As the text of the ex-CWO comrades points out, the fact that the CWO is feeling the need to ‘open’ itself to the outside world (which involves not only discussion with the ICC but a willingness to participate in international conferences, to open their pages to minority views and make an analysis of their own history) is a striking proof of the fact that in this period, it is impos­sible for revolutionaries to retreat into isolation and avoid the question of regroupment.

The Aberdeen/Edinburgh text goes more deeply into the contradictions in the CWO’s present orientation, and into an evaluation of its present and future perspectives, so we won’t dwell on this here. We will concentrate on the CWO’s general criticisms of the ICC. Although we cannot answer any of them in detail here, we can at least make a few observations which will define those areas which require further discussion and clari­fication. Taken in itself the CWO’s text demonstrates that the group still suffers from the same misconceptions and confusions which we examined in previous articles, that it still has a marked tendency to present an entirely distorted picture of the ICC’s positions; but the healthy aspect of this text is that it can and should serve as a stimulus to further public discussion between our organizations.

We will now deal with the specific areas of criticism the CWO puts forward.

1. Economics

The most significant point to be made here is that for the CWO, ‘economics’ is used as a cover for its sectarianism. This applies both to the way the CWO approaches the prob­lem of the economic foundations of capita­list decadence, and to the way they apply economics to their general political pers­pective. With regard to this first aspect, we can only reject the CWO’s assertion that our analysis of decadence, which draws a great deal from Rosa Luxemburg’s crisis theory, is “at variance with that presented by Marx in Capital”.

According to the CWO, Marx’s writings on the falling rate of profit are quite sufficient to explain the historic crisis of capitalism, and there is little further discussion to be had. As with many other questions, the CWO already holds the completed communist world-view. So anxious are they to avoid considering that there might be other sides to the problem, that they have begun to imply that the problem of saturated markets and overproduction has nothing to do with Marx but is an invention of Sismondi and Malthus, subsequently taken up by Luxemburg and the ICC (see the article on credit in Revolutionary Perspectives, no.8). Luxem­burg’s preoccupation with the problem of over-production is a variant of non-marxist ‘under-consumptionism’ (see RP, no.6). But if we go back to Marx and Engels we see that they considered the problem of over­production to be absolutely crucial in understanding capitalist crises. In Anti-­Duhring Engels insisted on the importance of seeing over-production as a fundamental, distinctive feature of the capitalist mode of production, at the same time castigating Duhring for confusing under-consumption with over-production:

“Therefore, while under-consumption has been a constant feature in history for thousands of years, the general shrinkage of the market which breaks out in crises as the result of a surplus of production is a phenomenon only of the last fifty years; and so Herr Duhring’s whole superficial vulgar economics is necessary in order to explain the new collision not by the new phenomenon of over­production but by the thousand-year-old phenomenon of under-consumption.”

Similarly, in Theories of Surplus Value, Marx attacks Say and Ricardo precisely for asserting that while there can be over­production of capital, over-production of commodities and a general glut of the mar­ket are not inherent tendencies in the capitalist process of accumulation.

“Over-production is specifically condi­tioned by the general law of the produc­tion of capital: to produce to the limit set by the productive forces, that is to say, to exploit the maximum amount of labor with the given amount of capital, without any consideration to the actual limits of the market or the needs backed by the ability to pay; and this is car­ried out through continuous expansion of reproduction and accumulation, and there­fore constant reconversion of revenue into capital, while on the other hand, the mass of producers remain tied to the average level of needs, and must remain tied to it according to the nature of capitalist production.” (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Part 2)

To develop these points adequately, the ICC plans to contribute further texts, including a reply to the CWO’s critique of Luxemburg’s crisis theory, which the CWO have frater­nally offered to publish in Revolutionary Perspectives. But for the moment it suff­ices to say that the ICC does not think that the CWO can make a constructive contribution to the debate on decadence if they continue to make inflated claims to defending the totality of marxist orthodoxy on the subject, while at the same time closing their eyes to a vital strand in the thought of Marx and Engels themselves.

Because Marx located two fundamental contra­dictions in capitalist accumulation -- the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, and the problem of realizing surplus value -- there are broadly speaking two theories of crisis that fall within the marxist frame­work: the one defended by Grossman, Mattick and the CWO which emphasizes the falling rate of profit; and the theory of Luxemburg which stresses the problem of the market. The ICC considers that the analysis elabora­ted by Luxemburg can more coherently explain the historical crisis of decadent capitalism and makes it possible to see how these two fundamental contradictions operate as aspects of a totality, although we don’t think that either Luxemburg or the ICC have provided any final answers. We think that this is a debate which must go on within the revolutionary movement today, and does not constitute a barrier to regroupment, parti­cularly because it is a problem for which there are no immediate answers.

The present class struggle also does not shed any direct light onto this problem, which is still one of the most complex theoretical questions facing revolutionaries. Confronting the reality of the crisis, the proletarian movement is forced to understand the inner dynamics of crisis-ridden capita­lism. But a firm political orientation based on the decadence of the system is the pre-condition for deepening this question in the practice of the workers’ movement. And it is here where the movement can stray from its path into either academicism and sectarianism or a crude immediatist activism, which treats theoretical questions as gospel affirmations, useless for ‘practice’. The ICC firmly believes that the question of economics is a crucial one for the proleta­riat, but that this question can only gain its relevance within the context of a cohe­rent international intervention, based on the regroupment of revolutionary forces.

At the same time, we have never said that there are no political consequences to be drawn from the different theories. In June 1974 when we debated this question with Revolutionary Perspectives (the precursor of the CWO) we presented what we felt to be the weaknesses of the Grossman/Mattick theory as an explanation for decadence, and the political implications of those weaknes­ses. At the same time we encouraged RP to try to demonstrate that the concept of deca­dence and the political conclusions which flow from it were not incompatible with the Grossman/Mattick theory.

There was no contradiction in what we said then, because while we think that different approaches to explaining the crisis do have political consequences, these consequences are rarely direct and never mechanical. Since marxism is a critique of political economy from the partisan standpoint of the working class, political clarity derives first and foremost from an ability to assimilate the lessons of working class experience. In the final analysis, an understanding of ‘economics’ comes from evolving a proletarian perspective and not the other way round. Marx was able to write Capital not because he was a clever man but because he was a communist, a pro­duct of the proletarian movement, of prole­tarian class consciousness which is alone able to grasp the historical finiteness of the capitalist mode of production. Unques­tionably a clearer understanding of the eco­nomic processes of capital is vital to an overall political clarity, but we reject the CWO’s sterile attempt to derive virtually all political positions from whether or not one holds the ‘falling rate of profit’ anal­ysis of the crisis. Thus in their text presented to the recent Milan conference and this most recent text, we find that everything from the ICC's ‘voluntarism’ and ‘organizational fetishism’, an alleged preoccupation with intervening at leftist meetings, our mistakes on the period of transition, etc, etc, can be directly traced to our ‘Luxemburgism’. This way of critici­zing political positions is based on a com­pletely false conception of where political understanding derives from which is the experience of the class and not the abstract contemplation of economics. It does not explain how groups (for example, the ICC and the PIC (Pour Une Intervention Communiste)) have similar economic analyses and widely differing political perspectives, and vice versa. It is ironic that the CWO should try to use a similar methodology as that of Bukharin in 1924-5, who attacked Luxemburg’s economic theories in order to liquidate the ‘virus of Luxemburgism’ from the Communist International, and to show how Luxemburg’s economic views led to ‘erroneous’ political positions, such as the rejection of national liberation struggles, the under-estimation of the peasantry, and by, implication, the denial of the possibility of ‘socialism in one country’ defended by Stalin!

2. The degeneration of the Russian Revolution

The CWO has failed to grasp the point of the ICC’s discussion on how to evaluate the degeneration of proletarian political groups. According to them, the ICC has evolved a ‘new line’, which is really noth­ing more than an attempt to strengthen our recruiting drive in the swamps of leftism. In fact the discussion that culminated in the ‘Resolution on Proletarian Political Groups’ at our Second Congress (see Inter­national Review, no.11) did not give rise to a new line, but to the clarification of a practice which was only implicit before­hand. The CWO has misunderstood the motive behind the debate and the methodology applied in it. Because we say that only crucial events like wars and revolutions can finally resolve the question of the class nature of former proletarian bodies, the CWO accuses us of ‘excusing’ Kronstadt and entertaining the idea that perhaps the Russian state had something proletarian about it until World War II. A cursory read­ing of any of the ICC texts can dispel these assertions. What we have been trying to get at is the complex and often painful way in which the workers’ movement has assimilated new lessons, like how the revolution in Russia was lost. The inevit­able lag between reality and consciousness meant that revolutionaries only became fully aware of the capitalist nature of the Rus­sian state and economy well after the prole­tariat had lost political power and the bourgeois counter-revolution had completely triumphed. This is why we insist that only major events in history -- even when ‘symbo­lic’ like voting for war credits or decla­ring for ‘socialism in one country’ -- can make it clear to revolutionaries at the time that former proletarian organs have definitely passed over to the enemy camp. It is important to see the difference bet­ween what can be understood from hindsight and what could be understood by revolutio­naries in the past. For example, Russia didn’t suddenly become an imperialist power in 1940; today it is possible to trace the imperialist tendencies of the Russian state back to 1921-2. The point is however that for revolutionaries of the thirties and forties, what had been a matter for polemic and debate within the workers’ movement, was decisively settled by events like Russia’s entry into World War II. These events showed beyond a shadow of a doubt that Russia was integrated into the imper­ialist world system, and that any defense of Russia meant participation in imperialist war, the abandonment of internationalism. With the Trotskyists and their defense of the ‘degenerated workers' state’, what had been a grave theoretical confusion culminated in the final crossing of class lines.

Why is it important to make the distinction between a grave confusion that can lead to the desertion of the proletarian camp, and the actual and definitive crossing of the class frontier? Why is it important to use extremely strict criteria for declaring the death of a proletarian organization? It is because any precipitous judgments mitigate against the possibility of convincing con­fused revolutionaries of the error of their ways; it means abandoning them to the bour­geoisie without a fight. This is a lesson which the CWO badly needs to learn. Accord­ing to them, the ICC is counter-revolutionary today because its confusions on the period of transition will lead it to act against the class tomorrow. Assuming for the sake of argument that the ICC does have serious confusions on this question, surely the task of any communist group would not be to write us off as hopeless counter-revolutionaries, but to try to fight against our errors in the hope that they won’t lead us into the capitalist camp in the future. Or does the CWO possess the foreknowledge which would make this effort a waste of time? In any case we hope that the CWO’s present resump­tion of discussion indicates a re-evaluation of its sense of responsibilities in this sphere.

3. The state

We will not take up the CWO’s assertions that “the ICC is guilty of a-historical moralizing on the issue of the state”. This accusation has been dealt with in the article ‘State and Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ in the International Review, no.11. We simply want to point out a glaring inconsistency in the CWO’s approach to this question. On the one hand they say that “the idea of a ‘state’ outside the workers’ councils is a reactionary anathema”, that is, that the state is the workers’ councils and nothing but. On the other hand they boldly affirm that “Sovnarkom, Vesenkha, the Red Army and the Cheka were class organs of the Russian workers’ state”. Either one thing or the other. The council communists were at least consistent on this. For them, the only proletarian organs in the Russian Revolution were the workers’ councils, the factory committees and the Red Guards; the Red Army, the Cheka, etc, were bourgeois institutions of the Bolshevik bureaucrats. The CWO, on the other hand, wants to advo­cate a state that is nothing but the workers’ councils, yet is quite prepared to call the Soviet State of 1917-21 a workers’ state.

But the Soviet State was emphatically made up not only of the workers’ councils, but also of non-proletarian assemblies like pea­sants and soldiers soviets, as well as administrative organs (Vesenkha, etc) and repressive organs (the Cheka, the Red Army) which were manifestly distinct from the workers’ councils. In fact the whole drama of the Russian Revolution and its inner demise was expressed by the progressive absorption of the workers’ councils by these state bodies. Here the CWO is still silent on the question posed in IR no.10: should the workers in their factory commit­tees and workers’ councils accept labor discipline from the various ‘necessarily evil’ state institutions set up to preserve social order in the post-revolutionary phase, or must the workers’ councils ensure a vigilant control over all these bodies?

The fundamental contribution of the Italian Left to deepening the marxist analysis of the state was to show how Marx and Engels’ intu­itions about the state being a ‘scourge’ were confirmed by the practical experience of the Russian Revolution. Thus Octobre wrote in 1938 that:

“... the state, even with the adjective ‘proletarian’ attached to it, remains an organ of coercion, and in sharp and perm­anent opposition to the realization of the communist programme. In this sense it is an expression of the capitalist danger throughout the development of the transition period ... the state, far from being an expression of the proletariat, is a permanent antithesis of the class ... there is an opposition between the dictatorship of the proletarian state and the dictatorship of the proletariat.”

As can be seen from the texts in IR, no.11, there is a discussion within the ICC today on questions such as whether the state in the transition period should indeed be cal­led a proletarian state, but it is clear that both the Resolutions presented to the Second Congress of the ICC have assimilated this crucial understanding, developed by the Italian Left, about the negative feat­ures of the transitional state. This is something which will prove to be a life or death question in the revolutionary period ahead, but it has not even been glimpsed by the CWO. Before declaiming about the ‘errors’ of the Italian Left on this ques­tion, we would ask the CWO to seriously reflect on the contribution made by frac­tions like Bilan, Octobre, and Internation­alisme, to the movement’s present under­standing of the state.

4. The Party

In IR, no.10 we asserted that the CWO had not grasped the lessons on state or party afforded by the Russian experience. The latest CWO text has the merit of stating very clearly what before had only been implicit in their writings: that the role of the communist party is to take and hold state power. While we profoundly disagree with this idea, we welcome the fact that the debate can now proceed on an unambiguous basis. In numerous texts we have tried to show why the assumption of state power by the Bolshevik Party was a determining factor in the degeneration of the party and the revolution as a whole, and why it is not the task of the political organization of the class to take power. The CWO, unable to understand any of this, thinks that for the ICC “the revolution could succeed when the majority of the class is not conscious of the need for communism”. Their position on the party reveals a deep misunderstanding of the way consciousness develops in the class. Not only do they hold to a parlia­mentary conception that communist conscious­ness can be measured by the willingness of the workers to vote for a party to run the state; they are also moving very close to the classical Leninist position that the workers’ councils are mere ‘forms’ in which the amorphous mass of the class is organized, and into which the party -- which is the communist consciousness of the class -- has the task of injecting a communist content. The CWO doesn’t see that class consciousness -- and thus communist consciousness -- deve­lops in the whole class and that the coun­cils are also an aspect of the development of communist consciousness. The party is the most conscious fraction of the class, it is an indispensable weapon in the gene­ralization of revolutionary consciousness, but it, clarity is always relative and it can never represent the totality of class consciousness. Once again the CWO emit have it both ways. On the one hand they correctly assert that a minority cannot substitute for the class in the taking of power, on the other hand they call on the workers to delegate state power to the party. But as the Russian Revolution showed, from the conception that the party repre­sents the class in power, to the party actually substituting itself for the class, there is only a thin line. And one sure sign of revolutionary consciousness develop­ing in the class tomorrow will be its refusal to invest political power, which it alone can wield, in the hands of a minority.

The CWO’s movement towards the idea that the party ‘holds’ or ‘represents’ the tota­lity of communist consciousness is also consistent with the idea that they themselves represent the entire communist movement today, that they possess the only communist platform in the world. The tragic conse­quences of this sectarian theory are well documented in the Aberdeen/Edinburgh text.

5. Theory

We have often pointed out that, given the slow and uneven development of the crisis and the class struggle today, the twin dan­gers facing revolutionary groups in this period are immediatism -- a tendency to over­estimate every partial struggle of the class -- and academicism -- a tendency to respond to inevitable lulls in the class struggle by retreating into ‘research’ for its own sake. The latter seems to be the danger confronting the CWO today. The CWO’s claim that the ICC is sliding towards a “journal­istic” approach to theoretical questions, towards “a running down of the need for historical and theoretical reflection” (Revolutionary Perspectives, no.8) is com­pletely false. We do not claim to have exhausted all areas of research -- in fact many have hardly begun, which is not very surprising given the extreme youth of the ICC and the revolutionary movement as a whole. But the CWO’s claim that we have lost interest in theoretical clarification simply does not stand up to an examination of the effort expressed by our publications over the last two years. Rather it is the reflection of the CWO’s own retreat into a self-appointed role as the sole guardians of communist theory, and in particular, as the ‘political economists’ of the revolutionary movement. The CWO has begun to jus­tify this stance -- and to explain its own inner decomposition -- by over-reaction to the relative slowness of the crisis and the lull in the class struggle after 1974 (a lull which has been limited mainly to the advanced countries). For them this means that both regroupment and intervention in the class struggle are extremely distant prospects for revolutionaries. But by ma­king a rigid separation between today and tomorrow -- almost as if we were living in a period of counter-revolution right now -- the CWO is ensuring that it will be organi­zationally and politically unprepared for the massive shocks and class conflicts which are maturing everywhere today. The need to achieve an active continuity between theoretical reflection, organizational consolidation and intervention in the class movement, is more than ever the task of the hour. This is the task the ICC has set itself, and a task that the CWO shows itself more and more incapable of achieving.

*********************

The CWO claims that the ICC is “caught in a cleft stick” by saying on the one hand that the ICC and the CWO share the same class positions and should work towards regroup­ment, while on the other hand pointing out their confusions. For us there is no contradiction here. We insist on the need for all communist groups to discuss with each other and work towards regroupment. But this does not mean hiding differences and engaging in premature fusions (in the manner of Revolutionary Perspectives and Workers’ Voice, as the Aberdeen/Edinburgh text explains). It means debating all differences to the full, in order to see which ones can be accommodated within a sin­gle organization, and which are more serious obstacles to regroupment. At the same time, regroupment can’t be based only on agree­ment on class positions. It also demands a common perspective for activity, a fraternal will to clarify and work together, a pro­found conviction of the need for unity in the revolutionary movement. The ICC directs its discussions on regroupment with the Aberdeen/Edinburgh comrades with this point clearly in mind. And, we hope, the time will come when we can again embark upon a similar process with the comrades of the CWO. Our only future is a common future.

ICC

Sixty years after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, which shook the world to such an extent that the century-long domination of the bourgeoisie was under a real threat, demonstrations of armed work­ers in Red Square have been transformed into insolent parades of troops marching in step under the complacent gaze of their masters. The Russian bourgeoisie can contemplate its armory of death with a tranquil eye. Com­pared to what it has today the weapons used in the two imperialist carnages look like harmless toys. It can baptize its hellish arsenal with names like ‘October’ and ‘Com­munism’, and embellish its hideous class rule with citations from Lenin. And it can do all this to exorcize the specter of communism. Never in the sixty years since October 1917 has the power of the Russian ruling class seemed so sure, under the aegis of the latest tanks and the most ultra­modern missiles.

But the specter of communism is raising its head once again. World-wide the capitalist system is in crisis, posing the objective basis for the proletarian revolution. Al­though the Russian proletariat has been ground beneath the most ferocious counter­revolution capitalism has ever spawned, the economic sub-soil under the boots of the Russian ruling class is becoming more and more unstable. It is the crisis of capita­lism, and nothing else, which after fifty years of deadly silence, will re-awaken the Russian proletariat which will be led into the whirlpool of revolution by the workers of Eastern Europe.

In this initial article we intend to demon­strate the existence of the general crisis of capitalism in Eastern Europe by showing the particular form it takes in the Russian bloc.

*************************

A few years ago, to talk of an economic crisis in the Russian bloc, to say that the contradictions which undermine decadent capitalism are the same in the East as in the West, would give rise to incredulity or sarcasm among the trusted defenders of the ‘socialist countries’. You could also hear the respectable representatives of the liberal bourgeoisie in the West going into ecstasies over the fact that, while the rest of the world was already in crisis, the phenomena of economic crisis (falling growth rates, inflation, unemployment) appeared to be absent in these countries. How marvelous to find at last an oasis of economic calm, with such wonderfully regular patterns of growth: And just think -- a Russia that was semi-feudal before 1914 had now overta­ken the USA in the production of steel! This sort of thing won the envious admira­tion of the western capitalists and brought cries of jubilation to the Communist Parties and their ‘critical supporters’, the Trotsk­yists. But admiration and jubilation soon changed to disquiet: the economic crisis is over there as well: There is no magic potion in the witches’ cauldron of decaying capitalism, whether it goes by the name of ‘socialist planning’ or ‘Mao Tse-tung Thought’.

In the world press today there are more and more articles pointing out the phenomena of crisis in the Russian bloc. The represen­tatives of capital in Eastern Europe have been to Canassa to ask the West for more and more credit from the big international banks.1 And the Trotskyists, who have been playing second fiddle to the tune about ‘the uninterrupted development of the pro­ductive forces’ in the East, are suddenly struck dumb in their ‘critical support’ for these ‘societies in transition to socialism’. Today they are much happier making a big noise about ‘the democratic opposition’.

Why has this concert of eulogies about ‘socialist planning’ been reduced to a whis­per? In order to understand this, we have to go back to the past, to the appearance of the Five-Year Plans in the 1930s.

The so-called ‘immunity to crisis’ of the Russian bloc

1. The ‘Planning’ of Decadence

The great myth of the Russian bourgeoisie since the Stalinist period of the Five-Year Plans is the ‘immunity to crisis of the socialist world’. This is taken up by all the Stalinist and Trotskyist parties of the world when they advocate ‘radical’ measures like nationalizations and ‘the expropria­tion of private capital’.

Thus, according to them, the countries of the East and all the third world countries where there is more or less complete stati­fication of the economy constitute a ‘world apart’ in the capitalist world. The juridi­cal suppression of private ownership warr­ants the label of socialism, either ‘pure’ or ‘degenerated’. For the Trotskyists the one weakness of this ‘new system’ resides in the parasitism of the ‘bureaucracy’, which uses and abuses ‘socialist property’ for its own personal benefit. It will be enough for the workers to get rid of the ‘bureaucracy’ through a ‘political’ revolu­tion which doesn’t touch the ‘socialist’ economic base for the ‘betrayed revolution’ to be finally completed. Then the workers will really be able to enjoy all the bles­sings of ‘socialist property’. For the Trotskyists, the fact that Russia is a ‘workers’ state’ is proved by the economic miracle of the 1930s. According to the Trotskyists this is the miracle of socialism itself:

“Socialism has proved its right to con­quer, not in the countries of capital, but in an economic arena which covers one-sixth of the surface of the globe; not in the language of dialectics, but in the language of iron, cement and electricity.” (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed)

Such an assertion would be funny today if one didn’t know what really lay behind this ‘right to conquer’. More than ten million dead during the first Five-Year Plans2; the proletariat reduced to a state of physi­cal poverty worthy of the horrors of the primitive accumulation of capital at the beginning of the nineteenth century; the headlong march towards an imperialist war which cost seventeen million victims. Such is the balance sheet of this ‘brilliant development’ Trotsky enthused over. Never in the history of capitalism has the dia­lectic of ‘iron, cement and electricity’ uncovered the barbarism of the real dialec­tic of capital, the dialectic of blood and iron.

The fact that the growth of production indices has never been a sign of socialism is a truism which has to be repeated today after fifty years of Stalinist and Trotsky­ist lies. For marxism, the higher the indi­ces of production, the greater is the abso­lute and relative pauperization of the work­ing class, which is forced to sell a labor power which is devalorized the more accumu­lation gathers apace. When the Trotskyists talk about the growth of the productive forces, they ‘forget’ to say that in the real period of transition towards socialism -- that is when the proletariat exercises its dictatorship in a system which is still capitalist -- the growth of production ‘indi­ces’ (in so far as one can talk about ‘indices’) will take the form of the abso­lute and relative development of the consu­mer goods sector. The sector of production goods, on the other hand, is the sector par excellence of capitalism and its infernal cycle of accumulation. Socialism is not proportional to the development of Department I, it is inversely proportional to it. The very condition for communism is that the whole of production is orientated towards the satisfaction of social needs, even if a certain amount must be set aside for enlar­ged social reproduction. But, much more than an arithmetical relationship between these sectors, it is the growth of consump­tion which marks the progress the proletar­iat makes towards replacing exchange value with use value, until the law of value has completely disappeared. Although the Octo­ber proletarian revolution had the task -- with the limited means left over by the civil war -- of developing the consumer goods sector, the dialectic of ‘iron, cement and electricity’ meant an inversion of the ratio between the two sectors, to the benefit of Department I -- not that the figures show an absolute growth of consumer goods either. Thus in 1927-8 (before the Five-Year Plan) the relationship between the consumer goods sector and sector of producer goods was 67.2% as against 32.8%. In 1932, after the first Five-Year Plan, it was already 46.7% against 55.3%. On the eve of the war the consumer goods sector was no more than 25% of overall production. This proportion has remained identical ever since.3

Year	World Industrial Production	Means of Production	Means of Consumption
1917	100	38.1	61.9
1922	100	32.0	68.0
1928	100	39.5	60.5
1945	100	74.9	25.1
1950	100	68.8	31.2
1960	100	72.5	27.5
1964	100	74.0	26.0
1968	100	73.8	26.2
1971	100	73.4	26.6

Respective ratio of the means of production and means of consumption in the world volume of industrial production (in percentages).

This ‘right to conquer’ of capitalism in Russia, taken up by the most brutal counter­revolution in history, expressed itself in the ‘language’ of figures, so dear to Trotsky, by a 50 per cent fall in real wages between 1928 and 19364, by a trebling of the productivity of labor, in other words of the rate of exploitation. With such a rhythm of exploitation the USSR was obviou­sly able to surpass the industrial produc­tion of Britain and soon equal that of Ger­many on the eve of the war.

The Bordigists5 have seen in the rapid growth figures in heavy industry proof that this represented the development of a ‘young’ capitalism, which thanks to its ‘youth’ could not yet be contaminated by the general crisis of capitalism which was brin­ging down the whole world. In short, as with the Trotskyists, the Bordigists see the USSR as a ‘special case’. However, in a table which was reproduced in a recent Programme Communiste (see below) it appears that:

-- the highest rate of growth was not achie­ved in the period of the Five-Year Plans, but during the period of reconstruction: 1922-8: +23%;

-- the fall in the annual growth rate which manifested itself during the Five-Year Plans

-- thus in the midst of the world economic crisis -- followed the world-wide rhythm of the slowing-down of accumulation since the beginning of the century6: 1929-32: +19%; 1933-7: +17%; 1938-40: +13.2%.

As we shall see later, this fall has contin­ued even more markedly ever since.

 

Rate of growth of Russian industry

Period	Plan	Rate of growth: annual average
1922-28	Before the Plans	23.0%
1929-32	1st plan	19.3%
1933-37	2nd plan	17.1%
1938-40	3rd plan (3 years)	13.2%
1941-45	WAR	---
1946-50	4th plan	13.5%
1951-55	5th plan	13.0%
1956-60	6th plan	10.4%
1961-65	7th plan (7-year-plan 1959-65)	8.6%
1966-70	8th plan	8.4%
1971-75	9th plan	7.4%
1976-80	10th plan	6.5%

Calculations based on figures in Narodnoe Khoziaistvo SSSR.

How are we to explain, in spite of this declining rate of growth, the fact that there was still considerable growth in this, one of the weakest of the industrialized coun­tries? The Stalinists use this as irrefut­able proof of ‘the superiority of socialist planning over capitalism’. They ‘forget’ one little thing: the USSR began from an extremely low level (it only regained the 1913 level of production in 1928) and was able, without totally stagnating, to rein­force or at least maintain its production in relation to world production. But the immediate slowing down of the rate of accum­ulation after that shows that Russia was not able, by means of some kind of ‘primitive accumulation’, to achieve the rates of growth of the major capitalist countries at the end of the nineteenth century. In contrast to these countries, which went through a long period of accumulation with a regular growth in the rate of accumulation, the highest figures for Russia were reached over a period of four years; and this is according to offi­cial statistics. If we don’t use ‘optimis­tic’ figures, we would have to reduce the whole scale by 30 or 40 per cent.7

Despite all the state capitalist measures which it carried out at such a frenzied pace, the USSR did not escape the general crisis which followed the 1929 crash. The official figures, even though they are obviously in­flated by the Russian economists, cannot hide the reality of a fall in production; they show that the crisis was present in Russia and that it followed the same rhythm as the rest of the capitalist world.

What then was the reason for autarky? Was it that Russia was able to escape the bank­ruptcy of 1929? In fact Russia was in the same situation as the other countries, it faced the same difficulty in exporting and importing. By the end of the 1930s Russian foreign trade was one-third of what it had been in 1913.

 

Value of imports of the United States, of Europe and of the USSR from 1928 to 1938 (according to the League of Nations, Annuaires Statistiques).

The Five-Year Plans were financed at the price of raging inflation: from 1928 to 1933 the mass of money went from 1.7 billion rubles to 8.4 billion. In 1935 the ruble had to be devalued by 80 per cent (cf Bord­iga, Economic and Social Structure of Russia). The relative ‘imperviability’ of the Russian frontiers to world trade thus expressed itself in total bankruptcy; as it did with the Nazi economy on the eve of the war. But, the Trotskyists and Stalinists will say, Russia’s part in world production between 1913 and 1938 went from 4% to 12%; the indices of production trebled or quad­rupled in a few years. What was the reason for this ‘miracle’? It was the same as for the miracles achieved by Germany: ‘socialist’ Russia threw herself body and soul into the war economy. Goring’s “Guns not butter” was paralleled by Stalin’s prosaic saying “you can’t make casseroles when you’re making cannons”.

 

The bourgeoisie has celebrated the sixtieth anniversary of the proletarian revolution of October 1917 in its own way:

• in Moscow, by parading its thermonuclear weapons and its latest tanks past the mummy of Lenin and a huge portrait of Brezhnev;

• in the ‘Western’ countries by making a vast cacophony on television and in the newspapers, hailing the ‘great economic advances’ in the USSR, the ‘exemplary courage of its people’ in the fight against Hitlerism — with of course the usual reserves about Gulag, etc.;

• everywhere by systematically making a travesty of the real meaning of October and portraying the monstrous Russian state as its true descendant. In fact, what capitalism has really been celebrating is not the October Revolution, but its death. The great ceremonies and celebrations all have the aim of exorcizing the spectre of a new October.

For the proletariat on the other hand, and thus for revolutionaries, the memory of October doesn’t require any ceremonies. They don’t need to bury it because for them it is still alive, not as the nostalgic image of a heroic past, but because of the experience it has given us, the hope it represents for the coming struggles of the class.

The ‘homage’ revolutionaries can render to October and its protagonists does not consist of funereal eulogies but of the effort to understand its lessons in order to fertilize these struggles. The International Review has already tried to begin this work ([1]), as have all the publications of the Current, and it is something which must be continued in a systematic manner. But this work can only have a meaning if one understands the real nature of the October Revolution, if one sees it and recognizes it as an experience of the proletariat — the most important up until now - and not of the bourgeoisie, which is the view of certain currents like the councilists. Otherwise October 1917 has no more value for the class than 1789 or February 1848, and certainly less than the Commune of 1871. It is for this reason that the precondition for really assimilating the lessons of October is the recognition and defence of its authentically proletarian character, and of the party which was its vanguard. This is the aim of the present article.

Questioning the Proletarian Character of October

When the revolution broke out in Russia, revolutionaries unanimously greeted it as the first step towards the world proletarian revolution, Already in 1914, Lenin had put forward this perspective: “In all the advanced countries, the war is putting the socialist revolution on the agenda.”

And throughout the war he continued to make this perspective more precise:

“It’s not our impatience or our desires, but the objective conditions brought about by the imperialist war which have led the whole of humanity to an impasse and faced it with the dilemma: either let millions more men die and annihilate European civilization, or transfer power in all the civilized countries into the hands of the revolutionary proletariat, carry out the socialist revolution.

“To the Russian proletariat has befallen the great honour of inaugurating a series of revolutions engendered through objective necessity by the imperialist war. But the idea of seeing the Russian proletariat as a revolutionary class elevated above the workers of other countries is absolutely foreign to us…It’s not any particular qualities, but solely particular historic conditions, which for what will probably be a very short time, have put it in the vanguard of the entire revolutionary proletariat.” (Farewell Letter to Swiss Workers, 8 April 1917).

Exactly the same perspective was shared by the other revolutionaries of that time - Trotsky, Pannekoek, Gorter, Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg. None of them had the idea that Russia was going through a ‘bourgeois revolution’. On the contrary, it was the struggle against this conception which separated them from the Mensheviks and the centrists à la Kautsky. Moreover, history soon showed that such an analysis necessarily led those who held it into the arms of the bourgeoisie and against the working class. In fact it became the position of the extreme ‘left’ of the bourgeoisie in its denunciation of the ‘adventurism’ of the Bolsheviks.

In the whole workers’ movement of the time, solidarity with the fight of the Russian proletariat went hand in hand not only with a recognition of the proletarian character of October, but also with an understanding of the need to generalize the essence of the Russian experience all over the world: the destruction of the bourgeois state and the seizure of power by the workers’ councils.

It was only in the wake of the terrible defeats the proletariat went through in the 1920s, particularly in Germany, and faced with the emergence in Russia of a society which dashed all their hopes, that a certain number of revolutionaries — like Otto Ruhle - began to abandon the position which had been unanimous in 1917. This was the time when ‘National Socialism’ in Germany was mobilizing the population for a new imperialist war, when anti—fascism was doing the same job in the democracies, and when ‘socialism in one country’ — really one of the most barbaric forms of capitalism — was being strengthened in Russia. Within certain revolutionary currents which had escaped the shipwreck of the Communist International, there began to be put forward a theory which saw the October Revolution as a bourgeois revolution of a ‘particular type’.

In 1934, ‘Theses on Bolshevism’ were published in the organ of the council communist movement (Raeterkorrespondenz, no.3 and International Council Correspondence). According to this text:

“7. The economic task of the Russian Revolution was, first, the setting aside of the concealed agrarian feudal system and its continued exploitation of the peasants as serfs, together with the industrialization of agriculture, placing it on the plane of modern commodity production; secondly, to make possible the unrestricted creation of a class of really ‘free labourers’, liberating industrial development from all its feudal fetters. Essentially, the tasks of the bourgeois revolution…

“9. Politically, the tasks confronting the Russian Revolution were: the destruction of absolutism, the abolition of the feudal nobility as the first estate, and the creation of a political constitution and an administrative apparatus which would secure politically the fulfilment of the economic task of the Revolution. The political tasks of the Russian Revolution were, therefore, quite in accord with its economic suppositions: the tasks of the bourgeois revolution.”

Here we find, almost word for word, the position of the Mensheviks, who were among the most dangerous enemies of the proletariat. The only noteworthy difference was that the latter concluded from their analysis that it was necessary to give power to the classic parties and institutions of the bourgeoisie (Cadets, Provisional Government, Constituent Assembly) while the ‘councilists’ argued that carrying out this bourgeois revolution was the task of ‘Bolshevism’.

Why is it that some of the revolutionaries who had greeted October 1917 as a proletarian revolution finally ended up with the analysis of the Mensheviks?

In his book written in 1938, Lenin as Philosopher, Anton Pannekoek clarifies this point. Referring to Materialism and Empirocriticism he says:

“It may happen that in a theoretical work there appear not the immediate surroundings and tasks of the author, but more general and remote influences and wider tasks. In Lenin’s book, however, nothing of the sort is perceptible. It is a manifest and exclusive reflection of the Russian Revolution at which he is aiming.

“Its character so entirely corresponds to middle—class materialism that, if it had been known at the time in Western Europe — but only confused rumours on the internal strifes of Russian socialism penetrated here — and if it could have been rightly interpreted, one could have predicted that the Russian Revolution must somehow result in a kind of capitalism based on a struggle." (Pannekoek, Lenin as Philosopher, The Merlin Press Ltd, 1975, p.97).

In brief, the ‘key’ to the nature of the Russian Revolution, which it was not possible to find in the face of the imperialist war of 1914, nor in 1917 in the middle of great class confrontations in Russia and all over the world, nor in the protagonists of the revolution, nor in their methods or their proclamations and appeals to the proletariat of all countries — this key was really contained in a philosophical work published in 1908 and translated into other languages in 1927, somewhat late, because:

“If this work and these ideas of Lenin had been known in 1918 among western marxists, surely there would have been a more critical attitude against the tactics for world revolution.” (ibid, p.102)

In fact, the real reason for this late discovery was not that the marxists’ lacked information about certain of Lenin’s philosophical conceptions but the enormous disarray which the counter—revolution had imposed on the revolutionaries themselves, on those rare militants who were attempting to preserve the principles of communism in the teeth of the storm. A disarray and a disappointment which, as we shall see, led them to abandon the marxist method which had allowed the revolutionaries of 1917, including the Bolsheviks, to understand the real nature of the revolution which had broken out in Russia.

Marxism and Fatalism

When one considers it closely, it can be seen that the councilist thesis was a restatement of an idea which had a lot of success in the bourgeois camp itself in the 1930s: i.e. that the regime in Russia was the necessary consequence of the October Revolution. The Stalinists were obviously the greatest defenders of this idea. For them, Stalin was the ‘genial continuator’ of Lenin’s work, the man who developed and applied “the greatest discovery of our epoch, the theory of the possibility of the victory of socialism in one single country” ([2]). But alongside the Stalinists, there was almost unanimous agreement that Stalin was indeed the son of Lenin, or rather that the terrifying state apparatus that had emerged in Russia was the rightful heir of October. The anarchists obviously proclaimed at the top of their voices that the barbaric police regime in Russia was the inevitable consequence of the authoritarian conceptions of marxism (on the other hand they didn’t consider that the entry of anarchists into an ‘anti-fascist’ bourgeois government was the inevitable consequence of their ‘anti-authoritarian’ conceptions). Democrats of all kinds announced that the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ and the rejection of parliamentary institutions were the roots of all the evils that had befallen the ‘Russian people’. In general they warned the proletariat thus: “this is the result of any revolution, of any attempt to overthrow capitalism: a regime that is even worse!”

Obviously, the councilist conception did not have the aim of discouraging the working class from any attempt at revolution or of depriving it of its theoretical weapon, marxism. On the contrary, the councilists undertook this re-examination of their former analysis in the name of the communist revolution and marxism.

However, by posing the question on the basis that “if the Russian Revolution ended up in state capitalism, it’s because it couldn’t have given rise to anything else”, they borrowed one of the most fundamental ideas of the bourgeoisie: “what happened in Russia necessarily had to happen”. Either this affirmation was a tautology — the present situation is the result of different causes which have determined it — or it was a theoretical error which reduces marxism to a vulgar fatalism.

For fatalism, everything that happens is already written in the Great Book of Destiny. And when it takes the form of ‘common sense’ garnished with philosophical verbiage which is spouted out by university academics, it always has the function of preaching the acceptance of the existing order, with varying degrees of subtlety. But marxism has always fought against submitting to ‘reality’ in this way. Of course, against voluntarist and idealist conceptions, it affirms that men don’t make history “of their own free will under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under given and inherited circumstances with which they are confronted”, but Marx pointed out quite clearly that “men make their own history” (The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte). Concerning the possibility of a revolution, Marx wrote:

“No social order disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.” (Marx, Preface to the Critique of Political Economy)

This is why marxism has always opposed anarchism, for which ‘everything is possible at any time, providing men want it’. In his analysis of the failure of the Paris Commune, for example, Marx was able to point to the immaturity of the material conditions capitalism had developed in 1871. However, it would be wrong to think that all social events can be explained directly by these ‘material conditions’. In particular, the consciousness which men, or more precisely, social classes, have of these material conditions is not a simple ‘reflection’ of them, but becomes an active factor in transforming them:

“When a society has discovered the natural laws which regulate its own movement it can neither overleap the natural phases of evolution, nor shuffle them out of the world by decrees. But this much, at least, it can do; it can shorten and lessen the birth pangs.” (Marx, ‘Preface’ to Capital)

Historic events are the product not only of the economic conditions of society, but also of the totality of ‘superstructural’ factors, of a complex interaction between various determining elements, one of which is ‘chance’, i.e. arbitrary and unforeseen factors. This is why one cannot see history as the working out of a ‘destiny’ which has been fixed once and for all, the unfolding of a scenario which has been written in advance — for some by a ‘divine will’, for others in the structure and movement of atoms.

Just as nowhere written that the works of Marx were to justify one of the most barbaric forms of capitalist exploitation, there was no destiny for the Russian Revolution, whose existence can be proved by what the revolution finally became.

Obviously the councilists would not accept that they were fatalists. For them, their position is perfectly ‘marxist’ because it’s based on an analysis of the development of the productive forces. But the fact that they consider only this problem, and then only at the level of Russia (when even for the bourgeoisie the October Revolution was an event of world—wide importance), betrays a narrow, one—dimensional conception of marxism, almost a caricature of it. And it is with this caricature that they claim to be able to explain why state capitalism emerged in Russia: if the October Revolution ended up in capitalism it is because it was itself a bourgeois revolution. In other words, it was ‘destined’ to lead to the conclusion it arrived at…and so we see good old fatalism coming in through the window after officially being chased out the door!

In fact, the councilist view doesn’t just suffer from a good dose of fatalism. If followed to its ultimate consequences, it leads to the complete abandonment of marxism and of any revolutionary perspective.

The Implications of the Councilist Analysis

For councilism, as expressed in the ‘Theses on Bolshevism’, “The economic task of the Russian Revolution was … the setting aside of the … feudal system … (and) … to make possible the unrestricted creation of a class of really ‘free labourers’”. Although it is not really necessary to provide proof, it is still necessary to remember that in 1917 Russia was the fifth largest industrial power in the world; and in so far as the development of capitalism in Russia largely passed over the stage of artisan production and manufacture, Russian capitalism took on the most modern and concentrated forms (with over 40,000 workers, Putilov was the biggest factory in the world). For councilism, the bourgeois nature of the Russian Revolution can be explained by local conditions. This was partly true for the real bourgeois revolutions like the 1640 revolution in England and 1789 in France. The uneven development of capitalism made it possible for the bourgeoisie to come to power at different periods in various countries. This was also possible because the nation is the specific geopolitical framework of capitalism, a framework which, for all its efforts, it can never go beyond. But while capital was able to develop in ‘islands’ within the autarkic feudal society, socialism can only exist on a world—scale, making use of all the productive forces and networks of circulation created by capitalism. As early as 1847, Marx and Engels responded categorically to the question “will it be possible for this revolution to take place in one country alone?”:

“No. By creating a world market, big industry has already brought all the peoples of the earth, and especially the civilized peoples, into such close relation with one another that none is independent of what happens to the others the communist revolution will not merely be a national phenomenon but must take place in all civilized countries … it is a universal revolution and will accordingly have a universal range.” (Engels, Principles of Communism)

It is clear that what had already been grasped by revolutionaries in 1847 had to be, after the period of capitalism’s greatest expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, the basis of any proletarian perspective at the time of World War I. The war showed that capitalism had completed its progressive task of developing the productive forces on a world scale, that it had entered its epoch of historic decline, and that consequently, there could be no more bourgeois revolutions. The only revolution on the agenda was the proletarian revolution all over the world, including Russia. This analysis was not only put forward by Lenin, that mind imbued with ‘vulgar materialist philosophy’, who is supposed to have wanted to turn the world communist movement into an apparatus for defending Russian state capitalism, but also by a revolutionary whom many have tried to set against the ‘bourgeois’ Lenin, and whose proletarian positions or knowledge of ‘things Russian’ have never been questioned by the councilists: Rosa Luxemburg. As she wrote at the time:

“Moreover, for every thinking observer, these developments are a decisive refutation of the doctrinaire theory which Kautsky shared with the government social democrats, according to which Russia, as an economically backward and predominantly agrarian land, was supposed not to be ripe for social revolution and proletarian dictatorship. This theory, which regards only a bourgeois revolution as feasible in Russia, is also the theory of the opportunist wing of the Russian labour movement, of the so—called Mensheviks, under the experienced leadership of Axelrod and Dan. And from this conception follow the tactics of the coalition of the socialists in Russia with bourgeois liberalism. On this basic conception of the Russian Revolution, from which follow automatically their detailed positions on questions of tactics, both the Russian and the German opportunists find themselves in agreement with the German government socialists. According to the opinion of all three, the Russian Revolution should have called a halt at the stage which German imperialism in its conduct of the war had set its noble task, according to the mythology of the German social democracy, i.e., it should have stopped with the overthrow of czarism. According to this view, if the revolution has gone beyond that point and has set as its task the dictatorship of the proletariat, this is simply a mistake of the radical wing of the Russian labour movement, the Bolsheviks. And all difficulties which the revolution has met with in its further course, and all disorders it has suffered, are pictured as purely a result of this fateful error.

"Theoretically, this doctrine (recommended as the fruit of ‘marxist thinking’ by the Vorwaerts of Stampfer and by Kautsky alike) follows from the original ‘marxist’ discovery that the socialist revolution is a national and, so to speak, a domestic affair in each modern country taken by itself. Of course, in the blue mists of abstract formulas, a Kautsky knows very well how to trace the worldwide economic connections of capital which make of all modern countries a single integrated organism. The problems of the Russian Revolution, moreover — since it is a product of international developments plus the agrarian question — cannot possibly be solved within the limits of bourgeois society.

Practically, this same doctrine represents an attempt to get rid of any responsibility for the course of the Russian Revolution, so far as that responsibility concerns the international, and especially the German, proletariat, and to deny the international connections of this revolution. It is not unripeness which has been proved by the events of the war and the Russian Revolution, but the unripeness of the German proletariat for the fulfilment of its historic tasks. And to make this fully clear is the first task of a critical examination of the Russian Revolution.

The fate of the revolution in Russia depended fully upon international events.” (Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution).

This is how one of the greatest marxist theoreticians posed the problem against the sophistries of Kautsky, the Mensheviks and … the councilists. Not only did Rosa Luxemburg put paid to the myth of ‘the immaturity of Russia’, she also provided the key to something the councilists have never been able to understand: the causes of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution which lay essentially on the failure of the world revolution, upon which “the fate of the revolution in Russia depended fully”.

In fact, by searching for the causes of the development of the revolution, and of the capitalist regime it ended up with, in Russia alone, the councilists turn their back on the objective foundations of internationalism. And even if their own internationalism cannot be put into question, in the end it could only be based on a kind of moral imperative. If you take their analysis to its logical conclusion, it leads to the idea that if the revolution had taken place in an advanced country (Germany for example) and had remained isolated, it would not have ended up in the same way as the Russian Revolution. In other words, it could have avoided the re—establishment of capitalism, which means that a victory over capitalism, the victory of socialism, is possible in one country. Just as councilism borrows from Stalinism the idea of a continuity between Lenin and Stalin, between the nature of the October Revolution and the nature of the regime that Russia ended up with, we can see that it also goes close to borrowing from Stalinism elements of one of its most important mystifications: ‘national socialism’. Thus the ‘marxist’ analysis of the councilists not only takes up the thesis of the Mensheviks and of Kautsky: it is also unable to avoid flirting with Stalin’s theory.

But this isn’t the only way the councilists’ analysis leads to an abandonment of marxism. One of the reasons why they see the Russian Revolution as a ‘bourgeois revolution’ is the nature of the economic measures taken from the beginning by the new power. Quite correctly, the councilists see that nationalizations and the dividing up of the land were bourgeois measures. They then rush to exclaim “you can see that this was a bourgeois revolution, because it took measures of this kind”. And against such measures, they put forward a truly ‘socialist’ policy:

“the taking over of the enterprises and the organization of the economy through the working class and its class organizations, the shop councils” (Theses on Bolshevism, Point 49). These are the kinds of measures the Russian Revolution would have adopted if it had been really ‘proletarian’; but for the councilists “The bourgeois character of the Bolshevik Revolution … could not be shown more clearly than in this slogan of control of production” (ibid, Point 47).

Here the councilists are not borrowing the foundations of their analysis from Kautsky or Stalin, but from Proudhon and the anarchists. Once again they are crossing out one of the most crucial teachings of marxism. For marxism, one of the fundamental differences between the bourgeois revolution and the proletarian revolution is the fact that the first took place at the end of a whole process of economic transformation between feudalism and capitalism, a transformation which was then crowned in the political sphere; whereas the proletarian revolution is necessarily the point of departure for the economic transformation between capitalism and communism. This difference is linked to the fact that, in contrast to the previous transformation, the transition to communism is not a change in the mode of property but the abolition of all property; it’s not the institution of new exploitative relations but the suppression of all exploitation. This is why, in contrast to previous revolutions, the goal of the proletarian revolution is not the establishment of a new form of class rule but the abolition of all classes; it is not the work of an exploiting class but, for the first time in history, the work of an exploited class. Capitalist relations of production developed within feudal society while the nobility had control of the state apparatus. The feudal power may have been a obstacle to the development of capitalism, but the latter was able to accommodate itself to it as long as capital had not advanced to the point where it had to overthrow the feudal order. The bourgeois revolution came as an almost ‘mechanical’ consequence of the extension of the capitalist economy, and its task was to eliminate the last barriers to the expansion of capital. In contrast to all this, communist social relations can in no way develop by little islands within capitalist society, when the bourgeois class still has control of the state. It is only after the destruction of the bourgeois state and the seizure of political power by the working class on a world scale that the relations of production can be transformed.

In contrast to previous periods of transition, the one between capitalism and communism will not be the result of an objective process independent of men’s wills; it will depend on the conscious action of a class which will use its political power to progressively eliminate the different aspects of capitalist society: private property, the market, wage labour, the law of value, etc. But this economic policy can really only be put into effect when the proletariat has defeated the bourgeoisie militarily. As long as this has not been definitively achieved, the demands of the world civil war will take precedence over the need to transform the relations of production in places where the proletariat has already taken power — and this is true whatever the economic development of such an area. In Russia the economic measures adopted by the new power - notwithstanding the errors that were committed, errors that were real and can teach us valuable lessons — are not the criteria for understanding the class nature of the October Revolution, any more than it was the economic measures taken by the Commune which conferred upon it its proletarian nature — and, as far as we know, neither the councilists nor the anarcho—syndicalists have ever questioned the proletarian character of the Commune. It never occurred to anyone that the reduction of the working day, the suppression of night work for bakery workers, the moratorium on rents or the depots at the Mont de Piet should be presented as ‘socialist’ measures. The greatness of the Commune was that, for the first time in the history of the proletariat, the class transformed a national war against a foreign power into a civil war against its own bourgeoisie; that it proclaimed and realized the destruction of the capitalist state and replaced it with the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. elected and revocable delegates at all levels, wages for functionaries equal to an average workers wage, the replacement of the permanent army by the permanent arming of the workers, and the internationalist proclamation of the Universal Commune. It was these essentially political measures which made the Paris Commune the first international attempt by the proletariat to carry out its revolution. And it is for these reasons that the experience of the Commune has been such an invaluable source of study for the revolutionary struggle of generations of workers in all countries. October 1917 simply took up and generalized the main themes of the Commune and it was certainly no accident that Lenin wrote State and Revolution, in which he made a detailed study of the Commune, on the eve of October. Thus it’s not by analyzing every detail of what the October Revolution did or did not do on the economic level that one can understand its class nature. This can only be grasped by analyzing its political characteristics — the destruction of the bourgeois state, the seizure of power by the working class organized in soviets, the general arming of the proletariat and the impetus the new power gave to the international movement of the proletariat; the ruthless denunciation of the imperialist war, the call to transform it into a civil war against the bourgeoisie, the call for the destruction of all bourgeois states and the seizure of power by the workers’ councils in all countries.

Because it never understood the primacy of political problems in the first phase of the proletarian revolution, anarcho—syndicalism ended up betraying the proletarian struggle, by diverting it into the impasse of self-management and the collectives while it itself sent ministers to the bourgeois government of the Spanish Republic. Its whole standpoint — and that of the councilists when it falls into line with anarcho—syndicalism — turns its back on the socialist revolution because it localizes it within the limitations not just of a country, but of a region or isolated factories, it reduces socialist production, which by definition can only exist on an international scale, to a domestic matter.

Despite the value of many of the criticisms put forward by the Workers’ Opposition in 1921, in particular its denunciation of the bureaucratization of the state and the smothering of life within the party, the platform of the group was fundamentally erroneous in so far as it reduced the problem of the development of the revolution to an economic question, to the direct management of production by the workers, thus implicitly giving credence to the idea that it was possible to establish socialism in one country, that socialist progress could be made in Russia on its own at a time when the international revolution was going through a series of defeats. ([3])

Whatever errors Lenin may have made, he was quite right to attack the petty bourgeois, anarcho—syndicalist aspects of the Workers’ Opposition. It is no accident that, later on, the theoretical leader of the Workers’ Opposition, Kollontai, took Stalin’s side against the Left Opposition to defend the theory of socialism in one country.

Thus the partisans of ‘socialism in one factory’ join the partisans of ‘socialism in one country’ and the theoreticians of the ‘immaturity of objective conditions’ in Russia. And Kautsky, Stalin and the ‘comrade ministers’ of the CNT are not very good company for the councilists, however much they may denounce them.

In fact, the only way councilism could reconcile its analysis of the October Revolution with internationalism — and certain currents have already done this — would be to consider that the ‘objective conditions’ for the proletarian revolution were not ripe in 1917, not only in Russia, but on a world scale. But this means rejecting the analysis of the Mensheviks or of Kautsky only to take up that of the rightwing social democrats who used it to suppress the proletarian revolution in Germany. It is not a question of saying that all those who ended up with such an analysis are like Noske. It’s quite possible to fight in a proletarian struggle even though you consider it premature and desperate — as did Marx with the Commune. But that kind of analysis by proletarian elements leads to conclusions every bit as disastrous as those of councilism.

We don’t want to refute this analysis here ([4]) since that would take us outside the scope of the article. We will restrict ourselves to a few remarks.

In the first place, such a conception leads to the rejection of the idea that capitalism has been in its decadent epoch since World War I, an idea which was the crucial issue in the revolutionaries’ break with the IInd International. The ‘councilist’ analysis undermines all the theoretical foundations of the Communist International, which is where the Council Communists came from in the first place. It thus leads to the rejection of the main acquisitions of the workers movement during World War I and the revolutionary wave of 1917—23; or else it makes it necessary to base communist positions on completely different foundations, in particular, the positions which the Communist Left took up against the CI:

• the rejection of parliamentarism, even the revolutionary kind;

• the rejection of trade unionism;

• the rejection of the idea of the mass party;

• the refusal to support national liberation struggles or progressive sectors of the bourgeoisie.

If you reject the idea of the decadence of capitalism, you are necessarily led to the conclusion that all the policies of the workers’ movement in the nineteenth century and most of the analyses of Marx and Engels were incorrect, In such a view, the Communist League, the Ist International and the IInd International were completely wrong to support the setting up of trade unions, the struggle for universal suffrage, certain national liberation struggles, etc. At the end of the day you might as well admit that, apart from the general theoretical underpinnings, Proudhon and Bakunin were right against Marx and Engels; and since from a marxist point of view it’s difficult to separate a theoretical vision from political implications, it would then be logical to take the final step and reject marxism in favour of anarchism. If only the councilists, who see the October Revolution as bourgeois because objective conditions on a world scale were not ripe in 1917, had the courage to take this final step and openly declare themselves as anarchists! They would then have one last problem to solve: how to reconcile their analysis with a theoretical viewpoint which rejects the need for an objective basis for socialism and for which ‘the revolution is possible at any time’?

The rejection of the idea that capitalism entered into its decadent epoch in 1914 has other implications which can be summarized briefly as follows;

• either the period of capitalist decadence is still to come, although looking at the catastrophes which have befallen society over the last sixty years it’s hard to imagine what the real decadence of capitalism would look like and to see how society could survive it;

• or else capitalism, in contrast to previous societies, will never go through a period of decadence. Then you must draw the conclusion from this: either you abandon any perspective for socialism or you base that perspective on something other than the objective necessities of society at a certain stage of its development. This means abandoning marxism, making socialism a ‘moral imperative’ — and thus joining up with anarchism.

During the course of its history, the workers’ movement has confronted three main adversaries: anarchism last century, social democratic reformism at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Stalinism between the two world wars. These currents were all banded against the proletariat at a crowning moment of the counter—revolution: the war in Spain in 1936. It must be recognized that councilism, even though it was one of the healthiest reactions against the degeneration of the Communist International and was able to hold to class positions during the worst moments of the counter—revolution, achieved the rare exploit of taking up many of the basic analyses of these three currents, even when its viewpoint did not lead to the abandonment of any revolutionary perspective — which was the case with some of its best elements. These are some of the implications of rejecting the proletarian character of October 1917.

CA

FOOTNOTES

1. See: ‘The Epigones of Councilism’, International Review no.2; ‘The Degeneration of the Russian Revolution’ and ‘The Lessons of Kronstadt’, IR no.3; ‘Platform of the ICC’, IR no.5; ‘Contributions on Period of Transition’, no.6; ‘The Communist Left in Russia’ IR nos. 8 & 9; ‘Texts on the Period of Transition’, IR no.11.

2. Preface to Selected Works of Lenin by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism (Central Committee of the CPSU).

3. See the following articles: ‘Degeneration of the Russian Revolution’, International Review no.3 and ‘The Communist Left in Russia’, IR nos. 8 & 9.

4. See the ICC pamphlet ‘The Decadence of Capitalism’ and other ICC texts.

In September 1977 an international discus­sion Conference called by political groups in Norway (including Arbeiderkamp) and in Sweden (including Arbetarmakt and Interna­tionell Revolution) took place, with the participation of the Communist Workers Organization and the ICC. We will publish the text presented by the ICC to this Conference at a later date. This text underlines the necessity to clarify the questions of state capitalism and national liberation, which are at the centre of dis­cussions in Scandinavia, in order to draw out the perspectives for international regroupment.

At the present time there are three things which any aspiring revolutionary group must understand: first of all, that other groups exist, that it is not the one and only group, which must evolve in isolation; secondly, that the development of class consciousness necessarily involves the con­frontation of political positions in the revolutionary milieu throughout the world; thirdly, that this vital discussion must be organized, that it cannot carry on through hearsay but must have an adequate framework, determined by the need for a regroupment of revolutionary energies.

Thus it is necessary to draw out agreed posi­tions, but also to define points of disagree­ment between groups. Revolutionaries must have criteria for deciding what divergences can be contained within one organization. The ICC has always been convinced of the need to reject monolithism. The idea of demanding total agreement on everything at all times before constituting a revolutio­nary organization is an aberration of small sects; it has never been part of the wor­kers' movement. However, it is also neces­sary to recognize that there are limitations to the disagreements existing in a proleta­rian group. For all these reasons discussion must be organized in an effective way. It is in order to defend this point of view -- which seems obvious to us -- that the ICC is concerned to extend international discus­sion as widely as possible. The texts in this issue show that this concern has not always been understood. Nevertheless we can only continue the effort that revolutio­naries have been engaged in since Zimmerwald, the first years of the Communist Internat­ional, and the work of the Communist Left.

In 1933 the Italian Left, in no.1 of Bilan, issued an appeal for discussion and research to all revolutionary groups it considered to be close to it, while maintaining an exemplary firmness on programmatic positions. The Italian Left in those days was very different from its pale shadow, the PCI (Programme Communiste) today, whose megalo­mania about the party is no cover for its degeneration on political positions. The spirit of openness, the recognition of the need for rapprochement between revolutio­naries, dominated the work of Internationalisme in the 1940s, to give the example of a group which was the direct predecessor of the ICC. This concern has animated our Current since its beginnings, especially because we are living in a period of deep­ening crisis and class struggle.

It was with this concern for the confronta­tion of political positions that the Inter­nationalist Communist Party (Battaglia Comunista) called a Conference in Milan, and it was in the same spirit that the ICC went to this Conference and invited other groups to its own Congress. When we went to Milan, we insisted on Battaglia Comunista inviting other groups, including all those who have come out of the Italian Left. Did we call for an unprincipled ‘get-together'? Absolutely not: The ICC rejected the idea of inviting Trotskyist groups like Combat Communiste and stressed the need to put forward clear political criteria for such a Conference. At the same time we reject the idea of hiding behind small so-called ‘autonomous' groups, which come from who knows where and represent who knows what politically -- a method which Pour Une Intervention Communiste (PIC) seems to have fallen into. On the contrary, the ICC went to Oslo in September to meet with serious political groups. The letter we are pub­lishing here is a balance-sheet of this experience, and aims to show that revolut­ionaries don't discuss for its own sake or to ‘clarify' in a purely abstract sense, but in order to work concretely and consc­iously towards regroupment. Everything which goes in this direction is positive, despite all the obstacles in the way. Everything which turns its back on this is negative and only serves to accentuate the isolation and weakness of the re-emerging revolutionary movement.

ICC

From: The International Communist Current

To: The Participants in the ‘Non-Leninist Conference' in Scandinavia

Dear Comrades,

We are writing this letter to continue the political dialogue begun among the various groups at the Oslo Conference, to clarify the nature of the ICC's intervention and to draw the conclusions from this experience.

Right from the outset, the process of political clarification in Scandinavia has been a focus of attention for the ICC (‘0pen Letter to Arbetarmakt', see Internat­ional Review no.4 in 1975, visits to the various groups over the last two years, correspondence) because such a process implicitly concerns all revolutionaries and has much more than simply local repercuss­ions.

Internationalism is the very basis of the workers' movement; it evokes and epitomizes the substance of the world proletariat's struggle against capital, against exploit­ation and alienation. It is not at all a question of ‘linking up' separate national proletariats or even a simple matter of solidarity or mutual aid. Internationalism expresses the fundamental unity of the wor­king class, of the problems it faces in struggle, of its experiences and the lessons to be drawn. Internationalism is an expre­ssion of the goals of the communist progra­mme which, in our period of the decadence of capitalism, constitutes the only basis for a revolutionary movement anywhere in the world.

What is true for the working class as a whole is even more true for its revolution­ary elements. Contrary to the ‘non-interf­erence in internal affairs' typical of the bourgeoisie and its nationalist framework, there are no specifically ‘Scandinavian' political questions which are separate from the communist programme as a whole. There are no Scandinavian affairs which must be dealt with before ‘opening up to the outside'. The recognition of this fundamental fact determined the calling of the recent Oslo Conference.

The revolutionary movement does not have organizations determined by nationalities or regions but rather by different political currents of thoughts in the proletariat. The aim of a revolutionary organization is to contribute to the development of class consciousness in the working class through intervention based on clear political analyses. This aim can never be furthered by flattering national exclusiveness or self-containment. Political currents do not necessarily flourish homogeneously in one ‘homeland' and the development of a revolutionary regroupment in Scandinavia for example, cannot be carried through in isolation. It has to benefit from the reflection and experiences (and the errors, so as not to repeat them) of other revolut­ionary currents in history and today; it must draw on international contact and discussion not only with the ICC but with the Communist Workers Organization (CWO), Pour Une Intervention Communiste (PIC), Battaglia Comunista, Fomento Obrero Revolucionario -- that is to say, the main currents in the international revolutionary milieu today. It is in this spirit that the invitation was extended to the Oslo Conference and that the ICC understood its own need to participate in such efforts (also the May 1977 Conference called by Battaglia). We can only hope that such efforts will continue. In this general framework we would like to offer our thou­ghts on the Oslo Conference and the discus­sions.

First and foremost the Oslo Conference was an important step in coming to grips with certain fundamental political questions. The agenda contained discussion on state capitalism and on the nature of national liberation struggles in our period. Part­icipants at the Conference included not only the representatives from the various groups and circles in Norway and Sweden (Arbetarmakt, Arbetarkamp, Marxist Study Group, For Kommunismen, Internationell Revolution, Trondheim circle, etc) but also the delegations from the CWO and the ICC. In its aims and broad outlines this Conference (as the two previous ones held in Scandinavia) can indeed be seen as a manifestation of the general reawakening and questioning taking place in the working class today.

There were, however, several disparate and often contradictory concerns expressed during the Conference which we could broadly characterize as follows:

-- a militant will to clarify political perspectives so as to become an active factor in the class struggle; this concern was by and large the dominant one at the Conference;

-- a certain academic approach which consid­ered marxism as the object of university seminars;

-- a diffuse preoccupation with ‘individual fulfillment', with vestiges of the ‘total revolution' ideology of 1968.

This last rather vague concern, for example, was felt in the emphasis given by some to the idea that political conferences were not so much a place for collective confro­ntation of analyses and positions as, more important in their mind, an opportunity for individual edification and expression. A focus on individuals is aided and abetted by the ‘revolt in daily life' mystique and is partly responsible for the lack of collective structure and cohesiveness in some of the groups.

This low-key concern with the vestiges of libertarianism is perhaps a leftover from the origins of many of the groups which came from splits with the Anarchist Feder­ation. In any case, individual fulfillment in capitalism is an impossibility and almost all efforts to concretize the ‘total revolution' end up in a caricature of ‘liberated behavior'. In fact, revolutionary conferences are not held for indiv­idual self-expression or realization but to develop a clearer sense of political dir­ection, to allow for the most efficient elaboration and confrontation of ideas. In its most debilitating form the individ­ualistic conception leads to the notion that if one is bored or sleepy it is not necessary to come to meetings or discuss­ions for hours at a time. Every man for himself -- the breakdown of organized, collective action.

The ‘academic' approach on the other hand was more obvious and openly expressed. First there was the persistent suggestion to transform the Conference into a series of seminar groups, small workshops with group leaders -- a procedure typical of any respectable and ever so slightly progressive British-style university conference. This suggestion was all the more puzzling because of the small number of militants actually participating in the Conference. The invitation to the ICC originally specified that the ICC and the CWO would each be asked to deliver a two to three hour lect­ure followed by a question-and answer period -- in much the same way as a visiting foreign professor would be invited to give a talk on marxology or Kierkegaard's conception of the void. The ICC brought this point up in its correspondence and the plan was in fact changed. Then there was an unsettling insistence on certain types of subjects (‘what is capital' or the decline in the profit rate or the saturation of markets) thought more worthy of discuss­ion than other points too basely ‘political'. Finally, there was a disdain if not outright hostility expressed towards polemics, towards the confrontation of political positions in debate, which supposedly cloud the clean air of the disinterested scholar. Confronting positions was considered ‘superficial' or simply an exercise in ‘talking like a leaflet'.

Taken to its logical conclusions, this attitude leads to a rejection of the very aim of discussion: to draw political con­clusions and arrive at an overall orient­ation which determines the framework for intervention in the class struggle. No matter how much all revolutionaries today suffer from the organizational break with the workers' movement of the past due to the long years of counter-revolution, no matter how difficult it may be to retrace the historical and theoretical links of revolutionary marxism, this can never be an excuse for the abdication of political responsibility. However long a process of regroupment may take, in Scandinavia or elsewhere, the framework of discussion can never be ‘study for its own sake'; the regroupment of revolutionaries on a clear programmatic basis must be the explicit goal determining the content, form and pace of discussion. A study circle can indeed be a step towards political clarification provided it does not become an end in its­elf, for ‘ten years', or a fiction of self-edification which becomes completely alien to any revolutionary content.

It is not simply a question of criticizing certain academic ‘forms' of organization. To counter the insistence on the academic style study-workshop approach it would be enough for the comrades to get out of their shell and go to other conferences among revolutionaries elsewhere in the world or read the way conferences of revolutionary organizations proceeded in the past. No, it is not a question of form in itself but a broader question of method.

Marxism is a weapon in combat, an arm in the class struggle. It is not a neutral science. If we are all united in our desire to deepen our understanding of marx­ism, to apply it to the current situation, this can only be done as a committed militant revolutionary. The marxology churned out by the academics of bourgeois institutions is a denatured, meaningless recuperation of the content of historical materialism.

Concerning the reproach against polemics, in the marxist method there is necessarily the clash of social forces and the confr­ontation of political positions. The notion of a ‘neutral' expose of ideas is anything but marxism which all through the history of the workers' movement has developed precisely as criticism and pole­mic. Marx's Capital which seems to be a fixation point of certain preoccupations was written as a "Critique of Political Economy". Most of the major works of marxism, the positions which influenced the course of the class struggle, of the organizations of the proletariat, of the revolutionary wave itself were developed in the heat of polemic, the confrontation of political positions, in practice. There is no other marxism.

Furthermore, marxist revolutionaries have always realized that clarification is indeed a process which, although it has no ‘end', has a beginning. Where is the beginning for us today? Should we recap­itulate Marx's own path and begin with Hegel (and why not further back all the way to Plato to get a full idea of the evolut­ion of philosophy)? Should we begin with Quesnay and Smith and work up to the labor theory of value until we get to . . . 1977? Or should we rather begin as the ICC (and the CWO and the PIC) has done from the experience of the highest and most recent expression of proletarian consciousness, the left communist movement which broke from the degeneration of the IIIrd Inter­national? The criterion is obviously the situation facing the working class today. We are not in a period of social peace with endless vistas for intellectual maturity ahead of us. On the contrary, the pressure of reality imposes a working class resist­ance to the crisis of the capitalist system. Sporadic and episodic upsurges of revolt encounter powerful obstacles. In this context revolutionary elements are scatter­ed and isolation plagues even the organized groupings. What then are we to think of those who ‘have no clearly delineated positions' on the major problems facing class struggle today but who choose to spend their time scoring points in the decline of the profit rate vs the saturat­ion of markets debate?

Although these points of theoretical clar­ification can have important consequences on a general level, they are not and have never been (for Grossman, Mattick, Luxem­burg or Lenin) the determining factors for revolutionary regroupment or intervention. Comrades holding different theoretical positions on this question worked together in the same organization because agreement was first and foremost political, based on a common platform or programme. The theor­etical roots of the crisis are certainly an important subject which Marx and his successors have made a great effort to clarify for more than 100 years in the workers' movement. But this subject only has a meaning in the proletarian camp. The bourgeoisie can also find the confront­ation of different theories ‘interesting' and even ‘intellectually stimulating'. Without a clear delineation of a common class terrain, of a revolutionary perspec­tive, such discussion is tantamount to turning one's back on the vital political questions facing the workers' struggle today.

The fixations of academic-type concerns what­ever they may latch onto are in fact an expression of the hesitancy and resistance to militant commitment in class struggle on the part of elements who have not yet bro­ken with the student milieu. A smokescreen, a confession that class struggle seems ‘so very far away' ... On this point the liber­tarian and academic approaches do indeed converge.

Nevertheless, despite many difficulties, the militant concern for clarification dominated the conference. The discussions brought out the need for further clarification on:

1. State capitalism, a manifestation of the permanent crisis of capitalism in decadence, a tendency which exists in all countries today to one degree or another; this posi­tion was defended in its major tenets by many comrades from Scandinavia and by the CWO and the ICC.

This position was opposed to the ‘state-bureaucratic mode of production' theory defended by comrades from Arbetarmakt; their document, with the aid of quotations from Kuron and Modzelevski considers the Eastern bloc countries and Russia as neither capitalist nor socialist but a ‘third sys­tem' which is ‘progressive' in the absence of proletarian struggle.

2. The national question today which consti­tutes the practical application of the understanding of decadence and state capitalism; ‘national liberation struggles' are the spearhead of the capitalist preparation for generalized war and the formation of a solid revolutionary current in Scandinavia must be predicated on a firm rejection of any ambiguities about the progressive nature of state capitalism or nationalism.

It is in this sense that the ICC intends to continue debate, asking that the comrades of Arbetarmakt seriously consider the ambig­uities of their positions and the grave political implications of their support for national liberation struggles.

Political discussion at the Conference was very positive with a great effort being made by Scandinavian comrades to translate and facilitate debate. Many important deci­sions were made: to publish a bulletin (in English too) with the texts and report of the Conference to provide a framework for future organized discussion, the decision to invite other non-Scandinavian groups to future Conferences.

Revolutionary potential exists in Scandina­via but militant energies must release them­selves from the weight of academic and liber­tarian preoccupations. If some groups or circles were more representative in some ways of a certain approach, overall there is no real homogeneity within the Scandinavian groups. No one type of pre­occupation was the exclusive property of any one particular group. Some of the exis­ting groups have difficulty creating a collective sense of direction, assuming responsibility for regular publication, creating an organizational cohesion. When coherence is not clearly defined political­ly, there is little reason how or why it should be expressed organizationally.

Sooner or later the groups in Scandinavia must come to conclusions about political definition. Experience has shown, particu­larly in the last ten years that groups which do not manage to free themselves from academic or libertarian fixations rapidly fall into modernism and disappear. The list is all too long: Manifestgruppen, Kommunis­men and Basis in Scandinavia; ICO, Mouvement Communiste in France, For Ourselves in the US, etc. There seems to be ‘all the time in the world' ... and yet the same mistakes are made.

Comrades often wonder whether the process of clarification and the inevitable selec­tion it entails would not mean a drastic reduction in the number of militants, break­ing up the ‘togetherness' of confusion or ambiguity. It must be said that the impor­tance of regroupment on the basis of revo­lutionary principles goes far beyond a ques­tion of numbers in the immediate sense. But in fact, in the long run, clarification brings the only positive results even num­erically because inertia and slow decompo­sition (whether back into blatant activism or into less obvious forms of intellectua­lism) demoralizes and exhausts the comrades, especially the new ones. In the end, for lack of a sense of direction, the whole house of cards falls in.

The process of revolutionary regroupment to­day encounters many obstacles along the way. This is not surprising and the difficulties in Scandinavia are much the same as those faced by comrades elsewhere. Nevertheless obstacles must be recognized for what they are. In this sense, we regret that the Conference rejected the idea of setting up a coordinating committee (consisting of members of the different groups and circles in Scandinavia) which was to plan future efforts towards regroupment taking into account the points of agreement and the points still needing clarification.

In fact, at the end of the Conference, cer­tain comrades exasperated by the ‘overly political' aspects of the discussion or perhaps by the ICC or CWO ‘intrusion' in Scandinavian debates, suggested that the future Conference in January be held along different lines: the limitation of two participants only from any foreign group (this was a modification of a proposal for their complete elimination), the re-estab­lishment of the tutorial and workshop form of discussion, an agenda devoted solely to theories of crisis: decline in the profit rate and saturation of markets. This sug­gestion was substantially accepted in the last hour of the Conference despite another proposal from other comrades in Scandinavia who asked that the next Conference continue the gains of the present discussion by fur­ther clarifying the national question and discussing the role of revolutionaries in the class struggle.

The decision to discuss only economic theory (kapital logik) at the next Confer­ence -- and thus in the six-month prepara­tion period -- is tantamount to turning one's back on the vital issues of political definition, refusing to face the implica­tions of the discussion in September. The January Conference, as it is now conceived, is not a further step along the path of clarification but a detour, a manifestation of resistance to dealing with the very meaning of a common political platform and its crucial importance.

Isn't the limitation of ‘foreigners' really symptomatic of a fear of being ‘eaten up' by what are thought to be ‘rival' organiza­tions, a desire to preserve a Scandinavian identity and individuality in discussion?

The ICC considers that the January Conference plan in its present form constitutes a dispersion of revolutionary efforts, a detour which will fritter away potential energies. Considering that it is an enormous effort for us to travel so far for what we sincere­ly think is a detour: tutorial sessions on Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital; consid­ering that it is impossible for us to inter­vene in Swedish or Norwegian or to under­stand these languages without an interpreter which would be almost impossible in small-group conversations; considering that our inevitable effort to put the debate onto a clearly political path will be met by even more virulent exasperation on the part of the elements who refuse this approach; it seems to us that an ICC presence at this particular Conference is useless both for you and for us. Concerning the agenda in January we refer you to the texts the ICC has written on this subject and more gene­rally to the contributions of many revolu­tionary currents today and to the classics of marxism. Concerning the crucial question of Scandinavian regroupment, a task which deeply affects revolutionaries wherever they may live, we ask you to reconsider your pre­sent orientation and to take up the sugges­tion to plan a more relevant Conference for which all the Scandinavian groups would pre­pare contributions on the agenda originally proposed: the national question and the role of revolutionaries, with the aim of explicit­ly moving towards regrouping forces before the impetus is lost.

Comrades, it is an illusion of bourgeois ideology to think that the problems of the world are ‘so far away' from Scandinavia. The deepening economic depression, the acce­leration of the war economy, the rise of class struggle, the obstacles to the devel­opment of class consciousness, the weakness of the revolutionary movement due to the legacy of the counter-revolution, all create the urgent need for the formation of a revo­lutionary current in the Scandinavian coun­tries which will be increasingly hard-hit by the world crisis. Despite the difficult­ies encountered by the groups in Scandinavia, the organization of the Conference corres­ponds to the beginnings of an answer to an objective need. As such, we hope that this initiative will be an encouragement to all revolutionaries. The intervention of the ICC is intended to help the process of clarification, not by flattery, ‘secret diplomacy' or subtle ‘tactics' but by clearly stating our point of view and criti­cizing conceptions which we consider incorr­ect. The decision rests with you and the ultimate responsibility is yours.

This letter is a contribution to the inter­nal bulletin you have set up. We hope to continue correspondence and contact with all the groups. Hopefully we will see you at future Conferences. We reiterate our invi­tation to any comrade to visit our sections any time and take this opportunity to thank you for your hospitality during our stay.

Fraternally and with communist greetings,

International Communist Current

12 November 1977

Presentation

The following has been written by the comrades of Aberdeen and Edinburg sections of the Communist Workers' Organization, who left CWO last July. The text points to some of the crucial problems faced by the revolutionary movement today, namely, the question of regroupment and the task of revolutionaries. from this standpoint, the text is a poignant testimony of a negative experience of the present proletarian movement. The CWO, a revolutionary group in Britain, was formed in 1975 fundamentally as an ‘anti-ICC' organization and to provide an ‘alternative pole of regroupment' internationally. Its subsequent splits and sectarian evolution confirm that revolutionaries cannot evade their responsibilities to the re-emerging class struggle, to the crying need of the proletariat to create for itself afirm, coherent and active pole of revolu­tionary clarification. Being one of the most vital weapons of the class, the future party of the class can only be forged if today revolutionaries understand the need to "... become aware of the :immense responsi­bilities which they have, to abandon the false quarrels which separate them, to sur­mount the deceptive divisions which the old world has imposed on them" (ICC, Manifesto, 1976). This is the spirit which permeates the text of the ex-CWO comrades.

We are presenting this text as part of a continuous effort to broaden out the lessons that the proletariat can learn from this and similar experiences. It is the break in organic continuity with the revolutionary movement developed in the last proletarian wave (1917-23) which helps explain many of the hesitations and confusions on the cruc­ial question of regroupment. It is perhaps on this issue that the present movement shows the greatest immaturity, the greatest disorientation.

The text by the Aberdeen/Edinburgh comrades presented here is not a complete version.For reasons of space we were forced to delete the first sections, dealing mainly with general questions of class consciousness, the development of class lines by the hist­orical workers' movement, the way that the movement of history appears to the communist minorities and the confusions of the CWO on these theoretical and practical questions. The parts that are included deal more with the history of the CWO and its present and future orientation, drawing out some of the important lessons from this experience. The complete text can be obtained from: M. Gavin, 27 Ashvale Place, Aberdeen, Scotland; or from the address of the ICC in Britain, BM Box 869, London WC1V 6xx.

Finally, the introduction of the comrades themselves speaks eloquently for the whole approach and concerns of their document:

A statement from the seceders

"On 31 July 1977, the Aberdeen and Edinburgh sections of the CWO split from that organization. Ostensibly the reason for the split was disagreement over the class nature of the International Communist Current, the Aberdeen and Edinburgh members maintaining, in opposition to the rump of CWO, that the ICC were not only part of the communist movement but were in fact a pole of regroupment of that movement. The split, unfortunately, took place very speedily, long before the arguments had been given time to mature. This text is an attempt to re­dress that. What began as an empirical defense of the communist nature of the ICC has deepened and broadened into a theoretical analysis of the nature of the whole proletarian movement, the meaning and function of class lines and, most difficult of all, the question of organi­zation and the regroupment of revolutio­naries.

This document is a conscious effort to participate in and contribute to the pro­cess of clarification and regroupment which has been taking place internation­ally throughout the past few years. We have no doubt that the ICC is the focus of this regroupment. The text also attempts to locate the CWO's inability to participate in this process within a critique of the theoretical confusions of the CWO and its consequently erroneous practice. If the tone is sharp, that is in the nature of polemical works. The intent is fraternal. We write in the hope that the comrades who remain within the CWO will be able to overcome their political confusions and take their right­ful place within the communist movement."

We have no doubt that this discussion will strengthen the whole proletarian movement today, because the lessons have international implications as to how to lessen the inevit­able pangs that the proletarian resurgence will confront as it unifies its forces to finally annihilate the capitalist order.

ICC

The CWO: Past, Present and Future

Unable to understand the class movement and its political expressions the CWO has no basis for understanding its own past and in fact, throughout its history, has shown a marked reluctance to even try. By July 1977 in two successive splits, it had lost 75 per cent of its membership leaving only a rump of a few comrades and had lost virtually all contact with other political groups. Yet it is only now and with ‘reluctance' that, any public response has been made and even this attempt to deal with its own history has only been produced to forestall "hostile political tendencies already embarked upon the jobs". An account of the CWO's history is underta­ken here by us to substantiate our analysis that in theory and in practice the CWO is a fundamentally sectarian organization.

 

Prehistory

 

By the end of the sixties capitalism's post­war boom was grinding to a halt and the pro­letariat throughout the globe was beginning once again to take the offensive. The inev­itable reflection of this was the emergence of political fractions of the class strugg­ling to achieve clarity on their own nature and on the tasks facing them. Both the fractions which were to become the CWO (Revo­lutionary Perspectives and Workers' Voice) participated in this process. Although the article ‘Two Years of the CWO' in the latest Revolutionary Perspectives describes quite accurately the organizational outcome of this process -- the formation of the ICC and the fusion of RP and WV -- the political achievements of this process are completely ignored. Although the CWO choose to forget it, it was within this process that the fundamentals which communists defend today were first systematically elaborated in the present period; viz the concept of capita­list decadence and all the political conse­quences which flow from it and just as impor­tantly, the reaffirmation of the vital necessity of the existence of a single centralized class party. The central role which Revolution Internationale, now the French section of the ICC, and Internationalism, now the American section of the ICC, played in this process, is just not mentioned and neither is the debt which the CWO owes for its pre­sent level of clarity. For example, com­rades constituting RP entered the process with no clear concept of decadence, belie­ving that the Russian Revolution was bour­geois and having little understanding of the meaning and function of a communist organization. However, understandably, the CWO might find itself embarrassed if it were to acknowledge that the bulk of the class positions they defend today were der­ived largely from organizations they charac­terize as bourgeois. (Or are they only bourgeois now anal weren't then?) However, it would be wrong to portray the RP elements as playing nothing but a passive role in this process. All the fractions which part­icipated were more or less confused and to a greater or lesser degree all contributed. That is the reality of the proletarian movement that the CWO now chooses to deny.

The central focus of the process of clarifi­cation rapidly became the question of organi­zation and regroupment. The groups which were clearest on this, who understood the necessity of international regroupment around the emerging class lines, in theory and in practice, coalesced to form, initial­ly the International Tendency and eventually the ICC. That the IT/ICC was the pole of regroupment was initially clearly recognized by RP. "In this period the pole of coher­ence was undoubtedly WR and the Internatio­nal Tendency to which you belong" (letter from RP to WR, December 1974).

This same letter makes quite clear that RP's political genesis was not for the fundamen­tal purpose of taking up the totality of communist tasks in the way that the ICC had formed around class lines but was in fact an organizational device to facilitate entry into the ICC, though the contradictions in­volved in forming one organization in order to join another appear to have been missed by the members of RP:

"... On our subsequent decision to write a Platform together; this was undertaken as a step towards integration in the International Tendency. To quote from a letter we sent to WR (2 September 1974): ‘We are considering the possibility of beginning to relate to WR as a collective and to work towards fusion collectively'."

In other words, RP owes its very birth to an attempt to identify itself vis-a-vis the ICC. This passage also makes nonsense of the CWO's claim in ‘Two Years of the CWO' that it was ridiculous of the ICC "to claim to be the kernal of the future communist party" since at the beginning RP quite clearly recognized it as such.

However, very rapidly, RP began to discover ‘barriers' to the process of regroupment on which they had embarked. The main problems put forward were the question of the econo­mic foundations of decadence, the question of a rigorous analysis of the last revolu­tionary wave, particularly in Russia, the problem of the proletarian state in the period of transition and the question of proletarian ‘bastions' mediating with the international bourgeoisie. RP was not the only group which failed to grapple with the organizational question. Other groups also began to resist regroupment and to draw away from the ICC -- Union Ouvriere, PIC, WV, the Revolutionary Workers' Group (US), etc. In this situation RP began consciously to attempt to function as an alternative pole of regroupment. The only group succes­sfully attracted was WV. Fusion took place in September 1975 and the CWO was formed. Within a short but crisis-ridden year the CWO had split into its original two constit­uents. In ‘Two Years of the CWO' the explanation is stated to be: "In the context of a temporary relaxation of the crisis in early 1976, the re-employment of many of the members (WV) and a trickle of sectional strikes in Merseyside."

All this leading the Liverpool members back into their bad old ouvrierist ways! This account is not only a travesty of reality but is also a travesty of the clarity with which the CWO was once able to view the whole sorry business. "It was felt that the old WV had never accepted the politics of the fusion, rather they used RP as a shield against the ICC" (extract from minutes of CWO meeting no.5, 9 October 1976).

In other words, the original regroupment had been fundamentally different from the process of regroupment which had given birth to the ICC; instead its only function was an attempt to form an anti-ICC in the manner of the mediaeval anti-Popes. That the regroup­ment was profoundly not on the basis of a greater programmatic coherence than the ICC is proved in the words of the CWO itself, talking of the fusion meeting at which the Platforms of both WV and RP were discussed:

"In retrospect the two main areas of disagreement or incoherence ... 1. The Russian Revolution; 2. The economics of decadence can be seen as a symptom of lack of sufficient coherence." (Text by the Aberdeen section, ‘Crisis in the CWO')

The disagreement on Russia consisted of a general difficulty within WV of recognizing the Bolsheviks as a proletarian expression and in particular, one member didn't even accept the revolution itself as a proletarian event! The problem over economics was that by and large WV had no economic analysis; what there was had been cribbed from RP.

In Revolutionary Perspectives, no.8, the regroupment is described as taking place with ‘misgivings' on the part of RP. This is a pathetic description compared to the one already expressed by the CWO in ‘Crisis in the CW0'. In attempting to account for the crises which racked it: "We would argue that this was the result of ... a political dishonesty of almost unbelievable level on the part of RP."

All this was taking place at a time when the CWO were intransigently denouncing the ICC for their opportunism in regroupment and their alleged willingness to water down political agreement in order to expand! (It is to be noted that disagreements over anal­ysis of the Russian Revolution and over economics presented no barriers to regroup­ment in this case.)

With hindsight it is easy to see that the eventual disintegration was implicit in the fusion itself since the political dynamic of the new organization was essentially an unreal one. The focus of regroupment was not coherence on the class lines and the tasks of a communist group but mutual hos­tility to the ICC. Even before this regroup­ment took place the sectarianism implicit in RP began to take tangible shape. In February 1975 the ‘Open Letter to the ICC' (RP, no.8) was drawn up. In this letter the theoretical cul-de-sac RP was building for themselves first saw the light of day. RP's dividing lines which had hitherto been areas for discussion between communist groups were now characterized as ‘class lines'.

"For us it is a class line to advocate any state outside the workers' councils or to advocate anything but the with­drawal of proletarian bastions from the world market." (our emphasis)

and

"For us, Kronstadt, the March Action, Frontism, or the NEP, constitute the definitive demise of the IIIrd Interna­tional and any discussion that goes be­yond is a discussion with the counter­revolution." (original emphasis)

The final conclusion, the counter-revolutionary nature of the ICC was avoided however on the grounds that their ‘errors' were ‘subjective'. But in RP, no.4 in ‘The Convulsions of the ICC' the process reached its logical conclusion. The ‘errors' were no longer subjective and the ICC was decla­red to be a bourgeois organization on the grounds that:

a. they didn't regard 1921 as the final de­mise of the Russian Revolution;

b. being wrong on the class nature of the Trotskyist Left Opposition;

c. advocating that a revolutionary bastion mediate with the peasantry and the inter­national bourgeoisie.

and with that the trap clanged shut.

The logic made so explicit in the CWO's relationship with the ICC was implicit in its relationships with other groups. Not surprisingly by mid-1977, the CWO's isola­tion was, to all intents and purposes com­plete. It was this situation which formed the background to the events which led to the members of the CWO from Aberdeen and Edinburgh splitting from the, CWO and re­orienting ourselves towards the ICC. Inevi­tably this process was a difficult and pain­ful one. That is implicit in any split within the communist movement and also in any struggle for clarity. Our initial attempts to overcome the sectarian trap the CWO (with our help) had backed itself into were unavoidably hesitant and confused. The initial document ‘Class Lines and Organiza­tion' (see RP, no.8) which we produced for discussion within the CWO was an expression of this. It was basically an attempt to defend the communist nature of the ICC by trying to accommodate them within the total­ity of the CWO's monument of sectarianism. It was only with great difficulty that we became clear that the problem was not that the CWO had misinterpreted the ICC but that the CWO's model for understanding the com­munist movement and the function of class lines was at fault. By isolating that text and treating it in RP, no.8, in ‘Two Years of the CWO' as a finished product rather than as the first step in a process, the CWO conveniently managed to side step the political questions posed by the split.

Not only was the text an early expression of the process in which we were engaged but the split and the manner in which it took place were so also. The split occurred after only two meetings and one text from either side. With hindsight we can see that we were guilty of the very monolithism and rigidity with which we were indicting the CWO. It would obviously have been more valuable and productive to have attempted to remain within the CWO so that our subse­quent development could have occurred within the CWO instead of outside it and against it (though doubtless our expulsion would have been fairly rapid). In splitting with such rapidity we abdicated our respon­sibility to our comrades who remained.

CWO: The Present

The events of the past year and the increas­ingly isolated position of the CWO have obviously left their mark. Even before the latest split discussions were taking place to attempt to understand and overcome this isolation. The latest split has accelerated the process. However, lacking both the capacity and the willingness for self-analysis, the CWO's attempt to understand their decline and fall in RP, no.8 can only present a picture of a seemingly hostile world at which they stare with an equal mix­ture of self-righteous truculence and genuine bewilderment. We are presented with an explanation which is no more than a description:

"The second year of the CWO was marked by a tendency towards isolation caused by a. the departure of certain interna­tional contacts whose sympathies lay with the Liverpool ouvrierists (in Australia, USA); b. the success of the ICC in winning over wavering individuals who shared some of our views (eg Belgium); c. the increa­sing toll the lull in the crisis and class struggle took of revolutionary groups."

Their analysis of both splits is basically identical, locating the reason in a combina­tion of the immediate level of the crisis and the personal and political inadequacy of individual members. In Liverpool's case an outbreak of local strikes lured them back into their ouvrierist ways. But in any case they never really accepted the CWO's politics (see quote above from Group Report, no.5). In the case of Aberdeen/Edinburgh a downturn in the struggle produced demora­lization and an unwillingness to accept the political burdens (see ‘Two Years of the CWO', p.37). In any case Aberdeen/Edin­burgh never really accepted the CWO's poli­tics either: " ... it's clear that you have not rejected the CWO's positions; indeed, what is clear is that you have never under­stood many of them" (letter from the CWO to Aberdeen/Edinburgh, 19 September 1977).

(If nothing else, the discovery that in little more than a year 75 per cent of the members of the only communist organization in the world didn't really qualify for membership should give the CWO some food for thought.) In this way the CWO has attempted to theorize its isolation and disintegra­tion in terms which placed responsibility firmly outside the CWO itself. If the CWO admits responsibility at all for any of it, it is merely at the level of their ‘naivety' and "insufficiently thorough propaganda work" ... (RP, no.8, p.54). Never for a moment is the notion entertained that their situation might be due to the contradic­tions inherent in their theory and practice.

The logic implicit in the condemnation of the ICC as counter-revolutionary was, under the impetus of the latest split, developed explicitly by the CWO to what must be its end point. That is, to be part of the pro­letarian movement an organization must de­fend a body of class lines which amount to the totality of the CWO's Platform. (The CWO have on occasion stated that economics are not a class line but past practice seems to deny this or at least to suggest that it presents an insurmountable barrier to regroupment (see the PIC document in RP, no.8 and Milan document in a pamphlet on the Milan Conference called by Battaglia Comunista). Any organization failing to defend the totality of these positions is, by definition, bourgeois. Since, at the present, only the remaining members of the CWO defend this totality, logically all other political expressions are part of the counter-revolution. At a stroke the entire proletarian movement, struggling to achieve clarity, disappears into the ranks of the bourgeoisie. Only the CWO is communist; only the CWO is proletarian. Even their own origins must become nothing more than a series of bourgeois groups interacting in the early seventies to somehow magically produce a communist organization. That is the explanation for the isolation and impo­tence of the Communist Workers' Organization.

This lies in their fundamental misunderstan­ding of the meaning and function of class lines and that is the root cause of their inability to fully carry out the tasks of a communist organization. The CWO states, and we fully endorse, that the main tasks of a communist group are:

"1. The struggle for clarity about the nature of the class movement itself so that we may react back on the class by intervention to draw out and deepen those elements of the movement that tend to go beyond the framework of capitalism, and to hasten the class' self-clarification." (‘Crisis and Class Struggle', RP, no.3, p.15)

Undeniably the CWO produced a high level of political clarity and an impressive body of theoretical work and has consistently attemp­ted to intervene in the class via regular leafletting. But the ability of the commu­nist organization to play a meaningful part in the class struggle doesn't merely depend on the development of theoretical clarity. It is fundamentally underlaid and dependent on what the CWO states to be the other major task of a communist organization.

"2. Organizational preparation for the revolutionary period itself when the needs of the class will demand a single unified party across national frontiers and grouped around a coherent programme. This requires now (our emphasis) working internationally for regroupment on the basis of common practice and clear pro­grammatic agreement with those groups produced by the deepening crisis and the growing class activity." (Ibid)

And again,

"The CWO doesn't deny that regroupment of revolutionaries today is an important task of communists today ..." (Text of the CWO for the Oslo Conference, Septem­ber 1977.)

In the light of their contention that they are the only communists in the world how can this be taken seriously? With whom do they imagine they can regroup? The counter-­revolution? Having already set up a model which denies the existence of a proletarian movement outside their own Platform, how can the CWO possibly undertake the tasks which communists must perform within the proletarian movement? That is, how can they relate in a fraternal and constructive manner to other groups struggling for clarity in order to intervene and assist that struggle? If they cannot recognize the proletarian movement they certainly cannot function as a pole of coherence or regroupment within it. And let us be quite clear -- the only reason for struggling to function as a pole of coherence is for the purpose of regroupment.

Future

Even before the Aberdeen/Edinburgh split the CWO had decided on a more vigorous and outgoing policy towards the outside world in an effort to overcome their isola­tion. The fact that this must inevitably result in a heightening of the contradict­ion between their theory and practice is already in evidence. Thus we find in ‘A Reply to the Majority' (RP, no.8, p.54):

" ... we must relax our criteria for evaluating whether discussion with this or that group is ‘worthwhile'. If a group wishes to discuss with us it can only be because they see a common strand in our politics and that must be the basis on which we meet with them."

All political criteria, all political rig­orousness has been completely abandoned here in order to engage in debate. By this methodology the CWO could find itself in debate with virtually anyone. This is underlined even more brutally in the same paragraph.

"Thus we can only abandon the view in RP, no.4 that ‘ ... on no account can we debate with groups that defend some aspect of the counter-revolution'," (Ibid)

Let's not be mealy-mouthed about this. For the CWO a group which defends some aspect of the counter-revolution is, by their own definition, bourgeois. What a pitiful and painful position for a group which was once so clear on that very subject. What possi­ble dialogue can communists have with the bourgeoisie? Communists can have only one thing to say to the bourgeoisie -- and that is to demand that it leaves the stage of history or be destroyed. The policy of communists to the bourgeoisie can only be one of intransigent denunciation. The only possible gain that might accrue from the CWO's approach is the hope that they might be able to split individuals from the coun­ter-revolutionary groups which wish to debate with them, unless the CWO can pers­uade a bourgeois organization to become communist. That is a purely tactical approach and in complete contradiction to the political approach which communists are obliged to adopt towards the more or less clear fractions of the proletarian movement. Towards the latter, the aim and the obligation are to clarify the entire fraction so that it can take its place within a unified communist organization.

However, if the CWO's ‘new policy' for relations with the outside world must inevitably mean the destruction of its obligation to intransigently denounce the bourgeoisie, it also has a more positive and hopeful feature. It means that the CWO will refrain from intransigently denouncing their proletarian comrades also (albeit from reasons of oppor­tunism and dishonesty). Having opened up the possibility of dialogue with the bour­geoisie the CWO has necessarily opened up the possibility (inadvertently as it was) of dialogue with fellow communists and pro­letarians. That dialogue with anyone is impossible via denunciations, the CWO has learnt only too painfully over the past year. That the lesson has indeed gone home is evi­denced in their latest communication to the ICC ‘Some Questions for the ICC', Internatio­nal Review, no.12. Here the CWO mount a coherent attack on the specific positions of the ICC which they disagree with, but in order to keep the dialogue alive they have deliberately disemboweled the central thrust of their critique so that nowhere to be seen is the conclusion that the ICC is an arm of the bourgeoisie because of their analysis of the last revolutionary wave and the nature of the state in the period of transition. Instead the entire text is specifically situated within a debate taking place for the final purpose of regroupment.

By coming into existence RP implicitly posed the question: Can debates about the final end of the last revolutionary wave and the exact form of the dictatorship of the prole­tariat take place within a single organiza­tion? RP explicitly answered no!

With the publication of the ‘Open Letter to the ICC' in February 1975 the question changed to: Can such debates take place within the proletarian movement? Again RP (CWO) answered no!

The direct results of this fundamental sect­arianism were physical disintegration and political isolation. In now attempting to overcome this by changing their practice the CWO must inevitably highlight the contra­dictions in their theory. Hopefully the end result will be a resolution of their theoretical confusions. If not, the future can only hold for them either disintegra­tion or "the long slow agony of a sect", condemned to increasing isolation from the historic movement of the proletariat with only an obstructionist and confusion­ist role to play.

Comrades of the former

Aberdeen & Edinburgh sections of the CWO,

November 1977.

Introduction

The following text ‘Some Questions for the ICC’ is a reply by the Communist Workers’ Organization to the text ‘Political Confu­sions of the CWO’ which appeared in the International Review, no.10. The ICC wel­comes it as a contribution to international discussion amongst revolutionaries, and more specifically, as an expression of the will­ingness of the CWO to resume political dia­logue with the ICC, despite the fact that the CWO has not changed its evaluation of the ICC as a ‘counter-revolutionary’ group. We are also publishing a reply to the specific points and criticisms put forward by the CWO in this text.

**********

The article ‘Political Confusions of the CWO’ (International Review, no.10), exhibits once again the ICC in a cleft stick of its own making. On the one hand we are told that the CWO and the ICC share the same class positions, while on the other a criti­que of our ‘confusions’ reveals us as ‘bor­dering on’ or ‘virtually’ substitutionist, Stalinist, and self-managed at the same time. Are these then, not class lines, but rather ‘confusions’ which are compatible with the positions of the ICC? Only wishful thinking (or opportunism) can bridge the gap between asserting on the one hand that we share the same class positions, and on the other that our confusions lead us to counter-revolut­ionary stances.1 Since few of your mem­bers outside the UK or USA can have had the chance to either study our positions, or our critique of the ICC, we thought it might prove useful to take up some of the points raised in the above article, and demonstrate the inconsistencies of the ICC. Once we have established the seriousness of our differences with you, we hope this will spur you to treat them more seriously than you have in the past.

1. Economics

The analysis of the ICC of the contradict­ions of capitalism is at variance with that presented by Marx in Capital. Despite its incomplete nature, and inevitable concentra­tion on nineteenth century capitalism, the basic content and method of Marx’s theory can be used to explain all the phenomena of the decay of capitalism.2 The CWO recognizes that abandoning Marx’s ideas leads to various theoretical and practical errors which render a group confusionist, or even lead it onto the paths of counter­revolution.3 Thus, for the CWO there is no problem as to why we analyze economics; to establish a sure bedrock for our posi­tions, and elaborate a political perspective. But what is the situation with the ICC? “We fully recognize the importance of dis­cussing this issue (ie economics - CWO) within the workers’ movement” (International Review, no.10, p.14). One cannot take such a statement seriously, since in the nine years since the foundation of the parent group of the ICC (ie Revolution Internatio­nale), the organization has never produced a public explanation and defence of its economic basis that has gone beyond journalistic assertions. The only text of any economic weight (The Decadence of Capi­talism) mentions Rosa Luxemburg, on whose theories the ICC claim to base themselves, only once. Despite its ‘importance’, eco­nomics is hardly a pressing issue for the ICC. Since, for the ICC, economics is very much a decorative addition to marxism, and cannot in itself lead to confusions or counter-revolution, this is in effect quite logical. Why waste time fighting for Luxem­burg’s economics (leaving aside for a moment their basic indefensibility4), since this, or other economic theories have no implica­tions?

If the ICC recognizes the ‘importance’ of discussing economics, why has it never done so in a serious fashion? More seriously, why is it ‘important’ to discuss ‘this issue’ if its political implications are minimal? What you seem to really recognize is (to avoid charges of being vulgarizers of marx­ism) the need to say that you recognize the importance of economics. We offer the ICC space in our journal, Revolutionary Perspectives, to reply to the text in no.6 ‘The Accumulation of Contradictions’, or ‘The Economic Consequences of Rosa Luxemburg’. In addition, we invite you to explain why it is important, in your view, to discuss economics.

2. Russia

Not only with Rosa Luxemburg’s economic theories is the ICC defending the indefen­sible; the same applies to its analysis of the decline of the revolutionary wave, and the ending of proletarian power in Russia. Presumably, the ICC must agree that in 1917 the working class actually held political power in Russia -- otherwise it is inconcei­vable that a proletarian revolution could have occurred. But, behind a smokescreen of vagaries, the ICC has never said when the working class finally lost this power. Now, if we agree that in 1917 the class did hold power, but that in 1977 it no longer does, so then it follows logically that somewhere along the line it lost this power. As we have explained many times, March 1921 was Thermidor5 (the NEP, Kronstadt, the United Front) after which there was nothing proletarian in the Russian state, the Bolshevik party, or the Communist Interna­tional. The defeat of the world revolution meant it was impossible for any other out­come to the heroic Russian experience. The ICC’s wish to avoid this conclusion forces it into many convolutions that are little short of breathtaking. To give but one example, Kronstadt, formerly a class line is now excused since the “principles” for dealing with such a situation hadn’t been tried and tested. Does the proletariat need to establish as a principle that its own massacre is counter-revolutionary?

Further problems arise for the ICC in dealing with the class nature of the tenden­cies in Russia associated with the butcher of Kronstadt, Trotsky. Why was the so-called left opposition an expression (how­ever degenerated) of the proletariat? No answer to this has ever been given, nor could it be if the ICC seriously examine the programme of the opposition and Trotsky. Incredibly, the only argument advanced has been that the opposition fought against the idea of socialism in one country. But here the ICC reveals themselves as poor legatees. How could the opposition, which died as an organized movement in 1923, have fought a theory that was not even pro­pounded till over a year later? Perhaps once again the ICC is simply a victim of its lack of awareness of the facts. Is it really the United Opposition of 1927 (Kame­nev and all) that we should be saluting, since it nominally opposed the ‘socialism in one country’ thesis of Stalin?

But anyway the idea that the proclamation of ‘socialism in one country’ meant that anything had changed as regards Russia or the Bolshevik party is doubly absurd. In the first place the adoption of this theory changed nothing in the policies of the Bolsheviks, the Comintern or Russia, which were as counter-revolutionary before as after its adoption; similarly they changed nothing as regards the position of the Russian working class. In the second place, your own ‘method’ cries out against Stalin’s theory as a dividing line. The rejection of ‘socialism in one country’ was not an ‘already established principle’. As you’ve noted, even poor old Marx had lapses in that direction (eg Civil War In France), while Lenin had specifically defended the possibi­lity of such an achievement in 1915 (cf The United States of Europe Slogan). So at best you might argue that after it had been tried and failed, socialism in one country became a class line, ie the late 1930s; in no way could it instantaneously become so when pro­pounded by Stalin. (Who anyway saw it exact­ly as Lenin saw NEP as a holding operation till the next wave of revolution in the west -- see Isaac Deutscher on this). So you can hardly brush aside NEP, and foam at socialism in one country -- which was its out­come, The ICC chops and changes its method according to the conclusions it wishes to come to. Stalin’s innovations, or the betra­yals of social democracy in 1914 are instan­taneously class lines, while Kronstadt, the United Front etc, only become so after they have been tried and found wanting.

If you abandon the idea of 1921 as Thermidor, there is no possibility of abandoning a defeatist position on Russia till 1940 when it entered the war. Indeed, if Russia had something proletarian about it, entering a war where it was attacked by Nazi Germany couldn’t change this, and we’d be forced even further back till 1944-5 when Russia became an imperialist power of significance, to avoid all defense of it. Indeed, the latest ICC publications show clear signs of heading in this direction, and proclaim that the defense of Russia was an unsettled question until 1940 (see International Review, no.10, p.14). The lessons we draw from the Russian experience crucially influ­ence what we advocate as the policies of the proletariat in the next revolutionary wave. As the ICC does not understand the former, it is unable to defend the latter.

3. The state

The ICC is guilty of a-historical morali­zing on the issue of the state that brings it close at times to anarchism and libera­lism. The former is illustrated by its view of the state as “essentially conserva­tive” and against ‘freedom’, while the lat­ter is shown by its view of the state as a ‘necessary evil’ which exists to reconcile or ‘mediate’ between classes. The ghosts of Kropotkin and John Stuart Mill haunt the publications of the ICC. But a marxist analysis of the state -- while it recognizes the common features in all state forms -- also breaks with such generalities as that which obsess the ICC and sees each historical state form as bearing specific features. “For a marxist, there is no such thing as a ‘state’ in general” (Karl Korsch, Why I am a Marxist).

To take as an example the Asiatic or despo­tic state; this was initially a revolutionary force, organizing the expansion of the productive forces, through the forcing of the scattered tribal producers into large scale public works. Similarly, the state of the absolutist period in Europe was a progressive alliance between the monarch and the bourgeoisie, to put down the war­ring feudal nobility (eg the Tudor monarchy in Britain). The ICC’s a-historical gene­ralities, which refuse to see what is speci­fic in each state-form, are illustrated in their approach to the absolutist state. In the Decadence Pamphlet we are told that this was a conservative organ, designed to prop up decaying feudal society, a reactionary phenomenon analagous to today’s strengthen­ing of the bourgeois state. True to the methodology of Luxemburg who fused all epochs of capitalism into capitalism ‘as such’, the ICC fuses all state forms into the eternally conservative state ‘as such’. Here we have idealism, the idealism of Platonic ‘forms’.

The working class state is thus not an ex­pression of the eternal essence of the state, but a specific weapon of class rule, design­ed to destroy the enemies of the proleta­riat politically. Outside of the class’s council-state there can be no organs of a political nature expressing the interests of hostile classes. There may exist assoc­iations on a technical/economic level under soviet supervision, or there may be created offshoots of the workers’ state through which it communicates with other strata, but the idea of a ‘state’ outside of the workers’ councils is a reactionary anathema. Indeed, in the past where all such class organs did develop, it was the task of com­munists and the class to destroy them. For example, the Constituent Assembly in Russia which was an expression of all ‘non-bourgeois classes’, especially the peasantry. Does the ICC now, like Rosa Luxemburg, criticize the Bolsheviks for dissolving the Assembly, which could have been a useful mediating force for avoiding the ‘excesses’ of war communism? In an attempt to turn the tables on the CWO’s idea that there can be a working class state, the text in International Review, no.10 accuses us of being silent on whether such institutions as the Sovnarkom, Vesenkhah, Red Army and Cheka were ‘class organs’ of the Russian workers’ state. Silent we have never been, and are not now; until the triumph of the counter­revolution they emphatically were so. The main weapon to destroy the counter-revolu­tion will not be mediations, but violence and terror.

In the Accumulation of Capital, Luxemburg sheds many tears over the fate of pre-capitalist tribesmen, artisans and peasants, yet (despite the ICC’s repeated assertions that her work is based on the law of value), the proletariat, whose extracted surplus value ensures the reproduction of capitalism, hardly merits a mention in the work, still less a tear. Lurking behind the ICC’s views on the state in the period of transition lays a similar liberal humanistic concern for non-proletarian strata and their fate. This leads to the advocacy (on a regularized basis) of political and economic concessions to the non-proletarian masses of the econo­mically backward areas of the globe. Cert­ainly the proletariat is a minority of the world’s population, but this is no argument for mediations or for the necessity of con­cessions. In the countries where the vast majority of the world’s industrial and agricultural output is concentrated the proletariat is a majority of the population, and other strata can be dealt with by force, repression or dispersal as appropriate. Who is to be mediated in the heartlands of capi­tal? The petty bourgeoisie like the shop­keepers? The professional strata, who can hardly be expected to act in other than an atomized fashion? A faulty class analysis that causes the ICC to put routine white collar workers into the ‘middle classes’ or even the petty bourgeoisie, leads to the view that such dubious elements will have to be kept at bay in their own organizations dis­tinct from those of the workers. But the speediest possible integration of such groups into productive work will be the surest safeguard against counter-revolution finding a base in their ranks. As for the millions of lumpenized human beings outside the advanced capitals, their only hope is to follow their own and the world proleta­riat into communism. Unlike the peasantry of the past they cannot even feed them­selves, and certainly pose no great threat to proletarian power. But should such a ‘state’ as the ICC foresees actually come into being, baptized in the holy water of avowedly communist groups, it would cert­ainly serve as a focus of counter-revolu­tion, overtly from non-proletarian strata, and covertly from capital itself.6

It is a fallacious argument (International Review, no.10, p.18) that since Bilan in the 1930s defended this position it cannot be a class line, as both the ICC and the CWO recognize Bilan as a proletarian group. If this view of the state is a class line, asks the ICC, why is Bilan not counter­revolutionary? But Bilan also defended the proletarian character of the trade unions, which for the ICC is a ‘class line’. It cannot be argued that it was only in World War II that this issue became clarified; as with the issue of the state this was settled in the revolution and counter-revolution of the years 1917-23. Leeway we can extend to groups in the depths of the counter revolution cannot be extended to groups emerging in a new pre-revolutionary situation. We can defend Bilan and say that the issue of the state is a class line, just as the ICC can defend them, despite the issue of the unions being a ‘class line’. Or will the trade unions become the next ICC ‘open question’?

4. The Party

The ICC finds it impossible to understand the views of the CWO on this issue and is horrified by what it sees as our ‘substitu­tionist tendencies’. What the ICC cannot grasp, is that like ‘autonomy’, substitu­tionism is a word to which it is impossible to ascribe any meaningful content. Let us try and unravel the gordian knot surrounding this non-issue.

‘Substitutionism’ is presumably meant to mean that a minority of the class attempts to carry out the tasks of the whole class. The term cannot apply to bourgeois groups; the minority rule of the bourgeoisie over the workers is not a substitution of the former for the latter, but a simple form of class rule. Thus the issue can only have meaning in relation to proletarian groups and indeed the ICC thinks that communist groups can cross class lines on the issue of ‘substitutionism’. We have to clearly distinguish between two separate issues here.

On the one hand there is the view, original­ly formulated by Blanqui and later endorsed to some extent by Lenin and Bordiga, that a communist minority, properly organized, can seize power on behalf of the working class, and hold power for them. This is certainly a confusion, but in no way can it be a class line. We want communism to avoid the annihilation of humanity, how we get it is beside the point; could it be achieved by Blanquist coups, or indeed by levitation, then that would be our programme. The issue is not a moral one. But since the conscious­ness and active participation of the class is necessary to defeat the enemies of the revolution, and construct a new society, such a view of minority tactics is simply a lamentable confusion.

The other side of the coin on the substitu­tionist question is at a more serious level. According to the ICC one of the ‘class lines’ on the issue of the state is that the poli­tical party does not aim at achieving power. Instead it contents itself with being an “active factor in the self-organization and self-demystification of the working class” (International Review, no.10, p.15), what­ever such a windy phrase is supposed to mean. If the majority of the class, through its experience, becomes conscious of the need for communism, and is prepared to fight for it, then they will mandate communists to the positions of responsibility within the class-wide organizations. One can at best talk of an insurrection, not a revolu­tion until there I is 'a communist majority in the class organizations. And these mandated communists do not come out of thin air; they are members of the communist par­ty (what else?). Therefore, at its victor­ious point, the insurrection will be trans­formed into a revolution, and majority sup­port for communism will be manifested by the class -- via the party in the councils -- holding power. The idea that the revolution could succeed while the majority of the class is not conscious of the need for com­munism, or while the majority of delegates to the councils are not communists, is pre­posterous. Such a conception robs the rev­olution of its vital aspect -- consciousness -- and reduces it to a spontaneist, counci­list act. At best this would be a doomed insurrection, not a revolution. Thus if the substitutionism of the party seeking to attain power is a class line, then the CWO has crossed this particular Rubicon long ago.

5. Theory

As the party has a vital role to fulfill, it needs to know what it is doing. Thus its programme, and how it is constructed (the­ory) is vital. Theory is not a hobby, or an embellishment of positions we already hold intuitively, but the onerous way -- we actually arrive at these positions. Nowhere is the decline of the ICC more marked than in its downgrading of theory, and the ten­dency for its work to become increasingly journalistic. As more and more issues are declared ‘open questions’ (and correspond­ingly more and more purveyors of counter­revolution branded as ‘confused’ proleta­rian groups7, we are assured that the tasks facing us are “basically concrete” (World Revolution, no.5, p.5) or that “matters of historical interpretation” like the death of the Comintern are “entirely irrelevant” (International Review, no.10, p. 17).

‘Practical’ tasks like intervention and regroupment cannot be separated from theory, from the elaboration of a coherent communist programme. We don’t write theoretical texts, or engage in polemics in order to give issues an airing, but to resolve them, so that regroupment can take place, and with it, intervention on a wider scale. The issue of regroupment cannot be posed in the abstract, divorced from political polemics; only if the discussion resolves the points at issue, does the existence of separate organizations become irrelevant. It is in this spirit that the CWO was in the past, and is now, prepared to debate with the ICC and in which we await answers to the ques­tions raised in this letter.

The Communist Workers’ Organization,

October 1977