ICC Introduction

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

Introduction

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

Socialism and consciousness

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.

The formation of the class party in history

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.

The task of the hour for revolutionary militants

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.

The party of tomorrow

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.

The internal regime of the Party

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

2014 Extraordinary Conference of the ICC

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.

Crises are not necessarily fatal

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 events of the present crisis of the ICC and the struggle against 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

The fight to defend the moral principles of marxism

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.”

The present crisis is not the ‘final’ crisis of the ICC

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

The Friends of Durruti

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:

1. The immediate constitution of a Revolutionary Junta formed of workers from the city and the countryside and combatants.
2. The family wage. Rationing card. Direction of the economy and control over distribution by the trade unions.
3. Liquidation of the counterrevolution.
4. Creation of a revolutionary army.
5. Absolute control of public order by the working class.
6. Firm opposition to any armistice.
7. A proletarian justice system.
8. Abolition of prisoner exchanges.

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.

An incomplete break with anarchism

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

The “national” limitations of the Friends’ vision

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

Guillamon’s position on the war and his criticisms of Bilan

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:

1. “Without destruction of the State, there is no revolution. The Central Anti-fascist Militias Committee of Catalonia (CAMC) was not an organ of dual power, but an agency for military mobilization of the workers, for sacred union with the bourgeoisie, in short, an agency of class collaboration.
2. Arming of the people is meaningless. The nature of military warfare is determined by the nature of the class directing it. An army fighting in defense of a bourgeois State, even should it be antifascist, is an army in the service of capitalism.
3. War between a fascist State and an antifascist State is not a revolutionary class war. The proletariat's intervention on one side is an indication that it has already been defeated. Insuperable technical and professional inferiority on the part of the popular or militia-based army was implicit in military struggle on a military front.
4. War on the military fronts implied abandonment of the class terrain. Abandonment of the class struggle signified defeat for the revolutionary process.
5. In the Spain of August 1936, revolution was no more and there was scope only for war: A non-revolutionary military war.
6. The collectivizations and socializations in the economy count for nothing when State power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie.”18

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.

Berneri and his successors

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.

What was the common ground between Berneri and Bilan?

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.

Vernon Richards and the Lessons of the Spanish Revolution

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

Anarchist ideology and proletarian principle

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

Part One: programme and practice

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.

Isaac Puente’s ‘Libertarian Communism’ pamphlet

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 events of 36-37: social revolution or imperialist war?

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’.