous to history – identified. It is also necessary to take account of these leading figures’ political biographies if we are to understand the weight they had in the Party. August Bebel, chairman of the SPD from 1892 until his death in 1913, was one of the Party's founders and had been imprisoned, along with his fellow Reichstag deputy Wilhelm Liebknecht, for their refusal to support Prussia's war against France in 1870. Kautsky and Bernstein had both been forced into exile in London by Bismarck's anti-socialist laws, where they had worked under Engels’ direction. The prestige, and the moral authority, that this gave them in the Party was immense. Even Georg von Vollmar, one of the leaders of South German reformism, first came to prominence as a left-winger and a vigorous and talented underground organiser, suffering repeated prison sentences as a result.
This then was a generation which had come to political activity through the years of the Franco-Prussian war and the Paris Commune, through the years of clandestine propaganda and agitation in the teeth of Bismarck's anti-socialist laws (1878-1890). Of a very different stamp were men like Gustav Noske, Friedrich Ebert, or Philipp Scheidemann, all members of the right wing in the parliamentary fraction of the SPD who voted for war credits in 1914 and played a key role in the suppression of the 1919 German Revolution – and in the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht by the Freikorps. Rather like Stalin, these were men of the machine, working behind the scenes rather than actively participating in public debate, the representatives of a Party which, as it grew, tended more and more to resemble and identify with the German state whose downfall was still its official goal.
The revolutionary left ranged against the growing tendency within the Party to make concessions to "practical politics" and was, strikingly, in large part both foreign and young (one notable exception being the old Franz Mehring). Apart from the Dutchman Anton Pannekoek, and Wilhelm Liebknecht's son Karl, men like Parvus, Radek, Jogiches, Marchlewski, all came from the Russian empire and were forged as militants under the harsh conditions of Tsarist oppression. And of course, the outstanding figure on the left was Rosa Luxemburg, an outsider in the German Party in every possible way: young, female, Polish, and Jewish, and – perhaps worst of all from the point of view of some of the German leadership – standing intellectually and theoretically head and shoulders above the rest of the Party.
The Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (SAP – German Workers’ Party), later to become the SPD, was founded in 1875 in Gotha, by the merger of two socialist parties: the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei (SDAP),8 led by Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, and the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADAV), originally established by Ferdinand Lassalle in 1863.
The new organisation thus sprang from two very different sources. The SDAP had only been in existence for six years; through Marx and Engels’ longstanding relationship with Liebknecht – although Liebknecht was no theoretician he played an important role in introducing men like Bebel and Kautsky to Marx's ideas – they had played an important part in the SDAP's development. In 1870, the SDAP adopted a resolutely internationalist line against Prussia's war of aggression on France: at Chemnitz, a meeting of delegates, representing 50,000 Saxon workmen, adopted unanimously a resolution to this effect: “In the name of German Democracy, and especially of the workmen forming the Democratic Socialist Party, we declare the present war to be exclusively dynastic... We are happy to grasp the fraternal hand stretched out to us by the workmen of France... Mindful of the watchword of the International Working Men’s Association: Proletarians of all countries, unite, we shall never forget that the workmen of all countries are our friends and the despots of all countries our enemies.”.9
The ADAV, by contrast, had remained faithful to its founder Lassalle's opposition to strike action, and his belief that the workers' cause could be advanced by an alliance with the Bismarckian state, and more generally through the recipes of “state socialism”.10 During the Franco-Prussian war, the ADAV remained pro-German, its then President, Mende, even pushing for French war reparations to be used to set up state workshops for German workers.11
Marx and Engels were deeply critical of the merger, although Marx's marginal notes on the programme was not made public until much later,12 Marx considering that “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes”.13 Although they refrained from open criticism of the new Party, they made their views clear to its leading members, and in writing to Bebel, Engels highlighted two weaknesses which, untreated, were to sow the seeds of the 1914 betrayal:
“the principle that the workers’ movement is an international one is, to all intents and purposes, utterly denied in respect of the present, and this by men who, for the space of five years and under the most difficult conditions, upheld that principle in the most laudable manner. The German workers’ position in the van of the European movement rests essentially on their genuinely international attitude during the war; no other proletariat would have behaved so well. And now this principle is to be denied by them at a moment when, everywhere abroad, workers are stressing it all the more by reason of the efforts made by governments to suppress every attempt at its practical application in an organisation! (...)
as its one and only social demand, the programme puts forward — Lassallean state aid in its starkest form, as stolen by Lassalle from Buchez. And this, after Bracke has so ably demonstrated the sheer futility of that demand; after almost all if not all, of our party speakers have, in their struggle against the Lassalleans, been compelled to make a stand against this “state aid"! Our party could hardly demean itself further. Internationalism sunk to the level of Amand Goegg, socialism to that of the bourgeois republican Buchez, who confronted the socialists with this demand in order to supplant them!”14
These fault-lines in practical politics were hardly surprising given the new Party's eclectic theoretical underpinnings. When Kautsky founded the Neue Zeit in 1883, he intended it to be “published as a Marxist organ which had set itself the task of raising the low level of theory in German social democracy, destroying eclectic socialism, and achieving victory for the Marxist programme”; he wrote to Engels: “I may be successful in my attempts to make the Neue Zeit the rallying point of the Marxist school. I am winning the collaboration of many Marxist forces, as I am getting rid of eclecticism and Rodbertussianism”.15
From the outset, including during its underground existence, the SAP was thus a battleground of conflicting theoretical tendencies – as is normal in any healthy proletarian organisation. But as Lenin once remarked “Without revolutionary theory, no revolutionary practice”, and these different tendencies, or visions, of the organisation and of society, were to have very practical consequences.
By the mid 1870s the SAP had some 32,000 members in more than 250 districts, and in 1878 the Chancellor Bismarck imposed an “anti-socialist” law with a view to hamstringing the Party's activity. Scores of papers, meetings, organisations were banned, and thousands of militants were sent to jail or fined. But the socialists' determination remained unbroken by the anti-socialist law. Indeed, the SAP's activity thrived under the conditions of semi-illegality. Being outlawed compelled the party and its members to organise themselves outside the channels of bourgeois democracy – even the limited democracy of Bismarckian Germany – and to develop a strong solidarity against police repression and permanent state surveillance. Despite constant police harassment, the party managed to maintain its press and expand its circulation, to the point where the satirical paper Der wahre Jacob (founded in 1884) alone had 100,000 subscribers.
Despite the anti-socialist laws, one public activity remained open to the SAP: it was still possible for SAP candidates to compete in elections to the Reichstag as unaffiliated independents. Hence a large part of the Party's propaganda centred around electoral campaigns at national and local levels, and this may account both for the principle that the parliamentary fraction should remain strictly subordinated to the Party Congresses and the Party's central organ (the Vorstand),16 and for the increasing weight of the parliamentary fraction with the Party as its electoral success grew.
Bismarck's policy was a classic "carrot and stick". While the workers were prevented from organising themselves, the Imperial state tried to cut the ground from under the feet of the socialists by introducing social insurance payments, in the case of unemployment, sickness or retirement, from 1883 onwards – a full twenty years before the French law on workers' and peasants' pensions (1910) and the British National Insurance Act (1911). By the end of the 1880s some 4.7 million workers received payments from the social security.
Neither the anti-socialist laws nor the introduction of social security achieved the desired effect of reducing support for Social-Democracy. On the contrary, between 1881 and 1890 the SAP's electoral score rose from 312,000 to 1,427,000 votes, making the SAP the biggest party in Germany. By 1890 its membership had risen to 75,000 and some 300,000 workers had joined trade unions. In 1890 Bismarck was dropped from the government by the new Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the anti-socialist laws were allowed to lapse.
Emerging from clandestinity, the SAP was refounded as a legal organisation, the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD – German Social-Democratic Party), at its Erfurt Congress in 1891. The Congress adopted a new programme, and although Engels considered the Erfurt programme an improvement on its Gotha predecessor he nonetheless felt it necessary to attack the tendency towards opportunism: “somehow or other, [absolutism] has to be attacked. How necessary this is is shown precisely at the present time by opportunism, which is gaining ground in a large section of the SocialDemocratic press. Fearing a renewal of the Anti-Socialist Law, or recalling all manner of over-hasty pronouncements made during the reign of that law, they now want the party to find the present legal order in Germany adequate for putting through all party demands by peaceful means (…) In the long run such a policy can only lead one’s own party astray. They push general, abstract political questions into the foreground, thereby concealing the immediate concrete questions, which at the moment of the first great events, the first political crisis automatically pose themselves. What can result from this except that at the decisive moment the party suddenly proves helpless and that uncertainty and discord on the most decisive issues reign in it because these issues have never been discussed? (…) This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences, this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present, may be ‘honestly’ meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and ‘honest’ opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all!”.17
Engels was remarkably prescient here: public declarations of revolutionary intent were to prove impotent without any concrete plan of action to back them up. In 1914, the party did indeed find itself “suddenly helpless”.
Nonetheless, the SPD's official slogan remained "Not a man nor a penny for this system", and its Reichstag deputies systematically refused all support for government budgets, especially for military spending. Such principled opposition to any class compromise remained a possibility within the parliamentary system because the Reichstag had no real power. The government of the Wilhelmine German Empire was autocratic, not unlike that of Tsarist Russia,18 and the SPD's systematic opposition therefore had no immediate practical consequences.
In South Germany, things were different. Here, the local SPD under the leadership of men like Vollmar, claimed that "special conditions" applied, and that unless the SPD was able to vote meaningfully in the Länder legislatures, and unless it had an agrarian policy able to appeal to the small peasantry, then it would be doomed to impotence and irrelevance. This tendency appeared as soon as the Party was legalised, at the 1891 Erfurt Congress, and as early as 1891 the SPD deputies in the provincial parliaments of Württemberg, Bavaria and Baden were voting in favour of government budgets.19
The Party's reaction to this direct attack on its policy, as expressed in repeated Congress resolutions, was to sweep it under the carpet. An attempt by Vollmar to put forward a special agrarian programme was voted down by the 1894 Frankfurt Congress, yet the same congress also rejected a resolution banning any vote by any SPD deputy in favour of any government budget. As long as reformist policy could be limited to south German "exceptionalism" it could be tolerated.20
Soon, the experience of the working class with a dozen years of semi-illegality began to be undermined by the poison of democracy. By its very nature bourgeois democracy and individualism, which go hand in hand, undermines any attempt by the proletariat to develop a vision of itself as a historical class with its own perspective antagonistic to that of capitalist society. Democratic ideology constantly drives a wedge into workers' solidarity, because it splits up the working class into a mere mass of atomised citizens. At the same time, the party's electoral success, both in terms of votes and seats in parliament grew rapidly, while more and more workers organised in the Trades Unions and were able to improve their material conditions. The growing political strength of the SPD, and the industrial strength of the organised working class, gave birth to a new political current, which began to theorise the idea not only that it was possible to build socialism within capitalism, to work towards a gradual transition without the need of having to overthrow capitalism through a revolution, but that the SPD should have a specifically German expansionist foreign policy: this current crystallised in 1897 around the Sozialistische Monatshefte, a review outside SPD control, in articles by Max Schippel, Wolfgang Heine, and Heinrich Peus.21
This uncomfortable, but bearable, state of affairs was exploded in 1898 with the publication of Eduard Bernstein's Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (Preconditions of socialism and the tasks of Social-Democracy). Bernstein's pamphlet explained openly what he and others had been suggesting for some time: “Practically speaking, we are no more than a radical party; we have been doing no more than the bourgeois radicals do, with this difference that we hide it under a language out of all proportion to our acts and our capacities”.22 Bernstein's theoretical position attacked the very foundations of marxism in that he rejected the inevitability of capitalism's decline and final collapse. Basing himself on the booming prosperity of the 1890s, coupled with capitalism's rapid colonialist expansion across the planet, Bernstein argued that capitalism had overcome its tendency towards self-destructive crisis. In these conditions, the goal was nothing, the movement was everything, quantity was to prevail over quality, the antagonism between the State and the working class could supposedly be overcome.23 Bernstein proclaimed openly that the basic tenet of the Communist Manifesto, according to which workers have no fatherland, was “obsolete”. He called upon the German workers to give their support to the Kaiser's colonial policy in Africa and Asia.24
In reality, a whole period, that of the expansion and ascension of the capitalist system, was drawing to a close. For revolutionaries such periods of profound historical transformation always pose a major challenge since they must analyse the characteristics of the new period, and develop a theoretical framework for understanding the fundamental changes taking place, as well as adapting their programme if necessary, all the time continuing to defend the same revolutionary goal.
The rapid expansion of capitalism across the globe, its massive industrial development, the new pride of the ruling class and its imperial posture – all this made the revisionist current believe that capitalism would last forever, that socialism could be introduced from within capitalism, and that the capitalist state could be used in the interests of the working class. The illusion of a peaceful transition showed that the revisionists had in fact become prisoners of the past, unable to understand that a new historic period was on the horizon: the period of capitalism's decadence and of the violent explosion of its contradictions. Their inability to analyse the new historical situation and their theorisation of the “eternity” of the conditions of capitalism at the end of the 19th century also meant that the revisionists were unable to see that the old weapons of the struggle, parliamentarism and the trade union struggle, no longer worked. The fixation on parliamentary work as the axis of their activities, the orientation on struggling for reforms within the system, the illusion of a “crisis-free capitalism” and the possibility of introducing socialism peacefully within capitalism, meant that in effect large parts of the SPD leadership had identified with the system. The openly opportunist current in the party expressed a loss of confidence in the historical struggle of the proletariat. After years of defensive struggles for the “minimum” programme, bourgeois democratic ideology had penetrated the workers’ movement. This meant that the existence and the characteristics of social classes were put into question, an individualistic view tended to dominate and dissolve the classes in “the people”. Opportunism thus threw overboard the marxist method of analysing society in terms of class struggle and class contradictions; in fact opportunism meant the lack of any method, of any principles whatever and the lack of any theory.
The reaction of the Party leadership to Bernstein's text was to downplay its importance (Vorwärts welcomed it as a “stimulating contribution to debate”, declaring that all currents within the Party should be free to express their opinions), while regretting in private that such ideas should be expressed so openly. Ignaz Auer, the Party secretary, wrote to Bernstein: “My dear Ede, one does not formally make a decision to do the things you suggest, one doesn’t say such things, one simply does them”.25
Within the SPD Bernstein was opposed in the most determined manner by those forces who had not been accustomed to the long period of legality following the end of the anti-socialist laws. It is no coincidence that the clearest and most outspoken opponents to Bernstein’s current were militants of foreign origin, and specifically from the Russian Empire. The Russian born Parvus, who had moved to Germany in the 1890s and in 1898 was working as the editor of the SPD press in Dresden, the Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung26 launched a fiery attack on Bernstein’s ideas and was backed by the young revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg, who had moved to Germany in May 1898 and who had experienced repression in Poland. As soon as she settled in Germany, she started to spearhead the struggle against the revisionists with her text Reform or revolution written in 1898-99 (in which she exposed the method of Bernstein, refuted the idea of the establishment of socialism through social reforms, exposing the practice and theory of opportunism). In her reply to Bernstein, she underlined that the reformist trend had come into full swing since the abolition of the anti-socialist law and the possibility to work legally. Vollmar’s state socialism, the Bavarian budget approval, south-German agrarian socialism, Heine’s compensations proposals, Schippel’s position on customs and militia were elements in a rising opportunist practice. She underlined the common denominator of this current: hostility towards theory. “What distinguishes [all the opportunist tendencies in the party] on the surface? The dislike of ‘theory’, and this is natural since our theory, i.e. the bases of scientific socialism, sets our practical activity clear tasks and limits, both in relation to the goals to be attained as much as in regard to the means to be used and finally in the method of the struggle. Naturally those who only want to chase after practical achievements soon develop a desire to liberate themselves, i.e. to separate practice from theory’ to make themselves free of it.”27
The first task of revolutionaries was to defend the final goal. “the movement as such without any link to the final goal, the movement as a goal in itself is nothing, the final goal is what counts.”28
In a 1903 text Stagnation and progress of marxism, Luxemburg considers the theoretical inadequacy of the Social-Democracy in these terms: “The scrupulous endeavour to keep ‘within the bounds of Marxism’ may at times have been just as disastrous to the integrity of the thought process as has been the other extreme – the complete repudiation of the Marxist outlook, and the determination to manifest ‘independence of thought’ at all hazards”.
In attacking Bernstein, Luxemburg also demanded that the Party’s central press organ should defend the positions decided by Party congresses. When in March 1899 Vorwärts replied that Luxemburg’s critique of Bernstein’s position (in an article Eitle Hoffnungen – Vain hopes),was unjustified. Luxemburg countered that Vorwärts “is in the fortunate situation of never being in danger of having a mistaken opinion or changing its opinion, a sin which it likes to find in others, simply because it never has or defends an opinion”.29
She continued in the same vein: “There are two kinds of organic creatures: those with a spine and which can walk upright, sometimes even run; and there are others who have no spine and therefore can only creep and cobble to something.” To those who wanted the Party to drop any programmatic positions and political criteria, she replied at the 1899 Party conference in Hannover: “If this is to mean that the party – in the name of freedom of critique – should not be entitled to take up position and declare through a majority vote. We do not defend such a position, therefore we have to protest against this idea, because we are not a club for discussions, but a political fighting party, which must have certain fundamental views.”30
Between the determined left wing around Luxemburg, and the right defending Bernstein's ideas and revisionism in principles, lay a “swamp”, which Bebel described in the following terms at the 1903 Dresden Congress: “It is always the same old and eternal struggle between a left and a right, and in between the swamp. They are the elements who never know what they want or rather who never say what they want. They are the smart-alecks, who usually first listen to see who is saying what, what is being said here and there? They always sense where the majority stands and they usually join the majority. We also have this sort of people in the party (…) the man who defends his position openly, at least I know where he stands; at least I can fight with him. He is victorious or I am, but the lazy elements that always duck out of something and always avoid a clear decision, who always say ‘we all agree, yes we are all brothers’, they are the worst. I fight against them hardest.”31
This swamp, unable to take a clear position, wavered between the straightforward revisionist, right and the revolutionary left. Centrism is one of the faces of opportunism. Positioning itself always between the antagonistic forces, between the reactionary and radical currents, centrism tries to reconcile the two. It avoids the open clash of ideas, runs away from debate, always considers that “one side is not completely right, but the other side is not totally right either”, views political debate with clear arguments and polemical tones as “exaggerated”, “extremist”, “trouble-making”, even “violent”. It thinks that the only way to maintain unity, to keep the organisation intact is to allow all political tendencies to coexist, even including those whose aims are in direct contradiction to those of the organisation. It shies away from taking responsibility and positioning itself. Centrism in the SPD tended to ally reluctantly with the left, while regretting the left’s “extremism” and “violence” and effectively preventing firm measures – such as the expulsion from the Party of the revisionists – from preserving the Party’s revolutionary nature.
Luxemburg on the contrary considered that the only way to defend the unity of the Party as a revolutionary organisation was to insist on the fullest exposure and public discussion of opposing opinions:
“By covering up the contradictions by the artificial ‘unification’ of incompatible views, the contradictions can only come to a head, until they explode violently sooner or later through a split (…) Those who bring the divergences of view to the fore and fight against the divergent views, work towards the unity of the party. But those who cover up the divergences work towards a real split in the party.”32
The epitome of the centrist current, and its most prestigious representative, was Karl Kautsky.
When Bernstein started to develop his revisionist views, Kautsky initially stayed silent and preferred not to oppose his old friend and comrade in public. He also completely failed to appreciate the extent to which Bernstein’s revisionist theories undermined the revolutionary foundations on which the Party had been built. As Luxemburg pointed out, if once you accept that capitalism can go on forever, that it is not doomed to collapse as a consequence of its own inner contradictions, then you are led inevitably to abandon the revolutionary goal. 33 Kautsky’s failure here – in common with most of the Party press – was a clear sign of the decline of fighting spirit in the organisation: political debate was no longer a matter of life or death for the class struggle, it had become an academic concern of intellectual specialists.
Rosa Luxemburg’s arrival in Berlin in 1898, from Zürich where she had just completed her studies of Polish economic development with distinction, and her reactions to Bernstein’s theories, were to play a major role in Kautsky’s attitude.
When Luxemburg became aware of Bebel’s and Kautsky’s hesitation and unwillingness to fight Bernstein’s views, she criticised this attitude in a letter to Bebel.34 She asked why they did not push for an energetic response to Bernstein, and in March 1899, after she had begun the series of articles which were later to become the pamphlet Reform or revolution, she reported to Jogiches: “As for Bebel in a conversation with Kautsky I complained that he won’t stand up and fight. Kautsky told me that Bebel has lost his drive, he has lost his self-confidence and no longer has any energy. I scolded him again and asked him: Why don’t you [Kautsky] inspire him, give him encouragement and energy? Kautsky replied: ‘You should do this, go and talk to Bebel, you should encourage him…”. When Luxemburg asked Kautsky why he did not react, he replied: “How can I get involved in rallies and meetings now, while I am fully engaged in the parliamentary struggle, this only means there will be clashes, where would this lead to? I do not have any time and no energy for this.”35
In 1899, in Bernstein und das sozialdemokratische Programm. Eine Antikritik (Bernstein and the Social-Democratic programme – an anti-critique) Kautsky at last spoke up against Bernstein’s ideas on Marxist philosophy and political economy and his views on the development of capitalism. But he nevertheless welcomed Bernstein’s book as a valuable contribution to the movement, opposed a motion to expel him from the party and avoided saying that Bernstein was betraying the Marxist programme. In short, as Luxemburg concluded, Kautsky wanted to avoid any challenge to the rather comfortable routine of Party life, and the necessity of criticising his old friend in public. As Kautsky himself admitted privately to Bernstein: “Parvus and Luxemburg already grasped the contradiction of your views with our programmatic principles, while I did not yet want to admit this and believed firmly that all this was a misunderstanding (…) It was my mistake that I was not as farsighted as Parvus and Luxemburg, who already then scented the line of thought of your pamphlet.”36 In fact, in Vorwärts Kautsky minimised and trivialised the attack on Bernstein’s new revisionist theory, saying that it was being blown out of all proportion, in a manner typical of the “absurd imaginings” of a petty bourgeois mentality.37
Out of loyalty to his old friend, Kautsky felt he had to apologize to Bernstein in private, writing: “It would have been cowardice to stay silent. I do not believe that I caused you any harm now that I have spoken. If I had not told August Bebel that I would answer your declaration, he would have done it himself. You can imagine what he would have said, knowing his temper and his callousness”.38 This meant he preferred to stay silent and blind towards his old friend. He reacted unwillingly, and only after being forced into it by the left. Later he admitted that it had been a “sin” to allow his friendship with Bernstein to dominate his political judgment. “In my life I only sinned once out of friendship, and I still regret this sin to this day. If I had not hesitated so much towards Bernstein, and if I had confronted him right from the start with the necessary sharpness, I would have spared the party many unpleasant problems.”39 However, such a “confession” is of no value unless it goes to the root of the problem. Despite confessing his “sin” Kautsky never gave a more profound political explanation why such an attitude, based on personal affinity rather than political principle, is a danger for a political organisation. In reality, this attitude led him to grant the revisionists unlimited “freedom of opinion” within the party. As Kautsky said on the eve of the Hannover Party Congress: “In general we have to leave it up to every Party member to decide whether he still shares the principles of the Party or not. By excluding someone we only act against those who damage the Party; nobody has yet been excluded from the Party because of reasonable criticism, because our Party has always highly valued freedom of discussion. Even if Bernstein had not deserved so much esteem for his part in our struggle, and the fact that he had to go into exile because of his Party activities, we would not consider expelling him”.40
Luxemburg’s answer was clear-cut. “However great our need for self-criticism, and however broadly we set its limits, there must nonetheless remain a minimum of principles which make up our essence, indeed our existence, which found our cooperation as members of a Party. Within our ranks, ‘freedom of criticism’ cannot apply to these principles, which are few and very general, precisely because they are the precondition for all activity and therefore also any criticism directed at this activity. We have no reason to block our ears when these principles are criticised by somebody outside the Party. But as long as we consider them to be the basis of our existence as a Party, we must remain attached to them and not allow our members to call them into question. Here, we can only allow one freedom: to belong to our Party or not. We force no-one to march with us, but as long as he does so voluntarily, we must suppose that he has accepted our principles”.41
The logical conclusion of Kautsky’s “lack of position” was that everyone could stay in the Party and defend what he liked, the programme is watered down, the Party becomes a “melting pot” of different opinions, not a spearhead for a determined struggle. Kautsky’s attitude showed he preferred loyalty to a friend to the defence of class positions. At the same time, he wanted to adopt the pose of a theoretical “expert”. It is true that he had written some very important and valuable books (see below), and that he had enjoyed the esteem of Engels. But, as Luxemburg noted in a letter to Jogiches: “Karl Kautsky limits himself to theory”.42 Preferring to refrain from any participation in the struggle for the defence of the organisation and its programme, Kautsky gradually started to lose any fighting attitude, and this meant that he placed what he saw as his obligations to his friends above any moral obligations to his organisation and its principles. This led to a detachment of theory from practical, concrete action: for example, Kautsky’s valuable work on ethics, including in particular a chapter on internationalism, was not welded to an unwavering defence of internationalism in action.
There is a striking contrast between Kautsky’s attitude towards Bernstein, and Rosa Luxemburg’s attitude towards Kautsky. On her arrival in Berlin, Luxemburg enjoyed close relations with Kautsky and his family. But she quickly came to feel, that the great regard the Kautsky family showed towards her was becoming a burden. Already in 1899 she had complained to Jogiches: “I am beginning to flee their honeyed words. The Kautskys consider me to be part of their family.” (12/11/1899). “All these tokens of affection (he is very well meaning towards me, I can see this), feel like a terrible burden, instead of being a pleasure to me. In fact, any friendship established in adult age, and more over such a ‘party’-based one, is a burden: It imposes on you certain obligations, is a constraint etc. And precisely this side of the friendship is a handicap for me. After the writing of each article I wonder: Will he not be disappointed, will the friendship not cool down?”.43 She was aware of the dangers of an attitude based on affinities, where considerations of personal obligation, friendship, or common tastes, obscure the militant’s political judgment, but also what we may call his moral judgment as to whether a particular line of action is in conformity with the organisation’s principles.44 Luxemburg nonetheless dared to confront him openly: “I had a fundamental row with Kautsky about the whole way of looking at things. He told me in conclusion, that I would be thinking like him in twenty odd years, to which I replied that if so I would be a zombie in 20 years.”45
At the Lübeck party congress of 1901 Luxemburg was accused of distorting the positions of other comrades, an accusation she considered slanderous and demanded to have cleared up in public. She submitted a statement for publication in Vorwärts with this in mind.46 But Kautsky on behalf of Neue Zeit urged her to withdraw her demand for publication of her Statement. She replied to Kautsky: “Of course I am willing to refrain from publishing my declaration in the Neue Zeit but allow me to add a few words of explanation. If I were one of those people, who without consideration for anyone, safeguarded their own rights and interests – and such people are legion throughout our Party – or rather that is the way they all are – I would naturally insist upon publication, for you yourself have admitted that you as editor had certain obligations towards me in this matter. But while admitting this obligation, you at the same time placed a revolver of friendly admonition and request at my breast [to prevent me] from making use of this obligation and thus getting my rights. Well I am sickened at the thought of having to insist upon rights if these are only to be granted amid sighs and gnashing of teeth, and when people not only grab me by the arm and thus expect me to ‘defend’ myself but try in addition to beat me to a pulp, in the hope that I may thus be persuaded to renounce my rights. You have gained what you are after – you are free of all obligations towards me in this case.
But it would seem that you labour under the delusion that you acted solely out of friendship and in my best interests. Permit me to destroy this illusion. As a friend you ought to have said: ‘I advise you unconditionally and at any cost to defend your honour as a writer, for greater writers (…) like Marx and Engels wrote whole pamphlets, conducted endless ink-wars, when anybody dared to accuse them of such a thing as forgery. All the more you, a young writer with many enemies, must try to obtain complete satisfaction…’ That surely is what you should have advised me as a friend.
The friend, however, was soon pushed into the background by the editor of the Neue Zeit, and the latter has only one wish since the Party congress [at Lübeck]; he wants peace, he wants to show that the Neue Zeit has learned manners since the whipping it got, has learned to keep its mouth shut.47 And fur such reasons the essential rights of an associate editor and regular contributor… must be sacrificed. Let a collaborator of Neue Zeit and one at that who by no means does the worst of the work – swallow even a public accusation of forgery as long as peace and quiet is maintained! That is how things are, my friend! And now with best greetings, your Rosa.”.48
Here we see a young, determined revolutionary, and a woman to boot, insisting that the “old”, “orthodox”, experienced, authority should take personal responsibility. Kautsky replied to Luxemburg: “you see, we should not antagonise the people of the parliamentary fraction, we should not leave the impression that we are patronising them. If you want to make them a suggestion, it is better to send them a private letter, which will be much more effective.”49 But Rosa Luxemburg tried to “revive” the fighting spirit in him “You must thoroughly hit out with guts and joy, and not as though it was a boring interlude; the public always feels the spirit of the combatants and the joy of battle gives resonance to controversy, and ensures moral superiority.”50 This attitude of not wanting to disturb the normal running of party life, not taking up position in the debate, not pushing for clarification of divergences, running away from debate and tolerating the revisionists, more and more alienated Luxemburg and it brought to the fore how much the fighting spirit, the loss of morality, the loss of conviction, of determination, had become the overriding trait of Kautsky’s attitude. “I now read his [article]‚Nationalism and Internationalism, and it was a horror and nauseating. Soon I shall no longer be able to read any of his writings. I feel as if a nauseating spider web is covering my head…”.51 “Kautsky is becoming more and more brackish. He is more and more fossilising inside, he no longer feels any human concern about anybody except his family. I really feel uncomfortable with him.”52
Kautsky’s attitude can also be contrasted to that of Luxemburg and Leo Jogiches. After the break-up of her relationship with Leo Jogiches in 1906 (which caused her immense pain and stress, as well as great disappointment in him as a partner) the two remained the closest comrades until the day of her assassination. Despite deep personal grudges, disappointment and jealousies, these profound emotional feelings over the break-up of the relationship never prevented them from standing side by side in the political struggle.
One might object that in the case of Kautsky this reflected the lack of personality and character of Kautsky, but it would be more correct to say that he epitomised the moral rot within the Social-Democracy as a whole.
Luxemburg was forced early on to confront the resistance of the “old guard”. When she criticised revisionist policy at the 1898 Stuttgart Congress, “Vollmar reproached me bitterly that I as youngster of the movement want to give lessons to the old veterans (...) But if Vollmar replies to my factual explanations with ‘you greenhorn, I could be your grandfather’, I only see this as proof that he has run out of arguments.”.53 As regards the weakening fighting spirit of the more centrist veterans, in an article written after the 1898 congress she declared that: “We would have preferred it if the veterans had taken up the struggle from the very beginning of the debate (…) If the debate did get off the ground this did not happen because of but despite of the behaviour of the Party leaders (…) Abandoning the debate to its fate, watching passively for two days to see how the wind is blowing and only intervening when the mouthpieces of opportunism have been forced to come out in the open, then making snide remarks about the ‘sharp tone’ of those whose point of view you then defend, is a tactic which does not cast a good light on the Party leaders. And Kautsky’s explanation as to why he has not made a public statement so far about Bernstein’s theory, because he wanted to reserve his right to say the final word in a possible debate, does not really look a good excuse. In February he published Bernstein’s article without any editorial comment in Neue Zeit, then he stays silent for 4 months, in June he opens the discussions with some compliments to the ‘new’ point of view of Bernstein, this new poor copy of the lecture-room socialist [a term used by Engels in his Anti-Dühring], then he stays silent again for 4 months, lets the Party congress begin then declares during the course of the debate that he would like to make the concluding remarks. We would prefer that the theoretician ex officio should always intervene in the debates and not just make the conclusion in such crucial matters, and that he should not give the wrong and misleading impression of not having known for a long time what he should have said.”54
Thus many of the old guard, who had fought under conditions of the anti-Socialist law, had been disarmed by the weight of democratism and reformism. They had become unable to understand the new period and started to theorise instead the abandonment of the socialist goal. Instead of passing on the lessons of the struggle under the conditions of the anti-Socialist law to a new generation, they had lost their fighting spirit. And the centrist current which was hiding and avoiding the combat, by running away from an open battle with the opportunists, paved the way for the rise of the right.
While the centrists were avoiding the struggle, the left wing around Luxemburg showed its combative spirit and was ready to take over responsibility. Seeing that in reality “Bebel himself has already become senile, and lets things slide; he feels relieved if others struggle, but he himself has neither the energy nor the drive to take the initiative. K [Kautsky] restricts himself to theory, nobody takes on any responsibility.”55 “This means the party is in a bad way (…) Nobody leads it, nobody takes on responsibility.” The left wing aimed at gaining more influence and was convinced of the need to act as the spearhead. Luxemburg wrote to Jogiches: “Only one year of perseverant, positive work, and my position will be great. At the moment I cannot restrict the sharpness in my speeches, because we have to defend the most extreme position”.56 This influence, however, was not to be achieved at the price of a watering down of positions.
Convinced of the need for a determined leadership, and recognising that she would be facing the resistance of the hesitant, she wanted to push the party. “A person, moreover who does not belong to the ruling clique [Sippschaft], who won’t rely on anyone’s support but uses nothing but her own elbows, a person feared for the future not only by obvious opponents like Auer and Co. but even by allies (Bebel, Kautsky, Singer), a person best kept at arm’s length because she may grow several heads too tall? (…) I have no intention of limiting myself to criticism. On the contrary, I have every intention and urge to ‘push’ positively, not individuals but the movement as a whole… point out new ways, fighting, acting as a gadfly – in a word, a chronic incentive for the whole movement”.57 In October 1905 Luxemburg was offered the opportunity to participate in the editorial board of Vorwärts. She was intransigent on a possible censorship of her positions. “If because of my articles there is a conflict with the leadership or with the editorial board, then I should not be the only one to leave the editorial board, but the whole left would show solidarity and leave Vorwärts, then the editorial board would be blown up”. For a short spell the left gained some influence.
The process of degeneration of the Party was not only marked by open attempts to abandon its programmatic positions, and by the lack of fighting spirit in broad sections of the Party. Beneath the surface lay a constant under-current of petty spite and personal denigration directed at those who defended most intransigently the organisation’s principles and disturbed the façade of unity. Kautsky’s attitude towards Luxemburg’s criticism of Bernstein, for example, was ambivalent. Despite his friendly relations with Luxemburg he could nonetheless write to Bernstein: “That spiteful creature Luxemburg is unhappy with the truce until the publication of your pamphlet, every day she presents another pinprick on ‘tactics’”.58
At times, as we will see, this under-current would break through the surface in slanderous accusations and personal attacks.
It was above all the right which reacted by personalising and scapegoating the “enemy” within the party. When a clarification of the profound divergences through an open confrontation was needed, the right – instead of coming forward with arguments in a debate, shied away and instead began slandering the most prominent members of the left.
Showing a clear feeling of inferiority on a theoretical level, they spread slanderous innuendo about Luxemburg in particular, making male chauvinist comments and insinuations about her “unhappy” emotional life and social relations (her relationship with Leo Jogiches was not known to the party): “this clever spiteful old maid will also come to Hanover. I respect her and consider her to be stronger than Parvus. But she hates me from the bottom of her heart.”59
The right wing party secretary Ignaz Auer admitted to Bernstein: “Even if we are not equal to our opponents, because not everyone is able to play a big role, we stand our ground against the rhetoric and the rude remarks. But if there was a ‘clean’ divorce, which nobody by the way considers seriously, Clara [Zetkin] and Rosa would be left on their own. Not even their [lovers] would take their defence, neither their former nor their present ones.”60
The same Auer did not hesitate to use xenophobic tones, saying that the “main attacks against Bernstein and his supporters and against Schippel were not by German comrades, and did not come out of the German movement. The activities of these people, in particular of Mrs. Rosa Luxemburg were disloyal, and not nice amongst comrades”.61 These kinds of xenophobic tones – especially against Luxemburg, who was of Jewish origin – became a permanent feature in the right’s campaign, which was to become increasingly vicious in the years leading up to World War I.62
The right wing of the party even wrote satirical comments or texts on Luxemburg.63 Luxemburg and other figures on the left had already been targeted in a particularly vile manner in Poland. Paul Frölich reports in his biography of Luxemburg, that many slanders were levelled against left figures such as Warski and Luxemburg. Luxemburg was accused of being paid by the Warsaw police officer Markgrafski, when she published an article on the question of national autonomy; she was also accused of being a paid agent of the Okhrana, the Russian secret police.64
Rosa Luxemburg started to feel sickened by the atmosphere in the party. “Each closer contact with the gang of the Party creates such a feeling of unease, that each time I am determined to say: three sea miles away from the lowest point of low-tide! After having been together with them I smell so much dirt, I sense so much weakness of character, so much shabbiness, that I rush back to my mouse hole.”65
This was in 1899, but 10 years later, her opinion of the behaviour of some of the party's leaading figures had not improved: “After all, try to remain calm and do not forget that apart from the Party leadership and the scoundrels (canaille) of the Zietz type. there are still many beautiful and pure things. Apart from the immediate inhumanity he [Zietz] appears as a painful symptom of general wretchedness, into which our ‘leadership’ has sunk, a symptom of a frightening terribly poor mental state. Some other time this rotting seaweed will hopefully be swept away by a foaming wave”.66 And she frequently expressed her indignation at the stifling bureaucratic atmosphere in the party: “I sometimes feel really miserable here and I feel like running away from Germany. In any Siberian village you care to name there is more humanity than in the whole of German Social Democracy.”67 This attitude of scapegoating and trying to destroy the reputation of the left was sowing the seeds for her later physical assassination by the Freikorps, who killed Luxemburg in January 1919 under the orders of the SPD. The tone employed against her within the Party prepared the pogrom atmosphere against revolutionaries in the revolutionary wave of 1918-1923. The character assassination which gradually seeped into the Party, and the lack of indignation about it, in particular from the centre, contributed to disarming the party morally.
In addition to the scapegoating, personalisation and xenophobic attacks the different instances of the party under the influence of the right began to censure the articles of the left, and of Luxemburg in particular. Above all after 1905, when the question of mass action was on the agenda (see below), the Party increasingly tried to muzzle her and prevent her articles on the question of the mass strike and the Russian experience from being published. Although the left had strongholds in some cities,68 the whole right wing of the party apparatus was trying to prevent her from spreading her positions in the Party’s central organ Vorwärts: “We have regretfully to decline your article since, in accordance with an agreement between the Party executive, the executive commission of the Prussian provincial organization [of the SPD], and the editor, the question of the mass strike is not to be dealt with in Vorwärts for the time being.”69
As we shall see the consequences of the moral decline and the decline in solidarity within the Party were to have a noxious effect when imperialist tensions sharpened and the left insisted on the need to respond with mass action .
Franz Mehring, a well-known and respected figure of the left, was also often attacked. But unlike Rosa Luxemburg he was easily offended, and tended to retire from the struggle when he felt he had been unjustly attacked. For example, before the Party congress in Dresden 1903, Mehring criticised Social Democrats writing in the bourgeois press as being incompatible with Party membership. The opportunists launched a campaign of slander against him. Mehring asked for a Party tribunal, which met and adopted a “mild judgement” against the opportunists. But more and more, as he came under increasing pressure from the right, Mehring tended to withdraw from the Party press. Luxemburg insisted that he should stand up to the pressure from the right and to their slanders: “You will surely feel that we are increasingly approaching times when the masses in the Party will need energetic, ruthless and generous leadership, and that without you our powers-that-be – executive, central organ, Reichstag caucus, and the ‘scientific paper’, will become continually more wretched, small-minded and cowardly. Clearly we shall have to face up to this attractive future, and we must occupy and hold all those positions which make it possible to spike the official leadership’s guns by exercising the right to criticise. (…) This makes it our duty to stick it out and not do the official Party bosses the favour of packing up. We have to accept continual struggles and friction, particularly when anyone attacks that holy of holies, parliamentary cretinism, as strongly as you have done. But in spite of all – not to give an inch seems to be the right slogan. Neue Zeit must not be handed over entirely to senility and officialdom.”70
As the new century opened, the foundation on which revisionists and reformists alike had built their theory and practice began to crumble.
Superficially, and despite occasional setbacks, the capitalist economy still appeared to be in robust health, continuing its unstoppable expansion across the last regions still unoccupied by the imperialist powers, notably Africa and China. The expansion of capitalism across the globe had reached a stage where the imperialist powers could only expand their influence at the cost of their rivals. All the great powers were increasingly involved in an unprecedented arms race, with Germany in particular engaged in a massive programme of naval expansion. Though few realised at the time, the year 1905 marked a watershed: a dispute between two great powers led to large-scale war, and the war in turn led to the first massive revolutionary upsurge of the working class.
The war, begun in 1904, was fought between Russia and Japan for control of the Korean peninsula. Russia suffered a humiliating defeat, and the strikes of January 1905 were a direct reaction against the effects of the war. For the first time in history, a gigantic wave of mass strikes shook an entire country. The phenomenon was not confined to Russia. Although not as massively and with a different background and different demands, similar strike movements broke out in a series of other European countries: 1902 in Belgium, 1903 in the Netherlands, 1905 in the Ruhr area in Germany. A number of massive wildcat strikes also took place in the United States between 1900 and 1906 (notably in the Pennsylvania coal mines). In Germany, Rosa Luxemburg – both as a revolutionary agitator and journalist for the German Party, and as a member of the SDKPiL’s Central Committee71 - had been following attentively the struggles in Russia and Poland.72 In December 1905, she felt that she could no longer remain in Germany as a mere observer, and left for Poland to participate directly in the movement. Closely involved in the day-to-day process of class struggle and revolutionary agitation, she witnessed at first hand the newly unfolding dynamic of the mass strikes.73 Together with other revolutionary forces she began to draw the lessons. At the same time as Trotsky wrote his famous book on 1905 where he highlighted the role of the workers’ councils, Luxemburg in her text Mass Strike, Party and Trade Unions74 underlined the historical significance of the “birth of the mass strike” and its consequences for the working class internationally. Her text on the mass strike was a first programmatic text of the left currents in the 2nd International, aimed at drawing the broader lessons and highlighting the importance of autonomous, massive action of the working class.75
Luxemburg’s theory of the mass strike went completely against the vision of class struggle generally accepted by the Party and the trade unions. For the latter, class struggle was almost like a military campaign, in which confrontation should only be sought once the army had built up an overwhelming strength, while the Party and union leaderships were to act as a general staff with the masses of workers manoeuvring according to orders. This was a long way from Luxemburg’s insistence on the creative self-activity of the masses, and any idea that the workers themselves might act independently of the leadership was anathema to the union bosses, who in 1905 were faced for the first time with the prospect of being overrun by just such a massive wave of autonomous struggles. The reaction of the right wing of the SPD and the union leadership was simply to ban any discussion of the issue. At the unions’ May 1905 Congress in Köln they rejected any discussion on the mass strike as “reprehensible”76 (verwerflich) and went on to say that “The TU congress recommends all organised workers to energetically oppose this [propagation of the mass strike]”. This heralded the cooperation between the ruling class and the SPD and unions in fighting revolution.
The German bourgeoisie had also followed the movement attentively, and wanted above all to prevent German workers from “copying the Russian example”. Because of her speech on the mass strike at the SPD’s 1905 Congress in Jena, Rosa Luxemburg was accused of “incitation to violence” (Aufreizung zu Gewalttätigkeit) and was sentenced to two months in prison. Kautsky meanwhile tried to play down the significance of the mass strikes, insisting they were above all a product of primitive Russian conditions, which could not be applied to an advanced country like Germany. He used “the term ‘Russian method’ as a symbol for lack of organisation, primitiveness, chaos, wildness”.77 In his 1909 book The Road to Power, Kautsky claimed that “mass action is an obsolete strategy of overthrowing the enemy” and contrasted it with his proposed “strategy of attrition” (Ermattungsstrategie).78
Refusing to consider the mass strike as a perspective for the working class across the world, Kautsky attacked Luxemburg’s position as if it were merely a personal whim. Kautsky wrote to Luxemburg: “I do not have the time to explain to you the reasons which Marx and Engels, Bebel and Liebknecht accepted as substantive. Briefly, what you want is a totally new kind of agitation, which we have always rejected so far. But this new agitation is of such a kind that it is not advisable to debate this in public. If we publish the article you would act on your own account, as an individual person, and proclaim a totally new agitation and action, which the Party has always rejected. A single person, no matter how high her standing may be, cannot act on her own account and make a fait accompli, which would have unpredictable consequences for the Party.”.79
Luxemburg rejected the attempt to present the analysis and importance of the mass strike as a “personal policy”.80 Even though revolutionaries must acknowledge the existence of different conditions in different countries, they must above all grasp the global dynamic of the changing conditions of the class struggle, in particular those tendencies which herald the future. Kautsky opposed the “Russian experience” as an expression of Russia’s backwardness, indirectly refusing international solidarity and spreading a viewpoint imbued with national prejudice, pretending that the workers in Germany with their powerful trade unions were more advanced and their methods “superior” … i.e. at a time, when the trade union leadership was already blocking the mass strike and autonomous action! And when Luxemburg was sent to jail for propagating the mass strike, Kautsky and his followers showed no sign of outrage and did not protest.
Luxemburg, who could not be silenced by such attempts at censorship, reproached the party leadership for focussing their entire attention on preparing the elections. “All questions of tactics should be drowned out by the delirium of joy over our present and future electoral successes? Does Vorwärts really believe that the political deepening and reflection of large layers of the Party could be fostered with this permanent atmosphere of hailing future electoral success a year,, possibly a year and a hal, before the elections and by silencing any self-critique in the Party?”81
Apart from Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek was the most vocal critic of Kautsky’s “strategy of attrition”. In his book “Tactical differences/ in the workers’ movement”82 Pannekoek undertook a systematic and fundamental critique of the “old tools” of parliamentarism and the trade union struggle. Pannekoek was also to be the victim of censorship and repression within the Social Democratic and trade union apparatus, and lost his job at the Party school as a result. Increasingly, both Luxemburg’s and Pannekoek’s articles were censored by the Party press. In November 1911 Kautsky for the first time refused to publish an article by Pannekoek in Neue Zeit.83
Thus the mass strikes of 1905 forced the SPD leadership to show its real face and oppose any mobilisation of the working class that tried to take up the “Russian experience”. Already, years before the unleashing of the war,, the trade union leadership had become a bulwark for capitalism. Under the pretext of taking different conditions of the class struggle into account, in reality this was used to reject international solidarity, with the right wing forces within Social Democracy trying to provoke fears and even whip up national resentment about “Russian radicalism” This was going to be an important ideological weapon in the war which started a few years later. Thus after 1905 the centre, which had been wavering until then, gradually became more and more pulled over towards the right. The inability and unwillingness of the centre to support the struggle of the left in the party meant that the left became more and more isolated within the Party.
As Luxemburg pointed out, “The practical effect of comrade Kautsky’s intervention is reduced to this: he has provided a theoretical cover to those in the Party and the unions who observe the impetuous growth of the mass movement with growing unease, and would like to bring it to a halt as soon as possible and return the struggle to well-worn and comfortable old rut of union and parliamentary activity. Kautsky has provided them with a remedy to their scruples of conscience, under the aegis of Marx and Engels; at the same time he has offered them a means to break the back of a movement of demonstrations that he supposedly wanted to make ‘ever more powerful’”.84
The 2nd International’s 1907 Stuttgart Congress tried to draw the lessons of the Russo-Japanese war and to throw the weight of the organised working class into the balance against the growing menace of war. Some 60,000 people took part in a demonstration – with speakers from more than a dozen countries warning of the danger of war. August Bebel proposed a resolution against the danger of war, which avoided the question of militarism as an integral part of the capitalist system and made no mention the struggle of the workers in Russia against war. The German Party intended to avoid being tied by any prescriptions as to its action in the event of war, in the form of a general strike above all. Lenin, Luxemburg and Martov together proposed a more robust amendment to the resolution: “Should war break out in spite of all this, it is [the Socialist Parties’] duty to intercede for its speedy end, and to strive with all their power to make use of the violent economic and political crisis brought about by the war to rouse the people, and thereby to hasten the abolition of capitalist class rule.”.85 The Stuttgart congress voted unanimously for this resolution, but afterwards the majority of the 2nd International failed to strengthen their opposition to the increasing war preparations. The Stuttgart Congress entered into history as an example of verbal declarations without action by most of the attending parties.86 But it was an important moment of cooperation amongst the left wing currents, who despite their differences on many other questions took up a common stand against the question of war.
In February 1907 Karl Liebknecht published his book Militarism and Anti-militarism with special attention to the international youth movement, in which he denounced in particular the role of German militarism. In October 1907 he was sentenced to 18 months of imprisonment for high treason. Yet in the same year, the leading right wing figure in the SPD, Noske, declared in a speech in the Reichstag, that in case of a “war of defence” Social Democracy would support the government and “defend the fatherland with great passion..Our attitude towards the military is determined by our view on the national question. We demand the autonomy of each nation. But this means that we also insist on the preservation of the autonomy of the German people. We are fully aware that it is our duty and obligation to make sure that the German people are not pushed against the wall by some other people”.87 This was the same Noske who in 1918 was to become the bloodhound of SPD-led repression against the workers.
In 1911 Germany’s despatch of the destroyer Panther to Agadir provoked the second Moroccan Crisis with France. The SPD leadership renounced any anti-militarist action in order to avoid putting at risk its electoral success in the upcoming 1912 election. When Luxemburg denounced this attitude, the SPD leadership accused her of betraying Party secrets. In August 1911 after much hesitation and attempts to avoid the question, the Party leadership distributed a leaflet which was meant to be a protest against the Morocco policy of German imperialism. The leaflet was strongly criticised by Luxemburg in her article “Our leaflet on Morocco”,88 unaware as she wrote that Kautsky was the author. Kautsky replied with a very personalised attack. Luxemburg fought back: Kautsky, she said, had presented her critique as “a malicious, back-stabbing, perfidious attack against [Kautsky] as a person. (…) Comrade Kautsky will hardly be able to doubt my courage to face someone in an open manner, to criticise or fight against someone directly. I have never attacked a person from ambush and I strongly reject the suggestion of comrade Kautsky that I knew who had written the leaflet and that I had – without naming him – targeted him. (…) but I would have taken care not to begin an unnecessary polemic with a comrade who overreacts with such a flood of personal vituperation, bitterness and suspicion against a strictly factual, although strong critique, and who suspects a personal, nasty, bitchy intention behind each word of critique.”89 At the Jena Party congress in September 1911, the Party leadership circulated a special pamphlet against Rosa Luxemburg, full of attacks against her, accusing her of breaching confidentiality and of having informed the International Socialist Bureau of the 2nd International of the SPD’s internal correspondence.
Although in his 1909 book on The Road to Power Kautsky warned that “the world war is coming dangerously close”, in 1911 he predicted, that “everyone will become a patriot” once war breaks out. And that if Social Democracy decided to swim against the current, it would be torn apart by the enraged mob. He placed his hopes for peace on the “countries representing European civilisation” forming a United States of Europe. At the same time he began to develop his theory of “super-imperialism”; underlying this theory was the idea that imperialist conflict was not an inevitable consequence of capitalist expansion but merely a “policy” which enlightened capitalist states could choose to reject. Kautsky already thought that the war would relegate class contradictions to the background and the proletariat’s mass action would be doomed to failure, that – as he would say when war broke out – the International was only good for peace time. This attitude of being aware of the danger of war but bowing to the dominant nationalist pressure and shying away from a determined struggle disarmed the working class and paved the way for the betrayal of the interests of the proletariat. Thus on the one hand Kautsky minimised the real explosiveness of imperialist tensions in his theory of “super-imperialism” and so completely failed to perceive the ruling classes’ determination to prepare for war; while on the other he pandered to the nationalist ideology of the government (and increasingly of the right wing in the SPD also) rather than confronting it, out of fear for the SPD’s electoral success. His backbone, his fighting spirit, had disappeared.
When a determined denunciation of the war preparations was needed, and while the left wing did its best to organise anti-war public meetings which attracted participants in their thousands, the SPD leadership was mobilising to the hilt for the upcoming 1912 parliamentary elections. Luxemburg denounced the self-imposed silence on the danger of war as an opportunistic attempt to score more parliamentary seats, sacrificing internationalism in order to gain more votes.
In 1912 the threat to peace posed by the Second Balkan War led the ISB to organise an emergency special Congress held in November in Basel, Switzerland, with the specific aim of mobilising the international working class against the imminent danger of war. Luxemburg criticised the fact that the German Party had merely tail-ended the German unions who had organised a few low-key protests, arguing that the Party as a political organ of the working class had done no more than pay lip-service to the denunciation of war. Whereas a few parties in other countries had reacted more vigorously, the SPD, the biggest workers’ party in the world, had essentially withdrawn from the agitation and abstained from mobilising further protests. The Basel congress, which once again ended with a big demonstration and appeals for peace, in fact masked the rottenness and future betrayal of many of its member parties.
On June 3rd 1913, the SPD parliamentary fraction voted in favour of a special military tax: 37 SPD deputies who opposed the vote in favour were reduced to silence by the principle of the discipline of the parliamentary fraction. The open breach with the previous motto of “not a single man, not a single penny” for the system prepared the parliamentary fraction’s vote for war credits in August 1914.90 The moral decline of the party was also revealed through Bebel’s reaction. In 1870/71 August Bebel – together with Wilhelm Liebknecht (Karl Liebknecht’s father) – distinguished himself by his determined opposition to the Franco-Prussian war. Now, four decades later, Bebel failed to take up a resolute stand against the danger of war.91
It was becoming increasingly clear that not only was the right going to betray openly, but also that the wavering centrists had lost all fighting spirit and would fail to oppose the preparation for war in a determined manner. The attitude defended by the most famous representative of the “centre”, Kautsky, according to which the Party should adapt its position on the question of war following the reactions of the population (passive submission if the majority of the country assented to nationalism or a more resolute stand if there was increasing opposition to war), was justified by the danger of “isolating oneself from the bulk of the Party”. When after 1910 the current around Kautsky claimed to be the “Marxist centre” in contrast to the (extremist, radical, unmarxist) left, Luxemburg labelled this “centre” as representatives of cowardice, cautiousness and conservatism.
Their desertion from the struggle, their inability to oppose the right and to follow the left in their determined struggle, helped to disarm the workers. Thus the betrayal of August 1914 by the Party leadership came as no surprise; it was prepared little by little in a piecemeal process. The support for German imperialism became tangible in several votes in parliament to support war credits, in the efforts to curb any protests against the war, in the whole attitude of taking sides with German imperialism and chaining the working class to nationalism and patriotism. The process of muzzling the left wing was crucial in the abandonment of internationalism and prepared the repression of revolutionaries in 1919.
While the SPD leadership had been focussing its activities on parliamentary elections, the Party itself was blinded by electoral success and lost sight of the final goal of the workers’ movement. The Party hailed the apparently uninterrupted growth in voters, in the number of deputies and in the readership of the Party press. The growth was indeed impressive: in 1907 the SPD had 530,000 members; by 1913 the figure had doubled to almost 1.1 million. The SPD in reality was the only mass party of the 2nd International and the biggest single party in any European parliament. This numerical growth gave the illusion of great strength. Even Lenin was remarkably uncritical about the “impressive figures” of members, voters and the impact of the party.92
Although it is impossible to establish a mechanical relationship between political intransigence and electoral scores, the 1907 elections, when the SPD still condemned the barbaric repression of German imperialism against the Herero risings in South-West Africa, led to an electoral “set-back”, as the SPD lost 38 parliamentary seats and was left with 43 seats ‘only’. Despite the fact that the SPD’s share of the overall vote had actually risen, in the eyes of the Party leadership this electoral set-back meant that the Party had been punished by the voters, and above all by the voters of the petty bourgeoisie, because of its denunciation of German imperialism. The conclusion they drew was that the SPD should avoid opposing imperialism and nationalism too strongly, as this would cost votes. Instead the Party would have to focus all its forces on campaigning for the next elections, even if this meant censuring its discussions and avoiding anything which might put its electoral score at risk. In the 1912 elections the party scored 4.2 million votes (38.5% of the votes cast) and won 110 seats. It had become the biggest single parliamentary group, but only by burying internationalism and the principles of the working class. In the local parliaments it had more than 11,000 deputies. The SPD boasted 91 newspapers and 1.5 million subscribers. In the 1912 elections, the SPD’s integration into the game of parliamentary politics went one step further when it withdrew candidates in several constituencies to the benefit of the Fortschrittliche Volkspartei (Progressive People’s Party), even though this party supported unconditionally the policy of German imperialism. Meanwhile the Sozialistische Monatshefte (in principle a non-Party publication, but in effect the revisionists’ theoretical organ) openly supported Germany’s colonial policy and the claims of German imperialism for a redistribution of colonies.
In fact the full mobilisation of the party for parliamentary elections went hand in hand with its gradual integration into the state apparatus. The indirect vote for the budget in July 1910,93 the increasing cooperation with bourgeois parties, (which had up to then been anathema), such as abstaining from nominating candidates in some constituencies in order to make possible the election of MPs of the bourgeois Fortschrittliche Volkspartei, the nomination of a candidate for the mayoral elections in Stuttgart – these were some of the steps on the road to the SPD’s direct participation in running the state administration.
This whole trend towards a growing interconnection between the SPD’s parliamentary activities and its identification with the state was castigated by the left, in particular by Anton Pannekoek and Luxemburg. Pannekoek dedicated a whole book to the Tactical differences within the worker’ movement. Luxemburg, who was extremely alert to the suffocating effect of parliamentarism, pressed for initiative and action from the rank and file: “the most ideal party executive would be able to achieve nothing, would involuntarily sink into bureaucratic inefficiency, if the natural source of its energy, the will of the Party, does not make itself felt, if critical thought, the initiative of the mass of the Party’s membership is sleeping. In fact it is more than this. If its own energy, the independent intellectual life of the mass of the Party, is not active enough, then the central authorities have the quite natural tendency to not only bureaucratically rust but also to get a totally wrong idea of their own official authority and position of power with respect to the Party. The most recent so-called ‘secret decree’ of our Party executive to the Party editorial staffs can serve as fresh proof, an attempt to make decisions for the Party press, which cannot be sharply enough rejected. However, here also it is necessary to make it clear: against both inefficiency and excessive illusions of power of the central authorities of the labour movement there is no other way except one’s own initiative, one’s own thought, and the fresh, pulsating political life of the broad mass of the Party.”94
Indeed, Luxemburg constantly insisted on the need for the mass of the Party members to “wake up” and take up their responsibility against the degenerating Party leadership. “The big masses [of the Party] have to activate themselves in their own way, must be able to develop their own mass energy, their own drive, they have to become active as a mass, act, show and develop passion, courage and determination.”95
“Every step forward in the struggle for emancipation of the working class must at the same time mean a growing intellectual independence of its mass, its growing self-activity, self-determination and initiative (…) It is vitally important for the normal development of the political life in the Party, to keep the political thought and the will of the mass of the Party awake and active,.. We have, of course, the yearly Party conference as the highest instance which regularly fixes the will of the whole party. However, it is obvious that the Party conferences can only give general outlines of the tactics for the Social Democratic struggle. The application of these guidelines in practice requires untiring thought, quick-wittedness and initiative (…) To want to make a Party executive responsible for the whole enormous task of daily political vigilance and initiative, on whose command a Party organisation of almost a million passively waits, is the most incorrect thing there is from the standpoint of the proletarian class struggle. This is without doubt that reprehensible ‘blind obedience’ which our opportunists definitely want to see in the self-evident subordination of all to the decisions of the whole party”.96
On 4th August 1914, the SPD parliamentary fraction voted unanimously for war credits. The Party leadership and parliamentary fraction had demanded “fraction discipline”. The censorship (state censorship or self-censorship?) and false unity of the Party followed their own logic, the very opposite of personal responsibility. The process of degeneration meant that the capacity for critical thinking and opposition to the false unity of the Party had been sapped. The moral values of the Party were sacrificed on the altar of capital. In the name of Party discipline the Party demanded the abandoning of proletarian internationalism. Karl Liebknecht, whose father had dared to reject the support for the war credits in 1870, now bowed to Party pressure. It was only a few weeks later, following a first regrouping of comrades who had remained loyal to internationalism, that he dared to express openly his rejection of the mobilisation for war by the SPD leadership. But the vote for war credits by the German SPD had triggered off an avalanche of submission to nationalism in other European countries. With the betrayal of the SPD the 2nd International signed its death warrant and disintegrated.
The rise of the opportunistic and revisionist current, which had appeared most clearly in the biggest Party of the 2nd International, and which abandoned the goal of the overthrow of capitalist society, meant that proletarian life, fighting spirit and moral indignation disappeared within the SPD, or at least in the ranks of its leadership and its bureaucracy. At the same time this process was inseparably linked to the SPD’s programmatic degeneration, visible in its refusal to adopt the new weapons of the class struggle, the mass strike and workers’ self-organisation, and the gradual abandonment of internationalism. The process of degeneration of German Social-Democracy, which was not an isolated phenomenon in the 2nd International, led to its betrayal in 1914. For the first time a political organisation of the workers had not only betrayed the interests of the working class, it became one of the most effective weapons in the hands of the capitalist class. The ruling class in Germany could now count on the SPD’s authority, and the loyalty it inspired in the working class, to unleash war and then to crush the workers’ revolt against war. The lessons of the degeneration of Social Democracy thus remain crucially important for revolutionaries today.
Heinrich / Jens
1 With 38.5% of the votes cast, the SPD had 110 seats in the Reichstag.
2 Karl Kautsky was born in Prague in 1854; his father was a set designer and his mother an actress and writer. The family moved to Vienna when Kautsky was aged 7. He studied at Vienna University and joined the Austrian Socialist Party (SPÖ) in 1875. In 1880 he was in Zürich, helping to smuggle socialist literature into Germany.
3 August Bebel was born in 1840, in what is now a suburb of Cologne. Orphaned at 13, he was apprenticed to a carpenter and as a young man travelled extensively in Germany. He met Wilhelm Liebknecht in 1865, and was immediately impressed by Liebknecht’s international experience; in his auto-biography, Bebel remembers exclaiming “That is a man you can learn something from” (“Donnerwetter, von dem kann man das lernen”, Bebel, Aus Meinen Leben, Berlin 1946, cited in James Joll, The Second International). Together with Liebknecht, Bebel became one of German Social-Democracy’s outstanding leaders in its early years.
4 This is clearly visible in Lenin’s One step forward, two steps back, concerning the crisis in the RSDLP in 1903. Speaking of the future Mensheviks he writes: “Their narrow circle mentality and astonishing immaturity as Party members, which cannot stand the fresh breeze of open controversy in the presence of all, is here clearly revealed (...) Can you imagine such an absurdity, such a squabble, such a complaint about ‘false accusations of opportunism’ in the German party? There, proletarian organisation and discipline weaned them from such intellectualist flabbiness long ago (...) Only the most hidebound circle mentality, with its logic of ‘either coats off, or let’s have your hand’, could give rise to hysterics, squabbles, and a Party split because of a 'false accusation of opportunism against the majority of the Emancipation of Labour group”
5 Rosa Luxemburg, The crisis in the German SocialDemocracy (better known as the Junius pamphlet), chapter 1. Luxemburg's pamphlet is required reading for anyone trying to understand the underlying causes of the First World War.
6 Luxemburg, ibid.
7 The SPD central press organ.
8 Also known as the Eisenacher party, from the city of its foundation.
9 Marx, First Address of the IWA General Council on the Civil War in France.
10 A similar tendency survived in French socialism out of nostalgia for the "national workshops" programme that had followed the revolutionary movement of 1848.
11 Cf Toni Offerman, in Between reform and revolution: German socialism and communism from 1840 to 1990, Berghahn Books, 1998, p96.
12 It is known today under the title Critique of the Gotha Programme
13 Marx to Bracke, 5th May 1875
14 Engels to Bebel [142], March 1875
15 Quoted in Georges Haupt, Aspects of international socialism 1871-1914, Cambridge University Press & Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme.
16 The parliamentary vote for war credits in 1914 was thus in clear violation of the SPD's statutes and Congress decisions, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out.
17 Kritik des sozialdemokratischen Programmentwurfs, Marx Engels Werke, Bd. 22, Berlin 1963, S. 233-235)
18 Though it should not be forgotten that Russian autocracy was more extreme: the Russian equivalent to the Reichstag, the State Duma, was only called under pressure from the revolutionary movement of 1905.
19 Cf JP Nettl's remarkable biography of Rosa Luxemburg, p81 (Schocken Paperback edition of the 1969 Oxford University Press abridged edition, with an introductory essay by Hannah Arendt). Throughout this article, we have quoted both from the abridged and the unabridged editions.
20 It is significant that while the Party tolerated right-wing reformism, the "Jungen" ("Youth") circle, who violently criticised the shift towards parliamentarism, were expelled from the Party at the Erfurt Congress. It is true that this group was essentially an intellectual and literary opposition with anarchist tendencies (a number of its members drifted into anarchism after leaving the SPD). It is nonetheless characteristic that the Party reacted much more harshly towards a criticism from the left than towards out and out opportunist practice on the right.
21 Cf Jacques Droz, Histoire générale du socialisme, p41, Editions Quadrige/PUF, 1974.
22 Letter to Kautsky, 1896, quoted by Droz, op.cit., p42.
23 Bernstein’s revisionist current was by no means an isolated exception. In France the socialist Millerand joined the government of Waldeck-Rousseau alongside General Gallifet, the hangman of the Paris Commune; a similar tendency existed in Belgium; the British Labour movement was completely dominated by reformism and a narrow-minded nationalist trade unionism.
24 “the colonial question (…) is a question of the spread of culture and, as long as there are big cultural differences, it is a question of the spread, or rather the assertion, of the higher culture. Because sooner or later it inevitably comes to pass that higher and lower cultures collide, and with regard to this collision, this struggle for existence between cultures, the colonial policy of the cultured peoples must be rated as a historical process. The fact that it is usually pursued from other motives and with means, as well as in forms that we Social Democrats condemn, may lead us in specific cases to reject it and fight against it, but this cannot be a reason for us to change our judgment about the historical necessity of colonisation” (Bernstein, 1907, quoted in Discovering Imperialism, 2012, Haymarket Books, p41).
25 Cf Nettl, op.cit., p101.
26 Parvus, also known as Alexander Helphand, was a strange and controversial figure in the revolutionary movement. After some years on the left of the Social-Democracy in Germany, then in Russia during the 1905 revolution, he moved to Turkey where he set up an arms trading company, becoming wealthy on the proceeds of the Balkan Wars, and simultaneously setting up as financial and political adviser to the Young Turks nationalist movement and editing the nationalist publication Turk Yurdu. During the war, Parvus became an open supporter of German imperialism, much to the distress of Trotsky whose ideas on “permanent revolution” he had strongly influenced (cf Deutscher, The prophet armed, “War and the International”).
27 Quoted in Nettl, op.cit., p133
28 Parteitag der Sozialdemokratie, Oktober 1898 in Stuttgart, Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd 1/1 p241
29 Rosa Luxemburg, Gesammelte Werke, Bd 1/1, p. 565, 29.9.1899
30 Rosa Luxemburg, 1899, Ges. Werke Bd 1/1, S. 578, 9.-14. Oktober
31 August Bebel, Dresden, 13.-20.1903, quoted by Luxemburg After the Jena Party congress, Ges. Werke, Bd 1/1, S. 351
32 “Unser leitendes Zentralorgan”, Leipziger Volkszeitung, 22.9.1899, Rosa Luxemburg in Ges. Werke, Bd. 1/1, p. 558.
33 Moreover, Bernstein “began by abandoning the final aim and supposedly keeping the movement. But as there can be no socialist movement without a socialist aim he ends by renouncing the movement” (Reform or revolution, “Collapse”).
34 “I am very grateful for the information, which helps me to understand better the orientations of the party. It was of course clear to me that Bernstein with his ideas presented so far is no more in line with our programme, but it is painful that we can no longer count on him altogether. But if you and comrade Kautsky had this assessment, I am surprised that that you and comrade Kautsky did not use the favourable atmosphere at the congress to launch immediately an energetic debate, but that you wanted to encourage Bernstein to write a pamphlet, which will only delay the discussion much more.” (Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 1, p. 210, letter to Bebel, 31.10.1898
35 Rosa Luxemburg, , Ges. Briefe, Bd 1, P. 289, letter to Leo Jogiches, 11. März 1899
36 Kautsky to Bernstein, 29.7.1899, IISG-Kautsky-Nachlass, C. 227, C. 230, quoted in Till Schelz-Brandenburg, Eduard Bernstein und Karl Kautsky, Entstehung und Wandlung des sozialdemokratischen Parteimarxismus im Spiegel ihrer Korrespondenz 1879 bis 1932, Köln, 1992.
37 Rosa Luxemburg, “Parteifragen im Vorwärts”, Gesammelte Werke Bd 1/1, p. 564, 29.9.1899
38 Laschitza, Im Lebensrausch, Trotz Alledem, p.104, 27.Okt. 1898, Kautsky-Nachlass C 209: Kautsky an Bernstein
39 Karl Kautsky to Victor Adler, 20.7.1905, in Victor Adler Briefwechsel, a.a.O. S. 463, quoted by Till Schelz-Brandenburg, p. 338).
40 Rosa Luxemburg – Ges. Werke, Bd 1/1, p. 528, quoting “Kautsky zum Parteitag in Hannover”, Neue Zeit 18, Stuttgart 1899-1900, 1. Bd. S. 12)
41 Translated from the French version, Freedom of criticism and science [143]
42 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, p. 279, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 3. 3. 1899
43 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 1, p. 426, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 21.12.1899
44 Luxemburg made it a point of honour to give her entire support as an agitator (she was much in demand as a public speaker) even to those Party members she criticised most sharply, for example during the electoral campaign of the revisionist Max Schippel.
45 Rosa Luxemburg Ges. Briefe, Bd. 1, p. 491, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 7.7.1890
46 Rosa Luxemburg, Erklärung, Ges. Werke Bd 1/2 , p 146, 1.10.1901
47 At the Lübeck party congress the Neue Zeit and Kautsky as its editor had been heavily attacked by the opportunists because of the controversy over revisionism.
48 JP Nettl, Rosa Luxemburg, Vol 1, p. 192 (the quote here is taken from the unabridged edition), Rosa Luxemburg, letter to Kautsky, 3.10.1901
49 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 1,. P. 565, Letter to Jogiches, 12.1.1902
50 Quoted in Nettl, op.cit., p127
51 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe Bd 3, p. 358, Letter to Kostja Zetkin, 27. June 1908
52 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe Bd 3, p. 57, Letter to Kostja Zetkin, 1.August 1909
53 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, 1/1, p. 239, p. 245, - Parteitag der Sozialdemokratie 1898 in Stuttgart, Oktober 1898
54 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke BDI 1/1, S. 255, Nachbetrachtungen zum Parteitag 12-14. Oktober 1898, Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung Dresden
55 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 1, p. 279, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 3.3.1899
56 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe Bd 1, p. 384, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 24.9.1899
57 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 1, p. 322, Letter to Jogiches, 1.5.1899
58 Kautsky to Bernstein, 29.10.1898, IISG, Amsterdam, Kautsky-Nicholas, C 210.
59 Laschitza, ibid, p. 129, (Ignatz Auer in a letter to Bernstein). In his Histoire générale du socialisme, Jacques Droz describes Auer as follows: “He was a ‘practical’, a ‘reformist’ in practice who gloried in knowing nothing about theory, but nationalist to the point of praising the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine before socialist audiences and opposing the reconstitution of Poland, cynical to the point of rejecting the authority of the International; in reality he cautioned line of the Sozialistische Monatshefte and actively encouraged the development of reformism” (p41).
60 Laschitza, ibid, p. 130 .
61 Laschitza, ibid, p. 136, in Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung, 29.11. 1899
62 Rosa Luxemburg was aware of the hostility towards her at a very early stage. At the Hanover party congress in 1899 the leadership had not wanted to let her speak on the question of customs. She described their attitude in a letter to Jogiches: “We had better have this sorted out in the Party, i.e. in the clan. This is the way things work with them: If the house is burning, they need a scapegoat (a Jew), if the fire has been extinguished, the Jew gets kicked out”. (Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 1, p. 317, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 27.4.1899). Victor Adler wrote to Bebel in 1910 that he had “sufficiently low instincts to get a certain amount of pleasure from what Karl was suffering at the hands of his friends. But it really is too bad – the poisonous bitch will yet do a lot of damage, all the more because she is as clever as a monkey [blitzgescheit] while on the other hand her sense of responsibility is totally lacking and her only motive is an almost perverse desire for self-justification”. (Nettl, 1, p. 432, unabridged version, Victor Adler to August Bebel, 5.8.1910),
63 The satirical weekly Simplicissimus published a nasty poem directed at Luxemburg:
“Nur eines gibt es was ich wirklich hasse:
Das ist der Volksversammlungsrednerin.
Der Zielbewussten, tintenfrohen Klasse.
Ich bin der Ansicht, dass sie alle spinnen.
Sie taugen nichts im Hause, nichts im Bette.
Mag Fräulein Luxemburg die Nase rümpfen,
Auch sie hat sicherlich – was gilt die Wette? –
Mehr als ein Loch in ihren woll’nen Strümpfen.”
Laschitza, 136, Simplicissimus, 4. Jahrgang, Nr. 33, 1899/1900, S. 263).
64 Frölich, Paul, “Gedanke und Tat”, Rosa Luxemburg, Dietz-Verlag Berlin, 1990, p. 62
65 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe Bd. 1, S. 316, Letter to Leo Jogiches, 27.April 1899
66 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Briefe, Bd 3 S. 89, Letter to Clara Zetkin, 29.9.1909
67 Rosa Luxemburg Ges. Briefe, Bd. 3, p. 268, Letter to Kostja Zetkin, 30.11.1910. These lines were provoked by the philistine reaction within the Party leadership to an article she had written on Tolstoy, which was considered both irrelevant (artistic subjects were not important), and undesirable in the Party press because it praised an artist who was both a Russian and a mystic.
68 Since the Party had a large number of papers, most of which were not under the direct control of the Berlin leadership, it often depended on the attitude of the local editorial board whether articles of the left current were published. The left wing had the biggest audience in Leipzig, Stuttgart, Bremen and Dortmund.
69 Nettl 1 p. 421 (unabridged edition)
70 Nettl, I, p. 464 (unabridged edition).
71 Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (Socjaldemokracja Królestwa Polskiego i Litwy – SDKPiL). The Party was formed in 1893 as the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland (SDKP), its best-known leading members being Rosa Luxemburg, Leo Jogiches, Julian Marchlewski, and Adolf Warszawski. It became the SDKPiL following the merger with the Union of Workers in Lithuania led by Feliks Dzerzhinsky among others. One of the SDKPiL’s most important distinguishing characteristics was its steadfast internationalism and its conviction that Polish national independence was not in the workers’ interests, and that the Polish workers’ movement should on the contrary ally itself closely with the Russian Social-Democracy and the Bolsheviks in particular. This set it permanently at odds with the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna – PPS) which adopted a more and more nationalist orientation under the leadership of Josef Pilsudski, later (not unlike Mussolini) to become dictator of Poland.
72 Poland, it should be remembered, did not exist as a separate country. The major part of historic Poland was part of the Tsarist empire, while other parts had been absorbed by Germany and Austria-Hungary.
73 She was arrested in March 1906, together with Leo Jogiches who had also returned to Poland. There were serious fears for her safety, with the SDKPiL making it known that they would take physical reprisals against government agents should any harm befall her. A mixture of subterfuge and help from her family managed to extricate her from the Tsarist gaols, whence she returned to Germany. Jogiches was sentenced to eight years hard labour, but succeeded in escaping from prison.
74 The full text can be found on marxists.org [144].
75 See the series of articles on 1905 [145] in the International Review nos 120, 122, 123, 125.
76 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd 2, p. 347
77 Rosa Luxemburg, “Das Offiziösentum der Theorie”, Ges. Werke Bd. 3, p. 307, article published in Neue Zeit, 1912.
78 The debate between Kautsky, Luxemburg and Pannekoek has been published in French under the title Socialisme, la voie occidentale, Presses Universitaires de France.
79 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd. 2, S. 380, “Theorie und die Praxis”, published in Neue Zeit, 28. Jg, 1909/1910, in reply to Kautsky’s article “Was nun?”
80 Rosa Luxemburg, “Die Theorie und Praxis”, Ges. Werke, Bd 2, S. 398
81 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd. 3, S. 441 “Die totgeschwiegene Wahlrechtsdebatte” (“The concealed debate about electoral rights”) 17.8.1910
82 Published in English under the title Marxist theory and revolutionary tactics [146].
83 At the time another major voice of the left in Holland, Herman Gorter, wrote to Kautsky. “Tactical divergences often entail an estrangement between friends. In my case as far as my relationship with you is concerned, this is not true; as you have noticed. Although you often criticised Pannekoek and Rosa, with whom I agree in general (and you thus also criticised me) I have always maintained the same kind of relationship with you.” (Gorter, Letter to Kautsky, Dec. 1914, Kautsky Archive IISG, DXI 283, quote in Herman Gorter, Herman de Liagre Böhl, Nijmegen, 1973, p. 105). “Out of old love and admiration in the Tribune we always abstained as much as possible from fighting against you” (ibid).
84 In Socialisme, la voie occidentale, p123.
85 Nettl, I, p. 401 (unabridged edition)
86 One major weakness of the more militant declarations was the idea of simultaneous action. Thus the Belgian socialist youth guard adopted a resolution: “it is the duty of the socialist parties and trade unions of all countries to oppose war. The most effective means of this opposition are the general strike and insubordination in response to the war mobilisation.” (The danger of war and the Second International, J. Jemnitz, p. 17). But these means were to be made use of only if they were adopted simultaneously in all countries, in other words intransigent internationalism and antimilitaristic action were made conditional on everyone sharing the same position.
87 Fricke, Dieter, Handbuch zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 1869 bis 1917; Dietz-Verlag, Berlin, 1987, p. 120
88 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd. 3, S. 34, published in Leipziger Volkszeitung, 26.8.1911
89 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges.Werke, Bd. 3, S. 43, published in Leipziger Volkszeitung, 30.8.1911
90 Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd 3, S. 11
91 “I am in an absolutely preposterous situation – I have to take responsibility thus condemning myself to silence though if I followed my own wishes, I would turn against the leadership myself.” (Jemnitz, p. 73, Letter from Bebel to Kautsky). Bebel died of a heart-attack while in a Swiss sanatorium, on 13th August.
92 In an article “Partei und breite Schicht” he wrote: “There are about a million Party members in Germany today. The Social Democrats there receive about 4,250,000 votes and there are about 15,000,000 proletarians. (...) One million – that is the party, one million in the party organisations; 4,250,000 is the ‘broad section’”. He stressed that “In Germany, for example, about one-fifteenth of the class is organised in the Party; in France about a hundred-and-fortieth part. In Germany there are four or five Social Democrats of the ‘broad section’ to every Party member; in France there are fourteen”. Lenin added: “The party is the politically conscious, advanced section of the class, it is its vanguard. The strength of that vanguard is ten times, a hundred times, more than a hundred times, greater than its numbers.... Organisation increases its strength tenfold” (September 1913, in “How Vera Sassulitch spreads liquidationism [147]”. Lenin, Collected Works, vol 19)
93 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd 2, p. 378
94 Rosa Luxemburg, “Again on the masses and the leaders [148]”, August 1911, originally published in the Leipziger Volkszeitung
95 Rosa Luxemburg, Ges. Werke, Bd. 3, S. 253, “Taktische Fragen”, June 1913
96 “Again on the masses and the leaders”, op.cit.
For more than ten years, the distant din of war had echoed across Europe - colonial wars in Africa, the Moroccan crises, the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, the Balkan wars - and the workers of Europe had trusted in the International to keep the threat of generalised war at bay. The contours of the war to come - already predicted by Engels in 18871 - had become clearer year by year, so much so that the International's congresses at Stuttgart in 1907, and at Basel in 1912, had denounced them clearly: not a defensive war, but a war of imperialist competition, pillage and rapine. Over and over, the International and its member parties had warned the workers of the danger and threatened the ruling classes with their own overthrow should they dare defy the power of the organised working class and unleash the hounds of war. And yet in August 1914, the International disintegrated, blown away like insubstantial dust, as one after the other its leaders and parliamentary deputies betrayed their most solemn promises, voted war credits and called the workers to the slaughter.2
How could such a disaster happen? Karl Kautsky, once the Second International's foremost theoretician, blamed it on the workers: "who would dare assert that an order given by a handful of parliamentarians is sufficient to make four million class-conscious German proletarians turn right-about face within twenty-four hours, in direct opposition to their former aims? If this were true, it would, of course, be evidence of a terrible collapse, not only of our Party, but also of the masses. [Kautsky’s emphasis] If the masses were such a spineless flock of sheep, we might just as well allow ourselves to be buried”.3 In short, if four million German workers allowed themselves to be marched off to war, it was of their own volition, nothing to do with the parliamentarians who, with the backing of the majority of their parties, voted war credits and (in France and Britain) soon found a place in bourgeois governments of national unity.
To this wretched, cowardly excuse, Lenin gave a stinging retort: “Consider: the only people in a position to express their attitude to the war more or less freely (i.e., without being immediately seized and dragged to the barracks, or the immediate risk of being shot) were a 'handful of parliamentarians' (who were free to vote, with the right to do so; they were quite able to vote in opposition. Even in Russia, no one was beaten up or even arrested for this), a handful of officials, journalists, etc. And now, Kautsky nobly places on the masses the blame for the treachery and the spinelessness of that social stratum of whose links with the tactics and ideology of opportunism Kautsky himself has written scores of times over a number of years!”.4
Betrayed by their leaders, their organisations transformed almost overnight from fighting organisations for workers’ defence to recruiting sergeants for the slaughter, the workers were left to confront the full might of the state’s military machine individually and alone. As one French syndicalist was to write later: “I have only one reproach to make to myself (…) and it is that I, an anti-patriot and anti-militarist, left with my comrades on the fourth day of mobilisation. I did not have the strength of character not to go, although I did not recognise frontiers or fatherland. I was afraid, it’s true, of the firing squad. I was afraid... But at the front, thinking of my family, scratching the names of my wife and son on the bottom of the trench I said ‘How is it possible that I, anti-patriot, anti-militarist, who acknowledged only the International, come to be attacking my companions in misery and perhaps shall die for my enemies against my own cause and my own interests?’”.5
All over Europe, the workers had had confidence in the International, believed its congresses’ repeated resolutions against the coming war. They trusted the International, that highest expression of the power of the organised working class, to stay the criminal hand of capitalist imperialism.
In July 1914, with the threat of war more and more imminent, an emergency meeting was called in Brussels of the International Socialist Bureau – the nearest thing that the International had to a central organ. The leaders of the parties present found it hard at first to believe that a full-scale war would really break out, but by the time the ISB met on 29th July, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia and imposed martial law. Victor Adler told the meeting that his party was impotent, no attempt was planned to resist mobilisation or the war itself. No plans had been made for the Party to go underground and to continue its activity in clandestinity. The discussion lost itself in deliberation about changing the venue for the upcoming congress of the International, which was to have been held in Vienna: no practical action was considered. Forgetting everything that had been said at earlier congresses, the leaders were still trusting the diplomacy of the great powers to prevent war from breaking out, unaware – or unwilling to see – that this time, all the powers were bent on war. The British delegate Bruce Glasier6 wrote that “although the dread peril of a general eruption of war was the main subject of the deliberations, no one, not even the German representatives, seemed apprehensive of an actual rupture between the great powers taking place until at least the full resources of diplomacy had been exhausted”.7 Jaurès could even declare that “at this moment the French government wants peace and is working for the maintenance of peace. The French government is the best ally in the cause of peace of that admirable English government which has taken the initiative in conciliation”.8
After the ISB meeting, thousands of Belgian workers gathered to hear the leaders of the International speak against the threat of war. Jaurès gave one of his greatest anti-war speeches ever, and the workers cheered him to the rafters. Yet one orator was notably absent from the platform: Rosa Luxemburg, the most clear-sighted and the most indomitable fighter of them all, refused to speak, sick to the heart at the spinelessness and self-delusion she saw all around her: she alone could see the wave of cowardice and betrayal that was to sweep the socialist parties into supporting their national governments’ imperialist ambitions.
Once war had broken out, the socialist traitors in every belligerent country claimed to be fighting a “defensive” war: in Germany the war was to defend German “Kultur” against the Cossack barbarism of Tsarist Russia, in France it was to defend republican France against Prussian autocracy, in Britain it was to defend “little Belgium”.9 Lenin demolished these hypocritical pretentions, reminding his readers of the solemn promises that the leaders of the 2nd International had made at the Congress of Basel in 1912 to oppose, not just war in general but this particular imperialist war which the workers’ movement had long seen in the making: “The Basel resolution does not speak of a national or a people’s war – examples of which have occurred in Europe, wars that were even typical of the period of 1789-1871 – or of a revolutionary war, which Social-Democrats have never renounced, but of the present war, which is the outcome of ‘capitalist imperialism’ and ‘dynastic interests’, the outcome of ‘the policy of conquest’ pursued by both groups of belligerent powers – the Austro-German and the Anglo Franco-Russian. Plekhanov, Kautsky and Co. are flagrantly deceiving the workers by repeating the selfish lie of the bourgeoisie of all countries, which is striving with all its might to depict this imperialist and predatory war for colonies as a people’s war, a war of defence (for any side); when they seek to justify this war by citing historical examples of non-imperialist wars”.10
How was it that the International, in which the workers placed such confidence, proved incapable of action? In fact, its ability to act was more apparent than real: the ISB was a mere coordinating body whose role was largely restricted to organising congresses and mediating in the disputes within and among the socialist parties themselves. Although the International’s left wing – around Lenin and Luxemburg in particular – considered the congress resolutions against war to be binding undertakings, the ISB had no power to enforce them; it was unable to take action independently – still less against the wishes – of each country’s socialist parties themselves and especially of the most powerful among them: the German SPD. Indeed, although International’s founding congress was held in 1889, the International Socialist Bureau was only constituted at the congress of 1900: until then, the International in effect only existed while the congress was in session. The rest of the time it was little more than a web of personal relationships among the different socialist leaders, many of whom had come to know each other personally during years in exile. There was not even any formal network of correspondence; August Bebel was even to complain to Engels in 1894 that all the SPD’s dealings with other socialist parties remained entirely in the hands of Wilhelm Liebknecht: “To meddle with Liebknecht in his foreign connections is simply impossible. No one knows to whom he writes or what he writes; he talks to no one about that...”.11
The contrast with the First International (the International Workingmen’s Association) is striking. Practically the first act of the IWA following its creation in 1864 by a meeting of largely British and French workers held at St Martin’s Fields in London, was to draft an organisational programme and to form a General Council – the centralising body of the International. Once the statutes were drafted, a broad range of workers’ organisations across Europe (political parties, unions, even cooperatives) joined the organisation on the basis of agreement with the IWA’s statutes. Despite the attempts by Bakunin’s “Alliance” to undermine it, the General Council, elected by the IWA’s congresses, enjoyed all the authority of a true centralising body.
This contrast between the two Internationals was itself the product of a new and different historical situation, and indeed confirmed the prescient words of the Communist Manifesto: “Though not in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bourgeoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie”.12 Following the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871, the workers’ movement entered a period of fierce repression and contraction especially in France – where thousands of the Communards were shot or exiled to penal servitude in the colonies – and in Germany where the SDAP (the SPD’s predecessor) was driven underground by Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws. It was clear that revolution was not on the immediate agenda as many revolutionaries, including Marx and Engels themselves, had hoped and believed during the 1860s. Economically and socially, the thirty years from 1870 to 190013 were to see a period of massive capitalist expansion both internally with the growth of mass production and heavy industry at the expense of the artisan classes, and externally as capitalism spread into new territories both within Europe itself and across the seas, especially in the USA and in the growing number of the Great Powers’ colonial possessions. This in turn meant a huge increase in the numbers of workers: the period was one where the working class had in effect to transform itself from an amorphous mass of displaced artisans and peasants, into a class of associated labour capable of asserting its own historical perspective and defending its own immediate economic and social interests. This process, indeed, had already been proclaimed by the First International: “the lords of the land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economic monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labor (...) To conquer political power has, therefore, become the great duty of the working classes. They seem to have comprehended this, for in England, Germany, Italy, and France, there have taken place simultaneous revivals, and simultaneous efforts are being made at the political organisation of the workingmen’s party”.14
By its very nature, given the conditions of the epoch, this self-formation of the working class was to take on forms that were specific to and determined by the historical development of each country. In Germany, the workers struggled at first in the difficult conditions of clandestinity imposed by Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, where the only possible legal action was in parliament, such that the unions grew under the wing of the socialist party. In Britain, still Europe’s most advanced industrial power, the crushing defeat of the great political movement of Chartism in 1848 had all but discredited political action and the workers’ organising energy was largely devoted to building up their trades unions: the socialist parties remained small and insignificant on the political scene. In France, the workers’ movement was fractured between marxists (Jules Guesde’s “Parti ouvrier’ founded in 1882), the Blanquists inspired by the revolutionary tradition of the great Paris Commune (Edouard Vaillant’s “Comité révolutionnaire central”), the reformists (known as “Possibilists”) and the unions grouped in the CGT and strongly influenced by the ideas of revolutionary syndicalism. Inevitably, all these organisations struggled to develop the workers’ organisation and education, and to win union and political rights, against their respective ruling classes and therefore within the national framework.
The development of mass union organisations and a mass political movement also helped to redefine the conditions under which revolutionaries worked. The old Blanquist tradition – the idea of a small, conspiratorial band of professional revolutionaries who would seize power with the more or less passive support of the masses – was outdated, replaced by the need to construct mass organisations which perforce must operate within a certain legal framework. The right to organise, the right of assembly, the right to free speech, all these became objects of vital interest to the mass movement: inevitably all these demands, yet again, were posed within the legal framework specific to each nation. To take just one example: whereas the French socialists could get deputies elected to a Republican parliament which wielded effective legislative power, in Germany the government’s direction depended not on the Reichstag (the Imperial parliament), but on the autocratic decisions of the Kaiser in person. It was thus far easier for the Germans to maintain an attitude of rigorous refusal to ally with bourgeois parties, since they were highly unlikely to be called on to do so; how fragile was this position of principle was shown by the way in which it was ignored by the SPD in South Germany, whose deputies regularly voted in favour of budget proposals in the regional Landtags (Länder parliaments).
Nonetheless, as the workers’ movements in different countries emerged from the period of reaction and defeat, the proletariat’s inherently international nature reasserted itself. In 1887, the German party congress held at St Gallen in Switzerland decided to take the initiative of organising an international congress; in the same year, the British TUC meeting in Swansea voted in favour of an international conference to press for an eight-hour working day.15 The latter led to the holding of an exploratory meeting in November 1888 in London at the invitation of the TUC’s Parliamentary Committee, attended by delegates from several countries, though not from Germany. These two simultaneous initiatives quickly demonstrated a fundamental split within the labour movement, between the reformists led by the British unions and the French Possibilists, and the revolutionary marxists, whose most important organisation was the German SDAP (the British unions, indeed, were opposed to any participation at all in their initiative by political organisations).
In 1889 – the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution, still a reference for all those who aspired to the overthrow of the existing order – there were thus not one but two international workers’ congresses held in Paris simultaneously: the first called by the French Possibilists, the second by the marxist Parti Ouvrier16 led by Jules Guesde. The subsequent decline of the Possibilists meant that the marxist congress (known after its meeting-place in the Salle Petrelle) was thereafter considered as the 2nd International's founding congress. Inevitably, the congress was marked by inexperience and a great deal of confusion: confusion over the highly charged question of validating delegates’ mandates, and also over translations which were undertaken by whichever members of the polyglot assembly happened to be available.17 The most important aspects of the Congress were thus not so much its practical decisions but first, the fact that it met at all, and second the roll-call of delegates. From France came Marx’s sons-in-law Paul Lafargue and Charles Longuet, together with Edouard Vaillant, the hero of the Commune; from Germany came Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, together with Eduard Bernstein and Klara Zetkin; Britain’s best-known representative was William Morris, and this was in itself indicative of the political backwardness of British socialism, since the membership of his Socialist League was barely numbered in the hundreds. A highlight of the congress was the handshake between the joint presidents Vaillant and Liebknecht, symbolic of the international fraternity between French and German socialists.
The Gauche Communiste de France were thus right, in 1948, to highlight two major characteristics of the new International. First, it “marked a stage of differentiation between the economic struggle of wage labour and the social, political struggle... [it] was the organisation of the struggle for reforms and of political conquests, for the political affirmation of the proletariat”. At the same time, the fact that the International was founded as an explicitly marxist, revolutionary organisation “marked a higher stage in the ideological demarcation of the proletariat by clarifying and elaborating the theoretical foundations of its historic revolutionary mission”.18
The 2nd International was founded, but it still had no permanent organisational structure. Existing only for the duration of its congresses, it had no means of enforcing the resolutions that these congresses adopted. This contrast between apparent international unity and national particularities in practice was nowhere more evident than in the campaign for the eight-hour day, centred on the May Day demonstration, which was one of the International’s major preoccupations during the 1890s.
Probably the most important resolution of the 1889 Congress was that proposed by the French delegate Raymond Lavigne: that the workers in every country should take up the campaign for the eight-hour day decided by the 1888 St Louis congress of the American Federation of Labour, in the form of massive demonstrations and a generalised stoppage of work to be held every year on 1st May. Yet it soon became clear that the socialists and the unions in different countries had very different ideas as to what the May Day celebrations should mean. In France, partly as a result of the revolutionary syndicalist tradition in the unions, May Day quickly became the occasion for massive demonstrations leading to clashes with the police: in 1891 at Fourmies in the North of France, troops fired on a workers’ demonstration leaving ten dead, including several children. In Germany on the other hand, difficult economic conditions which encouraged the employers to turn a strike into a lock-out combined with the German unions’ and the SDP’s reluctance to have their action dictated to them by anyone outside Germany, even by the International: as a result, there was a strong tendency within Germany to avoid putting the resolution into practice other than by holding meetings at the end of the working day. This German reluctance was shared by the unions in Britain.
The fact that the strongest socialist party in Europe should sound the retreat in this way alarmed the French and the Austrians in particular, and at the 1893 Congress of the International in Zürich, the Austrian socialist leader Victor Adler proposed a new resolution insisting that May Day should be the occasion for a real stoppage of work: the resolution was passed against the votes of the majority of the German delegates.
Yet only three months later, the SPD’s Cologne Congress was reducing the extent of the International’s resolution, by declaring that it should only apply to those organisations who actually felt it possible to join a stoppage.
The history of the May Day stoppages illustrates two important aspects that determined the International’s ability – or inability – to act as a united body. On the one hand, it was impossible to get around the fact that what was possible in one country was not necessarily possible in another: Engels himself was dubious about the May Day resolutions on precisely these grounds, fearing that the German unions might discredit themselves by making commitments that they would in the end be unable to honour. On the other, the very fact of operating in a national framework, combined with the dissolving effects of reformism and opportunism within the movement, tended to make the national parties and unions jealous of their prerogatives: this was especially true of the German organisations since as the largest party they were even more reluctant than others to be dictated to by the smaller parties who ought – so thought many German leaders – to be following the German example.
The difficulties experienced in this first attempt at united international action were to bode ill for the future, when the International would play for higher stakes by far.
The meeting in the Salle Petrelle not only founded the International, it founded it as an avowedly marxist organisation. The marxism of the 2nd International at its beginnings, dominated as it was by the German party and especially by Karl Kautsky as the editor of the SPD’s theoretical review Neue Zeit, tended strongly towards a vision of historical materialism which emphasised the inevitability of the transformation of capitalism into socialism. This was already evident in Kautsky’s unexpected critique of the Vorstand’s (the Party Executive committee) proposed draft of the SPD’s programme to be adopted at the 1891 Erfurt congress. In an article published in Neue Zeit, Kautsky described communism “as a necessity resulting directly from the historical trend of capitalist production methods”, and criticised the Vorstand’s proposal (drawn up by the veteran SPD leader Wilhelm Liebknecht) for deriving communism “not from the character of current production, but rather from the character of our party (...) The train of thought in the proposal of the Vorstand is as follows: the current method of production creates unbearable conditions; therefore we must eliminate them (...) In our opinion, the correct train of thought is this: the current method of production creates unbearable conditions; it also creates, however, the possibility and necessity of communism”.19 In the end, Kautsky’s proposal insisting on the “inherent necessity” of socialism, became the Erfurt programme’s theoretical preamble.20
To be sure, the evolution of capitalism makes communism a possibility. It is also a necessity for humanity. But in Kautsky’s conception it is also increasingly an inevitability: the growth of the trades unions, the resounding electoral victories of the social-democracy, all appeared as the products of an inevitable force that could be predicted with scientific accuracy. In 1906, following the 1905 revolution in Russia, he could write that “any coalition of European powers against the revolution, such as took place in 1793, is inconceivable (…) There is no fear of a coalition against the revolution”.21 In his polemic with Pannekoek and Luxemburg titled The new tactics, he argued as follows: “Pannekoek imagines that the destruction of the proletariat’s organisations will be a natural consequence of sharpening class struggle, that they will no longer be protected by law and justice (…) The attempt, the effort to destroy the organisations of the working class certainly increases as these organisations become stronger and more dangerous to the established order. But the ability of these organisations to resist also increases to the same extent, and yet more so their irreplaceability. To deprive the proletariat of any possibility of organisation has become impossible in the developed capitalist states today (…) Any destruction of working class organisations today could only be a passing episode”.22
During the last years of the 19th century, with capitalism still in the ascendant – enjoying, indeed, the massive expansion and prosperity that was later to be known, by contrast with the post-1914 era, as the Belle époque – the idea that socialism would be the natural and all but inevitable outcome of capitalism, was undoubtedly a source of strength for the working class. It gave a historical perspective and meaning to the painstaking work of building union and party organisations and it gave the workers a profound confidence in themselves, in their struggle, and in the future – this confidence in the future is one of the most striking differences between the working class at the beginning of the 20th and the 21st centuries.
History, however, is not a linear progression and what had been a strength for the workers as they built their organisations was to be transformed into a dangerous weakness. The illusion of the inevitability of the passage to socialism, the idea that this could be achieved by a gradual build-up of the workers’ organisations until, almost painlessly, they could simply step into a place left vacant by a capitalist class whose “private ownership of the means of production has become incompatible with their appropriate application and full development” (Erfurt programme), obscured the fact that a profound transformation was under way in the capitalism of the early 20th century. The significance of these changing conditions, especially for the class struggle, was made explosively evident by the Russian revolution of 1905: suddenly, new methods of organisation and struggle – the soviet and the mass strike – burst onto the scene. Whereas the left on the SPD – above all Rosa Luxemburg in her famous pamphlet on the Mass strike, party and unions – saw the significance of these new conditions and began pushing for a debate within the German Party, the right and the unions did everything they could to suppress any discussion of the mass strike: the trades unions' 1905 congress explicitly banned any discussion of the mass strike, while in the SPD it became more and more difficult to have articles on the subject published in the Party press.
On the centre and right of the SPD, confidence in the future had become blindness, to the point where Kautsky could write in 1909 “The proletariat has now grown so strong that it can contemplate a war with more confidence. We can no longer speak of a premature revolution, for it has already drawn so great strength from the present legal basis as to expect that a transformation of this basis would create the conditions for its further upward progress (…) if war should break out in spite of it, the proletariat is the only class that could confidently await its outcome”.23
In the Communist Manifesto Marx reminds us that the "natural condition" of workers in capitalism is that of competing, atomised individuals: it is only through the struggle that they can achieve the unity which itself is the vital precondition for the struggle to succeed. It is therefore no accident that many a 19th century union banner bore the inscription "unity is strength"; the slogan expressed the workers' awareness that unity was something to fight for, and something to guard preciously once achieved.
The same drive towards unity exists within and among the political organisations of the working class, inasmuch as they have no separate interests to defend, either for themselves or within the class itself. Naturally enough, this drive to unity finds its highest expression when the class struggle is historically on the rise, to the point where it becomes possible to create an international party: the IWA in 1864, the 2nd International in 1889, the 3rd International in 1919. The three Internationals themselves expressed a growing political unification within the working class: whereas the IWA had contained a very broad spectrum of political positions - from Proudhonists and Blanquists to Lassalleans to Marxists - the 2nd International was avowedly marxist, while the Third International's 21 Conditions for entry were explicitly intended to restrict membership to communists and revolutionaries and to correct precisely those factors which had caused the failure of the Second, in particular the absence of any centralising authority capable of taking decisions for the whole organisation.
Nonetheless, all the Internationals were real arenas of debate and ideological struggle, including the Third: witness, for example, Lenin’s polemic against Left-wing communism and Herman Gorter’s reply.
The 2nd International was deeply committed to the unity of the different socialist parties, on the grounds that since there was only one proletariat in any country, with the same class interests, so there should only be one socialist party. There were constant efforts to keep the Russian Mensheviks and Bolsheviks united after 1903, but the main issue during the International’s first years was the unification of the various French parties. This came to a head at the 1904 Amsterdam Congress, where Jules Guesde presented a resolution which was in effect no more than a translation of that adopted by the SPD at Dresden the year before, condemning “revisionist tactics [whose result] would be that instead of being a party which works for the most rapid transformation possible of existing bourgeois society into the socialist social order, ie revolutionary in the best sense of the word, the party would become one which is content with reforming bourgeois society”.24 This was an explicit condemnation of Millerand’s25 entry into government, and an implicit one of the reformism of Jean Jaurès’ Parti socialiste français. Guesde’s motion was passed by a massive majority, and the congress went on to pass unanimously a motion demanding the unification of the French socialists: the following April, the Parti socialiste and the Parti ouvrier united to form the Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière. It is a measure of Jaurès’ greatness that he accepted the majority vote of the International and gave up his own deeply held convictions26 in the name of the International’s unity.27 This moment was probably the closest the International ever came to imposing unity of action in the name of principle on its member parties.
Unity of action, however necessary for the proletariat as a class, can be a double-edged sword in moments of crisis when the tide of history turns. And the International was entering just one such period of crisis as the increasing tensions between the imperialist powers brought the threat of war closer. As Rosa Luxemburg put it: “By covering up the contradictions by the artificial ‘unification’ of incompatible views, the contradictions can only come to a head, until they explode violently sooner or later through a split (…) Those who bring the divergences of view to the fore and fight against the divergent views, work towards the unity of the party. But those who cover up the divergences work towards a real split in the party.”28
Nowhere is this danger more evident than in the resolutions adopted against the looming threat of war. The final paragraphs of the 1907 Stuttgart resolution read as follows: “If a war threatens to break out, it is the duty of the working classes and their parliamentary representatives in the countries involved, supported by the coordinating activity of the International Socialist Bureau, to exert every effort in order to prevent the outbreak of war by the means they consider most effective, which naturally vary according to the sharpening of the class struggle and the sharpening of the general political situation.
In case war should break out anyway, it is their duty to intervene in favor of its speedy termination and with all their powers to utilize the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby to hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule.”
The problem, is that the resolution has nothing to say about how the socialist parties were to intervene in the situation: they are merely to adopt “the means they consider most effective”. This swept under the carpet three major issues.
The first of these was the question of the mass strike, which the left in the SPD had been trying to bring to the fore ever since 1905 against the determined and largely successful opposition of the opportunists in the Party and union leadership. The French socialists, and Jaurès in particular, were fervent supporters of the general strike as a means to prevent war, although by this they meant a strike organised by the unions on the syndicalist model rather than the mass upsurge of proletarian self-action that Luxemburg envisaged, in a movement which the Party should encourage but could in no way launch artificially. It was noteworthy that a joint attempt by the French Edouard Vaillant and the Scot Keir Hardie at the 1910 Copenhagen Congress, to get a resolution passed committing the International to general strike action in the event of war, was voted down by the German delegation.
The second was the attitude the socialists in any particular country could be expected to take should that country be attacked: this was a critical question, since in imperialist war it is invariably the case that one belligerant appears as the “aggressor” and the other the “aggressed”. The period of progressive national wars was still very recent, and national causes such as the independence of Poland or Ireland remained on the socialist agenda: Rosa Luxemburg’s SDKPiL29 was very much a minority even on the left of the International, in opposing Polish independence. In the French tradition, the memory of the French Revolution and the Paris Commune was still active, and tended to identify revolution with the nation: hence Jaurès’ statement that “revolution is necessarily active. And it can only be so if it defends the national existence which serves as its base”.30 For the Germans, the danger of Tsarist Russia as the “barbaric” crutch of Prussian autocracy was equally an article of faith, and in 1891 Bebel could write that “The soil of Germany, the German fatherland belongs to us and the masses as much and more than to the others. If Russia, the champion of terror and barbarism, went to attack Germany (…) we are as much concerned as those who stand at the head of Germany”.31
Finally, for all the threats of proletarian action against war, the leaders of the International (with the exception of the left) continued to believe in the diplomacy of the bourgeois classes to preserve peace. Hence while the Basel Manifesto of 1912 could declare: “Let the governments remember that with the present condition of Europe and the mood of the working class, they cannot unleash a war without danger to themselves”, yet at the same time it could “consider the best means [to bridge the hostility between Britain and Germany] to be the conclusion of an accord between Germany and England concerning the limitation of naval armaments and the abolition of the right of naval booty”. The working classes were called to agitate for peace, not to prepare themselves for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism which alone could guarantee that peace: “The Congress therefore appeals to you, proletarians and Socialists of all countries, to make your voices heard in this decisive hour! (...) See to it that the governments are constantly kept aware of the vigilance and passionate will for peace on the part of the proletariat! To the capitalist world of exploitation and mass murder, oppose in this way the proletarian world of peace and fraternity of peoples!”.
The unity of the International, on which any hope of united action against the threat of war depended, was thus founded on an illusion. The International, in reality was divided between a right wing and a left, the former ready and even eager to make common cause with the ruling class in defence of the nation, the latter preparing to answer war with the revolutionary overthrow of capital. During the 19th century, it was still possible for right and left to exist within the same workers’ movement, and participate in the organisation of the workers as a class aware of its own interests; as the “epoch of wars and revolutions” opened, this unity became an impossibility.
Jens, December 2014
1 "Eight to ten million soldiers will swallow each other up and in doing so eat all Europe more bare than any swarm of locusts. The devastation of the Thirty Years War compressed into the space of three or four years and extending over the whole continent; famine, sickness, want, brutalising the army and the mass of the population; irrevocable confusion of our artificial structure of trade, industry and credit, ending in general bankruptcy; collapse of the old states and their traditional statecraft, so that crowns will roll by the dozens in the gutter and no one be found to pick them up; it is absolutely impossible to predict where it will all end and who will emerge from the struggle as victor. Only one result is absolutely certain: general exhaustion and the establishment of the conditions for the final victory of the working class" (Engels, Introduction to Sigismund Borkheim's pamphlet Zur Erinnerung für die deutschen Mordspatrioten 1806-1812, 1887, quoted in James Joll, The Second International, p109, Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1974).
2 One noteworthy exception was the Serbian Social-Democracy, whose parliamentary deputies refused support for the war even as Austrian shells fell on Belgrade.
3 Cited in Lenin, The Collapse of the Second International, chapter 6.
4 ibid
5 Cited in Édouard Dolléans, Histoire du mouvement ouvrier (1871-1936) : tome II.
6 Member of the Independent Labour Party’s National Council, opposed World War I, but fell ill with cancer in 1915 and was unable to play an active role against the war.
7 Cited in James Joll, The Second International, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974, p165.
8 Joll, op cit., p168. What Jaurès did not know, because he only returned to Paris on 29th July, was that the French President Poincaré had spent his time on a trip to Russia doing everything possible to bolster Russia’s determination to go to war: Jaurès was to change his mind about the French government’s intentions after his own return to Paris, in the days that preceded his assassination. (version française sur dormirajamais.org/jaures-1 [164] : le gouvernement français veut la paix et travaille au maintien de la paix. Le gouvernement français est le meilleur allié de la paix de cet admirable gouvernement anglais qui a pris l’initiative de la médiation.
9 The British ruling class wins the prize for hypocrisy, since its own war plans included an invasion of Belgium to attack Germany.
10 Lenin, op cit.
11 Cited in Raymond H Dominick, Wilhelm Liebknecht, University of North Carolina Press, 1982, p344.
12 Chapter 1, “Bourgeois and proletarians”.
13 Indeed, this period of economic expansion was to continue right up to the eve of war.
14 From the Inaugural Address of the First International, penned by Marx.
15 See Joll, op cit., p28.
16 By this time, the party had been renamed Parti Ouvrier Français
17 The descriptions of the difficulties over translations are reminiscent of the ICC’s first congresses!
18 Internationalisme, 1947 (cf https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201409/10368/nature-... [165])
19 See Raymond H Dominick Wilhelm Liebknecht, 1982, University of North Carolina Press, p361.
21 Karl Kautsky, Revolutions, past and present (1906). https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1906/xx/revolutions.htm [167]
22 “La nouvelle tactique” in Socialisme, la voie occidentale (texts by Pannekoek, Luxemburg and Kautsky, Presses universitaires de France), also in Karl Kautsky and the socialist revolution 1880-1938, Massimo Salvadori, Verso editions, p160.
23 Kautsky, The road to power, https://marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/ch09.htm [168]
24 Quoted in Joll, op cit., p102
25 Alexandre Millerand was an associate of Clémenceau and acted as an arbitrator in the 1892 Carmaux strike. He was elected to Parliament in 1885 as a radical socialist, and was to become the leader of Jaurès’ Parti socialiste de France faction in Parliament. In 1899 he entered the Weldeck-Rousseau government which was supposed to defend the French republic against the threats of anti-Dreyfusard monarchists and militarists – though how real this threat was, was a matter of debate as Luxemburg pointed out. According to both Millerand and Jaurès, he entered the government on his own initiative and without consulting the party. The affair caused a huge scandal in the International, both because as a Minister in a bourgeois government he bore collective responsibility for the repression of workers’ movements by the government, and because one of his fellow ministers was General Gallifet, who had led the massacre of the Paris Commune in 1871.
26 Jaurès, whatever his disagreements with the manner of Millerand’s entry into the government, was honestly reformist and profoundly convinced of the necessity for the working class to use parliamentary methods to win reforms from the bourgeoisie.
27 This was not the case with others, like Briand and Viviani, who were to leave the party rather than face a future without the hope of a ministerial portfolio.
28 “Unser leitendes Zentralorgan”, Leipziger Volkszeitung, 22.9.1899, Rosa Luxemburg in Ges. Werke, Bd. 1/1, p. 558 (quoted in our article on the degeneration of the SPD).
29 Social-Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania.
30 Quoted in Joll, op cit., p115.
31 Quoted in Joll, op cit., p114.
Hardly a town in the country is without a square or an avenue, or at the very least a street, that bears his name. The ruling class has all but transformed him into a national monument, and yet today Jean Jaurès is almost unknown outside France. It was not always so. At the height of his powers, Jaurès was, together with August Bebel, one of the “twin peaks of the Second International” to use Trotsky’s expression. A giant of a man, physically, mentally, and morally, Jaurès was, along with Rosa Luxemburg, one of the outstanding orators of the International; still more remarkable, he was one of very few French socialists able to address German workers in their own language. For the French ruling class, who all now claim him as one of their own, an exemplary democrat, Jaurès was the object of violent hatred. His assassination, on 31st July 1914, can be said to have cleared the way definitively for France’s entry into war, yet the circumstances surrounding his assassination remain a mystery which has never been completely cleared up.
Who then, was Jean Jaurès? What did he represent – as he still does today – for the international working class? What role did he play in the International and its struggle for the emancipation of the workers and against war? Why, finally, was he murdered?
Jaurès can, it is true, be a very useful person for a ruling class which has transformed his life into a sort of propagandist’s Swiss army knife. Depending on the occasion, they can always find a blade to suit: there is the national hero who lies in the Pantheon alongside the heroes of imperialist war like Jean Moulin for example, or then there is the moderate socialist who disapproved of the violent methods of the revolution, or again the partisan of the parliamentary and national road to socialism; there is a blade in favour of the French Communist Party, and another for the pacifist who broke the ties between the struggle against war and the struggle for proletarian revolution. All these clichés are lies and Lenin’s adage that the best way to deal with a man who is a danger to the established order is to make an inoffensive icon of him has been validated once again.
But who was Jean Jaurès really? Quite simply he was a product of the workers’ movement, the collective and historic product of a particular class of society, one of its most remarkable products given the epoch wherein Jaurès used his talents. Born in 1859 into the provincial petty bourgeoisie of Castres, a small town in the department of the Tarn (south-west France), he proved a brilliant student at school winning a scholarship which allowed him to study for the entrance exam to the prestigious Ecole normale supérieure. Returning to the South he taught high school in Toulouse, and became involved in the political activity of the day to the point where he was elected to parliament on a republican unity list in 1885, at the age of only 25; he lost the seat at the next election in 1889, and returned to teaching and journalism.
His transformation from radical republican to socialist came with the 1892 miners’ strike in Carmaux. The strike was sparked off by the sacking of Jean-Baptiste Calvignac, a miner who had been elected mayor of the town; the miners’ considered, quite rightly, that this was an attempt by the local big bourgeoisie to silence the workers’ efforts to express and defend themselves politically. Jaurès, now aged 34, was greatly impressed by the miners’ struggle and took an active part in it, defending the miners’ cause in the pages of La Dépêche and participating in their meetings. He was also scandalised by the bloody repression of a demonstration at Fourmies in the north where the workers were fighting for the 8-hour day. As a result of the Carmaux struggle, Jaurès threw himself whole-heartedly into the socialist cause, and was elected to parliament as socialist deputy for Carmaux in 1893. Like Marx and many other militant workers, it was the proletariat itself that won Jaurès over to the cause of revolutionary socialism. It was as a martyr to this cause that he was assassinated on the eve of the First World War, after throwing all his strength into the fight against militarism in the hope that the international action of the proletariat would stop the mobilisation for war. Certainly Jaurès belonged to the reformist wing of socialism and as such had several times contributed to a considerable weakening of the working class struggle, but his unconditional devotion to the proletarian cause allowed him to correct his mistakes, unlike his fellow socialist deputies such as Pierre Renaudel, Aristride Briand, René Viviani or Marcel Sembat who were very quickly carried away by the most crass opportunism. The members of the left in the 2nd International fought his ideas vigorously but the majority of them admired his personality, the eminence of his thought and his moral strength. Trotsky wrote in his autobiography: “Politically I had been far removed from him. But one could not help feeling the pull of his powerful personality (…) With a mighty force as elemental as a waterfall, he combined great gentleness, which shone in his face like a reflection of a higher spiritual culture. He would send rocks tumbling down, he would thunder and bring the earthquake, but himself he never deafened. He stood always on guard, watched intently for every objection, quick to pick it up and parry it. Sometimes he swept all resistance before him as relentlessly as a hurricane, sometimes as generously and gently as a tutor or elder brother”1. Rosa Luxemburg, this other great figure of the left, expressed similar sentiments. As Jaurès read German, she offered him a dedicated copy of her doctoral thesis on The industrial development of Poland. Jaurès had the same athletic physique as the sculptor August Rodin, and on the latter’s death, Rosa Luxemburg wrote to Sonia Liebknecht: “His must have been a marvellous personality: frank, natural, overflowing with warmth and human intelligence; he decidedly reminded me of Jaurès”2.
So rich and complex a personality can only be understood in the context of his epoch: the final phase of the ascendency of capitalism which unfolded into the First World War. Nor should one ever forget how much he was capable of learning at the school of proletarian struggle and the International. Although he never adopted completely Marx and Engels’ theories, at a conference in Paris on 10th February 1900, he felt the need to express his agreement with all the essential ideas of scientific socialism3.
The Paris Commune of 1871 demonstrated that the proletariat was capable of taking power and exercising it through the means of mass assemblies and elected and revocable delegates. It brought a decisive clarification: the working class could not simply take hold of the machinery of the state and use it for its own ends; it must first of all destroy the old bourgeois state edifice then set up a new state specific to the period of transition from capitalism to communism. In his magnificent work State and Revolution, Lenin was to remind those who had forgotten them of these fundamental lessons. But the Paris Commune also demonstrated that the proletariat had not yet the strength to keep power and to engender a revolutionary process at the international level. The proletariat appeared as a distinct class with its own programme at the time of the June 1848 insurrection, but the process through which it could constitute itself as an international force provided with a class consciousness and a political experience was far from complete. This immaturity was matched by a massive development of capitalism which was, precisely, the precondition and the context for the constitution of the proletariat into a class. This was a period of gigantic economic and colonial conquests during which the last “uncivilised” areas of the globe were opened up to the imperialist giants and which witnessed an enormous technical: electricity, the telephone, the automobile to mention but a few.
This period was not without danger for the proletariat, but it had no choice. Only capitalism could create the conditions for the international communist revolution, it alone could produce its own gravediggers. Basing itself on obtaining real reforms in its favour, the working class developed great economic struggles and, with this aim, organised itself into powerful trade unions and social-democratic parties. As the Communist Manifesto says: “It compels legislative recognition of particular interests of the workers, by taking advantage of the divisions among the bourgeoisie itself. Thus, the ten-hours’ bill in England was carried”4.
The struggles for workers’ legislation, for universal suffrage, including the defence of the bourgeois Republic faced with the forces of reaction, were understood as preparing the conditions for proletarian revolution which would overthrow bourgeois domination. The minimum and maximum programme formed a unity on condition that in the daily struggles, with their inevitable alliances with certain bourgeois and petty bourgeois factions, the proletariat defended its class independence and kept in mind the final revolutionary objective. It was the period par excellence of workers’ parliamentarism and Jean Jaurès, an orator of great talent, gave to it all his energy. Jaurès was part of the massive entry of socialists into parliament following the legislative elections of 1893. According to the clearest political tendencies of the time, workers’ parliamentarism was not an objective in itself but only a support to the general struggle of the proletariat. And indeed, when the socialists spoke in the Chamber of Deputies, they declared themselves to be speaking to those “outside the windows” to make it clear that their aim was not to convince bourgeois deputies but to clarify things for the working class, to encourage it to throw itself into great political struggles which would give it the necessary experience to exercise its future power. In the Considerations of the programme of the French workers’ party, drawn up in 1880 by Jules Guesde, Paul Lafargue, Engels and Marx, we find the following significant formulation:
“Considering,
That this collective appropriation [of the means of production] can only come out of revolutionary action of the productive class – or proletariat – organised in a distinct political party;
That a similar organisation (of society) must be pursued by all the means of which the proletariat disposes, including universal suffrage, transformed thus from an instrument of deception that it has been up to now into an instrument of emancipation (...)”5.
Parliamentarism is absolutely not seen here as the means for workers’ emancipation in place of revolution but, if one reads the preceding paragraph attentively, as one of the means for progress towards the great objective of the collective appropriation of the means of production. The unity of means and end is thus clearly asserted. The development of a gigantic international workers’ movement at the end of the 19th century in part fulfilled its promise by building a bridge between the Paris Commune and the revolutionary wave that culminated in Russia 1917 and Germany 1918. This development provoked a nameless dread in the ruling class: their desperate efforts to distort Jean Jaurès are not simply useful to them, they also serve to exorcise their fears.
In the end, opportunism, parliamentary cretinism and reformism gained the upper hand within the Second International; the failure of the workers’ organisations in 1914 and their unity with their bourgeoisie was a catastrophe which had profound repercussions on the workers’ movement. But it is necessary to be clear that this victory of opportunism was not a foregone conclusion and its origins are not to be found principally in the parliamentary fractions, the permanent political and union structures or in the general bureaucracy of these organisations. Even if these were vectors of the rot that ate away at the International, the latter’s fundamental origins are to be found in the lack of vigilance of the workers’ organisations faced with the surrounding atmosphere of the capitalist world. Capitalism’s headlong development during a time of relative peace (at least in the central countries of Europe) finished up by inducing the idea that the transition to communism could be effected in a gradual and peaceful manner. We should remember that the growth of the workers’ movement is not linear and that it is only possible at the price of constant struggle against the penetration of the ideology of the ruling class within the proletariat.
The testimony of Trotsky on this epoch and on the man who embodied it is invaluable, because it covers the transition between the ascendance and decadence of capitalism. This period of some 25 years is at the highest contradictory point where it “drew the spirit by the perfection of its civilisation, the uninterrupted development of technology, of science, of workers’ organisation and seemed at the same time paltry in the conservatism of its political life, in the reformist methods of its class struggle”6. In My Life, he underlined the high moral standing of such militants of the workers’ movement as Jean Jaurès and Auguste Bebel, of whom he wrote that “Jaurès’ mind, which was a composite of national traditions, of the metaphysics of moral principles, of love for the oppressed, and of poetic imagination, showed the mark of the aristocrat as clearly as Bebel’s revealed the great simplicity of the plebeian”.7 At the same time he showed their limits: “Jaurès and Bebel were at opposite poles, and yet at the same time they were the twin peaks of the Second International. Both were intensely national, Jaurès with his fiery Latin rhetoric, and Bebel with his touch of Protestant dryness. I loved them both, but with a difference. Bebel exhausted himself physically, whereas Jaurès fell in his prime. But both of them died in time. Their deaths marked the line where the progressive historical mission of the Second International ended”8.
Ever since the great bourgeois revolution of 1789, France had dominated European history. Whether in 1830 or in 1848, it was France that gave the signal for general upheaval. These circumstances gave to the proletariat in France a great political education and a capacity for action which continues to this day. But these qualities also have their other side. The working class in France has a tendency to underestimate the daily economic struggle which explains why the unions were less developed than in other countries. On the other hand, political struggle was seen in a restrictive sense, limited to the insurrection. On the opposing side, the bourgeoisie and most particularly, the industrial bourgeoisie, quite quickly achieved complete political sovereignty under the regime of the democratic Republic. And it was very proud of this. Thus this great bourgeois revolution led to bombastic, hollow speeches typical of French orations: the country of the Rights of Man granted itself the messianic task of the liberation of peoples from tyranny, understanding by that economic competition between nations and wars of rapine which led to the imperialist war of 1914. For many leaders of the workers’ movement in France this phraseology hid a deep-rooted nationalism.
Jean Jaurès is a classical representative of this republicanism which has weighed heavily on the workers’ movement in an epoch where the bourgeoisie was still progressive and where the form that proletarian power would take was still far from clear. Even for the elements of the left within the 2nd International, the Republic was the only form possible of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Jaurès expressed himself thus in an article in La Dépêche of 22nd October, 1890: “Neither England nor Germany have in their past a democratic Republic such as that proclaimed in France in 1792. Hence the hopes of English and German workers do not take a republican form and this is why the party of popular reforms there more particularly calls itself the socialist party. In France on the contrary, the single word Republic, full of the great dreams of the first republican generations, contains within it alone all the promises of fraternal equality”9.
Karl Kautsky was to defend the marxist position on this question. In an article published in Die Neue Zeit in January 1903, he recalls that, despite the historic continuity between bourgeois and proletarian revolutions there is a still more important political break simply because it is a matter of different classes with different political programmes each with specific aims and means: “It is really because of the great strength of the revolutionary tradition within the French proletariat that it is nowhere more important than here to lead it to think in an autonomous fashion by showing it that the social problems, the objects, the methods and the means of struggle are quite another thing today than they were in the epoch of Revolution, that the socialist revolution must be something quite other than a parody or a pursuit of the bourgeois revolution; the proletariat can borrow from it its enthusiasm, its faith in victory and its temperament but certainly not its way of thinking”10.
This classic position of revolutionary socialism was based on the work of Marx and Engels who, after the setback of the 1848 Revolutions, had called into question their idea of a permanent revolution based upon an organic unity between bourgeois and proletarian revolution and the growth of one into the other11.
Moreover, against Lassalle, the partisan of state socialism, and against Bakunin, who preached class equality, Marx and Engels always defended the final aim of communism of the abolition of classes, which means the end of the political domination engendered precisely by the existence of antagonistic classes, which implies the withering away of the state. But the end of the state is also an end to democracy which is only a particular form of the state. The ambition of communism, which appears huge but which is in fact the only realistic one faced with the laws of history and the dangerous contradictions of capitalism, consists of a mastering of the productive forces and the social forces at the world level, the only ground on which the contradiction between the general and particular interests, between the collectivity and the individual can be overcome. For the first time it has become possible to make the human community a concrete reality. That does not mean the end of problems and contradictions, but that the abolition of classes and of the political sphere could allow the liberation of all human potential whereas the promise contained in the slogan ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’, has never been honoured by the democratic bourgeoisie. Communism does not mean the end of history, but the end of prehistory and the beginning of real history. This idea of a passage from the reign of necessity to the reign of freedom, in other words the perspective of a society free from commodity production and the state, was not an unknown position during this epoch of workers’ parliamentarism and the struggle for reforms. The clearest political minorities tried hard to defend this, including William Morris in England12 and August Bebel in Germany13.
Like so many others, Jaurès never managed to free himself from this republican tradition, which prevented him from defending working class autonomy against the enemy class.
Captain Richard Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army high command, was judged by court martial in December 1894, falsely accused of passing secrets to Germany. This affair of espionage, in a context profoundly marked by anti-Semitism and chauvinism after the German annexation of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871, inflamed the Third Republic right up to 1906, when the Court of Appeal declared Dreyfus innocent and definitively rehabilitated him. It was not merely a matter of judicial error but of the defence of particular reactionary and nationalist factions of the bourgeoisie coming from and supported by military, clerical and monarchist elements. The crisis of the Radical party in power opened the way for them.
After some hesitation, Jean Jaurès threw himself into the battle for to defend Dreyfus and overturn the judgment against him. “And Jaurès was right” wrote Rosa Luxemburg “The Dreyfus Affair had awakened all the latent forces of reaction in France. The old enemy of the working class, militarism, stood completely exposed, and it was necessary to direct all spears against its body. The working class was called upon for the first time to fight out a great political battle. Jaurès and his friends led the workers into the struggle and thereby opened up a new epoch in the history of French socialism”14.
The marxist party of Guesde and Lafargue, as well as the party of the ex-Blanquistes of Vallant continued to preach neutrality, in other words political abstention when in fact the working class had to undertake a fight against the reactionary factions of the bourgeoisie including the defence of the bourgeois Republic. It had to seize this opportunity and combine its forces, mature politically while safeguarding its class autonomy. It is on the question of class autonomy that the political weaknesses defended by Jaurès are revealed. The working class supporters of Dreyfus had to keep their independence vis-a-vis his bourgeois supporters such as Emile Zola and Georges Clemenceau. Because he defended a fundamentally republican position, Jaurès engaged in the support of a radical government up to the point of going against the specific positions of the working class. He supported the government on the amnesty law adopted by the Chamber on 19th December 1900, despite the fact that its aim was amnesty for all, including and even especially those officers implicated in the plot against Dreyfus. He refused to launch a direct and systematic attack against militarism through the demand for a popular militia because there was a risk of a split among the various factions supporting Dreyfus. And these capitulations multiplied in the name of a so-called “combined republican work” which carried “the certainty of future victories”. Here is what Luxemburg said about it:
“The present attitude of the Jaurès group towards the policies of the government is, in one sense, in direct contradiction to its position during the Dreyfus Affair. But, in another sense, it is nothing but a direct continuation of the previous policy. The same principle – unity with the bourgeois democrats – served as the basis of socialist policy in both cases. It served during two years of unyielding struggle for a solution of the Dreyfus Affair, and, today, because the bourgeois democrats have deserted the fight, it leads the socialists to also liquidate the Dreyfus Affair and to give up all attempts at a fundamental reformation of the army and a change in the relations between Republic and Church.
Instead of making the independent political struggle of the Socialist party the permanent. fundamental element and unity with bourgeois radicals the varying and incidental element, this principle caused Jaurès to adopt the opposite tactic: the alliance with the bourgeois democrats became the constant, and the independent political struggles the incidental element.
Already in the Dreyfus campaign, the Jaurès socialists failed to understand the line of demarcation between the bourgeois and the proletarian camps: If the question presented itself to the friends of Dreyfus as an attack upon the by-products of militarism – as the cleansing of the army and the suppression of corruption – a socialist had to view it as a struggle against the root of the evil – against the standing army itself. And if the bourgeois radicals considered justice for Dreyfus and punishment for the guilty ones as the single central point of the campaign, a socialist had to view the Dreyfus Affair as the basis for an agitation in favor of the militia system. Only thus would the Dreyfus Affair and the admirable efforts of Jaurès and his friends have been a great agitational service to socialism”15.
Not only did Jaurès refuse to break with the government at the right moment, but he continued to support unreservedly the Waldeck-Rousseau cabinet and the participation of a socialist in government; thus opened the darkest chapter of Jean Jaurès’ political life.
In June 1899, the socialist Alexandre Millerand, alongside General Gaston de Galliffet, the assassin of the Paris Commune, entered the Radical government of Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau. For Millerand, who belonged to the movement of independent socialists, this was a purely personal decision: he had no mandate from a socialist party. We should take into account that this was at the time of the full-blown Dreyfus Affair where the degraded officer was still suffering the torments of the penal colony in Guyana. Jaurès did his utmost to support socialist participation in government. He saluted the courage of the French socialists who had sent one of their own “into the fortress of bourgeois government”. The whole affair strongly encouraged all the right wing of the International which impatiently waited for the this experience to be repeated in other countries, particularly Germany. The right warmly approved of the arguments of Jaurès according to which the evolution of capitalist society towards socialism engendered an intermediate stage during the course of which political power was exercised in common by both the bourgeoisie and proletariat. In Germany, Eduard Bernstein had just published his revisionist work where he called into question the marxist theory of the crises of capitalism and where he proclaimed: “The final aim, whatever it is, is nothing, the movement is everything”.
Rosa Luxemburg hurled herself into the battle with passion. She replied to Bernstein in a series of articles which later appeared in the celebrated pamphlet Reform or Revolution. At the same time she attacked the arguments of Jaurès. To begin with she recalled the basic principles of scientific socialism: “In bourgeois society, social-democracy, from the fact of its very essence, is destined to play the role of a party of opposition; it can only come to government on the ruins of the bourgeois state”16. She particularly emphasised the fundamental difference between the participation of socialists in the parliament of the bourgeois state or in local councils, which had been accepted for a long time, and the participation in the executive of the state. This was for two very simple reasons. Firstly, it was a question of making their claims effective but always on the basis of a critique of the government which persecuted the workers ceaselessly while trying to render null and void any social reforms that it was forced to adopt. This was the principle which motivated the systematic refusal of the socialists to vote for a parliamentary budget. Secondly, whatever party the members of the government belong to, they are required to share joint responsibility for government policy for which they are necessarily considered to be accountable.
The international socialist congress held in Paris from 23rd to 27th September 1900, condemned Millerand’s “governmental socialism”, which demonstrated that the conditions for an offensive of opportunism within the International did not yet exist. The resolution was titled: “The conquest of state power and alliance with bourgeois parties”. It was adopted on the basis of a motion presented by Kautsky and the majority of the members of the permanent commission. The problem was that the resolution’s author tried hard to give it a general theoretical character without confronting the specific case of Millerand. All the most far-fetched interpretations were allowed. That is why this resolution of Kautsky was called the “Rubber Resolution”. Jaurès, Vollmar, Bernstein, all the right including the most avowed revisionists charged into the breach. They presented the outcome of the Congress as favourable to Millerand.
They based themselves specifically on an idea presented in the resolution according to which in certain exceptional cases the participation of socialists in bourgeois governments could appear necessary. And indeed, all the socialist programmes of the day contained the position, which was valid at the time, that in the case of a defensive war (and therefore absolutely not in case of imperialist war) the socialists could participate in government.17 Alternatively, this might be the case should a political crisis threaten to bring down the Republic and its democratic victories. Rosa Luxemburg responded that in these exceptional cases it was not just a question of taking complete responsibility with the whole of government policy. But it was essential to define if the situation really corresponded to one of these exceptional cases. Jaurès declared that it did.
Since about 1885, France had been hit by constant political crises: the Boulanger crisis,18 the Panama scandal,19 the Dreyfus Affair. These revealed the existence of a rowdy nationalism, anti-Semitic outbursts, gross and hateful press campaigns, fighting in the street. The last hour of the Republic seemed to be imminent. But Rosa Luxemburg brilliantly showed that this was not in fact the case. The militarist and clerical reaction and the radical bourgeoisie were fighting for the control of this Republic in the framework of a profound crisis of the Radical Party in power. It was necessary to take part in these political struggles but certainly not by participating in government and pandering to the petty bourgeoisie, the traditional clientele of the Radical Party.
Jaurès invoked certain passages of the Communist Manifesto concerning the alliance of the workers with the bourgeoisie. First of all it is a question of an entirely different historic period where, as in Germany for example, the power of the bourgeoisie was not at all assured in the face of the political forces of feudalism. And above all, he forgot to quote the essential passages on the preservation of the independence of the working class in any circumstances. In particular this on the position of communists: “But they never cease, for a single instant, to instil in the working class the clearest possible recognition of the hostile antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, in order that the German workers may straightaway use, as so many weapons against the bourgeoisie, the social and political condition that the bourgeoisie must necessarily introduce along with its supremacy, and in order that, after the fall of the reactionary classes in Germany, the fight against the bourgeoisie may immediately begin”20.
Finally, the last argument of Jaurès consisted of underlining the importance of the reforms gained by Millerand for the workers. These were for him, “germs of socialism sown in the capitalist soil which would bear marvellous fruit”. it is enough to examine the reality of these reforms more closely in order to contradict the inordinate enthusiasm which held Jaurès inits grasp. For example, the original intention to shorten the working day ended up with it being lengthened for children and the mere hope of something better in the future. Or again, the guarantee of the right to strike ended up being greatly restricted within narrow legal limits. We have already seen the hypocrisy of the government’s policy over the Dreyfus Affair. To this we should add the hypocrisy of the state’s struggle for secularism, which ended up with charitable donations to the Catholic Church and which served above all as a real war machine against the socialist parties’ growing influence among the workers. Not forgetting that during the whole Millerand experience, troops continued to fire on strikers as they did at Chalons and in Martinique. The era of reforms culminated in the massacre of striking workers.
Rosa Luxemburg saw far and clear when she criticised “ministerialism”. What began in France as a sad farce ended up in Germany in tragedy in 1919 with a social democratic government consciously assuming a counter-revolutionary role. For the moment we can see that Jaurès was capable of learning from experience. Ten years after the beginning of the Millerand affair, he bitterly denounced both Millerand and two other socialist ministers, Briand and Viviani, whom he reproached for being “traitors who allowed themselves to be used by capitalism”.
We have seen that Jaurès closely followed Bernstein. However it is not possible to place him in the camp of revisionism. Similarly there is no trace in him of the philistinism of Kautsky who succumbed to the sirens of centrism around 1906. We’ve seen the intimate links with the members of the right wing of the workers’ international. His opportunism was one that the workers’ movement of the time had to confront and which is characterised both by an impatience regarding the results of the struggle (preferring to sacrifice the final aim to the profit of, largely illusory, immediate reform) and an adaption to the surrounding capitalist world (being content with the progressive dynamic and the period of peace which increased, relatively and with illusions, the security of the workers, and so sacrificing the interests of the general movement). But his strong personality placed him above other opportunists. After joining the socialist cause, he continued to serve the law, liberty and humanity. But, as Trotsky noted; “That which for the ordinary French disclaimers is only an empty phrase, [Jaurès] fills with a sincere and active idealism”. Trotsky correctly presents him as an ideologue in the positive sense of the term, someone who gripped the idea as a terrible weapon in the practical daily struggle, as opposed to the doctrinaire and the practising opportunist: “The doctrinaire congeals theory and so kills its spirit. The practical-opportunist learns the procedures of the political trade; but should a sudden upheaval occur, he finds himself in a situation of a worker made redundant by the adoption of a new machine. The great ideologue is only impotent at the moment where history disarms him ideologically, but even then he is sometimes capable of rapidly rearming himself, of taking on the idea of a new epoch and continues to play a role at the first level. Jaurès was an ideologue. He drew out of the political situation the idea that it held and, in his service of this idea, never stopped mid-way”21.
We have already noted Jaurès’ reticence towards marxism. He saw here in it cold, economic determinism leaving no place for the individual and for human freedom in general. His outlook was turned towards the past and the great days of the bourgeois revolution: “It is to the honour of the French revolution to have proclaimed that in every individual human being, humanity had the same native intelligence, the same dignity and the same rights”, he said22. As a result of his education and the general situation in France at the time, he did not see that the materialism of Marx, often misinterpreted as a form of absolute economic determinism, contained a coherent explanation of human history which, far from smothering them, on the contrary gave both a place – and a foundation – to the action of classes, to the force and the will of the individual which under capitalism had been wiped out in the name of the collective anonymity of the nation. The glorification of the individual under capitalism was in reality the mask of its absolute negation. In his pitiless critique of bourgeois society, Marx revealed its commodity fetishism and its reification. Nor was Jaurès able to recognise the presence in Marx of an authentic proletarian ethic23.
However the devotion of Jaurès to the cause of proletarian emancipation meant that he never turned away from the perspective of a classless, property-less society, where the means of production would be managed in common. He read Marx, admired his work and adhered to the theory of value exposed by Capital. Whereas in France the tendency was towards the underestimation of theoretical discussions, Jaurès participated, with Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, in public discussions on subjects treated in depth. On 12th December 1894, Jaurès responded to an invitation of the Groupe des Etudiants collectivistes who organised a debate on “idealism and materialism in the concept of history”. In his response one feels that he is confronting his own contradictions: “I do not mean that there is a part of history which is governed by economic necessity and another part guided by a pure idea, by a concept, by the idea for example, of humanity, justice and right; I do not want to put the materialist conception on one side and the idealist conception on the other. I maintain that they must penetrate one another, as in the organic life of man the mechanics of the brain and conscious spontaneity inter-penetrate one another”24. Paul Lafargue responded to him on 10th January, 1895. He began thus: “You will understand that it is with hesitation that I have taken on the task of responding to Jaurès whose spirited eloquence knows how to impassion the most abstract of metaphysical theses. While he was talking I said to myself, and you must have felt it, it is fortunate that this devil of a man is with us”25. The experience was repeated in 1900, when Jaurès and Guesde confronted one another at the Hippodrome in Lille, where a polemic “The two methods”, the revolutionary and reformist method were confronted.
The decisive moment in Jaurès’ evolution was the congress of the International in Amsterdam in 1904. With all the conviction of which he was capable, he defended his thesis on ministerialism and the defence of the Republic in several speeches. The confrontation with Auguste Bebel was relentless, but he led his arguments with such brio that he aroused the applause of the congress. Jaurès was an adversary who commanded respect. Rosa Luxemburg even translated one of his speeches because of a lack of translators. The congress finally condemned his positions and in a much clearer fashion than at the previous International Congress in Paris. Jaurès submitted to the discipline of the International because he was profoundly attached to the international movement of the proletariat, because he was aware of the traps involved in government participation, and also because he wanted to avoid at all costs a new setback to the unification of the socialists in France. A special motion of the congress, voted on unanimously, demanded that the French Socialists should at last unite. One of the considerations of this motion said: “There can only be one socialist party as there is one proletariat”26.
The failure of the Paris Commune, drowned in blood by the bourgeois democratic Republic of Adolphe Thiers, provoked a period of depression in the workers’ movement in France. When it began to recover at the end of the 1870’s, it appeared as an incoherent assemblage of disparate elements. There were the Proudhonian mutualists, the Utopians of the old school like Benoit Malon, anarchists, narrow-minded syndicalists patronised by the Radical Party, some Blanquists, Collectivists and finally old Communards still addicted to the verbiage of insurrection. In these circumstances, the unification of the workers’ movement took different forms in comparison to other countries. Before regrouping, it was necessary first of all to take the first step through a process of differentiation and progressive elimination of heterogeneous elements. In 1879 the first strictly marxist party was set up, the French Workers’ Party of Jules Guesde, and two years later, the Blanquists regrouped behind Edouard Vaillant in the Central Revolutionary Committee. A real clarification was appearing on the basis of the present tasks of the socialists which underlined the importance of political action and workers’ parliamentarianism. Despite a rapprochement, those that were called the “Parties of the old school” regarded each other with distrust and were incapable, from the fact of their history and the fact of their accumulated political errors, of fighting for the unification of the movement. Only new and independent forces could fulfil this role.
This offered a whole field of action to such personalities as Jean Jaurès. The crisis in the Radical Party brought new blood and new militants. But they were marked by their petty bourgeois origins and presented themselves as independent socialists who were above parties. There was thus a risk of the movement losing its class character and only the old socialist parties could avoid this trap. Rosa Luxemburg described the situation in this way: “While the old parties have shown themselves incapable of translating the final socialist objective into practical slogans applicable to the politics of the moment, the ‘independents’ could not, in the present political circumstances, preserve the stamp of the final socialist goal. The failings of the independents make it obvious that the mass movement of the proletariat needs a force that is organised and educated on solid principles to lead it; on the other hand, the attitude of the old organisations show that none amongst them is capable of undertaking this task alone”27.
The evolution of the situation with the growth of militarism, imperialist tensions and with the crisis of successive radical governments, gave a final impulse. After the setback of 1899, arising from disagreements over ministerialism, the unification of the socialists was realised at the Congress held in the Salle du Globe in Paris, 1905. The Socialist Party was formed as “French Section of the Workers’ International”28 on the basis of the Resolutions of the Amsterdam Congress. It presented itself as “a class party, which aims at socialising the means of production and exchange, that is to say transforming capitalist society into a collective and communist society”. It “is not a party of reform but a party of class struggle and revolution”. The Party’s parliamentary deputies were to form “a single group against bourgeois political factions” and “refuse the government all the means which assure the domination of the bourgeoisie” in other words refusing appropriations for the military, for colonial conquest, for secret funds and indeed the budget as a whole29. With all his intellectual power Jaurès dominated the new party. April 18th 1904, saw the publication of the first issue of L’Humanité, the great socialist daily founded by Jean Jaurès. It would soon replace the official organ of the finally united party, Le Socialiste.
The revolution in 1905 in Russia and Poland overturned the situation. The glimmers of light from the east carried not only precious weapons for the revolutionary struggle, the mass strike and workers’ councils, they also revealed that bourgeois society was about to pass to the other side of its historic evolution, the downward trend of the decadence of the capitalist mode of production. The entire epoch marked by the creation of the Second International in 1889, where: “the centre of gravity of the workers’ movement was placed entirely on the national terrain in the framework of national states, on the basis of national industry, in the domain of national parliamentarism”30, was entering its death throes.
Jaurès’ profound ambiguity was once again revealed in his work L’Armée nouvelle (The new army). Published as a book in 1911, this text first saw the light as an introduction to a proposed law turned down by the Chamber of Deputies. Far from trying to understand and analyse the growth of militarism and imperialism which concerned and mobilised the clearest socialists, Jaurès proposed a “really popular organisation for national defence” based on the “nation in arms”. His idea was some distance away from the demand for an “army of militias” defended in the previous period by the French and German socialists. It was based on the idea of a “defensive war”, an idea that had really lost its meaning with the evolution of events. It was enough that through a series of provocations an imperialist power pushed an enemy to react, for it to appear immediately as the aggressor nation.
The two Moroccan crises, in 1905 and 1911, the two Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, the constitution of two imperialist blocs, the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy and the Triple Entente of Britain, France, Russia, all this meant that the era of national wars was finished and war of a new type was appearing on the horizon: an imperialist war for the carving up of the world market. Totally in the grip of his Republican positions, Jaurès did not see the centrality of the internationalist positions of the proletariat and the danger of the least concession to the national interest, trying again to reconcile the two: “It is in the International that the independence of nations has its highest guarantee; it is in the independent nations that the International has its most powerful and noble organs. One could say; a little internationalism distances us from the fatherland; a lot of internationalism brings us back to it.”31
Whereas he was perfectly conscious of the mortal danger that lay in wait for the world proletariat, Jaurès strode the corridors of the Chamber of Deputies calling on this or that minister under the illusion that he could block the fatal gearing up to war and demanding the government to condemn the imperialist appetites of Russia. He multiplied his appeals for international arbitration between nations and supported the International Court of the Hague created by Russian Tsarism and subject to the mockery of the entire world. Basically, in the end he shared the position of Kautsky according to whom the trusts and the cartels would be interested in making peace. This so-called “super-imperialism” obscured the danger of world war, totally disarming the proletariat and rallied centrism to opportunism. The old friends, Kautsky and Bernstein were finally reconciled.
But once again it is very difficult to force Jaurès into a box. Like Engels some years earlier, he understood that a world war would mean a profound defeat for the proletariat which would call the future into question. He recalled his formula condemning capitalism: “Your violent and chaotic society always (...) bears within it war as a sleeping cloud bears the storm”32. In 1913, at the Chamber of Deputies, one could hear him thunder against the return of three-year military service and he employed all his strength to have demonstrations organised in common between the revolutionary syndicalists of the CGT and the Socialist Party. Demonstrations were organised in many towns. In Paris enormous crowds flocked to the Butte-Rouge, at Pré-Saint-Gervais. His condemnation of war was not simply on moral grounds and that is why it carried all the hopes of the world and the international proletariat. He again used all his oratory power in a speech at Lyon-Vaise, July 25 1914: “In this moment when we are threatened with murder and savagery the only chance for the maintenance of peace and the salvation of civilisation is for the working class gather all the strength of its numerous brothers and that all the proletarians, French, English, German, Italian, Russian and we ourselves ask of these thousands of men to unite so that the unanimous beat of their hearts should thrust back this horrible nightmare”33.
This is what made Jaurès the target for the hatred of the whole bourgeoisie. A veritable campaign of slanders and death threats was launched against him. Some demanded he be executed by a firing squad. The most excited voices came from the most reactionary political tendencies and the ultra-nationalists, the petty bourgeois milieu and the lumpenproletariat which played such a big role in the irrational mobs. They were sustained and encouraged by the democratic government. It was like a pogrom against the Jews. They had to find a scapegoat who could play the guilty role, someone to be designated the cause of all the problems, all the anguish for the future. Jaurès was that sort of symbol, a banner that had to be gotten rid off at all costs. Rosa Luxemburg’s and Karl Liebknecht’s deaths were demanded in November 1918 and obtained in January 1919. In the same way the bourgeois called for the death of Jaurès and got it on 31st July, 1914. Raoul Villain, the assassin of Jaurès, was recognised as a “patriot” and was acquitted on March 29 1919.
Jaurès went to the last pre-war meeting of the International Socialist Bureau in Brussels on 29th July 1914. After the meeting a public meeting was held with the leading speakers of the Socialist International. Jaurès took the floor and again talked of peace and arbitration between nations. He fulminated against a French government incapable of reasoning with Russia. He pointed his finger at the German, French, Russian and Italian leaders who would be swept away by the revolution that the war would provoke, as in 1871 and 1905. He addressed Rosa Luxemburg sitting alongside him on the tribune: “Allow me to salute the intrepid woman whose thought enflames the heart of the German proletariat”34. Everyone in the room was overwhelmed by Jaurès’ speech and gave him a long standing ovation. But the talk about peace revealed the impotence of the International. What was lacking was the call to break with the bourgeoisie and with the opportunists who supported it. This was the meaning of Karl Liebknecht’s slogan: “The main enemy is in our country, it is our own bourgeoisie”. That was also the meaning of the calls to break with opportunism launched by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. War should be opposed not by peace but by revolution. Luxemburg, Lenin and Martov stipulated thus in their celebrated amendment at the International’s Stuttgart Congress of 1907: “In case war breaks out anyway, it is the duty [of the working class and its representatives in parliament] to intervene for its speedy termination and to strive with all their power to utilise the economic and political crisis created by the war to rouse the masses and thereby hasten the downfall of capitalist class rule”35.
It is not for us to speculate on what Jaurès would have done faced with the test of war had he survived. But it seems very likely that the French bourgeoisie or its secret services did not want to take the risk; they knew his weaknesses, but they also knew his strength, his moral uprightness, his hatred of war and his great reputation among the workers. Rosmer recalls that Jaurès began to distrust the pacifist and lying declarations of Poincaré36 and that some hours before his death, a rumour had it that Jaurès was ready to draft an editorial in L’Humanité which would be a new J’accuse!,37 denouncing the government and its warmongering, and calling on the workers to resist it. Before he could write the feared article, Jaurès was killed by Raoul Villain in circumstances which have nver really been clarified. The assassin, after passing the war in prison, was acquitted in proceedings for which the widow of Jaurès even had to pay the costs38.
With Jaurès dead, those who resisted the chauvinist turn of 1914 were at first a tiny minority. Most of the French leaders from the revolutionary syndicalists to the socialists took the bitter pill of betrayal. All proclaimed that the international working class should hold back the bloody arm of imperialism but added craftily: “On condition that the socialists of Germany do the same. In fact if we renounce the advance of the defence of the country it means that we will be encouraging the chauvinists of the enemy country”. With such reasoning, the workers’ International made no sense, nor did its resolutions against the war at the Stuttgart Congress of 1907, of Copenhagen, 1910 and Basel, 1912. It is true that the International was undermined from within and that it was to collapse like a house of cards when the order for mobilisation was pronounced. The Third International was soon raised on the ruins of the Second.
Jean Jaurès does not belong to our tradition, that of Marx and Engels, that of the Left in the Second and then the Third Internationals, the tradition of Left Communism. But with all his being Jaurès belonged to the workers’ movement, that is to say the only social force which still carries with it to this day the perspective of human emancipation. That is why we pay him homage and we can conclude with Trotsky: “Great men know how to disappear with time. Feeling his death approach, Tolstoy fled from the society that he renounced and went to die in a pilgrimage to an obscure village. Lafargue, epicurean and stoic, lived in an atmosphere of peace and meditation up to sixty-eight years of age, then decided that he had had enough and took poison. Jaurès, an athlete of ideas, fell in the arena while fighting against war, that most terrible scourge of humanity and of the human species. And he remains in the memory of posterity as the precursor, the prototype of superior man who must be born from sufferings, failures, hopes and struggle”39.
Avrom E, August 18 2014
1 Leon Trotsky, My Life, Penguin Books, 1979, pp251-2.
2 Rosa Luxemburg, J’etais, je suis, je serai, Correspondence, 1914-19, Paris ed. Maspero, 1977, Letter to Sonia Liebknecht, 14.1.1918, p 325.
3 Cf. Rosa Luxemburg, Le Socialisme en France ,Marseilles/Toulouse, ed. Agone/Smolny, 2013, p. 163
4Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
5Considérants du Parti ouvrier français (1880) in Oeuvres I, Paris, ed. Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1963, p. 1538.
6Leon Trotsky, “Jean Jaurès” in Le Mouvement communiste en France, Paris, ed. de Minuet, 1967, p. 25.
7My Life, op.cit. P251.
8 Ibid., p252
9Jean Jaurès, “La socialisme de la Révolution française” (1890), in Jean Jaurès, Karl Kautsky, Socialism et Révolution française, Paris, ed. Demopolis, 2010, p.189.
10Karl Kautsky, “Jaurès et la politique francaise vis-a-vis de l’Eglise” (1903), idem, p.228.
11See the prefaces to the Communist Manifesto and the preface to Marx’s work, The class struggles in France, 1848-1850, where Engels explained why “history has shown us, and all those who thought in a similar way, to be wrong”. The clearest explanation that the historic tasks of one class cannot be assumed by another is given by Marx in The Cologne Communist Trial (Basel, 1853).
12For example in his book News From Nowhere, 1890.
13Woman in the past, present and future, 1891. See our series “Communism is not a good idea but a material necessity”, parts XII to XV in International Review nos. 84, 85, 86 and 88.
14The Radical Party or the Republican Party or Radical Socialist Party, was born in 1901 and held a central role in government in the 3rd Republic in particular in preparing for an alliance with the socialists (Emile Combes). It was also able to manage a provocation and hard repression against the working class under the auspices of Georges Clemenceau. The quote from Luxemburg comes from “Die sozialistische Krise in Frankreich”, published in Die Neue Zeit 1900/1901: https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1901/socialist-crisis-france/... [183].
15Luxemburg, op.cit.
16“Eine taktische Frage”, Leipziger Volkszeitung, Nr.153, 6th July 1899
17On this issue see in particular our pamphlet Nation or Class.
18Georges Boulanger was a right-wing general and War Minister who gave his name to the “boulangiste” movement from 1889-91. Although the movement regrouped many from the proletarian left, these only served as a façade to Boulanger’s avowed anti-democratic intentions, which led the monarchists to give him their support. This finished by alarming the republican parties in power to the point where the movement was banned in 1889. Boulanger himself committed suicide in 1891.
19A colossal financial scandal around the collapse of the first attempt to build a canal through the Isthmus of Panama by a French company, led by Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man who had been responsible for the construction of the Suez Canal. The company was shown to have paid substantial bribes to members of the government to win their support, while 85,000 small investors were ruined.
20 Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Chapter 4: Position of the communists in relation to the various existing opposition parties. Marx, Engels, Selected Works, Lawrence and Wishart, 1968.
21The two quotes are from Jean Jaurès, an article of 1915 in Leon Trotsky, Le Mouvement communiste en France (1919-1939). Op.it. p. 32.
22Quoted in the review L’Histoire no. 397, March 2014, p.48.
23“The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest essence for man – hence, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable (...)”: “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm [184]
24 Quoted in the review L’Histoire no. 397, March 2014, p. 50.
25 This can be found in Paul Lafargue, Paresse et revolution, Ecrits, 1880-1911. Paris, ed. Tallandier. Coll. Texto, 2009, p. 212.
26 Alfred Rosmer, Le Mouvement ouvrier pendant la premiere guerre mondiale, Paris, ed. d’Avron, 1993, tome I, p. 41.
27 L’unification Francaise, 1899 article in Rosa Luxemburg’s, Le Socialisme en France (1898-1912), Op. Cit., p. 81.
28It was generally known thereafter as the SFIO (Section française de l’Internationale ouvrière)
29 All the quotes from the unification congress come from Pierre Bezbakh, Histoire du socialisme francaise. Paris, ed. Larousse, 2005, p. 138.
30 Manifesto of the first Congress of the Communist International. Manifestes, theses et resolutions des quatre premiers congres de l’Internationale communiste, 1919-1923, Paris, ed. La Breche-Selio, 1984, p. 33.
31 Jean Jaurès, L’Armee nouvelle, quoted in Jean Jaurès, un prophete socialiste, Le Monde, hors-serie, March-April 2014, p. 51.
32 Speech of 1898 to the Chamber quoted in the review L’Hisotire, no 397, March 2014, p. 57.
33 Quoted in Alfred Rosmer, “Le Mouvement ouvrier pendant la premiere guerre mondial, Op. Cit. P. 487.
34Quoted by Paul Frolich, Rosa Luxemburg, Paris, ed. l’Hartmattan, 1991, p. 252.
35Quoted in Lenin’s struggle for a revolutionary International, Monad Press, p35.
36French President in 1914, leader of the French ruling class’ warmongering faction.
37From the title of Emile Zola’s devastating attack on the reactionary forces during the Dreyfus affair.
38Cf. our article 1914: how the bloodletting began [185]. There is however another version of events given by Pierre Dupuy, Deputy and manager of the Petit Parisien founded by his father Jean Dupuy who sat in the government of Waldeck-Rousseau. According to Dupuy, Jaurès told him in confidence a few hours before his assassination: “He said that a little before he had learned from a reliable source that the German socialists of the workers’ international had unreservedly decided to obey the general mobilisation and that, in these conditions, it would be necessary that evening for him to redraft, for appearance the next day, an article in his paper, L’Humanité, titled “Forward!”. He considered in fact that in the face of this now definitive setback to all his efforts and those of his party to maintain peace it was now necessary to avoid giving the enemy of tomorrow the impression of a disunited and fearful France” (this witness is quoted in Le Monde, February 12 1958). But one can question what faith can be put in this witness who, as an ally of Poincaré, had every interest in making Jaurès out to be a posthumous patriot. For the details of the proceedings involving Raoul Villain see Domique Pagenelli, Il a tué Jaurès, La Table Ronde, 2014.
39 Leon Trotsky, Jean Jaurès in Le Mouvement communiste en France (1919-39), Op. Cit. P. 35.
A visit to the "Truth and Memory" exhibition of British war artists, currently showing at London’s Imperial War Museum, prompts some thought about the complex relationship between art, politics and propaganda.
For a start, there is a striking contrast between the paintings in "Truth and Memory" and the conventional World War I special exhibit on the ground floor.1 Where the art is raw, harrowing, the museum exhibit is bland and colourless. Juxtapositions of military uniforms, weapons, reproductions of propaganda posters – a film of muddy fields: nothing there to shock even the most sensitive spectator. There are tin hats and jackets for visitors to try on and take selfies, but heaven forbid that we should be reminded of what this war really was, of the horror and the stench of death in the trenches. World War I has been sanitised and packaged for tourist consumption and it seems unlikely that those who visit it will learn very much, or indeed anything at all.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the World War I exhibit, in your face on the ground floor, is packed with a queue of families waiting to get in, while the exhibition of war art, discreetly hidden away on the third floor behind frosted glass doors, is almost empty. This exhibition is organised in two parts, on opposite sides of the Museum: one part called "Truth" exhibits paintings produced during the conflict, mostly by artists employed by the British War Propaganda Bureau who in some cases were already serving soldiers; the part called "Memory" contains paintings produced after the war, both independent and official. It has to be said that this section is by far the least interesting, artistically and for what it has to say about the war itself. The pictures are for the most part still, almost peaceful, they seem distant from reality, lacking in immediacy, as if both the artist and the spectators – and certainly the state – wanted not to remember but to forget, or at least to gloss over memory with a patina that would relegate the war safely to the past. Only two pictures strike us with any force. One, "A battery shelled" by Percy Wyndham Lewis (who fought in the artillery) shows the soldiers working under fire reduced to machine-like stick figures, while those outside the danger zone are detached, indifferent.
The other, "Over the top" by John Nash (brother of the much better-known artist Paul Nash) evokes the futility of the endless assaults which ended with tens of thousands dead and a military result of zero; there is something dreadful about the soldiers’ hopeless advance towards certain death, all the more so when we know that Nash portrays here an attack by his own unit, the 1st Artists Rifles, which ended with barely a man left alive or uninjured.
One is inclined to think that after the war, for the most part, people wanted to forget or at least to return to life and leave war behind. And that the governments were only to happy to let them do so because World War I had – for many – discredited capitalist society and the governments that managed it.
Bourgeois society has a more paradoxical relationship to truth than any previous class society. This is due to two factors: the conditions and demands of industrial production; and the specific characteristics of bourgeois class domination.
Capitalism is the first mode of production which cannot live without constantly revolutionising and overturning the productive process through the application of scientific and technical innovation. At the outset, as bourgeois society begins to emerge within its feudal shell, this is not immediately apparent: the woollen textile industry in 13th century England begins to break out of the constricting bonds of the feudal guild system, but the technology remains largely unchanged. The revolution is social, not yet technical, based on new ways of organising production and trade. By the 17th century, experimental science aims to contribute to the improvement of manufacture, and by the 18th century scientific investigation of nature is applied to industry and becomes a productive force in its own right. Today, quantum mechanics and relativity theory may seem abstruse and even weird – nonetheless, a multitude of products in everyday use are dependent on their effects.
Capitalism, then, depends on science. But science itself rests on two pillars: the assumption that a world exists independent of thought, be it human or divine; and the conviction that it is possible to understand this material world through free investigation and freedom of debate.2 A precondition for the development of capitalism and bourgeois society is therefore the victory of Copernicus and Galileo over the Catholic church and the Inquisition: the Catholic church cannot be allowed to maintain its monopoly over thought.
Class rule under capitalism is also unique. Indeed, the bourgeois class is the first in history to pretend that its class domination does not exist, the first to justify its own rule by basing it on "the will of the people". Bourgeois society is therefore the most hypocritical in history.
Yet, if this were all there were to it, such domination would not long survive. The bourgeoisie dominates, but it must not be seen to dominate; its hypocrisy must be sincere. Nor can the search for truth be limited to the domain of science, prevented from spilling out into the social and artistic sphere, for science and art are not two separate worlds, they do not at all rely on antithetical or even different qualities of the human mind. The bourgeoisie then, is forced to give free rein to the search for truth as much in the artistic as in the scientific domain, under pain of loosing out to its competitors. It was the United States, not Nazi Germany, that succeeded in producing the atomic bomb.
There is another new characteristic of capitalist society: for the first time, the revolutionary class is an exploited class. Even more important, this exploited class is a cultured class. For the first time, the exploited class must be educated in order to master the intricacies of capitalist production: workers must be able to read and write, to handle increasingly complex technical and social tasks. Capitalism itself educates and trains the masses of workers in the skills necessary not just to master social organisation but to lay claim to the heritage of all humanity’s artistic, scientific, and technical knowledge and achievements which it will use to satisfy human needs, including human cultural needs. More: at its best, the proletarian class has never been satisfied with the scraps from the table of bourgeois culture, it has set out to grasp this culture and make it its own. "Marxism has won its historic significance as the ideology of the revolutionary proletariat because, far from rejecting the most valuable achievements of the bourgeois epoch, it has, on the contrary, assimilated and refashioned everything of value in the more than two thousand years of the development of human thought and culture".3
The greater the presence within society of this cultured, revolutionary and exploited class, the less the bourgeoisie can rely solely on lies and repression. Only in regimes where the workers have been utterly crushed – regimes like Nazi Germany or the Stalinist USSR – is it possible for propaganda to rely solely on the ideological knout.
The British ruling class, perhaps more than any other, is aware of this strange, shifting, and contradictory situation, aware that it must play the propaganda game in two directions. We are almost tempted to answer Winston Churchill’s famous dictum that "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies" by turning it round: "Lies are so precious that they must be surrounded by a bodyguard of truth".
"There's an east wind coming, Watson."
"I think not, Holmes. It is very warm."
"Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There's an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it's God's own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared".4
These words are spoken at the very end of Arthur Conan Doyle’s last "Sherlock Holmes" story, His Last Bow, in which Holmes foils a German master spy just before the outbreak of war. The fictitious Holmes only echoes here sentiments that were expressed by real characters at the outbreak of war: Collins-Baker, Keeper at the National Gallery, writing in August 1914, believed that art would benefit from a "cleansing war",5 and this was a not uncommon view in the British establishment who hoped the war would "regenerate" art and society and rid both of the disturbances of Cubism, Modernism, and everything offensive to so-called "good taste".
Previous wars had been celebrated "realistically" and patriotically as a series of heroic engagements – the kind of thing that could have been produced during the Crimean war for example:
Doubtless the reactionary wing of the British ruling class and its art establishment expected such painting to drown out foreign, decadent, and corrupting influences. But this turned out to be a dying genre. As we enter the exhibition we are presented, symbolically, with one example: William Barnes Wollen’s "2nd Ox & Bucks defeating the Prussian Guard at Nonne Bosschen".
Step into the next room, and we are in a different world altogether, and here we want to focus on the evolution of two artists who followed diametrically opposed directions from the artistic standpoint as a result of their war experience: CRW Nevinson and William Orpen.
Nevinson was 25 when war broke out, and joined the Friends Ambulance Unit set up by the Quakers; he was profoundly shocked by his experience and this clearly informed his art. He was already in 1914 an established landscape painter associated with the Italian Futurist movement and particularly the painter Marinetti who would later be one of Mussolini’s supporters. In 1914, Marinetti had declared that "We wish to glorify war – the only hygiene of the world" (a sentiment he shared with a Catholic reactionary such as the poet Hilaire Belloc for example, and others that we have cited above), yet there is no trace of any glorification of war in Nevinson’s work. On the contrary, Nevinson declared in 1915 that "Unlike my Italian Futurist friends, I do not glory in war for its own sake, nor can I accept the doctrine that war is the only healthgiver (…) In my pictures (…) I have tried to express the emotion produced by the apparent ugliness and dullness of modern warfare".6 In 1915, he told the Daily Express: "Our Futurist technique is the only possible medium to express the crudeness, violence, and brutality of the emotions seen and felt on the present battlefields of Europe". Nevinson uses these Futurist techniques of juxtaposed planes and sombre colouring to show man reified and dehumanised, transformed into an adjunct of the machine in a war which was mechanised more than ever before: his painting "La mitrailleuse" ("The machine gun", 1915) is emblematic of this attitude. In "Return to the trenches", the soldiers have almost been transformed themselves into machines.
Nevinson fully intended his art to be an indictment of war and its motivations. Of his painting "La Patrie" ("The fatherland", 1916) he wrote "I regard this picture, quite apart from how it is painted, as expressing an absolutely NEW outlook on the so-called ‘sacrifice’ of war. It is the last word on the ‘horror of war’ for the generations to come"7
Nevinson’s paintings were well received when he exhibited them in November 1916, despite the fact that his modern and "foreign" style typified everything that the more patriotic and reactionary side of British society abhorred. But after two years of war, war weariness and disenchantment were setting in, and Nevinson’s ferocious critique caught the mood better than official government propaganda. Leading critics accepted that "modern methods were needed to depict modern war" and even the Times saw in his work "a nightmare of insistent unreality, untrue but actual, something that certainly happens but to which our reason will not consent".8
Another painting which created a sensation when it was exhibited in 1916 was Eric Kennington’s "The Kensingtons at Laventie". This painting shows his own unit shortly before he himself was wounded (Kennington appears in the background on the left wearing a balaclava helmet).
The enthusiastic reception given to Kennington’s and Nevinson’s work was in large part due to the public’s perception of these paintings as more truthful, more credible, than the drawings produced on the basis of photographs or second hand accounts, in the illustrated magazines: first, because they portrayed a reality that people knew to be far closer to the truth, both visually and emotionally, and second because the artists were, or had been, serving soldiers with real experience of the front line.
These paintings were all produced before either Nevinson or Kennington had been employed as a war artist by the British Department of Information. The latter was the successor to the Bureau of War Propaganda, which had been set up in secret in August 1914 and at first concentrated on the written word, organising the output in favour of Britain’s war effort of well-known writers like John Buchan and HG Wells. One of the Bureau’s first efforts was the "Report on alleged German outrages" (also known as the Bryce Report), which accused the German army of war crimes against civilians following the invasion of Belgium. By May 1916, the Bureau’s chairman, the Liberal MP Charles Masterman, an ally of the Prime Minister Lloyd George, decided to respond to the demand for illustrations from the picture press by recruiting the well-known artist Muirhead Bone (who had lobbied hard for the establishment of an Official War Artists scheme), who was sent to tour the front with an honorary commission. The sketches he brought back, despite their graphic excellence, are bland and lifeless compared with the raw emotion evident in Nevinson’s art.
Even his "Soldiers’ cemetery" is scarcely more stirring than an image of a country churchyard:
This was doubtless what prompted the Ministry of Information to open up to younger artists, especially those serving on the front whose work the public would accept as more authentic. At the same time, bringing artists under the aegis of the Ministry meant that their exhibitions were subject to military censorship. By the time that his second, hugely successful exhibition opened in 1918 Nevinson seems to have come to the conclusion that only a return to realism was adequate to express his horror at the war, as we can see in the picture ironically entitled "Paths of Glory" – a title later used by Stanley Kubrick’s 1957 anti-war film starring Kirk Douglas. The irony of the title is only too evident when we see the corpses face down in the mud, already bloated by decomposition.
If Nevinson’s earlier work showed man dehumanised, reduced to the status of a machine, incorporated into the machine one might almost say, we can wonder whether he felt the need to escape from the aesthetic, even an aesthetic of the machine, to show the true horror of what war was doing not to machines but to real human beings of flesh and blood with whom we can identify and sympathise – something we cannot do with a machine.
The painting was banned by the authorities. Nevinson hung it in the exhibition anyway, obscured by a large ribbon inscribed with the word "Censored".
Paul Nash, another war artist who was to become one of Britain’s best known landscape artists of the 20th Century, commented bitterly on his employment as a war artist: "I am no longer an artist. I am a messenger who will bring back word from the men who are fighting to those who want the war to go on for ever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls". And the public could surely not escape the implications of this painting entitled "We are building a new world".
While Nevinson moved from the modernist to the traditional, another very different artist moved almost in the opposite direction. William Orpen was nearly 40 when war broke out, and a popular well-established, and even wealthy high society portrait painter. Sent to France as a war artist with the rank of Major, he was derided by some for his privileged and safe situation well away from any combat experience, and indeed the earliest portraits he produced could readily serve as propaganda images of British troops, especially the pilots treated by the press and the propaganda machines as the new "knights in shining armour" of modern warfare.
His portrait of the young pilot Lieutenant Rhys Davids, killed shortly afterwards in a dogfight, was much reproduced.
Orpen’s portraits of Generals Haig and Trenchard were also widely praised and he could have stuck to merely doing more of the same, but he did not.9 On the contrary, he was increasingly disturbed by the effects of war on those involved in it, both soldiers and civilians, and as time went on he turned more and more to an imagery that sometimes approaches a Dali-esque surrealism.
We know that he had been shocked to see young French prostitutes plying for trade at a burial ceremony. Maybe it was this that prompted his "Adam and Eve at Péronne":
There is something almost pornographic about this picture. Here there is no loss of innocence – it is already long gone, lost in the wreckage of war that we see in the background. Eve’s modest headscarf contrasts oddly with her plunging neckline and the somehow cynical expression on her face, while the bored indifference of the young soldier suggests someone who has seen so much death that he has become indifferent to life.
The same soldier turns up in "The mad woman of Douai", depicting a scene Orpen had witnessed of a woman raped shortly beforehand by retreating German troops . Here he appears equally indifferent to the rape, to the tragedy of the victim, and to the hastily buried corpse whose foot we see sticking out of its grave in the foreground.
Tucked away in a room at the back of the exhibition is a series of seven etchings by Percy Delf Smith, who was a gunner in the Royal Marines on the front.
Where some of Orpen’s pictures reprise themes from Goya (for example, "Bombing, Night"), Smith returns to the imagery of decadent medieval society with its omnipresent portrayals of death. These are some of the most shocking pictures in the exhibition.
In "Death awed", even Death shies away from the slaughter, epitomised by the two boots still filled with the stumps of legs, while "Death intoxicated" makes a mockery of dance as Death cavorts deliriously behind a soldier about to spit an enemy on his bayonet.
It seems natural enough to want, almost to expect, that artists who move us by their critical spirit should share our ideas. Natural, but profoundly mistaken. The artists who figure here – and to them we could add poets like Wifred Owen and Siegried Sassoon, and German Expressionists like Otto Dix or Käthe Kollwitz – were profoundly revolted by the war, indeed several of them suffered nervous breakdowns of varying degrees of severity by the end of the war. But none of them were in the least moved by a proletarian political viewpoint; in some cases they were not even particularly attractive as people.
We sometimes forget that the great masters who we admire today were not alone, on the contrary (with very rare exceptions) they were the greatest exponents of an effort in which many were engaged. And when artists rise above the common run that surrounds them, when their art reaches heights that continue to touch us today when so many lesser contemporaries have been forgotten, then it somehow communicates to us something that goes beyond the artist himself. At such moments, the artist is attuned to something in the social atmosphere, something which is very often not explicit. Is it really an accident, that some of these most stinging indictments of the War should have been produced in the same year – and could almost have served as illustrations for – Rosa Luxemburg’s Junius Pamphlet. In Junius, Luxemburg declared: "Violated, dishonored, wading in blood, dripping filth – there stands bourgeois society. This is it [in reality]. Not all spic and span and moral, with pretense to culture, philosophy, ethics, order, peace, and the rule of law – but the ravening beast, the witches’ sabbath of anarchy, a plague to culture and humanity. Thus it reveals itself in its true, its naked form". Is it not precisely this that we see reaching out to grip us from the picture frames of the Imperial War Museum? And is it not precisely because there existed, somewhere, a mind capable of Junius, and a workers’ movement bloodied and betrayed but still alive and capable of taking up and transforming into social action the ideas of Junius, that there could also exist a critical artistic spirit capable of speaking not to the consciousness, as Luxemburg did, but directly to the emotions. In doing so, they speak to something constant in human nature, something truly human (as Marx might have said) which can only react with revulsion to the monstrous machine of death that capitalism had become.
It is striking, at all events, that while World War I produced some of Britain’s greatest 20th century painting, not to mention some of Germany’s most outstanding artistic expression, nothing of the kind can be said of World War II which produced absolutely nothing comparable.
In part, this was the result of technical evolution. When illustrated magazines like the famous Picture Post looked to show the war in images, they turned less to artists than to photographers, and in particular to the new breed of war photographers such as the great Robert Capa. Much more importantly, the ruling class on both sides of the conflict had a much firmer grasp on the importance of propaganda. The Nazi regime exerted a state control over artistic production, denouncing the Expressionists as "degenerate art": Otto Dix, though he remained in Germany, retreated into a self-imposed exile both personal and artistic, and the great enemy of capitalist war and social corruption spent his last years painting innocuous, though technically irreproachable, portraits such as "Nelly as Flora" from 1940.
Hitler was a great admirer of British war propaganda, and the British themselves lost no time, when war began, in setting up a "War Artists Advisory Committee" subordinated to the Ministry of Information. We need only compare Paul Nash’s almost lyrical "Battle of Britain" with his "We are making a new world" to see that the critical spirit of the latter has completely disappeared.
Or again, compare Alfred Thomson’s 1943 painting of an injured airman receiving treatment, with Nevinson’s World War I depiction of a hospital scene in "La Patrie". Here we have an image of calm peacefulness, far removed from the agony and the anguish of the field hospital.
The critical spirit had not entirely disappeared. Some of the American combat artists featured on the PBS site "They drew fire" – and doubtless it is significant that these men were themselves faced with the terror of war – produced art which echoes the horror experienced by the combatants of World War I.
Of one sketch, the artist Howard Brodie wrote: "My most searing memory of any war was during the Battle of the Bulge, when Germans posing as GI's infiltrated our lines. I heard we were going to execute three of them… A defenceless human is entirely different than a man in action. To see these three young men calculatingly reduced to quivering corpses before my eyes really burned into my being. That's the only drawing I've ever had that's been censored. All coverage of the execution was censored".
And there is certainly nothing glorious about Kerr Eby’s "Helping wounded man" (Eby had served on an ambulance crew during World War I).
The United States’ involvement in World War I had been relatively minor, certainly the involvement of the population as a whole in the fighting was incomparably less than was the case in the European countries, and far less than it was to be in World War II. Perhaps we can explain the powerful effect of the images above by the naïvety of the American working class which – although it had to confront one of the most brutal fractions of the capitalist class in its struggles, had yet to experience the insane barbarism of full-scale modern warfare.
These forthright portrayals of war’s brutality – and the insanity it inflicts on human beings that we see staring out of the eyes of Eby’s "wounded man" – reveal an honest search for artistic truth, which shows that integrity and humanity continued to survive even in the heart of barbarism. But there is one aspect missing when we compare these to the World War I works: a sense of a broader social criticism that goes beyond the individual reaction to individually experienced events. Marx was wrong to say that only bad artists put titles on their paintings (Britain’s greatest landscape artist, William Turner, not only gave his works long titles, he sometimes accompanied them with lines from his own poetry), and titles such as "Paths of Glory" or "We are making a new world" underscore for us the broader protest of the artist against the war, its causes and its consequences.
Thanks to "socialist realism", Russian painting of World War II was anything but realistic, and during the Korean War the principles of socialist realism seem to have been applied with equal enthusiasm by both the Americans and the Chinese.
It is only with the Vietnam War that art truly returns to a critical onslaught against war, and here it is art of a new kind that comes front-stage: photography.
Photography and painting are very different technical skills: where the painter sketches to prepare a final work, the photographer will take hundreds, sometimes even thousands of shots. Where the painter adds to his work, little by little, teasing out the truth by adding paint, the photographer rejects, pares down to a single shot which best embodies the event, the scene, or the face that he is trying to represent. And of course, black and white photography in particular involves a subtle work with chemicals in the darkroom to deepen shadow, highlight, and bring the focus onto the essentials.
At their highest expression, painting and photography can, like all art, both express a search for truth. And hence we have one of the most emblematic pictures from the Vietnam war. Vietnamese photographer Nick Ut's photo of Trang Bang after Napalm Attack (8th June, 1972). No painting from World War I portrayed the sheer horror, barbarity, and above all senselessness of this war better than does this photo.
Nick Ut was a photographer with Associated Press, a non-profit news cooperative founded during the Mexican War of 1846, which produced much of the best – most emotionally true – photography to come out of the Vietnam War.10 The war itself came at a very specific moment, and was in some ways unique in the annals of war photography. For one thing it was “the first war in which reporters were routinely accredited to accompany military forces, yet not subject to censorship.”11 This was a lesson that the United States, in particular, was to learn for future wars. The Gulf Wars, for example, were rigorously censored with television reporting being systematically verified before going on air. All those "live" reports were live only in the sense that they came with a few minutes delay while the military censor checked their content as it streamed: under such conditions, many reporters learned to censor themselves.
Pictures like Ut’s, or like Art Greenspon’s photo of American soldiers awaiting a helicopter coming to evacuate the wounded, are more than just war photography telling a striking story, they are also a form of social criticism. Although there are relatively few pictures of Vietcong troops other than prisoners, we are left in no doubt who are the principal sufferers in the war: the civilians first and foremost, of course, but also the "grunts" as the American GI conscripts were called to distinguish them from the "lifers", or professional military (and of course the South Vietnamese army and the Vietcong had their equivalents): overwhelmingly, it was the conscripts, workers in uniform, who were sent into the most dangerous situations on the front lines.
If this form of social criticism were possible, this is not just because the American army had not yet learnt about censorship. A picture, whether it be painting or photography, is always communication. The artist communicates his truth, but he can only do so if the truth is also heard, if within society there are those able to hear and understand this truth. Those who regard art are also part of its meaning. So it is no accident that these photographs come from 1968 and 1972, from the Vietnam war and not the Korean (just as it is no accident that M.A.S.H., a satirical film about the Korean war, was only made in 1970), for this is the period when the post-war reconstruction is coming to an end and the class struggle is once again on the rise, finding its most momentous expression in May ‘68 in France.
The "spirit of the age", the Zeitgeist, can seem an ungraspable, nebulous notion. Yet when we consider this artistic production that grew out of wars brought to an end either because the working class revolted directly against the war itself (World War I), or because the workers revolted against the effects of the crisis of which the war was a part, and increasingly refused to fight (the Vietnam War), it seems to us clear that such art was only possible because within society there existed a working class with "radical chains", a class which is historically opposed to the present state of society, even if the workers themselves are not aware of it, much less the artists. Balzac, as Engels said, went beyond his own class prejudices in portraying truthfully what he saw: so the artists of the First World War bring to us something that goes beyond what they themselves were because they have teased out the truth that underlies the surface. The relationship between artistic expression within capitalism and the revolt against it, is by no means a mechanical one. Art is not great because it is socialist. Like science, art has its own dynamic and the artist’s first responsibility is to be true to himself. One is tempted to paraphrase what Engels’ said of science: ".... the more ruthlessly and disinterestedly [art] proceeds, the more it finds itself in harmony with the interests of the workers."
Jens
1The topography of the Museum has its own significance. The World War I exhibit is to be found immediately, on the ground floor, in a dramatic gallery housing aircraft and originals of the German V1 and V2 missiles from World War II. The war artists of the "Truth and Memory" exhibition are housed far more discreetly, in two galleries on opposite sides of the third floor.
2The fate of the Stalinist USSR’s agricultural production as a result of the ideological imposition of Lysenko’s theories of evolution is a counter-example. And of course, the fact that the scientific world often fails to live up to this necessity does not in any way invalidate it.
3Lenin, "On proletarian culture [186]", 1920
4Read the whole book on Project Gutenberg [187]
5See Paul Gough, A terrible beauty, Sansom & Co., 2010, p17
6Quote drawn from the generally thoughtful labels that accompany the exhibits.
7Quoted in this useful and intelligent review [188] of Paul Gough’s book about Britain’s war artists, A terrible beauty.
8From one of the exhibition labels.
9It is significant also that he donated his entire collection of war paintings to the Imperial War Museum, feeling that it was morally wrong to profit from painting a war where so many suffered.
10See this article in the NYT [189].
11See the article just cited.
Links
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1913/accumulation-capital/ch27.htm
[2] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200601/1609/iww-failure-revolutionary-syndicalism-usa-1905-1921
[3] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&prev=_t&sl=fr&tl=en&u=https://www.zabalaza.net
[4] http://www.lutte-ouvri
[5] https://www.pelloutier.net/dossiers/dossiers.php?id_dossier=74
[6] https://libcom.org/article/1816-1939-syndicalism-south-africa
[7] https://www.pelloutier.net
[8] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1917/boer-war
[9] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1918/african-national-congress
[10] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1919/international-socialist-league
[11] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1920/south-african-communist-party
[12] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/africa
[13] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/south-africa
[14] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1895/workers-movement-africa
[15] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1853/nelson-mandela
[16] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1914/andrew-dunbar
[17] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1915/tw-thibedi
[18] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1916/bernard-le-sigamoney
[19] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippines
[20] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/2012/5305/november/international-review-special-issue-imperialism-far-east-past-
[21] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/2009/136/war-economy
[22] https://en.internationalism.org/series/271
[23] https://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/unions_chapter_03.htm
[24] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/142/intro-left-tkp
[25] https://en.internationalism.org/pamphlets/unions.htm
[26] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200304/133/history-us-foreign-policy-world-war-ii
[27] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8373770.stm
[28] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201211/5329/chinas-imperialist-ambitions-continuity-decades-militarism
[29] https://globalnation.inquirer.net/21671/chinese-communist-party-says-it-has-disowned-local-rebels
[30] https://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2007/lagman
[31] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-ii
[32] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1946/subic-bay-military-base
[33] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1947/us-invasion-philippines
[34] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1948/hukbalahap
[35] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1949/huks
[36] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/philippines
[37] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1939/gregorio-aglipay
[38] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1940/isabelo-delos-reyes
[39] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1941/herminigildo-cruz
[40] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1942/emilio-aguinaldo
[41] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1943/manuel-quezon
[42] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1944/crisanto-evangelista
[43] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1945/marcos
[44] https://libcom.org/article/workers-councils-anton-pannekoek
[45] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/2008/132/1947_conference
[46] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201303/6505/communism-not-nice-idea-vol-3-part-10-bilan-dutch-left-and-transitio
[47] https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1946/violence.htm
[48] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/vercesi-period-of-transition
[49] https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/class-party.htm
[50] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/395/communism-agenda-history
[51] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/27/dictatorship-proletariat
[52] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/italian-left
[53] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/german-and-dutch-left
[54] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/french-communist-left
[55] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/marc-chirik
[56] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/amadeo-bordiga
[57] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/anton-pannekoek
[58] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/ir153_english.pdf
[59] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/28/1995/communist-left-after-world-war-ii
[60] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/28/revolutionary-organisation
[61] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/communist-left
[62] https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR029_function.htm
[63] https://en.internationalism.org/specialtexts/IR033_functioning.htm
[64] https://en.internationalism.org/node/3123
[65] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/114_congress.html
[66] https://en.internationalism.org/262_infraction.htm
[67] https://fr.internationalism.org/icconline/2006_ficci
[68] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/111_OT_ConfSol_pt1
[69] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200301/1893/orientation-text-2001-confidence-and-solidarity-proletarian-struggle
[70] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/127/marxism-and-ethics
[71] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/128/marxism-and-ethics-pt2
[72] https://en.internationalism.org/content/9742/communique-our-readers-icc-under-attack-new-agency-bourgeois-state
[73] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/life-icc/congress-reports
[74] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/amigos37-450pix.jpg
[75] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/200101/10395/1937-may-days-barcelona
[76] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/102_durruti.htm
[77] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/128/cnt-rev-syndicalism
[78] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/129/CNT-1914-1919
[79] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/130/CNT-1919-1923
[80] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/2008/132/spain_1934
[81] https://www.libcom.org/library/buenaventura-durruti-peter-newell
[82] https://libcom.org/article/theses-spanish-civil-war-and-revolutionary-situation-created-july-19-1936-balance-agustin
[83] https://www.libcom.org/history/berneri-luigi-camillo-1897-1937
[84] https://libcom.org/article/berneri-luigi-camillo-1897-1937
[85] https://libcom.org/article/anarchists-government-spain-open-letter-comrade-federica-montseny-camillo-berneri
[86] https://libcom.org/history/between-war-revolution
[87] https://struggle.ws/berneri/international.html
[88] https://struggle.ws/berneri/last_letter.html
[89] https://en.internationalism.org/wr/270_rev_against_war_03.html
[90] https://www.marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1925/04/syndic1.htm
[91] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/history-workers-movement/1936-spain
[92] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/internationalist-anarchism
[93] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/political-currents-and-reference/official-anarchism
[94] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2002/friends-durrutti
[95] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2012/camillo-berneri
[96] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2013/jaime-balius
[97] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2030/vernon-richards
[98] https://libcom.org/article/conquest-bread-peter-kropotkin
[99] https://libcom.org/article/organisational-platform-general-union-anarchists-draft
[100] https://www.libcom.org/files/Argentina.pdf
[101] https://www.libcom.org/library/libertarian-communism
[102] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/zaragoza-congress
[103] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/garcia-oliver
[104] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/munis
[105] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/faud
[106] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1988/fora
[107] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1989/vadim-damier
[108] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1990/isaac-puente
[109] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1991/gregory-maximoff
[110] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1992/franco
[111] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1993/poum
[112] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/world-war-i
[113] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/3/15/decadence-capitalism
[114] http://www.iwm.org.uk/centenary
[115] https://centenaire.org/sites/default/files/references-files/rapport_fusilles.pdf
[116] https://en.internationalism.org/ir/120_cgt.html
[117] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/index.htm
[118] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch03.htm
[119] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/17/1914-18-not-futile-war
[120] https://ia700301.us.archive.org/18/items/tragedyoflordkit00esheuoft/tragedyoflordkit00esheuoft.pdf
[121] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/historic-events/ottoman-empire
[122] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1341/tsingtao
[123] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1372/balkan-wars
[124] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1891/fashoda-incident
[125] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1892/moroccan-crisis
[126] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1893/baghdad-railway
[127] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/general-and-theoretical-questions/war
[128] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/rosa-luxemburg
[129] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/bismarck
[130] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1880/gavrilo-princip
[131] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1881/wilfred-owen
[132] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1882/jaroslav-hasek
[133] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1883/albert-suedekum
[134] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1884/raymond-poincare
[135] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1885/alfred-rosmer
[136] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1886/von-buelow
[137] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1887/bethmann-hollweg
[138] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1888/jean-jaures
[139] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1889/abel-ferry
[140] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1890/viviani
[141] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/7/1879/christopher-clark
[142] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/letters/75_03_18.htm
[143] https://www.marxists.org/francais/luxembur/works/1899/rl189909.htm
[144] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1906/mass-strike/index.htm
[145] https://en.internationalism.org/series/340
[146] https://www.marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1912/tactics.htm
[147] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/sep/30.htm
[148] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1911/08/29.htm
[149] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1936/gotha-programme
[150] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1985/erfurt-programme
[151] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1986/1907-stuttgart-congress
[152] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/1987/1912-basel-congress
[153] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/geographical/germany
[154] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/development-proletarian-consciousness-and-organisation/second-international
[155] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/jogiches
[156] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/karl-liebknecht
[157] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/karl-kautsky
[158] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/people/august-bebel
[159] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1934/vollmar
[160] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1935/eduard-bernstein
[161] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1983/ignaz-auer
[162] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1984/marchlewski
[163] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/august-1914-cover-of-vorwarts.jpg
[164] http://dormirajamais.org/jaures-1/
[165] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201409/10368/nature-and-function-proletarian-party
[166] https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1891/erfurt-program.htm
[167] https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1906/xx/revolutions.htm
[168] https://marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/ch09.htm
[169] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/2028/foundation-2nd-international
[170] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/6/2029/may-day
[171] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/186/imperialism
[172] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/135/internationalism
[173] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1931/william-morris
[174] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1932/paul-lafargue
[175] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/1933/millerand
[176] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2022/victor-adler
[177] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2023/bruce-glasier
[178] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2024/wilhelm-liebknecht
[179] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2025/jules-guesde
[180] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2026/edouard-vaillant
[181] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2027/keir-hardie
[182] https://en.internationalism.org/files/en/images/jean-jaures.jpg
[183] https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1901/socialist-crisis-france/index.htm
[184] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm
[185] https://en.internationalism.org/internationalreview/201401/9440/1914-how-bloodletting-began
[186] https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/oct/08.htm
[187] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2350/2350-h/2350-h.htm
[188] https://gerryco23.wordpress.com/2014/02/16/a-terrible-beauty-british-artists-in-the-first-world-war/
[189] https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/05/arts/design/images-of-the-vietnam-war-that-defined-an-era.html
[190] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/4/263/culture
[191] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2031/wyndham-lewis
[192] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2032/john-nash
[193] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2033/paul-nash
[194] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2034/crw-nevinson
[195] https://en.internationalism.org/tag/25/2035/william-orpen