For more than a year now not a day has passed without a new act of barbarism in the Israel-Palestinian conflict in the Middle East. The age-old ideologies of Palestinian nationalism and Israel Zionism, more than half a century after the inception of Israel and the first Arab-Israeli war, continue to fuel havoc in this region. The spectacle is absolutely appalling. On one side, radical Palestinian militants blow themselves up together along innocent victims in suicidal terrorist attacks; suicidal armed confrontations against an adversary thousands of times better armed and organized; children, women and desperate young Palestinians aiming to kill at random, so long as the victim is a Jew. On the other hand, rubble, destruction and death caused by all-powerful Israeli state terror displayed with cynical impunity and total disregard for human life. On both sides populations living in fear, hating each other and ready to kill, poisoned to the core by the nationalist ideologies of their respective dominant classes.

This is today the situation in this region where a decade ago "a new era of peace" was announced with so much fanfare by the world bourgeoisie. Nothing more than a spiral of interminable violence, which threatens to escalate at any moment into a full-blown war.

The so-called "civilized" democracies of the US and Europe would like us to believe that they have nothing to do with the current events in the Middle East, that they have encouraged peace and that if it has not worked out is due to the radical terrorist Palestinian groups, or the policies of Arafat's PLO, or the Israel radical right wing politicians. Nothing is further from the truth. Although in the context of capitalism there is no solution to the Palestinian-Israel conflict, the imperialist maneuvering of the great imperialist powers for influence in the Middle East has always been a major factor in the exacerbation of political violence that characterized its history.

"Pax Americana" in the Middle East in the 1990's

The collapse of the Stalinist regimes at the end of the 80's and the beginning of the 90's brought with it the disappearance of the imperialist blocs that had divided the world since the end of WWII. This upheaval has had profound consequences in the Middle East. For decades the US and the USSR, as a means to secure influence in the region, had supported this or that bourgeois clique or state on their respective petty imperialist rivalries against their neighbors. The collapse of the imperialist bloc lead by the USSR and the diminished imperialist stature of Russia profoundly upset the interimperialist relationships between the countries of the region. Countries like Syria and bourgeois factions like the PLO suddenly found themselves without a godfather to resort to for money, weapons and political influence. Meanwhile, as Russian influence vanished, the American bourgeoisie established itself as the dominant imperialist power in the region.

The 1991 Gulf War, launched by the US as a means to demonstrate to its potential imperialist rival its willingness to defend its imperialist world hegemony, strengthened even more the grip of American imperialism in the Middle East. Through the ruthless killing of hundred of thousands of people, a new imperialist relation of forces among the local bourgeois cliques in the region emerged from Operation Desert Storm. Iraq, before the war a local imperialist power to be reckoned with, was reduced to the stature of a "nobody" in the region; the PLO, punished for backing the wrong horse during the war, descended one step further into political bankruptcy, particularly as some of its traditional sources of financial support from other Arab states dried up; Syria, on the side of the winners, was granted Lebanon as a reward for its services, plus a promise of negotiations on the status of the Golan Heights, currently under Israeli occupation; Saudi Arabia was rewarded with upgraded military "aid" -and a US military base in its soil-for its role as crucial center for the American military operations.

In the face of these changes in the Middle East political situation, and as a centerpiece of its strategy for reinforcing its position as imperialist master of the region, the US bourgeoisie pushed for a political compromise between Israel, its most trustworthy ally in the region, and Israel's traditional Arab foes. Through this compromise Israel's right of existence would be recognized by its historical enemies, while the Israel bourgeoisie would made its own concessions, among which the most important would be its acquiescence on the creation of Palestinian state in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West bank

Since this "Pax America" was announced through the showcase of the so-called "peace conferences" in 1991, and the Oslo agreements between Israel and the PLO in 1992, the American ruling class consistently stuck to this policy, despite the switch from Republican to Democratic control of the White House. Even the present Bush administration, which seems to have now abandoned the idea of creating a Palestinian state, had up until very recently stuck to this same strategy. However, the present sudden US government support for Israel's current policy of reneging on its compromise on the Palestinian question seems to be more than a spur-of-the-moment event. In fact this policy change is a well thought out response to both the difficulties that the US has faced during the last decade in its struggle to maintain its dominance all over the world, and to the need for adjustment in US policy in the Middle East in the wake of the September 11 events.

The revamping of American's imperialist strategy

Since the disappearance of the interimperialist relations that determined world politics in the Cold War era, the US has been faced with the reality that it not longer controls Western Europe. In fact its ex-allies in the old Western bloc have been the main challengers of its world dominance. Thus the US has been struggling for the last decade to defend and strengthen its hegemony in the areas outside Europe that are strategically vital, such as the Middle East, the Balkans, the Horn of Africa, and now Central Asia.

This struggle to defend its world supremacy, although not a total failure, has not prevented the US challengers from advancing their own imperialist cards, as shown for instance in the growing influence of Germany in the last decade in its historical hunting grounds of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. Increasingly the US has found it necessary to rely on brutal force to defend its threatened hegemony, and to stand alone against the rest of the world. The perspective of 'every nation for itself' that has characterized the impact of capitalist decomposition on international relations, in which each nation plays its own card, now includes even the US, the world's only remaining superpower. This bellicose position, openly defended by Secretary of State Colin Powell at the World Economic Forum in New York this winter, only fueled criticism and opposition from the US's erstwhile allies in Europe. The unflinching support of US imperialism to the war campaign of its most reliable Middle Eastern ally, Israel, reflects the American commitment to war and bloodshed as the lynchpin of its foreign policy.

The 'Axis of Evil'

As Uncle Sam looks furtively for a new victim in its never-ending war against international terrorism, Pres. George Bush coined a new term in his State of the Union address in January when he spoke of the "Axis of Evil," comprised of Iraq, Iran and North Korea. This sobriquet, yet another attempt to cloak the current war effort in the same patriotic clothe as World War II, is of course absolutely ridiculous. The Axis powers were an imperialist bloc, an alliance for war against a rival bloc, the Allies. There is no alliance between these three demonized states; in fact, Iraq and Iran are adversaries.

This verbal trial balloon for future military attacks triggered an even greater flood of criticism against US policy from European powers have been making overtures to Iran and Iraq, for example, and are opposed to the new US offensive. Even from the American perspective, the new line is contradictory, at least in regard to Iran, for example, which actually cooperated with the US in the Afghanistan war, and had been earning praise in the US media for its actions. Once the war ended, it's true that Iran started to try Uncle Sam's patience with its efforts to maintain its traditional sphere of influence in western Afghanistan. But it was the Israeli capture of a vessel carrying 50 tons of illegal Iranian munitions, supposedly being shipped to the Palestinian Authority, which served both as the pretext for US support to Israel's campaign of annihilation against the Palestinians, and put Iran in the "evil" dog house.

The American commitment to military action was made clear in Bush's State of the Union speech, when he said, "My hope is that all nations will heed our call, and eliminate the terrorist parasites who threaten their countries and our own…But some countries will be weak in the face of terror. And make no mistake: if they do not act, America will." The future that capitalism offers humanity is one of militarism and terror, in which human life is expendable, and destruction a cold political calculation. The notion of an "axis of evil" may be questionable, the "excess of evil" oozing from decomposing world capitalism is all too apparent. It is only the struggle of the working class that can block this bleak future that capitalism promises.

ES

It is no surprise that the worst impact of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center and the ensuing ideological campaign would be found in the US, where the events were particularly traumatic for a working class that had not experienced war on its own national territory since the Civil War (1861-65), except for Pearl Harbor – which had occurred in Hawaii, some 2,000 miles from the American mainland. Prior to Pearl Harbor the last significant foreign attack on the US was the British burning of the White House and the Capitol during the War or 1812-15. The success of US imperialism's ideological campaign in the first weeks after the attacks is difficult to exaggerate. Whatever its confusions and disorientations since the revival of class struggle at the end of the 1960s, the proletariat in America has been defiant and distrusting of the state, willing to undertake militant struggle, to confront the police if necessary, and even, at an elementary level, to put the unions into question. The American proletariat, despite its historical and political weaknesses, has consistently echoed the struggles of the international proletariat over the past 33 years. The overnight transformation of this battalion of the world proletariat into a patriotic, flag-waving mass, susceptible to the worst racist attitudes and manipulation by the state was an unnerving phenomenon, and for weeks, made the defense of proletarian internationalist principles in the face of this barbaric ideological onslaught completely against the current.

No matter how sober we must be in our recognition of the success of the ideological campaign in the US, it is clear that the historic course towards decisive class confrontations has not be reversed. For one thing, the historic course is not determined on the basis of the momentary situation in a single country, even if it is the most powerful economic nation on earth. On the contrary, it is determined on a global level, particularly in the main capitalist countries that have the greatest concentration of the proletariat. On this level, it is clear that the situation in other countries in no way paralleled that in the US. Furthermore, even in the US, there is growing evidence that the setback in class consciousness is not permanent, but transitory. There is a clear tendency for workers to return to the proletarian terrain to defend their class interests, and not to be dissuaded from class struggle by the demands of patriotism and the war.

For example, in October, 23,000 public sector workers went on strike in Minnesota, despite criticism from the governor and the media that to strike during a period of such national crisis was unpatriotic, to which the workers responded, "how dare you use these events against us." So strong was sentiment for this strike, that not only did the national union involved directly endorse it , but other unions were obliged to express "solidarity." Other strikes in the post-Twin Towers period include a week long walkout by sanitation workers in Orange County, California; an illegal strike by teachers in Middletown, New Jersey (a suburb of New York) in which 200 teachers were jailed for defying a court injunction to return to work, a strike by teachers at parochial secondary schools in New York; a strike by 4000 machinists at Pratt and Whitney jet engine manufacturing plant in Connecticut; and a one day wildcat strike by several hundred private bus company bus drivers in New York City. The angry response of postal workers to the obvious class bias in the state's handling of the anthrax scare in the US, where Senate and Congressional offices were shutdown for over a month to permit fumigation to destroy the virus, while postal workers at contaminated postal sorting centers were required to continue working, putting their health at risk, was yet another sign that despite the prevailing patriotic climate, workers were capable of seeking their own terrain. These struggles in the US have all ended in varying degrees of defeat, and they occur in difficult circumstances, but more importantly they demonstrate in a very concrete manner that the acceleration of the crisis is pushing workers to reassert themselves as workers, to struggle to regain their confidence in themselves as a class, and to rediscover the power of their unity in struggle.

In other countries, especially in Europe, despite certain success in mobilizing sympathy for the US following September 11, and taking advantage of the situation to introduce measures to strengthen the police and the repressive apparatus, the ideological success of the bourgeoisie has been nowhere comparable to the US. There have been strikes in a number of European countries in the last few months. Meanwhile the global economy has plunged into open recession, which will only heighten the attacks on the working class's standard of living, and build pressure for the workers to return to the class struggle to defend itself.

RP, 30/3/02

After months of warning of a possible economic slowdown, the American bourgeoisie has suddenly acknowledged that its economy has in fact been in recession since last March, based not on the traditional capitalist economic criteria of two consecutive quarters of negative growth, but for the first time based on an admission that rising unemployment can be utilized as an indicator of economic decline. At this level, even though its manipulation of economic data had eliminated the statistical negative growth figures, the skyrocketing unemployment, which the working class understands full well is the paramount indicator of open recession and an attack on its living conditions, made it fundamentally impossible for the ruling class to maintain the fiction that a recession had not yet occurred. The rise of joblessness in the US has been staggering in the past year, with the number of officially unemployed workers in the US skyrocketing in 2001 by 2.6 million, up to 8,250,000, or 5.8 percent of the official workforce. As always the bourgeoisie's statistics underestimate the real picture of unemployment. For example, the bourgeoisie admits that its unemployment figure does not include 1.3 million workers who are "marginally attached to the labor force," by which they mean people who want to work but did not look for a job in the preceding 4 weeks before the latest government survey. Nor does it include the estimated 344,000 "discouraged workers" who have given up looking for jobs that don't exist.

The list of firms announcing massive layoffs grows daily. In January, Ford Motor Company, the world's second largest automaker, has announced plans to cut 35,000 jobs world wide, more than 10% of its workforce. This came after an earlier announcement last year by DaimlerChrysler that it would cut 26,000 jobs (20%) of the Chrysler workforce. Despite the bourgeoisie's propaganda efforts to blame the economic woes on the terrorist attacks of September 11, the Labor Department's figures indicate that only103,000 workers had been laid off as a direct or indirect consequence of the attacks, 42% in the airline industry and 29% in the hotel industry. The other 2.47 million laid off workers lost their jobs due to the workings of the capitalist business cycle. And it was only a few short years ago in the heydey of the Clinton prosperity that the capitalist pundits declared we had arrived at a utopian era of permanent prosperity, that the business cycle had been surpassed.

All of this occurs at a moment when the bourgeoisie has an increasingly restricted margin of maneuver. In 2001, in a desperate attempt to jump start the economy, even though it was still denying there was recession at the time, the Federal Reserve lowered the prime rate 11 times, four times since September 11, to the point in which the prime is less than half the rate of inflation. The US Treasury is literally printing and giving away money to the banks, and still the economy slides deeper into trouble. In this context the scandalous bankruptcy of Enron, the Houston, Texas-based American energy giant, the seventh largest corporation in the US, with close links to the Bush administration, is an ominous reminder that the bubble has burst for the phony prosperity of the last decade which was based on speculation and debt. The disintegration of the Enron employee pension plans that were locked into Enron stocks, which had shriveled from a value of $92 less than a year ago to 34 cents a share, is a warning of what lies in store for other pension plans as the crisis deepens.

Internationalism, 30/3/02

The ICC is not the only organization in the communist left milieu to find itself under parasitic attack in the current period. A similar attack has been launched by the Los Angeles Workers Voice (LAWV) against the International Bureau of the Revolutionary Party (IBRP). All of this follows the collapse of the IBRP's American affiliate that had been inaugurated at a conference of IBRP North American sympathizers in Montreal in April 2000. The IBRP-sympathizing section was a regroupment of the Los Angeles Workers Voice (LAWV) with another sympathizer (AS), then based in Wisconsin, now in Indiana. This US regroupment, which organized around the name Internationalist Notes (a newsletter published for several years by AS), quickly began to unravel.

By the summer of 2001 we were given a public glimpse of a bitter political and organizational internal dispute within Internationalist Notes that had apparently be brewing almost from very beginning on some very fundamental, basic questions pertaining to organizational functioning, centralization, and intervention in class struggle. By December there was a parting of the ways with LAWV, which had broken with the organizational orientations and practices of the IBRP, and for that matter, the communist left. Initially the IBRP offered to retain, cordial, fraternal relations with LAWV, and encouraged them to continue their political development. In a letter to LAWV in December the IBRP wrote, "Perhaps you may develop towards us in the course of time or perhaps you develop towards another tendency. The important thing is that you develop…We would though encourage you to investigate all the tendencies of the communist left own political basis." However, shortly afterwards, following outrageous charges of dictatorial practices by the IBRP, the IBRP denounced the LAWV for "resorting to slanders, which pre-empt all further discussion."

This collapsed regroupment is an unfortunate setback not just for the IBRP, but also for the entire communist left political milieu on the international level, especially here in the US. Whatever divergences separate the organizations of the communist left milieu, the political legacy and principles that we share far outweigh the differences. The class line separating the communist left milieu from the groups of bourgeois leftism is very real, and very critical. The ability to strengthen all the political organizations in the communist left milieu, both in terms of numerical growth and in political influence within the working class, is a reflection of the deepening of class consciousness within the proletariat. For nearly a quarter century Internationalism had been alone in defending the communist left perspective in the US. With the growth of the IBRP in the US there was an increased presence for this perspective.

The dispute that tore apart the American affiliate of the IBRP centered on a basic organizational question, long ago settled in the revolutionary workers' movement. There was apparently a heated disagreement on the need for a regular press, regular public meetings, a reasoned and purposeful political intervention in the class struggle, centralization on the organizational level. From what we are able to make of the debate, it appears that LAWV, a group that was in the process of breaking with leftism, was mired in localism, immediatism and activism. In the words of the IBRP, "What they (LAWV) object to is not a Bolshevik model of organization but any organization which goes beyond their little group. As it is, United States Workers' Voice (as LA now calls itself) remains a loose grouping of individuals which does not consistently hold a clear set of positions but consistently show themselves unable to work with anyone outside their immediate circle" (Statement Regarding the Relationship of Los Angeles Workers Voice (LAWV) with the IBRP). The texts published by LAWV draw heavily on stalinist vocabulary and ideological formulations, such as "party building," "agit-prop," the need to be with the masses in motion, etc., and a complete confusion about so-called "reforms" won by mass, interclassist movements in the US in the '60s, and '70s.

It's not surprising that the LAWV had political confusions. They were coming to the communist left after a terrible experience in bourgeois leftism, actually stalinism, bringing with them tremendous negative political baggage, which was bound to effect their political evolution, and required firm political discussion. Their immediatist and localist weaknesses were clearly apparent in the period before their formal affiliation to the IBRP from their continuous grinding out of leaflets for distribution at leftist and union rallies and demonstrations, without any political assessment of the appropriateness of the intervention. Indeed this was one of the weaknesses criticized by AS in his debate texts published in the IBRP press. But again militants coming from leftism often suffer from these immediatist, activist and localist confusions. Their break with leftism is often marred by sentimental attachments to "mass struggles" and "agit-prop," an antipathy towards theoretical reflection, and a lack of patience in regard to intervention in the class struggle. They often distrust organizational centralization because they mistakenly identify it with the totalitarian domination by central committees in leftist organizations that they were subjected to in their prior political experience. The only chance for the LAWV to overcome this leftist political baggage was to put themselves in a positive orientation towards the communist left, to learn and assimilate the lessons of the past, and to subject their own past to a severe self-critique.

But during its brief and stormy affiliation with the IBRP the LAWV's actions clearly reflect that the influence of alien class ideologies predominated. The LAWV carried out political intrigue and maneuvering within the IBRP, holding secret and private political and organizational discussions in Los Angeles, without the participation, or even the knowledge, of AS, or the rest of the IBRP. They disregarded the rules and mode of functioning in revolutionary organizations, and of the comportment of comrades within a proletarian organization. The fruit of this bourgeois leftist mode of operation was the unilateral taking of organizational decisions, and eventual announcement of abrupt changes in basic class line positions without even a murmur of discussion within the organization. When criticized for these gross organizational violations, the LAWV responded with personalized attacks against AS, and with slanders against the IBRP. A group of individuals who carry on secret, clandestine political decision-making within the organization had the temerity to denounce the organization as being undemocratic!!!

We express our solidarity to AS, and to the IBRP, on this score. We, too, are very familiar with this type of behavior from the parasitic milieu that exists to attack and discredit communist organizations. Indeed this righteous charge of "undemocratic" and stalinist practices is incredibly reminiscent of the filth emanating from the so-called "fraction" recently causing problems within the ICC. There are obvious differences between the LAWV and the "fraction" formed by former members of the ICC, most notably that the LAWV were individuals in a process of breaking with leftism --actually stalinism -- and with only a minimal grasp of communist left principles, whereas our "fraction" was comprised of much more experienced militiants, some of whom had been entrusted with important responsibilities in the central organs of the ICC. Nevertheless, there are remarkable similarities in comportment; both are very much cut from the same cloth. There is the same influence of alien class ideologies, the same tendency to compensate for the inadequacy of their political arguments with peronsalizations in the debate, the same violation of basic rules covered with denunciations of stalinism and undemocratic practices against the organization, and the same attempt to insist that is they who are the continuators of the communist left tradition - the same parasitic behavior.

Once the LAWV had put itself into a negative dynamic in relation to the IBRP, it quickly fell into a sharp political regression. Thus, for example, the LAWV, which had affirmed its agreement with the platform of the IBRP since the mid-1990s, abruptly adopted the ridiculous notion that the Russian Revolution had degenerated into a state capitalist regime and the Bolsheviks had become counter-revolutionary by 1918. Indeed it was the appearance of this anarchist view in a publication that claimed affiliation with the IBRP, that help precipitate the IBRP's decision that a parting of the ways was necessary. While this is not the appropriate place to enter into a lengthy refutation of the LAWV position, we do wonder how the LAWV can explain the fact that these supposedly counter-revolutionary Bolsheviks of 1918 then undertook the formation of the Communist International in 1919, and exhorted the revolutionary proletariat of the world to break with the social democratic parties and prepare to spread the revolution throughout the world. For LAWV, the failure of the Russian Revolution is not due to the failure of the revolution to spread internationally, but because of the betrayal of the Bolsheviks and because conditions for socialism in Russia were not ripe. This pearl is actually a variant of the Stalinist theory of socialism in one country, since it implies that socialism in a single country is possible; the problem was that it was attempted in the wrong country, one that wasn't developed enough.

The political regression of the LAWV is continued in their new platform published in their new publication, the New Internationalist (LAWV bowed to pressure from the IBRP to abandon the Internationalist Notes name which has been used historically by ICP- Battaglia Communista). The platform is a poorly written, two-and-a-half page document, presented as a single, never-ending paragraph. Especially in the beginning, the LAWV text appears to follow very closely the Basic Positions that appear in all issues of the ICC's press (not as a platform but as merely a summary of the major points of the ICC platform), and borrows various formulations from the ICC.

The ICC is not flattered by this seductive imitation by a parasitic group. We are well aware that parasites often seek legitimacy by making overtures to established groups in the proletarian milieu, as part of an effort to play one organization off against the other. In any case, the LAWV redrafts and adds many formulations and points to what they have lifted from our Basic Positions document, which reflect their inconsistencies, confusions and political regression away from the communist left traditions. For example, instead of talking about the decadence of capitalism, the LAWV refers to a period of barbarism ushered in by World War in 1914. But later in the document there is a reference to "decadent capitalism" without any explanation what decadence is. The document is also unclear as to whether state capitalism exists only in the stalinist countries or as a universal tendency in all countries in decadent capitalism. The "dictatorship of the proletariat," a fundamental acquisition of the revolutionary workers movement going back to Marx and Engels, is totally unmentioned in the document. From the rightwing of the American bourgeoisie, the LAWV borrows the conception of "term limits:" "No delegate [to the workers councils] can serve consecutive terms."

Unfortunately, today in the US, not only do we have a weakened IBRP presence, and hence a weakened communist left presence in the US, but now we are confronted with the presence of a parasitic group of former leftists, with only a half-baked comprehension of communist left positions, heavily imbued with an amalgam of localist, immediatist, activist, and stalinist ideological conceptions from their past, and libertarian distrust of centralization and the Russian Revolution, affirming themselves as spokespersons of the communist left in America. At the same time they distort the positions of that political tradition and slander one of its most important organizations internationally, the IBRP. It won't be long, we suspect, before the ICC, too, is subjected to the slander and denouncement by such parasitic elements.

JG, 24/5/02.

In the context of the acceleration of political chaos and war around the world following the September 11th events, the Middle East is once again threatening to go up in flames. After being overshadowed for some time by conflicts in others parts of the world --Bosnia, Yugoslavia, Chechnya, Afghanistan -- this region is reclaiming its status as an imperialist powder keg. In a situation that changes daily, the bourgeois media is packed with a dazzling amount of information on and "analyses" of the region. For a start, the US bourgeoisie has made clear its intention to once again unleash a military intervention against Iraq. At the same time the chronic Israel/Palestine conflict has reached the level of an all out open war. There is not day passed without a new act of barbarism being committed by either the Israel State or its Palestinian rivals. The death toll on both sides has already reached the thousands, Palestine's economic infrastructure is in shambles, and Israel's is not much better. Both populations live in constant fear; the misery, the suffering, the desperation is reaching nightmarish levels.

As usual, the bourgeoisie, both left and right, all over the world exhort the working class to choose sides in this conflict, to either support Palestine's "freedom fighter" terrorists or Israel's Zionist defenders of the Jewish State. Anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim feelings are being stirred up all over the world. Pro-Palestine or pro-Israel demonstrations are organized in many countries. In the face of this campaign to push workers to choose between the capitalist cliques who are fighting in the Middle East, the working class cannot permit itself to be drawn into this nationalist war fever. The only way that workers -particularly in the industrialized countries where the main battalions of the working class are concentrated- can support their Palestinian and Israeli class brothers is by developing their class struggle in their own terrain. The working class has no country, no nationality or religion to defend. Against the present drive to war by world capitalism workers need to oppose their own international struggles for the abolition of wage slavery and all national frontiers. The creation of a Palestinian state or the defense of a Jewish state is not the task of the working class movement.

The Western democracies would like us to believe that they have nothing to do with the Palestine/Israel war. They present themselves as peace loving nations in the midst of barbarians stirring up chaos in an increasing unstable world. In the US, the Bush administration portrays itself as a concerned and fair "peace broker," while in fact it has provided political cover to Israel's scaled-up war against its Palestinian rivals. The latest Israel's military offensive in the West Bank aimed at weakening the Palestinian's militia groups could not have taken place without the "green light" of the American government. Despite the leverage that the Israel's bourgeoisie has with the US, as its most trustworthy ally in the region, it can't afford to go against American global imperialist interest. There is not secret that Israel could not have survived as a nation state without the economic, military and political support of the US for the past half century. Thus the US present support of the policies of Israel has nothing to do with a Bush government being somehow teledirected by the Jews, as some conspiratorial theories with an anti-Semitic flavor maintain, but it is mainly determined by the American bourgeoisie immediate political objectives in the region.

The US, paradoxically, needs this war to give a new lease on life to the "pax Americana" in the region, so that it can get underway its war against Iraq in the best possible conditions. The apparently contradictory policy of the Bush administration comes from this situation. It is impossible for the US to go into another war against Saddam Hussein with the Palestinian/Israel conflict at the level reached in the last months. The acquiescence of the US Arabs allies in the region to the US policies depends in great part on the US ability to reign on Israel expansionist policies. The 1990's "peace process" launched by the US in the wake of the Gulf war was supposed to create a balance of power in which Israel would resolve its outstanding rivalries with its Arabs neighbors. The resolution of the Palestinian question was in this context high on the agenda. This is why Arafat's PLO was given the task to police the Palestinian territories with the promise of the eventual formation of a national state. However this "pax Americana" particularly in relation to the Palestinian question has in the end come to a total failure. The Israel/Palestinian conflict has reached levels in the last year-and-a-half not seen since the 80's, jeopardizing the policies of the US in the region. Arafat's PLO - when it is not itself participating in the military activities against Israel -had proven unable to reign in the Islamic extremist terrorist groups. In fact, a group like Hamas is more popular among the Palestinian population than the famously corrupt, gangsters turned policemen of the "Palestinian Authority." This is why the Bush administration has no choice, despite the danger that its policy would alienate its Arabs allies, but to give Israel the green light to crush militarily the terrorist groups.

It almost seems ironic that as far as the Palestinian bourgeois cliques are concerned, the main beneficiary of the Israel latest military campaign is Mr. Arafat, Mr. Sharon's declared "hated enemy." After being humiliated and virtually held prisoner by Israel during the last 4 months, Arafat has gained a new political lease on life. Of course it is very likely that this has been Israel intention all along.

As far as the European powers are concerned, they also have their share of responsibility in the present mayhem in the Middle East. They of course do not have the imperialist stature to challenge directly the US hegemony in the region as Russia did during the so-called cold war period. However this has not prevented them from trying hard during the last few years to set foot in this strategically important area of the world. Thus their vociferous condemnation of Israel's latest military campaign betrays their past efforts to sabotage the "pax Americana" in the region. Furthermore they know that behind Israel's offensive, there is the American bourgeoisie preparation of a new and more devastating war in the Middle East that will weaken even more their imperialist standing in the region.

Once again the Palestinian question has no solution within the framework of capitalism. Palestinian state or no Palestinian state, the misery, exploitation and oppression of the Palestinian masses will continue unchanged. Once again it's only the world working class that can provide a way out of the increasing spiral of barbarism that is sweeping the world.

ES, 24/5/02.

On April 11th, opposition forces, including factions within the army, overthrew the Chavez government in Venezuela. Forty-eight hours later, Chavez and his government were restored to power. In both instances, the bourgeoisie invoked the rhetoric of democracy. When Chavez was overthrown capitalist propaganda told workers in Venezuela, and the U.S. as well, that the opposition forces were overturning a tyrannical populist president. The military forces involved in this action took great pains to insist this was not a coup, but rather manifestation of the "support of the army for civil society." When Chavez returned to power, capitalist propaganda declared that the overthrow of a democratically elected leader by wealthy oligarchs could not be tolerated.

The situation in Venezuela continues to be highly unstable. Chavez's restoration has not resolved the deep internal divisions within the bourgeois class that precipitated the crisis. On the one hand, there are the pro-Chavists who maintain their allegiance to the guerrilla methods of the 60's and 70's, their links with Cuba, Libya, ad the Colombian FARCs, and openly project an anti-American posture, which is unacceptable to Washington, particularly in a region that long been America's backyard. On the other hand, there is the opposition comprised largely of businessmen, the unions, the church, and various political parties. The military is divided with some factions backing Chavez, others the opposition. Chavez's return to power only exacerbates these serious tensions within the ruling class.

The U.S. regards Chavez as incapable of restoring stability to the chaotic national situation in Venezuela. In addition, Chavez's unwillingness to support American policy in Colombia and on the contrary to support the FARCs poses serious problems for Washington. There is no question that Washington would support the overthrow of Chavez, but at a time when the U.S. is so deeply engaged in an international war against terrorism that is purportedly designed to "help nations blossom through the use of democratic governments," the Bush administration requires that a democratic charade be employed to dump the bothersome populist. So, while the restoration of Chavez will not mean political stability in Venezuela, and bloody in-fighting is to be expected, the U.S. will have to intervene in Venezuela's politics more subtly, but also more decidedly. A campaign around bourgeois democracy will be unleashed to numb the working class and prepared the ground for ousting Chavez and his clique. Parliament will be used as a showcase for the disposition of political disagreements in a civil manner in a modern democracy, while the murders, backstabbing and Machiavellian scheming will occur behind the scenes.

The social chaos that reigns in Venezuela is not unique in Latin America. The recent economic collapse in Argentina also exposed the difficulties of the local bourgeoisie to find a common political front, as five different presidents were elected within the space of two weeks. What is "unique" to Venezuela is that the Chavez government represents the left Latin American style. His populist verbiage was necessary to quell the threat of hunger riots from the extremely poor social strata, which in Venezuela constitutes 70 percent of the population, and has consistently supported Chavez. The populist rhetoric is also used by Chavez to pit the poor, declassed strata against the working class, and to quash working class discontent by getting them to accept the imposition of tremendous austerity measures supposedly to help the poorest raise their standard of living.

Meanwhile, going back to last year, the opposition has developed a concerted strategy to manipulate the working class' anger both to legitimize its own action aimed at taking control of the government, and to derail working class struggles onto bourgeois terrain. For example, the CTV (Confederacion de Trabajorderes de Venezuela), the major trade union confederation, called for a 24-hour general strike for April 9 based on protests among public sector workers and the mobilization of executives and professionals within the petroleum industry. This strike was supported by the FEDECAMARAS, the bosses' federation, and by the opposition political parties. The strike was then extended by 24 hours, and finally, on April 10, the bosses and the unions decided on an indefinite national strike to oust Chavez. The Venezuelan bourgeoisie is trying to channel the anger and discontent of the various social strata and classes into an effort to bring some social stability, but above all, to prevent the workers for developing their own struggles on their own terrain.

The pro-Chavists took advantage the provisional junta's dissolution of all public powers - parliament, governors, majors, etc - to mobilize national and international support by claiming that there had been a coup that nullified the constitutional power and disregarded the democratic "popular will." We have not seen the end the ideological campaigns around bourgeois democracy. The working class in Venezuela will face the difficult task of developing its own struggles in a climate of democratic euphoria, against the tremendous weight of interclassism coming from the sheer size of the poorest strata, and the emboldened petty bourgeoisie within the opposition, a strengthened union apparatus, and all within the general framework capitalist decomposition.

An, 24/5/02.

Recently Internationalism received a pamphlet from the Chicago Revolutionary Network (CHIREVNET), entitled "The Revolutionary Uprising of Sailors and Workers of Kronstadt, Russia, March 1921." First, we want to acknowledge the effort of the pamphlet's author to consider important events in the history of the workers' movement that have important lessons to be learned on how revolutionaries conceive of the essential problems of proletarian revolution today. The pamphlet cites our book-recently translated into English-The Dutch and German Communist Left: A Contribution to the History of the Revolutionary Movement as the source of its account of the events of the Kronstadt uprising, but it also criticizes the ICC for supposedly regarding the Bolsheviks' repression of the revolt as a "tragic necessity." In this regard, the pamphlet fundamentally misunderstands, miseads or misrepresents our analysis of the Kronstadt events. Over the years, the ICC has consistently and sharply criticized political groups that defend the incorrect view that the suppression by force of the Kronstadt rebellion was a "tragic necessity," as can been seen in the two part series we begin publishing below, or in International Review No.3, or No. 104

The CHIVREVNET pamphlet also reflects a number of essentially anarchist or councilist myths regarding Kronstadt and the lessons to be drawn therefrom. This is particularly, but not solely, true in its understanding of the role of the Bolshevik party in the crushing of the revolt, and the anti-party lessons it draws from the supposed "statist authoritarianism" of the Bolsheviks. To cite only one example, the author argues that:"(….) there is no revolutionary need for political parties since this implies: participating in the capitalist electoral charade-which we all know means more or less the same old capitalist, authoritarian dictatorship by the big capitalist ruling class-and, a desire for state power." This oversimplified anti-party political conclusion completely misunderstands the role of the revolutionary party and the relationship between party and class in the process of coming to consciousness, which has nothing to do with participation in the electoral mystification peddled by the bourgeoisie.

Furthermore, the pamphlet's methodological frame of reference-despite CHIVRENET'S frequent invocation of the Marxist dialectic elsewhere1-fails to grasp the true historical meaning of these events. For example, it does not seek to set the Kronstadt revolt in its historical context - and the author acknowledges this from the outset. Despite its supposed aim of developing a proletarian understanding of the meaning and significance of the Kronstadt revolt, the pamphlet fails to grasp these events through the lens of historical perspective, which is the sine qua non for developing a scientific, Marxist-in short, proletarian-understanding of social, political and historical events. Lacking this grounding, it is not surprising that CHIREVNET falls prey to anarchist moralizing regarding Lenin and the Bolshevik Party. Weakened by anarchism's ageless moralistic essentialism, the pamphlet fails to draw any real historical balance sheet of the Kronstadt revolt and its overall relation to the Russian Revolution itself, the most important event to date in the history of the proletariat's struggle against capitalism. Without this critical frame of reference, the pamphlet fails to understand how the repression of the Kronstadt revolt flowed not simply from certain theoretical errors of the Bolshevik Party or from Lenin's "substitutionism," though these were clearly important factors, but ultimately from the contextual realities imposed on the actors by the failure of the revolution to effectively spread to other countries and the international isolation of the proletarian bastion in Russia from the massive working class concentrations of Western Europe and North America. Without this understanding, the old anarchist moralist explanations for the degeneration of the Russian Revolution prove too tempting for CHIREVNET to pass up. According to this view, the origins of this latter process are to be found in the authoritarian predispositions of the Bolshevik leadership, essentially reducing the question to a matter of good vs. bad historical personalities-to the possession, or lack thereof, of the correct moral outlook …a theory that, in the end, reflects iidealist and petty-bourgeois rejection of historical materialism.

In responding to this pamphlet, we are publishing translations of two articles previously appearing in French in Revolution Internationale #310, March 2001, the territorial press of the ICC's section in France. These articles explain the ICC's position on the repression of the Kronstadt revolt particularly well, demonstrating the origins of these positions in the Marxist balance-sheet of the Russian Revolution drawn by our predecessors in the left fractions that detached themselves from a degenerating Third International, during the height of the Stalinist counter-revolution.

It is our hope that CHIVRENET will accept our response in a fraternal manner and will continue the process of debate and discussion, which is the fundamental and necessary precondition for political clarification within the workers movement. We encourage our readers to intervene in this debate with written contributions and by raising these issues in their discussions among themselves, with us and other groups of the milieu.

However, it is also important here to mention that the Los Angeles Workers' Voice (now calling itself USWV) has also published a lengthy article on the Kronstadt revolt. It is not necessary to recount here the rather circuitous political evolution of this group from supporters of Albanian Stalinism to their current parasitic attack on the groups of the proletarian milieu (see articles in this issue and Internationalism #122 ). It is enough to recognize that despite the apparent similarities of the analysis of Kronstadt offered by LAWV and CHIREVNET, the two groups currently evidence completely different political trajectories. Although the articles of both publications share similar serious libertarian and anarchist confusions, CHIREVNET's is clearly searching for political clarity in understanding the issues confronting the workers' struggle. By contrast the LAWV's current position on the Russian Revolution, in which it sees the Bolsheviks as counter-revolutionary from about 1918, and the Russian Revolution as degenerating almost as soon as the insurrection was completed in October 1917, is a clear and abrupt step backward from the historical positions of the Communist Left that they defended during their affiliation with the IBRP for over five years.

We suspect that the LAWV's jumping on the libertarian bandwagon on Kronstadt reflects a seductive attempt to gain credibility with the libertarian and anarchist-influenced groups as part of its current parasitic campaign of denigration of the organizations of the Communist Left (the ICC and the IBRP). The LAWV goes so far as to reproduce, without citing the source, the cover of CHIREVNET'S pamphlet on the cover of the latest issue of The New Internationalist. Further, in its article attacking the ICC in the same issue, the LAWV charges that the alleged ICC defense of the crushing of the Kronstadt revolt as a "tragic necessity" is supposed proof of our desire to "empower ourselves" and for a "party-state dictatorship over the proletariat." What may have been an honest misreading of our position by the CHIREVNET becomes a blatant lie and slander in the pages of the LAWV.

We look forward to the positive spirit of debate with groups that are honestly trying to come to grips with serious issues facing the working class and in drawing the lessons of past struggles, which can serve as an effective counter-weight to the divisive and destructive parasitism of elements like the LAWV.

CHIVRENET can be contacted at: Perry Sanders PO BOX 578042 Chicago, IL 60657-8042 [email protected] [11]

The Repression of Kronstadt in March 1921: A Tragic Mistake for the Workers' Movement

Over 80 years ago, in March 1921, less than four years after the seizure of power by the working class in the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Bolshevik Party put an end, by force, to the insurrection of the Kronstadt garrison on the small island of Kotlin in Gulf of Finland, about 30 kilometers from Petrograd.

Over the course of several years, Soviet Russia had been forced to lead a bloody fight in the civil war against the counter-revolutionary intrigues of the white armies who were supported by a number of foreign powers. Nevertheless, the revolt of the Kronstadt garrison was not a part of these counter-revolutionary endeavors: it was a revolt emanating from the same working-class partisans of the Soviet regime who had been at the forefront of the October Revolution. These workers advanced grievances with the aim of correcting the numerous abuses and intolerable deviations of the new power. The bloody repression of Kronstadt constituted a great tragedy for the worker's movement in its entirety.

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a proletarian revolution, the first victorious episode in the development of the world proletarian revolution that was the international working class' response to the imperialist war of 1914-1918. The October insurrection was part of a process of the destruction of the bourgeois state and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and, as passionately defended by the Bolsheviks, its profound meaning was that it marked the first decisive moment in the world proletarian revolution, of the class war of the world proletariat against the bourgeoisie.

Isolation Was The Real Cause of the Degeneration of the Russian Revolution The revolution initiated in Russia in 1917 did not succeed at the international level despite the many attempts of the working class to spread the struggle across the whole of Europe and elsewhere.

Russia itself had been torn apart by a long and bloody civil war that devastated the economy and fragmented much of the industrial proletariat, the real supporters of Soviet power.

The elimination of the factory committees, the progressive subordination of the soviets to the apparatus of the state, the demolition of the workers' militias, the growing militarization of social life-results of the tense period during the civil war- and the creation of various bureaucratic commissions, were all extremely significant demonstrations of the developing degeneration of the revolution in Russia. Even if certain of these factors date to the period preceding the civil war, it was the latter period that witnessed the full blossoming of the process of degeneration. More and more, the leadership of the "Party-State" developed arguments that claimed that the self-organization of the working class might be fine in principle, but that-in the present instant-all efforts must be subordinated to the military struggle against the counter-revolutionary forces. A doctrine of "efficiency" began to undermine the essential principles of proletarian democracy. Under the cover of this doctrine, the state began to institute a militarization of labor, which submitted the workers to the methods of surveillance and extreme exploitation. Having emasculated the factory committees, the path was opened for the state to introduce the "management of one" and the Taylorist system of exploitation at the point of production, the same system Lenin had denounced as the enslavement of man to machine. The havoc of the war economy, coupled with the international blockade, rendered the entire country on the brink of famine; and the workers were forced to satisfy themselves with rations that grew more and more meager each day, and were often distributed in a very irregular manner. Many sectors of industry ceased to function entirely, and thousands of workers were forced to resort to their own resources in order to survive. The natural reaction of many workers was to leave the city altogether in order to find some means of subsistence in the countryside.

As long as the civil war raged, the Soviet state maintained the support of the majority of the population, as it was identified with the struggle against the old possessing classes. The sufferings of the civil war had been endured with a relative willingness on the part of the workers, laborers, and small peasants. However, following the defeat of the white armies, many began to expect that their living conditions would become less severe and that the regime would loosen a bit its grip on economic and social life. Nevertheless, the Bolshevik leadership, at all times confronted with the devastation of production caused by the war, was rather reluctant to permit any loosening of the state's control over social life.

The Kronstadt Uprising At the end of 1920, peasant uprisings spread across Tambov province, the middle Volga, Ukraine, Western Siberia and several other regions. The rapid demobilization of the Red Army fanned the flames of the revolt as the "peasants in uniform" returned to their villages. The main grievances of these revolts were the ending of grain requisitions and the right of the peasants to determine the use of their own products. At the beginning of 1921, the spirit of revolt spread to the workers in the cities that had been at the forefront of the October insurrection: Petrograd, Moscow and Kronstadt.

Petrograd witnessed a series of important spontaneous strikes. In factory assemblies and street demonstrations, resolutions were adopted that demanded an increase in food and clothing rations, as the majority of workers were suffering from cold and hunger. In conjunction with these economic grievances, other more political demands appeared as well: the workers wanted an end to the restrictions on moving outside the city, the liberation of imprisoned workers, freedom of expression, etc. Without any doubt, some counter-revolutionary elements such as the Mensheviks and the Social revolutionaries (SRs) played a role in these events. Nevertheless, the strike movement in Petrograd was essentially a spontaneous proletarian response to intolerable conditions of life. The Bolshevik authorities, however, could not admit that the workers might strike against the post-insurrectional state, which was regarded by them as a "Workers' State", and charged the strikers as provocateurs, idlers and individualists.

These were among the social troubles in Russia, and above all in Petrograd, which would serve to detonate the sailors revolt at Kronstadt. Even before the strikes in Petrograd broke out, the Kronstadt sailors (which Trotsky described as being the "glory and honor of the revolution") had already opened up a struggle of resistance against bureaucratic tendencies and the reinforcement of military discipline within the Red Fleet. However, when news of the revolts of Petrograd arrived and with the declaration of martial law, the sailors immediately mobilized. On the 28th of February they sent a delegation to the Petrograd factories. The same day the crew of the cruiser "Petropavlovsk" held a meeting and voted a resolution that was to become the program of the Kronstadt insurgents. This resolution advanced both economic and political grievances, and demanded notably the ending of the draconian measures of "war communism" and the regeneration of the power of the soviets along with the freedom of speech, a free press and the right of expression to all political parties.

On the 1st of March, two delegates from the Bolshevik party met with the crew of the Petropavlovsk, denounced their resolution and immediately threatened repression if the sailors did not back down. This arrogant and provocative attitude of the Bolshevik authorities poured oil on the fire and galvanized the anger of the sailors. On the 2nd of March, the day of the reelection of the Kronstadt Soviet, 300 delegates voted for the Petropavlovsk resolution and adopted a motion for the "peaceful reconstitution of the soviet regime". The delegates formed a "Provisional Revolutionary Committee" (PRC) charged with the administration of the city and the organization of its defense against any armed intervention of the government. This was the birth of the Kronstadt commune, which began to published its own Izvestia, the first issue of which declared: "The Communist Party, master of this state, has proven itself incapable of bringing the country out of the chaos. The innumerable incidents which have recently transpired in Moscow and in Petrograd clearly show that the party has lost the trust of the working masses. The party neglects the needs of the working class because it believes that its grievances are the fruit of counter-revolutionary activities. In this belief, the party commits a profound mistake."

However, the revolt of the Kronstadt Commune remained totally isolated. The call of the insurgents for the extension of what they called the "Third Revolution" failed to gain an echo. In Petrograd, despite sending a delegation to the factories, despite the distribution of tracts and the Petropavlovsk resolution, the Red Fleet's call did not succeed in mobilizing the working class of the whole of Russia who could recognize their own situation in the program of the insurgents and who alone could fully sustain the revolt. The Petrograd workers ceased their strike movements and returned to work under conditions of martial law. The Russian working class had been broken, demoralized and scattered by the dislocations of the civil war.

The Crushing of the Kronstadt Commune The immediate response of the Bolshevik government to the rebellion was to denounce it as a part of the counter-revolutionary conspiracy against the power of the soviets. Certainly, all the vultures of the counter-revolution, from the white guards to the SR's, attempted to recuperate the rebellion to their own purposes and offered it their "support." Nevertheless, except for the humanitarian aid offered through the channel of the Russian Red Cross controlled by the émigrés, the PRC rejected all the advances made by the forces of reaction. It proclaimed that it was struggling not for the return of autocracy, or the Constituent Assembly, (wherein were assembled, beginning in 1918, the enemies of the revolution) but for a regeneration of the soviets liberated from bureaucratic domination: "It is the soviets and not the Constituent Assembly that are the ramparts of the workers" declared the Izvestias of Kronstadt. " In Kronstadt, power is in the hands of the sailors, the red soldiers and the revolutionary workers. It is not in the hands of the white guards commanded by General Kozlovsky, as deceptively affirmed by Radio Moscow."

One cannot deny that there were petty-bourgeois elements in the program and ideology of the insurgents, as well as among the personnel of the navy and the army. In fact, this was an opportunity for these elements, hostile to the Bolshevik Party because it had been at the forefront of the revolution of 1917, to demonstrate their contempt. However, the presence of these elements did not alter the fundamental nature of the movement itself.

The Bolshevik leadership reacted to the Kronstadt rebellion with an extreme firmness. Its intransigent attitude very rapidly eliminated any possibility of discussion or compromise. During the military assault on the fortress itself, the Red Army units sent to crush the rebellion were constantly on the verge of demoralization. Some of these units fraternized with the insurgents. In order to ensure the loyalty of the army, eminent Bolshevik leaders were dispatched to the scene from the 10th Party Congress, then in session in Moscow. At the same time, the rifles of the Cheka were pointed at the backs of the soldiers in order to doubly ensure that any demoralization would not be able to spread. When the fortress finally fell, some of the insurgents were massacred, summarily executed or quickly condemned to death by the Cheka. The others were sent to concentration camps. The repression was systematic and without mercy.

At the time of these events, an overwhelming fear of the danger that the White Guards would only exploit the Kronstadt revolt in order to level their account with the Bolsheviks obliged some of the voices most critical of Bolshevik power to support the crushing of the rebellion.

A Mistake for the Whole Workers' Movement If there is one aspect of the crushing of the Kronstadt revolt that anti-Leninists of all stripes continually do their best to mask, it is that the Bolshevik Party's mistake was shared, at the time, by the entirety of the workers' movement, including the fractions and currents of left communists who had been excluded from the International.

Thus, the Workers' Opposition, a fraction in opposition to the Bolshevik leadership, expressed its full support for the repression; and Alexandra Kollantai (who was at the forefront of this fraction) went so far as to indicate that the members of her fraction would be the first to volunteer to serve in the crushing of the rebellion.

The fractions of the German-Dutch left, even if its position was clearly differentiated from Kollantai's enthusiastic support of the repression, did not condemn nor critique the Bolshevik policy. Thus, the KAPD2, at the time, defended a thesis according to which the Kronstadt Revolt was a counter-revolutionary plot against Soviet Russia, and thus did not condemn the repression. Herman Gorter, a militant of the Dutch left, affirmed that the measures taken by the Bolsheviks were "necessary" in the face of the Kronstadt Revolt, as he believed the latter was a counter-revolutionary insurrection emanating from the peasantry.

From within the Bolshevik Party itself, Victor Serge, even if he affirmed his refusal to take-up arms against the sailors at Kronstadt, did not protest against the repression out of loyalty to the party.

Thus, it is clear that this tragic mistake was not committed by the Bolshevik Party, and even less by its leadership, alone. In reality, the Bolsheviks only carried out a tragically mistaken policy that was the natural consequence of the incomprehensions of the entirety of the workers movement at the time, a movement that did not see that the counter-revolution could emanate from within the post-insurrectional state itself. This is not because, as the anarchists argue, "the maggots were already present in the fruits" of 1917 (i.e. the existence of a class party always already contains within it the seeds of counter-revolution); but because, due to the international isolation of the Russian Revolution, the Bolshevik Party was absorbed by the state and the latter identified itself with this state against the working class. This mistake of the whole workers' movement of the day was expressed in the general confusion surrounding the idea that the institutional apparatus that emerged following the revolution of October 1917 was a "proletarian state."

1 See their pamphlet, Some Important Lessons of the International Working-Class In the Revolutionary Class Struggle for Socialism/Communism: The Emancipation of the Working-Class Is the Act of the Working Class Itself!

2 Kommunistiche Arbeiter Partei Deutschlands or Communist Worker's Party of Germany, excluded from the Communist International in 1920 due to its critical stance towards many of the International's positions, particularly against its policy of the "United Front."

Over the summer the Los Angeles Workers Voice (LAWV) - actually they now call themselves the U.S.Workers Voice - began a smear campaign against the ICC. In their article, "ICC - What Do They Stand For?" in their publication "The New Internationalist", the LAWV unleashed a barrage of one liners charging that the ICC "specializes in pouring cold water on the workers' mass struggles;" that the ICC seeks to impose "their party dictatorship over the proletariat;" that the ICC seeks "to use the working class to empower themselves;" that our views and tactics are "embarrassingly absurd, and …mainly just give the Communist left trend a bad name" - unsupported by any evidence or argumentation and presented in a manner more characteristic of the worst tactics of bourgeois leftism than the revolutionary workers movement. They even go so far as to falsely charge that the ICC defends the position that the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising in 1921 in Russia was a "tragic necessity" when we have repeatedly defended precisely the opposite position, in published articles specifically denouncing that view (see our article on Kronstadt in this issue, or International Review No. 3 or International Review 104.

All these slanders, distortions, and lies about the ICC are thrown out there willy nilly to distract attention from the very serious criticisms the ICC made in "In defense of the revolutionary milieu: The LAWV's Parasitic Attacks Against the IBRP" in Internationalism 122. It is particularly striking that, if you look beyond the litany of false statements about the ICC, the LAWV article contains no denial or refutation of the essential points of our critique of the LAWV's comportment during the process by which they split from the IBRP and their sudden rejection of fundamental class line positions that they had defended for nearly half a decade. There is no denial of the facts of their secret discussions that excluded the other IBRP member in the US, and which they hid from their own organization, a gross violation of fraternal relations within a proletarian organization. In fact they appear to defend such a breach of revolutionary organizational behavior because of the alleged need to escape the "dictatorial" oversight of the central committee. Nor do they respond to our criticism of their sharp political regression on fundamental class line positions, without explanation - such as their rejection of the proletarian nature of the Russian Revolution, their rejection of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the failure to make clear their position on the decadence of capitalism, or on the nature of state capitalism.

There are three main currents in the left communist milieu in the world today, the IBRP, the ICC and the Bordigists. The LAWV has already denounced the two main currents, the IBRP and the ICC - as essentially Stalinist, substitutionist, non-proletarian, and a disgrace to the workers movement. It is of course a curious charge against two historic currents in the left communist movement coming from individuals who spent most of the past quarter century as adherents of a stalinist organization that extolled the virtues of Albanian Stalinist dictator Enver Hoxha. Their bizarre political trajectory and behavior today are marked by that terrible experience in capitalism's leftist political apparatus. On the other hand they retain certain non-proletarian political behaviors they learned in leftism -maneuvering, slandering, personalizations (especially their attacks against AS in the IBRP), immediatist and activist misconceptions, the retention of stalinist verbiage and conceptions - like "agit prop", "party building" and the pandering to the daily struggle. At the same time, in their incomplete attempt to break with Stalinism, they have lapsed into grave libertarian errors, mistakenly identifying the grossest Stalinist distortions of revolutionary principles as inevitable manifestations of marxism - leading to their rejection of the need for a centralized revolutionary party, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the Russian Revolution (after 1918).

The LAWV was particularly scandalized by our pointing to their simultaneous manifestations of Stalnism and libertarianism, which they ridiculed as incoherent oxymoron of "stalinist libertarism." Of course, we did not use that term but they are correct that there is incoherence here, but the incoherence is theirs, not ours.

The LAWV's smear campaign against the political organizations of the communist left reflect an attempt to drive a wedge between the ICC and the IBRP, on the one hand, and the various new groups developing in the US, on the other, in order to isolate left communist forces from the rest of the milieu emerging in North America today. This goal is revealed in the LAWV'statement that "no serious Communist can unite with the ICC today," and that the ICC deems anyone who disagrees with it as "useless or even enemies of the working class." This last slander is particularly pernicious. The ICC doesn't hide its disagreements with other groups. We have enough respect for militants who seriously seek to defend the interests of the proletariat and advance the revolutionary struggle to engage in open and honest debate. We believe that the open confrontation of ideas and political perspectives is a vital aspect of the deepening and extension of class consciousness.The existence of differences between organizations and groups doesn't preclude the ability to work together for the common revolutionary goal. There is no secret that the ICC and the IBRP and its affiliates have long had serious political divergences, but we defend the IBRP as part of the revolutionary political milieu. In fact our original critique of the LAWV was written in solidarity with and in defense of the IBRP. Despite the LAWV's attempt to paint the ICC as narrow sectarians, at the time of the Kosovo War, and the outbreak of the Afghanistan war, we appealed to the LAWV and other IBRP sympathizers in North America to draft a joint leaflet against US imperialism's policies in the name of a united left communism. At the time of Kosovo this proposal for joint action was summarily rejected by the LAWV. During the Afghanistan war, they didn't even bother to respond.

The LAWV's attempt to distort our record on the class struggle is also part and parcel of this attempt to isolate left communism from the rest of the political organizations in the US. What the LAWV calls "pouring cold water on workers' mass struggles" is the ICC's effort to fulfill its responsibility as a revolutionary marxist organization to analyze each struggle, each confrontation, as it arises, to understand the dynamic in which it unfolds, and the balance of forces between the classes, as a basis for determining its understanding of the appropriate intervention to make in such a struggle. Such analysis may be mistaken in this or that instance, but it is important that revolutionaries bring communist consciousness and the analytical tools of marxism to the struggle. As Lenin put it, the mass struggle, needs a mass of consciousness. Marxists are not cheerleaders for the class struggle, indiscriminately hailing and celebrating every little strike or union confrontation because of immediatist or romanticist illusions about the class struggle. Workers face very difficult conditions of class struggle today, in the context of the rising pressures of the social decomposition of capitalism, the political disorientation that followed the collapse of stalinism and the bourgeoisie's ideological campaign about the alleged death of communism, and the efforts by the bourgeoisie to strengthen and refurbish its union apparatus. To fail to recognize and comprehend the conditions under which the working class struggles today and adopt an appropriate intervention is a failure to live up to revolutionary responsibilities.

In contrast to the ICC's analytical approach to class struggle, the LAWV uncritically rushes off to every union called rally or demonstration as if it were some manifestation of autonomous "workers' mass struggle." In the last issue the New Internationalist they claimed that they intervene in a principled manner in these demonstrations. The empty meaning of this "principled" intervention can be seen in a leaflet they published in the same issue of New Internationalist,which they distributed at a teachers demonstration in Los Angeles. Most of the leaflet is devoted to a recitation of the facts of the dispute, followed by some very ambiguous recipes for action which are neither principled nor clear. The LAWV's says, "to advance, and prevent more routs don't new political and industrial organizaions need to be built up?" There's no attempt to give any revolutionary marxist content to this rather ambiguous statement - actually a question, not a statement. One wonders what they really mean, what kind of new industrial organizations … the creation of militant caucuses within the existing unions, the formation of new "class struggle" unions, as some leftists advocate, or mass assemblies and strike committees outside the framework of the union apparatus, as revolutionaries might suggest? What kind of new political organization - maybe a labor party, like the Trotskyists advocate? Why don't they speak openly and honestly to the workers about what they mean? Or do they know what they mean?

As we pointed out in Internationalism 122, "we are now confronted with the presence of a parasitic group of former leftists, with only a half-baked comprehension of communist left positions, heavily imbued with an amalgam of localist, immediatist, activist, and stalinist ideological conceptions from their past, and libertarian distrust of centralization and the Russian Revolution." They now function to distort the positions of the communist left and slander its two most significant political organizations. We appeal to working class militants and political groups to be on guard against the opportunist overtures of this strange political formation. If you wish to understand and debate the political positions of the left communist movement, we encourage you to engage in discussion with the ICC and the IBRP. You don't have to agree with us - after all the goal of political discussion is the clarification of ideas, even if that means better understanding the differences in point of view. We urge that you be on guard against this erratic group of former Stalinists, who after a brief sojourn in the left communist milieu, suddenly claim to be the only coherent, principled left communists in the whole world, and seek to keep the existing left communist groups isolated from the rest of the emerging workers movement in North America and sabotage the process of open discussion and debate among those committed to the revolutionary destruction of capitalist exploitation

JG, 11/10/02.

In the wake of Stalinism's collapse, the end of the XX century was celebrated by the dominant class all around the world as the beginning of a new era of peace and prosperity in the life of capitalism. The disappearance of the division of the world in two major imperialist blocs was supposed to end the bloodshed and the potential thermonuclear obliteration of human beings and any other form of life in the planet. The chronic state of economic crisis and the poverty suffered by most of humanity was said to be finally on the way to being resolved thanks to economic globalization and other marvels of democratic capitalism.

History itself has already proven the worthlessness of these projections. Imperialist wars and chronic economic crisis are a permanent feature of decadent capitalism. They are scourges to which the dominant class has no solution. In the last years, rather than disappearing, imperialist conflicts end economic disasters are reaching dramatic levels all over the world.

At the level of the economy, all major industrialized countries are facing open recessions, while the so-called developing nations, capitalism's weakest sector, are moving from one economic catastrophe to the next, facing ever growing difficulties to keep their heads above water.

At the level of imperialist conflict, the challenge of the US hegemony and the battle of the American bourgeoisie to maintain its world dominance are more and more spreading war and political instability around the world.

In this context of growing barbarism one of the most important elements in the current international situation at the level of imperialism is, undeniably, the American bourgeoisie's growing awareness and adjustments of its imperialist strategy to the realities and needs of the present historical situation. The US flexes its military muscle

These adjustments to its strategy, to judge by the "debates" and dissensions that we have witnessed among the bourgeoisie in the last 10 years, has not been an easy process. For instance, Mr. Bush the elder lost his chance for reelection to a second term because of his administration's hesitations in the face of the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the ensuing Balkans wars. And, as we pointed out several years ago, the real root of the scandals that plagued the Clinton administration was the divisions on imperialist policy within the American bourgeoisie, in particular vis a vis the Chinese question. Nonetheless, whatever their divisions, the dominant fraction of the bourgeoisie has already managed to put in practice a strategy of which the planned invasion of Iraq is one of its latest manifestations.

This strategic orientation aims to maintain the status quo in the world, i.e. American hegemony, and has, according to the bourgeoisie itself, the following elements:

A Commitment to Maintain a Uni-Polar World in Which the United States Has No Peer Competitor: Already at the end of the first Bush administration, Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz made this goal clear when he wrote that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US must act to prevent the rise of peer competitors in Europe and Asia. And as Mr. Bush the son declared last July: "America has, and intends to keep, military strengths beyond challenge-thereby making the destabilizing arms races of other eras pointless, and limiting rivalries to trade and other pursuits of peace." The same idea affirming that the US will never allow its military supremacy to be challenge the way it was during the cold war, was recently expressed again by Bush: "the president has not intention of allowing any foreign power to catch ch up with the huge lead the US has opened since the fall of the Soviet Union more than a decade ago" as printed in "The National Security Strategy of the US." The esence of this policy is nothing else but the decleared intention of the American bourgeoisie to do all that it can to prevent the arising of a strong competitor around which a new imperilaist bloc could eventually be formed.

A Commitment to Stay On the Offensive: According to this, the old cold war era concept of deterrence is totally outdated. This is the context in which the so-called doctrine of the preemptive strike is being discussed, and which is behind the new drive to relocate troops around the globe, as well as the efforts to gain direct control of strategic regions of the world. As Mr. Bush put it, "the military must be ready to strike at a moment's notice in any dark corner of the world. All nations that decide for aggressions and terror will pay a price."

A Commitment "To Do It Alone": According to this precept, the US will act unilaterally in responding to "threats". In other words, the illusions of stable alliances-NATO, etc.-are being recognized as undesirable constraints in carrying out American military adventures. As Mr. Rumsfeld explained: "the mission must determine the coalition; the coalition must not determine the mission. If it does, the mission will be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, and we can't afford that."

A Commitment to "Nation-Building": In plain words this means a direct territorial control of strategic zones of the world. We have seen this strategic element being applied in Afghanistan and more recently in the planning being put forward for a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq. According to bourgeois propaganda calculations, the US will need to stay in Iraq after overthrowing Hussein for at least the next 20 years. This drive to gain a direct territorial control over strategic regions of the globe has been described by some bourgeois analysts as a new, but necessary-given the present state of chaos in the world-neocolonialist imperialist tactic that the US must carry out in order to fight the spread of chaos and decomposition. Clearly, the bourgeoisie has seemed to obtain a rather accurate consciousness of the dangers that decomposition poses to the system as a whole; and it is currently developing an imperialist strategy that accords with the recognition of this reality. Nevertheless, the assimilation of the present "nation building" tactic of the US, to the colonialism of a previous era in the history of capitalism, an ideological claim popular among many leftists and certain spokesmen of the bourgeoisie-above all in Europe, is quite far fetched. Colonialism was an expression of the outward expansion of capitalism in a period in which the world market was still being created. In that sense, despite the suffering that it brought to the indigenous populations of colonized regions, it represented a positive step forward in the development of the productive forces of humanity as a whole. On the contrary, the US's tactic of "nation building" today does not have anything positive to offer anyone. It will only, on the other hand, be one more factor in political destabilization of the world. American Imperialism offensive

A concrete manifestation of this strategy is the present effort of the American bourgeoisie to directly control Central Asia. With the collapse of the Stalinist bloc, this zone-which had been for most of the 20th century a privileged sphere of interest for Russian imperialism-has become the target of US attention. The American bourgeoisie has been for many years quite active in the countries that formed in the wake of the collapse of the USSR, not only through its oil companies and financial institutions, but also through actions intended to have a direct military presence in the region. In this sense, the Afghanistan campaign launched under the cover of the "fight against terrorism" in the wake of the September 11th events, has just capped a tendency that has long been underway.

The same can be said of the Middle East. Despite the "Pax-Americana" imposed by the US after the 1991 Gulf War, it has not succeeded in completely keeping this region under its control. Second and third rate powers have not given up their efforts to advance their own interests and to torpedo the American-imposed order in the region. There have been, for instance, many widely known initiatives by France, Germany, China, Russia, et. al., to advance their own interests in the region. Even local imperialist gangsters like Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran have grown bolder in the pursuit of their own interests, often clashing with the US's designs in the region. The Palestinian/Israeli "peace process" has blown into pieces. In this context, a second Desert Storm launched against Saddam Hussein's Iraq is the US's chosen way of regaining the political momentum in the region. What is even more important, is the US's goal of assuring, through an upgrading of its direct presence on the ground in Iraq, a much more thorough control of this crucial strategic zone. Evidently the US's "allies" are well aware of what is really at stake behind the American bourgeoisie's targeting of Iraq, and hence their strident opposition and efforts to derail the US war plans.

ES, 11/10/02.

One of the main ideological themes used by the dominant class during the 1990s, in order to maintain its ideological domination over society, was the supposed economic health and prosperity of its system. According to this fable, following the recession of 1990-91, the American economy enjoyed the longest period of recovery in history. For some years capitalist acolytes even declared that, thanks to the new communication technologies, their system had arrived at an era of permanent prosperity, and that the so-called "business cycle" had been definitively surpassed.

Then, in 1997-98, the explosion of the once exemplary economies of the East Asian "tigers" and "dragons" sent shock waves across the globe. Tales of capitalism's imminent collapse and an open world recession filled the media. Nevertheless, the main capitalist countries-with the exception of Japan-managed to stay out of recession for a couple more years giving some continued credence to the tale of a booming capitalism.

Today there is no more chatter about the wonders of the "new economy" energized by the "internet revolution." It seems so long ago that Bill Clinton bragged: "America's economy is the healthiest in a generation and the strongest in the world." By all accounts, world capitalism is experiencing once again a new fall into the abyss of its chronic economic crisis. All the major economies of the world are officially in open recession or just limping by.

At the center of this new downfall of world capitalism is the American economy-by far the biggest in the world. In the summer of 2001, after months of warnings about a possible economic slowdown, the bourgeoisie suddenly recognized that its economy had been in recession since March of that year. Skyrocketing unemployment and the wave of corporate bankruptcies made it impossible for the bourgeoisie to continue preaching the fiction of a healthy economy, even though by its own account, the economy had still not qualified for an official recession, which the economists define as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Then in the winter of 2001-02, the bourgeoisie suddenly had a change of heart, and magically the recession was officially over as a new myth was born: the US economy has just gone through its shortest and mildest recession in history!

However, no amount of optimism and economic manipulation can hide the severity of the recession that the US is currently experiencing. Even the normally deceiving economic indices that the bourgeoisie uses to evaluate the state of its system don't leave much room to brag about the health of the economy. There are so many black spots that some economists are talking of the dangers of a "double dip recession". For instance:

• Unemployment: The economists can talk all they want about the ongoing recovery, but for people that have lost their jobs and can't find a new one it feels like a recession. According to the Labor Department, there are almost 3 million people nationwide that have been out of work for at least 15 weeks, up more than 50 percent from a year ago. From this 3 million, half have not worked in at least 6 months. The difficulty in finding a new capitalist willing to exploit you once the previous one has decided to "let you go" is not a new phenomenon, but has been a general trend of the last 30 years of chronic economic crisis. When the jobless rate was around 6 percent in 1970 and during the 1980's, as it is supposed to be today, the average length of unemployment was 10 to 12 weeks. In August, according to the Labor Department the average length of unemployment was 16.2 weeks. The impact of this growth in long-term unemployment is causing financial havoc for the laid-off workers. Many who have not worked for months have begun spending retirement savings that were already diminished by the stock market's fall. Others are considering taking low-wage jobs at a fraction of their old pay. Moreover, as usual, the bourgeoisie severely underestimates the number of workers out of a job. Officially, the unemployment rate is floating around 6 percent of the labor force. But, by the "official" bourgeois definition, a worker is only consider unemployed if he/she is receiving unemployment benefits, or is actively looking for a job. Thus, by their own account, 2 million appear to have dropped out of the labor force in the last two years, no longer looking for work and thus not counted as unemployed.
• Fall In Industrial Production: Industry-the real heart of the capitalist economy-has been, according to the economists' statistics, the sector of the economy hardest hit by the recession. Much of the talk about "recovery" has been based on industry's sluggish, but steady rise since last January. Thus, when the Federal Reserve reported that industrial growth stumbled in August, some economists could not avoid talking about the dangers of falling back into recession.
• Fall In Consumer Spending: Just a month ago, a New York Times economic reporter claimed: "One big reason economists remain optimistic that neither the national economy nor manufacturing will backslide into recession is because consumers, whose spending accounts for two-thirds of economic activity, have been holding up amid the economic turbulence." However, although consumer spending is not at all a reliable measure of the state of the economy-individual spending can often be buttressed by consumer debt that will never be repaid- it is symbolic that even this economic indicator is headed downward. Officially, there is a slump in retail sales. In August, retailers announced one of the worse "back-to-school" sale seasons ever, raising worries about the upcoming holiday season. Meanwhile, the real estate market-after a growing wave of speculation that has seen housing prices skyrocket-is starting to cool off amid rising fears of an unavoidable bust of the real estate bubble.
• Stock Market Instability: Ever since the stock market speculation bubble burst over two years ago, things have not been going well for this sacred symbol of capitalism. Last July, the overall market hit a five-year low; and to this day, it has not recovered its previous value, prompting some economists to compare the present stock market slump to the days of the Great Depression.
• Corporate Bankruptcies: The list of bankruptcies is quite long: first were the once celebrated start-up "dot-coms"-many of which never had more than a "virtual" existence. Then came a number of filings in the technological and communications sector. Moreover, in the months following the Enron collapse, many of the titans of American capitalism have been toppled, while others are struggling to avoid bankruptcy. Over 1000 American companies have now restated their earnings since 1997, admitting in effect that they had previously published wrong or misleading profit statements. The existence of these phony accounts means that much of the profit growth of the late 1990s, the ostensible justification for Wall Street's celebrated heights, was equally phony. It would be a mistake to think that this malaise is due only to the greed and "corporate irresponsibility" of a few bad CEOs. In fact, what these so-called "corporate scandals" reveal is a widespread attempt to cheat capitalism's law of value, the very fundamentals of the bourgeoisie's own economic system.
• The Return of the Federal Budget Deficit: Driven largely by the recession and the so-called sluggish recovery, the Federal Budget deficit is projected to reach 1.5% of GDP this year. And as the price-tag of the permanent war in which the American bourgeoisie is currently embarking escalates, the myth of balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility-which the whole bourgeoisie was so fond of just over a year ago-will continue to go up in smoke.

However most of these "economic indices" say little of the impact of the crisis in the working class and other non-exploiters strata, which are really as always bearing the brunt of the economic difficulties of the bourgeoisie. By the bourgeoisie own account "the recession that began in March 2001 has reduced the earnings of millions of Americans -Census Bureau annual report on income and poverty NY Times 9/250-." Of course not every body is suffering the same because while the working class has seen its salaries decline "the gap between rich and poor (has) continued to grow -ibd-."

This document also says that the number of so-called poor Americans rose last year to 32.9 million, an increase of 1.3 millions, reaching 11.7 percent of the total population of the country.

Marxist revolutionaries have repeatedly insisted that so-called recessions are not just a bump in the road of an otherwise healthy economic system, the downturn of the so-called "business cycle." For us, recessions today are nothing more than a particular moment-one more step into the abyss-of the chronic economic crisis of overproduction that a decadent capitalist system, unable to create sufficiently solvent markets for its products, is condemned to suffer. Moreover, coming in the wake of all the propaganda of the 1990s about the "exuberant American economy", this recession is quite important. In particular, it lays bare the feeble basis upon which the prosperity of that decade was built: the stock market speculation; the explosion of personal debt in order to stimulate a consumer binge that allowed overproduction to be hidden to some extent; and the corporate debt that financed a spree of investments in communication technology that have proven to be, to a good degree, useless; being but the most obvious examples of the palliative measures that the bourgeoisie has been forced to adopt.

The stock market bubble: a symbol of the veritable "casino-economy" that characterizes, not the health of capitalism, but its total bankruptcy.

Despite all the talk of "recovery" the fact is that all of the bourgeoisie's attempts to invent various "medicines" with which to revive its economy have been largely ineffectual. Despite the Federal Reserve having lowered its prime interest rate to historic lows, there has not been a revival of the credit market. The effects of the "shot in the arm" given to the economy by the Bush administration's engineered tax cuts, have been, in the long-term, inconsequential. Further, the effects of the rise of military spending necessary to prosecute its "war without end," have yet to hit the economy with their full force.

ES, February 2003.

Introduction

This is the second installment in our two-part series on the historical lessons of the Kronstadt revolt, presented in response to a pamphlet published by the Chicago Revolutionary Network (CHIREVNET) that takes an anarchist perspective on Kronstadt and at the same time seriously misrepresents the ICC's analysis of the events. As we wrote in the introduction to the first part of this article, we have never claimed-contrary to the assertions of CHIREVNET's pamphlet-that the Bolshevik repression at Kronstadt was in any way a "tragic necessity." In sharp contrast, the ICC has always maintained that the repression was a "tragic mistake" that hastened the worldwide counter-revolution against the global revolutionary wave of 1917-1927, and was a major step into the abyss for the Bolshevik Party, a process which led to its eventual betrayal of the working-class and its integration into the state apparatus as the manager of the Russian national capital.

Nevertheless, as we explained in our last issue, even if we recognize the Bolsheviks' grievous error in their conception of revolution, a conception that was used to sanction violence within the working-class as a means of solving the inevitable differences that may arise in the period of transition from capitalism to communism, we do not join CHIREVNET in their anarchist contentions - that if the Bolsheviks committed this terrible repression, this fact-by itself-is evidence that Bolshevik party never stood in the vanguard of the revolution, that it was always a murderous state-capitalist clique destined to usurp the revolution to its own alleged purposes of grabbing state power. CHIREVNET's historical methodology is not a Marxist, not a materialist, one. Instead, it reflects the essentialist moralizing attitude of anarchism that cannot situate historical events in their context, and evaluates historical actors based on how well they live up to, or stray from, preconceived moral precepts divorced from history.

If CHIREVNET is serious about this methodology, we can only ask that it be consistent. As we will see in Part II of our article below, the Bolsheviks were not the only ones holding a flawed conception of the relationship between party and class, and a mistaken position on violence as a means to solve disputes within the class during the period of transition. If CHIREVNET thinks the Kronstadt repression is evidence of Lenin and the Bolsheviks' inherently counter-revolutionary nature, then it should equally denounce the Left Communists of the day, and certain anarchists as well, many of whom mistakenly supported the repression at Kronstadt. Moreover, if substitutionism alone is evidence of a counter-revolutionary nature, as CHIREVNET asserts, it would then also be obliged to denounce Marx and Engels themselves, for they were known to take certain "substitutionist" positions at times - a mistake we in the ICC have never been shy in criticizing.

Thus, we can see how the methodology CHIREVNET-and anarchism and councilism in general-tends to employ only leads to obfuscation of the central historical lessons of Kronstadt, as well as the proverbial, "throwing away of the baby along with the bath water." The ICC agrees with CHIREVNET that Lenin and the Bolsheviks demonstrated, in certain of the their theoretical and political conceptions, a number of profound non-proletarian confusions, distortions and weaknesses. These flaws were a definite factor leading to an, at times, even more flawed political practice in the course of the Russian Revolution. Chief among these errors was the idea that the party should act in the name of the class and should assume control of the state in the period of transition. But as we will show below, this was an error shared by almost the entirety of the workers' movement at the time. In fact, this is one of the real lessons of Kronstadt and the Russian Revolution itself, the lesson that such a conception can lead to an identification of the party with the state, and eventually to the idea that if revolts against the state take place, then these revolts must be counter-revolutionary and thus must be suppressed. This conception was a key factor in the mistaken repression of the Kronstadt revolt: a revolt that, despite its anarchist confusions, and manipulation by counter-revolutionary elements, expressed a real attempt by the working class to reinstitute the workers councils as the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In another example of CHIREVNET's oversimplified moralism, it glorifies the Kronstadt revolt unconditionally (employing all types of simplistic leftist phraseology and rhetoric, replete with copious use of the exclamation points even!) refusing to acknowledge or address its confusions and its manipulation by the counter-revolution.

Nevertheless, this picture of the Bolsheviks only gives part of the story. What about their unconditional defense of internationalism in 1914? Or Lenin's work in setting up the Zimmerwald Conference in 1915, the Bolshevik's call to "turn the imperialist war into a civil war," and Lenin's leadership in 1917 in calling for the insurrection against any compromise of the revolution with the bourgeois Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries? Were Lenin and the Bolsheviks counter-revolutionary in these events as well? Were all these exemplary examples of proletarian internationalism just a vicious ploy to seize state power years later? We await CHIREVNET's answer to these questions. The key to examining any period in history from the Marxist perspective is to situate the events in their totality and to draw the lessons this methodology allows. In this regard, it becomes clear that substitutionism and a failure to resist the use of violence within the working class, were failings of this entire historical period in the workers' movement, not the "original sin" of Lenin and the Bolsheviks alone. The task of revolutionaries today is to learn from these mistakes so as not to repeat them in the future, not to engage in a masochistic-moralist attack against the most visible figures, flawed as they were, of this period.

Our intent in publishing this article is to contribute to the process of debate and political clarification within the North American political milieu on what is a very important historical issue for the working-class and its revolutionary minorities. We were thus pleased to receive a response from CHIREVNET to the first part of our article in the form of a flyer. Nevertheless, the content of this flyer is basically a rehashing of the same moral condemnation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks that their original pamphlet espoused, and as such does little to advance the debate. It also criticizes our position as "centrist" and "erroneous," as a blatant exercise in excusing the Bolsheviks'-a part of the ruling class in CHIREVNET's opinion-hijacking of the authentic proletarian revolution of 1917. We certainly welcome the opportunity to continue this debate as part of the process of the working class coming to grips with its own history. However, we must also insist that the debate be carried out in accordance with certain proletarian principles of sincerity and an honest representation of one's opponent's views. In this regard, CHIREVNET's flyer is unfortunately notable for what it doesn't say. Despite our reproach to them for misrepresenting our views on Kronstadt,-an honest mistake we assumed-in writing that the ICC views the repression of Kronstadt as a "tragic necessity," when in fact we have repeatedly criticized groups that defend that position, CHIREVNET fails to clearly retract its previous misrepresentations and set the matter straight with its readers and contacts. Furthermore, CHIREVNET continues to distribute its original pamphlet-uncorrected we assume since we haven't been informed otherwise-where this mistake is printed.

We understand that sometimes in the heat of debate mistakes and errors may be made in representing an opponents' view. But when this happens, the responsible thing for any group or organization to do is to openly admit its error, retract its misrepresentation in a conspicuous way, i.e., in print, and adjust its polemic to account for what the other side really said. CHIREVNET has failed to issue a conspicuous retraction so far, despite the clear and voluminous evidence we gave it that it misrepresented our views. Thus, we must conclude this introduction by calling on CHIREVNET to conspicuously retract its original misstatement of our views in print, and to circulate this retraction to all its regular subscribers and contacts. This would be in continuity with the principles of debate that proletarian organizations have followed in the past.

Moreover, we must also take notice that in responding to Part I of this article, CHIREVNET, in addition to its flyer, also sent us a copy of the Los Angeles Workers Voice's (LAWV) (now calling themselves "United States Workers' Voice" (USWV) article on Kronstadt that cites CHIREVNET's original pamphlet on this question in order to denounce the ICC as "counter-revolutionary" for what is a completely mistaken representation of our views. This is not the place to recount LAWV's current parasitic attack on the groups of the Communist Left (readers can see the article in this issue, as well as Internationalism # 122 and 123). Nevertheless, we also call on CHIREVNET to stop distributing the LAWV article containing a blatant misstatement of our views, a misstatement that CHIREVNET itself is responsible for propagating, and which is now being used by LAWV/USWV, not in a spirit of debate and the open exchange of ideas between revolutionaries, but in a parasitic denunciation of the groups of the Communist Left.

CHIREVNET can be contacted at Perry Sanders, POB 578042, Chicago, IL 60657-8042 ([email protected] [11]). - Internationalism Against the Anarchist Theses: The Lessons Drawn From Kronstadt By the Communist Left.

The only current, while defending the October Revolution, at the same time rejected and condemned the repression of the Kronstadt revolt was the anarchist current. Nevertheless, it is necessary to distinguish among the various tendencies that comprised this current at the time. Certain anarchists, notably the immigrant anarchists such as Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were very close to the Bolshevik Party (and they gave it their full support in October 1917 contrary to other anarchists emanating from the intelligentsia or declassed elements whose anti-Bolshevism clearly expressed the reactionary conceptions of the petty-bourgeoisie).

It is without a doubt that numerous anarchists are correct in their criticisms of the Cheka (the party's political police) and the crushing of the Kronstadt Revolt. The anarchists' problem though, is that their conceptions offer no method for understanding the historical meaning of these events: as witnessed by the analysis of Voline: "Kronstadt is a luminous beacon that lights the way (?) At once the full liberty of discussion, of organization and action was definitively achieved by the laboring masses themselves, along the true route of independent popular production, the rest flows automatically from these acquisitions." (Voline, The Unknown Revolution).

Thus, according to Voline, it is sufficient for the Kronstadt Revolt to be victorious for the rest to "follow automatically." In reality, though, even if the revolt had spread to the rest of Russia, even if the Kronstadt insurgents had won their battle, this would have done nothing to solve the essential problem of this epoch: the international isolation of the soviet bastion to one country. (However, it is true that in the logic of the anarchists, as one can see demonstrated in their analysis of the "proletarian revolution" in Spain of 1936, the Marxist analysis according to which communism cannot be established except at the international level is always a secondary concern.) Such an underestimation of the difficulties and of the necessity of a rapid international extension of the revolutionary process is a real poison for the consciousness of the proletariat, which masks the first and most important lesson of the Kronstadt revolt, a comprehension of the fact that any revolution that remains isolated in one country is irredeemably doomed to failure. 1. The Proletarian Revolution Must be International Or It Is Nothing

The proletarian revolution can only succeed at a global level. It is impossible to abolish capitalism or "build socialism" in one country, but only by the extension of proletarian political power across the entire planet. Without this extension, the degeneration of the revolution is inevitable, regardless of whatever changes are effected in the economy. This was exactly Lenin's point when he declared in 1918 that the Russian proletariat waited with impatience for the extension of the revolution in Europe, because if the proletariat of Western Europe did not quickly come to the aid of Soviet Russia (which had begun to be asphyxiated by the economic blockade of the world bourgeoisie) the latter would be condemned.

For the anarchists, the Bolsheviks were determined to crush the workers and sailors of Kronstadt because they were, according to the terminology of Voline, "statist, authoritarian Marxists." In reality, what Voline and the whole anarchist current have never understood, is that the disappearance of workers' democracy, which bled the soviets of any real proletarian life, was the direct consequence of the tragic impasse in which the Russian revolution found itself trapped. It is from this incomprehension of the real movement and the general historical dynamic of the world proletariat that the anarchists rewrite and interpret history in their own fashion through their old anti-Marxist, anti-party and "anti-authoritarian" theoretical frame. In this manner, the anarchist ideology provides more ammunition for the anti-communist campaigns of the bourgeoisie, which have as their objective to perpetuate, before the proletariat, the lie that there exists a pretend "continuity-theoretical, practical and historical" between Lenin and Stalin, between the Revolution of October 1917 and the Stalinist counter-revolution. Because Marxism defends the formation of a proletarian political party, calls for the centralization of the proletariat's forces and recognizes the inevitability of a state in the period of transition to communism, it is condemned, according to the anarchists, to conclude in the execution of the masses. Such "eternal truths" have no utility for the understanding of the real historic process and for drawing out the lessons that must be stressed to the future revolutionary movement.

In this context, we must now ask; what were the real lessons of the tragedy of Kronstadt drawn by the Communist left? 2. Violence Can Never Be a Means to Solve Disputes Within the Working Class Itself.

Revolutionary violence is a weapon that the proletariat is forced to use in its fight against the capitalist class. However, in regards to disputes within the proletariat, violence can have no place, as it cannot but destroy the class' unity, its solidarity, its cohesion and engender demoralization and a loss of hope.

Under no pretext, can violence serve as an instrument within the working class because it is not a method for the acquisition of consciousness. The proletariat cannot acquire the latter except through its own experience of the class struggle and the constantly self-critical examination of this experience. This is why violence within the working class, whatever its immediate motivation, cannot but serve to interfere with the masses own self-activity; and, in the end, constitute the most profound hindrance to its acquisition of class consciousness, which is the indispensable condition for the triumph of communism. In this sense, even if certain fractions of the working class demonstrate errors or confusions, the "just line" cannot be imposed upon them by the force of arms by another fraction, even if it is the majority. The uprising at Kronstadt did, in fact, constitute a weakening of the proletarian bastion, at the level of its cohesion and unity. However, the repression of Kronstadt constituted a weakening even more profound and dangerous and hastened the degeneration of the revolution altogether. 3. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat Is Not That of A Party:

The tragedy of the Russian Revolution, and in particular the massacre of Kronstadt, was that the entirety of the workers' movement of the day lacked clarity regarding the role of the party in the exercise of proletarian power. In fact, within the workers' movement the idea that, as in the bourgeois revolution, it was the party that must exercise the dictatorship of the proletariat in the name of the working class, still held currency. However, contrary to other revolutions in human history, the proletarian revolution requires the constant active participation of the whole of the working class. This means that under no circumstances can it tolerate, under the threat of immediately opening up a course of degeneration, neither the "delegation" of power to a party, nor the substitution of a body of specialists or any fraction of the working class-as revolutionary as they may be-for the whole of the working class itself. It is equally due to this reason that when the state raises itself up against the working class, as it did in the case of Kronstadt, the role of the party-as an emanation from, and the vanguard of, the proletariat-is not to defend the state against the working class, but to lead the struggle on the side of the latter against the state. 4. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat Cannot Be Identified With the State:

At the time of the Russian Revolution, there existed a general confusion in the workers' movement, which identified the dictatorship of the proletariat with the state that appeared following the overthrow of the Tsarist regime. This state came to be represented by the All-Russian Congress of Delegates of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants' Soviets. Proletarian power, instead of being manifested through the specific organs of the working class (factory assemblies and workers' councils) was identified with the apparatus of the state (territorial soviets, emanating from all the non-exploiting social strata).

Yet, as clearly brought to the forefront by the Italian Communist Left at the end of the 1930's and the Gauche Communsite de France following that, in drawing the lessons of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, the autonomy of the proletariat means that, under no circumstances, can the unitary and political organs of the working class subordinate themselves to state institutions, as that can only have the effect of diluting these proletarian organs and cause them to abdicate their communist program, which is their proper subject and their real concern. Holding these conceptions that plagued the workers' movement of the day (the idea of a "proletarian state") any resistance on the part of the workers against the state apparatus could only be considered as "counter-revolutionary." At no moment, can the proletariat relax its vigilance vis a vis the state apparatus, as the events of Kronstadt and the Russian experience as a whole have shown that the counter-revolution can very well manifest itself through the channel of the post-insurrectional state and not merely in the form of a bourgeois aggression from the "exterior".

As tragic and as devastating as the Bolshevik mistakes were, it is not the latter, but really the isolation of the Russian Revolution, that was the basis for its degeneration. If the revolution had been able to spread, in particular in the form of a victorious insurrection in Germany, it is highly probable that these errors could have been corrected in the course of the revolutionary process itself. This possibility is witnessed by the positions defended by Lenin in the debate of 1920-1921 in which he was opposed to Trotsky on the question of the unions (a debate that transpired at the 10th Party Congress at the same time as the Kronstadt events unfolded). Thus, just as Trotsky defended the idea that the unions must become an apparatus for the instruction of the working class by the "proletarian" state, Lenin-in disagreement with this analysis-argued that the workers must defend themselves against their "own state", particularly in his estimation that the soviet regime had become no longer a proletarian state but a "workers' and peasants' state" with "profound bureaucratic deformations."

Elsewhere, in 1922, in a report presented to the central committee of the party, it was in these terms that Lenin began to perceive that the counter-revolution had raised its head within Russia itself and that the party apparatus, bureaucratized as it had become, was headed in the wrong direction in regards to the real interests of the proletariat: "The machine is in the process of evading the hands of the conductor: in fact, one could say that there is someone at the controls, who manages this machine, but this manager follows another path from that which is required, it is driven by some invisible hand (…) Only god knows to whom this hand belongs, perhaps a speculator, perhaps a private capitalist, or perhaps both at the same time. The fact is that the machine does not go in the direction of the requirements of those whom are supposed to be in control and, sometimes, it goes-in fact-in the opposite direction." B and C From Revolution Internationale # 310, March 2001.

Internationalism, February 2003.

The November 2002 issue of Internationalist Notes (publication of the newly constituted Internationalist Workers Group regrouping the remaining sympathizers of the International Bureau for the Revolutionary Party (IBRP) in the US and Canada) rejects the ICC's expression of solidarity in the face of the Los Angeles Workers Voice's (LAWV) parasitic attacks against the IBRP(see Internationalism 122). Readers will recall that in that article we not only defend the IBRP against the ludicrous LAWV accusation that it was no longer a working class organization, but also supported the IBRP's criticism of LAWV's reprehensible behavior on the organizational level and its headlong retreat from the political legacy of the communist left. Calling our article an "unfortunate intervention," IN criticizes specifically our criticism of the LAWV for violating revolutionary principles of fraternalism and organizational functioning because "they held secret and private political and organizational discussions in Los Angeles." Dismissing our expression of solidarity, IN writes:

"As usual with the ICC there is always a clear lack of proportion in their accusations. Though the LA group is clearly localist, the ICC needs to add accusations on its effort to characterize them as parasites so as to give support to their own sectarian theory of parasitism. How else could the LA people meet other than privately as the closest IBRP supporter was many hundreds of miles away? This has permitted the LA group to respond to the ICC accusation in a way that can imply that the IBRP could have demanded some kind of mandatory observation at those meetings."

Of course, we're not so stupid or naïve that we don't recognize that geographically dispersed militants in revolutionary organizations normally meet without the physical presence of comrades from other geographical locales. However, we are well aware that geographically dispersed militants in revolutionary organizations communicate with each other through letters, documents, texts, minutes, etc. and have a responsibility to keep each other and the rest of the organization informed of discussions and decisions, which are taken within a shared framework. Our point was that these "private" meetings in LA were held secretly, that they violated earlier collective decisions and were deliberately hidden from the other comrades - just as the comrades who recently split from the ICC held secret meetings hidden from the organization, in gross violation of our statutes.

Just for the record, the "unfortunate intervention" we made in Internationalism 122 in regard to these "private" meetings was the following:

"The LAWV carried out political intrigue and maneuvering within the IBRP, holding secret and private political and organizational discussions in Los Angeles, without the participation, or even the knowledge, of AS, or the rest of the IBRP. They disregarded the rules and mode of functioning in revolutionary organizations, and of the comportment of comrades within a proletarian organization. The fruit of this bourgeois leftist mode of operation was the unilateral taking of organizational decisions, and eventual announcement of abrupt changes in basic class line positions without even a murmur of discussion within the organization. When criticized for these gross organizational violations, the LAWV responded with personalized attacks against AS, and with slanders against the IBRP. A group of individuals who carry on secret, clandestine political decision-making within the organization had the temerity to denounce the organization as being undemocratic!!!"

We are of course a bit baffled by IN's apparent complete turn around on LA's comportment, for our comments in that article were merely a paraphrase of what the IBRP and the militants of IN themselves had already published on this episode. The defense of "private" discussions in Los Angeles in the November Internationalist Notes constitutes a retreat from the clarity of the IBRP's own previous analysis and description of the situation in its external press and on its web site, upon which Internationalism drew heavily in writing our previous article.

For example, in the "Statement Regarding the Relationship of Los Angeles Workers Voice (LAWV) with the IBRP", which was originally published on the IBRP web site, and which IN republishes as part of the November 2002 article, "The IBRP, Internationalist Notes and the US Workers Voice," the IBRP explained unprincipled secret behavior of the LAWV in these terms:

"Thus, although LAWV formally agreed to work in tandem with the Bureau the differences between us were growing rather than diminishing. Rather than tackle these differences politically as they emerged, LAWV preferred to pretend they did not exist and instead produced a smokescreen of diversions and virulent attacks on the IBRP comrade elsewhere in the USA, including demanding his expulsion from the Bureau."

"…they agreed to take on the work of publishing Internationalist Notes Volume 3. When it finally came out, however this was labeled 'US Workers Voice magazine' and all reference to the existence of other IBRP supporters in the US was omitted, including acknowledgement of the articles contributed. All this was no accident. To the criticisms that there should be a collective discussion of all US comrades on the contents of the publication, LA replied that from now on 'the majority' (i.e. themselves) would decide. This is their idea of resisting 'authoritarian' practice! Theoretically there was little to distinguish this effort as a publication o the communist left."

"Now post hoc (since it was never part of the discussion)…LA now find that the Bureau is 'non-working class', not to mention favoring Bolshevik methods of 'top-down elitism and commandism.'…LA are now resorting to slanders, which pre-empt all further discussion".

A similar point of view on the danger of the so-called private discussions in Los Angeles, also appeared in the article "The Debate Among IBRP Sympathizers in the US," by AS.This article presented very persuasively and correctly the argument that the regroupment in April 2000 of militants in Los Angeles and Wisconsin (now Indiana) as a sympathizing section of IBRP meant that the comrades were "obligated to openly discuss and inform each other and the Bureau of proposed decisions that affect our activity…" But instead of functioning according to the principles of a revolutionary organization, AS's article points out:

"The comrades of Los Angeles Workers' Voice made a decision privately amongst themselves when they changed the rate of publication in Internationalist Notes without open discussion. They also adopted the organizational name of "US Workers' Voice" without open discussion. They discarded the agreement that we made regarding the joint publication of IN. They refused to answer any questions regarding their actions preferring to make accusations and recriminations. We cannot claim to be a sympathizing section of the Bureau if we are not willing to work with the comrades of the Bureau and definitely not if we are not willing to work together as a group….a vote cannot just be taken in private without allowing a minority voice to be heard. The process of how revolutionaries make decisions involves much more than simply taking a vote. The first thing that revolutionaries do is to open a debate and try to reach a consensus through this debate. If all else fails then we make decisions by means of a majority vote."

So, it seems a bit disingenuous of IN to chastise the ICC for agreeing with and reaffirming the IBRP's own earlier criticism of the "private" meetings of the LAWV. In this apparently sectarian brush off of our expression of solidarity and our theory of parasitism, IN seriously underestimates the danger posed by LAWV (now calling itself USWV) to the workers movement. Previously, as the quotations reprinted from the IBRP above demonstrate, the IBRP and IN saw the LAWV as guilty of comportment totally at odds with the tradition and principles of the workers movement, of abandoning fundamental class positions, and publishing a journal which as the IBRP put it contains "little to distinguish this effort as a publication of the communist left," and slandering the IBRP as "non-working class." But as of November, IN now sees the main problem with LAWV is that it is localist. But in fact LA's localism is the least of their shortcomings, as the IBRP and IN themselves previously pointed out.

The small forces of left communism in North America now face a very serious problem. As we noted in Internationalism 122, "now we are confronted with the presence of a parasitic group of former leftists, with only a half-baked comprehension of communist left positions, heavily imbued with an amalgam of localist, immediatist, activist, and stalinist ideological conceptions from their past, and libertarian distrust of centralization and the Russian Revolution, affirming themselves as spokespersons of the communist left in America." The LAWV (USVW) actively distorts the positions and political traditions of left communism and now denounces the two most important organizations of the international left communist movement, the IBRP and the ICC, as non-working class and irrelevant.

After we expressed our solidarity with the IBRP, LAWV turned its venom on the ICC, distorting our views - for example literally lying about what we have written in our press on the Kronstadt rebellion. To their credit, IN notes this outrageous slander by their former Los Angeles comrades in their article, but makes an egregious error when it basically equates the ICC and the LAWV, essentially saying "a pox on both your houses." In this sense, IN announces that the political struggle against LAWV "is of no interest to the revolutionary movement and the international working class," as if the parasitic attacks and political distortions of the LAWV will disappear if they are ignored. It is critical that IN resist any sectarian biases against the ICC, and join with us in countering the confusions and distortions of revolutionary principles being peddled by the Los Angeles group. Even if they don't accept our theoretical understanding of political parasitism, surely IN must understand that against the LAWV attack against the very idea of a revolutionary Marxist organization, against the conception of the revolutionary party, against their rejection of the Russian Revolution, against their rejection of the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat, against their ridicule and denunciation of the organizations of the communist left, we share a common bond and common struggle. This is especially true since the IBRP and IN bear a particular responsibility for the fact that the LAWV gained a certain aura of legitimacy as partisans of the communist left because of their sojourn as members of an IBRP sympathizing section, despite their inability to deal with and break with their leftist past. It is impossible to "go forward" as IN wishes to do without taking up the responsibility to defend the communist left against a monster they helped to create, even if at the same time they are aware of political disagreements between the organizations of that milieu.

JG, 12/16/02.