The importance of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, and even of the wave of class struggle which swept Eastern Europe in 1953-56, was not least to have shown the potential which exists for the internationalization of the proletarian struggle, for the real constitution of the working class as a single, unified, world-wide revolutionary force. But, as we saw in part 1 of this article, this potential could not be realized at that time. These class movements of millions of workers were shattered by their isolation at a world scale. As we saw, the history of the great upheavals of the eastern and central European workers from the 20's to the 50's is, above all, the history of their isolation from the rest of the proletariat. This came about because, in addition to all the permanent barriers which capitalism imposes on the working class (into factories, industries, nations etc.), a global shift in the balance of class forces took place at the beginning of this century, in favor of the bourgeoisie, which would determine the whole development of the class struggle for six decades. The decisive moment in this process was the inability of the proletariat to prevent the outbreak of World War I. The result of this unprecedented defeat which was August 1914, was to give free reign to the barbarism of decadent capitalism, to imperialist war, which split the world proletariat right down the middle. The tendency of capitalism in its period of imperialist decline is not only to reinforce the unity of each national capital around the state, but also to divide the world into two great warring imperialist camps. The result for the proletariat which was not strong enough to confront and destroy this system before it collapsed into barbarism, was to have its organizations, its political lessons, its traditions of struggle wiped out in an ocean of blood and misery.

As we saw in part 1, the revolutionary wave was confined mainly to the countries defeated in World War I, whereas the struggles of the 50's remained within a Russian Bloc emerging out of the 1939-45 carve-up, which had to brutally concentrate its forces and frontally attack the proletariat in order to try and keep pace with the American Bloc, and therefore hardly benefited from the post-war reconstruction boom. The conse­quences of this international isolation of militant parts of the proletariat, imposed by the divisions of imperialism itself, are extremely grave:

-- It becomes impossible for the proletariat as a whole even to begin to attack the roots of the system of exploitation they are fighting against, since this can only be done on a world scale.

-- The power of the world bourgeoisie remains intact, and is directed against the proletariat in a unified, co-ordinated manner.

-- The working class is prevented from fully understanding the tasks of the period, since a revolutionary consciousness is based precisely on the understanding of the everyday experiences of the struggle (the defeats organized by the unions, the brutal reality behind the mask of democracy etc), as being part of the conditions of workers everywhere, indissolubly bound up with and pointing towards the need to smash the system worldwide. This profound insight can only be the product of the world wide struggles of the workers, meeting the same conditions, the same tasks, and the same enemy everywhere. It is in the heat of worldwide generalization of struggles that the international unity of the proletariat will be forged.

In the present, second part of this article we are examining the development of the proletarian struggle in the 1970's and into the 80's. It is the end of the counter-revolution, the beginning of the international resurgence of the proletarian fight. It is the end of the isolation of the workers of the east. It is the period of the redressing of the global balance of class forces, which for over half a century stood in favor of capitalism. For the first time ever, the period opening up is one of simultaneous generalization of the economic crisis and of the proletarian resistance across the globe. This international response of the proletariat has forced the world bourgeoisie to unite its forces, to prepare to confront and defeat the workers in order to open up the path to its own 'solution' to the crisis ‑ global war. In this way, by blocking off the road to imperialist war, by raising the specter of the proletarian revolution, the working class has progressively closed off the split torn within its ranks by two imperialist world wars. The last decade has shown that the conditions of struggle of the workers, and the response of the bourge­oisie, are becoming more and more unified. It is a world moving, not towards war but towards world­wide class war.

The conditions of the working class in the ‘socialist paradise'

Since the end of World War 2, daily life for workers in Eastern Europe has come to resemble the ‘home front' of a world in a permanent state of war. The naive belief of the post-war Eastern European working class in the possibility of a better life under capitalism is a good example of the fact that, in the epoch of world capital­ism, the conditions prevailing at the global level are more important in determining the state of consciousness of the class in any one region of the globe than are the specific conditions prevailing in that region. There was nothing in the everyday life of the workers of the east to nourish illusions in the progressive nature of their ‘own' regimes! They had to go hungry, in order that tanks could be built. They had to queue for hours for the most basic foodstuffs. Every protest, every class resistance, was considered mutiny and treated as such. In a world still dominated by the antagonism between rival imperialist blocs, and not yet by the battle between classes, the illusions of the workers -- especially in the east -- concentrated above all on conditions in the other bloc. The western illusions in the progressive nature of the ‘socialist' east, and the Eastern illusions in the permanent and paradisical nature of the western post war reconstruction, which they hoped ‘their' bourgeoisie would sooner or later be drawn into, were two sides of a single coin. It was a period when the conditions of struggle in the 2 blocs were radically different, which itself lent credence to the myth that contending social systems were in operation in east and west. In the west the class struggle was declared to be a thing of the past. In the east, where it wasn't supposed to exist anymore either, it was even harder to hide. The struggles there were explosive but isolated, and could be presented to the workers in the west as national liberation movements or as reactions to the flaws of an otherwise genuine socialism. In the East and in the West, the crisis in the Russian Bloc became so oppressive and so permanent that it was possible for the world bourgeoisie to declare: "That's not crisis, that's Socialism"! 

Autarky and the war economy

Only through the severest autarchy can the countries of the Russian Bloc prevent themselves from falling under the control of American imper­ialism. The direct and unlimited control of the economy and of foreign trade exercised by the state in these countries, the restrictions on direct investment of capital from the west, on East-West trade, on the movement of labor etc, are not at all proofs of the non-capitalist nature of COMECON, as the Trotskyists pretend. They serve exclusively the preservation of the Russian bloc against western domination.

In having to isolate themselves from the main centers of world capitalism, the already uncomp­etitive national capitals of the east fall even further behind the technological level of the west. Their progressive loss of competitiveness means that they are only able to realize a fraction of their invested capital on the ‘world market'. The lions' shares of commodities produced by COMECON are sold within its borders. Like any individual capitalist who has to buy his own produce because he can find nobody else to take them, the laws of capitalism dictate that the Russian bloc go out of business sooner or later. Only, at the level of national capitals and imperialist blocs, the verdict of bankruptcy only finally falls with the outcome of imperialist world war.

In order to evade the verdict of history, the Eastern European bourgeoisie has to try and keep up with the west at the military level. To even attempt this, it must invest a much higher pro­portion of its wealth in the military sector than the west. Building up for years behind the aut­archy lines drawn up at Yalta and Potsdam, the "Socialist Countries" were able to achieve spect­acular growth rates during the 50's and 60's. But apart from the war sector there was little real growth, just a spewing up of often unusable industrial goods, which in the west would find a market only at scrap yards.

In the 1970's COMECON began to open itself up somewhat more to the west. This did not take place, as the Trotskyists reported, in order to raise the living standards of the workers. Nor did it signify, as many western politicians believed at the time, a capitulation of the Kremlin before the western money-bags. The opening took place in order to modernize a hopelessly outdated war machine. This opening could pretend to banish the danger of world war, and to open up a new era of economic expansion. For the workers of the east, this modernization meant a temporary increase in the supply of certain consumer goods, and increased possibilities of visiting, or even of working in the west. Poland, possessing as it does large reserves of coal, an ice free coastline, and large reserves of cheap labor power slumbering in the agricultural sector, was specially selected by the Kremlin to become the motor force of the modernization. This is why Poland became the focal point of the contradiction between the false illusions nourished by the modernization on the one hand, and the real stepping up of the war economy on the other. As such it became the most important centre of the development of the class struggle for over a decade.

The ‘70's saw the first dents appearing in the illusions concerning the west, caused by the sharpening of the crisis and the class struggle there. Nevertheless, this decade was characterized above all by the slump in the living condit­ions of the workers accompanied by heightened illusions in a future of peace and prosperity. This explosive contradiction between illusion and reality broke to the surface after the downturn in the world economy at the end of the 70's. Its first fruits in the 1980's, the years of truth, have been the mass strikes in Poland, and the world wide echo which these struggles have found.

The ‘Acquisitions of October'

Whether in the east or in the west, there are no lack of defenders of the ‘gains of the October Revolution' which the workers of the Russian bloc are supposed to enjoy. We will examine some of these gains. For example, the alleged rise in real wages and shortened working hours. Based on official figures, and on sources such as Nikita Kruschev's own memoirs, Schwendtke and Tsikarlieff, coming from Russian dissident circles, calculate the following:

"In a word, whether according to the soviet or to foreign information, the fixing of the average income of industrial workers in Russia before the First World War at 60 to 70 roubles a month can be taken as accurate. This means that the present earnings, corresponding to the nominal value of the rouble, are twice as high as before the revolution, and that in the face of prices, which are 5 to 6 times higher, today's worker in the USSR lives 2-1/2 to 3 times worse than before the revolution. The number of working days in the year in the soviet era, despite the introduction of the 5 day week, is higher than before the revolution, as a result of the many church holidays, which were observed in the old period. Whereas today there are 8 free days a year and the general number of days worked total 252, the working year before the revolution consisted of only 237 days, which by the way amounts to an average working week of 4-1/2 days...If we divide the monthly income -- 150 soviet against 70 Czar­ist roubles -- by the number of' work days in the month (21 days in the USSR, 19.75 in Russia) we get a daily earnings of 7.14 roubles in the USSR and 3.54 in Russia. We now give the prices of the most important foodstuffs.

"A 1967 handbook of Soviet labor statistics showed that over 20% of workers employed in the highest paid sector, the construction industry, were below the poverty line, and over 60% of those in the low paid textile and food industries were under the poverty line." (‘The Soviet Working Class, Discontent and Opposition'; M. Holubenko in Critique.)

In the Russian bloc women are almost totally employed. East Germany for example has the high­est rate of women employed in industry in the world. They play a similar role to the immigrant workers in the west, receiving on average half the male salary. They are employed not only in factories, but also on building sites, in the construction of roads and railways, for example in Siberia, etc.

"Recently the road from Rewda to Swerdlowsk has been widened through the addition of a second lane. This extremely severe physical work was carried out by 90% women. They worked with picks, shovels and crowbars. In fact women of national minorities are predominant here (Mordva, Tachunaschi, Marejer). If in the west it is sometimes possible to mistake a young man for a girl, because of clothing and hair style, in Russia it's the opposite, as a result of their dirty work clothes, hands, way of walking, cursing and drinking" (Schwendtke, page 62).

In our opinion, these reports of the misery of the conditions of the workers in the ‘socialist countries' tend if anything to underestimate the situation. For instance, the figures on the work­ing day given above ignore the constant rise in compulsory -- often unpaid -- overtime. In 1970, workers in the Warski Docks in Sczcecin said they had to do over 80 hours of overtime a month (see ‘Rote Fahne uber Polen'). And even if standards of living are much lower in the USSR, especially its Asiatic parts, than in eastern Europe, the benefits of permanent austerity have not bypassed the workers of the satellite countries either:

"A study of the revolution and its causes published clandestinely in Hungary at the begin­ning of 1957 under the pseudonym Hungaricus, draws an official Hungarian statistics to argue that the level of real wages had fallen some 20% during the years of socialist construction from 1949 to 1953. The average monthly workers' wage was less than the price of a new suit, while the daily pay of a worker on a state farm was insufficient to buy one kilo of meat. Indeed, the Hungaricus pamphlet contends only 15% of Hungarian families lived above the regime's own declared ‘minimum standard of living', with 30% attaining it and 55% living below it. This meant that in15% of working class families, not every member had a blanket to sleep under, and 20% of workers didn't even have a winter coat. It was these sans-manteaux, Hungaricus suggests, who were to provide the front-line troops to be found attack­ing the Soviet tanks in October 1956" (Lomax, ‘The Working Class in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956'). You don't have to look any further for the principal cause of the 1953-56 wave of class struggle!

With regard to the famous ‘abolition of unemployment' in the Russian Bloc, we quote from the oppositional Osteuropa No. 4, ‘Unterboschaf­tigung and Arbeitslosigkeit in der Sowjetunion':

"With the beginning of the Stalinist 5 Year Plans, the Labor Exchanges were closed. Those who wanted work were sent to the socialist construct­ion sites in the most far flung regions... Through declaring the abolition of unemployment, and ceasing the payment of unemployment benefits, the government condemned millions to misery and hunger. Stalin also made use of concentration camps in his ‘conquest of unemployment', which siphoned off the surplus labor power in the most populous regions. According to the calculations of the expert of the BBC, Pospelowski, 2% to 3% of the working population was unemployed in the 1960's, that means 3 to 4 million people. Not included in these figures are school leavers, people who for technological reasons are idle waiting for work, the only partially employed seasonal Kolkhotz chosen-peasants and workers on the Sowchosen. Taken as a percentage of the population, that amounts to more unemployed then in West Germany during the 1967-69 recession, and in absolute figures more unemployed than in the post war years in the USA. Pospelowski adds that this is the total figure for the long term unemployed according to figures for 1957. He considers that, when we include the temporary unemployed... a total of 5% of the working population would be unemployed... since then, the number of long-term unemployed has increased considerably".

It is a true reflection of the anarchy of the capitalist mode of production that unemployment should be a major problem in countries where the bourgeoisie has to compensate for a lower organic composition of capital and a lower technological level through increased use of labor power, so that unemployment grows alongside an increase in the shortage of labor. Since 1967 employment offices have been reopened in all the big Russian cities. They send the unemployed to the extreme north and the Far East. As a result of ‘rationalizations' in the Russian economy during the 5 Year Plan 1971-75, 20 million workers were fired from their jobs. In addition there are over 10 million seasonal workers. Since the beginning of the 70's, the work camps and ‘Pioneer colonies' of Siberia have become once more an important outlet for the unemploy­ment explosion and for the flight from the land.

Despite the discreet silence of the pro-Russian Left in the west, the existence of unemployment in the east has been an open secret there for years. We will mention as an example a reader's letter to the Russian teachers' news­paper Utschitelskaja Gazeta, published on the 18.1.1965:

"How can one reconcile oneself to such disgraceful circumstances, when in a middle-sized city there are still young people who have neither worked nor gone to school for years now. Left to themselves, they lounge around on the streets for years on end, pick pocketing, selling things, and getting drunk at the railway stations." (Schwendtke, 75). In addition to direct unemployment -- the Polish government is threatening to lay off over 2 million workers presently -- industry is plagued by stoppages due to lack of fuel supplies, spare parts, raw materials or repair services. In 1979 the KOR claimed that up to a third of Polish industry was lying idle at any given time for such reasons. The figure would certainly be higher today. For workers on piece rates this means a further drastic drop in take-home pay. Industry is also racked by astronomically high turnover rates, as starving workers search desperately for a better deal. Today, the Russian bourgeoisie is forced to allow workers to change jobs twice a year, in order to avoid social explosions.

"The turnover of labor is the main plague of the soviet economic system. The loss of work hours due to turnover in the Soviet Union is much greater than in the USA as a result of strikes. For example, in the factory where I was working, with a staff of 560 people, more than 500 employees left during the year 1973" (Nikolai Dragosch, founder of the ‘Democratic Unification of the USSR', ‘Wir Mussen die Angst Uberwinden').

In the face of the immediate need to survive, workers live through pillaging the factories they work in. These actions are an expression of the extreme atomization of the class outside periods of struggle, but they also reveal the absence of any identification with the profits of ‘their' company or with the fulfilling of the 5 Year Plans.

"The automobile plant in Gorki maintains at its own cost a criminality-department of the militia, consisting of about 40 persons, who in daily controls confiscate about 20,000 roubles worth of tools and spare parts from workers. The desperation of' workers goes so far, that they cut up the bodies of Volga cars into several pieces with a torch, fling them over the fence, weld them together again, and sell them." (Schwendtke, 69)

And these are the words of a foreman at the Obuda shipyards in Budapest: "They say copper is needed for the ships destined for the Soviet Union? Plated sheets will be good enough for them! The copper will be sold to the small foundries." (Quoted in Lomax, 32)

In the face of the naked realities of permanent economic crisis, police control and open repression have long been the main means of keeping the proletariat in check. In the following pages we will see how little state terror has succeeded in paralyzing a proletariat driven to revolt by a deteriorating social situation, a growing scarcity of consumer goods, soaring prices, especially on the black markets, speed-ups in the factories, the collapse of social services, the most severe housing shortage since 1945, constant humiliation at the hands of the cops and the administration. The workers have begun to question every aspect of capitalist control, from the unions and the police to the vodka bottle.

The upsurge of the class struggle in the USSR 

"The editors estimate that until the middle of the ‘70's, of the spontaneous actions of the workers, not more than 10% have become known publically, or to people in the west." (Schwendtke, 148). Holubenko comments in the same vein "... samizdat has yielded little on the question of working class opposition. Samizdat, which now reaches the west in well over 1,000 items a year, is written mostly by ‘liberal' or right wing intelligentsia, and reflects the concerns of that intelligentsia." (Holubenko, 4)

But the problem goes much further than that. The western espionage services are extremely well informed of what the working class in the Russian bloc is doing, as are of course the broadcasting services transmitting toward the east (Radio Liberty, BBC, Deutsche Welle etc) who collaborate closely with the former. What we are dealing with here is a massive black-out on news of the class struggle on the part of the ‘free world'. This censorship concerns first of all the information given to the workers in the east, in order to lessen the danger of generalization. One of the best known examples of this is the decision of Radio Free Europe in Munich to refuse to broad­cast a series of letters sent by the striking Rumanian miners in 1977, who wanted to use the radio station in order to inform other Rumanian and eastern European workers of their actions. Secondly it concerns the information allowed to pass through to the workers in the west. For example the Russian strikes in Kaliningrad, Lwow and several cities in Byelorrussia which broke out in solidarity with the Polish upsurge of 1970, are well known in Poland itself, but were report­ed in the west only in 1974, and even then via the Hsinhua Press Service, Peking (9.1.74).

The western bourgeoisie has good reason to collaborate with its Russian counterpart in shrouding the activities of the workers, especially in the USSR, in silence. The workers in the west would hardly continue to believe that ‘the Russians' are about to invade ‘us' over here if they knew that the Russian proletariat is engaged in almost permanent struggle with its ‘own' bourgeoisie. On the other hand it would give the world proletariat a greater feeling of force and unity to know that one of its strongest detachments had returned to the path of the class war. In part 1 of this article we dealt with the revival of the class struggle in the USSR in the ‘50's and into the ‘60's. In part 1, written in November 1980,  and dealing with the strike wave of the early ‘60's -- with its culmination point in Novocherkassk 1962 -- we commented -- erroneous­ly, it appears -- on the absence of strike comm­ittees or other means of organizing and coordinating the struggle beyond the first spontaneous  outbursts. One account tells how: "The insurgents in the Donbas region reportedly considered the demonstrations in Novocherkassk unsuccessful because they rebelled there without the consent of the strike organization offices in Rostov, Lugansk, Tagonrog and other cities. This would confirm rumors and reports concerning a headquarters for organized opposition in the Donbas." (Cornelia Gerstenmaier , ‘Voices of the Silent').

The strike wave of 1962 was provoked by the announcement of price increases on meat and dairy products. "Sit down strikes, mass protest demonstrations on factory premises, street demonstrations, and in several instances in many parts of the Soviet Union, large scale rioting occurred. Evidence at hand speaks of such occurrences at Grosny, Krasnodar, Donetsk, Yaroslav, Zhdanov, Gorki and even Moscow itself, inhere reportedly a mass meeting took place at the Moskvich Automobile Factory." (Holubenko, 12) Holubenko, basing himself on the reports of a Canadian Stalinist called Kolasky, who spent two years in the USSR, also mentions a strike of port workers in Odessa against food shortages, and a strike at the motorcycle factory in Kiev. Chauviers' text (‘The Working Class and the Unions in Soviet Companies') talks of a strike in Vladivostok against food shortages, which led to a bloody rising.

Until 1969 relative quiet returned to the strike front. The new Brezhnev-Kosygin leadership began by being more compromising over wages. Since 1969, however, wages have been steadily below the level even of the Khrushchev era. Already warned by the big strikes in the Donez Basin and in Charkov in 1967, the government decided to phase in the necessary price increases. Also, the forces of repression were strengthened in advance.

"Since 1965, and especially since 1967, many new organizations have been established to reinforce the police and special agent depart­ments. The power of the police has widened, the number of policemen greatly increased and pro­fessional security officers, night shift police stations and motorized police units set up. Furthermore, a series of new laws have been put into effect to ‘strengthen the social order in all fields of law'. Ordinances, decrees and laws such as the one passed in July 1969, which emphasized the suppression of dangerous political offenders, mass riots, and the murder of police­men, reflects a new emphasis on ‘law and order'. There is also the unprecedented promotion of' KGB security chiefs to positions in the central and republican politburos." (Holubenko, 18)

The strike wave of 1969-73 in the USSR was one of the most important if less well known elements in the international resurgence of the world proletariat in response to the re-entry of the capitalist system into open international crisis -- all over the ‘Soviet Union' workers began to come out in protest against food shortages, rising prices, and bad housing conditions. Some of the strikes of ‘69 known to us:

-- In mid-May 1969, workers at the Kiev Hydro­electric Station in the village of Beryozka met to discuss the housing problem. Many of them were still in prefabricated huts and in railway coaches despite the authorities' promise to provide housing. The workers declared that they no longer believed the local authorities, and decided to write to the central committee of the Communist Party. After their meeting the workers marched off with banners such as "All power to the Soviets" (Reddaway, ‘Uncensored Russia'). The report stems from the clandestine oppositional journal Chronicle of Recent Events.

-- A strike movement broke out in Sverdlovsk against a 25% drop in wages with the introduction of the 5-day week and of new wage norms. Centered on the big rubber plant, the strike, according to Schwendtke, took on semi-insurrectional forms. The civil war militia (‘BON' and ‘MWD') had to be called off and all the demands of the workers conceded.

-- In Krasnodar, Kuban, the workers refused to go to the factories until adequate food supplies arrived in the shops.

-- In Gorki, women working at the big armaments factory "walked off the job stating that they were going to buy meat and would not return to work until they had bought enough of it" (Holubenko, 16).

-- In 1970 a strike movement broke out involving several factories in Vladimir.

-- In 1971, in the largest equipment factory of the USSR, the Kirov plant in Kopeyske, the strike ended with the arrest of strike militants by the KGB.

"The most important disturbances in this period took place in Dnipropetrovsk and Dniprodzerzhinsk in the heavy industrial region of Southern Ukraine. In September 1972, in Dniprop­etrovsk, thousands of workers went on strike, demanding higher wages and a general improve­ment in the standard of living. The strikes inv­olved more than one factory and were repressed at the cost of many dead and wounded. However, a month later in October 1972, riots broke out again in the same city. The demands: better provisioning, improvement in living conditions, and the right to choose a job instead of having it imposed... Fortunately, because of the exist­ence of a recent samizdat document, a good deal more information is available on the riots which occurred in Dniprodzerzhinsk, a city of 270, 000, several kilometers from Dnipropetrovsk. Specifically, the militia arrested a few drunken members of a wedding party, loaded them into a police wagon, and drove off. Minutes later, the police wagon crashed, and the militia (who themselves had been drinking) concentrated on saving themselves, leaving the arrested to burn to death in the wagon, which exploded. The assembled crowd marched in fury to the city's central militia building and ransacked it, burning police files and causing other damage. The crowd then marched to the party headquart­ers where the person ‘on duty' ordered the crowd with threats to disperse immediately. The crowd surged forward and attacked the party head­quarters, whereupon two militia battalions open­ed fire. There were ten dead, including militia killed by the crowd. The riot is an example of the strained social relations in the Soviet Union -- an example of how an apparently small incident can spark off a major event which far surpasses the importance of the incident itself." (Holubenko, the Samizdat source is Ukrain'ske Slovo. The Ukranian Donbas has long been a centre of proletarian resistance, and already particip­ated in the 1956 wave of struggles which shook Eastern Europe. The ‘56 wave in the Donbas is mentioned by Holubenko, as well as by the ‘Czechoslovakian Socialist Opposition' in its publication in West Germany, Listy Blatter, September 1976. Listy also mentions "mass demon­strations of the proletariat in Krasnodar, Naltschyk, KrivyjRik" and the popular rising in Tashkent in 1968).

For the year 1973, the end-point of the second postwar strike wave in the USSR, we can mention the following important actions:

-- A strike in the largest factory in Vytebsk against a 20% drop in wages. The KGB tried unsucc­essfully to track down the ‘Ringleaders'

"In May 1973, thousands of workers at the machine building factory on the busy Brest Litovsk Chausee in Kiev went on strike at 11.00 demand­ing higher pay. The factory director immediately telephoned the Central Committee of the Commun­ist Party of the Ukraine. By 15.00 the workers were informed that their salaries were to be increased, and most of the top administrators of the factory were dismissed. It is important that the local population, according to this report, attributed the success of this strike to the fact that it had an organized character and that the regime was afraid that this strike might develop into a ‘Ukrainian Szczecin'." (Holubenko, source: Sucharnist, Munich.)

-- The popular rising in Kaunas, Lithuania, in 1973, which led to street fighting and the erection of barricades, and which was bloodily suppressed (mentioned by Listy). This explosion, of popular rage, provoked by the worsening economic situation and by increased police repression, had heavy nationalist undertones. A similar revolt took place in Tiflis, Georgia, on May 1st 1974, developing out of the official May Day Demonstration.

-- Finally, in the winter of 1973, the strike wave reached the western metropoles of Moscow and Leningrad, with scores of stoppages on construct­ion sites being reported.

Polish interlude 1970-76

The reappearance of the proletarian fight in the 1970's was international in its dimensions. But it was not yet generalized. In the USSR, the struggles were numerous and violent, but they remained isolated and often unorganized. They took place mostly outside the industrial centers of the Russian USSR. This is not to say that great masses of workers were not involved. There are tremendous concentrations of the proletariat especially in parts of the Ukraine and western Siberia. But these workers are more isolated from each other and from the main concentrations of the world proletariat. Even more important, these struggles can be limited through the use of national, regional, and linguistic mystifications (the ‘Soviet' proletariat speaks over 100 languages), which present the fight as being against ‘the Russians'. Through assuring more favorable supplies of foodstuffs and consumer goods on the one hand, and through a formidable array of the forces of repression on the other, the state has been able to maintain its social control in Moscow and in Leningrad, where the proletariat has been more decimated by the defeat of the revolutionary wave of the twenties, and by the resulting war and state terror, than anywhere else in the world. This control over the Russian USSR is decisive.

In the 1970's, Poland became the main centre within the Russian bloc of the worldwide resurg­ence of the class struggle. The proletariat in Hungary and East Germany was still reeling under the double defeats of the ‘20's and ‘50's. The Czechoslovakian workers had, in addition, to re­cover from the heavy blow of the ‘68-69 defeat as well. These are precisely the most important countries of the bloc for the perspective of the unfolding of the world revolution, being highly industrialized, with significant concentrations of workers rich in the traditions of struggle, and bordering as they do onto the industrial heartlands of Western Europe, most significantly West Germany.

As for Poland, which once belonged to the ‘agricultural belt' along with Rumania and Bulgaria, but which underwent an important industrialization after the war, its historical role consists in becoming a revolutionary transmission belt between the front line industrialized countries of the bloc to its west, and the USSR to its east. Because the workers of eastern and central Europe had to bear the main brunt of the counter-revolution from the ‘20's to the ‘50's, the response of the proletariat there to the reappearance of open world-wide capitalist crisis has been more hesitant and uneven than in the west. As a result, the Polish transmission belt appeared long before the un­folding of mass struggles to the east or to the west which it could link to one another. This is the real basis of all the illusions about Polish exceptionalism -- or the notion that Poland is the centre of the world -- which, however much they hate capitalism and its state, will continue to tie the workers there to national ‘solutions', to the Polish national capital, until mass struggles erupt elsewhere.

Nevertheless, the Polish workers were not alone in this period, either world-wide or in the east. We have already mentioned the Russian solidarity strike with the Polish revolt of 1970.  This explosion in turn was preceded by an important strike of the Rumanian miners, and the big strike wave in the USSR, which began 18 months earlier. The bourgeoisie of the whole bloc was shocked by the upsurge.

"Everywhere, the Five Year Plans were altered in favor of the supply of consumer goods and food­stuffs. In Bulgaria, price rises previously planned for 1.1. 71 were withdrawn, in the USSR in March great fuss was made over the sinking of certain prices. In the GDR the events in Poland accelerated the outbreak of a latent political crisis which left its mark in the replacement of Walter Ulbricht by Honecker. The SED lowered the prices for textiles and other industrial goods, after there had been unrest over hidden price rises, and raised pensions." (Koenen and Kuhn, Freiheit, Unabhangigkeit und Brot.)

In November 1972, with the two year price freeze in Poland forced on Gierek by the workers from Lodz in February 1971 about to run out, the dockers of Gdansk and Szczecin struck, just as the trade union congress was assembling in Warsaw to argue against the prolongation of the price freeze. Gierek flew to Gdansk to pacify the work­ers. In his absence the textile workers in Lodz and the miners in Katowice came out. President Jaroszewicz had to appear on TV to announce the continuation of the price freeze (See Green in Die Internationale 13, p26). The workers were defending their living standards without hesit­ation. In the Baltic shipyards in 1974 for example, a new productivity deal provoked a massive protest strike. Reports of similar incidents came in from many parts of the country. By March 1975 there was no meat left in the shops. In order to forestall a proletarian explosion, the meat reserves of the army were rushed to the Baltic ports and to the Silesian mine-fields. Instead, the textile workers in Lodz went on strike. There were hunger riots in Warsaw. In Radom, the munitions workers forced the release of 150 women who had been arrested after going on strike. (Reported in Der Spiegel, 13/3/75).

In June 1976 an attempt was made to raise food prices by up to 60%. The reaction was immediate. In Radom, a demonstration of the munitions workers called out the workers of the whole city. The party headquarters were burnt out, and 7 workers were killed in barricade fighting. There followed a wave of repression: 2000 workers were arrested. At the same time, in the massive tractor factory at Ursus near Warsaw, 15,000 downed tools and blocked off the Moscow to Paris railway line, taking the international express hostage. The police arrested 600 workers, and 1000 more were sacked immediately. In Plock the workers marched to the party headquarters, singing the Internationale, and to the army barracks to fraternize with the soldiers there. Here again, over 100 workers were arrested, This use of massive repression in secondary industrial centers couldn't halt the movement, because the dockers on the Baltic, the automobile workers of Warsaw, workers in Lodz, Poznan etc were coming out. It seemed like it would only be a matter of hours before they would be joined by the Silesian miners. Gierek was forced to withdraw the price rises immediately. But this concession was followed by a wave of mass arrests, torturings, and police atrocities. The price rises were enforced more slowly, less obviously, but just as surely. In the face of this vicious bourgeois counter-attack, and in view of the fact that their living standards were deterior­ating despite even the most resolute struggles, the proletariat in Poland entered a period of retreat and reflection.

The period ‘76-80 was one of relative quiet on the Polish strike front. For those who only look at the surface of events it could have seemed like a period of defeat. But the deepening of the class struggle internationally, the slow but sure maturation of the second world-wide wave of proletarian resistance since 1968, which already in the period ‘76-81 has reached a qualitatively higher level, would soon reveal the ripening of the conditions for a future revolutionary wave going on below the surface.

Krespel

III

"....The Russian Revolution reserves a chair in ancient history for Kautsky...." and in Philosophy for Harper.

Following the various criticisms we made of Harper's philosophy, we now want to show that the political standpoint that he derives from his philosophy in actual practice takes him away from revolutionary positions (our initial aim was not to make a profound philosophical study, but simply to show that while all of Harper's criticisms of so-called mechanistic materialism are based on a correct, if somewhat schematic, exposition of the problem of human knowledge and praxis, their practical political application leads him into vulgar mechanistic standpoint as well) ,

For Harper

1) The Russian revolution, in its philosophical manifestations (the critique of idealism) was entirely an expression of bourgeois materialist thought ... thoroughly conditioned by the necessities of the Russian milieu.

2) Russia, from an economic point of view colonized by foreign capital, needed to ally itself with the revolution of the proletariat. Therefore, Harper adds,

"Lenin...had to rely on the working class, and because his fight had to be implacable and radical, he espoused the most radical ideology of the Western proletariat fighting world-capitalism, viz Marxism. Since, however, the Russian revolution showed a mixture of two characters, middle-class revolution in its immediate aims, proletarian revolution in its active forces, the appropriate bolshevist theory too had to present two characters, middle-class materialism in its basic philo­sophy, proletarian evolutionism in its doctrine of class fight." (Lenin as Philosopher, Merlin Press, p.96)

And from there Harper goes on to characterize the conceptions of Lenin and his friends as a typica­lly Russian form of Marxism except, perhaps, for Plekhanov, whom Harper sees as the most west­ern kind of Marxist, though by no means complete­ly free of bourgeois materialism.

If it is really possible for a bourgeois movement to rely on "a revolutionary movement of the proletariat fighting world capitalism" (Harper), and if the result of this fight has been the establishment of a bureaucracy as a ruling class that has stolen the fruits of the international proletarian revolution, then the door is open to the conclusion reached by James Burnham.

According to Burnham, the techno-bureaucracy has established its power in a struggle against the old capitalist form of society, and it has done this by relying on a working class movement. From this point of view, socialism is just a utopia.

It's no accident that Harper's conclusions are the same as Burnham's. The only difference is that Harper ‘believes' in socialism whereas Burnham ‘believes' that socialism is a utopia[1]. But they both share the same critical method, one which is quite foreign to the revolutionary method.

Harper -- who joined the Communist International, who formed the Dutch Communist Party, who partic­ipated in the CI in the crucial years of the revolution, who helped mobilize the proletariat of Europe in the defense of this "counter-revol­utionary Russian state" -- explains himself thus:

"if it had been known at the time..." (ie. Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocriticism), "one could have predicted..." (the degenera­tion of the Russian revolution and of Bolshevism into a state capitalism supporting itself on the working class).

We can reply to Harper that a number of ‘enlight­ened' Marxists did predict this, and arrived at the same conclusions as Harper about the Russian revolution well before he did. We can, for example, cite the case of Karl Kautsky.

Karl Kautsky's position on the Russian revolution was given a broad public through the extensive debate that took place between him, Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg (1915-1918, Lenin: Against the Stream; Socialism and War; Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism; State and Revolution; The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Kautsky: The Dictatorship of the Proletariat. 1921, Luxemburg: The Russian Revolution. 1922, Kautsky: Rosa Luxemburg and Bolshevism).

From the series of articles by Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Bolshevism, published in Belgium, in French in 1922, one can see how similar Kautsky's conclusions are to those of Harper.

"...And this book (Luxemburg's Russian Revolution) puts us (Kautsky) in the para­doxical position of being compelled to defend the Bolsheviks against more than one of Rosa Luxemburg's accusations". (Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Bolshevism).

What Kautsky does is to defend the ‘errors' of the Bolsheviks (which Luxemburg criticizes in her pamphlet) by portraying them as logical consequences of the bourgeois revolution in Russia; by showing that the Bolsheviks could only carry out what the Russian milieu destined them to, namely, the bourgeois revolution.

To give a few examples: Rosa criticized the Bolshevik slogans and policies concerning the dividing up of the land by the small peasants. She felt that this would lead to all sorts of difficulties and advocated the immediate collectivization of land. Lenin had already responded to such arguments when Kautsky made them from a different starting point (cf. the chapter ‘Subserviency to the Bourgeoisie in the Guise of "Economic" Analysis', in The Prolet­arian Revolution and. the Renegade Kautsky).

Kautsky:

"...There is no doubt that this (the dividing up of the land) constitutes a powerful obstacle to the progress of socialism in Russia. But this was something that was impossible to prevent: one can only say that it could have been carried out in a more rational manner than the Bolsheviks did it. This is precisely the proof that Russia is essentially at the stage of the bourgeois revolution. This is why the Bolsheviks' bourgeois agrarian reforms will outlive the Bolsheviks, whereas they themselves have had to recognize that the socialist measures they took are incapable of lasting and have in fact been prejudicial..."

Of course, Kautsky's mighty arguments were totally invalidated by that other ‘socialist' Stalin, who collectivized the land and ‘socialized' industry when the revolution had already been strangled to death.

And here is along sample of Kautsky's views on the development of Marxism in Russia. It is strangely reminiscent of Harper's dialectic (see ‘The Russian Revolution' chapter in Lenin As Philosopher).

"...As with the French, the Russian revolut­ionaries inherited from the reactionaries this belief in the exemplary importance of their nation over the other nations...

"...When Marxism reached Russia from the decaying west, it had to fight very energetically against this illusion, and demonstrate that the social revolution could only come out of a highly developed capitalism. The revolution that Russia was heading towards would necessarily be, first of all, a bourgeois revolution on the model of the ones that had taken place in the west, But as time went by, this conception seemed restrictive and paralyzing to the more impatient Marxist elements, esp­ecially after 1905, when the Russian prolet­ariat fought so triumphantly and stirred the enthusiasm of the whole European proletariat. From then on, the most radical Russian Marxists developed a particular nuance of Marxism. That part of Marxism which made socialism depend on economic conditions, on the advanced development of industrial capitalism, more and more faded away from their eyes. Now Marxism as a theory of the class struggle was increasingly emphasized, Moreover, it was seen simply in terms of the struggle for political power by any means, divorced from its material base. With this way of approaching the question, the Russian proletariat ended up being seen as an extraordinary being, the model for the prol­etariat of the entire world. And the prolet­arians of other countries began to believe it -- to praise the Russian proletariat as the guide for the whole international proletariat in the struggle for socialism. It's not difficult to explain this. The west had the bourgeois revolutions behind it and the pro­letarian revolutions in front of it. But the latter required a strength which hadn't yet been achieved anywhere. Thus, in the west, we find ourselves in an intermediate stage between two revolutionary epochs, and this puts the patience of the advanced elements to a hard test.

"Russia, on the other hand, was so backward that it still had the bourgeois revolution and the overthrow of absolutism in front of it.

"This task didn't require the proletariat to be as strong as it would have to be to carry out the exclusive conquest of working class power in the west. Thus the Russian revol­ution took place sooner that the revolution in the west. It was essentially a bourgeois revolution, but this didn't become clear for some time, because the bourgeois classes in Russia today were much weaker that they were in France at the end of the 18th century. If one neglected the economic base, if one looked only at the class struggle and the relative strength of the proletariat, it could for a time really seem as though the Russian prol­etariat was superior to the proletariat of western Europe and was determined to be its guide..." (Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg and Bolshevism).

In a more philosophical way, Harper reiterates Kautsky's arguments one by one.

Kautsky puts forward two opposing conceptions of socialism:

1) In the first, socialism can only be realized on the basis of advanced capitalism (Kautsky's position, and that of the Mensheviks. This position was also used by the German social democrats, including Noske, in order to criticize the Russian revolution. It's a conception which in fact led to the adoption of state capitalist measures, supported by a ‘part of the masses', against the revolutionary proletariat).

2) In the second, "the struggle for political power, by any means, divorced from its economic base", would allow socialism to be built even in Russia (this is Kautsky's version of the Bolsheviks' position).

In fact, Lenin and Trotsky said: the bourgeois revolution in Russia can only be made through the insurrection of the proletariat. Since the insurrection of the proletariat has an objective tendency to develop on an international scale, we can, given the level of the development of the productive forces on a world scale, hope that this Russian insurrection will provoke a world-wide movement.

From the point of view of the development of the productive forces in Russia alone, the Russian revolution would be a bourgeois one; but the realization of socialism was possible if the revolution broke out on a world scale. Lenin and Trotsky, as well as Rosa Luxemburg, thought that the level of development of the productive forces on a world scale not only made socialism possible -- they made it a necessity. They all agreed that capitalism had reached its epoch of "(world) wars and revolutions". They only disagreed about the economic causes of this situation. For socialism to be possible, the Russian revolution could not remain isolated.

Alongside the Mensheviks, Kautsky replied that Lenin and Trotsky saw the revolution as a ‘voluntarist' affair, the mere seizure of power through a Bolshevik putsch. They even compared Bolshevism with Blanquism.

All these ‘enlightened' Marxists and socialists are precisely the ones Harper seems to cite as an example, as those who ‘issued Marxist warnings', who were against ‘the international workers' movement being led by the Russians' -- people like Kautsky:

"...that Lenin did not understand Marxism as the theory of proletarian revolution, that he did not understand capitalism, bourgeoisie, proletariat in their highest modern develop­ment was shown strikingly when from Russia, by means of the Third International, the world revolution was to be started, and the advice and warnings of Western Marxists were entire­ly disregarded" (Lenin As Philosopher, p.98).

All of them with Kautsky to the fore reproach Bolsheviks for not taking into account the backward state of the economy. In reality, from1905 onwards, Trotsky had a masterful response to all these "honest family heads" as Lenin called them. He showed how, on the one hand, the advanced level of industrial concentration in Russia, and, on the other hand, its backward social situation (the delay in the bourgeois revolution), ensured that Russia would be in a constantly revolutionary state; and this revolution would be proletarian, or it would be nothing.

Harper, building his theory and his philosophical critique on Kautsky's theory and historico-econ­omic critique, says that owing to the backward state of the Russian economy, to the inevita­bility of the bourgeois revolution in Russia on the economic level, the philosophy of the Russian revolution had to carry on the first phase of Marx's thought, ie, the Feuerbachian, revolut­ionary bourgeois democratic phase: "religion is the opium of the people" (the critique of religion). It was thus natural that Lenin and his friends didn't attain the second phase of Marxist philosophy, the revolutionary proletarian dia­lectical phase: "social existence determines consciousness". (Harper forgets to point out -- even though it's impossible for him not to have known this -- that the main struggle of the Bolsheviks before 1918 was directed against all the social democratic currents to their right, both the governmental and the centrist factions; and that this battle was waged on a very broad scale, through the whole European press and pamphlets in many languages, where­as Materialism and Empiriocriticism was only known to a wider Russian public much later, was translated into German quite a bit later, into French even later still, and was very little read outside Russia. One feels just­ified in asking whether the spirit of Materialism and Empiriocriticism was contained in these articles and pamphlets. Harper doesn't attempt to prove this, and with good reason). Anyway, Harper, like Kautsky, con­cludes from all this that despite the voluntarist conception of class struggle held by Lenin and Trotsky, who wanted to "make the Russian proletariat the orchestral conductor of the world revolution..." the revolution was doomed to be philosophically bourgeois, since Lenin and his friends had adopted a Feuerbachian bourgeois materialist philosophy (Marx phase one).

These ideas bring Harper and Kautsky together in their critique of the Russian revolution -- both in their approach to the fundamentals of the problem, and in the way they both accuse the Bolsheviks of wanting to direct the world revolution from the Kremlin.

But there is more. In his philosophical expose Harper argues that Engels wasn't a dialectical materialist, that his conceptions of knowledge were still profoundly marked by the natural sciences and bourgeois materialism. To verify this theory you would have to examine the writings of Engels in detail, which. Harper doesn't do. Mondolfo, on the other hand, in an important work on dialectical materialism seems to want to demonstrate the opposite, which proves that this isn't a new quarrel. Whatever the case, I think that new generations can often observe in those who preceded them what have noted in Lenin or Engels, who - made a critique of the philosophies of their time on the basis of the same level of scientific knowledge, and were often far too schematic in their approaches. But the real point is to study their general attitude, not simply their philosophical position -- to see whether, in their general activity, they situated themselves on the terrain of praxis, of Marx's Theses on Feuerbach.

In this what Sydney Hook says about the work of Lenin in his Understanding Marx is much closer to reality:

"What is strange is that Lenin seems not to notice the incompatibility between, on the one hand, his political activism and the reciprocal dynamic philosophy of action of What Is To Be Done, and, on the other hand, the absolutely mechanistic theory of knowledge which he de­fends so violently in Materialism and Empirio-criticism. Here he follows Engels word for word in his statement that "sensations are the copies, the photographs, the reflection, the mirror image of things", and that mind is not an active factor in knowledge. He seems to believe that if one argues for the particip­ation of mind as an active factor in knowledge, conditioned by the nervous system and the entire history of the past, it must follow that the mind creates everything that exists, including its own brain. That would be idealism in its most characteristic form, and idealism means religion and belief in God.

"But the passage from the first to the second proposition is the most obvious non sequitur one could imagine. In reality, in the inter­est of his conception of Marxism as the theory and practice of the social revolution, Lenin had to admit that consciousness is an active business, a process in which matter, culture and mind react reciprocally on each other, and that the sensations don't constitute knowledge but are a part of the material worked upon by knowledge.

"This is the position Marx takes in his Theses on Feuerbach and in The German Ideology. Whoever sees the sensations as exact copies of the external world, themselves leading to knowledge, cannot avoid fatalism and mechanism. In Lenin's political writings, rather than his technical writings, one finds no trace of this Lockean dualist epistemology. His What Is To Be Done, as we have seen, contains a frank acceptance of the active role of class knowledge in the social process. It's in his practical writings dealing with the concrete problems of agitation, revolution and recon­struction that you find the real philosophy of Lenin...." (Understanding Marx, Sydney Hook, p.57-8)[2].

The clearest testimony to what Sydney Hook says, putting Harper alongside Plekhanov and Kautsky, is something Trotsky wrote in My Life. Speaking about Plekhanov, he says, "His strength was being undermined by the very thing that was giving strength to Lenin -- the approach of the revolution ... He was Marxian propagandist and polemist-in-chief, but not a revolutionary politician of the proletariat. The nearer the shadow of the revolution crept the more evident it became that Plekhanov was losing ground..."

We can see now that what's original in Harper isn't his philosophical thesis (which is, on the cont­rary, a statement of position following on from many others), but above all the conclusion he draws from it.

This is a fatalistic conclusion, lust like Kautsky's. In his pamphlet Rosa Luxemburg and Bolshevism Kautsky cites a phrase written to him by Engels in a personal letter:

"...the real, and not the illusory ends of a revolution are always realized by this revolution later on".

This is what Kautsky tries to demonstrate in his pamphlet, and this is what Harper argues for (to those who want to follow him in his conclusions) in Lenin As Philosopher. Having fought against the bourgeois materialism of Lenin and Engels, he comes to the most vulgarly mechanistic concl­usion about the Russian revolution, portraying it as a ‘fatal product', a ‘real and not illusory end'. The Russian revolution produced what it had to produce -- it was all inscribed in Material­ism and Empiriocriticism and in the economic conditions of Russia; the world proletariat was simply used as an ideological cover for all this. What's more, Pannekoek goes on to argue that the new class in power in Russia quite naturally took up Leninism's mode of thinking, its bourgeois materialism, in their struggle against the established bourgeois strata, who on the philo­sophical level had fallen back into religious cretinism, mysticism and idealism, and had become conservative and reactionary. This new, fresh philosophy, this new state capitalist class of intellectuals and technicians, find their raison d'être in Materialism and Empiriocriticism and Stalinism, and are rising in all count­ries...Thus we have the equation: Marx phase one = Lenin's Materialism = Stalin!

Without knowing Harper's work, Burnham has under­stood this equation very well -- just as the anarchists have been repeating it for ages without understanding it. It''s obvious that Harper does­n't say this quite so brutally, but the fact that he opens the door to all Burnham's bourgeois and anarchist conclusions is enough to show the underlying flaw in Lenin As Philosopher.

Finally, when he comes to draw the ‘pure' prolet­arian lessons of the Russian revolution (I would point out that the language of Harper and Kautsky always talks about the ‘Russian revol­ution' and not the ‘October revolution', which is quite a significant distinction), Harper separates the action of the Russian working class from the ‘bourgeois' influence of the Bolsheviks, and ends up saying that it is the generalized strikes and soviets (or councils) ‘in themselves' which produced the Russian revolution and which bring us the following positive lessons:

1) the proletariat must detach itself ideo­logically from bourgeois influence ‘man by man'

2) it must gradually learn, on its own, how to manage the factories and organize production

3) generalized strikes and the councils are the exclusive weapons of the proletariat.

This conclusion is a refined type of reformism, and what's more, is totally anti-dialectical.

Even if it were realizable, this ‘man by man' detachment from bourgeois ideology would post­pone socialism for centuries. It turns the Marxist doctrine into a beautiful fairytale for the childish workers, to give them the courage to face up to life. If every man had to be detached from the ruling ideology of bourgeois society on an individual basis, then Marxism becomes no more than an idea -- an eternally valid idea, but no more. In reality, it's the working class as a whole which detaches itself in certain historic conditions, when it's thrown with particular violence against the old system. Socialism can't be realized ‘man by man', as the old reformists used to believe, arguing that you had first to reform men before you could reform society. In fact the two can't be separated: society changes when humanity enters into movement not ‘man by man', but ‘as one man', when it finds itself in particular historic conditions.

The fact that Harper repeats the old reformist refrains in a seemingly new form, allows him, under a philosophical-dialectical verbiage to gloss over the real problems of the Russian revolution, to dismiss its fundamental contri­butions as no more than reasons of the Russian state. We refer to Lenin's position against the war and Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution.

Oh yes, Messrs. Kautsky and Harper, you may some­times hit the mark in a purely negative critique of the philosophical or economic theories of Lenin and Trotsky, but that in no way means that you have reached a revolutionary position. In their political positions during the crucial, insurrectionary phase of the Russian revolution, it was Lenin and Trotsky who were the true Marxist revolutionaries.

It's not enough, twenty years after the battle, and having yourself participated in the front line, to philosophically conclude that all this had to end up in the Stalinist state. You also have to ask how and why Lenin and Trotsky could base themselves on the international workers' movement, and prove to us that Stalinism was the inevitable product of this movement.

Harper, just like Kautsky, is incapable of answering these questions, because in their political positions, in the face of the bour­geoisie, in an imperialist war, or a phase of revolution, they lack the concepts that would allow them to approach these problems. They may know Lenin ‘as philosopher' or as a ‘head of state', but they don't know Lenin as a revolutionary Marxist, the real face of Lenin, when he fought against the imperialist war, or the real face of Trotsky, when he fought against the mechanistic concept of an ‘inevitable' capitalist development for Russia. They don't know the real face of October, which aren't just the mass strikes or the soviets. Lenin wasn't attached to the soviets in an absolute way, as Harper is, because he believed that the forms of proletarian power emerged spontaneously out of the struggle. In that I think that Lenin was also more Marxist, because he wasn't attached to soviets, unions, or parliamentarian­ ism (even if he was mistaken) in a definitive manner, but according to whether they were appropriate to the class struggle at a given time.

On the other hand, Harper's quasi-theological attachment to the councils now leads him to a position of advocating a form of workers' co-management under capitalism, as a kind of apprenticeship in socialism. But it's not the role of revolutionaries to advocate this kind of apprenticeship. Together with the ‘man by man' theory of socialism, this kind of apprenticeship would condemn humanity to eternal slavery and alienation, with or without councils, with or without ‘council communists' and their schemes for apprentice­ ship under the capitalist regime -- a vulgar reformist-conception which is simply the other side of Kautskyian coin.

As for the ‘struggle of the workers themselves', with its ‘appropriate' means -- strikes, etc -- we have seen the results. It comes close to the ‘strike-cultivating' theories of the Trotskyists and anarchists, with their latter-day versions of the old ‘trade unionist' and ‘economist' traditions which Lenin attacked so violently in What Is To Be Done. This means that the anti-union position of the council communists, correct in a purely negative sense, is no less false ‘in itself', because the unions are replaced by their younger brothers, the soviets, and play the same role, as though the content could be changed by changing the name. One no longer calls the party the party or unions, unions, but one replaces them by the same organizations that have the same functions but a different name. If one were to call cats ‘Raminagrobis' they would still have the same anatomy and the same place in the world. But for some they would have become a myth, and it's a curious thing that there are ‘dialectical' philosophers and materialists whose point of view is so narrow that they try to convince us that their world of mythological constructions, a world in which ‘raminagrobis' have replaced cats, really is a new world.

Thus: in the old world, Kautsky was a vulgar reformist, whereas, in the new world, Trotskyists, anarchists and council communists are ‘authentic revolutionaries'. In fact they are even more grossly reformist than the great theoretician of reformism, Kautsky.

The fact that Harper takes up the classical arguments of bourgeois reformism, both Menshevik and Kautskyist (and, more recently ‘Burnhamite'), against the Russian revolution, should not surprise us too much. Instead of trying to draw the real lessons of the revolutionary epoch as a Marxist would (and as Marx and Engels did, for example, with regard to the Paris Commune), Harper tries to condemn the Russian revolution ‘en bloc', as well as the Bolshevism that was linked to it (just as Blanquism and Proudhonism were linked to the Paris Commune).

If, instead of trying to condemn the Bolsheviks as being ‘appropriate to the Russian milieu', Harper had asked himself about the level of thought reached by the left of social democracy which all of us come out of, he would have reached very different conclusions in his book. He would have seen that this level of thought (even amongst those who were the most developed in dialectics) was insufficient for solving certain of the problems posed by the Russian revolution, especially the problem of party and state. On the eve of the Russian revolution, no Marxist had a very precise understanding of these problems, and for good reasons.

We insist that at all levels of knowledge -‑ philosophical, economic, and political - the Bolsheviks in 1917 were amongst the most advanced revolutionaries in the whole world, and this was to a large extent thanks to the presence of Lenin and Trotsky.

If subsequent events seem, to contradict this, it's not because their intellectual development was appropriate to the ‘Russian milieu', but because of the general level of the international workers' movement; and this poses philosophical problems which Harper hasn't even tried to raise.

Philipe

[1] ICC note: In a future issue of International Review, we will see how one of Harper's best disciples, Canne-Meyer, ended up, albeit with regret and sadness, at the same conclusion as Burnham about socialism being a utopia. Fundamentally, with a great deal more blather, this was the conclusion also reached by the Socialisme ou Barbarie group and its mentor, Chalieu-Castoriadis-Cardan.

[2] Note from the original text: Against the Harper/Kautsky thesis on a ‘specifically Russian milieu', we can cite Marx's Theses on Feuerbach: "The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing, and that, therefore, changed are products of other circumstances and that the educator needs educating. Hence, this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one is superior to society....The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice". 

In our press, we have often characterized the 1980s as ‘the years of truth’ (see, in particular, the International Review numbers 20 and 26). The first two years of the decade have confirmed this analysis. The years 1980‑81 have witnessed events of the greatest importance, events that are particularly significant for the stakes that will, in large part, be played out during the 1980s --imperialist war or worldwide proletarian revolution.

The illusions about the economic situation -- which determines the whole of social life -- have come brutally to an end; 1980 and 1981 appear as the years of a new recession in the world economy, with a massive growth of inflation and an unprecedented rise in unemployment.

The bourgeoisie’s response to this crisis -- wor­sening inter-imperialist tensions and the preparations for war -- has fully lived up to the causes that prompted it. 1980 began with the invasion of Afghanistan, while at the close of 1981 comes an intense growth in armaments throughout the world, and the opening in Geneva of new negotiations between Russia and the US over ‘disarmament’. We have already seen their role as a smoke-screen designed to conceal the headlong arms-race towards a new holocaust.

The workers’ response has also lived up to the raising of the stakes; during the summer of 1980 there took shape in Poland the mightiest move­ment of the world proletariat for more than half a century. A movement that every bourgeoisie spared no efforts to stifle, and which it has not yet managed to deal with. A movement which showed, at the same time, the capacity of the capitalist class for solidarity in the face of the proletarian struggle, and the necessity for this struggle to spread to the world level.

This article aims to take stock of these three fundamental elements of humanity’s destiny: the capitalist crisis, and the response of bourg­eoisie and proletariat respectively.

A continuously deteriorating economic crisis

In 1969, the leader of the world’s greatest power triumphantly declared: “We have finally learned to manage a modern economy in such a way as to assure its continuous expansion”[1]. A year later, the United States entered its worst rec­ession since the war: -0.1% growth of the Gross Domestic Product (nowhere near as bad as it was to become later) .

In 1975, Chirac, Prime Minister of the world’s fifth largest power, was taking his turn to play Nostradamus: “We can see the light at the end of the tunnel.” A year later, he was obliged to make way for ‘France’s best economist’, Prof­essor Barre, who, on his departure in May 1981, left the situation even worse than he had found it (unemployment doubled, inflation at 14% inst­ead of 11%).

A year ago, the American bourgeoisie chose Reagan to put an end to the crisis (at least this is what he said). But the remedies concoc­ted by Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize for Econom­ics, and a few other adepts of ‘supply-side economics’ have achieved nothing. The American economy is plunging into a new recession, unemp­loyment is approaching the 10 million mark (a post-war record) , and even David Stockman, dir­ector of the budget, admits that he didn’t really believe in the success of the economic policy for which he himself was largely responsible.

As regularly as autumn follows summer and win­ter follows autumn, the world’s leaders have deceived both themselves and their audience in announcing “the end of the tunnel” as if in a surrealist film, the tunnel’s end has seemed to retreat more and more as the train advanced to the point where it is no more than a little speck of light, soon to disappear altogether.

But the western leaders don’t hold a monopoly on hazardous predictions.

In September 1980, Gierek was replaced by Kania at the head of the PUWP for having led the Polish economy to disaster. With Kania, things would be different! And different they were -- to the point where the economic situa­tion of the summer of 1980 takes on an air of prosperity compared with the situation today; a fall in production of 4% has been followed by a collapse of 15%. Kania, after being tri­umphantly re-elected to the leadership of the party in July, disappeared into oblivion in October.

As for Brezhnev, his regularly disappointed predictions are at least as numerous as the plenary sessions of the Central Committee of the CPSU. In an outburst of lucidity, and with a certain humor that was probably unintended, Brezhnev recently finished by observing that after three consecutive years of bad harvests caused by the weather, the analysis of the Russian climate would have to be revised.

In recent years, the whole of Comecon has been marked by a chronic inability to meet the obj­ectives of the 1976-1980 plan. While the most ‘serious’ member, East Germany, managed to raise the national income by 80% of the plan’s forecast, for Hungary this figure falls to 50%. As for Poland, its growth in relation to 1976 has been zero, which comes down to saying that it produces only 70% of what was forecast by the planners. So much for the ‘great wor­kers’ victory’ that the planned economy is supposed to represent, according to the Trotskyists!

As for the state monopoly of foreign trade -- the other ‘great workers’ victory’ according to the Trotskyists -- it too has demonstrated its remarkable effectiveness: the countries that make up Comecon are among the most indebted in the world.

As for the myth of the absence of inflation in these countries, it has been killed off ever since the massive and repeated official price increases -- going as high as 200% (eg 170% on the price of bread in Poland) .

In 1936, Trotsky saw the economic progress of the USSR as proof of socialism’s superiority over capitalism; “There is no longer any need to argue with the bourgeois economists; socialism has shown its right to victory, not in the pages of Capital, but in an economic ar­ena that covers a sixth of the planet; not in the language of dialectics, but in that of iron, cement and electricity”[2].

With the same logic, we would today be obliged to come to the opposite conclusion -- that cap­italism is superior to socialism, so obvious is the economic weakness and fragility of the so-called ‘socialist’ countries. Moreover, this is the battle-cry of the western econ­omists to justify their defense of the capit­alist mode of production. In fact, the crisis hitting the eastern bloc is a new illustra­tion of what revolutionaries have always said -- that there is nothing socialist about the USSR and its satellites. These are capitalist econ­omies, and relatively under-developed ones at that.

But the cries of satisfaction coming from the defenders of private capitalism, as they point the finger of scorn at the countries of the eastern bloc are unable, though this is their purpose, to conceal the gravity of the crisis in the very heart of the citadels of world capital.

The following graphs give an idea of the dev­elopment of the three main economic indicators for the whole of the OECD (ie the most devel­oped western countries): these are inflation, the annual variation in the Gross Domestic Product and the rate of unemployment.

The yearly figures are already significant in themselves, but it is more interesting to ex­amine the mean for a period of several years (1961-64, 1965-69, 1970-74, 1975-79, 1980-81). For the three indicators that we are consider­ing, the figures show a constant deterioration in the situation of western capitalism. 

For some people, of course, this is not yet the ‘real’ crisis, since we have not seen a massive decline in production over a long per­iod, as was the case during the 30s: for the moment, the average rates of growth are still positive. There are two things to be said in reply to this argument:

1) As we have already pointed out in previous articles, while the bourgeoisie has not ‘learnt’ to resolve the crisis -- for the good reason that it is insoluble -- it has, by contrast, learnt since 1929 how to slow down its devel­opment, in particular through the massive use of state capitalist measures, and through the leading countries in each bloc taking in hand the affairs of a number of their satellites (essentially via Comecon in the eastern, and via the OECD and the IMF in the western bloc) . Moreover, it is worth remarking that notwith­standing inter-imperialist antagonisms, the richer bloc may, when the need arises, come to the aid of the stricken economy of a coun­try in the enemy bloc, especially if it is threatened by social upheavals. Western aid to Poland and the adherence of Poland and Hungary to the IMF are good illustrations of this.

2) The existence of a real crisis is not indic­ated solely by a decline in production. The continuing decline in the average rates of growth, clearly shown by the graph, demon­strates that something has definitively broken down in the world economic machinery. Further­more, the present massive introduction of automation means that the yearly rate of inc­rease in labor productivity is such that, in good times or bad, and even if many companies have to shut up shop, the total volume of pro­duction may increase from one year to another, without this indicating the slightest health in the economy[3].

In fact, among the most significant indicat­ors of the deepening crisis, the increase in unemployment is especially important. This is a direct expression of capitalism’s inability to integrate new workers into its productive apparatus. Worse still, it expresses the be­ginning of their large-scale rejection. And this is the case not only in the Third World, as it was during the post-war reconstruction, but in the capitalist metropoles themselves -- the developed countries. This is a flagrant sign of the historical bankruptcy of a mode of production whose mission was to spread its relations of production -- the exploitation of wage labor -- throughout the world, but which is now not even capable of maintaining them in its own strongholds (not to mention the sit­uation in the Third World, where unemployment has held tragic sway for decades).

The development of the rate of inflation is another highly significant indicator of the constant breakdown in capitalism’s function­ing. Inflation is a direct expression of cap­italism’s headlong flight forward which has become its mode of survival. Unable to find solvent outlets for its production, the sys­tem is drawing credits on its future by in­debting itself massively and continuously. And it is the state that shows the way. By means of constantly growing budget deficits and use of paper money, the bourgeoisie tries to create artificial markets to re­place those that slip from the grasp of national production. Currencies are more and more turning into ‘funny money’, IOUs put out by states that are themselves no longer solvent. And this ‘funny money’ can only go on diminishing in value, whence the increase in inflation.

When it tries to put a limit to this phenomenon, economic policy only succeeds, in the end, in bringing about a recession: the attempt to mort­gage the future a little less puts the present more at risk. We have seen the result of Mrs. Thatcher’s ‘shock treatment’, which incr­eased unemployment by 68% in a year, to over 3 million (a record since the ‘30s). Reagan’s magic potion has also had wonderful results: 9 million unemployed, 8.4% of the working pop­ulation in November 1981 (Reagan had under­taken not to go beyond 8%). As for Schmidt’s elixir, it also has proved its worth -- unemp­loyment increased by 54% in a year.

In fact, every bourgeoisie is caught more and more tightly between two scissor-blades: recession and inflation. Every attempt to escape one of these scourges ends up falling into the other -- without, however, getting away from the first.

Reagan, for example, amongst many other pro­mises, announced a reduction of the budget deficit to $42.5 billion for the fiscal year 1981-2: the forecast is now in the order of $100 billion for this fiscal year, and $125 billion and $145 billion for the following two.

We could go on citing figures which all high­light the dead-end that capitalism has run into. In fact, plain common sense is enough to see that this system’s crisis has no solution: if the conditions of 1965-69 brought about the worse conditions of 1970-74 (see Table 4) , and if these in their turn resulted in the still worse ones of 1975-79, it is hard to see how, or by what miracle, things could suddenly get better.

Already in 1974, the then French president Giscard d’Estaing declared, in a burst of lucidity: “The world is unhappy. It is unhappy because it does not know where it is going, and guesses that if it knew, it would find out that it is heading for a catastrophe” (24/10/74).

More recently, the OECD in its July 1981 ‘Economic Perspectives’ gave a touching ex­ample of the anguish that grips the bourg­eoisie every time it considers its own future. Put off by years of forecasts that have turned out to be overoptimistic, and refusing to probe lucidly into the world’s economic future for fear of “finding that it is heading for a catastrophe”, this serious organization if ever there was one wrote: “In most countries, the immediate perspective is complex and difficult.... Forecasts can never be considered as certain. Even behavior, whose reg­ularity, which is the very basis of any fore­cast, appears to be well-established, can change, sometimes very abruptly…..     

If, as often happens, the many hypotheses at the foundation of our forecasts are not confirmed, the future can appear in a very diff­erent light.”

In other words, the OECD admitted that it was no longer of any use ... This inability of the bourgeoisie to forecast its own future ex­presses the fact that as a class it no longer has any future to offer humanity other than a general holocaust.

Only the working class can give humanity any future. This is why it alone is able to understand the perspectives facing the world today, in particular through its revolutionary currents basing themselves firmly on Marxist theory. This is why revolutionaries, without any of the immense resources for study and investigation available to the bourgeoisie, were able to write as early as 1972:

“... the coming crisis is indeed of the same type as those which have plunged the world during the 20th century into the greatest catastrophes and barbarities of its existence. This is no longer a crisis of growth like those of the previous century, but a true death-crisis.

Without wanting to make predictions as to the time-scale, we can therefore indicate the following perspectives for the capitalist world:

-- massive reduction in world commerce;

-- commercial wars between different countries;

-- setting-up of' protectionist measures, and the break-up of customs unions (EEC etc);

-- a return to autarky;

-- falling production;

-- massive increase in unemployment;

-- reduction in workers’ real wages.”

(Revolution Internationale Ancienne Serie no 7, March/April 1972)

And it is for the same reasons that in 1968, at a time when no-one yet spoke of the crisis, which revolutionaries were already writing:

“1967 saw the fall of the £ Sterling, 1968 has seen Johnson’s measures; and as inter-imperial­ist struggles make the threat of war ever more present, we see the decomposition of the capit­alist system, which was hidden for a few years by the intoxication of the ‘progress’ that foll­owed the Second World War.

We are not prophets, and we do not claim to guess when and how future events will take place. But what we are indeed aware and sure of', as far as the process that capitalism is at present plunged in is concerned, is that it cannot be stopped by reforms, devaluations or any other variety of capitalist economic meas­ure, and that it is leading directly to crisis.” (Internacionalismo, January 1968. Press of the ICC in Venezuela.)

The bourgeoisie’s response to the crisis

Increasingly, the bourgeoisie is mortgaging the future, through runaway indebtedness and inflation. But its forward flight is not limited to the economic level. As in the past, at the bottom of the economic abyss lies generalized imperialist war. As surely as the great crisis of the 30s led to World War II, so the present crisis is pushing capitalism to a third holo­caust.

The threat of war no longer has to be demon­strated -- it is more and more among the daily preoccupations of the vast majority of the population. It is enshrined in the enormous acceleration in all countries’ military efforts, and especially in that of the most powerful countries: as he presented his military program, Reagan declared (12 October): “No American administration since Eisenhower has presented a nuclear project of this scale.” It appears in the development and installation of new and ever more sophisticated weapons: the Backfire bomber and the SS-20 on the Russian side, neutron bomb, cruise missile and Per­shing 2 on the American. It is revealed in the fact that more and more it is Europe -- central theatre of the two previous world wars -- that is becoming the main ground for military prep­arations: the present controversy and the Russian-US negotiations at Geneva over ‘Euro­missiles’ are good illustrations. In the same way as the crisis struck violently first at capitalism’s periphery, and then struck at its heart, so war, which has for so long confined its ravages to the Third World (Far East, Middle East and Africa) , now extends its threat to the metropoles.

But the third holocaust is not being prepared by the accumulation of armaments alone. It also in­volves a process of closing ranks around the leading countries of the two blocs. This is especially clear in the west, where despite all the declarations and campaigns of the various parties, the governments are drawn into toeing the line behind the positions of the US. Schmidt, for example, has seemed to be acting as a sharp-shooter and to be disobeying Amer­ican instructions. In fact his 22 November meeting with Brezhnev was not an occasion for infidelity to his bloc: quite the reverse -- the positions he adopted during this meeting even earned him the congratulations of the right-wing opposition in the Bundestag.

For his part, Mitterand has adopted a fine air of independence from the US as far as the Third World is concerned. At the North-South summit of Cancun, he made a song and dance against Reagan’s positions and in favor of ‘global negotiations’ between developed and under­developed countries, so that the former should come to the aid of the latter, Two days prev­iously, in Mexico City, he had made a moving speech, prepared by his counselor Regis Debray (one-time admirer of Che Guevara), in which he addressed himself to “those who take up arms to defend their liberty”. His message to “all freedom fighters” was that “courage, freedom will win!”

These declarations, along with the recognition of the E1 Salvador guerrilla movements, seemed like spanners in the works of American policy. In fact, it was simply a division of labor within the western bloc between those who use the language of intimidation (which is dominant as far as the Third World is concerned) and those who have the specific job of giving the western bloc control over opposition and guerr­illa movements and preventing them from going over to the Russians.

The American bloc has already long since del­egated to French imperialism the job of keep­ing order in certain zones in the Third World. Mitterand has taken over the job of policing Africa from Giscard (as we have recently seen in Chad). Given his ‘socialist’ and ‘humanist’ image, he has also been given a mandate, along with his Mexican acolyte Lopez Portillo, of doing the bloc’s public relations as regards the bourgeois movements struggling against Latin America’s military regimes.

But these ‘deviant’ declarations do not express the real ties between French and Amer­ican imperialism. These are to be seen in Mitterand’s other declarations, following the 18 October meeting with Reagan at York­town:

“These were good conversations. Dialogue is easy between friends ... We spoke with the frankness of old friends who can say everything without destroying anything”; and Mitterand emphasized “the good health of Franco-American friendship, which is not threatened by our divergences.”

The idea of a rise in neutralism, so often put forward in the bourgeois media (and which finds a complement in the idea of the ‘disintegra­tion of the blocs’ so dear to the groups Pour une Intervention Communiste and Volonte Comm­uniste), is basically no more than a propaganda exercise, aimed at allowing the continued strengthening of the ties amongst members of the western bloc, faced with its growing imper­ialist rivalries with the Russian bloc.

A recent illustration of this tendency to strengthen the western bloc was given by Sadat’s assassination, in which the ‘hand of Moscow’ was detected -- as propaganda demanded. In reality, Sadat’s death was very convenient for the west. On the one hand, it allowed the replacement of an increasingly unpopular leader confronting a growing social discontent. Continued US support for Sadat was likely to end up in an Iran-style situation. On the other hand, (as Cheysson, French Minister of Foreign Affairs bluntly put it) it opened the way towards reconciliation amongst the Arab coun­tries, and especially the two most powerful -- Egypt and Saudi Arabia. And this restoration of Arab unity, which had fallen apart after the Camp David agreements, and which can only be realized under the American aegis, is indeed one of the spearheads of western imper­ialism in the face of instability in Iran and the Russian thrust in Afghanistan. If anyone’s ‘hand’ is behind the religious extremists who carried out the assassination, it is certainly not the KGB’s, but rather the CIA’s -- which, moreover, was responsible for Sadat’s security arrangements.

Sadat’s assassination was presented as a threat to ‘peace’. In a sense this is true, but for quite different reasons from those put forward by western propaganda. If this event contri­butes to the march towards war, it is not because Sadat was a ‘man of peace’; he never has been, whether in 1973 when he started the war against Israel, or at Camp David, designed to strengthen the west’s political and military positions in the Middle East, in the framework of the ‘Pax Americana’. And, as always in dec­adent capitalism, peace in one part of the world is simply a preparation for a still more widespread and murderous war elsewhere.

This is a cruel reality of the world today: peace, and talk of peace, has no other purpose than to pave the way for war. This is the significance of the present enormous pacifist campaigns being unleashed in Western Europe.

History shows that world wars have always been prepared by pacifist campaigns. Even before 1914, the reformist wing of the Social-Democ­racy, notably under Jaures’ leadership, under­took an intense pacifist propaganda -- the better to call the workers to war in August 1914 in the name of ‘defending civilization’: the same civilization which they proposed pre­viously to defend by demonstrating for peace. While Jaures, who was assassinated on the eve of the war, did not have the chance to take this final step, by contrast Leon Jouhaux, leader of CGT and who had taken a leading part in the pacifist campaigns, ended up in the Government of National Unity. From before 1914 then, the pacifism promoted by the reformists was one of capitalism’s methods used to bind the proletariat hand and foot, and hurl it into the imperialist massacre.

In the same way, in 1934, the Amsterdam-Plegel movement (so called after the two towns that hosted the preparatory conferences) fixed itself the objective of the struggle for peace, under the aegis of the Stalinist parties and their fellow-travelers, with the participa­tion of the Socialists and the enthusiastic adherence of the Trotskyists (and even the anarchists). This movement ended up in the ‘Popular Fronts’ against fascism (supposedly the main war-monger) , and was one of the means by which the proletariat was mobilized for World War II.

The same maneuver was used again at the begin­ning of the ‘50s, when the ‘cold war’ made its appearance as the preliminary of a Third World War. Following the ‘Stockholm appeal’ against atomic weapons, the Stalinist parties set in motion an immense campaign of petition-signing ‘for peace’, which met with a certain unden­iable success (to the point where prostitutes caught in the act of soliciting their clients claimed in their defense to be soliciting signatures for the petition!).'Although this time, the inter-imperialist tensions did not result in a new world war, the methods for preparing it had once again been put to work.

Why are wars always preceded by pacifist cam­paigns?

In the first place, by proposing to put pressure on governments to ‘keep the peace’ or ‘give up armaments’, they give credence to the idea that governments have a choice between several policies, that imperialist war is not an inevitable evil of decadent capitalism, but the result of a ‘war-mongering’ policy on the part of a particular section of the bourg­eoisie. Once this idea is well fixed in the workers’ heads, it can then be used to con­vince them that it is ‘the other country’s’ bourgeoisie that is ‘war-mongering’, that ‘wants war’, and so that the ‘sacred union’ is necessary to fight it and prevent its victory. This is how the French Socialists in 1914 called for a struggle against ‘Pruss­ian militarism’, and the German Socialists for a struggle against ‘Tsarism and its allies’. This is how the Stalinists and social-demo­crats prepared the ‘anti-fascist’ crusade of World War II.

Secondly, pacifist campaigns tend to deny class differences and antagonisms, in that they draw together all those citizens who are ‘against war’. In doing so, they channel and dilute proletarian combativity into an inter-classist morass, where all ‘men of goodwill’ meet, but where the proletariat loses sight of its class interests. They are thus a formidable barrier to the class struggle -- which is the only real obstacle to the bourgeois conclusion to the contradictions of capitalism: imperialist war.

This is why, both before and during World War I (in particular under Lenin’s leadership), rev­olutionaries fought against pacifism, and put forward the revolutionary slogan “Change the imperialist war into a civil war” against slogans of the reformists; this is why they explained that the scourge of war could dis­appear only with the disappearance of capitalism itself. In the same way, the only ones to re­main on a class terrain between the wars and during the second were those who maintained this position against the pacifists of the day.

Today’s pacifist campaigns have exactly the same function as those in the past. They are the follow-up to the previous campaigns for the ‘defense of human rights’ promoted by Carter, and the ‘defense of the free world’ promoted by Reagan. But while the previous campaigns were in the main a failure, the pacifist ones are meeting with a far greater success, for they are based on a real anxiety on the part especially of the population of Western Europe. For the moment, they are not directly anti-Russian as were their predecessors. In some places they even enjoy the support of the eastern bloc, through the Stalinist parties. But even if their main target is for the mom­ent the military policy of the western bloc (in particular the Pershing and cruise missiles and the neutron bomb), this is only of second­ary importance, since they are only a first step in the mobilization of the proletariat in the west behind ‘its’ bloc. At the right moment it will be ‘shown’ that the real danger to peace is the ‘other side’, the eastern bloc. In the meantime, the object is above all to prevent the proletariat from appearing as an autonomous social force, as it has begun to do especially since the strikes in Poland.

The main thing for the bourgeoisie is that the workers should be unable to understand the link between the struggles they are forced to wage against austerity, and the struggle against the threat of war. Nothing worries the capitalist class more than the prospect of the proletariat becoming aware of what is really at stake in its struggles, since the significance of the class struggle today is not limited to the economic demands which accompany it; it is a real barrier to the bourgeoisie’s preparations for imperialist war, and constitutes the work­ing class’ preparations for the overthrow of capitalism.

The pacifist campaigns are thus a smoke­screen designed to mislead the working class, to take it onto unfavorable ground, and to imprison its struggles in the strictly econ­omic arena. They aim at defusing the resurg­ence of the class struggle and in so doing, to remove capitalism’s only real obstacle on the road to imperialist war.

The role of revolutionaries is to denounce them as such.

What perspectives for the working class?

The struggle of the working class, because it threatens the very foundations of this society of exploitation and not just a particular section of it, and because it therefore obliges the world bourgeoisie to close ranks, is the only force within society capable of throwing the imperialist war out of gear. We have seen this once again during 1980. Following the invasion of Afghanistan, the first part of the year was dominated by an unprecedented aggrav­ation of inter-bloc tension. By contrast, as soon as the mass strike exploded in Poland, the overall situation was transformed.

The escalation of war propaganda was temp­orarily halted, and in November of 1980, even before his investiture, Reagan sent his per­sonal ambassador Percy to renew a contact with the Russian government that had been broken since the end of 1979. Although America continued its diatribes over Poland, they had a quite different meaning from those following the invasion of Afghanistan. Certainly, the occasion is too good to miss for presenting Russia to western opinion as the ‘bad guy’ that has it in for ‘the independence of the Polish people’. But the main purpose of America’s warnings to the USSR against any temptation to invade Poland was precisely to make this threat credible in the eyes of Polish workers, and thus encourage them to stick to ‘moderation’.

Confronting the proletariat in Poland, we have seen the creation of a real ‘Holy Alliance’ of the whole world bourgeoisie, which has shared out the dirty work both on the external level (eastern and western blocs) and on the internal (UPWP and Solidarity) so as to isolate the proletariat and curb its struggle[4]. This is why the question of the worldwide generalization of proletarian combat has become so fundamental, as we have so often emphasized in these pages[5].

Today we can see how, for lack of such generalization, the bourgeoisie has progressively recovered the ground that it had to yield in August 1980. By deciding (2 December 1981) to use force against the striking trainee firemen (6000 riot police against 300 firemen) the Polish authorities scored a new point against the working class. This progressive recovery goes back to February 1981 with Jaruzelski’s appointment as head of government. It opened out in March with police violence at Bydgoszcz, where the authorities deliberately provoked the working class (even if Walesa presented the affair as ‘a plot against Jaruzelski’), so that they could go ahead with preparing for the repression. And moreover, it was not so much the government as Solidarity that played the crucial part here. After a lot of noise over a 4-hour warning strike and the preparation of an unlimited general strike, Solidarity signed a compromise with the government and made the workers swallow it.

The process continued with Jaruzelski’s nomin­ation in October as First Secretary of the UPWP. From this moment, the general held three key posts: at the head of the party, the govern­ment and the army. And, just as after his nom­ination in February, that of October was foll­owed by a brutal and still more massive use of the police -- this time under his direct respon­sibility.

Today, it is once again up to Solidarity -- using a radicalized language if necessary -- to defuse the accumulating discontent of the workers, who are faced with the government’s counter-offensive and the continuing decline of their living conditions. And so, on 7 December, the government gleefully and repeatedly broadcast Walesa’s radical words at the 3 December meeting of Solidarity’s leaders, following the police intervention:

“I've got no more illusions. Things have gone so far that we mus to tell people everything, tell them that what’s at stake is nothing less than changing reality. No system can be changed without breaking something. The main thing is to win.”

The aim of this government maneuver is obvious: to intimidate the population by threatening serious repercussions to such talk. The other aim is to refurbish Walesa’s image amongst the most combative workers, since the government will still need him to calm them down when the moment comes.

The bourgeoisie’s strategy is obvious -- to drive the proletariat to a choice between capitulation or a head-on attack which it knows it would lose, given its present isolation.

This is why the international generalization of the class struggle appears every day as a still more imperious necessity.

For the moment, this generalization is slow in coming. In the eastern bloc, we have seen a rising combativity amongst the workers most hard-hit by the crisis -- in Rumania (where the government has taken over the western pacifist campaigns!). This combativity will only find a full expression in every country, east and west, when the economic pressure on the working masses becomes intolerable. With the worsening of the crisis, this pressure is dev­eloping everywhere. But at first, it tends to provoke a greater passivity in the proletariat (although the significance of such figures should always be examined with caution, stat­istics reveal an almost universal decline in strike-days lost and in the number of disputes for 1980 and the beginning of 1981). This does not mean that the proletariat has already lost -- although this would become a danger were such passivity to continue. Rather, it is a sign of awareness spreading through the class of what is at stake in the coming struggles, of the full extent of the tasks that await it. If the proletariat still hesitates, this is because it is beginning to realize that ‘the years of truth’ have begun.

F.M.  (8 December 1981)

In August 1980 the workers of Poland gave us the example of the mass strike, of self-organization in the struggle, of true workers' solidarity. Since December 13, 1981, they have given us the example of the courage and combativity which proves that the workers' reaction to the crisis will not be the same as in the thirties. It is precisely because the working class didn't knuckle under when faced with the whole armed might of the capitalist state, it's because even a year of union sabotage and all the illusions fostered by the different agencies of the bourgeoisie were not able to dry up this exceptional force of combativity, that we know that the revolution is possible.

Even if they are not directly aware of it, it is not as ‘Poles' that the workers of Poland have been fighting. Their courage, their determination in an unequal and desperate fight are not the specific characteristics of ‘the Polish people', These are traits specific to the world working class. In history, there are many examples of the heroic courage the proletariat of all countries is capable of: the ‘Communards' of 1871, the Russian and Polish workers of 1905-1906, the workers of Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, China and so many other countries in 1917-1927.

What kind of defeat?

In Poland today, a battalion of the world working class is being attacked with all the violence capitalism is capable of: tanks, machine guns, mass arrests, concentration camps, mines flooded with gas or water (an old capitalist ‘technique' used particularly by the English bourgeoisie in India in the thirties). A battalion of the world working class which is fighting magnificently, to the last ounce of courage. That the battle is lost is obvious: today the authorities announce with satisfaction that there are no longer any points of resistance. Even the passive resistance will be overcome in the long run because it is no longer the fruit of a mass movement, of the collective and organized action of the working class, but the product of a sum of workers who have been reduced to atomization by repression and terror.

And even if this form of resistance keeps up for a long time, the bourgeoisie will still have won a victory by eliminating the most direct expressions of the life of the working class: mass strikes, general assemblies, comparing experiences and open discussion among workers.

We have to face reality. The proletariat in Poland has suffered a defeat today. But this defeat is neither definitive nor irreversible. The workers have not been crushed.

As revolutionaries have observed for a long time, particularly Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, the proletar­iat is condemned to experience defeats until the    day of its final victory over capitalism. By drawing the lessons of defeats in the clearest way possible the proletariat finds the force to prepare the victories of tomorrow.

In itself, a partial defeat is not a catastrophe for the working class. It is part of its long, hard road towards the revolution. It is a school where the proletariat learns to understand its enemy and to understand itself, to evaluate the forces it must develop for future battles, the weaknesses it has to overcome. It is an inevitable aspect of the matura­tion of class consciousness which will be one of its most crucial weapons in the decisive confrontations to come.

However, every defeat of the proletariat does not have the same meaning. There are defeats which only lead to long-term demoralization and disarray within the working class. These are defeats which take place in the context of a general course of retreat of class struggle, of the triumph of the counter-revolution. Such was the defeat suffered in Spain between 1936 and 1939. In this case, not only did the proletariat lose a million from its ranks, but this sacrifice only prepared the way for the 50 million dead in World War II. In general what characterizes the type of defeat is that the proletariat did not fight directly on its class terrain, but let itself be dragged onto a bourgeois terrain like ‘anti-fascism' in 1936.

On the other hand, defeats which take place in the context of a course towards rising class struggle are fought out on a proletarian terrain. The working class is defeated but it hasn't been enlisted to fight for objectives which aren't its own. The revolution of 1905 was a rehearsal for the victory which came in 1917 because the proletariat in Russia in 1905 fought on its own terrain even if it didn't win right away: the terrain of the mass strike, of the struggle to defend its economic and political interests, of self-organization in the soviets.

In spite of all the maneuvers and the negative weight of Solidarity, in spite of all the Polish flags and the pictures of the Virgin which hampered its movement, the proletariat in Poland was capable of remaining on its own terrain in the struggle against increased exploitation and capitalist repression. Those who fixate on the bourgeois claptrap the working class hasn't yet got rid of cannot understand this and greet the workers' combat in Poland with skepticism. They belong in the same category as those who in 1936 imagined that a red flag gave a proletarian character to anti‑fascism.

In the course of a year and a half of fighting in Poland, themes of bourgeois mystification have not been lacking. But these were not themes to mobilize the working class. On the contrary, they were themes to demobilize the workers' struggles which generally sprang up with class demands (against price rises, food restrictions, repression, arbitrary use of authority in factories, in favor of reducing hours, etc),

This is what allows us to say that the proletariat of today is not fighting against the crisis in the same way it did in the thirties. This is what shows us that the magnificent resistance of the workers in Poland is not just a shot in the dark but the way in which the workers pass the torch of the struggle to their class brothers in other countries.

The defeat today thus belongs to the category of those which directly contribute to the preparation of the final victory of the proletariat. But this can really be so only if the working class draws the maximum of lessons and gives itself the means to avoid such defeats in the future. In fact, the tactic the bourgeoisie is trying to use, as in the past (particularly in Germany in the early 1920's) consists of beating the proletariat group by group, factory by factory, country by country, A series of partial defeats like today's could lead to an irreversible weakening of the working class, to the reversal of the course of history, Then there would no longer be the perspective of the proletarian response to the crisis -- the revolution -- but only the bourgeois response -- world imperialist war.

What lessons?

The essential questions to be raised are therefore:

How did it happen?

Why was the bourgeoisie able to inflict such a bloody setback on the proletariat?

How can we avoid such defeats, such repression, in the future?

The first essential point that should be clear for the proletariat is that the world bourgeoisie is not reacting in a scattered, dispersed way towards class struggle but through concerted action. It is true that the bourgeois class is riddled with a multitude of conflicts of interest which the crisis merely sharpens and which culminate in a division of the world into military blocs, But history has taught us, and today's reality confirms once again, that the bourgeoisie is capable of overcoming its antagonisms when its survival as a class is threat­ened. On many occasions in the columns of this Review and in our territorial press we have pointed out the division of labor between the different factions of the bourgeoisie in its efforts to deal with the workers' struggle in Poland: between the government and Solidarity, between East and West, between right and left. We return to that subject here, in order to denounce the monstrous duplicity of the American bloc, which is waxing indignant over the repression against the Polish workers and over Russia's collaboration in this repression.

It's important to remember that this ‘indignation', for which Reagan is now the main mouthpiece and which is becoming a major part of the western bloc's ideological preparations for war, was not at all in evidence when the state of siege was first imposed.

For several days, the bourgeoisie of the west, Washington included, was putting out the myth of a "strictly Polish affair", It was only after it became clear that the western workers were unable to express a real solidarity with their class brothers in Poland, that whatever feelings of solidarity they did express were being suitably channeled by the unions and the left, that the western bourgeoisie, feeling secure on the class struggle front, could afford the luxury of using the repression in its propaganda against the Russian bloc -- a repression which it had directly helped to prepare.

If there is still any proof needed of the compli­city between the great powers in the repression of the workers in Poland, we only have to take note of the declaration made by M. Doumeng, a member of the French Communist Party and a bigwig in a major commercial enterprise (in Paris Match of 1 January) To the question "Concerning the military coup in Poland, do you believe that the Soviet Union and the United States got together beforehand", Doumeng answered openly: "What strikes me is that both have an interest in order reigning in Poland. I was in Poland three weeks ago. I met a very powerful American businessman. He was there to explain to the Polish government that he was prepared to lend the Polish government a billion dollars on one condition: order must be restored in Poland." It's not because he is s member of the French CP that this individual can say such things. You could read exactly the same sort of thing in the Wall Street Journal immediately after Jaruselski's coup.

But neither side admits that the solidarity between east and west is not just limited to finance, In the last analysis, the bourgeoisie is ready to write off the economic collapse of Poland. What was important to the bourgeoisie above all was to silence a proletariat that was giving too much of a ‘bad example' to the proletariats of other countries -- and to do this before other workers took up this example under pressure front increas­ing misery.

This is the second essential point that should be clear for the world working class: the bourgeois repression in Poland was possible only because the proletariat of this country remained isolated. (cf. the article in this issue ‘Economic Crisis and Class Struggle').

This isolation in particular allowed Solidarnosc to weaken the working class in Poland and facil­itated the impact of its democratic, union, self-management and nationalist mystifications.

Poland today is a tragic example of the need for the proletariat to generalize its struggle on a world scale, If this lesson isn't understood, if the proletariat lets itself be turned around by the false campaigns of ‘solidarity' orchestrated by the left factions of capital, if it doesn't realize that the only true solidarity is to be found in the common struggle against misery and exploitation, then there will be other, worse repressions and at the end of the line, an imperialist holocaust.

FM

(4 January 1982)

Over the last few months, the revolutionary milieu has been going through a series of political convulsions. Some organizations have disappeared or fallen apart:

-- the PIC (Pour Une Intervention Communiste, France) has just dissolved. Only one of its factions, ‘Groupe Volonte Communiste', is continuing a political existence (see Revolut­ion Internationale 88)

-- FOR (Ferment Ouvriere Revolutionaire) has dissolved its section in Spain and separated itself from comrades in the USA.

Other groups have seen militants leaving their ranks:

-- the International Communist Party (Communist Program) has just excluded its sections in the south of France and some in Italy, including the Turin section.

-- in the ICC there have also been a number of departures and exclusions.

Other groups are going through a profound polit­ical regression:

-- the Nuclei Leninisti Internazionalisti (Italy, originating in a split from Communist Program and thus from the revolutionary milieu) have just published a declaration in favor of political unification with the crypto-Trotskyist group Combat Communiste in France.

Still others have experienced a temporary dis­orientation:

-- the Communist Workers Organization in Britain, after calling for an immediate insurrection in Poland, has made a complete volte-face in its appreciation of the situation (in Workers Voice 4 the CWO ran the headline ‘Revolution Now!' In the next issue the CWO honestly criticized this erroneous analysis, which it now sees as an "adventurist" call. The CWO is one of the rare groups in the revolutionary milieu capable of openly and publicly correcting its mistakes).

Why all these convulsions? Why is the tiny min­ority of the working class, the revolutionary milieu, being reduced even more, and what conc­lusions should we draw from it? Why these fail­ures and political disorientations?

It's all the more difficult to answer these questions seeing that the ‘revolutionary pol­itical milieu' is no more than a juxtaposition of' political groups, each one jealously guard­ing its ‘secrets', keeping silent about its crises, its internal life, thinking that it's quite alright to gloat over other groups' problems. The political milieu has no framework for debating its problems and clarifying its political positions.

It's thus difficult to say with any certainty what the precise political reasons behind these convulsions are. But all the same it's necessary to try to draw up an initial balance sheet of the present situation, even if it means correcting it later on.

We think that today's milieu

-- is paying the price for the political and organizational immaturity which has existed for a long time in a milieu ravaged by sectarianism

-- is going through political convulsions because its political positions and its practice are inadequate in the face of the new situation opened up by the mass strike in Poland.

The ICC's own problems must be seen in the context of the same problem: how to contribute to the growth of class consciousness in these ‘years of truth'.

The failure of the International Conferences

The immaturities which the milieu is paying for today, and will pay for even more tomorrow, were already clearly revealed in the failure of the international conferences from 1977 to 1980. This was the failure of the political milieu that emerged out of the first wave of class struggle after 1968 and that lived through the reflux of the mid-70s.,

The cycle of international conferences called by Battaglia Comunista and fully supported by the ICC[1] was the first serious attempt since 1968 to break down the isolation between revolutionary groups.

From the beginning of the conferences, the ICP (Program), in its disdainful isolation, refused to participate, convinced that the hist­orical, formal party, indivisible and invariant, existed already in its own program and organization. Believing that it alone exists, the ICP refused to take part in an international polit­ical discussion, attributing to others its own view of the conferences, as a place to go fishing for recruits, which supposedly doesn't interest the ICP.

The FOR, after having agreed in principle with the first conference, and after coming to the first session of the second one, withdrew from the proceedings with a theatrical display which barely covered its inability to defend its positions -- above all the one that denies the significance of the economic crisis of the system and instead talks vaguely about a ‘crisis of civilization'.

The PIC, after communicating its agreement in writing, suddenly changed its mind. It refused to participate in a discussion which, even before it took place, was denounced as a ‘dialogue of the deaf'... But it was the PIC that was deaf, and the result of this sort of attitude is that the PIC will never hear any­thing again, because it's dead.

But sectarianism didn't stop at the door of the conferences. The spirit of the sect, the refusal to take discussions to their conclusion, obstructed all the work of the conferences.

It's true that the conferences did help to dismantle the wall of suspicions and misunderstandings which existed between the groups. They debated questions that are essential for the revolutionary milieu: where we have reached in the crisis of capitalism and the evolution of the class struggle; what is the role of the unions, of nationalism and ‘national liberation struggles'; what is the function of the organization of revolutionaries. These debates were published in pamphlets and distributed din three languages. In this sense, the conferences were an important gain for the future.

But they never really understood why they existed, or the seriousness of their tasks. Political sclerosis, the fear of taking the confrontation of political analyses and pos­itions to its conclusions, meant that these discussions were more like a ‘match' between ‘rival' groups than a real search for under­standing, for fruitful debate. The conferences as such always refused to issue a summary of the agreements and disagreements between the groups. Even more serious: under the pretext that revolutionary organizations can't sign any common declarations unless they agree about everything, Battaglia, CWO, and Eveil Internat­ionaliste refused to affirm, with the ICC and the Nuclei, the most basic revolutionary principles against the danger of imperialist war today! The conference remained ‘dumb' towards its political responsibilities, towards the working class. The idea that a revolutionary group comes out of the working class and must be historically accountable to the class, that it's not just a circle which can say what it likes or act like a weathervane -- this idea has not yet entered the heads of most of today's revolutionary milieu.

At the third conference, thinking it was time to make an a priori political selection, BC and CWO, proposed, as a new criterion for participating in the conferences, a resolution on the party which, they said, would exclude ‘spontaneists' (like the ICC). Without any real discussion, the ICC thus found itself excluded from the conferences through a sordid maneuver.

At the time some groups talked a lot about the need for a ‘strict selection' amongst revolutionary organizations. They wanted to limit the discussion on the party and other questions in advance, so as to avoid having to confront the ‘kill-joys' of the ICC. Instead of encour­aging the continuation of political debate, this ‘selection' by maneuver, which attributed to the ICC all kinds of imaginary positions instead of listening to the ones we really defend on the party, stifled all debate and the conferences themselves: there have been none since then. Seduced by Battaglia's flirtations into believing in a premature ‘regroupment', the political milieu thus rejected the chance of creating a framework for the international political discussion that is so indispensable to it.

"..... selection arises out of the practice of the class or in relation to world wars, not as a result of discussion conducted behind closed doors...This is why, to begin with, it is necessary not to over-estimate the capacity of ‘self-selection' through simple debate. Selection -- speak of that at the required time". (‘Sectarianism, An Inheritance From The Counter-revolution That Must Be Transcended', in IR22)

And in fact, it's today's objective reality which is carrying through a process of decant­ation in the revolutionary milieu. But we no longer have an organized framework for debating the current difficulties: we are just having violent convulsions that take place in a confused, dispersed manner,

The years of truth

The international conferences fell apart in May 1980, only a couple of months before the outbreak of the mass strikes in Poland. These mass strikes were the most important sign that we are entering a new cycle of international class struggle. They mark the beginning of a decisive phase, of a period of unprecedented class con­frontations that will determine the future of humanity: capitalist war or proletarian revol­ution.

It's the reality of this new period which is throwing down a challenge to the dispersed revolutionary groups: are they sufficiently politically armed to understand and face up to the demands of this new situation?

In order to understand these new demands, we must outline the essential aspects of the accelerating historical process over the last ten years:

-- the grave accentuation of the economic crisis which is hitting all the countries of the world, including -- in fact, in the most brutal manner -- the countries of the eastern bloc, as well as the giants of the western bloc, West Germany and Japan. Today, this crisis and unemployment aren't limited to particular cate­gories of society but are biting into the main concentrations of the western working class. Rationing and shortages in the east are the future that this society holds in store for workers everywhere;

-- the attempt to push the crisis onto the peripheral countries, the ‘Third World', no longer makes up for the economic failure of the great powers. As for the under-developed countries themselves, it has led to genocides whose hopelessness is becoming harder and harder to conceal;

-- the aggravation of inter-imperialist tensions, above all between the two blocs. The crisis already holds within itself the premises for a new war, and its present evol­ution is accelerating the preparations for war. The danger of war exists as long as capitalism exists, but today the road towards a world conflict is barred by the combativity of the proletariat;

-- the deepening crisis has provoked a new wave of international class struggle; the mass strike in Poland 1980 is an announcement that there are going to be decisive class confrontations in the years to come. All the elements of the present situation converge in the lessons of Poland and in the necessity for the internationalization of workers' struggle;

-- the bourgeoisie, on an international scale, has recognized the danger which this class combativity poses to its system. Across national frontiers, even across the blocs, the capitalist class is working together against the danger of the mass strike. In the decisive confrontations of this period, the proletariat won't be facing up to a bourgeoisie that is surprised and disconcerted as it was during the first wave of struggles after 1968. It will be dealing with a bourgeoisie that has been well warned and is fully prepared to use all its skills of mystification, diversion and repression;

-- the bourgeois strategy against the prolet­ariat is based essentially on the left, and is most effective when the left is in ‘opposition' to the governing parties, thus hiding the real convergence between all bourgeois parties and unions, which are ensconced in the machinery of state capitalism, of the state totalitarianism that marks the decadence of the system. The main cleavage in society, between the working class and the bourgeoisie that has taken refuge in the hypertrophied capitalist state, is thus hidden behind the facade of ‘democratic choice'. The aim of the unions and the ideological campaigns of the left is to disarm the working class and set it up for repression when the time is right. The key to the historic course res­ides in the capacity of the working class to resist being mobilized behind the left.

The proletariat of the main industrial centers only partially understands these overall aspects of the current situation, But the maturation of class consciousness in the face of the deterioration of the objective situation -- clearly demonstrated in the mass strikes in Poland -- is not a ‘Polish' phenomenon but part of a long, tortuous, painful process which is unfolding on an international scale, and which only comes to the surface at certain important moments. The strikes in Poland are part of a process leading towards the unification of the class across capitalist barriers and national front­iers.

But for the revolutionary minorities, those who have to contribute to the development of class consciousness, the years of truth represent a more immediately tangible challenge, since revolutionary organizations operate at the consc­ious level or not at all. Are they to be a mere reflection of the hesitations and con­fusions in the working class, of the disper­sion that has reigned in the past, or are they going to be equal to the demands posed by the mass strike and become an active factor in the historical situation? History doesn't grant pardons: if today's revolutionary organizations aren't able to respond to the demands of the hour, they will be swept aside pitilessly

The demands of the present period

It's inevitable that the demands of the new period of accelerating events should shake a political milieu composed essentially of groups constituted during the years of reflux and out of what was left from 1968. But 1968 and the first wave of workers' struggles again­st the crisis didn't leave behind sufficient acquisitions to ensure a profound political stability today. What's more, groups life the ICP or BC, who came directly out of political fractions created during the counter-revolutionary period prior to 1968, while having an important degree of political stability, also went through a process of sclerosis in their political positions and in their organizational life, which is exposing them as much as anyone else to the convulsions of the present period.

On top of this, the pressure imposed by the state terror of the bourgeoisie is growing, in itself leading to a decantation in our ranks of those who haven't yet understood what political commitment really means.

Very broadly, we can define the demands of this period in the following way:

-- the need for a coherent programmatic framework, synthesizing the acquisitions of Marxism in the light of a principled critique of the positions of the Third International;

-- the capacity to apply this framework to an analysis of the present balance of forces between the classes;

-- an understanding of the question of organization of revolutionaries as a political question in itself; the need to create an inter­national, centralized framework for this organization, to clearly define its role and pra­ctice in the process of revolutionary regroup­ment and in the unification of the class as a whole.

If we look at the present trajectory of certain political groups, including the ICC, we will see that these three aspects are linked, but that each one needs a particular examination,

1) Concerning the programmatic framework, the principles deriving from the history of the workers' movement: unless you base yourself on the acquisition of Marxism, you are doomed. Groups like the PIC, which in its last phase threw away the acquisitions of the 1st, 2nd, and Third Internationals, seeing them all as degenerate and counter-revolutionary, leave the historical ground of Marxism and end up simply disappearing. Without the real historical dim­ension of Marxism any so-called ‘principles' become mere abstractions.

But it's also true that Marxism isn't a bible in which every letter has to be retained. This way of looking at Marxism also leads to failure, although in a less immediately catastrophic way. Bourgeois ideology always uses the past errors of the workers' movement to insert itself into the class.

Having a programmatic framework adequate for today necessarily implies a critical re-examination of the Third International. Today's direct continuators of the Italian left have stopped half-way in their critical balance-sheet of the positions of the Communist International. That is why a group that has come out of the Italian left, and which still claims descent from it, the Nuclei, can now think about uniting with a variant of Trotskyism -‑ on the union question, on ‘national liberation', and even on parliamentarism. It only had to make one step towards finding an area of ‘entente' with Trotskyism. What the Nuclei is now actually doing -- sliding towards leftism -- remains an implicit danger for all those who make an ‘integral' defense of the positions of the 2nd Congress of the CI, after 60 years of experience with trade unions, parliamentarism, and the national question. We've seen BC's ‘union groups' and ‘united front at the base' and the splits which these gave rise to in 1980. We see this danger today in the ICP (Program) with its ‘tactical' front against repression, which seems to have been one of the factors behind the recent split.

Moreover, the blindness of these groups to the positive contributions of the German left leaves them without any framework for arriving at a real understanding of the mass strike in Poland and its political significance (for an analysis of the mass strike today, see IR27, ‘Notes on the Mass Strike, Yesterday and Today').

The mass strike in Poland raises concretely, for the first time since 1917, the question of the role of the workers' councils, which in May ‘68 in France could only be posed verbally, in a confused way, through the ‘action committees', which brought together student contestation and the beginnings of a working class resurgence, The schema of the Italian left, or those under its influence like the CWO, which sees the working class and its councils as a mere mass to be maneuvered by the party, whose task it is to take power, is less and less connected to the reality of our epoch; it is a theoretical error for which the working class has already paid dearly (for the implications of Poland at the level of the question of the party, see IR24 ‘In the Light of the Events in Poland, The Role of Revolutionaries'). Also, for the ICP (Program), for example, unions, strike committ­ees, workers' councils are all at the same level -- they are manifestations of ‘workers' associationism' which has to be subordinated to the party. Thus, the ICP was not only unable to grasp the dynamic of the mass strike, but the events in Poland also revealed its ambiguities on the union question. Confusions on the role of unions today, illusions about the possibility of ‘rank and file' or ‘radical' union work, lead you into playing the game of Solidarnosc and, whether you like it or not, helping to tie the proletariat to the state.

The outbreak of the mass strike has exposed the programmatic weaknesses of a number of organizations. Groups who don't have a theoretical framework that will enable them to understand the present period and to react quickly to the sudden upsurges of the working class, will tend to fall into adopting superficial and erroneous positions. When you don't understand that the development of proletarian consciousness is a process, it's easy to be blase about the efforts of the workers, to see only their weaknesses and to miss their positive lessons and potentialities. Moreover, the activist tendencies of certain groups pushes them into a localist viewpoint: what's happening ‘at home' seems to have a greater importance than ‘far off' strikes in Poland in which it's difficult to have a direct ‘physical' (ie. local) presence. Thus the most important political aspect of Poland hasn't been understood: the need for political organizations to generalize the lessons of Poland to the international proletariat.

If at the beginning most groups tended to under­estimate the historic importance of these events, certain groups then went in the opposition dir­ection, calling for an ‘insurrection' in Poland on its own. This kind of call, completely adventurist in the present situation, raises a fundamental question about the maturation of the conditions for revolution. We began a discussion on internationalization in IR26 ‘The Historic Conditions For The Generalization Of Working Class Struggle' -- without getting much echo in the milieu.

Political incomprehensions and weaknesses have always had repercussions at the level of a group's organizational life. Two examples.

The PIC seriously underestimated the significance of the mass strike. Following the events of August 1980 all the PIC could see were ‘priests' and trade unionism. This mistaken position gave rise to a discussion in the group, resulting in a rectification in its paper Jeune Taupe! But divergences remained, involving a discussion about the role of revolutionary organizations. Three ideas about organization came out of this debate, giving rise to three tendencies, each one more vague than the other. Those who defended the least vague ideas left to form Volonte Communiste in. Paris, leaving the PIC to dissolve. This is a logical conclusion when you don't know why you exist.

The FOR also missed the real significance of Poland. This group, which has never made an analysis of the objective conditions for the dev­elopment of revolutionary consciousness, believes that the revolution is ‘always possible', that it's just a question of ‘will'. This is why it could write in its paper Alarme at the end of 1980: "The movement (in Poland) shows more insufficiencies from the revolutionary point of view than positive aspects" -- while at the same time calling for the formation of workers' councils and for the communist revolution. It's like its fiery leaflet at the time of Longwy-Denain in France, calling for the seizure of power! A divergence on the appre­ciation of the events in Poland seems to be one of the reasons behind the departure (or exclus­ion?) of the comrades of the FOR in the USA (the Focus group).

It's extremely serious when political organizations of the working class are so badly mistaken about such historically important events. What's more, in the future, adventurist calls could have extremely disastrous repercussions. If the present political milieu isn't able to rise to its tasks at the level of principles, it will be doomed to decomposition.

2) At the level of concretizing principles and drawing out more conjunctural political analyses and orientations, the acceleration of events has also inevitably posed problems for groups. The PIC with its theory of the ‘crumbl­ing of the blocs' (whereas in reality the two blocs are confronting each other more and more openly) got lost at this level, because it couldn't distinguish between the particular economic interests of certain countries (Japan and Germany) and the much more powerful military, strategic and economic needs of the bloc as a whole, which force each country to integrate itself into the bloc at the risk of perishing. The real nature of state capitalism and of the totalitarian tendencies of the decadent bour­geoisie escapes both the PIC and the FOR.

BC saw the counter-revolution lasting until 1980, but foresaw the ‘social democratization of the Stalinist parties' (taking Euro­communism at face value), whereas in reality the game of ‘opposition' has pushed the CPs in the opposite direction. The ICC has had difficulties in linking aspects of the new period to the analysis of the left in opposition and has sometimes slipped into making local electoral predictions which proved to be erroneous. Today we are seeing more clearly how to strengthen this analysis but this effort has created tremors in the organization.

It's inevitable that the present situation, where we are seeing a slow, painful develop­ment of class consciousness in response to an economic crisis of the system, should disorient revolutionary organizations to some degree. In 1871, 1905 and 1917 it was the imperialist war which directly and rapidly gave rise to the insurrection. For all groups (especially those like the ICP who refuse to see the revolution coming from anywhere except a war today), this situation poses new questions which don't have a direct parallel with the workers' struggles against the cyclical crises of ascendant cap­italism. The capacity to orient oneself in practice depends, above all, on the solidarity of one's principles. It is this theoretical and programmatic clarity alone which can guide us and decide our fate as political groups.

The thing to avoid in this period of rising struggles is panicking about not receiving an immediate echo in the class and sliding, via activism, towards leftism. We have seen where this has led the Nuclei. We've seen the PIC's activism dissolving into nothing. It also seems that those who advocated the ‘anti-repression front' in the ICP excluded those who weren't convinced. We see the opposite in the ICC: among others, it was the activist, leftist-type tendencies who left. We've also seen impatience about the ‘insurrection' and various unsuccessful attempts to build ‘workers groups' in the factories. The class struggle threatens to shake us even more violently if we don't learn how to develop our intervention without falling into activism. And above all if the question of the role of the revolutionary organization isn't clear.

3) The question of organization is generally the one around which all the others crystallize in a movement of upheaval. What has to be emphasized here is essentially the need to respond to the demands of the present period with an international organizational framework. Only an international organization can face up to the needs of the proletariat, to its unifi­cation through the internationalization of its struggles. The dislocation of the FOR's inter­national effort demonstrates what we have been saying for a long time: it's not so easy to create an international organization which has an intense but unified political life. You can't improve such things, especially if you haven't got a coherent view of the role of revolutionaries.

The ICC has also gone through a crisis recently, essentially over the question: centralism or federalism; the unity of the organization or individual agitation. These difficulties have led us to a deep re-examination of whether the organization as a whole has really assimilated the principles of centralization and its statutes. We will develop this point further on.

Splits, dispersion of revolutionary organizations obviously go against the general tendency in this historic period of rising struggle: the tendency towards the unification of the class and its political expressions[2]. We have always said that it was irresponsible of the PIC to have split from the ICC on the issue of when to produce a leaflet on the events in Chile (the ICC in fact produced the leaflet 4 days later). You don't enter or leave polit­ical groups as if they were shops. It's poss­ible, even probable, that irresponsible acts of this kind are hiding more basic disagree­ments, but this kind of behavior obstructs discussion, because in such cases you don't know what the real disagreements are, or whether they are serious enough to warrant a split. Acting like this is no help to the political milieu.

Similarly, we also said it was irresponsible when, in 1975, a number of groups, who then had the same basic platform as the ICC (incl­uding the old Workers' Voice and what's now the CWO), refused to associate themselves to the formation of the ICC. A group is defined by its platform. By maintaining a separate existence for secondary or localist reasons, you discredit the very idea of revolutionary organization. Following this, the groups who survived found a number of ‘reasons' and new positions to justify their separate existence, but without ever confronting the problem of sectarianism.

But if we think that the process of unification will take place in the light of the class struggle, we shouldn't see the present decant­ation as something entirely negative, We don't regret the fact that a confused group like the PIC has disappeared and thus eliminated a smoke­screen from the eyes of the working class. Neither do we regret that elements who have been sliding towards leftism or demoralization are leaving our own ranks.

If the political milieu has to pay for its imm­aturities, it's better if this is done as thor­oughly as possible. We've often asked ourselves how the unity of tomorrow is going to be forged: will it be through a gradual expansion of the milieu from the 1970's? Today we have part of the answer: it won't be through a gradual expansion but through convulsions, clashes and crises, which will sweep away all the debris, everything that is useless for the future -- through tough ordeals that will test the validity of the existing political and organizational framework. The winds of destruction are not yet stilled, but when the class stru­ggle has truly tested today's milieu there will be a clearer basis for a new point of departure.

The debates in the ICC

The demands of the new period have thus caused certain upheavals in the ICC. The source of these difficulties resides, as always, in political and organizational weaknesses.

At the ICC's 3rd Congress in 1979 we decided to respond to the new period of rising workers' struggles by accelerating and broadening our intervention. This orientation was correct and necessary, but it was often misinterpreted within the organization.

For example, the ICC's intervention in the Rotterdam dock strike, at Longwy-Denain[3] or Sonacotra in France, in the steel strike in Britain, revealed certain political misunderstandings. Does a revolutionary organization intervene at the level of collecting strike-funds, of acting principally as ‘hewers of wood' for the workers in struggle, or should it intervene at the political level in the general assemblies? What do we say when the workers have been dragooned into union ‘strike committees' whose aim is to stifle the struggle?

It's quite normal that these and many other questions should arise when an organization begins to be tested by the struggle. On a general level, our response was to make a deeper study of the overall conditions of the class struggle in the period of decadence, insisting on the differences between the 19th century and today, on the impossibility, the danger, of trying to use the same tactics as in the past (see IR 23 ‘The Proletarian Struggle In the Decadence of Capitalism'). But we had a lot of trouble concretizing this appreciation and the discussion in the organization tended to remain on the surface, which resulted in a poor assimilation of the whole problem.

Moreover, we had to respond to a tendency to give way on matters of principle, especially during the steel strike in Britain. Although the organization as such took a clear position on the union character of the ‘strike committees' which served to stifle the enormous combativity of the workers, certain comrades, through activism or demoralization, began to question the very basis of our position on the unions, seeing these union committees as a ‘hybrid' form which could allow the workers to take a step forward. This discussion was linked to the wider issue of the danger of ‘rank and file' or ‘radical' unionism, of sliding towards leftism and leftist practices.

In general, the idea of expanding our intervent­ion was too often seen as a green light to localist and immediatist tendencies, to the detriment of our international unity. We tended to overestimate the possibilities of getting an immediate echo in the class, of overestimating strikes which were only a prelude to more decisive confrontations. The fixation of part of the organization on the steel strike in Britain blinded the same elements to the events in Poland. But in fact it is the mass strike in Poland which has helped us to rectify our activities and our analyses.

The ICC, which was formed in 1975, during the period of temporary reflux, has often believed that, when the struggle picked up again, all our problems would disappear in the general enthusiasm. Now we understand that this isn't the case -- that this was a childish view of the ordeals history has in store. Although in our analyses of the proletariat's struggle we have been able to clarify debates fairly quickly, the organization has had a tendency to see only this aspect, and thus to miss out on examining the balance between the classes. Although we have developed the analysis of the historic course at the theoretical level, at the day-to-day level there was a resistance against analyzing the response of the bourgeoisie as a whole -- its global strategy against the working class. Comrades thought we would become ‘bourgeois researchers' if we talked too much about the strategy of the bourgeoisie! There was a lot of difficulty in seeing the extreme importance of understanding what the class enemy is up to.

At the beginning of the new wave of struggles, in 1978-9, we wrote about the ‘years of truth', about the potential of the situation opening up, and about the efforts of the bourgeois state to protect itself by making the fullest use of rank and file unionism and of ‘the left in opposition'. When one begins to put forward a new analysis, it is inevitably limited to its broad outlines, and this can give the impression of a certain schematism. For example, in 1967-8, when the forerunners of the ICC talked about the crisis of capitalism, they were often written off as being crazy, because many superficial facts seemed to be against this thesis. However, it was still correct. In the same way, the analysis of the present per­iod, and of the ‘left in opposition', needs to be deepened, especially in those cases when, formally speaking, we went wrong by trying to use the analysis for local electoral prognoses, without taking into account the contingent factors involved. Nevertheless, we are still developing this study, rectifying our errors without throwing out the general framework. But, following the elections in France, certain comrades wanted to abandon any reference to this framework, to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We opened up the debate in our public press (cf IR 26, RI July ‘81, WR August '81, Internationalism 30), and we will continue to do so if need be. In the next issue of the IR we will be publishing one of the fruits of our internal discussion -- a study of the organization and consciousness of the bourgeoisie in the period of decadence, the epoch of state capitalism. For us, the existence of divergences in our ranks is not a weakness: what is dangerous is the flight into impulsive reactions which reject the need for a coherent analyses, for a clear theoretical framework. This can only lead to total disorientation. We will be continuing the discussion of the left in opposition within the theoretical framework that we have established.

Although we are aware of the dangers of self‑satisfaction, we can still say that, despite its contingent political weaknesses, the ICC does have a coherent framework of principles which has enabled it to respond to events and continue its work, rectifying errors when necessary. In contrast to the groups who are not equipped to face up to the present period and the period to come, the ICC will be able to contribute a great deal to the struggle of the proletariat as long as it rigorously applies its method and principles. There's a very big difference between an erroneous contingent analysis of the elections in France and an inability to understand a mass strike or the historic course.

Organizational difficulties

As we said, political weaknesses manifest themselves at the organizational level. With the ICC, a lack of rigor in its immediate analyses and activities gave rise to a whole series of discussions on internal functioning:

-- Are we ‘individuals' vis-a-vis the working class (the myth of the revolutionary as a ‘sniper'), or does the working class secrete political organizations who have a collective responsibility towards the class?

-- On the rights of minorities in relation to the unity of the organization. We think that a minority, as long as it has not convinced the organization of the validity of its posit­ions, must abide by the only way of functioning we know: the carrying out of decisions arrived at by a majority. These decisions are not necessarily correct (history has often demonst­rated the contrary), but as long as the organization has not changed its opinion, it must speak with one voice; it must act as an inter­national unity. This doesn't mean that we must keep our divergences ‘secret': on the contrary we think that our internal discussions must be opened up publicly.

But no minority can be permitted to sabotage the work of the whole. It's certainly difficult to live with disagreements on questions of analysis, to have a non-monolithic organization, but we are convinced that this is the only principled way to ensure that the political life of the proletariat really expresses itself within the revolutionary organization.

-- Centralism versus federalism. Localist tendencies can always arise within an inter­national organization but it would be deadly to make concessions to them[4]. We have also seen debates degenerate into calumnies about our internal functioning. Some started calling the organization ‘bureaucratic' for the simple reason that we take decisions in a centralized manner.

We can't go into all the aspects of these debates here. We will return to them in due course. But while not all the criticisms made are entirely without foundation, the main problems have been an incomplete assimilation of our basic positions on organization, a tendency to rush through the integration of new members, a lack of rigor in our organizational practice etc.

The most important point to make here is that this discussion often glossed over the real underlying divergences. The history of the workers' movement shows us that a question of organization can often be a profoundly serious criterion of discrimination: we have only to recall the debates between Marx and Bakunin in the First International on centralism and federalism, or the debates about the criteria for joining the Russian social democratic party at its second congress, which resulted in the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Today the question of the international unity of a proletarian political organization is a fundamental one, as are the questions of militant commitment and the collective responsibility of a revolutionary group. Today's movement is still haunted by the memory of Stalinist practices and this continues to be an obstacle to real organizational work. The movement suffers wither from a stifling of debates and minorities, as in the ICP, or from minorities failing to recognize their duties towards the organization and to see how precious a revolutionary organization is to the proletariat, as has sometimes happened in the ICC.

After our 4th Congress where we noted our organizational weaknesses, we decided to begin a discussion on organizational questions with a view to holding an extraordinary ICC conference. The aim of this conference would be to allow us to draw up a balance sheet of the organizational experience of the ICC since its inception, and to help us improve our internal functioning.

We take a collective responsibility for the incomprehensions that have arisen in our organization. It's not our intention, either inside or outside the organization, to make those who have left the ICC the escape-goats for our errors. The weaknesses of our organization are a product of the whole and it's often for secondary or even accidental reasons that certain individuals crystallize the difficulties of the whole more than others (others who may also have shared the same ideas at a given moment).

But events in the ICC were precipitated this summer. Just as we began this discussion in our internal bulletins, a ‘tendency' suddenly declared its existence, without any documents defining its positions, while at the same time it began to circulate ‘clandestine' texts outside the organization, denigrating it in all kinds of ways. Three days after the organization at last officially received a collective docum­ent announcing the formation of a tendency, most of its members, rather than staying to discuss, left the organization, stealing material and keeping the organization's money they held. Without clarifying divergences, without waiting for the conference, others left through sheer demoralization.

The recent events

Why did the discussions suddenly turn out so badly? Why were they accompanied by an unpreced­ented campaign of calumny against the ICC? Partly, no doubt, because we reacted too slowly to the political issues involved. But the main reason behind this precipitation was the manipulations of a particularly dangerous individ­ual, ‘Chenier'. We now have a number of documents proving the existence of a whole sordid, secret plot, minutely and cold-bloodedly planned out, with instructions by Chenier on how to use personal ties, how to burden others with organizational tasks, how to "drown" the central organs and under­mine the organization "without scruple". This ‘project' used gossip and all kinds of intrigues based on a personal, clandestine network. We can only regret that a certain number of comrades allowed themselves to be whipped up into a fever of contestation and dragged into secret correspondence and meet­ings which set up a clandestine organization within the organization. Chenier's traject­ory through the political milieu shows that he has acted in the same way in all the groups he's been through, each time disorg­anizing them from within.

When the ICC published in its press a ‘warning' against Chenier's activities, we were only doing our duty towards the political milieu. Some interpreted what we wrote as being a more precise denunciation: they are wrong. We have no formal proof that Chenier belongs to a state agency or something similar and we have never claimed this. What we have said is that this is a shady element whose behavior is dangerous for political organizations, and this is some­thing of which we are profoundly convinced. Those who ignore this warning do so at their own risk, as the ICC has learned through its own experience. Any political group can find out about his trajectory by asking the ones he has been through. What we can say is that those who work deliberately to destroy revolut­ionary organizations on behalf of the state and its appendages would not act differently from the way Chenier did.

The response of the political milieu to this warning shows its weaknesses. It's as though the possibility of such things had never entered the heads of certain groups. Do we really believe that the problem of security doesn't exist? In any case, the sectarianism of a group like the Groupe Communiste Internationaliste simply used our efforts to denigrate the ICC. They wrote, in a letter to the ICC (17/11/81) that "this warning serves only to throw discredit on a militant breaking with you, and on the whole of his tendency." But the ICC has seen a lot of comrades leaving it (including the GCI) and has never ‘used' anything except political discussions to respond to political questions. In 13 years of our existence as a political current we have never excluded militants for having political divergences[5]; still less have we descended to inventing stories about security. If we granted to resort to ‘maneuvers' we would have acted like Chenier: in secret, through plots, never saying anything openly. But our aim is not to ‘get rid' of people who have political disagreements. On the contrary: it was the unprincipled, precipitous departure of certain members of the ‘tendency' manip­ulated by Chenier which closed the door to the clarification of divergences. And this is quite logical: a manipulator is always afraid of discussion. Open discussion cuts the strings which allow him to play on particular individuals. Chenier precipitated these departures to avoid discussion and we denounce him for his work of destruction.

It's understandable that serious political groups should ask us questions about this: to a certain extent, one should be wary of accusat­ions. We regret that today's political milieu lacks the least framework to deal with problems of this kind while continuing with the confront­ations of political positions. If this had been the case, we would have immediately opened up the question to the collectivity. This collect­ivity doesn't exist, so we went ahead with carrying out our responsibilities and warning the others -- even those who have used this warning to feed their own shabby anti-ICC prejudices. Now that we have recovered most of the material stolen from us, we consider the Chenier affair closed. And now that Chenier has reached the end of his work of destruction, taking advantage of a moment of weakness in the ICC, it seems that he is retiring from politics.

When they stole from the organization, the other ex-comrades (Chenier not included) no doubt did not realize the gravity of what they were doing. Especially if you come from the leftist milieu, where these sorts of actions are commonplace. By reacting against this despicable act the ICC has defended not only its own organization but a general policy with regard to behavior within the revolutionary movement.

To steal the collective resources of a revolut­ionary organization is to reduce it to silence. It's a political act with serious consequences. We warned, in writing, all the elements involved in the act that we condemned it and would respond to it. They replied that the ICC was a band of "outraged proprietors" and that the stolen material was a "compensation" for the subscriptions they'd paid previously! Thus any treasurer, when he leaves an organization, can take the funds. Is a revolutionary organization like a building society -- when you leave it, you withdraw your investments, with interest if possible?

The ICC is not a group of pacifists. We got our material back. In response to our legitimate and extremely controlled effort of recuperation, our ex-comrades, on several occasions, threatened to call the police. No doubt because of their political confusions as much as their cowardice.

Non-violence within the revolutionary milieu, the repudiation of the use of violence or theft to regulate disagreements, is a principle that absolutely must be defended. Without it, revolutionary activity is impossible. We defended the principle not only for the ICC, but for the revolutionary milieu as a whole. When you leave a group, should you try to destroy it? Do you have the right to decide, from one day to the next, that a group is ‘degenerate', ‘dead' ‘useless' or ‘bureaucratic' in order to justify stealing its means of intervention? These are the habits of the leftist morass, and if revol­utionary groups don't clearly and publicly take a position on these questions, the revolutionary milieu won't exist. If revolutionary organizations don't react against this sectarianism which makes the nearest revolutionary group enemy no.1, there will be no political milieu in the period to come. This is the way to open the door to the bourgeois state in its efforts to destroy revolutionary organizations. The question of non-violence within revolution­ary organizations and between them is only one aspect of a much more profound question: non-violence within the working class. We have raised this question before and it's time for other groups who claim to be revolutionary to take a clear position on it.

The ICC has continued with its work on the extraordinary conference; and even in the absence of some of the individuals concerned we will continue to debate their political positions so that we can more clearly define our own orientation.

For the whole revolutionary milieu as for the ICC the issue is the same: either we will be equal to our tasks, or we will disappear.

JA

[1] The participants in the international conferences were the Nuclei and Battaglia Comunista (Italy), the ICC, CWO (UK), Internationell Revolution (Sweden - now a section of the ICC), and, at the 3rd conference Eveil Internationaliste (France). The GCI, a split from the ICC in 1978, came to the 3rd Conference as an observer. Their ‘participation' consisted in denouncing the conference and sabotaging the agenda. For the political criteria for participating, see three pamphlets produced on the conferences.

[2] Although the tendency towards the regroupment of revolutionaries is the best expression of the needs of the class, we don't see it as an absolute. This tendency won't ever be completed in the formation of a single class party before the revolution. We reject the Bordigist conception which on principle admits of only one political expression of the proletariat.

[3] Cf IR 20, ‘Reply to our Critics'

[4] The ex-members who now form the group News of War and Revolution in Britain left the ICC in June expressing one aspect of the localist, federalist weakness. For them, as for our ex-members in Manchester are now working with elements from the decomposing libertarian group Solidarity, dedicating themselves in theory and practice to a purely local work (see WR November-December, 1981). The ‘Ouvrier Internationaliste' group formed by Chenier in Lille collapsed after two issues, attempting to ‘intervene' by selling door-to-door in the good old leftist tradition favored by Lutte Ouvriere. The ‘discussion circle' formed in London by ex-tendency members has also dissolved itself in total confusion.

[5] The ICC excluded the members who stole from the organization for "behavior unworthy of communist militants". Contrary to the ill-informed chatter now in circulation (notably in GCI's letter, and their article in Le Communiste no 12) the ex-ICC members in Britain who formed News of War and Revolution had nothing to do with the theft, the recuperation, or the exclusions. The profoundly erroneous positions they have taken up over this affair cannot be put at the same level.

The 13 December military coup in Poland put an end to the most important episode in fifty years of struggle between the world working class and capital. Since the historic resur­gence of the proletarian struggle at the end of the 1960s, the world working class has never gone so far in combativity, solidarity and self-organization. Never before has it used, on such a broad scale, that essential weapon of its struggle in the period of capitalist decadence: the mass strike. Never has it put such fear into the bourgeoisie, or compelled it to take such measures to defend itself.[1] Today, the proletariat in Poland has been muzzled. Once again, it has spilled its blood, and in contrast to 1970 and 1976, the result has been to suffer even greater exploitation, poverty approaching famine, and unrestrained terror. Thus, this episode has ended in a defeat for the working class. But, while all the combined forces of the bourgeoisie have obliged the working class to withdraw from the stage in Poland, the world proletariat must draw all the lessons it can from this experience. The proletariat and its communist avant-garde must answer the question: where are we today? What is the perspective for the class struggle?

Poland 1980-81: The beginning of the years of truth

For several years now the ICC has been saying that the 1980s are the ‘years of truth' -- years in which "the reality of the world today will be revealed in all its nakedness", years which "will to a large degree, determine the future of humanity." (International Review no 20). This analysis didn't come from nowhere. It was based on a serious study of the evolution of capitalism's economic situation. We concretized this in our resolution on the international situation at the 3rd Congress of the ICC, in June 1979:

"After more than ten years of the slow but ineluctable deterioration of its economy and the failure of all its ‘salvage' plans, capitalism is supplying the proof to what Marxists have said for a long time: this system has entered into a phase of historic decline and it is absolutely incapable of surmounting the economic contradictions which assail it.

In the coming period, we are going to see a further deepening of the world crisis of capitalism, notably in the form of a new burst of inflation and a marked slowdown in production, which threatens to go far beyond the 1974-75 recession and lead to a brutal increase in unemployment." (International Review no 18)

The characterization of the 1980s as ‘years of truth' was also based on the fact that " ... after a period, of relative reflux during the mid-seventies the working class is once again tending to renew the combati­vity which it showed in a generalized and often spectacular manner after 1968 ... As it continues to force down the living standards of the proletariat, the crisis will oblige even the most hesitant workers to return to the path of struggle." (ibid).

The workers' struggles in Poland, which blew up in the summer of 1980 and which, for a year and a half after that, occupied a central position in the international situation, have up until now been the most important expre­ssion of this tendency towards a resurgence of class struggle.

They followed on from the social movements which, from 1978 onwards, had begun to hit a significant number of the industrialized countries -- USA (the Appalachian miners' strike), Germany (steel strike), Holland (dockers), France (the explosions in Longwy and Denain) and especially Britain, which in 1979 saw more strike days lost than in any year since 1926 (29 million). But only the strugg­les in Poland illustrated the "tendency to take off from the highest qualitative level reached by the last wave." (ibid)

The fact that the first great battles of the years of truth took place in Poland is the result of the weakness of the bourgeoisie in the so-called ‘socialist' countries. This weakness is expressed both on the economic and the political levels. The mass explosion of summer 1980 was the direct result of the economic catastrophe hitting Polish capital, which is one of the weakest links in all the poorly-developed, crisis-prone countries of the eastern bloc.

But this explosion could take place because the Polish bourgeoisie didn't have at its dis­posal one of the most essential weapons in its armory: a left wing team, which, thanks to its ‘working class' language and its place in the opposition, is able to derail and divert workers' struggles from within.

In the big working class concentrations of the west, which has also been hard hit by the crisis in recent years, as can be seen from, among other things, the level of unemployment (nearly 30 million in the OECD), the bourgeoisie has acted in a preventative manner against the tendency towards the resurgence of class struggle.

It has based its strategies fundamentally on the maneuvers of the left, the ‘workers' parties and the unions, whose essential task it is to immobilize the working class, to tie its hands while the government teams get on with the job of redoubling austerity. The clearest example of this has been in Britain. In 1978, faced with the class struggle, the Labor Party and the unions went into opposition, gave up the ‘social contract' which aimed at tying workers directly to the government, and started radicalizing their language against the policies of Thatcher. Thanks to this ‘left in opposition', the British bourgeoisie, one of the sharpest in the world, put an end to the struggles of 78-79, and in 80-81 largely silenced the working class just as it was suffering one of the most violent attacks in its history.

In Eastern Europe, the existing regimes, which are direct products of the counter-revolution, base their power essentially on police terror and don't have the same flexibility. In 1980 in Poland, faced with such a broad strike movement, and in an international context of rising class struggle, the bourgeoisie wasn't able to use bloody repression as it did in 1970 and 1976. In August it was thrown off-balance by the situation, and the proletariat exploited the gap in its line of defense by waging its most important struggles for half a century.

Thus, it wasn't just because of the gravity of the crisis and of the attack on workers' living conditions that the struggles in Poland could reach such heights. The inability of the local bourgeoisie to use the political weapons which have proved their worth in the west is a factor which at least is equally important in explaining the situation.

The ruling class only supplied itself with such a weapon in the heat of the battle -- through the creation of the Solidarity union. And the bourgeoisie had to wage its counter­offensive on an international scale. In August 1980, it also understood that we are entering the years of truth, and it began to accelerate its preparations to deal with them.

The bourgeoisie deploys its forces

Having understood the international dimension of its struggle against the proletariat, the bourgeoisie has been deploying its forces on an international scale. This has meant pushing its inter-imperialist rivalries into the back­ground and using its real divisions as a way of sharing out the tasks in combating the working class.

In this share-out, the governments of the eastern bloc have had the job of intimidating the workers in the region through threats of intervention and violent repression by ‘big brother' Russia. These governments have also tried to turn other eastern bloc workers against the Polish workers through nationalist campaigns and slogans such as ‘the Poles are idle troublemakers', ‘that's why their economy is collapsing', ‘their agitation is the cause of our own economic difficulties'.

But the main brunt of the work has fallen to the big western powers, who have been carry­ing out a whole series of tasks:

-- economic aid to bankrupt Polish capital, notably through staggering its debts

-- making Moscow's campaign of intimidation more credible, mainly by warning against ‘any foreign intervention in Poland'; such warnings were widely broadcast in eastern Europe via Radio Free Europe and the BBC

-- Campaigns towards the western proletariat around the theme ‘the problem faced by the workers in Poland are specific to that country or that bloc' (owing to the gravity of the economic crisis, scarcity, totalitarianism, etc)

-- the left and the unions in the west giving political and material aid to the sett­ing up of the Solidarity apparatus (sending funds, printing materials, delegations to teach the new-born union the techniques of sabotaging struggles ...)

-- systematic sabotage of workers' struggles in the west by these same organizations, using their classic weapons (‘days of action', dead-end ‘strikes', dividing the class into profe­ssional or geographic sectors), and also, more recently, the enormous pacificist campaigns which aim to steer into a hopeless impasse the workers' real and justified anxiety about the threat of war (cf. the article ‘Economic Crisis and Class Struggle' in IR no 28). It's worth pointing out that, to help in this job of sabotaging       combativity, the unions in the west have been cashing in on Solidarity's popularity to refurbish their own image. What a good swap! The cynicism and duplicity of the bourgeoisie, especially of the left, knows no limits.

In Poland itself, this world-wide offensive against the working class had the following; result:

-- the development of the ‘independent union' to the detriment of the greatest conquest of August 1980: the mass strike, the self-organization of the struggle

-- the development of the nationalist, democratic and self-management illusions put about by Solidarity, and nourished by the passivity of the workers in other countries.

Contrary to the absurd notion that the Polish proletariat was about to embark upon a decisive struggle (even the revolution!), we must under­stand how, between August 1980 and December 1981, there was a gradual weakening of the class despite the huge stores of combativity that remained within it; we must understand why it was that the bourgeoisie waited for nearly a year and a half to unleash the repression. We must show clearly that the repression didn't take place because the bourgeoisie, and its agents within the prole­tariat, Solidarity, were being by-passed, but, on the contrary, because the proletariat was in a position of weakness against the bour­geoisie's offensive. And this weakness revealed itself on a world scale.

A defeat for the working class

The declaration of martial law in Poland was a defeat for the working class. It would be illusory and even dangerous to hide this. Only the blind or the unconscious could claim any different. It was a defeat because, in Poland itself, the workers are now being jailed, deported, terrorized, forced to work with a gun at their heads for a wage that is even more miserable than it was before. The resistance they put up for several weeks after the coup, for all its courage and determination, was doomed to failure.

The various forms of passive resistance will themselves be overcome in the long term, because they don't come out of a mass move­ment, out of collective, organized class action. They are the work of a sum of workers atomized by terror and repression.

It's a defeat because, in Poland, the proleta­riat allowed itself to be deceived and demobilized by mystifications put about by the bour­geoisie, and because its most pernicious enemy, Solidarity, wasn't exposed clearly enough -‑ in fact, it's now got the blessing of a martyr's halo. The repression the workers are now suffe­ring doesn't really give them the means to draw the lessons of this experience, to see clearly what's at stake in the struggle.

It was finally and most fundamentally a defeat because the coup is hitting the workers of all countries in the form of demoralization, of a real disorientation and confusion in the face of the campaigns unleashed by the bourgeoisie after 13 December, in full continuity with the preceding campaigns.

The world proletariat suffered this defeat from the moment when capitalism, in a concerted manner, succeeded in isolating the workers of Poland from the rest of the world proletariat, in ideologically pinning the working class down behind the frontiers between blocs (the ‘socialist' countries of the east) and count­ries (Poland is a Polish affair); from the moment when, using all the means to hand, it turned the workers of other countries into spectators -- anxious but passive -- and prevented them from giving vent to the only real form of class solidarity: the generalization of the struggle to all countries. Instead, the bourgeoisie made a hideous caricature of solidarity: sentimental demonstrations, huma­nist petitions, Christian charity with its Christmas parcels.

The non generalization of the workers' struggle is a defeat in itself. This is the first and most essential lesson of the Polish events.

The 13 December coup, its preparation and its aftermath, was victory for the bourgeoisie. For the working class, it has been a painful example of the effectiveness of capital's worldwide strategy of the ‘left in opposition'. This illustrates once again the fact that in the decadent period of capitalism, the bour­geoisie doesn't confront the working class in the same way it did last century. At that time the defeats and bloody repressions inflicted on the proletariat didn't leave any ambigui­ties about who were its friends and who were its enemies. This was certainly the case with the Paris Commune, and even with the 1905 revolution which, while already presaging the battles of this century (the mass strike and the workers' councils) still contained many of the characteristics of the previous century (especially with regard to the methods used by the bourgeoisie). Today, however, the bour­geoisie only unleashes open repression after a whole ideological preparation, in which the unions and the left play a decisive role, and which is aimed at undermining the proletariat's capacity to defend itself and at preventing it from drawing all the necessary lessons from the repression.

Capitalism has not renounced the use of open, brutal repression against the proletariat, and never will. It is its most favored weapon in the backward countries, where the proleta­riat is least concentrated. But it's not limited to these regions. Everywhere, it is the weapon used to complete a victory over the proletariat, to dissuade it from reviving its struggle for as long as possible, to ‘set an example' to the class as a whole, to demoralize it. This was the function of the 13 December coup in Poland.

However, in the big working class concentra­tions, the most essential weapon of the bourgeoisie is the ideological one. This is why the proletariat must guard itself against an accu­mulation of ideological defeats like the one it has just been through, because this could sap the combativity of its decisive battalions and prevent it from embarking upon a frontal assault against capitalism.

What is the perspective?

As the first major attack on the capitalist citadel in these years of truth, the workers struggle of summer 1980 in Poland was an appeal to the world proletariat -- even if its protagonists weren't conscious of it.

Drowned by all the noise of bourgeois propag­anda, this appeal for the generalization of the struggle wasn't heard. On the contrary, if, for example, we look at the statistics for the number of strike days (this is not an absolute criterion, but it still indicates certain tendencies), the years 1980 and 1981 are among the lowest expressions of class combativity since 1968. At the moment, in the big capitalist powers like the USA and Germany, the bourgeoisie is able to impose major reduc­tions in living standards without much reaction from the workers (cf. the agreements in the US motor industry, and in steel in Germany). The ‘cordon sanitaire' the world bourgeoisie has built around the Polish disease has been effective. Somewhat caught on the hop by August 1980, the bourgeoisie has clearly won this first confrontation.

Does this mean that the proletariat is already beaten, that right now the bourgeoisie has a free hand to impose its own solution to the crisis of its system; an imperialist holocaust?

This is not the case. However cruel, the defeat the proletariat has been through in Poland is only a partial one. The very reasons that made this first battle of the years of truth take place in Poland (the weakness of the economy and the regime), that allowed the bourgeoisie to isolate the struggle so easily (Poland being a second rank country relatively peripheral to the main concentrations of the proletariat) -- these very reasons mean that the battle in Poland was not a decisive one. The defeat was partial because the confrontation was partial. It was as though a particular detachment of the proletariat was sent out in a preliminary skirmish. But the main body of the army, based in the huge indust­rial concentrations of the west, and notably in Germany, has not yet entered into the fray. And it is precisely to prevent this happening that the western bourgeoisie is developing its current campaigns, with Reagan as the conductor of the orchestra (it's not by chance that the media talks about the ‘Reagan show').

This campaign is in continuity with the one which was set up well before 13 December and which in fact made the coup possible.

The only difference is that before, the campaign was simultaneously aimed at the workers in the west and the workers in Poland, since the latter were in the front line of the class struggle; now, the western bourgeoisie is fundamentally aiming at the proletariat of its own bloc. Having silen­ced the most combative detachment of the world proletariat, capital now has to direct its ideological attack towards the most important battalions -- those on whom the ultimate outcome of the class war depends.

This is why we shouldn't see these campaigns as direct ideological preparations for war. Certainly, both blocs will use every opp­ortunity to win points in this sphere, because the conflict between the blocs never disappears. Furthermore it is clear that the final outcome of a general defeat for the proletariat would be a new imperialist holocaust. However, it is important to under­line the fact that the main objective of the present campaign is to prevent proletarian upsurges in the main capitalist metropoles, by trying to tie the workers of the west to the wheels of the ‘democratic' state. The use of the line about the ‘totalitarianism of the eastern bloc' doesn't have the imm­ediate function of sanctioning a war-footing against the other bloc; it is aimed at demobilizing workers' struggles, which is the essential precondition for mobilizing the workers for war.

Just as in the pacifist campaigns the fear of war is exploited to take the proletariat off its own class terrain, so in the present ‘Reagan show' divisions between the blocs and between countries are used to destroy the workers' combativity. What we are seeing now is not a division between sectors of the bourgeoisie, but a division of labor between these sectors.

What are the chances of success for this campaign of the bourgeoisie?

Even if the bourgeoisie doesn't have a free hand to bring about its war-like response to the crisis, isn't there the danger that the bourgeoisie will keep the ideological cards stacked in its favor until the point is reached where it can completely and defin­itively stifle the workers' combativity?

This danger exists and we have already re­ferred to it. But it's important to point out the assets which the proletariat still has, and which distinguish the present sit­uation from those which existed on the eve of the 1914 war or in the 1930's, when the balance of forces swing in favor of the bourgeoisie. In both cases, the proletariat had been beaten directly in the big metropoles (in particular, those of western Europe: Germany, France, Britain) -- either on the purely ideological level (as on the eve of 1914, due to the weight of re­formism and the betrayal of the socialist parties), or on both the ideological and the physical levels (as after the terrible defeat of the 1920s).

This isn't the case today[2], where the proletarian generations in the main indust­rial centers haven't suffered a physical defeat, where democratic and anti-fascist mystifications don't have the same impact as in the past, where the myth of the ‘socialist fatherland' is moribund, where the old workers' parties, now gone over to the enemy (CPs and SPs), have less capacity to mobilize the proletariat than they did when they first betrayed the class.

It's for all these reasons that the pro­letariat's reserves of combativity are still practically intact -- and, as we have seen in Poland, these reserves are enormous.

The bourgeoisie cannot hold down this combativity forever, despite all the campaigns, maneuvers, and mystifications it can use on an international scale. To be effective, all mystifications must be based on a semblance of truth. But the mystifications the bourgeoisie has used so far to prevent the world working class engaging in massive struggles are going to be attacked head-on by the aggravation of the crisis:

-- the myth of the ‘socialist states', which was once a major instrument for mobilizing the working class behind its enemies, is now on its last legs, due to the economic chaos in these countries, the growing misery this imposes on the workers there, and the social explosions which result from all this;

-- the idea that there are national or bloc ‘specificities' -- which allowed the proletariat in Poland to be isolated -- will be pulverized more and more by the leveling down of the economic conditions in all countries, and of the living conditions of all workers;

-- the illusion that by accepting sacrifices you can prevent an even worse situation (an illusion which weighed on the American and German workers when they agreed to wage cuts in exchange for so--called job security) cannot indefinitely stand up against the inexorable deterioration of the economic situation;

-- the belief in the virtues of this or that miraculous potion (‘supply-side economies', nationalizations, self-manage­ment, etc) that are supposed , if not to solve the economic crisis (we've already gone beyond that) then at least stop things getting worse -- this belief is also taking a hard battering from the real facts.

More generally, all the ideological pillars of the system are being undermined by the economic collapse:

-- all the great politicians' phrases about ‘civilization', ‘democracy', the ‘rights of man', ‘national solidarity', ‘human brotherhood', ‘security', ‘the future of society', appear more and more as they really are: vulgar blusterings, cynical lies;

-- to growing masses of workers, including those in what till now have been the most ‘prosperous' countries, the present system is showing its true nature, and to them is becoming synonymous with barbarism, state terror, egoism, insecurity and despair.

Despite (and because of) the terrible ordeals which the aggravation of the crisis is imposing on the proletariat, the crisis is an asset for the proletariat. All the more because the present crisis is develop­ing in a way that is much more likely to open the proletariats' eyes than the crisis of 1929. After the violent collapse at the beginning of the 1930s, for several years capitalism gave the illusion that it was recovering thanks to the massive interven­tion of the state and the development of a war economy. This ‘recovery' ended in 1938 but it allowed the bourgeoisie to complete the demobilization of the proletariat, which was already considerably weakened by the defeats of the 1920s, and drag it bound hand and foot into the second imperialist butchery.

Today on the other hand the bourgeoisie has already exhausted all its neo-Keynesian measures and has had a fully developed war economy for decades. It can no longer offer society any illusions about a recovery the inexorable nature of the crisis is becoming clearer and clearer. This has now reached the point where the most fervent academic defenders of capitalism, the economists, are admitting; their total impotence. After the Nobel Prize-winning ‘neo-Keynesian', Paul Samuelson announced sadly in 1977 "the crisis of economic science", his rival, the ‘monetarist' Nobel Prize winner, Milton Friedman confessed in September 1977 "I no longer understand what's happening" (Newsweek).

If the recession of 1971 was followed by a euphoric recovery up until 1973, the 1974-75 recession was followed by an anemic recovery, and the recession which began in 1980 has continued to get worse, giving the lie to all predictions about a new recovery. This really is the end of all the potions administered during the 1970s to hold off the trend towards bankruptcy. Today all these potions just make things worse. Confronted with an over-production of commodities, the big capitalist powers have tried to sell the excess by using and abusing credit. The result is worth noting: between ‘71 and ‘81, the total debt of the Third World went from 86.6 to 524 billion dollars, with a rise of 118 billion in 1981 alone. Most of these countries have simply stopped paying. In the country of the ‘miracle' Brazil -- now a champion of debt -- out of every 100 dollars loaned to it, only 13 are invested in productive activity. The other 87 go to pay the interest and redemp­tion on previous debts. But the indebted­ness of the Third World is only a part of the grand world total, which is now well past 1000 billion. This is how capitalism tried to overcome the crisis in the ‘70s: The bankruptcy of the whole world economy. Although the origins of the crisis reside in the centre of capitalism, the countries where it is most highly developed, the latter have for over a decade been attempting to push its most brutal effects towards the periphery of the system. But as the waves on the surface of a basin return to the centre after reaching the edges, the most violent convulsions of the crisis are now returning with redoubled force to hit the capitalist metropoles, including that ‘model' country, Germany, once the envy of the world, now suffering one of the steep­est increases in unemployment throughout Europe.

Now that the proletariat of the metropoles is being hit by the full force of the crisis it will be compelled to take up the struggle on once again, despite all the maneuvers of the left in opposition, which in the long run will inevitably be worn out. In this it will be following on from the workers in the more peripheral countries (Brazil ‘78-‘79 and Poland ‘80-‘81 for example). But the bourgeoisie won't be able to iso­late the proletariat of the main metro-poles as easily as it did with the Polish proletariat.

The conditions are emerging, therefore, for a real, world-wide generalization of workers' struggles, the necessity for which has been highlighted by the events in Poland[3]. This generalization isn't merely a qualitative step in the development of the class struggle. It is truly a qualitative step that the proletariat is going to have to take. Only such a step

-- will enable the class to surmount the nationalist, trade unionist, and democratic illusions, peddled mainly by the left, which weigh so heavily on the proletariat

-- will enable the class to counter-act the solidarity and co-operation of the bourgeoisie against the class struggle

-- will create the conditions in which the problem of overthrowing the capitalist state, of the seizure of power by the proletariat, can really be posed (contrary to those like the Groupe Communiste Inter­nationaliste, who already say it is the task of the Polish workers to take up arms)

-- will give the proletariat the means to become aware of its strength, of the fact that its struggle represents the only hope for the whole of humanity, The real significance of the proletariat's current struggles is that they are a pre­paration for the communist revolution -- the idea of which is once again becoming familiar to the class after being eclipsed for over half-a-century.

It is because the crisis is now hitting the big capitalist metropoles head-on that this generalization is becoming possible. The road will be long and hard and will contain more defeats, partial but still painful. The main battle lies ahead; for a long time yet, the proletariat will come up against the sabotage of the left, in particular its ‘radical' expressions, such as rank-and-file unionism. Only after breaking out of the many traps of the left will it be able to frontally attack the capitalist state and destroy it.

A long and difficult battle is beginning, but there is very reason to think that, in alliance with the irreversible collapse of the capitalist economy, the proletariat will be equal to winning it.

FM. 12/3/82.

[2] See the report on the historic course to the 3rd Congress of the ICC (IR 18)

[3] See the text on the conditions for the generalization of workers' struggles, IR 26.

The international unification of the proletar­iat in the process of the world revolution is the most decisive material condition for commun­ism. After showing the strength of the workers' struggle in Eastern Europe between 1920 and 1970, and the limits imposed on them by their isolation from the international arena (Intern­ational Review 27 & 28), the last part of this study shows how the struggles of the 1980's are opening up the possibility of ending this isolation

Generalized resurgence 1976-81

In September 1976, the Czech Oppositionalists reported in Listy Blatter the development of a new wave of resistance in the USSR: "On November 8 last year, 60 Russian, Latvian, and Estonian sailors of the Red Banner Fleet mutinied on board the rocket destroyer ‘Storoschewoi'. The ship left the harbor of Riga and was attacked at high sea by helicopters and submarines. The battle is said to have been very bloody, since most of the sailors were killed, and the survivors came before a war tribunal and were executed. The cause of the rebellion: unbearable social conditions and inhuman treatment - similar to the Czarist cruiser Potemkin in the year 1905 off Odessa...There is also the continuing unrest in the Georgian metropole Tiflis, about which the Georgian party organ Sarja Wostoka has reported in April. Street demonstrations from school kids and students, assassinations against Russian party functionaries and their collaborators, spontaneous freedom demonstrations of the workers and women, even barricade fighting and bombings of party palaces...the unrest has taken on a mass character, and cannot be totally suppressed by the secret police. Finally we must mention the recent strike wave caused by the shortages of groceries, which here again has its center in the industrial centers of non-Russian areas (Balticum, Ukraine). The supply situation heats up the pre-revolutionary atmosphere. Spontaneous downing of tools, mass gatherings, marches, protest meetings, have been reported from Rostow on the Don, Lviv, Kiev, Dnijpropetrowsk, Riga and Dnjiprodserschinsk. In the Ukranian metropole Kiev, bloody clashes took place between women workers and militia in front of empty food stores. The biggest shortages are in the supply of essential foodstuffs - meat, bread, dairy produce. In the combines of Tscheljabbinsk (machine construction) and Schtschekino (chemicals), strikes broke out in reaction to lock outs." Apart from the nonsense about a "prerevolutionary atmosphere", there can be no doubting the extent of the social turbulence which gripped wide areas of the USSR at the end of the 70s. One report tells of how supplies had to be rushed to Tula in face of a strike movement which broke out in 1977. The workers there had refused to collect their wages two months running, because there was nothing to buy with it, Brezhnev decided -- 33 years after the end of the last war! -- to declare Tula a ‘Hero City' for its role in defeating Hitler. This status involves getting better food supplies. (Osteuripakomitee, Info 32 and Social­ist Review, Summer 1980). In December of the same year there was a violent strike in the big rubber plant of Kaunas, Lithuania, and soon afterwards, a go-slow strike in the Putilov steel plant in Leningrad, the plant which stood at the heart of the October Revolution, in pro­test against the treatment of prisoners working in the plant. (Reported in Listy).

In 1973 protest strikes broke out in the mine­fields of Rumania. As in 1970 they were violent in nature, but they remained sporadic and isol­ated. (Reported in Der Spiegel, 12.12.77). In 1977 the miners, the militant of the working class in Rumania, struck again. The strike broke out in Lupeni and spread immediately to all the neighboring mining valleys. Altogether 90,000 went on strike. 35,000 of them gathered at Lupeni, to avert the danger of repression through weight of numbers. On the second day, some members of a top party delegation sent to ‘negotiate' were taken prisoner, and others had the filthy food which the workers are given to eat, rubbed in their faces. Ceausescu then came in person, and was lucky to get away alive -- the workers tried to lynch him. He flew immediately to the Kremlin to consult with Brezhnev. An army detachment went to disperse the workers changed its mind when it met with resistance. Then, as the strike began to spread beyond the minefields of the Schil valley -- to the rail­ways, to a textile factory in Brasov, to a heavy machinery plant in Bucharest -- Ceausescu returned to concede all the workers' demands. For two weeks the supply situation improved dramatically. Then the army returned. 2000 crack troops alone were sent to Lupeni. They attacked the workers, beating many of them until they were crippled for life. Then they deported 16,000 miners with their families to different parts of the country. Many were sent to work in uranium mines, where they lose all their hair within weeks, and get cancer within months. The main slogan of the miners in Lupeni was "Down with the proletarian bourgeoisie". In their fifth letter to Radio Free Europe, the workers wrote "From our whole hearts we ask you to read this letter over the microphone. Don't be afraid that it will become known that there are strikes in socialist states. There will be more, and we may have no other choices than to take justice into our own hands - with our pick axes." In September the German News Agency DPA reported new strikes in the area. From 1 January 1978 on the Schil valley was declared a forbid­den zone, which outsiders could not enter.

The problem of isolation facing the workers in Rumania is akin to those met with in the USSR. This explains the viciousness of the Ceausescu regime, much praised in the west for its ‘indep­endence' vis a vis Moscow and its supposed ‘commitment to peace'. Ceausescu's is in fact the most hated government in the Eastern Bloc, with the exception of the Honecker regime in the GDR.

In the late 70's, working class discontent began to manifest itself in the western part of the bloc. Already in 1971, a series of strikes were reported to have taken place in Budapest. In 1975 Der Spiegel reported the following on the situation in Czechoslovakia. "Leaflets distributed at many factories speak of protest actions which show an open discontent of the workers directed against the regime: in the industrial complexes of Prague, in the steel works in east­ern Slovakia, among the railway workers". Reports of short protest strikes have come through from Czechoslovakia frequently since then, for example, at the key CKD machine factory in Prague in pro­test against price rises (Reported in Intercont­inental Press, no 49, 1978).

The brittle social peace which has reigned in East Germany since 1953 came to an end in the Autumn of 1977. In October of that year, a strike movement erupted in Karl Marx Stadt against hidden price rises, centered on the Fritz Heckert Werke, which was violently crushed by crack troops and the political police. 50 workers were arrested. The bosses of the local administration were decorated with the ‘Karl Marx Medal' for their part in crushing the revolt. (Tagesspiegel 13.1177 and Deutschland­archiv 12, December 77). On the 7 October, a crowd of young people fought police in the centre of East Berlin after the latter tried to break up a rock concert. Several people were killed including two policemen. The population in the nearby workers' district of Prenzlauer Berg protected the youngsters by hiding them in their homes and by pouring boiling oil onto the heads of the pursuing police. A few days later, the workers of the Narva works in East Berlin struck, demanding that a third of their wages be paid in western currency. The Stasi had to go to the workers' homes every day, force them to work and take them back again in the evening (Reported by Robert Havemann in an interview with Le Monde, 21.1.78) A series of strikes were reported from Dresden, where the same demand was raised. In the middle of the same month const­ruction workers in East Berlin struck (Der Spiegel, 17.10.77). A new law passed on the 1.1.78 made it possible for workers to be fined up to half a million marks! Such measures have not succeeded in intimidating the workers. In May 1978, in the cities of Witteberge and Erfurt, violent confrontations with the police were reported. In the second half of 79 and into 1980 reports continued to reach the west of strikes and protest actions, for example a strike of the dockers in Rostock, which held up war material due for shipping to Vietnam, and a big strike in Waltershausen which ended with a series of arrests.

The quantitative and qualitative progression of the class struggle in the Russian bloc can only be understood in the context of the downturn of the world economy, which eliminated the last illusions in an expansive world market through East-West trade. The sharpening of the over­production crisis makes it impossible for the COMECON to repay its spiraling debts in the west through increases exports, and left its member countries tottering toward bankruptcy. The crisis heightens the imperialist conflict between the blocs, and it forces the bourgeoisie to attack the proletariat all the more firmly, in order to support increased military efforts. The bourgeois solution for the crisis is war. If the crisis provoked a rapid drop in workers' living standards (soaring prices and increasing shortages in all COMECON countries), it also made the invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979 necessary. And this military effort in turn calls for even harder attacks on the work­ers.

The rivalry between the blocs, and that between the classes, are the two poles around which dec­adent capitalism revolves. Of the two poles, that of the class struggle is fundamental. In the absence of the class war, the rivalry between the blocs will become dominant. We mean here the absence of the proletarian fight, since the bourgeois attack against the workers is permanent. Since the end of the 60's, the class war has been the dominant factor in the world, for the first time in almost half a century. The Russian invasion of Afghanistan did not alter this. It expressed a heightened tension between the blocs, but this tension remains secondary, so long as it provokes in its turn a response from the workers at a qualitatively higher level. The two poles of society are determined by their goals: war or revolution. They are diametrically opposed to each other, but since the full participation of the proletariat is essential for either, the trajectory of society depends on the workers' response to the crisis.

The struggles of the 50's necessitated a temp­orary collaboration of the world bourgeoisie. But because these struggles remained restricted to one bloc (as opposed to 1917-23, when both war camps were hit by the class struggle, espec­ially on the eastern front) they did not chall­enge the domination of inter-imperialist rival­ries over society. In the face of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie installed some popular governments (Gomulka, Nagy, Khrushchev even) and these were supported by more left wing opposit­ions, who tried to tie the workers to these governments. The Dubcek regime in Czechoslovak­ia was the least successful attempt to control the workers through a popular government. Also the mass terror of the Stalin era came to an end. It was replaced by selective terror, which clamped down immediately on militant workers in the factories, but which allowed bourgeois oppositionalists room for maneuver. This change in climate did not yet correspond to an alterat­ion of the balance of class forces. The oppos­itionalists were there to boost the democratic image of the regimes such as that of the USSR, where the bleatings of the Samizdat circulated under the eyes of the KGB, and where           there were at the time at least one million political prisoners, mostly proletarians, being held to this day! (see Boris Lswytzkij: Politische Opposition in der Sowjetunion). These oppositions were foreseen as the guarantee that the regime would grant full democracy to the workers if they were prepared to fight for the capitalist fatherland. They were ‘anti-Stalinist' and warned Khrushchev against a ‘return to Stalin's methods'. Even when they called themselves ‘Marxist Leninist', or referred to the USSR as being state capitalist (an obvious concession to an opinion prevailing among many workers!), these groups usually declared their loyalty to the constitution (of Stalin!), to the CP, against the ‘restoration of the bourgeoisie' (!) etc. In this period, those who were pro-western were immediately repressed or deported. The principle thesis of the ‘Democrats of Russia, the Ukraine and the Balticum,' for example (a movement claiming to have 20,000 activists and 180,000 sympathizers -- see Lewytzhij, 69-70) was that it was in the regime's own interests to reform itself.

The international upsurge of the class struggle in the 70's did change the balance of class forces, and left the bourgeoisie, including its oppositional factions, in complete disarray. In Poland the workers no longer believed that it was possible to ‘regenerate' any part of the Stalinist apparatus, and the oppositionalists coming from 1956 and from the student movement of the 60's (Kuron etc.) who were propagating just that, found themselves completely isolated from the class. This created a dangerous polit­ical vacuum, into which the class struggle could expand. After the 1970-71 strike movement, militant workers in Sczecin and other centers tried to resist the dissolution of the strike committees by converting them into nuclei of an oppositional trade union. Oppositionalists inside and outside the CP were still able to channel workers' illusions in trade unionism into a project for making the existing unions ‘independent of the government.' The project to control the workers in this manner failed miser­ably, on the one hand because the workers had lost all faith in the existing unions, on the other hand because the bourgeoisie was prepared to organize a democratic facade for the unions, but wouldn't agree to it organizing strikes and protest actions. In the west, the unions main­tain their grip by organizing stillborn ‘actions' in order to prevent the workers taking their fate into their own hands. In the east, the Stalinists have traditionally relied on the police to maintain order, since every stoppage, even if union organized, means falling further behind the west in the arms race.

The 70's saw important changes in the social atmosphere in the Russian bloc, especially in the USSR itself. The new generation of workers, who didn't live through the Stalinist counter revolution, are outspoken and fearless. At the market places of Taschkent or in the Moscow underground, they openly criticize the regime. But they still have many illusions in the west, and especially in ‘free trade unions' and in western democracy. In the USSR, strikes have become an everyday occurrence in small and medium sized factories; where there is little work done anyway. The workers are undernourished, often starving, and productivity is abysmal. In the key plants working for the war economy, which are in Siberia, armed police stand with machine guns trained on the workers at their work places. In these factories there can be no strikes. The only alternatives are production or civil war. With the generalization of the class struggle, in the USSR and internationally, it can only be a matter of time before these work­ers also revolt. The strike waves of the 70 have made this clear to the bourgeoisie. They are sitting on a powder keg.

The invasion of Afghanistan further exacerbated the social tension. It became clear that the sacrifices workers were being called on to make were not for a ‘better future', for ‘Communism', but for world war. This perspective has streng­thened the resolve of the proletariat not to make any sacrifices for the sake of this system. The mass desertions from the Russian Army in Afghanistan are just a symptom of this. Most significantly, in the Russian USSR, the last patriotic identification with the ‘fatherland', hanging over from the Second World War, has disappeared. With Afghanistan, the absolute contradiction between the interests of the prol­etariat and those of ‘mother Russia' are becom­ing particularly clear.

With the workers of the east ready for a fight with their own government, and being held back only by the vastness of the apparatus of repres­sion, the development of a strong and credible bourgeois opposition becomes a major concern of the world bourgeoisie. It should be remembered that whereas the Eastern European oppositional­ists do not have a very high press circulation (the KOR in the late 70's distributed 30,000 copies of each issue of Robotnik), their polit­ics are transmitted to millions of workers day and night via the western broadcasting stations. These are the propaganda organs the workers attend to, not Pravda or Neues Deutschland.

Nationalism is a prime weapon for controlling the workers. In the 50's and 60's, CP governments were able to use it to strengthen their control over the class (e.g. Gomulka). In the USSR, Khrushchev's decentralization reform was intended to give the CP's of the Ukraine, Georgia etc more room for diverting anger against ‘the Russians'. In addition, it played the different nationalities off against one another. In 1978 for example, a strike wave swept the autonomous province of Abchasien, be­longing to Georgia, gripping the capital city Suchunci and the mining districts, and gaining the active support of the landworkers and peasants. This intense social movement remained com­pletely isolated, because it was diverted into a national liberation struggle against ‘the Georg­ians'. Abchasien sells its industrial and agri­cultural produce to Georgia at a fixed price, and Tiflis then feels free to resell a portion to Russia at a profit. Under such circumstances, it wasn't difficult for the oppositionalists to lead a workers' movement into a bourgeois cul-de-sac, involving the workers in a customs war at the frontier.

By the beginning of the 70's, the ability of the ruling CP's to enforce the nationalist mystification in Eastern Europe or in the non-Russian USSR was dying; because nobody believed anything they said anymore, and because a convincing nationalism in the eastern bloc today has to be very much more anti-Russian than any government­al team can afford. Instead, the Kremlin decided to leave the task entirely to the opposition. The official governmental position against anti-Russian nationalism in any shape or form could only reinforce the credibility of the opposit­ion. This was the reasoning behind the ‘Brezhnev Doctrines':

-- after the Prague invasion, the so-called ‘limited sovereignty of socialist states'

-- then, in December 1972, proclamat­ion of the ‘solution' of the national question in the USSR through the creation of ‘one great Soviet people'.

As in Poland and Czechoslovakia the party/re­formist and human rights/pro-western opposition­alists in the USSR entered into crisis with the upsurge of the class struggle. The future clear­ly belonged to those who could radicalize them­selves and create a presence within the prolet­ariat.

In the Ukraine and other areas of the Soviet Union where the class struggle has been particularly powerful, the oppositionalists have long been radical and have concentrated on gaining an influence. Among such groups in the past were ‘All Power To The Soviets' (Moldavia 1964), ‘The Young Workers' (Alma-Ata 1977), the Kommun­arden Group, the ‘Ural Worker' (Sverlowsk 1970), ‘For The Realization of Lenin's Ideas' (Voro­schilovgrad, 1970). (See ‘Die Politische Oppos­ition in der Ukraine', in Sozialistisches Ost­europakomitee, Info 32). We don't possess suff­icient documentation to judge whether some of these groups could have represented political expressions of the proletariat. What is certain is that the majority of them, for all their verbal radicalism, represented programs for ‘democratizing' Russian capitalism, in order to avoid social explosions. The fact that these groups had to resort in many cases to talking about ‘Soviet Capitalism' and the ‘new bourge­oisie' in the USSR in order to get a hearing among the workers certainly reflects the attitude among the militant workers to the ‘Soc­ialist Fatherland'. The radicals in turn have been divided into hard line nationalists, who work in strict clandestinity, propagate and even practice ‘armed struggle'; and more working class oriented currents who mix the nationalist poison with demands for free trade unions. Dur­ing the seventies, in the Ukraine for example, such leftists have developed an activity in the factories. There are hundreds of such organizations all over the USSR. In addition, towards the end of the seventies, a series of attempts have been made to set up republic-wide oppositional trade unions, the most recent and well-known being the SMOT, with sections in a dozen cities to begin with. Whereas striking workers in strategically vital factories are executed out of hand, these stalwart defenders of the capit­alist state get away with being harassed or arrested by the KGB. If the police left them completely alone, the workers would hardly have much trust in them.

The formation of the KOR in Poland in 1976, which had the immediate effect of steering the workers' response to the repression of 1976 onto a legalist and democratic terrain, is a good example of the development of a radical, opposit­ionalist current, which claims to defend the workers against the government, in order to head off the rise in class struggle. The KOR abandon­ed the demand of reforming Stalinism, and called instead for the workers to organize ‘outside and against the state' -- in state organs however, in trade unions, which give the workers the illus­ion of being able to permanently defend them­selves without having to constantly take up the struggle and organize themselves in that strugg­le. This agitation (members of the KOR went to work and militate for example on the Lenin docks before the summer of 1980), helped to pre­pare the way for the formation of Solidarnosc, today the number one force for law and order in Poland.

We do not intend here to go into the details of the mass strike in Poland and its international repercussions. We refer our readers to the art­icles in the International Review Nos 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, and to scores of articles in our international press in seven languages.

The veer of the opposition to the left, and the willingness of the state to tolerate their activities, were key factors in the bourgeois strategy against the working class after Afghanistan, and especially after the eruption of 1980 in Poland. Realizing the impossibility of preventing the outbreak of the mass strike, the bourgeoisie concentrated on restricting it to single nation states. The threats to invade Pol­and, which were directed more at keeping the workers in the other Eastern European states in check, were reinforced and complimented by the posing of bourgeois goals for the movement, (being put forward by the newly radicalized opp­osition). This, in turn, led to the encapsulat­ion of the movement and reinforcing the state through strengthening the oppositional wing of its apparatus with new oppositional unions. The ideology of democracy and free trade unions not only succeeded -- after a year of struggle -- in ending the mass strike. It allowed the world bourgeoisie -- in Eastern Europe via the opposit­ionalists to present false lessons of a strug­gle in Poland which was gripping the attention of workers all over the world. If the workers of Eastern Europe didn't join the mass strike, this was not only because the supply situation is not yet as bad in East Germany or Hungary as in Pol­and, or because of the immense presence of the Russian Army in these countries, or because the governments could persuade their populations that the strike movement was ruining the Polish economy, but above all because the opposition in these countries was telling the class that the workers in Poland had succeeded in raising such massive resistance because they had organized themselves beforehand in free trade unions. Therefore, the task of the Eastern European proletariat should not be to join the fight, following their comrades in mass struggle organized in workers' assemblies and elected and revocable strike committees, and confronting the state. Rather, it should consist in waiting, in building ‘free trade unions'; each in his own country, each working class democratizing his ‘own' terrorist state. This ability to stop the mass strike spreading beyond Poland was, in turn, crucial in persuading the workers in Pol­and of the absence of any perspectives other than national ones. And this is the message of the Gdansk Congress of Solidarnosc with its famous appeal for the formation of ‘independent trade unions' in the other Eastern bloc countries. This false internationalism consists in announcing: ‘for you too, there are only national solutions'.

How little ‘national' the strike wave of 1980-81 in Poland was, is shown by the fact that it was a continuation of a strike movement of the late seventies which passed over East and West Germany, Holland, Britain and France, Brazil, the USSR and South Korea etc. It was immediately preceded by a massive if short-lived strike movement in the USSR. In early May 1980, 17,000 workers in the car plant in Togliattigrad came out in solidarity with the bus drivers, and had their demands met after two days. Immediately after­wards 200,000 car workers in Gorki struck in protest against shortages. The strike was pre­ceded by the widespread distribution of leaf­lets. It was the biggest single walkout in the history of the USSR. A month later a strike is believed to have taken place at the giant Kama River truck plant. In August and September, at the height of the movement in Poland, a series of protests and disturbances were reported from the mining areas of Rumania, and soon afterwards in Hungary (Budapest) and Czechoslovakia. The Czech party boss Husak had to rush to the mines around Ostrava in order to put the lid on the situation. Many of the mines in this area extend across the Polish border, and the contact with the Silesian miners at this time was particular­ly intense. Prague reacted by practically seal­ing the border to Poland. Soon, the Polish bord­ers to East Germany and the USSR became practic­ally impassable for ‘ordinary' Eastern Europeans. All local trains between East Germany and Poland were cancelled for instance, At the same time, the armies of the Warsaw Pact were massed along these borders, and an unending series of maneuvers were held in and around Poland, At the beginning of October, street demonstrations and clashes with the police were reported in the capital of Estonia, Tallin, and spread to other centers in the Baltic USSR. Strikes were reported from Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania, cities where many people speak Polish.

As the situation developed, workers in Poland, for example at the Lenin Docks in Gdansk, began to dismiss the threats of an invasion as a bluff, because, as they said, the workers in the neighboring countries would not permit such a thing. This conviction was vindicated by an acc­umulation of reports in the western media, of which we give two examples here - "The soviet authorities fear that an invasion of the East German army in Poland would provoke a generalized strike movement in the GDR. Already, social movements have been in progress in the country for three months now..." (L'Expansion, 22.12.80) The movements referred to concern, among other things, the strike movement around Magdeburg in November and solidarity strikes in cities along the Polish border such as Gorlitz and Frankfurt/Oder.

The second report, from the Financial Times (13.2.81) concerns attempts to mobilize reservists in the Ukraine in order to invade Poland. "According to reports, the call up of reservists in Trans-Carpathia in August proceeded amid scenes of near chaos. Residents of the area were dragooned on the streets, cars were commandeered on the roads, and reservists, many of whom regularly left assembly points to sleep at home­ with their families, were said to reflect the low morale of people in the area, who are well informed about events in Poland and sympathize strongly with the Poles."

1981 continued with important struggles of the workers. The most important were in Rumania in November, where the miners were joined by steel workers and others in a series of strikes, clashes with the police and attacks against state buildings, leaving several people dead.

"The helicopter which was to fly in the state president Ceausescu for a dialogue with the ‘dissatisfied' in the miners districts was pelted with stones" (DPA/AFP reports). The same report speaks of the increased activity of the oppositionalists in the Baltic republics and elsewhere in the USSR, the formation of ‘indep­endent' trade unions, and, for example, the distribution of leaflets in Estonia calling for a strike for the beginning of December in protest against the price rises of August 1. Similar appeals have been reported from Lithuania and Latvia. Significantly enough for a region where nationalist and separatist mystifications are very persistent, the report claims that it is the deteriorating economic situation which is animating the workers.

Alongside the class struggle of the proletariat, there have been important social explosions in regions where separatism and nationalism play an important role, but where now more than ever the impoverishment of the workers and other sectors tends to become the dominant aspect of the social situation. This is the background for instance of the violent uprisings in Georgia (USSR) and in Kosovo (Yugoslavia) during the spring of 1981.

Today we can say that the potential for the generalization of class struggle in Eastern Europe is evidently greater than at any time since the 1920's, but that the relative quiet on the strike front in Western Europe (which is no­thing but the lull before the storm), and the encapsulation of the mass strike in Eastern Europe by the oppositionalists, who have largely succeeded in limiting it to Poland, have prevented the powder keg from exploding. The perspective of major struggles in the western metropoles in the coming period, and the acceleration of the crisis, now also in East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, show that despite the world wide bourgeois counter-offensive in the wake of Poland, that the potential for generalization is growing.

Towards the unification of the world proletariat

From the Marxist standpoint, the most revolutionary achievement of capitalism was to have created its own gravedigger, the international proletariat -- and the forces of production, at a world scale, with which the proletariat can abolish class society. For this service we will be eternally grateful to our grabbing exploiters and their barbarous system. Capitalism has created the material conditions for communism, but only on a world scale. Capitalism has con­quered the globe, not in a planned manner, but through centuries of competition which have created an international division of labor, the interdependence of each part of the world econ­omy. This is why the international unification of the proletariat in the process of the world revolution is the most decisive material precondition for communism.

Today, every struggle of the proletariat is a conflict with capitalism as a whole, because the system confronts the workers as a single react­ionary mass, where all of its parts are equally rotten. This is why the workers can no longer organize themselves corporately or nationally. The secret of the existence of the workers' councils in the mass struggles of decadent capitalism is the permanent, subterranean -- but surfacing! -- thrust towards the world-wide unif­ication of the working class. "The proletariat creates a new form of organization, which encompasses the entire working class regardless of profession, and political maturity, an elast­ic apparatus which is capable of constantly re­newing and expanding itself, of integrating new sectors into itself..." (Manifesto of the Comm­unist International 1919).

The workers' councils have appeared in the con­text of the mass strike, of the autonomous generalization of the proletarian fight, which threatens to overflow all the barriers erected by capitalism within the working class. And yet, up to now, as a result of the immaturity of the subjective conditions for the world revolution, the workers' councils have paradoxically always reflected also the heterogeneity of the world proletariat. The councils of 1905 in Russia signaled the end of capitalist ascendency worldwide. But they also sowed the avant garde role of the young Russian proletariat, which led for example to the Communist International being formed in 1919 clearly around a pole of regroup­ment in Russia -- the Bolsheviks. Similarly, in the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, the workers' councils played an important role only in those countries which had been defeated in the war. As such, the workers' councils expressed not only the striving for unity of the class, but also its real division as a result of the war. Third­ly, the appearance of the workers' councils in Hungary in 1956 was not a sign of an internat­ional maturation, but of the coming to an end of the continuity with the revolutionary wave. The defeats of the 50's were the final break with this continuity. The Hungarian workers still re­membered the experience of the councils in 1919, as was expressed in the call within the councils for "not a government of Nagy or Kadar, but of Bela Kun!"

Today the workers in Poland have been confronted with the unified resistance of the world bourge­oisie, which has united around the strategy of strengthening, the left, oppositional factions like Solidarnosc, the organs of the bourgeois state implanted within the working class to con­trol its reactions. Because of this unity, there can no longer be a ‘weak link in the chain of imperialism' as with Russia in 1917. This is why there were no workers' councils in Poland in 19801981: not because of the weakness of the Polish sector of the class, but because the mass strike there is the most developed expression to date of an international maturation, a real homogenization of the world proletariat. In these circumstances, the workers' councils and the class party of the future will be directly international phenomena, they will appear as a result of a growing awareness of the need to confront and destroy capitalism.

In the perspective of the world revolution, Europe becomes the key to the future, the centre of the world proletariat and of the rivalry be­tween the blocs. The proletariat of Western Europe will play the most crucial role

-- because of its concentration, its indust­rial and cultural level

-- because it has the most experience with bourgeois democracy and ‘free trade unions', these most lethal weapons of the class enemy.

-- because the national economies of this area are so intertwined, that a nationally limited struggle will sooner appear as an absurdity

-- because the workers of West Germany or France speak five or ten languages, not in diff­erent regions, but on one and the same assembly line, and will more easily attain a global vis­ion of the world wide tasks of the class

-- because a mass strike can be downplayed in Poland and quietly massacred in Siberia, but if it breaks out in a major country of the west, it will paralyze a large part of the world economy, and therefore force workers everywhere to take account of it

-- finally, the workers of the west have been spared the crushing double defeat of the 20's and 30's. This is why they will have to play a leading role in preparing the way for the international council republic and the world commun­ist party of the future.

The last revolutionary wave of the 20's ended with the near obliteration of the revolutionary proletariat of Russia and Germany. Tomorrow, the working class of the USSR, larger, more concen­trated, more powerful than ever before, will take its place alongside its class brothers and sisters in the world wide revolutionary fight. And the proletariat in Germany will have to take up the key role of forming the bridgehead between east and west, smashing the Berlin Wall, the symbol of the splitting of the world prol­etariat through two world wars. The isolation of the workers of the east is coming to an end. That is the lesson of the class struggle enter­ing the 1980's.

Krespel. November 1981.

To go beyond capitalism: Abolish the wages system

On Nicholas Bukharin's Criticism of Rosa Luxembourg's Theses

Communism is an age-old dream of humanity -- a dream as old as class society. Ever since men, in order to survive materially within nature, have been forced to divide their community into antagonistic classes, they have dreamed of a reunited human community -- a communist society.

This dream tends to appear more forcibly when class society enters into crisis. Today this project is more real than ever. A class exists which can make it concrete: the working class. But it is by understanding what crisis society is suffering from, that we can understand why this class is historically revolutionary, and how it must act. This is why Marxism remains indispensable for revolutionary consciousness. This is why it is necessary to go back over the debates that have taken place in the workers' movement on the conceptions of the capitalist crisis and their consequences.

To understand the crisis is to understand how to go beyond capitalism

"As an ideal of a social order based on frater­nity and equality between men, as an ideal of a communist, society, socialism dates back thou­sands of years. With the first Christian apostles, and for various mediaeval religious sects during the peasant wars, the idea of socialism has never ceased to appear as the most radical expression of revolt against the exist­ing order. But precisely in this form of an ideal, desirable at any time and place in history, socialism was no more than the beauti­ful dream of a few visionaries -- a golden dream as unattainable as a rainbow in the clouds.

(...) One man drew the ultimate conclusion from the theory of the capitalist mode of' production, by placing himself, right from the start, at the viewpoint of the revolutionary proletariat ‑- Karl Marx. For the first time, socialism and the modern workers' movement stood on the unshak­able ground of scientific knowledge." (Rosa Luxembourg, Introduction to Political Economy, Ch. l, Pt.5)

For years, the streets filled with cars shining under the flash of neon lights made it seem as if the economic crisis would never be seen again. The yellowing photos of the 1930s unemployed had been stored away along with the pictures of Napoleonic battles and mediaeval famines. The Marxist revolutionaries who spent their time, as they had done for almost a century, announcing the inevitability of the capitalist crisis, were classed in more or less the same category as the Jehovah Witnesses with their unceasing ‘the end of the world is nigh'. Bourgeois bureaucrats and specialists in ‘social questions' proclaimed ‘the resounding bankruptcy of Marxism'.

Today, the pride of place in papers all over the world is regularly taken by the deepening of an economic crisis whose end no-one any longer dares to predict....and whose dimensions no-one had foreseen.

A fine revenge for those who, ever since the mid-nineteenth century, have tried to define a vision of the world unobscured by the ideologi­cal filters of those who profit from the system: a vision that rejects the idea of capit­alism as an eternal system of production; that is always able to consider capitalism in its historical dimensions, that is to say, as a sys­tem destined to disappear, along with slavery and feudal serfdom!

Marxism is essentially the theoretical effort to view the world from the standpoint of the class directly exploited by capitalism -- the proleta­riat -- with the aim of its revolutionary overthrow. It is the attempt to understand what today is the objective basis for the necessity and possibility of revolutionary action by this class.

For Marxism, the communist revolution is possible and necessary only to the extent that capitalism shows itself unable to carry out the historical function of every economic system in history: to allow men to satisfy their material needs. Its inability to go on fulfilling this function appears in reality as an economic crisis paralyzing the productive process.

A large-scale proletarian struggle has never occurred outside periods of economic crisis. Without the economic crisis, there can be no workers' revolution. Only the collapse of the economy is strong enough to destabilize the soc­ial order to the point where society's vital force, the world proletariat, and with it all the world's exploited, will be able to build a new world, adapted to their own plans and to the tech­niques and potential of a humanity united by the will of the producers themselves.

The vectors of capitalism's existence, the evolu­tion of its forms of life, are also explained by the system's permanent struggle against its own contradictions, to avoid its economic crises. The leaders of world capital do not remain inac­tive in the face of their system developing internal contradictions and the ever more devas­tating crises that the exacerbation of these con­tradictions provoke. Imperialism, wars and the tendency to the absorption of society by the state, for example, are incomprehensible without knowing why capitalism is forced to have recourse to them. To understand the remedies that capital tries to apply to its sickness, we must under­stand the nature and causes of its disease, and therefore of its crises.

In the article ‘Crisis Theories from Marx to the Communist International' (International Review, no. 22), we insisted on the link between the theo­retical debates on the analysis of capitalist crises and such crucial problems for the workers' movement as the alternative between reform and revolution, or the proletariat's participation in imperialist wars.

The fundamental question posed by Bukharin's critique of Rosa Luxembourg's analysis of crises is above all that of the content of communism, the definition of the new society.

To be historically viable, the new society that will succeed capitalism must be able to prevent the reappearance of the conditions that block society today. The only thing we can be certain of is that communism, if it ever exists, will have overcome the present contradictions of capitalism.

Feudalism overcame slavery because it allowed men to subsist without depending on the pillage of other populations; in its turn, capitalism imposed itself historically in the face of feudalism's collapse, through its ability to allow the concentration of human and material productive forces that the fragmentation of society into autonomous and jealously isolated fiefdoms made impossible.

If we want to know what communism will be like, we must start by knowing what has gone wrong in present society: where is the machine blocked; what is it in capitalist relations of production that prevents men from producing for their ends. If we manage to determine what lies at the heart of the capitalist disease, we will be able to deduce the historically necessary characteristics­ of the future society.

Understanding the causes of capitalist crises thus means understanding how and why socialism is historically necessary and possible. It also means understanding who capitalism can be over­come, what must be destroyed and what are the bases of a real human community.

Behind the theoretical differences between Bukharin and Rosa Luxembourg's analyses of crises, there appear two radically different conceptions about the economic foundations of the new society to be built on the ruins of the old.

For Rosa Luxembourg, at the centre of capita­lism's contradictions lies the limit imposed on its development by the generalization of wage labor. From this point of view, the crucial question in the construction of communist society is therefore the abolition of wage labor.

For Bukharin, what is fundamental is capitalism's inability to overcome its internal divisions and to master the ‘anarchy' of its production. As a result, planification and the centralization of the means of production in the hands of the state, in themselves constitute the supersession of capitalism. In this way, Bukharin, referring to the Soviet Union, where state planning of production is highly developed, but wage labor continues to exist, speaks in 1924 of "the contradiction between the capitalist world and the new economic system of the Soviet Union".

It is this aspect that it is most important to bear in mind in replying to Bukharin's 1924 pamphlet criticizing Luxembourg's analysis: Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital.

This aspect is the result of a different view of the analysis of capitalist crises -- of what blocks capitalist society.

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

Rosa Luxembourg's analysis of crises of overproduction

Capitalist crises take the form of crises of overproduction. Factories close, drowned by stocks of unsold goods, while at the same time the unemployed are thrown on the street, and the wages of those remaining in work are reduced. By destroying their mode of production, capitalism has destroyed the buying power of populations not integrated into the capitalist system. The most favored of these populations are integrated into the capitalist system as its slaves, while the rest -- two-thirds of humanity ‑- are reduced to starvation. ‘Overproduction' exists, not in relation to society's ‘absolute' needs, but in relation to its ‘solvent' needs, in other words, in relation to the buying power of a society dominated by capital.

The originality of Rosa Luxembourg's theses does not lie in her analysis of the fundamental, ‘ultimate' cause of capitalism's economic crises. As far as the ‘cause' is concerned, she is simply taking up the analysis of Marx.

"The ultimate reason for all real crises is always the poverty and limited consumption of the masses, faced with the tendency of the capi­talist economy to develop the productive forces as if their only limit were society's absolute power of consumption." (Marx, Capital, Vol. 3, Pt. 5)

For Luxembourg, as for Marx, capitalism is condemned to economic crises by the contradiction between its constant need, under the pressure of competition, to develop its productive capacity on the one hand; and on the other hand, its inab­ility to create by itself enough outlets to absorb an ever-growing mass of commodities. Capital is obliged at one and the same time to throw an ever greater mass of products for sale onto the market and to limit the buying power of its wage earning masses. As Marx put it:

"The particular condition of overproduction is the general law of the production of capital: to produce to the limit of the productive forces (that is to say, exploiting the greatest possible mass of labor with a given mass of capital), without taking account of the existing limits of the market or of solvent needs, and to do so by constantly enlarging production and accumulation, and so by constantly reconver­ting revenue into capital, while on the other hand, the mass of producers remains and must necessarily remain, due to the nature of capitalist production, limited to an average level of demand." (our emphasis) (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, end of the 17th chapter)

Rosa Luxemburg takes up the same analysis of the basic cause of capitalist crises. Her contribution is at a more concrete and historical level. The question she answers is the follow­ing: when does this contradiction transform capitalist relations of production into a seri­ous barrier to the development of humanity's productive forces? Luxemburg replies: from the moment when capitalism has extended its domination throughout the world.

"The capitalist mode of production would be able to expand powerfully as long as it is continually able to thrust back outmoded forms of production. Its evolution lies in this direction. However, this evolution traps capitalism in the following fundamental contradiction: the more capitalism replaces backward modes of production, the narrower become the limits of the market created in its search for profit, in relation to the existing capitalist enterprises' need to expand." (R, Luxembourg, Introduction to Political Economy, final chapter)

For Luxembourg, capital finds the extra mar­kets that it needs to develop in the ‘non-capitalist' sector, capitalism's colonial expan­sion, which reached its height at the beginning of this century, expresses the search for new outlets by the main capitalist powers.

Luxembourg, moreover, is simply developing the idea expressed in the 1848 Communist Manifesto:

"The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe."

In the nineteenth century, while Marx was alive, capitalism went through a series of economic crises, According to the Manifesto, the bourgeoisie overcomes them "on the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces, on the other by the conquest of new markets, and by the, more thorough exploitation of the old ones."

For Rosa Luxembourg, a qualitative change appears in the life of world capital from the moment when ‘new markets' become increasingly scarce and inadequate in relation to the devel­opment of the capitalist powers. The appearance of new powers such as Germany and Japan on the world market at the beginning of the century thus leads to new crises. But unlike those of the nineteenth century, these can no longer be surmounted by the conquest of ‘new markets'. The ‘solutions' indicated by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto which now take on the greatest importance are: the improved exploitation of old markets and above all the destruction of the productive forces. The first world war, with its 24 million dead, a total and unrestrained kind of warfare bringing in its wake the systematic destruction of the capitals competing to seize each others' old markets, signified in all its horrific barbarism the end of capitalism's flourishing period.

Rosa Luxemburg's contribution to marxist theory thus consists essentially in her explanation of how the contradiction between production and consumption that has characterized capitalism since its birth leads it -- from the moment when it has spread its domination throughout the planet -- to imperialism and humanity's self-destruction, thus putting on the historical agenda its supersession by a society based on new relations of production.

If factories close for lack of solvent outlets, while humanity's material misery deepens, the only historical solution lies in the elimina­tion of the laws of the market, and of wage labor in particular.

By generalizing wage labor, capitalism has generalized the market as a mediation between men's activity as producers, and their activity as consumers. From this point of view, superseding capitalism means destroying this media­tion and re-establishing the direct link between production and consumption From the viewpoint of Luxembourg's analysis, the forward march of the revolution is identified with the struggle against wage labor (ie against the use of labor power as a commodity); its immediate aim must be to subordinate production to consumption, to orientate production directly towards men's material needs. There is no other way out.

A reply to Bukharin's criticisms of Rosa Luxembourg

Apart from its immediate aim -- the analysis of capitalist crises, Bukharin's work lies within the framework of the ‘Bolshevization of the parties of Communist International'[1] Bukharin takes on the job of ‘destroying' Luxembourg's analysis, and to do so he uses any­thing that comes to hand. He criticizes every­thing he sees, without always stopping to ask what might be the overall coherence of what he is analyzing, and without any fear of arriving at contradictions. Nonetheless, one finds for­mulated in this pamphlet the main criticisms of Luxembourg which have since been used by the Stalinists and Trotskyists, as much as by the Bordigists and ex-Trotskyists like Raya Dunayevskaya, The main point of this criticism can be formulated as follows:

Luxembourg is mistaken when she says that capital cannot create its own outlets to ensure its development; the problem that Luxembourg poses -- production for whom? -- is a false one; the workers can constitute a sufficient outlet to ensure this expansion; finally, Luxembourg's explanation of crises ignores or neglects the main contradictions pointed out by Marx - in particular the ‘anarchy' of capitalist production.

Can capital create its own outlets?

This is how Luxembourg poses the problem:

"What we have to explain are the main acts of social exchange, which are provoked by real economic needs (...) What we must prove is the economic demand for the surplus product ..." (RL, Accumulation of Capital, ch. 9)

For Luxembourg, following the theories of Marx, the development of capital, and its accumulation, is expressed in a growth in productive capacity and therefore in the product of the exploitation of workers -- the surplus product. Studying the conditions for this development therefore means, amongst other things, determining who buys this surplus production, who buys the part of social production left over once the workers have spent their wages, and once the capitalists have both paid for raw materials and wear and tear of machines, and extracted a part of the profit for their own personal consumption. In other words, who buys that part of the profit destined to be transformed into new capital, new means of exploitation of labor.

For the most part, capitalist production itself creates its market, its ‘real economic need': the mass of wages (variable capital), the expense of restoring wear on the productive apparatus and replacing the raw materials used, the expenses of the capitalists for their own personal consumption, all this constitutes a ‘real economic need', ‘solvent demand' from capital's point of view, All this makes up that part of production that capitalism can buy ‘back from itself'. But a part of what is produced remains to be sold: that part of the surplus product that the capitalists -- unlike feudal lords or the slave-owners of antiquity who personally consumed all their profit -- do not consume, so as to be able to increase their capital, to engage not just in ‘simple' reproduction to renew the productive cycle, but in ‘enlarged' reproduction. This part of production is very small in relation to the total mass. But capitalism depends on its ‘realization', that is, its sale, to continue its enlarged accumulation.

Rosa Luxembourg affirms that this part of the surplus value cannot, under capitalist conditions be sold either to the workers or to the capitalists. It cannot be used either to increase the consumption of the dominant class -- as in previous systems -- or for the workers' consumption.

"... the increasing consumption of the capitalist class cannot in any case be considered as the final aim of capitalist accumulation: on the contrary, to the extent that this production occ­urs and grows, there cannot be accumulation; the capitalists personal consumption falls into the category of simple reproduction. Rather, what we want to know is for whom the capitalists are pro­ducing when they ‘abstain' from consuming themselves the surplus value, ie when they accumu­late. Still less can the aim of capital accum­ulation from the capitalist viewpoint, be to maintain an ever more numerous army of workers. The workers' consumption is always a result of accumulation, never either its aim or its condition, unless the bases of capitalist pro­duction were to be overthrown. Moreover, the workers can only ever consume that part of the product, corresponding to variable capital and not a penny more. Who then realizes the constantly increasing surplus value?" (The Accumulation of Capital, ch.25)

And Luxembourg replies: the non-capitalist sectors. Capital cannot constitute a market for the whole of its production.

For whom do the capitalist produce?

Bukharin quotes this passage in his pamphlet and in reply, begins by putting in question the very way in which the question is posed:

"Firstly, can we pose the problem from the view­point of the subjective aim (even the subjective class aim)? What is the meaning of this sudden intrusion of teleology (study of ultimate ends) in the social sciences? It is clear that the way of posing the problem is methodologically incorrect, to the extent that we are talking of a serious formulation and not a metaphorical turn of phrase. Let us take an example an economic law recognized by comrade R Luxembourg herself -- for example the law of the falling rate of profit. ‘For whom', that is, in whose interest, does this fall occur? The question is obviously absurd, it cannot be posed, since the idea of intent is here excluded a priori. Each capitalist (our emphasis) tries to gain a differential profit (and sometimes succeeds); others catch up with him, and the result is a social fact: a fall in the rate of profit. In this way, comrade Luxembourg abandons the path of marxist methodology, in renouncing the conceptual rigor of Marx's analysis." (Bukharin, Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, ch. l)

Bukharin is right to say that it is absurd to pose the question ‘For whom does the rate of profit fall?' The falling rate of profit is a tendency that concerns the measurement of an economic ratio (the profit on capital engaged). It is a tendency which has no ‘addressee'. It is not erected by someone to be supplied to someone else. The question ‘for whom' has no meaning. But the question ‘why do capitalists decide to increase their produc­tion?' is quite another matter.

The capitalist produces to sell and realize a profit. He only increases his production if he knows that it will find an outlet, buyers able to realize in money form the labor he has extracted from his workers. The capitalist only increases his production if he knows who to sell to, which is the capitalist translation of the more general question: ‘production for whom?' And this question is so vital for him that if he is unable to reply, he is condemned to bank­ruptcy.

Replying to the French economist JB Say and his well-known law according to which production automatically creates its own market, Marx wrote in the Critique of Political Economy:

"The metaphysical equilibrium between buying and selling comes down to this: each purchase is a sale and each sale a purchase. This is no great consolation for those who destroy commo­dities because they are unable to sell and therefore to buy" (Section on ‘The Metamorphosis of Commodities')

An argument that obeys the rules of logic but arrives at false conclusions -- ie conclusions con­tradicted by the reality it is supposed to express - we call a sophism. This is the case with Bukharin's reasoning.

What Bukharin says is true: whatever type of society we consider, there is an ‘objective' link between production and consumption. For there to be production, there must be consumption, even if it is only of food for the producers. To consume, it is also necessary to produce the ob­ject of consumption. This is true, but it is neither very original, nor very useful here. From the Stone Age to capitalism, there has always been an ‘absolutely objective' link bet­ween production and consumption. But this link is not the same in all successive systems of production.

In capitalism, in particular, this ‘absolutely objective' link is totally transformed by the generalization of wage labor. Capitalism has introduced humanity to a phenomenon it could previously never even imagine: the crisis of overproduction. For the first time in history, there can be an increase in the goods ready to be consumed, without there being a corresponding increase in consumption. What's more, during crises of overproduction, consumption falls as a result of redundancies and reductions in wages, and those who remain in employment must work harder than ever under the threat of redundancy. In this sense, Bukharin's plati­tude of the ‘absolutely objective' link between production and consumption does not take the question forward one iota. On the contrary, by confounding capitalism with previous systems, it simply clouds the issue to the point of making it insoluble.

Nonetheless, Bukharin insists, and sets his seal on it. "The growth in consumption -- he says - "as a result of increasing production is the fundamental condition for growth in any social system."

This is a. a triviality and a stupidity which was the hobbyhorse of most nineteenth century bourgeois economists.

A triviality, because increasing consumption pre­supposes an increase in production. It is obvious enough that, for there to be more consumption, there must be more goods to consume. One can hardly consume what does not exist.

A stupidity, because an increase in consump­tion is a result of a growth in production. Under capitalism, it is possible to produce more without there being any increase in consumption. Only under capitalism is such a thing -- a crisis of overproduction -- poss­ible, but it is precisely capitalism that we are concerned with here, and not previous social systems.

Growth in consumption is a systematic result of a growth in production only in social systems where production is orientated to­wards the immediate consumption of the pro­ducers.

In the classless societies of ‘primitive communism', men shared out more or less equally the results of their production. When­ever the produce of the hunt, of stock farming, or of agriculture increased, consumption automatically increased corresp­ondingly.

Under feudalism, or in the slave-holding soc­ieties of antiquity, the ruling class approp­riated the surplus produced by the exploited class, and consumed it. When production dev­eloped, this was expressed, on the one hand, in an eventual increase in the consumption of the laboring class (partly dependent on their masters' goodwill), and on the other, in an increase in the consumption of the ruling class. In one form or another, an in­crease in production systematically resulted in an increase in consumption.

Under capitalism, this systematic link is broken. The link between producer and consumer has become contradictory. Capital only develops by reducing the share of consumption.

"The capitalist mode of production is peculiar in that human consumption, which was the aim in previous societies, is now no more than a means to the real end: capitalist accumulation. Capital's growth appears as the beginning and the end, the end in itself, and the meaning of all production. The absurdity of such   relationships only appears to the extent that capitalist production becomes worldwide. Here, on a world scale, the absurdity of the capitalist economy is expressed in the picture of the whole of humanity groaning under the terrible yoke of a blind social power that it has itself unconsciously created: capital. The fundamental aim of every social form of production -- the upkeep of society through labor, and the satisfaction of its needs -‑ appears here completely upset and stood on its head, since production for profit and not for mankind becomes the rule throughout the planet, while under-consumption, permanent insecurity of consumption, becomes the rule for the immense majority of humanity." (R. Luxemburg: Introduction to Political Economy, Chapter on ‘The Tendencies of the Capi­talist Economy').

Just like the bourgeois economists who think that capitalist laws of production have always existed because they are ‘natural', Bukharin fails to perceive what fundamentally distinguishes capitalism from every other type of society in history. This leads him at one and the same time into imagining a capitalism with communist characteristics, and viewing comm­unism, or at least a break with capitalism, as state capitalism -- which has much more serious political consequences.

Can the workers provide the extra demand necessary for the development of capital?

To counter Luxemburg's analysis, Bukharin claims that increasing consumption by the workers can constitute the outlet necessary to the realization of capitalist profit, and so to capitalist accumulation.

"The production of labor-power is unquest­ionably the precondition to the production of material values, of capital's surplus-value. The production of extra labor-power is unquestionably the precondition for increasing accumulation." " (...) In reality, the fact is that capitalists employ extra workers, who then represent, precisely, an extra demand."

"Unquestionably", Bukharin moves in a theoret­ical world foreign to the reality of capital­ism and its crises. Applying Bukharin's anal­ysis to reality comes down to this; what should capitalists do to avoid laying-off workers when their businesses no longer find any outlets? Simple! -- take on "extra work­ers!" It only needed someone to think of it. The trouble is that a capitalist who followed this advice would go rapidly bankrupt.

So Bukharin takes refuge in a theoretical picture of a planned and centralized capital­ist economy, which is to get rid of crises by following his directives:

"Let us picture to ourselves (...) a collective capitalist regime (state capitalism), where the capitalist class is united in one trust, and whereas a result we have an econ­omy that is organized, but still antagonistic from the class viewpoint (...) is accumulation possible in this case? Indeed it is. There is no crisis, since the reciprocal demand of each  branch of production on every other branch as well as the demand for consumption for the capitalists as well as for the workers, is given in advance (there is no ‘anarchy of pro­duction', there is a plan that is rational from the capitalist viewpoint). In the case of a ‘miscalculation' of the means of pro­duction, the excess is stocked and the corr­esponding readjustment is carried out during the next production cycle. On the other hand, in the case of a ‘miscalculation' of the workers' means of consumption, this leftover is either distributed free, or a correspond­ing part of the product is destroyed (our em­phasis). If there is a miscalculation in the production of luxury products, the ‘way out' is equally clear. As a result there cannot here be any crisis of overproduction." (Bukharin, Idem, end of Ch 3)

Bukharin claims to solve the problem theoret­ically by eliminating it. The problem in capitalist crises of overproduction is the diff­iculty in selling what is produced. Bukharin tells us: all that needs to be done is "give it away free"! If capitalism were able to distribute its produce for nothing, it would indeed never undergo any major crises -- since its main contradiction would thus be solved. But such a capitalism can only exist in the mind of a Bukharin who has run out of arguments. The "free" distribution of produc­tion, that is to say the organization of soc­iety in such a way that men produce directly for themselves, is indeed the only way out for humanity. But this ‘solution' is not an organized form of capitalism, but communism.

In the real world, a capitalist nation that played at handing out its produce for nothing to the producers would soon lose all economic competivity in relation to other nations -- by raising the ‘cost' of its labor-power. In the jungle of the world market, the capitals that survive are those that sell at the lowest price -- and therefore those make the exploit­ed class produce at the lowest possible cost. The workers' consumption is a cost, a burden for capital, not an objective. Marx has already replied to this kind of theoretical nonsense:

"In those regimes where men produce for them­selves, there, are no crises, bur there is no capitalist production either. (...) Under cap­italism, a man who has produced has no choice between selling or not selling. He must sell." "It must never be forgotten that capitalist production is not a matter of use-value, but of exchange-value, and especially of the increase in surplus-value. That is the motor of capitalist production, and it is trying to hide the facts to disregard its very basis with the sole aim of removing the contradict­ion from capitalist production and turning it into production orientated towards immediate consumption by the producers." (Marx, Theories of Surplus Value)

********

One of the arguments most often used against Luxemburg's analysis is formulated by Bukharin as follows:

"Rosa Luxemburg makes the analysis too easy. She gives special attention to one contradiction -- the contradiction between the con­ditions of the production of surplus-value and of its realization, between production and consumption under capitalist conditions." (....) R. Luxemburg supposedly neglects such contradictions as that "between different branches of production, the contradiction be­tween industry and agriculture limited by land-rent, the anarchy of the market and competition, war as part of this competition, etc..." (Bukharin, Idem, Ch 5)

We will deal with this question in the next part of this article.

(To be continued)

R.V.

[1] "A number of comrades in the German CP were, and some still remain, of the opinion that a revolutionary program must be based on comrade R. Luxemburg's theory of accumulation. The author of the present work, who is of another opinion, necessarily had to take on the work of analyzing the Accumulation of Capital from a critical point of view. This was all the more necessary in that, following the slogan of the Bolshevization of the Communist International's member parties, we had begun to discuss such questions as the national, agrarian, and colonial questions, on which comrade R. Luxemburg had adopted an attitude different from that of orthodox Bolshevism. We therefore had to see if there was not a relationship between the errors of her Accumulation of Capital." (Bukharin, 1925 - Preface to Imperialism and Accumulation of Capital).

Russia 1917and Spain 1936

FOCUS (USA)

"The Spanish workers went far beyond the Russian workers in 1917. Russia in 1917 was a contest between feudalism and the bourgeoisie, the latter manipulating the workers. Spain 1936 was strictly a contest of workers against capital."[1]

Internationalism replies "In Russia in 1917, in contrast to Spain 1936, the capitalist state was overthrown by the mass organs of the prolet­ariat... the desperate uprising of workers in Barcelona in May ‘37 was a last gasp of the proletariat, a vain effort to overthrow the capitalist state apparatus."

**********

Introductory remarks

For some time, the press of the political tendency that calls itself the International Communist Current (ICC) has published polemics directed at the international political grouping to which we belong, Fomento Obrero Revolucionario (FOR). These polemics have covered a broad range of subjects, always noting that the ICC defends certain basic positions close to those of the FOR: above all, opposition to the unions and to ‘national liberation' wars. These points of virtual agreement, however, important as they are in the pres-day world, should not suggest any basic identity or agreement between ICC and FOR, The guidelines for interpreting these positions, the ways of intervening, the methods of research, and the historical analyses of the ICC and the FOR are wholly, totally different.

For example, although both tendencies attack the unions, the theoretical basis for doing is entirely at odds. The ICC begins with a subjective, honest and necessary recognition of the anti-worker function of the unions, Then, using some-what limited theoretical tools, they attempt to project backward into history a retrospective theory of unionism, based on the concept that unions were progressive in the last century, when capitalism was on the rise and could satisfy the basic needs of the workers, while today capitalism is decadent and must use the unions to help trim consumption. This analysis ignores the day-to-day role of unions in the sale of labor power, and therefore as an organic sector of capital. For us of the FOR, what is wrong with the unions is not whether or not they deliver a higher wage, but in negotiating wages, or the price of labor, they fortify the system in which labor is bought and sold as a commodity. Nor do the unions obvious repressive functions derive from the episodic need of the bourgeoisie for a buffer between them and the workers, an aspect of the problem that in its own way can lead workers astray by planting the suggestion that ‘new', ‘class-struggle' union are the answer to the corruption of union bureau­crats. The very origin of the unions is in the inevitability, given the sale of labor power as a commodity, of competition between the seller (the worker) and the buyer (the employer), over price.

Workers today tend to oppose the unions because of their role in the workplace as police and regulator of production, an immutable aspect of their economic role, and not a product of the vagaries of any sort of political mediation, real or imag­ined The ICC's propaganda on unions, though excellent in its impetus, nevertheless remains too incorrectly over-‘theorized' to contribute directly to the development of an anti-union workers' movement. An attachment to amateurish ‘theory' and a blindness to experience, of which the union question provides only one example, characterize the whole of the ICC's polemical and political activity. This is particularly evident in the ICC's most recent communication with the FOR, the text ‘Confusions of FOR on Russia 1917 and Spain 1936' in International Review, number 25, 1981 (herein­ after referred to as ‘1917/1936') The purpose of the present text is to provide a basis for a full answer to the points raised by the ICC in the    ‘1917/1936' text.

Before taking up the ‘1917/1936' text, further clarifications are in order. Although the author of these lines is a member of the FOR, the present work is not and must not be taken as an ‘official' statement of the FOR on Russia 1917 and Spain 1936. It is this writer's opinion that activity in a political organization, while presuming agreement on program and on the major political questions of the day, cannot and should not automatically require agreement on all points of analysis of the past. The reasons for this are, first, the need for militants to develop habits of inde­pendent inquiry, and second, the futility and juvenilism of seeking simple and absolute answers in the analysis of historical events. The author's propositions on Spain 1936 do not differ from those of the FOR in general and of its leading spokesperson, G.Munis, in particular. This is not       the case with Russia 1917, where lately this writer has come to disagree with major elements of the analysis put forward by Munis. We say lately because our present position on Russia, as will be seen, differs dramatically from that put forward by the present writer in a letter on Trotsky published in Marxist Worker, number 2, 1980. The Marxist Worker letter presents a view held until this year.

We will examine the ICC's positions on Spain and Russia. We will then discuss Munis on Russia. Finally, we will present our own view on Russia. But we must add a final stipulation. Our critique of the ICC is extremely harsh in line with the FOR text ‘False Trajectory of Revolution Inter­nationale' soon to be published in English in our bulletin The Alarm. This does not exclude a perspective of common political work with the ICC. The FOR and the ICC are today the only groups with a combative class position on the ‘national liberation' counter revolution, the most urgent question of the moment. In our attacks on the Salvadoran ‘left' we are alone, a matter of the fullest pride. While our intellectual traditions and methods differ so radically as to preclude full agreement, that need have no effect on spec­ific projects for joint political action. On this point the author of these lines is fully support­ed by the other members of FOCUS.

l. The ICC and FOR on SPAIN

We of the FOR cannot disguise our disquiet at what we see as major flaws in the ICC's theoret­ical and polemical system, no better expressed than in their discussion of Spain. To begin with, in the ‘1917/1936' text, the ICC employs critical methods against Munis that are lamentably within the worst traditions of the false ‘left'. Rather than studying and analyzing without illusions the views of Munis, the ICC sets up and then handily demolishes a straw man, representing what they hope will be accepted, by those unacquainted with Munis' work, as his views. The ‘1917/1936' text attempts to label Munis' (and our) emphasis on the Spanish over the Russian phase in the world- revolutionary convulsion of 1917-37 a "basic error", then attacks the "origins of the error" by zeroing in on a supposed "emphasis on social over political measures" in Munis' writings. The one of course ‘flows' from the other, for the dialectic must be respected. The ICC is led into a kind of witch-hunt over Spain not, apparently, as a consequence of research into Iberian polit­ical history between 1930 and 1939, but by a des­ire to protect and justify at all costs the ‘covenant' passed on to them by the Bordigists, who denied that a revolution took place in Spain because...no ‘Bolshevik' party emerged. The ICC does not state this so crudely; they speak of a "left communist workers' organization," which is how they describe the Bolshevik party throughout their discussion of Russia. We shall see where this leads them. What strikes us about this ‘principle' of Bordigism and the ICC is that it smacks of a return to Hegelianism. But Spain is a matter of history; we are neither prepared nor anxious for a discussion of philosophy. What we say about this position, when the Bordigists originally held it, is that their touchstone, Bilan, was hardly consistent on the matter, since they called on the Spanish workers to ‘go forth' to social revolution on the basis of a repetition of July 19, 1936, thereby recognizing the fully revolutionary and communist significance of that major event in the Spanish Revolution, of which more below.

Regrettably, the ICC's ‘1917/1939' text is not organized to facilitate debate on Spain, since it proceeds by the method of touching on one subject and then shifting suddenly and disjointedly to another, where one feels on firmer ground. In sum, the ICC does little more than repeat Bordig­ist arguments: "Munis says there was a social revolution in Spain but not in Russia; but this is obviously wrong, because...Munis also praises the Spanish economic collectives, and they obviously weren't authentically communist." But the character of the Spanish Revolution is not determined by that of the collective enterprises. To concentrate on them is to improvise. One can forgive a brilliant or useful improvisation, like those of Rosa Luxemburg on the Russian Rev­olution; but the evidence is that the ICC are simply attempting to justify a denial adhered to religiously. On the collectives, a point must be made immediately: the positive aspects of their work cited by Munis were not invented by him. They existed; neither more nor less than the hopes of the workers of the world in the unfortunate ‘Russian experiment' existed. To ‘bait' the Spanish collectives today does no more credit to the ICC than it did to the Bordigists of Comm­unist Program ten years ago (see Alarm, number 25, 1973, in reply to Le Proletaire). Regarding the supposed "emphasis on social over political meas­ures" the ICC, by citing the "social content" of the collectives as a proof of ‘no revolution in Spain', practices what they attack. In general the discourse of the ICC is characterized by imp­rovisation of a kind tending to put one outside the communist tradition. This is one reason why FOR and Munis tend to either ignore the ICC or reply to it with an ‘excess of vitriol'.

We of the FOR certainly admit that for us Spain is the most crucial question. But we do not red­uce our analysis of revolutions to criteria based on party activity or state measures. What decides the magnitude of a political struggle is the extent of autonomous action of the workers, not any particular ‘measure'. Thus, the superiority of Spain over Russia consists of certain key aspects of Spain 1936-39 that are absent from the Russian experience:

a. Smashing of the state, the police and the army, by workers and not by any single party or grouping, on July 19, 1936.

b. Seizure of major industries by the workers, followed by collectivization of economy, in which the role of the state and even, to an extent, the unions, was originally secondary to the non-institutional mass impulse. For example, in Russia in 1917 urban workers' food committees were organized to seize grain from the kulaks; but as an economic measure this kind of action was rather quickly replaced by nationalizations. In Barcelona in 1936 all markets and food indust­ries were collectivized by their own employees. What happened in Russia was a ‘revolutionary' confiscation, a temporary weapon against famine. What happened in Spain was a class blow against capital and the wage system.

c. May 3, 1937 in Barcelona: a victorious armed workers' uprising against Stalinism, defeated only thanks to betrayal by the leaders of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT.

d. Most importantly, these events took place against a background of several years of massive class confrontations and open working class preparations for revolution, symbolized above all by the 1934 commune in Asturias.

To his credit Trotsky, notwithstanding his many errors, recognized that in the 1936-37 period the Spanish workers went far beyond the Russian workers in 1917. Russia in 1917 was a contest between feudalism and the bourgeoisie, the latter manipulating the workers. Spain 1936 was strictly a contest of workers against capital.

To this the ICC has only one answer: Spain was no more than a dress rehearsal for the second world war and a forerunner of Vietnam; only a war between antagonistic imperialist powers. In their view of links between Spain and the Second World War they exaggerate an undeniable but, for revolutionaries, a secondary truth, exactly in the manner of bourgeois political commentators of that period as well as the great majority of bourgeois and Stalinist historians of the Spanish conflict, who also see in Spain an ‘antifascist war' and nothing else. What they all wish to overlook is that while the Spanish Revolution was turned from a civil war into an imperialist war (an eloquent revenge of history on Lenin's famous but empty formulation on turning the imperialist war into a civil war), it was at first a social revolution, and the masses resisted its transformation into an imperialist war, in direct proportion to the greater violence and deceit employed by the Stalinists in 1936-39 as compared with the Social Democrats in the1914-23 period, Had the Spanish workers not resisted the bourgeois war campaign, the Stalinist reaction would hardly have been necessary. The resistance of the Spanish workers to the war-mongering international bourgeoisie and to the Stalinists distinguishes them greatly by contrast with the workers of France and Germany in1914 -- the First World War was certainly not preceded by a July 19 or a May 3 - and also with the workers of Eastern Europe since 1945, where neither a July 19 nor a May 3 has been achieved. These are major issues to be discussed on Spain, although the ICC chooses to ignore them.

2. The ICC on Russia

Like Spain, the ICC treats Russia with a bluff­ing approach. Let us examine a few high points of the Russian question as it appears in the ‘1917/1936' text, which reveals not only a caricature of Munis' views, but also a caricature of Marxism tending to strongly discredit the ICC. A procedural point to be made is that the ICC, in discussing Munis on Russia, choose to ignore his main work on the subject, the book Parti‑Etat, Stalinisme, Revolution (Party-State, Stalinism, Revolution), published in 1975 by Spartacus, Paris. But we will deal with that further on. What catches our glance on reviewing the ‘1917/1936' text is the presence of gems like the statement that "the workers' (i.e. Bolshevik - our note) party still (during the period of "war communism"-- our note) exercised certain political, control over the state that emerged from the Russian Revolution. We say ‘certain' because that control was relative, and decreasing." (International Review number 25, 1981 page 30). The reaction of anyone even super­ficially acquainted with the history of Bolsh­evism to this statement must be one of bewilder­ment if not shock. Who has ever seriously sugg­ested that Bolshevik control over the state "decreased" in any way after 1917? To make such a claim is to suggest that Stalin, for example, was not a Bolshevik. To say that the Stalinist regime did not represent the revolutionary int­entions of the Leninists is one thing; but to claim that the Stalinist party-state did not develop out of the Bolshevik party dictatorship is to engage in an editing of history worthy of the false ‘Spartacists' of Robertson, if not of the Stalinists themselves. The fact that the Bolshevik party continued to rule throughout both the ‘revolutionary' and the ‘counterrevolutionary' periods of post-1917 Russian history is precisely what must be analyzed. A schoolchild habit of playing with concepts, visible in this ridiculous remark about a "decrease" in Bolshevik state control, shows how far into excess the ICC is carried by its solicitude for the honor of the Bolsheviks, an attitude unfortunately shared by Munis, though Munis has gone farther than any other ‘Lenin loyalist' toward a demystification of October 1917. This ‘Lenin loyalism' also leads the ICC to discuss in an apologetic and hesitant way aspects of Bolshevism even they cannot stomach. For example, in the ‘1917/1936' text they state that "what (the Bolsheviks) did on the social and economic level was the most that could be done" (ibid, page 31). What the Bolsheviks did was set up state capitalism! Was that really all that could be done? Furthermore, the ICC state that "Bolshevism's treason should be added as a fundamental internal cause" of the counter‑revolution, as if this "treason" were a mere footnote! The ICC makes and has made no attempt to analyze the roots of this "treason", beyond the hackneyed remark that "the fundamental internal error of the Russian Revolution was to have identified dictatorship of the party with the proletarian dictatorship, with the dictatorship of the workers' councils. This was a fatal substitutionist error of the Bolsheviks." This position is, again, shared by Munis and by those within the FOR who agree with him. On this point, the author of these lines disagrees vehemently with both the ICC and Munis. To begin with, what was wrong with the Bolshevik dictatorship was not the fact that it ‘substituted' itself for the masses. The argument against "substitutionism" is a bourgeois democratic argument against dictatorship in general. All dictatorships without exception are substitutionist. A dictatorship of workers' councils would substitute itself for the workers no less than a party dictatorship. A dictatorship of the proletariat would most assuredly substitute itself for the rest of society. In fact, ‘substitution for the masses' is absolute­ly necessary in certain situations. The reject­ion of "substitutionism" made by the ICC is, ironically, exactly the error made by the anar­chist FAI in Spain in 1936, an error recognized, to their credit, by the real revolutionary anar­chists of the Friends of Durruti group, who fought, with the predecessor of the FOR, along­side the masses in Barcelona in May 1937. The point is not dictatorship, but by whom? The problem with the Bolshevik dictatorship, as we will attempt to demonstrate further on, is that it was a dictatorship of a non-proletarian party.

A full critique of the ICC, as we have said, would have to leave the domain of politics for that of philosophy, since Hegelian hints keep reappearing, for example in the remark that "any alteration on the political level ( in a revolution -- our note) implies the rapid return of capitalism" (ibid, page 32). For us, it is rather that the persistence of capitalism deter­mines the character of any alteration in the political form. The rest of the ICC's theoretical ‘arsenal' is of the same poor quality. To speak of the isolation of Russia after the Rev­olution as a determining factor in the history of the Bolshevik state is well and good, but after almost sixty years of repetition, this point has been at least partially transformed into a pretext. After all, the ‘isolated' country was ‘one sixth of the world'. And although we hardly accept the theories of Voll­mer or of Stalin on ‘socialism in one country', there remains the curious ‘acceptance' of Russ­ian isolation by Zinoviev and the other ‘old Bolsheviks' in 1923, 1926 and 1927 in Germany, Britain and China; an aspect of Bolshevik hist­ory hardly sufficiently explained by Trotsky's psychological analyses. As far as the question of ‘isolated revolutions' goes the ICC indulges in something close to slander when discussing Munis, since Munis has always insisted that the victory of the Spanish revolution, and of any other revolution, is contingent above all on the smashing of national borders and extension of the revolution to other countries. Finally, what if the ‘isolated revolutionary country' in question, rather than being Bolivia, as suggested by the ICC, should prove to be the USA, Russia, West Germany, or Japan? Or even France or Italy, China or Brazil? Wouldn't such an event tend to contribute to a ‘simultaneous' world revolution, a possibility the ICC chooses to deprecate? One may jeer at us of the FOR for basing a whole perspective and a Second Commun­ist Manifesto on this possibility, but this was precisely the perspective of Marx and Engels, who based their expectations on England and France, the US and Russia of their day, equally capable of carrying the whole world along with them ‘simultaneously'.

ICC Reply

Before discussing the class nature of the events in Russia 1917 and Spain 1936, which are the central issues in the FOCUS text, a few comments are necessary regarding FOCUS's ‘Introductory Remarks'. FOCUS dismisses the ICC's analysis of how the role of trade unions has differed in the ascendant and decadent phases of capitalism, and offers instead the argument that unions were always anti-working class because "in negotiat­ing wages, or the price of labor, they fortify the system in which labor is bought and sold as a commodity". Here FOCUS exhibits a moralistic and ahistorical view on the nature of unionism, and a lack of understanding of the qualitative difference between the ascendant and decadent phase of capitalism, and the differing condit­ions under which the proletariat struggles.

In ascendant capitalism, when capitalism was still a historically progressive system, expanding the forces of production, creating the world market, and laying the material foundat­ions for the communist revolution, proletarian revolution was not yet on the historic agenda. What was on the agenda for the working class was a struggle to constitute itself as a class, defend its class interests, participate in the struggle to overthrow feudalism where this had not yet been accomplished, and to wrest reforms and concessions from the bourgeoisie so as to improve its working conditions and standard of living -- which indeed involved a struggle to improve the terms of the sale of labor power. Unions were never revolutionary, but they did offer the means for the proletariat a hundred years ago to struggle for its own class interests and to develop the political and organizational skills required for the confrontation with the capitalist state. This is why revolutionaries in that era, Marx and Engels in­cluded, were correct in their view that unions were schools for socialism, However, when capit­alism entered its decadent phase, the bloody announcement of which was the outbreak of the first inter-imperialist world war (1914), when the possibility of winning durable reforms had definitively come to an end, and capitalism had become a fetter on the further development of the productive forces, proletarian revolution was now on the historic agenda and could alone constitute progress for the human species. The material basis for the existence of unions as working class organs had been destroyed by the historic crisis of the capitalist mode of pro­duction, and unions were now definitively incor­porated into the capitalist state apparatus. If FOCUS wants to insist that unions were always anti-working class in nature because they struggled only for improvements in the cond­itions of the working class, it is not the ICC they must attack, but the very conception, which is basic to Marxism, that capitalism in its ascendant phase constituted a necessary and progressive step for humanity, and that the proletariat had to defend its class interests, which were directly opposed to those of the bourgeoisie, through a political and economic struggle, even as capitalism created the mater­ial and human conditions for its own destruct­ion.

Political versus economic measures

To begin, a few things must be clarified re­garding the article ‘Russia 1917 and Spain 1936, Critique of Munis and FOR' which appeared in International Review 25. This article stressed the crucial point that the overthrow of the capitalist state and the seizure of political power by the working class is the decisive first step in the proletarian revolution. It is the revolutionary destruction of the capitalist state and the establishment of a proletarian dictatorship through the workers' councils which is the indispensable precondition for the revolutionary transformation of economic rel­ations. Economic measures undertaken by the workers revolution when it triumphs in any one country are not inconsequential, or unimportant; correct economic measures can accelerate the process of revolution, can contribute to the internationalization of the revolution and to the most rapid obliteration of the persistence of the law of value, and incorrect policies can certainly retard this process. But the crucial point is that economic measures must be seen in their political context. Proletarian political power is the basis of the revolution.

The ICC does not believe that "what (the Bolsh­eviks) did on the social and economic level was the most that could be done." As we have previously pointed out, the Bolsheviks undertook disastrous economic policies, some that were even bourgeois, but we insist that as long as the proletariat exercises political power such mistakes can be corrected (see International Review 3). The clearest and most far-reaching economic policies carries out by the proletariat when is has seized political power in any one country cannot achieve a transition to commun­ism. Only the extension of the revolution through international civil war between the proletariat and capital, and the overthrow of the capitalist state apparatus in every country can make possible the transition to communism, which necessitates the abolition of commodity production, wage labor and the law of value. Economic mistakes and even policies which are objectively concessions to capitalist social relations can be corrected...but only if the proletarian political power, its class dictat­orship, is intact. On the other hand, any fail­ure to extend the class struggle to dual power, to a direct assault on, and destruction of the capitalist state, renders any attempt at an economic transformation meaningless and without any revolutionary content whatsoever. The article in International Review 25 pointed out that this political power of the proletariat, this precondition for the transition to commun­ism was completely missing in Spain 1936.

Spain 1936-1937

FOR and FOCUS claim that the bourgeois state was smashed by the workers in Spain in 1936, but this is not true. There was certainly a workers' uprising which prevented the coup launched by Franco from succeeding, but within a few short weeks the anarchists, Stalinists, Trotskyists were all integrated into the same capitalist state with the bourgeois Republicans. The absence of mass, unitary organs of the prolet­ariat, with elected and revocable committees to coordinate the struggle (workers' councils), the control of the armed militias by capitalist  organizations (Stalinists, Social Democrats, the anarchist CNT), the halting of the general strike in key cities like Barcelona by these same organizations, the dispersal by these same capitalist organizations of the armed workers to the "front" to win territory from Franco's armies rather than to fight on the front of the of class struggle and overthrow the capitalist state apparatus at its moment of weakness, and finally the very incorporation of these organizations into the government of the Spanish capitalist state, quickly transformed a workers' uprising into a war between rival cap­italist factions. Each faction was armed and supplied by a competing imperialist bloc and what transpired was a war in which the proletariat was butchered for the salvation of capitalism.

This basic fact that the state was not smashed, that the proletariat did not exercise its class dictatorship means that the collectivizations which FOCUS extols were empty of revolutionary meaning, and were in fact used against the workers to prevent strikes in war industries, increase the rate of exploitation, lengthen the working day, etc. So long as the bourgeois state apparatus exists such economic ‘revolutionary' acts become diversions from the really primord­ial revolutionary task: destroying the capital­ist state. As the recent propaganda barrage for ‘self-management' in Poland, and the moves toward self-management in failing American enter­prises amply demonstrate, illusions about the economic steps workers can take without destroy­ing the capitalist state hold out the perspective of self-exploitation under capitalism.

If the bourgeois state was destroyed in 1936, as FOCUS argues, how did the working class exercise its class dictatorship? But even FOCUS find it difficult to believe that the working class really did hold political power in Spain, and they are thus forced to contradict themselves as they do when they write that there was a "victorious armed workers' uprising against Stalinism, defeated only thanks to betrayal by the leaders of the anarcho-syndicalist CNT" on May 3, 1937 in Barcelona. If the bourgeois state had been destroyed in 1936, why was an armed uprising necessary in 1937? Why would workers have to make a revolution against some­thing they had already destroyed? And what are we to understand by the curious formulation "a victorious...defeated" uprising?

The desperate uprising of workers in Barcelona in May 1937 was a last gasp of the proletariat, a vain effort to overthrow the capitalist state apparatus which, mortally wounded a year earlier, had been saved by the combined forces of Social Democracy, Stalinism, anarchism and Trotskyism. This uprising was crushed not by the betrayal of some anarchist "leaders" as FOCUS would have us believe, but by the very army which these capitalist organizations -- not just leaders -- of the left had themselves created, and by the continued ideological influence which these same organs of the capitalist state had over the working class.

Russia 1917

In assessing the Russian Revolution, FOCUS ex­hibits extreme confusion and inconsistency. The text concludes that what happened in Russia in 1917 was not a proletarian revolution, but a bourgeois revolution against feudalism. This implies that these comrades either don't under­stand that capitalism, as a global system, had entered its decadent phase at the beginning of this century and that the proletarian revolution was on the agenda, or that they fail to see capitalism as a global, world-wide system and believe that capitalism's decadent phase had begun only in some countries and not others. Both views are mistaken. If, indeed, the bourge­ois revolution was on the agenda in 1917, we frankly fail to understand FOCUS's hostility to what they mistakenly define as a radical bourge­ois tendency (the Bolsheviks), since marxists supported the progressive bourgeoisie in over­throwing the remnants of feudalism which blocked the further development of the product­ive forces in the ascendant phase of capitalism. But the fact is that capitalism in 1917 was a world system, dominating the entire world market, driven by insurmountable contradictions which made it an obstacle to the development of the productive forces on a world scale, and therefore the proletarian revolution was on the agenda in Russia, as everywhere else.

In Russia in 1917, in contrast to Spain 1936, the capitalist state apparatus was overthrown by the mass organs -- the soviets -- of the proletariat, and this momentous event was clearly seen as only being a first step in the world revolution of the working class. Neither the overthrow of the capitalist state, nor the recognition of the vital necessity for world revolution would have been possible without the decisive role of the revolutionary minority of the class, the Bolshevik party -- and this despite, on the one hand, all of the mistaken and even frankly capitalist conceptions of its program (the Party substituting itself for the class etc.); and, on the other hand, the no less decisive role this same party played in the counter-revolution which crushed the working class.

We can only agree with G.Munis, who speaks for the FOR (though not for FOCUS), when he writes: "A revolutionary analysis of the counter-revol­ution must reject any and all idiocies on the supposed crypto-bourgeois nature of the Bolshev­iks, no less than any comments, shaded with gossip, on their crudeness and avidity for power. Such arguments lead to a denial of the Russian revolution and of revolution in general: they are the work of skeptics and not exclusively theirs, but above all, more and more, come from defrocked Stalinists."

Having rejected the proletarian class nature of the 1917 Revolution, FOCUS is incapable of draw­ing any lessons for the future from that moment­ous event, but instead opts for a strained lit­erary exercise comparing the Russian Revolution to the French Revolution, which of course follows from FOCUS's mistaken view that the revolution in Russian in 1917 was -- like the French Revolution -- a bourgeois revolution. The lessons for the proletariat in its revolution concerning the need for internationalization of the revolution, for the dictatorship of the workers' councils and for the rejection of substitutionalism are, therefore, completely lost to FOCUS. Indeed they reject "clichés about Bolshevik: substitutionalism". FOCUS believes that all dictatorships without exception are substitutionalist: "A dictatorship of workers' councils would substitute itself for the workers no less than a party dictatorship. A dictator­ship of the proletariat would most assuredly substitute itself for the rest of society. In fact, ‘substitutionalism for the masses' is absolutely necessary in certain situations." Because they reject the working class nature of the revolution, they fail to see that the Russian Revolution shows that substitutionism is the death knell of the workers' revolut­ion, that substitutionism was a mighty factor in the counterrevolution in Russia which dest­royed the power of the working class organized in the workers' councils and led to totalitar­ian state capitalism.

When FOCUS speaks of the councils substituting themselves for the working class they fail to understand the dynamic relationship between the class and the councils, that the councils cannot be permitted to become an institution above and over the class, but must be maintained as the unitary organs of the working class in which the fullest workers' democracy is maintained. If substitutionism is inevitable and necessary, as FOCUS argues, one wonders whether FOCUS has any conception of, or commitment to, workers' democracy.

Jerry Grevin & Mac Intosh

[1] We are publishing two parts of this letter. In IR 28, we mentioned the split between FOCUS and the FOR; this letter was written when FOCUS was part of FOR.

The acceleration of events and the gravity of the 'years of truth' compel revolutionaries to deepen their conceptions about the vanguard organisation of the proletariat, about its nature and function, its structure and mode of operation.

This report on the nature and function of the organisation was adopted by the International Conference of the ICC of January 1982. In the next IR we will publish the second report, on the structure and mode of operation of the organisation.

1. Since it was formed, the ICC has always emphasised the importance of an international organisation of revolutionaries in the new upsurge of worldwide class struggle. Through its intervention in the struggle, even on a still modest scale; through its persistent efforts to work towards the creation of a real centre of discussion amongst revolutionary groups, it has shown in practice that its existence is neither superfluous nor imaginary. Convinced that its function corresponds to a profound need in the class it has fought against both the dilettantism and the megalomania of a revolutionary milieu still heavily marked by irresponsibility and Immaturity. This conviction is based not on a religious belief but on a method of analysis: marxist theory. The reasons for the emergence of a revolutionary organisation, its role, form, goals and principles cannot be understood outside this theory, without which there can be no real revolutionary movement.

2. The recent splits the ICC has been through cannot be seen as a mortal crisis of the organisation. They are essentially expressions of the inability to understand conditions, the line of march, of the class movement which gives rise to the revolutionary organisation:

• that the course towards the revolution is a worldwide phenomenon, not a local one;
• that the breadth of the crisis and of the struggle doesn't fatalistically open up an immediately revolutionary period;
• that the necessity for organisation is not a contingent or local need, but involves a whole historic period up until the worldwide victory of communism;
• that, consequently, the work of the organisation must be seen on a long-term basis, and must protect itself from all the artificial shortcuts of immediatist impatience, which is a real danger to the organisation.

3. An inability to understand the function of a revolutionary organisation has always led to a denial of its necessity:

• in the anarchist and councilist vision, the organisation is seen as a violation of the personality of each worker, and is reduced to a purely fortuitous conglomeration of individuals;
• classical Bordigism, which identifies the class with the party, indirectly rejects the necessity for the revolutionary organisation by confusing the function of the organisation of revolutionaries with the function of the general organisations of the class.

4. The necessity for an organisation of revolutionaries remains as great today as it was yesterday. Neither the counterrevolution, nor huge outbreaks of struggle where no organised revolutionary fraction was present (as in Poland today) eliminate this necessity:

• since the constitution of the proletariat as a class in the 19th century, the regroupment of revolutionaries has been and remains a vital need. Every historic class which carries within itself the potential for transforming society must have a clear vision of the goals and methods of the struggle that will lead to the triumph of its historic aims;
• the communist aims of the proletariat give rise to a political organisation which, theoretically (programme) and practically (activity) defends the general goals of the whole proletariat;
• a permanent secretion of the class, the revolutionary organisation transcends and thus negates all natural divisions (geographic and historical) as well as artificial ones (professional categories, place of production). It expresses the permanent tendency towards the development of a unitary consciousness in the class, which affirms itself by opposing all immediate divisions;
• faced with the bourgeoisie's systematic attempts to derail and destroy the consciousness of the proletariat, the revolutionary organisation is a decisive weapon in the battle against the pernicious effects of bourgeois ideology. Its theory (the communist programme) and its militant action within the class are a powerful antidote to the poison of capitalist propaganda.

5. The communist programme and the principles of militant activity are the foundation stones of any revolutionary organisation worth its name. Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary function, ie. no organising for the realisation of this programme. Because of this, marxism has always rejected all immediatist and economist deviations, which serve to deform and deny the historic role of the communist organisation.

6. The revolutionary organisation is an organ of the class. An organ means a living member of a living body. Without the organ, the life of the class would be deprived of one of its vital functions, and thus would be momentarily diminished and mutilated. This is why this function is constantly being reborn, growing, expanding, and inevitably creating the organ that it needs.

7. This organ is not a simple physiological appendage of the class, limited to obeying its immediate impulses. The revolutionary organisation is a part of the class. It is neither separate from nor identical with the class. It is neither a mediation between the being and consciousness of the class, nor the totality of class consciousness. It is a particular form of class consciousness, the most conscious part. It thus regroups not the totality of the class, but its most conscious and active fraction. The class is no more the party than the party is the class.

8. As a part of the class, the organisation of revolutionaries is neither the sum of its part (militants) nor an association of sociological strata (workers, employees, intellectuals). It develops as a living whole whose various cells have no other function than to ensure that it operates in the best possible way. It gives no privilege either to individuals or to particular categories. In the image of the class, the organisation emerges as a collective body.

9. The conditions for the full flowering of the revolutionary organisation are the same that allow for the revolutionary maturation of the proletariat as a whole:

• its international dimension: in the image of the proletariat, the organisation is born and lives by breaking through the national framework imposed by the bourgeoisie. Against the nationalism of capital it defends the internationalisation of the class struggle in all countries;
• its historic dimension: the organisation, as the most advanced fraction of the class, has a historic responsibility towards the class. Since it holds onto the memory of the irreplaceable experience of the past workers' movement. It is the most conscious expression of the general, historic goals of the world proletariat.

It's these factors which give both the class and its political organisation their unitary form.

10. The activity of the revolutionary organisation can only be understood as a unitary whole, whose components are not separate but interdependent:

• theoretical activity, whose elaboration must be a constant effort, and which is never finally fixed or completed. It is both necessary and irreplaceable;
• the activity of intervening in the economic and political struggles of the class. It is the practice par excellence of the organisation, where theory is transformed into a weapon of combat through propaganda and agitation;
• organisational activity leading to the development and strengthening of its organs, to the preservation of organisational acquisitions, without which quantitative development (new members) won't become a qualitative development.

11. Many of the political and organisational incomprehensions which have been expressed in the Current are derived from forgetting the theoretical framework which the ICC adopted at its beginning. They are based on a poor assimilation of the theory of the decadence of capitalism, and of the practical implications of this theory in our intervention.

12. While the organisation of revolutionaries has not changed its essential nature the attributes of its function have been qualitatively modified between the ascendant and decadent phase of capitalism. The revolutionary convulsions which followed World War I have made certain forms of existence of the revolutionary organisation obsolete, while developing others which had only appeared in an embryonic manner in the nineteenth century.

13. The ascendant cycle of capitalism gave a particular and thus transitory form to revolutionary political organisations:

• a hybrid form: co-operatives, unions as well as parties could exist in the same organisation. Despite Marx's efforts the political function of the organisation was pushed into the background while the union struggle took the centre stage;
• the formation of mass organisations regrouping significant fractions of particular social categories (youth, women, co-operators), or even the majority of the working class in certain countries, gave the socialist organisation a loose form which tended to diminish its original function as a revolutionary organisation.

The possibility of immediate reforms, both economic and political, shifted the field of action of the socialist organisation. The immediate, gradualist struggle took precedence over the broader perspective of communism that had been affirmed in the Communist Manifesto.

14. The immaturity of the objective conditions for revolution led to a specialisation of tasks that should have been organically linked together, an atomisation of the function of the organisation:

• theoretical tasks reserved to specialists (schools of marxism, professional theoreticians);
• tasks of propaganda and agitation carried out by permanent union and parliamentary representatives ('professional revolutionaries');
• organisational task~ carried out by functionaries paid by the party.

15. The immaturity of the proletariat, large numbers of which had just come out of the countryside or out of artisan workshops, the development of capitalism within the framework of nations that had only just been formed, obscured the real function of the organisation of revolutionaries:

• the enormous growth of the proletarianised masses without political and organisational traditions, still influenced by religious mystifications, still prisoners of a nostalgia for their former condition as independent producers, gave an inordinate role to the work of organising and educating the proletariat. The function of the organisation was seen as an injection of consciousness and of 'science' into a class that was still lacking in culture and suffering from the illusions of its early infancy;
• the growth of the proletariat within the framework of industrialised nations obscured the international nature of socialism (there was more talk of 'German socialism' or of 'English socialism' than of international socialism. The First and Second Internationals operated more as a federation of national sections than as a single, centralised, world socialism;
• the function of the organisation was seen as a national one: the building of socialism in each country, crowned by an associated, federation of 'socialist' states (Kautsky);
• the organisation was seen to be an organisation of the 'democratic' people, whose task was to rally the people to the socialist programme through elections,

16. The transitory characteristics of this historical period falsified the relations between the party and the class:

• the role of revolutionaries seemed to be one of leadership, in the sense of forming a general staff. The chief virtue of the class was seen to be military discipline, submission to leaders. As with any army, it could not exist without 'chiefs' to whom was delegated the accomplishment of its goals (substitutionism) and even of its methods of struggle (trade unionism). The party was the party of the 'whole people', which it aimed to win over to 'socialist democracy'. The class function of the party disappeared in the swamp of democratism.

It was against this degeneration in the function of the party which the left of the Second International and the early Third International were fighting. The fact that the CI took over some of the conceptions of the old bankrupt International (mass parties, frontism, substitutionism) is a reality which should not be seen to have the virtues of an example for today's revolutionaries. The break with these deformations about the function of the organisation is a vital necessity imposed by the historical epoch of decadence.

17. The revolutionary period which followed the war meant a profound, irreversible change in the function of revolutionaries:

• the organisation, whether still reduced in size or a developed party, no longer had the task of preparing or organising the class and thus the revolution, which was the act of the whole class;
• it is neither an educator nor a general staff preparing and leading the militants of the class. The class educates itself in the revolutionary struggle and the "educators" themselves that have to be "educated" by it as well;
• it no longer recognises particular groups (youth, women, co-operators, etc).

18. The revolutionary organisation has thus an immediately unitary nature, even if it isn't the unitary organisation of the class, the workers' councils. It is a unity within a wider unity - the world proletariat which has given rise to it:

• it no longer arises on a national scale, but on a world scale, as a totality secreting its different 'national' branches;
• its programme is identical in all countries, East as well as West, advanced capitalist countries as well as underdeveloped ones. Although national 'specificities' still exist today, the product of an uneven capitalist development and the persistence of pre-capitalist anachronisms, these can in no way lead to a rejection of the unity of its programme. The programme is worldwide or nothing.

19. The maturation of the objective conditions for revolution (concentration of the proletariat, greater homogeneity in the consciousness of a class that is more unified, better qualified, with an intellectual level and a maturity superior to what it was in previous centuries) has profoundly modified both the form and the goals of the organisation of revolutionaries: a) In its form;

• it is a more restricted minority than in the past, but more conscious, selected by its programme and its political activity;
• it is more impersonal than in the nineteenth century and ceases to appear as an organisation of leaders directing the mass of the militants. The period of illustrious leaders and great theoreticians is over. Theoretical elaboration has become a truly collective task. In the image of millions of 'anonymous' proletarian fighters, the consciousness of the organisation develops through the integration and surpassing of individual consciousness in a single, collective consciousness;
• it is more centralised in its mode of operation, in contrast to the 1st and 2nd Internationals, which to a large extent were no more than a juxtaposition of national sections. In a historic period when the revolution can only take place on a world scale, it is the expression of a worldwide tendency towards the regroupment of revolutionaries. This centralisation, contrary to the degenerating views of the Communist International after 1921, does not mean the absorption of the worldwide activity of revolutionaries by a particular national party. It is the self-regulation of the activities of a single body that exists in a number of countries, without one part dominating over the other parts. The primacy of the whole over the parts conditions the very life of the latter;

b) In its goals:

• in the historic phase of wars and revolutions it discovers its true finality: to struggle for communism no longer through simple propaganda for a long term goal, but through its direct insertion in the great struggle for the world revolution;
• as the Russian Revolution shows, revolutionaries arise and only exist in and through the class from which they have neither rights nor privileges to demand. They do not substitute themselves for the class and neither procure power nor hold state power on its behalf;
• their essential role is to intervene in all the struggles of the class, and until after the revolution to fully carry out their irreplaceable function of catalysing the maturation of proletarian consciousness.

20. The triumph of the counter-revolution, the totalitarian domination of the state, made the very existence of the revolutionary organisation more difficult and reduced the scope of its intervention. In this period of profound retreat its theoretical function prevailed over its function of intervention and proved itself to be vital for the conservation of revolutionary principles. The period of counter-revolution has shown:

• that as small circles, nuclei, or insignificant minorities, isolated from the class, revolutionary organisation could only develop after the opening of a new historic course towards revolution;
• that 'recruiting' at any price leads to a loss of the organisation's function by sacrificing principles to the mirage of numbers. Those who join must do so on a voluntary basis out of conscious agreement with a programme;
• that the existence of the organisation can only be maintained by a firm and vigorous commitment to the marxist theoretical framework. What it loses in quantity it gains in quality through a severe, theoretical, political and militant selection;
• that, more than in the past, it is the privileged place for the resistance of the weak proletarian forces against the gigantic pressures of a capitalism strengthened by fifty years of counter-revolutionary rule.

This is why, even though the organisation does not exist for itself, it is vital to conserve resolutely the organisation that has been engendered by the class, to strengthen it, and to work towards the regroupment of revolutionaries on a world scale.

21. The end of the period of counter-revolution has modified the conditions of existence of revolutionary groups. A new period has opened up, favourable to the development of the regroupment of revolutionaries. However, this new period is still an in-between period where the necessary conditions for the emergence of the party have not been transformed - through a real qualitative leap - into sufficient conditions.

This is why, for a whole period of time, we will see the development of revolutionary groups who through the confrontation of ideas, through common action, and finally through fusing together, will manifest the tendency towards the constitution of a world party. The realisation of this tendency depends both on an opening up of the course towards revolution and the consciousness of revolutionaries themselves.

Although certain stages have been reached since 1968, although there has been a selection within the revolutionary milieu, it should be clear that the emergence of the party is neither automatic nor the fruit of voluntarism, given the slow development of the class struggle and the still immature character of the revolutionary milieu.

22. In fact, after the historic resurgence of the proletariat in 1968, the revolutionary milieu proved to be too weak and immature to deal with the new period. The disappearance or sclerosis of the old communist left, who had struggled against the stream during the period of counter-revolution, was a negative factor in the maturation of revolutionary organisations. Even more than the theoretical acquisition of the coma mist left, which were slowly rediscovered and re-assimilated, it was the organisational acquisitions (the organic continuity) which was missing, and without these acquisitions theory remains a dead letter. The function of the organisation, even the need for it, was often misunderstood, when not actually subject to ridicule.

23. In the absence of this organic continuity, the elements that emerged from the post '68 period were subjected to the crushing pressure of the student and contestationist movement, in the form of:

• individualist theories about daily life and self-realisation;
• the academicism of the study circle where marxism is seen either as a 'science' or as a personal ethos;
• activism/immediatism in which ouvrierism thinly covered up a submission to the pressures of leftism.

The decomposition of the student movement, its disillusionment faced with the slow, uneven pace of the class struggle, was theorised in the form of modernism. But the real revolutionary movement purged itself of the least firm and serious elements, for whom militantism was either a monkish occupation or the supreme stage of alienation.

24. Despite the striking confirmation, especially since Poland, that the crisis would open a course towards broader and broader class explosions, revolutionary organisations, including the ICC, have not freed themselves from another danger, no less pernicious than modernism and academism: immediatism, whose twin brothers are individualism and dilettantism. The revolutionary organisation must be able to resist these scourges today if it is to be able to definitively liquidate them.

25. In recent years the ICC has suffered the disastrous effects of immediatism, the most typical form of petty bourgeois impatience, the final incarnation of the confused spirit of May 1968. The most striking form of this immediatism has been:

1. Activism, which has appeared in interventions and theorised in the voluntarist conception of 'recruitment'. It has been forgotten that the organisation doesn't develop artificially, but organically, through a rigorous selection on the basis of the platform. 'Numerical' development is not the fruit of mere will, but the maturation of the class and the elements it secretes.
2. Localism, came to the surface in particular interventions. We have seen certain elements in the ICC present 'their' local section as though it were a personal property, an autonomous entity, whereas it can only be a part of a whole. The necessity for an international organisation was even denied or ridiculed, seeing it as no more than a 'bluff', or at best as a vague series of 'links' between sections.
3. Economism, which Lenin fought against a long time ago, has expressed itself in a tendency to see each strike in itself rather than integrating it into the worldwide framework of the class struggle. Often the political function of our Current was pushed into the background. By considering revolutionaries as 'water-carriers' or as 'technicians' of struggle in the service of the workers, you end up advocating the material preparation of the future struggle.
4. Suivism (or 'tailism'), the final embodiment of these incomprehensions about the role and function of the organisation, took the form of a tendency to simply follow strikes while hiding our own banners. There were hesitations about clearly and intransigently denouncing all hidden forms of trade unionism. Principles were set to one side in order to stay with the movement and find a more immediate echo - in order to be recognised by the class at any price.
5. Ouvrierism was the final synthesis of these aberrations. As with the leftists, certain elements cultivated the crassest kind of demagogy about 'workers' and 'intellectuals', about the 'leadership' and the 'rank and file' within the organisation.

The departure of a certain number of comrades shows that immediatism is a very serious disease, and that it inevitably leads to denying the political function of the organisation, its theoretical and programmatic basis.

26. All these leftist type deviations are not the result of a theoretical insufficiency in the platform of the organisation. They express a poor assimilation of our theoretical framework, and in particular, of the theory of the decadence of capitalism, which profoundly modifies the forms of activity and intervention open to the revolutionary organisation.

27. This is why the ICC must vigorously oppose any abandonment of the programmatic framework which can only lead to immediatism in political analysis. It must resolutely fight:

• against empiricism, where fixating on immediate events and phenomena inevitably leads to the old conception of 'particular' cases, the eternal source of opportunism;
• against all tendencies towards superficiality, which take the form of a routinist spirit or of intellectual laziness;
• against a certain mistrust or hesitation about theoretical work. The 'grey' of theory must not be opposed to the 'rosy' colours of intervention. Theory must not be seen as something reserved for specialists in marxism. It is the product of collective thought and the participation of everyone in this thought.

28. In order to preserve our theoretical and organisational acquisitions, we have to liquidate the vestiges of dilettantism, that infantile form of individualism:

• working in a piecemeal manner, without method, and in the short term;
• individual work, expression of the dilettantism of the artisan;
• political irresponsibility in the constitution of premature or artificial tendencies;
• resignations or flights away from responsibilities.

The organisation is not in the service of the militants in their daily lives; on the contrary, the militants wage a daily struggle to insert themselves into the broad work of the organisation.

29. A clear understanding of the function of the organisation in the period of decadence is the necessary condition for our own development in the decisive period of the 1980s. Although the revolution is not a question of organisation, it does have questions of organisation to resolve, incomprehensions to surmount in order for the revolutionary minorities to exist as an organ of the class.

30. The existence of the ICC can only be guaranteed by a reappropriation of the marxist method, which is its surest compass in the comprehension of events and in its intervention. All work of the organisation can only be understood and developed on a long term basis. Without method, without a collective spirit, without a permanent effort of all militants, without a persevering attitude that excludes all immediatist impatience, there can be no real revolutionary organisation. In the ICC the world proletariat has created an organ whose existence is a necessary factor in future struggles.

31. In contrast to last century, the task of the revolutionary organisation is more difficult. It demands more of each of its members; it still suffers from the last effects of the counter-revolution, and from the imprints of a class struggle still marked by advances and retreats. For a whole period the organisation will often be forced to struggle against the stream in difficult conditions.

Although it no longer has to live in the stifling, destructive atmosphere of the long night of the counter-revolution, although its present activities are being undertaken in a period favourable to the class struggle and to the outbreak of mass movements on a world scale, the organisation must know how to retreat in good order when there is a momentary set back in the class movement.

This is why, right up until the revolution, the revolutionary organisation must know how to struggle resolutely against the tides of uncertainty and demoralisation that can sweep over the class. The most vital task is the defence of the integrity of the organisation, of its principles and its function. Learning how to resist, without weakness, without turning in on themselves for revolutionaries, this is the way to prepare the conditions for the future victory. This demands a bitter struggle against immediatist deviations, so that revolutionary theory can take hold of the masses.

By liberating itself from the scars of immediatism, by reappropriating the living tradition of marxism, preserved and enriched by the communist lefts, the organisation will demonstrate in practice that it is the irreplaceable instrument secreted by the proletariat so that it can be equal to its historic tasks.

ADDITION

It is in periods of generalised struggles and revolutionary movements that the activity of revolutionaries has a direct, even decisive impact, because:

• the working class then has to directly confront its mortal enemy. Either it imposes its own perspective or gives way to mystifications and provocations and allows itself to be crushed by the bourgeoisie;
• the class is subjected, within its assemblies and councils, to the work of sabotage and undermining carried out by the agents of the bourgeoisie who use all available means to slow down and divert the struggle.

The presence of revolutionaries, who have to put forward clear political orientations for the movement and accelerate the process of homogenisation of class consciousness, can then be a decisive factor that tips the balance one way or the other, as was shown by the German and Russian revolutions. In particular, we must recall the fundamental role played in this area by the Bolsheviks, as Lenin defined it in the April Theses:

"Recognise that our party is a minority and at the moment only constitutes a small minority in the Soviets of Workers Deputies, faced with all the opportunist, petty bourgeois elements who have fallen under the influence of the bourgeoisie and who are spreading this influence within the proletariat... Explain to the masses that the Soviets of Workers Deputies are the only possible form of revolutionary government and that, consequently, our task, as long as this government allows itself to be influenced by the bourgeoisie, can only be to explain patiently and systematically to the masses the errors in their tactics, basing this on their practical needs" (Thesis 4).

From today, the existence of the ICC and the realisation of its present tasks represents an indispensable preparation for being equal to the tasks of the future. The capacity of revolutionaries to carry out their role in periods of generalised activity is conditioned by their present activity.

1) This capacity is not born spontaneously but is developed through a process of political and organisational apprenticeship. Coherent and clearly formulated positions, like the organisational capacity to defend, disseminate and deepen them, don't fall from the sky, but have to be prepared right now. Thus history shows how the capacity of the Bolsheviks to develop their positions by taking into account the experience of the class (from 1905 to the war), and to strengthen their organisation, allowed them, unlike the revolutionaries in Germany for example, to play a decisive role in the revolutionary combats of the class.

Within this framework, one of the essential objectives of a communist group must be to go beyond the artisan level of activity and organisation which, in general, marks the initial phase of the political struggle. The development, systematisation, the regular accomplishment of its tasks of intervening, publishing, distributing, discussing and corresponding with close elements must be at the centre of its preoccupations. This implies a development of the organisation through rules 'f functioning and specific organs which enable it to act not as a sum of dispersed cells but as a single body with a balanced metabolism.

2) From today, the organisation of revolutionaries represents a coherent pole of international political regroupment for the political groups, discussion circles and workers' groups which emerge all over the world with the development of struggles. The existence of an international communist organisation with a press and an intervention makes it possible for these groups, through a confrontation of positions and experiences, to situate themselves, to develop the revolutionary coherence of their positions, and, in some cases, to join the international communist organisation. If such a pole is absent, there is much more likelihood that such groups will fall into dispersion, discouragement and degeneration (through, for example, activism, localism and corporatism). With the development of struggles and the approach of a period pf revolutionary confrontations, this role will become all the more important with regard to the elements directly produced by the class struggle.

More and more the working class will be forced to face its mortal enemy face on. Even when the overthrow of bourgeois power is not immediately realisable, the shocks will be violent and decisive for the outcome of the class struggle. That is why revolutionaries must intervene right now, with whatever means they have, inside the class struggle:

• to push workers' struggles forward as far as possible so that all the potential they hold is realised;
• to ensure that a maximum number of questions are raised, that a maximum number of lessons are drawn in the framework of general political perspectives.

To go beyond capitalism: Abolish the wages system

Critique of Bukharin (Part 2)

(On N.Bukharin's critique of the theses of R. Luxemburg)

"To know what communism will be like, we must start by knowing what is wrong with the present society." In the previous article[1], we showed how, from a marxist viewpoint, one's conception of socialism depends on one's anal­ysis of capitalism's internal contradictions. Behind the criticisms of Rosa Luxemburg's analyses of capitalist contradictions formulat­ed by Bukharin, Bolshevik and ‘theoretician' of the Communist International[2], there appear the outlines of the theory of the possibility of socialism in one country, and the identif­ication of state capitalism with socialism.

To demonstrate this, we have begun by rejecting some of Bukharin's main objections. We have thus replied to the argument that the basic problem Luxemburg poses - capitalism's inability to create its own outlets -- does not exist. We have recalled how and why crises of overproduction have been and remain an essential and inevitable fact of capitalism, and we have demonstrated the emptiness of the argument that the workers' consumption can constitute a large enough outlet to absorb capitalist overproduct­ion.

In this second part, we aim to reply to one of the arguments most frequently used against Luxemburg. Bukharin expresses it in this way: "Rosa Luxemburg makes her analysis too easy. She singles out one contradiction -- that betw­een the conditions of production of surplus-value and the conditions of its realization, the contradiction between production and cons­umption under capitalist conditions." (Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, Chap. 5).

Is there one contradiction within capitalism that is more decisive than others?

Like any living organism, the capitalist system of production has always been traversed by mul­tiple contradictions, that is to say, mutually exclusive and opposing needs. Its life, its development, its impetuous march through hist­ory, overthrowing thousands of years of history in a few centuries and molding a world in its own image, were the product not of an idealist will to domination in itself, but of a perman­ent struggle to overcome its internal contra­dictions.

The great virtue of Marx's work was to show how and why these contradictions must one day lead capitalism, like previous societies (ancient slavery, feudalism), to go through a phase of decomposition, opening the way to the install­ation of new social relations, the arrival of a new society which can only be communism.

Marx shone a light on many of these contradict­ions. Bukharin, reproaching Rosa Luxemburg for "singling out one contradiction", cites several that Luxemburg neglects, according to him: "The contradiction between branches of product­ion; the contradiction between industry and agriculture limited by land rent; the anarchy of the market and competition; war as a means of competition" (ibid),

Amongst the more important, we should add:

-- the contradiction between on the one hand, the ever more social character of production (technically speaking, the world tends to prod­uce as one factory, each product containing labor from the four corners of the globe), and on the other the divided, limited, private  nature of the appropriation of this production;

-- the contradiction in the fact that capital can only extract profit from the exploitation of living labor (the capitalist cannot "exploit" the machine), while at the same time, in the process of production, the share of living lab­or in relation to dead (machines) tends to fall as techniques progress (a contradiction express­ed in the ‘tendency of the falling rate of profit');

-- lastly, and above all, the living contradic­tion that is exploitation itself -- the ever-sharper antagonism between the producers and capital.

All these contradictions as a whole, which for centuries worked as a stimulant to its expansion, are now driving capitalism to its decad­ence, suffocation, paralysis, and historic bankruptcy.

The object of the debate is not to decide whet­her or not these contradictions exist. It is first and foremost to know why, and at what given moment of their development these internal contradictions transform themselves from stim­ulants to hindrances on the productive process.

Rosa Luxemburg does indeed reply by "singling out" one contradiction: that between the cond­itions of production of surplus-value and the conditions of its realization on the world market; this is itself a product of the contra­diction between use-value and exchange-value within the capitalist commodity.

The contradiction between the conditions of production and the conditions of realization of surplus-value stand above all capitalism's other contradictions

For Rosa Luxemburg, it is when capitalism can no longer enlarge its markets "in relation to the needs of expansion of existing capitalist enterprises" that all its internal contradict­ions tend to break out with the greatest clarity. The contradiction discovered by Marx, between the conditions of production of surplus-value (profit) and the conditions of its realization (realization in money form, sale of the surplus-value extracted) stands above all the others.

If the contradiction between the need to prod­uce on an ever larger scale, and the need to reduce the share of production that returns to the mass of wage-laborers can be overcome, then all the other contradictions are attenuated, or even transformed into stimulants.

As long as capitalism can find markets, outlets on the same scale as the requirements of its expansion, then all its internal difficulties are smoothed over.

This is why crises break out when the market has become too restrictive, and are overcome once new outlets are discovered. All the mode of production's internal contradictions burst out, or are smoothed over at the level of the world market and its crises, This is Marx's meaning when he writes: "The crises of the world market must be seen as the real synthesis and the violent leveling out of all the con­tradictions of this economy, whose every sphere manifests the various aspects that are reunited in these crises." (Matriaux pour 1'Economie Ed La Pleiade T II p 476)

The nature of this contradiction, which deter­mines all the others, appears clearly when we analyze the concrete conditions that exacer­bate or attenuate other important contradictions. Let us examine the two contradictions most often highlighted by Rosa Luxemburg's critics: competition between capitalists, and the tend­ency for the rate of profit to fall.

Competition is a stimulant as long as there are adequate markets

All those who, like Bukharin, have tried in one way or another to theorize the existence of a ‘non-capitalist' system of production in the USSR have always given ‘inter-capitalist competition' pride of place among capitalism's internal contradictions.

The USSR said to be non-capitalist because it is supposed to have eliminated competition, and with it, anarchy in the productive process. And yet, we only have to analyze the reality of this competition to understand that its extent and character as a contradiction are strictly determined by the abundance of exist­ing solvent markets.

Markets are the prize of inter-capitalist competition.

In the struggles between primitive cannibal tribes the prize was human bodies to devour; the city-states in ancient slave times fought for slaves, and to plunder the wealth of other populations; the feudal lords fought for land, serfs and cattle. But capitalists fight for something far more abstract and universal - markets. To be sure, they, like their ancestors, don't deprive themselves of plunder when they can get it, but is what is more specific to them is their ruthless confrontation, no holds barred, for control over markets.

Because of this, the sharpening of inter-capitalist competition and the intensity of its effects are strictly dependent on the size of the markets that are the objects of this comp­etition. In periods where capital can dispose of adequate solvent outlets, competition plays a stimulating role in enlarging the productive process. With unlimited markets, ‘free comp­etition' could appear as a mere sporting rival­ry between capitalists. But as soon as those outlets are restricted, the capitalists tear each other apart in bloody confrontations, the survivors feeding on the corpses of the victims of the lack of markets. Competition then becomes a barrier to the development of capital and of society's productive forces in general. For more than half a century, capitalist compet­ition has in this way thrown society into ever more destructive world wars, while in time of ‘peace' it has developed a growing burden of expenditure, not to increase or maintain pro­duction, but to "face up to the competition" -- the developing state bureaucracy, armaments, advertising, etc.

It is not competition that makes markets scarce, it is the lack of markets that exacerbates competition and makes it a destructive force.

It is capitalism's ability to push out the limits of the world market that determines the degree of exacerbation and ‘harmfulness' of capitalist competition.

The tendency of the rate of profit to decline takes effect when the market is inadequate

The same is true of the permanent tendency for the rate of profit to fall. This tendency, which Marx was the first to point out, is caused by:

1) Capitalism's permanent need to ‘modernize' production, constantly increasing the role of machines in the productive process, in relation to living labor;

2) The impossibility for capitalists to extract surplus labor from any source other than living labor itself.

But if this law is said to be a ‘tendency', this is precisely because it is constantly counteracted, restrained or compensated by other tendencies within the system.

Marx also clearly pointed out the factors that counteract it and those that compensate for its effects.

The tendency towards a fall in the rate of profit is itself restricted largely by the fall in the real cost of production (wages, machines, raw materials) provoked by the growth in labor productivity. Less labor time is needed to reproduce and maintain a worker, a machine, or a particular raw material.

The effects of the falling rate of profit itself tend to be compensated by a growth in the mass of profit. A rate of profit of 20% is less than 22%, but a profit of 20% on $2 million is far more than 22% on $1 million. But the capital­ists ability to increase his productivity, and similarly to increase his mass of profit, are strictly dependent on his ability to produce on a larger scale, which in turn depends on his ability to ‘sell more' (this question is treated at greater length in the article already cited: ‘Crisis theory from Marx to the Communist International').

The tendency for the rate of profit to fall becomes real and destructive when the forces that ‘normally' counteract or compensate it are weakened. This happens essentially when it has become impossible to enlarge the productive process due to a lack of solvent markets where surplus-value can be realized. Like competi­tion, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall is a contradiction which itself depends on the contradiction existing in the condi­tions for the realization of surplus-value.

Rosa Luxemburg does not single out one contra­diction at random amongst the others. She emphasizes the one where the rest are concen­trated, the one that translates the pressure and tensions of all capitalism's internal contradictions. And this allows us to see when those contradictions as a whole are transformed into a break on its development.

Bukharin, having affirmed that, in seeking to understand its crises, it is wrong to single out any one contradiction of capital, none­theless finds himself confronted with the question: when do these contradictions become definitive limits? And the only answer he can gave is: "these limits are set by a definite degree of tension in capitalist contradictions". (Idem)

‘A definite degree?' But what degree?

What degree of ‘competition' must be reached? What is the minimum rate of profit? Bukharin does not answer those questions, because they cannot be answered without referring specifi­cally to capitalism's ability to find outlets.

Luxemburg's analysis by contrast, makes it possible to determine in what way ‘these limits' are those of the world market, and in particular those of the extra-capitalist market

Is the contradiction highlighted by Rosa Luxemburg "external" to the process of capitalist production?

How -- according to Luxemburg -- has capitalism been able to overcome the contradiction between the need constantly to increase its outlets and constantly to reduce the exploited classes share of what is produced? By finding buyers outside the capitalist process of production. For the worldwide enterprise of capitalism, it is meaningless to buy products that it sells to itself. It must have ‘clients' outside the enterprise, to whom it can sell this surplus, this share of surplus that cannot be acquired either by the worker or the capitalist. As Luxemburg explains, capital at first found these clients, or ‘third buyers' essentially among the feudal lords.

During the period of the industrial revolution, it found them mainly in the agricultural and artisan sectors remaining outside its control and especially in the colonial territories that the great powers ended up fighting over in two world wars.

During its decadent phase, capitalism finds a momentary compensation for its lack of external outlets in the reconstruction of the indust­rial centers destroyed by war. And since the end of the ‘60's, that is to say, since the end of the reconstruction following World War II, capitalism has resorted to a headlong flight, through ever more massive credits, to under-developed countries and to the cap­italist metropoles.

The introduction of this element -- the extra capitalist sectors -- into the analysis of capitalist contradictions and the widening of analysis' framework to embrace its fullest reality -- the world market -- is seen by Luxemburg's critics as a ‘heresy' against Marx, and a search for capitalism's contradictions outside the sphere of capitalist production. Thus for Bukharin, for example, the lack of clients unconnected with capit­alist companies, of ‘third buyers' is supposedly not an ‘internal' contradiction. "Cap­italism" he says, against Luxemburg "develops its internal contradictions. It is these, and not a lack of ‘third buyers' that finally bring about its demise." (Idem).

In other words, to understand capitalism's contradictions, we must limit ourselves to capitalist reality within the factory and ignore what goes on the world market: the world market is somehow supposed to be ‘exter­nal' to capitalism's deepest reality!

This critique of Luxemburg is given a part­icularly clear expression by Raya Dunayer­skaya (who formerly collaborated with Trotsky) in an article written at the end of the Second World War on the analysis contained in Accumulation of Capital:

"For Marx, the fundamental conflict in a capitalist society is that between capital and labor: every other element is subord­inated to it. If this is how it is in real life, the first necessity for theory, even more than in society, is to pose the pro­blem as one between worker and capitalist, purely and simply. Hence the exclusion of ‘third buyers', and as he himself says on several occasions, the exclusion of the world market as having nothing to do with the conflict between workers and capitalists". (Raga Dunayerskaya: Analysis of R. Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital published in 1967 as an appendix to the pamphlet State Capitalism and Marx's Humanism).

It is true that, to explain how the capitalist exploits the workers, it is not necessary to refer to the world market and to the extra-capitalist sectors in particular. But to understand the conditions that allow this exploitation to be prolonged and developed, or eventually to be blocked, a view of the overall process of capitalist reproduction and accumulation is indispensable. This can only be done on the same scale as capital's real existence -- on the scale of the world market.

The market constituted by the extra-capit­alist sectors is not, in itself, the product of the exploitation of the worker by capital, but without it, this exploitation cannot be reproduced on an enlarged scale.

If capital has a vital need of this kind of markets to survive, it is because the rel­ationship between worker and capital is such that neither the worker nor the capitalist can constitute a solvent demand capable of realizing that part of the profit that is destined for reinvestment. If the masses' consumption were not limited by their wages, if there were no exploitation of the worker by the capitalist, if the workers could directly or indirectly consume everything they produced, in short, if wage labor did not exist, then the problem of external markets would disappear; but then, so would capitalism.

The extension of the world market is only a limit for capitalism, to the extent that it is indispensable to the existence of capit­alist reproduction in contradictory condit­ions.

In this sense, there is no contradiction between the supposedly ‘internal contra­dictions' of capitalism and its need for external outlets is not, any more than capitalism's inability to enlarge them to the point of integrating all humanity direct­ly into the capitalist productive process, a phenomenon determined by forces or laws external to capitalism but by the contradictory nature of its internal laws.

To clarify further this aspect of the question, let us consider the convulsions at the end of the feudal mode of production.

For many bourgeois historians, the catast­rophes that engulfed feudal society, during the 14th century in particular, are to be explained by the lack of culti­vable land. The famines, epidemics and wars, the general stagnation or decline that covered Europe in the 14th century, are thus supposed to express a somehow ‘natural' limit.

It is true that feudalism in decline came up amongst other things, against the difficulty of extending the land-area under cultivation. But this was not due to ill will on the part of mother nature, but because the social relations of production did not permit the setting in motion of the human and technical methods necessary to undertake more difficult cultivation.

The feudal economy was too splintered into millions of fiefs, corporations and privileges to allow the concentration of productive forces that the situation demanded. The hist­orical collapse of feudalism is not explained by ‘nature' but by its own inadequacies, its own internal contradictions.

Nature here is neither an ‘external' nor an ‘internal' contradiction. It is the environ­ment within which and in face of which the system's contradictions are exacerbated.

The case of capitalism and the scarcity of extra-capitalist markets are somewhat similar. The life and expansion of capitalism is synonymous with the transformation of new men into proletarians and the replacement of the old productive forms by capitalist rela­tions of production. A developing capitalist business is one that takes on more proletari­ans. A given business may take workers from another. But overall, world capitalism can only take on extra-capitalist workers. In order to live, capitalism must feed off the absorption of the non-capitalist world (artisans, small shopkeepers, peasants). But it is not only to procure its labor-power that capital lives at the expense of the non-capitalist sector.. As we have seen, it is essentially because this sector provides it with clients, a solvent demand for that part of the surplus product that it cannot buy itself.

Sadly for itself, capital cannot do business with its non-capitalist clients without ruining them. Whether it sells them consumer goods or means of production, it automatically destroys the precarious equilibrium of any pre-capitalist (and therefore less productive) economy. Introducing cheap clothes, building a railway, installing a factory, are enough to destroy the whole of pre-capitalist economic organization.

Capital likes its pre-capitalist clients just as the ogre ‘likes' children: it eats them.

The workers of a pre-capitalist economy who has had ‘the misfortune to have had dealings with the capitalists' knows that sooner or later, he will end up, at best proletarian­ized and at worst -- and this has become more and more frequent since capitalism's slide into decadence -- reduced to misery and bank­ruptcy in the now sterilized fields, or marginalized in the vast slums of urban cong­lomerations.

Capital is thus confronted with the following situation: on the one hand, it needs more and more outside clients to dispose of a part of its production; on the other hand, in condu­cting business with them, it ruins them. Imp­erialism, the decadence of capitalism, the cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction, are signs of the fact that for more than half a century non-capitalist outlets have been inadequate in relation to world capitals need to expand.

But, like nature in relation to feudal relat­ions of production, the non-capitalist sector is neither an ‘internal' nor an ‘external' contradiction. It is part of the environment within and against which capital exists.

When he pronounces his critique of Luxemburg -- that it is capitalism's internal contradictions and not any lack of ‘third buyers' that will finally kill capitalism -- Bukharin is tilting at windmills. Luxemburg has no more claimed that pre-capitalist economies ‘killed' capitalism than that the pebbles of the European soil were behind the death of feudalism.

What she has done is to resituate capitalism's internal contradictions -- discovered not by her, but by Marx -- in their living environ­ment: the world market.

Capital's environment is the world market

Like Raya Dunayerskaya, Bukharin claims to be able to understand capitalism's most fundamental mechanisms, those which lead it into crisis, without taking any notice of the environment the system lives in. One might as well try to understand the functioning of a fish, without taking into account the fact that it lives in water, or of a bird, without analyzing its relation­ship with the air. Not to understand the importance of the world market in analyzing capitalist crises comes down to not under­standing the very nature of capitalism itself.

This is to forget that before being a producer, the capitalist is first and fore­most a merchant, a trader.

In bourgeois mythology, the capitalist is always presented as a small producer who has become a large one thanks to his own indust­riousness. The small craftsmen of the middle ages are supposed to have become the great industrialists or State employees of our own days. The historical reality is quite other­wise.

In decomposing feudalism, it is not so much the craftsmen of the towns who develop into the capitalist class, but rather the merchants. Moreover, the first proletarians were often none other than the craftsmen forced to submit to capital's ‘formal domination'.

The capitalist is a merchant who trades mainly in labor-power. He buys labor in the form of labor-power as a commodity, and sells it in the form of products and services. His profit -- surplus value -- is the difference between the price of the commodity, labor-power, and the price of the goods it produces. The capitalist is obliged to concern himself with the productive process of which he is master, but he nonetheless remains a merchant. The world of a merchant is the market, and in the case of the capitalist, the world market.

The non-capitalist sector is part of the world market

Those who reject Rosa Luxemburg's analysis generally have a totally false vision of the world market -- when they finally admit its existence. It is considered simply as the sum of capitalists and the capitalists' wage laborers. This, however, makes it impossible to understand the reality of capitalist crises of the world market.

The sum of capitalists and wage-laborers makes up the market for the major part of capitalist production -- this is capitalism's ‘internal' market. But there are also the ­non-capitalist sectors -- the ‘external' market.

Here is how Rosa Luxemburg defines these two parts of the world market:

"The internal and external markets certain­ly occupy important and very different places in the pursuit of capitalist deve­lopment; but these are notions, not of geography, but of social economy. From the standpoint of capitalist production, the internal market is the capitalist market, it is capitalist production in the sense that it buys its own products and supplies its own elements of production. The market external to capital is the non-capitalist social milieu that surrounds it, absorbs its products and supplies it with the elements of production and labor power".

The world market is this whole, and must be integrated as such into any analysis of its crisis.

Rosa Luxemburg's analysis allows a better understanding of why commodity production and therefore wage labor, are the bottom of all capitalism's contradictions

In Capital, Marx often leaves the world market out of consideration, since in this part of his work, he aimed essentially to analyze the internal relationships of the system's functioning. Certain epigones have seen here an argument against Rosa Luxemburg's analyses. In integrating this analysis into its more general and more concrete framework of the world market, Rosa Luxemburg was doing no more than developing Marx's uncompleted work, following the meth­odological path that he had set himself: "Rising from the abstract to the concrete."

Whether singled out or not, the contradiction between the condition of the production of surplus-value and of its realization, this ‘internal' antagonism discovered by Marx, cannot really be understood without knowing all the "conditions of its realization". Now, the realization of surplus-value implies the sale of a part of it to clients other than capitalists and their wage-laborers, ie. to the non-capitalist sector. By introducing the latter into the analysis of capitalism's contradictions, Rosa Luxemburg does not deny the capitalist mode of production's internal contradictions; on the contrary, she supplies the means for understanding them in all their concrete and historical reality.

But by singling out the contradiction between the production and the realization of surplus-value, she ‘singles out' the basic contra­diction of capitalism: that between the use and exchange values of commodities in general and of the principal commodity in particular -­- labor-power and its money price, wages. The very existence of wage-labor appears at the basis of the breakdown of capital.

The realization of surplus value, the meta­morphosis into money of the commodities pro­duced by the workers' surplus labor, is contradictory because wage-labor inevitably limits the consumption of the workers them­selves.

In Theories of Surplus Value Marx wrote:

"...It is the metamorphosis of the commodity itself which encloses, as a developed movement, the contradiction -- implied in the unity of the commodity - between exchange value and use value, and then between money and commodity."

The contradiction between the use value of labor power and its exchange value, wages, is none other than that of the workers' exploitation by capital.

So it is only within the framework of Rosa Luxemburg's analysis that the elimination of wage-labor appears in a coherent way as the primary characteristic of the supersession of capitalism.

The question takes on its full political impo­rtance when it comes to a problem such as the evaluation of the class nature of the USSR ‘socialist' or ‘on the road to socialism' for the ‘Socialist' or ‘Communist' parties and all the parties of the centre and right; ‘degen­erated workers' State' according to Trotsky and the Trotskyists. It was left to the ‘German Left' of the 1920's to produce a first analysis from the marxist standpoint of the USSR as state-capitalist. It is not an accid­ent that this was one of the only currents in the workers' movement to know and share Rosa Luxemburg's analysis of crises.

In his pamphlet criticizing The Accumulation of Capital, Bukharin clearly affirms the non-capitalist nature of the USSR:

"To all the contradictions of the world capitalist system, there is added one cardinal contradiction: the contradiction between the capitalist world and the new economic system of the Soviet Union". (Idem, p.136)

Nor is this an accident. Whoever, in analyzing capitalism's crises, ‘singles out' contradic­tions such as "competition and capitalist anarchy", tends to see nationalizations, the development of state power and planning, as proofs of a break with capitalism. By ignoring the reality of the world market and its importance in the life of capitalism, this leaves the door wide open to the idea of a possible ‘socialism in one country'.

Through his theoretical criticism of Rosa Luxemburg's analysis, Bukharin laid the foundations for the theories which were to be used under Stalinism to present, in marxist verbiage, a regime of capitalist exploitation as social­ism.

Understanding the economic problems of the transition period from capitalism to communism is strictly dependent on the analysis of capit­alist crises. Tomorrow, we shall have to draw all the lessons from the practical experience of the Russian Revolution in this domain. This also means overcoming all the theoretical aberrations born of the revolution's degener­ation.

R. V.

Already appeared on crisis theory in the IR:

‘Marxism and Crisis Theory': no.13

‘Economic Theories and the Struggle for Socialism': no 16

‘On Imperialism': no.19

‘Crisis Theory, from.Marx to the CI': no.22

[1] IR 29. See also ‘Crisis Theories from Marx to the Communist International', in IR 22.

[2] N. Bukharin, ‘Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital'.

Harper's conclusions about the Russian revolution and the aspects of the Marxist dialectic which he preferred to ignore...

There are three ways of looking at the Russian Revolution:

A. The first is the way it's looked at by ‘socialists' of all description: left, right and centre; ‘Revolutionary Socialists' (in Russia), ‘independent' socialists elsewhere, and so on.

Before the revolution their perspective had been: the Russian Revolution will be a bourgeois demo­cratic revolution, within which the working class will have to struggle ‘democratically' for its ‘rights and liberties'.

All these gentlemen, as well as being ‘sincere revolutionary democrats', were fervent defenders of the ‘right of nations to self-determination'. They ended up defending the nation by making a detour from internationalism which led them from pacificism to the struggle against aggressors and oppressors. These people were moralists in the pure sense, defenders of Rights with a big R, Liberty with a big L, champions of the poor and the oppressed.

When the first revolution, the one in February, broke out, they gave vent to a torrent of joyful tears: this was at last the confirmation of their sacred perspective.

Unfortunately they failed to realize that the February insurrection was just a flea's bite, merely opening the door to the real battle between the classes at hand. The Tsar had fallen, but already the bourgeois revolution had virtu­ally been carried out in the context of the old autocracy. This whole apparatus was now rotten and had to be replaced. February opened the door to the struggle for power.

Within Russia itself, there were four main forces at hand:

1. The autocracy, the feudal bureaucracy which had been governing a country in which big capital was in the process of installing itself.

2. The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie; big capital, directors of industry, the intellectual elite, medium-sized landowners, etc.

3. The huge mass of poor peasants, only just out of serfdom.

4. The intellectuals and petty bourgeois prole­tarianized by the crisis of the regime and of the country; and the industrial proletariat itself.

The ‘reactionary' elements (supporters of the Tsarist regime) had been convinced that the introduction of large-scale industrial capitalism into Russia was inevitable and necessary. Their only aspiration was to be the managers and gen­darmes of foreign finance capital, while main­taining a social status quo favorable to them: the maintenance of the imperial bureaucratic sys­tem, a ‘liberation' of the serfs (needed to supply labor to industry) which ensured that the bureaucracy and the nobles would keep a high degree of control over the middle peasantry, which was seen as a class of tenant farmers.

This was, obviously, already the ‘bourgeois revolution'. But the social forces that were entering the historical arena didn't take the desiderata of the bureaucracy into account. Once capital had been introduced into Russia, that meant, on the one hand, the proletariat, and on the other hand, the capitalist class, composed not so much of possessors of capital, but of the whole social class which effec­tively directed industry and administered the circulation of capital.

The import of capital had the consequence of showing the Russian ruling classes, in the broadest sense, the enormous possibilities of capitalist development in Russia.

Within these classes, two ambivalent tendencies emerged: the first out of the need to use foreign finance capital for the development of capitalism in Russia; the second, a tendency towards national independence, and thus, towards breaking free of the grip of foreign capital.

When the revolution first broke out, the coun­tries which had invested capital in Russia, such as France, Britain and others, saw the danger mainly from the perspective of ‘their' capi­tal. Now, the main reaction of a property-holder when his property is threatened is fear, dirty-dealing, and the unleashing of whatever forces he has to hand.

These countries knew very well that a democratic government would safeguard their interests.

But, like any capitalist, they saw a reactionary putsch as a way of dictating their policies and having effective control over an extremely rich territory. The foreign countries thus played every possible card, supporting everyone -- Kerensky, Deniken, the reactionary bands, the provisional government, etc... Some got money, weapons and military advisors; others got ‘disinterested advice' from ambassadors or con­suls. And through this squabble for power, imperialist rivalries were also played out: united one day, the imperialist powers would be plotting against their allies and stabbing them in the back the next.

The most adequate term for the political geo­graphy of the period between the first revolu­tion (February) and the second (October) is a morass, a chaos which contemporary historical study is only just beginning to find out about, thanks to the Bolshevik government's publication of all the secret official agreements.

B. The imperialist war itself was at an impasse. The cadavers were rotting in the no-man's land between the trenches in a front which ran along the whole of eastern Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the south of these countries as well. There seemed to be no way out of the war.

In this general chaos, a small political group had stood for revolutionary internationalism at the conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal, and had insisted on the necessity for a new revolu­tionary workers' movement on the ruins of the IInd International. It argued that the prole­tariat had to above all proclaim its inter­nationalism by entering into struggle, whatever the consequences, against its own bourgeoisie, while having it clearly in mind that such a struggle was part of an international prole­tarian movement which, if it was to carry out the socialist revolution, would have to extend to the main capitalist powers.

The real divergence between the social demo­crats and the nucleus of the future Communist International was on this point: the social dem­ocrats thought you could arrive at socialism through a gradual expansion of democracy within each country. What's more, they saw the war as an ‘accident' in the movement of history, and argued that the class struggle should be set aside during the course of the war, while wait­ing for victory over the wicked enemy who was preventing this ‘struggle' from being carried on in a ‘peaceful' manner. (If we had more space we would include the manifestos from the differ­ent ‘socialist' parties in the period from 1914 to 1917, and extracts from the newspapers these parties put out towards Russian troops in France, in which ‘socialism' was defended with a truly heroic ardor.)

The left which began to regroup after the two conferences in Switzerland had its most solid political foundations built around the persona­lity of Lenin, who at the time was almost totally isolated, not only from ex-partisans of the Bolshevik Party, but also from many in the left itself. Lenin's essential message was as follows:

"Preaching class collaboration, renouncing the social revolution and revolutionary methods, adapting to bourgeois nationalism, forgetting the changing character of national frontiers and countries, making a fetish of bourgeois leg­ality, reneging on the idea of class and class struggle for fear of scaring the ‘mass of the population' (ie the petty bourgeoisie) -- this, without doubt, is the theoretical basis of opportunism."

"... The bourgeoisie abuses the people by draping the imperialist brigandry with the old ideology of the ‘national war'. The proletariat unmasks this lie by proclaiming the transformation of this imperialist war into a civil war. This is the slogan indicated by the resolutions of Stuttgart and Basle, which anticipated not war in general, but this present war, and which didn't talk about the ‘defense of the father­land' but about ‘hastening the downfall of capitalism', about exploiting the crisis pro­duced by the war, by giving the example of the Commune. The Commune was the transformation of national war into civil war.

Such a transformation isn't easy and can't be ordered by this or that party. But this is precisely what corresponds to the objective state of capitalism in general, and of its final stage in particular. It's in this direction, and only this direction, that socialists must work. Not by voting for war credits, not by approving the chauvinism of your own country and its allies but, on the contrary, by combating above all else the chauvinism of your own bourgeoisie, and by refusing to be restricted to legal methods when the crisis is open and the bourgeoisie itself has annulled the legality it has created; this is the line of march which leads towards civil war, towards a conflagration which will spread throughout Europe ..."

".., . The war isn't an accident, a ‘sin' as the priests might say (they preach patriotism, humanity and peace at least as well as the opportunists). It's an inevitable phase of capitalism, a form of capitalist life just as legitimate as peace. The present war is a war of the peoples. But this doesn't mean that we must follow the ‘popular' tide of chauvinism. During the war, in all aspects of the war, the social antagonisms which divide the peoples still exist and will continue to exist..."

"... Down with all the sentimental drivel, the imbecilic sighs for ‘peace at any price'! Imperialism is playing with the fate of Europ­ean civilization. If this war isn't followed by a series of victorious revolutions, it will soon be followed by other wars. The fable about the ‘war to end all wars' is a crude, empty fairytale, a petty bourgeois myth (to use a very apt expression of Golos.)

Today or tomorrow, during the war or after it, now or during the next war, the proletarian ban­ner of civil war will rally behind it not only hundreds of millions of conscious workers, but also millions of the semi-proletarians and petty bourgeois who are presently being brutalized by chauvinism, and who may be horrified and depressed by the horrors of war, but who are above all being instructed, enlightened, awakened, organized, tested and prepared for the war against the bourgeoisie -- the bourgeoisie of ‘their' country and of the ‘ foreign' countries ..."

"... The IInd International is dead, vanquished by opportunism. Down with opportunism and long live the International, purged not only of the ‘turncoats' (as Golos wants) but also of opportunism. Long live the IIIrd International!

The IInd International has completed its useful functions ... It's now up to the IIIrd International to organize the proletarian forces for a revolutionary offensive against all the capi­talist governments, for a civil war against the bourgeoisie in all countries, for the conquest of power, for the victory of socialism..."

If we compare this to Marx, we can see that, contrary to what Harper wants us to believe, Lenin did understand marxism and knew how to apply it at the right moment:

"It is altogether self-evident that, to be able to fight at all, the working class must organize itself at home as a class and that its own country is the immediate arena of its struggle. In so far its class struggle is national, not tin substance, but as the Communist Manifesto says, ‘in form'. But the ‘framework of the present-day national state', for instance, the German Empire, is itself in its turn economically ‘within the framework' of the world market, politically ‘within the framework' of the system of states. Every businessman knows that German trade is at the same time foreign trade, and the greatness of Herr Bismarck consists, to be sure, precisely in his kind of international policy.

And to what does the German workers' party reduce its internationalism? To the consciousness that the result of its efforts will be ‘the international brotherhood of peoples' -- a phrase borrowed from the bourgeois League of Peace and Freedom, which is intended to pass as equivalent to the international brotherhood of the working classes in the joint struggle against the ruling classes and their governments." (Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program)

What distinguished this left within social democracy from the rest of the workers' movement were its political positions.

1. On the question of the seizure of power (the quarrel between bourgeois democracy and workers' democracy as realized in the dictatorship of the proletariat).

2. On the nature of the war and the position of revolutionaries in this war.

On all the other points, notably the ‘economic' organization of socialism, they still adhered to the old formulae -- the nationalization of land and industry, etc, just as many still clung to the notion of the ‘insurrectionary general strike'. But it's worth pointing out that, even within the left, very few socialist militants understood Lenin's positions during the war; they rallied to them afterwards, when the Russian Revolution turned the theory into a fact.

So much was this the case, that in the quarrel between Kautsky and Lenin, Kautsky didn't say a word about it -- and yet, as Lenin pointed out, at the Basle Congress Kautsky had opted for an­alogous and extremely advanced positions on workers' power and on internationalism. However, it's not enough to sign resolutions: you also have to know how to apply them in practice. It's when theory has to be transposed into prac­tice that you see who the real marxists are. All the worth of a Plekhanov or a Kautsky, considerable figures in the socialist workers' movement at the end of the nineteenth century, collapsed like a sandcastle in the face of this small group of Bolsheviks who had to translate their theories into practice, first on the sei­zure of power, then on the question of the war, in opposition to the Left Social Revolutionaries and the Bolshevik fraction which was for ‘revolutionary war' over the Brest-Litovsk issue, (This question of war was posed to the Bolshe­viks both over the German offensive, and the internal civil war).

While waiting for the revolution to extend onto the international arena, in Russia itself the economy could only be organized in a bourgeois manner, even though on the model of the most advanced forms of capitalism; state capitalism. Only the unfolding of the international revo­lution (which took as its point of departure the examples of the Bolsheviks) would have per­mitted a transformation towards socialism. Only when this is made clear does it make sense to cite all the erroneous positions Lenin had, before and after the revolution.

In 1905, Trotsky gave Lenin a severe lesson in ‘Our Differences', and it was the synthe­sis of Trotsky's position in ‘Our Differences' and Lenin's position in What is to be Done which guided the seizure of power during the war. After the seizure of power, a formi­dable number of errors were made by Lenin, Trotsky and many others in the party... It's not a question of hiding from these errors. We will return to them in future, especially when it comes to dealing with the ‘pure Leninists'. But it's one thing to draw lessons thirty years later, when the economic conditions have changed, when the characteristics of the period have become clearer, and quite another thing to face up to immediate events that are unfolding in an anarchic and unforeseen manner. Today, it's much easier to say what the errors of the Bolsheviks were, since you can study the Russian Revolution as an historic event, you can see what political groups were involved, analyze and study their documents, their activities etc.

But, at that time, and despite all their back­ward positions, were the Bolsheviks, with Lenin and Trotsky at their head, engaged in a movement whose immediate aim was to be a movement towards socialism? Where did the paths the Bolsheviks took lead to? Or the ones taken by Kautsky, or by X, Y, or Z?

Our reply is that there was only one basis for leading the movement towards the socialist revo­lution, and the Bolsheviks (and even then, by no means all the Bolsheviks) were the only ones who defended it and applied it. The Bolsheviks were engaged in a class struggle whose aim was the overthrow of capitalism on an international scale, and their general political positions were a real contribution towards this aim.

There is so much to be said about the broad lines of the positions which animated the October Bolshevik movement. The discussion about them has hardly begun. But such a discussion must have as its minimum basis the revolutionary pro­gram of October -- a program whose essential aspects have remained valid for the whole workers' movement over the last thirty years.

The revolutionary movement which began in 1917 in Russia proved that it was an international movement, through the repercussions it had in Germany a year later.

But a few days later, the armistice was signed and a few months later, Noske had done his job of repression. By 1917, when the 1st Congress of the CI was held -- and although the great move­ment launched by the Russian-German revolution was to shake the proletariat for years after­wards -- the highpoint of the revolution had already been passed, The bourgeoisie had reco­vered its composure, the peace settlement gradually softened the class struggle, the proletariat retreated ideologically as the German revolution was broken bit by bit. The failure of the German revolution left Russia isolated, forcing it to carry on with its economic organization and to wait for a new revolutionary wave.

But history shows that a workers' movement can't be victorious in stages. The Russian revolution was only a partial victory: since the final result of the movement it unleashed was defeat on an international level, the so-called building of ‘socialism' in Russia could only be an image of this defeat of the international workers' movement.

The fact that the CI had to hold its congresses in Moscow already showed that the revolution was blocked. As the defeat became more definite, each new congress registered a further retreat for the international workers' movement: theoretically in Moscow, physically in Berlin.

Once again, the revolutionaries found themselves in a minority, then excluded. The IIIrd Inter­national went the way of the IInd International. Like so many ‘socialist' and ‘workers' parties before them, the ideology of the Communist Parties became more and more bourgeois.

But two notable phenomena accompanied this retreat of the workers' movement: a degenerated workers' party held onto state power, and capi­talism, having entered a new period in 1914, plunged into even more serious than ever before. The analysis of these two phenomena, which only the Italian Fraction of the Communist Left (which published Bilan between 1933 and 1938 -- the name alone being a whole program) was able to develop in a clear way, is the basis for the birth of a new revolutionary workers' movement.

C. Faced with the degeneration of the workers' movement, with the evolution of modern capita­lism, with the Russian Stalinist state, with the problems posed to the insurrections of the sov­iets, there is a third position which doesn't bother to make too profound a research into the historical, political whys and hows of the last thirty years, and instead looks around for a handy scapegoat. Some choose Stalin, and through their anti-Stalinism, end up participa­ting in the war effort of the ‘democratic' American camp; others look for ‘dadas' of var­ious kinds, depending on what's in fashion. In 1938-42, it was the fashion to blame fascism for the war and the degeneration of society, rather than seeing the maintenance of capitalism as a whole as the real problem. Today Stalinism is a more modish scapegoat. There's a marvelous blossoming of theories and theoreticians: Burnham, against the bureaucracy; Bettelheim, for it, etc. There's Sartre, and ‘freedom', and the whole clique of writers paid by the political parties of the bourgeoisie, and the rotten, careerist world of modern journalism. In all this, Harper's accusations against ‘Leninism' leading ‘inevitably' to Stalinism seems like just one more to add to the list.

At a time when ‘marxism' is going through its greatest ever crisis (let's hope it's only a crisis of growth), Harper adds a bit more con­fusion when there's too much around already. But when Harper writes:

"But nothing of the sort is found in Lenin; that ideas are determined by class is not mentioned; the theoretical differences hang in the air. Of course theoretical ideas must be criticized by theoretical arguments, then, however, the social consequences are emphasized with such vehemence, the social origins of the contested ideas should not have been left out of consider­ation. The most essential character of marxism does not seem to exist for Lenin." (Lenin As Philosopher, Merlin Ed. p.88)

-- he goes further than mere confusion. This isn't just a polemical question, an excess of language. Harper is one of those numerous mar­xists who see marxism as a philosophical and scientific method, a theory, and who remain in the astronomical heights of theory without ever applying it to the historical practice of the workers' movement. For these ‘marxists', ‘praxis' is yet another philosophical object, not an active subject.

Is there no philosophy to be drawn from the revolutionary period?

Yes of course. I would even say that, for a marxist, philosophy can only be drawn out of a historical movement -- by drawing lessons in the wake of such a movement. But what does Harper do? He philosophizes on the philosophy of Lenin by taking it out of its historical context. If that was all, he would simply have ended up by uttering a few half-truths. But he tries to apply his conclusions, his half-truths, to a historical period he hasn't taken the trouble to examine. Here he shows that he has done no better, and perhaps worse, than Lenin in Materialism and Empiriocriticism. He has spoken about marxism, and showed that he knows what it is in his writings about knowledge. A lot could be said about what Harper writes: especially on the main aspect of his approach to the problem of praxis. For a marxist, praxis can't be divorced from the immediate political context, which makes it truly revolutionary -- ie from the development of revolutionary thought and action. Now, Harper repeats over and over again, like a litany, that ‘Lenin wasn't a marxist ... he's understood nothing about the class struggle'. But in the development of his practical, revolutionary political thought. Lenin did follow the teachings of Marx.

The proof that Lenin understood and applied the teachings of marxism to the Russian Revolution is contained in Lenin's preface to Marx's Letters to Kugelmann, where he points out the lessons that Marx drew from the Paris Commune. There is a curious analogy between the texts by Lenin we quoted above and the extract from Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program.

Lenin and Trotsky are part of the tradition of revolutionary marxism. They followed its teachings step by step. Trotsky's theory of the ‘per­manent revolution' is quite simply a lesson drawn from the Communist Manifesto and marxism in general; the Russian Revolution was a faith­ful reproduction of this theory and is fully in line with the non-degenerated heritage of marxism. Harper, like so many other marxists, forgets one thing: is the perspective that was valid for the revolutions of the nineteenth century, during the ascendant period of capita­lism, which was just ending when the Russian Revolution took off, still valid in the degenerating phase of this society?

Lenin was able to draw out the new perspective when he talked of the new period of ‘wars and revolutions'. Rosa Luxemburg clearly put for­ward the idea that capitalism had entered into its epoch of degeneration. This didn't stop the CI, and later on the Trotskyist movement and other left oppositions, from remaining tied to the old perspective, or from going back to it, as Lenin himself did after the failure of the German Revolution. Harper certainly thinks that there is a new perspective, but his analy­sis of Lenin and the Russian Revolution proves that, like many others, he hasn't been able to develop it, and has fallen into a whole lot of vague or false positions.

It's no accident that it's the heirs of the theoretical acquisitions of Bilan who have responded to him, as they have done elsewhere to the ‘pure Leninists'.

Both the ‘pro'- and the ‘anti'- Lenins forget one thing: although the problems of today can only be understood in the light of the problems of the past, they are nonetheless different.

Philippe

This article was written by our Current during the hostilities in the South Atlantic and expresses our position on the real nature of the Falklands war. Today, in the way of all the bourgeoisie's ‘nine-day wonder' propaganda barrages, the Falklands are almost forgotten. The method of the bourgeoisie is to use the hyenas of the press to mount a full-blown production, as they did over E1 Salvador, and then ... on to something else, whereupon the whole world press shuts up about it. But for us, the Falklands affair has important lessons for the working class. Why weren't the minor differences between Argentina and Britain dealt with through negotiations like hundreds of other conflicts? Why was this blown out of all proportion? This is what the article tries to make clear.

Through the Falklands war the bourgeoisie par­aded the specter of a third world war before the eyes of the workers, but in fact the real worry of the bourgeoisie is not war but the possibility of class conflict in the major centers of capitalism. The historic course is still towards revolution, and this is what the bourgeoisie is trying to change so that the way to world war can be opened. To do this it must confront a proletariat which is not defeated, and so the incessant propaganda campaigns today have only one purpose: to weaken the proletariat's consciousness before this confrontation takes place. The Falklands propaganda campaign was therefore part of an international attack of the bourgeoisie against the proletarian danger.

More recently there has come the war in the Lebanon which, unlike the Falklands affair, is a true reflection of dangerous inter-imper­ialist, inter-bloc antagonisms. An operation to re-establish order against destabilizing forces in this crucial zone for the western alliance, the Lebanese war is aimed at elimin­ating these destabilizing forces and so make the Lebanon into a stronghold of the US bloc. This is a grave reminder that the threat of war is real.

These wars evidence the immensity of the mass­acre that decadent capitalism holds in store for humanity and thereby underline the danger for the working class if it lets itself be taken in by nationalist, jingoist campaigns. Already the proletariat in Britain is paying a price merely for its silence over the Falk­lands in a divisive and humiliating manipulation of its struggle by the bourgeoisie and the unions.

The class struggle in Poland in 1980 showed that the proletariat is not yet defeated, and that its reserves of combativity are enormous. The economic crisis is striking hard, pushing the proletariat towards revolution. It is in the face of this obstacle that the bourgeoisie has used the Falklands conflict to try to ‘distract' the proletariat from developing its own perspective and to hide the fact that the only way to put an end to war is to put an end to capitalism.

The causes of the Falklands conflict

The Falklands affair cost hundreds of dead and wounded from the beginning of hostilities on April 2nd, 1982. Set off by the invasion of Arg­entine troops, carried on at the slow pace of a naval blockade by the British, the war broke out in earnest under fire from the most sophisticated sea and air weapons of the NATO arsenal.

The whole history of the bourgeoisie and its wars is proof that humanist alibis are only lies. This conflict was no exception. The regime of torturers in Buenos Aries which pretended to be the defenders of anti-colonialism and of anti-American imperialism owes it entire existence to the political, economic and military aid of the US. The British bourgeoisie all of a sudden became the intransigent defender of democratic values -- a bourgeoisie whose entire history is marked by colonial massacres and imperialist war, a bourgeoisie whose specialty today is repression in Northern Ireland. All of this is just propaganda. But what then was the possible conflicting interests justifying such a war?

What economic interests?

Almost completely unheard of a few months ago, the Falklands were pushed on to the centre stage of world events: eighteen hundred inhabitants whose main source of revenue is 300,000 sheep and some fishing became prison­ers under a deluge of bombs. Such meager re­sources could hardly be at the root of such a showdown. Did the Falklands have some hidden secret? The press went on and on about the hidden resources of the sea: oil, planckton, minerals etc., to give a semblance of an explanation for the conflict. But with a world crisis of overproduction, who is going to invest in the South Atlantic with its horrible climate near the South Pole? The South Atlant­ic is not the North Sea, surrounded by highly industrialized countries where oil deposits can be exploited in what still remain very difficult conditions.

There are no major economic interests in the Falklands. Are these rocks lost in the middle of the ocean, swept by glacial winds, of some vital strategic military significance?

What strategic interests?

Up to now the Falklands were the furthest thing from the minds of military strategists. The old territorial claims of Argentina seemed to be just another aspect of Latin American folklore, and before the invasion, Britain's military presence was a symbolic one of a handful of soldiers. These islands are of no strategic value either for Argentina or for Britain.

Nor are they a strategic point for the Western Alliance as a whole, two of whose major allies was fighting each other. As for the rival bloc controlled by Russia, it is beyond their capacity to launch a military intervention in this part of the world. South America is the private reserve of the US. The Falklands are a thousand kilometers from the South American continent and thous­ands of kilometers from the nearest pro-Russian bases in Cuba or Angola. The much-vaunted Russian bases in the Antarctic, if they indeed exist, are reputed to be on the other side of the Pole. The most important Russian military presence in this region is the eye of its satellites.

Can the Russian danger come from Argentina itself? (No one can seriously imagine it coming from Britain, in any case). The main argument in support of this hypothesis revolves around Argentina's trade relations with the USSR, particularly the wheat deals with the Eastern bloc. After all, didn't Argentina oppose Carter's wheat embargo im­posed after the invasion of Afghanistan? This argument does not stand up to scrutiny: the US itself exports more wheat to Russia than Argentina. Giving credence to the "pro-Russian" danger in Argentina is to ignore the control that the US exercises over Argentina, whose government and military dance to the music of American advisors.[1] A conflict on the scale of the Falklands mobilization could not have been put into motion without the US being informed.

If there were no vital economic or military stakes that can justify such a massive troop engagement -- why then did this war take place? Why weren't the minor antagonisms between these two countries settled by diplomatic means as hundreds of others have before? Why all the dead?

By realizing what the Falklands conflict was not, we can see what it really was: a gigantic lie! Its purpose was two-fold: to test modern naval-air weapons and tactics and to feed an intense propaganda campaign aimed at inhibiting and deviating world working class consciousness, particularly by immobilizing the major battalions of the proletariat in the industrialized countries of Europe.

Deadly war games

In the Falklands, the US-controlled bloc took advantage of the opportunity to test its most sophisticated weapons in realistic con­ditions, far from any possibility of inter­ference from the USSR, in all "tranquility" in relation to the main rival, the Eastern bloc.

This war between two important and loyal allies of the US did not lead to weakening of the western bloc. On the contrary, it served as a testing ground to organize the bloc's naval air strategy and to orient the billion dollar investments necessary to mod­ernize its weapons arsenal.

In its time, the six-day war between Israel and Egypt revolutionized the strategy of death in modern tank battles. The hundreds of tanks destroyed in a few hours showed the import­ance of missiles and electronic equipment in modern land warfare. The Falklands conflict today clarified modern naval tactics in the same way.

In the middle of a storm, in frozen waters that kill within minutes, during nights that last 15 hours, the bourgeoisie maneuvered its troops and tested its most sophisticated weapons with all the scorn for human life that this implies. Atomic submarines, ultra­modern destroyers with pompous names, planes and missiles with names like toys, trans­atlantic "luxury" liners for troop carriers -- the bourgeoisie paraded the deadly perfection of its war machine just as in the past when the press of the Allies greeted the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as proof of "great scientific progress".

The French bourgeoisie betrayed the hypocrisy of the whole capitalist class when it couldn't resist applauding the effectiveness of the Mirage and Super-Etendard planes and the Exocet missiles used to kill the troops of its own ally, Britain.

A British captain revealed the real military concerns of the western bourgeoisie when he declared that the Exocet missile was able to sink the Sheffield only because the latter had no defense system against this weapon and that in any case the Russians had no equivalent of the Exocet. Behind the Falk­lands show, the western bourgeoisie was really preparing the rearmament of NATO's naval air forces against the USSR.

But this is not the only or even most essential point. The bourgeoisie had another even more important purpose in this conflict: creating a propaganda barrage to divert, disorient and control the proletariat.

The ideological campaign

The "spectacle" of the war between Argentina and Britain mobilized the media of the entire world. The Iran-Iraq war which has cost over 100,000 lives and is still going on, has never known such media "success". Such press campaigns on a world scale are not accidents, nor are they the result of humanist impulses or the simple desire to inform the public.

In the period of capitalist decadence, the bourgeoisie maintains its domination through terror and lies. Never before has mankind known such barbarism as in the 20th century: 100 million dead in wars, billions of victims of starvation and misery. Each day in its factories the bourgeoisie assassinates more workers in accidents due to disastrous work conditions than all the soldiers killed in 3 months of the Falklands, Each day the desperate living conditions imposed by capit­alism pushes thousands of new victims to suicide. This reality of the barbarism of the capitalist system tries to make people forget through its propaganda.

The ideological campaign on the Falklands was no exception to this rule, The way the Argentine bourgeoisie launched into this conflict to deflect growing social unrest and the way the British bourgeoisie reacted by developing a chauvinistic parade is almost a caricature of the ideological poison the bourgeoisie wants to disseminate: creating a wedge of nationalism to divide the world working class. Only the bourgeoisie comes out the winner in this syndrome; both national ‘unity'[2] and the false opposition between ‘pacifists' and ‘hawks' are traps whose whole point is to pre­vent the working class from even thinking of independent, autonomous action against the exploiters. The whole idea is to drag the workers in behind the bourgeoisie and its different factions.

Although the campaign was the most obvious in the two countries directly involved, Argentina and Britain, its full significance is its international dimension in the whole western bloc. The campaign was aimed at the proletar­iat of the entire bloc controlled by the US.

What does the bourgeoisie hope to gain from such ideological campaigns? First of all, to spread confusion among the workers. The crisis is pushing the bourgeoisie towards economic collapse. The capitalist class is increasingly obliged to attack the proletariat, to cut down its standard of living, to reduce it to conditions of misery. After the workers of the under-developed countries, now the workers of the advanced countries are being slowly reduced to pauperism.

In the 70's, against a limited attack of the bourgeoisie, the proletariat of the capitalist metropoles showed that it was not defeated, The crisis has swept away the last illusions. The strikes in Poland showed that the reserves of combativity are intact. In Europe, the historic centre of the proletariat, conditions are pushing the proletariat to a realization of the necessity and the possibility of a proletarian revolution. This awakening realization is what the bourgeoisie wants to stifle, weaken, and deviate through incessant campaigns. In the last two years we have seen media circuses on the hostages in Iran, on the invasion of Afghanistan, on Poland, on El Salvador, on pacifism, etc.[3]. The campaign on the Falklands is the direct continuation of this attack and only in this context is its full significance clear.

The bourgeoisie's propaganda serves one main purpose: to make the proletariat forget the terrain of the class struggle. With the local war of the Falklands, after Afghanistan, Iran, E1 Salvador, the bourgeoisie keeps the work­ers minds occupied with propaganda and tries to make them forget the essentials. It tries to get the workers used to the idea of war, to condition them to war ideology and thus disorient them completely. The bourgeoisie tries to hypnotize the workers with propaganda like a snake paralyzes its prey before the kill.

The necessary corollary of these campaigns is, of course, pacifism. Locking the proletariat into the false alternative "peace or war" has only one aim: to make the workers accept capitalist "peace", that is, misery. Capital­ist "peace" is an illusion, a preparation for further imperialist war in a system which for decades has lived only for and by war.

Before the casualties, the folklore of the Falklands operation prevented a full develop­ment of the campaign in all its glory. The bourgeoisie killed just enough people (sever­al hundred soldiers) to give credibility to the danger of war. Frighten the proletariat to make it forget the revolutionary perspect­ive on the horizon. Make the workers bury their heads in the sand of nationalism.

The bourgeoisie did the same thing with the anti-terrorist campaigns: create a feeling of insecurity and panic, feed it with bomb­ings, statistics, sensationalistic articles on hoodlums to justify the strengthening of the police machine, to divide the proletariat and accentuate atomization in the name of law and order.

The impact of the Falklands campaign cannot be measured by whether or not the proletariat in Argentina or Britain was really mobilized behind the flag (a very unlikely, or, in any case, short-lived phenomenon) but by the extent to which the fear of world war and isolationist reflexes were instilled. Behind these reflexes is the poison of nationalism.[4]

The campaign around the war in the Falklands was in continuity with the campaigns that preceded it in the attempt to use the fear of war as a way of paralyzing the proletariat by making it believe that any social conflict accelerates the tendency to war. This tactic was used during the Polish strikes when the bourgeoisie tried to make the workers believe that their struggles in Poland increased inter-imperialist tensions. In fact, just the opposite is true -- the mass strike in Poland in 1980 acted as a brake on the world bourge­oisies tendencies towards war. The military apparatus of the Warsaw Pact was paralyzed along with the Polish economy. The western bourgeoisies, frightened of the possible spread of unrest in Europe, were also obliged to put their military rivalry with the Eastern bloc into the background.

Nationalism is a vital weapon to weaken and isolate the workers in every country. Through pacifism, neutralism, war-mongering, anti-Americanism, anti-totalitarianism and all, the bourgeoisie is attempting to recreate a nati­onalistic and isolationist syndrome. With the Falklands campaign, the bourgeoisie's strat­egy is obvious -- divide the workers so as to deal with them piecemeal.

This manipulated conflict allowed the bour­geoisie to play off one part of the world working class against another through the "divisions" between the two camps:

The launching of a violent anti-American cam­paign in Latin America (after the El Salvador barrage) was aimed at exacerbating the anti gringo, anti-American sentiment still strong in Latin America, tried to get the workers of South America against the workers of North America. In the same way, Argentina's "anti colonial" propaganda against the alliance of advanced countries, Europe and the USA, attempted to turn the proletariat of the under-developed countries against the proletariat of the advanced countries. In Europe, the workers were called upon to supp­ort the war effort in the name of "western values", of "democracy", against militarism and dictatorship, the same theme used against the Russian bloc.

In the present period, the massive inter­national propaganda campaign of the bourge­oisie, whatever their specific pretexts, are aimed at accentuating the divisions with­in the world proletariat, isolating one part of the working class from the others. Divide and conquer is still the tried and true formula for the exploiters.

The victory that the bourgeoisie of all coun­tries hoped to gain from the Falklands war was not the victory of the battlefield but the victory of propaganda and lies. Its real goal was not the control over a pile of rocks in the South Atlantic but the control over the working class.

War or revolution

Contrary to what the ruling class tries to make people believe, the Falklands conflict was not a precursor to World War 3. It marks the continuation of the bourgeoisie's economic, ideological and military attack against the working class. The proletariat is the enemy they are all afraid of.

All the capitalists' palliatives have proven powerless against the crisis. The major ind­ustrial heartlands are sinking and the worst is yet to come. The steady decline of the centers of the world economic system is creating the conditions for a social outburst in the heart of the world proletariat, in Europe, where capitalism launched out to conquer the world, where two world wars were fought, where at the beginning of this century the question of revolution was concretely raised.

Poland was a warning for the world bourgeoisie. An accelerated decline in the living standards of the working class will push it to a qualit­atively new level of struggle and conscious­ness on a world scale. The "divide and rule" ideological campaigns of the bourgeoisie are trying to hold back this process leading to the communist revolution.

The road to world war is for the time being barred by the dynamic of class struggle. The perspective of revolutionary confrontation is open and the bourgeoisie has not been able to actively mobilize the world proletariat to drag it into world war. Paradoxically, the very nature of the Falklands conflict shows that world war is not right now on the cards.

The bourgeoisie's number one problem today is the danger of a confrontation with the working class. The press and the theoreticians of the bourgeoisie themselves express this more and more clearly today:

"But the ‘hawks' and ‘doves' are starting to ask themselves: is a military effort in peacetime the best way to resolve the economic crisis? How far can austerity be taken before an internal balance is endangered?" (Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1982)

"The problem of European defense is serious but it is above all political and economic. The risk in Europe is not from an improbable invasion by the USSR but from a moral, economic collapse which could serve the USSR's interests." (Quote from the Assistant Director of the Political Science Institute in Washington, idem)

The extent of the media hype is a reflection of the extent of the bourgeoisie's fear.

But even though world war is not imminent, the danger of war is always present. Capit­alism cannot live without war; to a certain extent, the Falklands also proves this once again. If the working class does not want to be drawn into capitalist war, it will have to destroy capitalism. The weapons-testing experiment in the South Atlantic is only a prelude to what the bourgeoisie has in store. If the workers do not react, the bourgeoisie will inevitably be pushed by the contradict­ions of its system into bigger and bloodier battles.

To put an end to war, we have to put an end to capitalism. The two are inextricably bound together. That is what the bourgeoisie tries to make us forget. More than ever before, in our time, the alternative is either the division of the proletariat and world war, or the unity of the working class and revolution.

J.J.

[1] This conflict was fought between Argentina and Britain, two countries which culturally (150,000 Argentines of British origin), economically (the city of London has enormous investments in Argentina) and militarily (Britain supplied a large part of arms which killed its own soldiers) are very closely linked. Japan is helping Argentina to deal with its war expenditures by agreeing to postpone the repayment of Argentina's debts. All these elements seriously undermine the idea of deep antagonisms in this war.

[2] In Argentina the torturers are supported by their former victims in opposition. Nationalism wipes out everything. The bourgeoisie's fondest dreams are realized: a world where victims accept their executioners and the exploited respect their exploiters!

[3] On Poland, see International Reviews, nos 27, 28 and 29. On El Salvador, no. 25 and on Iran, no 20 and 22.

[4] The bourgeoisie adores opinion polls, instruments of intoxication on the theme of "public opinion" which also serves as test for the impact of its ideological campaigns. Gallup din an international poll on "The defense of your country". In France, in an IFRES-Wickert poll 47% of the participants believed that the Falklands war could lead to world war, while 87% of West Germans felt that the risk of world war was heightened because of this conflict. Due to this fear, the age-old nationalist reflex returns by way of the healthy but illusory and recuperated desire to remain outside of the conflict: 61% of people in France were against supporting Britain if this would imply a military engagement; 75% of West Germans demanded strict neutrality. In part this statistics show the failure to gain the population's agreement to war.

IS WAR A FAVOURABLE CONDITION FOR THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION?

Between 1845 and 1847, the world, and Europe in particular, following on from a series of bad harvests, went through a grave economic crisis. In France the price of grain doubled, giving rise to hunger riots. The ruined peasants could no longer buy industrial products: unemployment  became general, wages fell,the number of bankruptcies soared. The working class embarked on a struggle for reforms: for the limitation of the working day, for a minimum wage, for jobs,for the right to form associations and to strike, for civil equality and thesuppression of privileges, etc. As a result, the explosive events in February1848 in France, so brilliantly condensed in Marx’s famous work The Class Struggle in France, bequeathed a major lesson to posterity: the necessity for the working class to demarcate itself from the bourgeoisie, to preserve it’s class independence. However, an essential aspect of this revolution is often forgotten: it was not provoked by a war. Those who forgot its causes tended to focus their attention on the crushing of the insurrection of June 1848 and on the problem of how to arm the workers more effectively, how to organise better street-fights, ignoring the lessons Marx and Engels drew about the historic period and the nature of the class struggle.

Later, the disaster at Sedan led to the collapse of the Empire in September 1870 and to the setting up of the ‘government of National Defence’ led by the bourgeois Thiers; this in turn failed in its attempt to disarm the Parisian population and provoked the setting up of the Commune in March 1871. This was without doubt the first victorious proletarian insurrection in history; but even so, as Marx recognised, it was an ‘accident’ in a period which was still that of capitalism’s ascendancy. Once again the bourgeoisie triumphed over the proletariat just as it was constituting itself into a class. Those who invoked the Commune while forgetting its accidental nature character sanctioned all sorts of confusions about the possibility of a proletarian revolution emerging successfully out of a war. Certainly, as Engels noted in an introduction to The Civil War in France: “from March 18 onwards the class character of the Paris movement, which had previously been pushed into the background by the fight against the foreign invaders, emerged sharply and clearly”.

But the objective conditions were lacking: the Communards were ahead of the march of history. Within this context, two factors contributed to the defeat: isolation (a city under siege) and the predominance of the military terrain, which is home ground of the bourgeoisie (as Engels put it “the continuing war against the Versailles army absorbed all its energies”. And of course we must not forget the total support that the Prussian forces gave to the French bourgeoisie. An incredible ‘irony’ of history: the Commune, while concretely demonstrating the possibility and necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, gave rise to the idea that any revolution could henceforth emerge out of a war. This gave rise to many false theorisations in the workers’movement. For example, Franz Mehring and Jules Guesde theorised about ‘revolutionary war': in Guesde’s case this thesis became mixed up with the nationalist position of subordinating yourself to your own bourgeoisie. Now,above all at the end of the century as capitalism entered its decadent phase,there were no longer any ‘revolutionary’ wars: what’s more, wars had never been revolutionary in the proletarian sense. In this text, we shall see why war in itself is not a ‘necessary evil’ for the revolution.

Obviously, like any original experience, the Commune, even though it was born out of a reaction of ‘national defence’, came up against a bourgeoisie that was surprised and inexperienced in the face of a proletarian threat in the middle of a war. It showed that a war will inevitably be stopped by the eruption of the proletariat, or at least that it can’t be waged as the bourgeoisie would like it as long as the smallest island of proletarian resistance remains.

The stopping of the war in such conditions allows the bourgeois forces to regroup themselves, to call a temporary halt to their imperialist antagonisms, and together to surround and strangle the proletariat. Despite the fact that such situations are more favourable to the bourgeoisie, for decades it was an accepted axiom in the workers’ movement that wars created or could create the conditions most favourable to the generalisation of struggles and thus to the outbreak of the revolution. There was little or no consideration about the insurmountable handicap posed by a situation of world war, which would limit or reduce to nothing a real extension of the revolution. It was only when capitalism entered its decadent phase and began the race towards the First World War that the issue became clearer: War or Revolution, and not War AND Revolution.

CLASS STRUGGLE UNDER WAR CONDITIONS

The Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 in the Course Towards World War

However displeasing it may be to those who glorify the past, the Russian and German revolutionary minorities within the IInd International hadn’t sufficiently considered the conditions imposed by capitalism’s change in period. It’s true that it was terribly difficult to break away from the process of degeneration that the IInd International was going through. The future founders of the Communist International were surprised by the outbreak of the war and had not carried out all the preparatory work that the proletariat needed.
For several years now, the ICC has attempted to show the importance of the notion of the historic course and to point out that conditions of war have been unfavourable for past revolutions (see in this regard the article on the conditions for the generalisation of the class struggle in IR 26).

In retrospect, one can see that it was the audacious, lucid Trotsky and his fraction at the beginning of the century who not only understood, before 1914 and better than the majority of the Bolsheviks, that the bourgeois revolution was no longer on the agenda in Russia, but who also managed to sweep away a number of false theorisations by examining the conditions of the 1905 revolution – a revolution that, to use his own terms, was “belated” and “off target”: “It is incontestable that the war has played an enormous role in our revolution: it has materially disorganised absolutism, it has dislocated the army, it has forced the mass of the population to act with audacity. But fortunately, it has not created the revolution, and that is lucky because a revolution born out of a war is impotent: it is the product of extraordinary circumstances, it is based on a strength outside itself and has definitively shown itself to be unable to maintain the positions it conquers” . (Our Revolution).

The minority around Trotsky, which published Nashe Slovo (Our World) , a product and crystallisation of a powerful movement of the class at the beginning of the century in Russia, was one of the currents that was best able to draw the crucial lessons about the historic spontaneity of the proletariat and the workers’ councils.But it also highlighted an essential reason for the failure of 1905: the situation of war.

In his article ‘Military Catastrophe and Political Perspectives’ (Nashe Slovo, April-Sept. 1915), Trotsky, in the name of his fraction, refused to speculate on the war itself – not for humanitarian reasons, but because of his internationalist conceptions. He pointed to the insurmountable division introduced by the process of war: while defeat shook the vanquished government and could consequently hasten its decomposition, this didn’t at all apply to the victorious government which on the contrary was only strengthened.Moreover, in the defeated country itself nothing positive would emerge if there wasn’t a strongly developed proletariat capable of completely destabilising the government after its military defeat. It was extremely doubtful whether the contradictions that come in the wake of a war would constitute a favourable factor for the success of the proletariat. This observation was subsequently confirmed by the failure of the wave of revolutionary social upheavals that began in the year 1917. War is not a guaranteed springboard for the revolution.It is a phenomenon over which the proletariat cannot have complete control;it’s not something that the proletariat can, of its own free will, get rid of while it’s raging on a world-wide scale.

During these years of apprenticeship, Trotsky clearly saw the impotence of a revolution solely based on “extraordinary circumstances” . The unfavourable conditions of a revolution which has come out of a military defeat in a given country derive not only from the fact that it is restricted to this country, but also from the material situation bequeathed by the war: “economic life shattered,finances exhausted, and unfavourable international relations” (Nashe Slovo).Consequently, the situation of war makes it difficult, if not impossible to realise the objective of a revolution.

Without denying that a situation of defeat can prefigure the military and political catastrophe of a bourgeois state and must be used by revolutionaries, Trotsky reiterated the point that the latter could not shape historical circumstances to their liking but were themselves one of the forces of the historical process. What’s more, hadn’t these revolutionaries been in error in 1903, believing in the imminence of a revolution after a massive development in Russia? This development was initially paralysed by the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese war; after the turn-about of 1905 it was defeated by the stopping of the war. Trotsky saw an historical analogy with the important strikes of 1912-13, which despite having the advantage of being able to draw on previous experience, were once again blocked by the preparations for war. A Russian defeat in these circumstances did not seem to be all that favourable as far as Trotsky was concerned, all the more so because social patriots like Lloyd George, Vandervelde, and Herve looked favourably on the prospect of such a defeat because it would enhance “the governmental good sense of the ruling classes”. He thus criticised vulgar defeatist speculations about “the automatic strength of a military crash, without the direct intervention of the revolutionary classes” . The military defeat in itself was not the royal road to the revolutionary victory. Trotsky insisted on the vital importance of the agitation of revolutionaries in the period of upheavals that was opening up - even if it was doing so in unfavourable conditions, judging by previous historical experience.

By exhausting the capitalist autocracy’s means of economic and political domination, didn’t the military catastrophe bring with it the risk of only provoking discontent and protest within certain limits? Wasn’t there also the risk that the exhaustion of the masses brought about by the war would only lead to apathy and despair? The weight of war was colossal: there was no automatic route to a revolutionary outbreak. The havoc wrought by the war could pull the carpet from underneath the feet of a revolutionary alternative.
Unfortunately Trotsky was wrong on one point. He believed that an accumulation of military defeats would not facilitate the revolution. But he didn’t see that the contrary was true: precisely to avoid this danger, the world bourgeoisie, informed by its past experience, stopped the war in 1918. Also, Trotsky still used the slogan of the “struggle for peace” instead of the more consistent one of the revolutionary defeatism which was firmly defended by Lenin.

However, in the tragic and, in the long term, unfavourable circumstances of the first world war, Trotsky clearly pointed to the qualitative leap that was necessary with regard to 1905: the revolutionary movement could no longer be ‘national’ ; it could only be a class movement, contrary to the bleatings of the Menshevik and liberal social patriots who lined up behind the capitalist slogan of ‘victory’ ie, of prolonging the war. The proletariat in Russia was faced with all the bourgeois factions who wanted to isolate it and prevent it from reacting on its class terrain. In contrast to 1905, it could no longer count on the ‘benevolent neutrality’ of the bourgeoisie. In 1905 it was isolated from the proletarian masses of Europe, while Tsarism on the other hand had the support of the European states.
In 1915, two questions were posed: whether to recommence a national revolution in which the proletariat was once again dependent on the bourgeoisie, or to make the Russian revolution dependent on the international revolution? Trotsky responded affirmatively to the second question. More clearly than in 1905, the slogan ‘Down with the war! ” had to be transformed into ‘Down with the state power!’ In conclusion: “Only the international revolution can create the forces through which the struggle of the proletariat in Russia can be carried through to the end”.

This long resume of Trotsky’s interesting article, with its pertinent analysis of the unfavourable conditions created by an imperialist war, provides us with important material for combating the leftist and Trotskyist ideologies today, which try to convince us that the class struggle has always assumed a truly revolutionary dimension in the context of nationalism and war: thus these ideologies demonstrate that they belong to the camp of the bourgeoisie.

The explosion of October 1917, forced the capitalist world to stop the war. Because of the weakness and incompetence of the Russian bourgeoisie, world capitalism was caught napping by the proletariat of the industrial centres of Russia. But it was able to recover and call a halt to the revolutionary wave stirred up by this initial success. The crushing of the revolutionary movement in Germany was a decisive blow against the internationalisation of the revolution. This recovery of the world bourgeoisie condemned the proletariat in Russia to isolation, and consequently to a long but inexorable degeneration, which was to prove fatal for the whole world proletariat in the ensuing period. After this first gigantic appearance of the proletariat on the stage of the 20th century had had its brief victory, the bourgeoisie made the class pay a very high price indeed – a counter-revolution from which the international proletariat didn’t recover for decades, even during the course of the Second World War.

THE ABSENCE OF A PROLETARIAN REACTION DURING AND AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

In the middle of this half-century of triumphant counter-revolution, the Second World War could only complete this defeat which isolation had brought in 1920’s. There were no revolutionary movements comparable to those of 1905 and 1917-19. We can of course cite the so-called Warsaw Commune of 1944 – a desperate reaction, dominated by the social democrats, of a population martyrised and decimated under the military jackboot. This uprising held out for 63 days and was then exterminated by the Nazis with Stalin’s consent.  We can also mention the 1943-44 strikes in Italy repressed with the endorsement of the British and their Allies. Neither of these cases proved to be part of a world-wide resurgence of the proletariat, threatening the continuation of the imperialist war.

This was the most profound, most tragic coma the workers’ movement had ever been through. Its best forces had been decimated by the Stalinist counter-revolution and finished off by the democratic and Nazi belligerents, with their resistance fronts and their terror bombings. This second world imperialist carnage achieved an even higher level of horror than the previous one.

Could a revolution put an end to this planetary massacre, could it emerge during or after the war? Dispersed and isolated, the revolutionaries hoped in vain.The victory went to the counter-revolutionary ‘maquis’, with its chauvinist ideology of ‘national liberation’ – a ‘liberation’ by ordered stages,supervised by the democratic strike-breakers, Churchill, De Gaulle, Eisenhower, with ‘comrade’ Stalin at their side. The war ended not because of a new proletarian danger, but because the limits of total destruction had been reached, because the capitalist ‘allies’ had achieved what they wanted in world hegemony.

There was no new October 1917. Capitalism regained a breath of youth, like the grass which grows up over human corpses. A period of reconstruction began on the ruins. This period of reconstruction was temporary: after just over two decades the system once again plunged into an economic morass, accelerating the development of a war economy in preparation for... a third world war. The few workers’ revolts which took place in this period remained fragmented and isolated. Whether in France, in Poland, or the third world, they were derailed and smothered in the mire of capitalist reconstruction or in the so-called liberation of the colonies, planned by the two‘superpowers’ . Fundamentally the course of history was still unfavourable to the proletariat. It would take a long time to recover from the physical and ideological defeat of the 1920’s. You have to understand just how deep this defeat was to see why the world war followed on ineluctably in 1940’s .

THE LIMITS OF THE REVOLUTIONARY PROCESS INCONDITIONS OF WAR

World war is the highest moment in the crisis of decadent capitalism, but in itself it does not bring about the conditions for the generalisation of the revolution. To understand that is to emphasise the historic responsibility of the proletariat faced with the possibility of a third world war. When we examine the period of the first world war, we can see that, after having suffered an ideological defeat, and then reviving in Russia, Germany and central Europe, the proletariat remained shut up within each nation. By stopping the war to face up to the proletarian attack, the bourgeoisie strengthened national barriers. Although they were a product of a deteriorating economic situation and constituted a revival of the powerful struggles which had begun in 1910, these combative actions by the proletariat were unable to go beyond an illusion propagated by the treacherous IInd International - that the revolution would develop gradually country by country. Despite the justified foundation of a truly communist IIIrd International, the grip of nationalism was strengthened by social chauvinism. Moreover, when the war stopped,differences between the economic situation of the victorious and the vanquished countries maintained illusory divisions within the international proletariat. In putting forward the idea of ‘peace’, the world bourgeoisie was aware of the dangers of revolutionary defeatism and the risks of contagion which, despite everything, existed both in the victorious and the vanquished countries. Only the armistice between the different capitalist belligerents enabled them to close ranks and re-establish ‘social peace’ . Thus Clemenceau was able to lend Hindenburg and Noske a hand against the proletariat in Germany. The isolated proletariat was pushed into rapid, unfavourable insurrections. The conditions for this failure were completed by the stopping of the war in Germany; the proletariat’s one success was isolated within Russia in the exceptional conditions of the ‘weakest link’ – i.e., a situation which didn’t deal a decisive blow against the geographical heart of capitalism:Europe. In this first decisive and inevitable historic confrontation between the reactionary bourgeoisie and the revolutionary class, the bourgeoisie remained the master of the terrain. We can thus say that the whole period of the First World War did not create the most favourable conditions for the proletarian revolution.

A bloody repetition of this capitalist barbarism, the Second World War came directly out of the clauses of the‘Armistice’ of 1918, a provisional and hypocritical peace aimed at justifying the new capitalist division of the world. This repetition was only possible after the physical defeat of the proletariat in the early 1920’s, a defeat completed by the counter-revolutionary ideologies of Stalinism, fascism and anti-fascism.

If the proletariat was able seriously to disrupt the waging of the First World War it was because it hadn’t been physically and frontally crushed beforehand. Fighting on its class terrain, it was inevitably led into opposing the war. Moreover, trench warfare, because of the proximity of the combatants, was favourable to the spreading of the revolutionary contagion. This factor no longer existed during the Second World War with its bombers and submarines. By perfecting the destructive capabilities of these long-range weapons of death, and by developing its first nuclear weapons – ‘tested’ at Hiroshima by the ‘democratic’ American bourgeoisie - capitalism was already preparing to ‘go further’ in a third world war. Now that it could destroy entire cities and could dangle the threat of war over the remotest part of the planet, it was even better equipped to deal with any possibility of internal revolt. There’s nothing mystical about noting this growth in capitalism’s destructive capacities. It merely emphasises the responsibility of the proletariat, whose historic task is to stop this march towards generalised destruction by applying the weapons of the class struggle with at least as much vigour as during the revolutionary wave at the beginning of the century.

Is a third world war inevitable? The last few years certainly invite comparisons with the periods which preceded the two world wars: ‘armed peace’, deterioration of capitalist international relations,local wars, unlimited growth of militarism. social pacifism, relentless ideological campaigns. The comparison is easy to make but the arguments don’t stand up very well to social reality. In saying this it’s not a question of taking our desires for realities but of looking at the concrete situation of the 1980s.

FOUR CONDITIONS FOR THE REVOLUTION IN OUR TIME

If we fixate on the surface phenomena of the two greatest imperialist slaughters in the history of humanity, we could say spitefully ‘never two without three’ , like a superstitious coffee-bar philistine. But if we use the marxist method, we can say that “great historical events repeat themselves: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce”.We are all well aware that communism is not inevitable, that it all depends on whether the proletariat can raise itself to the level of its historic responsibilities.

But if we examine the immense potential of the modern proletariat, we can also see that the third world war isn’t inevitable either. More than ever, it’s up to the revolutionaries who have drawn the lessons from past defeats to show the real path that has been opened up by the dead generations.

However, it has to be said that the immense majority of the proletarian masses today are still not fully conscious of what’s at stake nor are they ready to embark upon decisive struggles. Despite this, they are more and more being forced to prepare themselves for such struggles. We can’t prove this by talking vaguely about social discontent or by counting the millions of strike-days lost in all countries over the past twenty years. Today, the curve of these strikes tends to be in the descendent, and most struggles end in failure. The bourgeoisie even manages to organise false strikes, counterfeit struggles, or to sow illusions about the self-management of bankrupt factories. But, despite this hardly glossy table of journalistic facts and figures, there have been a certain number of workers’ outbreaks overt he last two decades, in all parts of the planet, from Brazil to Poland, which have built up a series of international experiences. These experiences, though irregular, reveal the essential conditions for the world revolution.

1. The world economic morass

The first real condition for the revolution resides in the world economic morass which has definitively buried all bourgeois hopes for a world in perpetual development. This unstoppable,incurable economic crisis has done more than any revolutionary speech to expose the mystification of humanity progressing towards happiness under capitalism (a mystification which puts the working class back in the 19th century).

Much longer and more intense than the cyclical economic crisis of the 19th century or the crisis of the in-between period at the beginning of the century, this crisis has hit every corner of the planet. Not one capitalist, not one country not one bloc has escaped it. It effects concern, mutilate, aggravate the situation of the entire world proletariat. The economic infrastructure is slowly collapsing, revealing the fatal weakness at the heart of the system. It can no longer be blamed on the enemy on the other side of the Rhine or the Pyrenees. It’s the ‘same the world over’. Despite all the censorship and distorted news in the west as well as the east, ‘they’ can no longer govern as before. The system is showing its retrograde, decadent character and is thus incessantly compelled to renew its panoply of mystifications. ‘They’ are no longer just the bosses but a whole state  superstructure for containing and dominating social life: governments, unions,parties of left and right with their shared language of austerity. The                                                                        disintegration of the economic infrastructure can’t fail to shake the bourgeois political infrastructure. Even though the latter is trying to prevent the proletariat from becoming aware of the causes of the economic morass, it’s not easy to find alibis when the system is suffering from a profound crisis in its basic structures and no longer has any real outlets as it did in its ascendant phase last century. It’s becoming harder and harder to conceal the fact that the only perspective capitalism has to offer is destruction, waste and impoverishment, culminating in a new world war.

2. The perspective of world war

This perspective of world war, which has become particularly clear over the past ten years, is thus the second condition for the development of the proletarian alternative. This isn’t paradoxical. Two world wars have left an indelible mark despite all the boasts of the ‘liberation’. The bourgeoisie, in all its varieties, has always presented these two world wars as:

-            a way of resolving its economic difficulties (‘export or die’)

-            inevitable, despite the good will of men of peace (‘it’s the other’s fault’ or ‘we had no choice’).

The exacerbation of imperialist competition,and the pauperisation which followed on from these wars, as well as today’s gigantic economic crisis, reveal the inanity of the first argument. The barbarism of the two world wars is the product of the bourgeoisie’s inability to resolve the aberrations of its system. Despite the fact that a faction of the capitalist class – the Stalinists  -have outrageously stolen the term for themselves, the net result of all this barbarism has been to hold back the movement towards communism.
As for the idea that the next war is inevitable, this is all the more a lie in that the capitalists themselves are not convinced of this – fundamentally because they haven’t managed to convince the proletariat and the immense majority of the population of this planet. War is indeed inevitable if you only consider the military aspect of the question, but the bourgeoisie can’t be reduced to its military apparatus, even if the latter holds the reins during the war, or comes to the fore when it’s a question of physical repression. The bourgeoisie can’t run society through the military alone: it’s never been able to mobilise for war and repress the proletariat solely via its military HQ,which doesn’t have a sufficient grasp of social reality. If you just look at things from the perspective of the military command, you won’t understand why the proletariat refuses to subordinate itself to the bourgeoisie. This isn’t a classic war with troops in recognisable uniforms, with generals, munitions,etc, facing a similar adversary. The real threat exists inside each capitalist  country, ‘friends’ or ‘enemies’. It’s name is proletarian unity and consciousness.

The hypothesis of a third world war in the short term presupposes an imbecility or suicidal folly on the part of the bourgeoisie, or at least an inability to have any control over the unleashing of a war. We should never forget that the capitalists and their generals can’t make war without troops. The previous world wars weren’t conflicts between professional armies or mercenaries. We’re not saying that the capitalists are preparing for trench warfare or will bring back the musket. The point is that they can’t just present themselves to the world as the murderers of humanity.It’s alright to brand Hitler or some other defeated enemy with this reputation, but capitalism as such has to exempt itself from such a responsibility. Neither Foch, nor Clemenceau, nor Wilson, nor Churchill, nor Stalin, nor Eisenhower could say that they were organising a war for capitalist booty. They had to talk about ‘liberty’, the ‘right of nations to self-determination’, or ‘socialism’. Each one needed such mystifications to lead their troops to the slaughter, justifications to parade before those whom they sent off to figh tfor ‘fatherland or death’. Today, can the Reagan administration invoke the interests of humanity without blushing? Can Brezhnev or Mitterand talk about socialism without making people throw up? Only the proletarian revolution can consign the horrors of local and world wars to the dustbin of capitalism’s past.

3. The awakening of working class consciousness

The third basic condition for weakening the perspective of war, but above all for raising the prospect of revolution, is the conscious, organised, centralised emergence of the only revolutionary force: the proletariat, which has been moving into action since the end of the 60s.

The proletariat wasn’t asleep after the end of the second world war, but during the years of reconstruction its reactions were isolated and the relative prosperity of the system allowed the bourgeoisie to make economic concessions. The year 1968 was a major turning point, marked not only by the massive strike in France in May, but also and above all by the fact that from this point on workers’ struggles began to develop all over the world. The beginning of the 1970s was marked by a succession of important struggles in several European countries,but thanks to the successful sabotage of the bourgeois left, whose speciality in this area was derailing discontent into the trap of electoralism, it appeared towards the end of the 70s that the proletariat had calmed down. With the aid of its sociological lackeys (Marcuse, Bahro, Gorz, etc.) the bourgeoisie was once against spreading the idea that the proletariat had disappeared. Then the workers of Poland came along. Too bad for all the ideologues:today, as in 1918, the proletariat is the only class that can prevent war and put forward the communist alternative. Against all those who in one way or another encourage the survival of capitalism, the proletariat must raise the cry ‘War OR Revolution’. This cry wan’t heard in Poland, but ian affirmation of the class struggle such as August ’80 amounts to the same thing. For two years, western ears have been pounded with propaganda about the invasion of Afghanistan, a ‘confirmation’ of the ‘Russian threat’ .We’ve heard all about the USA’s supposed military weaknesses in comparison with the Warsaw Pact forces. But the Polish mass strikes once again raised the spectre of the proletariat. Despite the unequal and dispersed struggles of the last decade, they confirmed that the proletariat is moving towards a new level of struggle.
The proletariat’s leap onto this new level will be based on the struggle against capitalist austerity, but its also true to say that it is maturing out of all the contradictions of decadent capitalism.

The essential element, class consciousness, is developing because a certain number of bourgeois mystifications are being used up. Even in the 19th century, Marx could see (in the Communist Manifesto) that the bourgeoisie was producing its own gravediggers. Today as well we can say that: “The bourgeoisie itself, therefore, supplies the proletariat with its own elements of political and general education; in other words, it furnishes the proletariat with weapons for fighting the bourgeoisie” .

At the beginning of the century, there were those who doubted the proximity of the revolution because the working class had only recently emerged out of the artisan strata or out of the countryside, or because of the residues of feudalism, of illiteracy, etc. Today no hesitation is possible: in the main industrialised countries, the proletariat really has been formed into a class, and it’s the same in a number of third world countries. It exists as a force which is historically compelled to overcome the weaknesses and failures of its past. Today the lessons of the whole history of the workers’ movement can be reappropriated much more quickly despite all the filth of capitalism. There’s no longer any need for a ‘socialist education’ or for party schools for the cadre. By fighting the economic laws of capital, the proletariat is at the same time smashing up the ideological superstructure of bourgeois rule. This takes place through two factors: the education dispensed by bourgeois society and the modern methods of communication.

We’re not making a eulogy of bourgeois education, the aim of which is to reproduce social inequalities; nor are we making a fetish of ‘knowledge’, which is no measure of class consciousness. Moreover,this education dispensed and fabricated by capitalism is to a large extent a means of manipulation. It makes individuals vulnerable to the dominant ideology and takes the place of feudal religious obscurantism in the maintenance of social discipline. But we have to understand that, at a certain level of the degeneration of any society, even the best fireguards can help to spread afire. In the main industrialised countries illiteracy hardly exists and many proletarians have gone through secondary education and speak a second language.In themselves this ‘progress’ and this ‘education’ have nothing revolutionary about them: they only facilitate revolt because they are synonymous with DEQUALIFICATION and unemployment, because the bourgeoisie has developed school and university education in an anarchic way. Many workers and employees have degrees. Many of the unemployed have university diplomas and are thus without any ‘productive’ qualifications. After being beguiled all through their studies by the promise of escaping the working class condition, the former pupil or student then confronts the harsh reality of capitalism, if he hasn’t understood it already. In the past, an illiterate worker might swallow the speeches of a schoolmaster, or believe that differences in intelligences are hereditary, and leave important issues to ‘those in the know’ . But today they are different.
Modern electronic means of communication are also a two-edged weapons. Radio and TV broadcasts, with their use of the lie-by-omission, penetrate every building today, reaching the most atomised proletarian even if he doesn’t want to read a newspaper, and have the function of smothering class consciousness.But after a certain point these emissions of sophisticated bourgeois propaganda - because that’s what they are – become unable to go on playing the role of‘directors’ of consciousness; when the condition of life are getting worse and worse. When the bailiffs start to knock at the door, they can no longer mask the horrors of decomposing capitalism.
The general crisis of bourgeois ideological values is much more striking when you compare the situation with the 19th century. Then, many workers were illiterate, got their news late, and were crammed with patriotism. Today the system has given rise to a new breed of workers who are constantly dissatisfied, full of doubt about the promises offered by various ideologies.In the absence of class struggle these aspects of contemporary alienation can lead to demoralisation, but when the struggle does develop they can turn against the bourgeoisie and speed up the tendency to question its whole system of oppression.

4. The internationalisation of proletarianstruggles

The internationalisation of proletarian struggles is the fourth factor which will not only facilitate, but will actually be the decisive step towards the world revolution. In the 19th century, the development of struggles could still be seen as something taking place within nations. As Marx put it: “Nations cannot constitute the content of revolutionary action. They are only the forms within which the only motor of history operates: the class struggle.”

In the First and Second Internationals, the realisation of world socialism was seen like this: first struggles added up enterprise by enterprise (nationalisations); then they became revolutions country by country; then the latter would ‘federate’. This is still the vision of the Bordigist wing of the revolutionary movement.

However, although the changed conditions of declining capitalism have shattered this vision, Marx’s idea hasn’t been invalidated, it’s been extended: the form within which the class struggle operates is the whole capitalist world, over and above the barriers of nations or blocs. The world bourgeoisie exploits each proletariat in every country - the Italian machinist, the Russian bricklayer, or the American electrician. A South American worker employed in an off-shoot of Renault knows that his main boss lives in France; the Polish metal-worker knows that he’s dependent on a ‘fraternal’ company in Russia. All this explains concretely why all capitalists have an interest in closing ranks against any strike or mass struggle. On the other hand, corporatist identification with a particular branch of industry has never really permitted workers’ solidarity to break down national divisions. The nature of the working class can’t be defined in corporatist terms: it’s independent of the different professions. The American air traffic controllers recently had a tragic experience of the absence of international solidarity within a particular corporation, an illusion fed by the ideology of the left of capital. In the context of unbridled capitalist competition, the British steel workers on strike saw ‘foreign’ steel being preferred to ‘their’ steel; French miners saw the same with ‘Polish’ or‘German’ coal. The defence or exaltation of the product of a corporation is a terrain where capital remains the master, particularly through the trade unions. It’s a fertile soil for chauvinism. To hope for the extension of the struggle through the same branch or a sister company is to put the workers on the same competitive terrain as the various firms which turn out the same product. It encourages ‘patriotism’ with regard to a particular enterprise,strengthening the capitalist idea that the products ‘belong’ to the workers of this or that industry. Thus the workers are tied to the limits of the enterprise instead of calling the whole capitalist mode of production into question.

The proletariat in its entirety produces all the wealth. Capitalist production, fragmented and mercenary, is alien to it. It has no ‘rights’ over how this production is used at the end of the day. A proletarian is essentially defined  by being a wage-labourer, an exploited subject in a commodity system which is hostile to him. When the proletarians struggle, they don’t fight for a better French coal or a better British steel: they struggle whatever their profession- against the conditions of exploitation and subordination. And, providing they don’t allow themselves to founder on the obstacles put in their way by the trade unions, this struggle leads them into a confrontation with the capitalist state. The generalisation of struggles onto an international level can’t come out of a corporatist extension. The massive strike in May ’68 in France, the strikes which followed elsewhere in the world, or the mass strike of August ’80 in Poland, weren’t the product of a sum of corporations in struggle, first going through a particular branch, then one branch joining another. It was by going beyond the whole idea of a sum of corporations that the workers of Poland found the road of struggle against the state. In the factories and the streets they posed the same objectives: their revolt against the condition of  exploitation became a struggle against the capitalist order and not for a better management or production of commodities. The reaction of the Polish state received the solidarity of capitalist states everywhere. Behind it stood both the Russian state and the western states. This coalition of the bourgeoisie teaches a clear lessons about the proletariat’s lack of international unity. It shows the necessity for a unified fight by the whole proletariat against a ruling class which can momentarily suspend its intrinsic divisions in order to face up to the class struggle. The fact that all factions of the bourgeoisie hurled themselves as one man to fight the Polish fire proves that, despite its insurmountable economic difficulties, this retrograde class will seek at any price to prevent itself being destroyed by the proletariat. It proves that it is wary of the dangers of imitation and contagion. The repression that had been prepared for along time beforehand on an international scale was presented as  a ‘settling of accounts’ between ‘Poles’ .But none of this can hide the fact that behind the Polish army and militia stood the whole world bourgeoisie.

The renewed utilisation of national barriers is a dominant trait of bourgeois  policy today and it makes it hard to envisage an absolutely simultaneous explosion of workers’ struggles in different countries, in which the workers go beyond corporations and start to link up across national boundaries. But the deepening of the economic crisis is undermining these barriers in the consciousness of a growing number of workers, since the facts show that the class struggle is the SAME everywhere. We must draw the lessons from the fact that the main struggles in recent years have been separated in time and without direct links from one country to another. But now the crisis is tending less and less to hit first one country then another, one going up while the other goes down, as in the period of reconstruction after the Second World War. Now it’s tending to hit all countries at the same time, especially the most industrialised countries –those which up till now have been the leaders of capitalist ‘growth’ . Thus the whirlwind of the economic crisis, even though it’s still moving slowly, is nevertheless tending to reproduce a moment such as in 1968 when a sudden acceleration gives rise to workers’ struggles in several countries at the same time, and on the same basis: the struggle against capitalist austerity, against the threat of unemployment, and implicitly against the threat of war. Much more than through the successive struggles that have taken place in recent years, it will be through this growing simultaneity of struggles in different countries that the problem will be posed of joining up the struggles across national frontiers and imperialist blocs. Whether it likes it or nor, this is the next qualitative step the proletariat will have to take. It’s possible in the present world situation, it’s obligatory if the class is to take its struggle forward. In such a situation a mass movement on the scale of Poland in 1980 won’t remain isolated but will get solidarity through the development of other mass movements.
In the 1980s the proletariat has to hit at the main capitalist metropoles if it is to give a powerful impetus to its international struggle. Particularly in the old heart of capitalism, Europe,contacts between different zones in struggle can no longer be the caricature offered by the union officials. The concretisation of real international contacts will be an example to the whole world. This will be decisive for the international revolution. The problem of the destruction of the bourgeois states may be posed more abruptly elsewhere but it can only be resolved in the heartlands.

Gieller

Crisis of overproduction, state capitalism, and the war economy

(Extracts from the report on the international situation, 5th Congress of Revolution Internationale.)

An understanding of the critique of the ‘theory of the weakest link’ must not make us forget what the Polish workers actually did. This struggle showed the international proletariat what a mass movement looks like, and it posed the problem of internationalization even if it couldn’t resotlve it -- thus also posing the question of the revolutionary content of the workers’ struggle in our epoch, which can’t be separated from the question of internationalization. The ICC has dealt at length with the question of internationalization and with the class struggle in Poland1. On the other hand we haven’t spent enough time talking about the revolutionary content of the struggle -- a prob­lem the Polish workers came up against but didn’t understand. However, this question was still posed, particularly with regard to the ‘economic’ question -- as, for example, when the workers first began to criticize Solidarnosc in an open, direct way; when, in the name of the ‘national economy’ and ‘self-management’ Solid­arnosc directly opposed the strikes which broke out in the summer of ‘81. During these strikes, to use their own terms, the workers were prep­ared to put even the most popular Solidarnosc leaders (Walesa and Co.) “in the cupboard”, and to carry on their strikes “till Christmas and longer if necessary”. The only thing that sto­pped them doing so was their lack of a perspect­ive. In the situation of generalized scarcity which dominates the eastern bloc countries, the Polish workers left to themselves weren’t able to go forward. This situation will inevitably arise again, but in the developed countries the simultaneous existence of generalized overprod­uction and of an ultra-developed technical appar­atus will make it possible for the workers to put forward their own revolutionary, internationalist perspective.

The development of the class struggle and of the objective conditions which determine it -- the crisis of capitalism -- confirms the bankruptcy of all the idealist conceptions which deny the existence of the ‘catastrophic crisis’ of capitalism as an objective basis for the world communist revolution.

The crisis signals the failure of the whole notion of ‘ideology’ being the motor-force of revolution. This notion is, in fact, a rejection of the marxist theory which holds that the relations of production determine all social relations. It’s the failure of the theories of the Situationists, who said of Revolution Internationale's analysis of the crisis in 1969 that “the economic crisis was the eucharistic presence which sustains our religion”. It also means the bankruptcy of the ­pathetic notion of the Fomento Obrero Revolucion­ario for whom “will-power” is the motor of revol­ution. It is the end of the line for all the theories which came out of Socialisme ou Barbarie asserting that state capitalism and militarism represent a third alternative, a historical sol­ution to the contradictions of capitalism.

But affirming that the historic catastrophe of capitalism is the necessary and objective basis for the communist revolution is not enough. Today it is absolutely vital to show why and how it is. This is the aim of the present study.

It is not surprising that all the groups mentioned above defend a ‘self-management’ conception of the revolutionary transformation of society. The present historical situation not only marks end of the line for idealist notions but also for all the populist, third-worldist conceptions supported by the theories of the ‘weakest link’ and the ‘labor aristocracy’ defended particularly by the Bordigist currents.

We not only have to show that the crisis is necessary because it impoverishes the working class in an absolute sense and therefore pushes it to revolt, but also and above all how the crisis leads to revolution because it is the crisis of a mode of production, the crisis of social relations where the nature of the crisis itself, overproduction, poses both the necessity and the possibility of revolution. The very nature of the crisis reveals both the subject and the object of the revolution, the exploited class and the end of all exploiting societies and of scarcity.

The first step in accomplishing this task is to show as clearly as possible the nature of today’s qualitative leap in the economic crisis which has thrown the industrialized metropoles into recession and generalized overproduction.

The period of decadence is not a moment fixed in time, an endless repetition -- it has a history and an evolution. To understand the objective basis of class struggle today, we have to situate the evolution of overproduction and of state capitalism and of their reciprocal relations. In this way we can identify more clearly what we mean by the “qualitative step in the economic crisis” and its consequences for class struggle.

By dealing with all its various aspects -- over-production, state capitalism, militarism -- it will become clear that this qualitative step in the crisis is not just a qualitative leap in terms of the 1970s but in relation to the entire period of capitalist decadence. The crisis today is the crisis of the palliatives which the bourgeoisie has used to deal with the historical crisis of its system up to now. The historical importance of this situation cannot be overestimated.

“The anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape”, wrote Marx; that is, the higher form of development of a species reveals in finished form the tendencies and developmental lines of embryonic forms in lower species. The same is true for today’s historical situation which rev­eals, in the highest expression of decadence, the truth and reality of the epoch which goes from the First World War to today.

Overproduction and State Capitalism

State capitalism was never an expression of the health or vigor in capitalism; it was never an expression of a new organic development of capit­alism but only:

-- the expression of its decadence;

-- the expression of its ability to react to this decadence.

That’s why in the present situation we have to analyze the relation between the crisis of capitalism in all its different aspects: social, economic and military. We’ll begin with the latter.

Overproduction and Armaments

The overproduction crisis is not only the prod­uction of a surplus which finds no market, but also the destruction of this surplus.

“In these crises not only is there destruction of a large amount of goods already produced but also of existing productive forces. A social epidemic breaks out which in any other era would be absurd: the epidemic of overproduction.” (Communist Manifesto)

Thus the overproduction crisis implies a process of self-devaluation of capital, a process of self-destruction. The value of non-accumulatable surplus is not stockpiled but has to be destroyed.

The nature of the crisis of overproduction is clear and unambiguous in the relation between the crisis and the war economy today.

The whole period of decadence shows that the over-production crisis implies a displacement of production towards the war economy. To consider this an ‘economic solution’, even a momentary one, would be a serious mistake. The roots of this mistake lie in an inability to understand that the overproduction crisis is a process of self-destruction. Militarism is the expression of this process of self-destruction which is the result of the revolt of the productive process against production relations.

This displacement of the ‘economic’ towards the ‘military’ could hide the general overproduction only for a certain time. In the 30s and after the war, militarism could still create an illusion. But today the situation of the war economy in the general crisis of capitalism reveals the whole truth.

Today there is an enormous development of armaments, for example in the US where: “The Senate broke a record on December 4th by voting $208 billion for the 1982 defense budget. No American appropriations bill has ever been so huge. The final amount was $8 billion more than President Reagan asked for.” (Le Monde, 9.12.81)

But in the overall situation of world capitalism today, and with the financial situation of the different nations of the world, we have to be aware of the fact that such a policy of armaments spending is a very serious factor deepening the economic crisis, accelerating both recession and inflation.

In the present situation such arms budgets not only in the US but everywhere in the bloc (espec­ially in Germany and Japan) cannot maintain the level of industrial production even in the short run as they did in the 30s or after the war. On the contrary, they are rapidly accelerating the decline of production.

Unlike the 30s, today’s armaments policies do not create jobs or only replace a handful of jobs they eliminate. This situation is heightened by the fact that arms development is not accompanied by social spending and public works projects like in the 30s but is carried out in direct opposition to these policies. Moreover, the jobs created by armaments development today concern only a small proportion of very qualified workers, or of tech­nicians with a scientific background because of the highly developed technology of modern weapons.

Thus weapons development today cannot hide the general crisis of overproduction. In fact, with the deepening of the recession and the accelera­tion of inflation which arms investment provokes, the crisis of capitalism is also the crisis of the war economy.

“The Reagan government cannot sustain this milit­ary spending except by imposing an even more restrictive monetary policy, with a restrictive fiscal policy and a limitation on non-military public spending. All these efforts will lead to an increase in unemployment. Beyond this military Keynesianism, the first military depression of the 20th Century is coming.” (‘Un Nouvel Ordre Militaire’, Le Monde Diplomatique, April 1982)

In this situation, the weight of already-existing weapons and their present increase are seen by the population and particularly by the working class as the direct cause of poverty and unemploy­ment as well as the source of a menacing apocalyptic war. That is why the revolt against war is part of the general revolt of the proletariat even if war isn’t an immediate threat.

It would be simplistic to think that the planning of ultra-modern arms production is the character­istic of the Reagan administration alone. Such industrial preparation cannot be carried out over­night or even in several months. The truth is that the weapons seeing the light of day today were carefully prepared in the 70s under Democratic administrations; but the Democrats couldn’t take direct political responsibility for them without leaving the social front uncovered.

It is not an accident that in today’s historical situation and for the first time in the whole history of decadence, it is the right-wing, the Republicans in the US, who have propelled the armaments policy.

“The military expansion policies in the US are not at all characteristic of the Republicans. The military booms of the last 50 years -- the 1938 expansion, the Second World War, the rearmament of the Korean War and of the Cold War 1950-52, the space and missile boom of 1961-64 and the Vietnam War -- were all inspired by Democratic governments.” (idem)

It is not an accident either that pacifism is today one of the themes preferred by the opposition. We would be wrong to consider pacifism or campaigns over E1 Salvador as only long-term preparations. In the short-term and immediate sense, they contribute to isolating the struggles of the workers in Poland and to getting the so-called ‘austerity’ budgets passed -- budgets which work to the benefit of armaments.

“We must make a distinction between pacifist campaigns today and those which preceded the Second World War. The pacifist campaigns before WWII directly prepared the mobilization of a working class already subjugated by anti­fascist ideology.

“Today the pacifist campaigns still try to prepare a mobilization for war but it is not their direct, immediate task. Their immediate aim is to counteract class struggle and avoid mass movements in the developed countries. Pac­ifism today plays the same role as anti-fascism yesterday.

“For the bourgeoisie, it is vital that no link be made between the struggle against war and the struggle against the crisis. That the alternative ‘war or revolution’ isn’t posed.

“For this, pacifism is a particularly efficient weapon because it responds to a real anxiety in the population while separating the questions of war and crisis, posing a false alternative of ‘war or peace’. At the same time it tries to reawaken nationalist sentiments through a pseudo-‘'neutralism’.

“The false alternative ‘war or peace’ in relation to war complements the other false alternative in relation to the crisis, ‘prosperity or auster­ity’. Thus with the struggle ‘against austerity’ on the one hand and the struggle ‘for peace’ on the other, the bourgeoisie covers all angles of the social revolt. It is the best illustration of what we mean by the ‘left in opposition’.” (from a text of Revolution Internationale of November 1981)

Overproduction and Keynesianism

Just as militarism has never been a field for capital accumulation, so state capitalism in its economic aspects has never been an expr­ession of an organic and superior development of capitalism, of its centralization and con­centration. On the contrary it is the expression of the difficulties encountered in the accum­ulation process. State capitalism, especially in its Keynesian forms, could, like militarism, look convincing from before the war right up to the 70s. Today, the reality is sweeping away the myth.

We have often pointed out that, despite the gigantic debts they contract, the under-devel­oped countries are unable to make a real economic ‘take-off’. On the contrary, it has now reached the point where three-quarters of the credits won from the western bloc only serve to repay prev­ious debts. But this indebtedness is not a priv­ilege of the under-developed countries. What is remarkable is that indebtedness is character­istic of the whole of capitalism, from east to west2, and this is not altered by the many different forms that it takes in the west. As for state capitalism as an economic ‘rudder’, this policy of indebtedness and deficit has finally got the upper hand, far more than the policy of ‘orienting’ the economy. It is the economy that has imposed its laws on the bourgeoisie, and not the bourgeoisie that has ‘oriented’ the economy.

“The US became the ‘locomotive’ for the world economy by creating an artificial market for the rest of its bloc by means of huge commer­cial deficits. Between 1976 and 1980, the US bought $100 billion worth of foreign goods, more than they sold abroad. Because the dollar is the worldwide reserve currency, only the US could put such a policy into practice without being forced to carry out a massive currency devaluation. Afterwards, the US flooded the world with dollars by means of an unprecedented expansion of credit in the form of loans to under-developed countries and to the Russian bloc. This mass of paper money temporarily created an effective demand which allowed world commerce to continue.” (Report on the economic crisis to the 4th ICC Congress, International Review 26)

Here we can take the example of the world’s second economic power to illustrate another aspect of reflation through indebtedness and state deficits:

“Germany set itself to play the ‘locomotive’ yielding to the pressure, it must be said, of the other countries….. The increase in government spending has nearly doubled, growing 1.7 times, like the national product. To the point where half of the latter is centralized by the public sector .... Thus the growth in the public sector debt has been explosive. This indebtedness, stable at around 18% of GNP at the beginning of the 70s, passed abruptly to 25% in 1975, then to 35% this year; its share has thus doubled in ten years. It has reached a level unheard of since the bankruptcy of the inter-war years .... The Germans, who have long memories, are again haunted by the specter of wheelbarrows filled with banknotes of the Weimar Republic.”3 (L’Expansion, 5.11.81)

And rather as in the under-developed countries, the debt is so great that “the debt’s servicing absorbs more than 50% of new credits”.

Here is the hidden face of the late 70s ‘refla­tion’, the ‘secret revealed’ of the cures that have proved worse than the illness.

At the 4th ICC Congress, as well as in other reports and articles published since, we have shown at length that this policy of the late 70s had come to an end. The world’s states have used it to the point that, were they to pursue it, they would head rapidly for financial disaster and an immediate economic collapse. The 1979 dollar crash was the first sign of this disaster, was the clearest signal for the need to change economic policy, of the end of the ‘locomotives’, and of further indebtedness4.

In the light of the development of the economic situation, we can make a first appraisal of the ‘new economic policy’, of ‘austerity’. Here again the US provides a reference point. The most advanced in the policy of ‘indebtedness’, they have also been fist in the policy of ‘monetarism’. The result has not been brilliant; they have cer­tainly avoided collapse, but at what a price.

Production has fallen incredibly in every sector except armaments, and 15% of the working class is now unemployed... We have seen a decline in inflation over these last few months in all the developed countries ... except in France. But here again, the fall in inflation is essentially due to the fantastic fall in production: “The White House has not neglected to celebrate this success. In reality, it is the recession that explains the fall in inflation, rather than this being a sign of a possible reflation.” (Le Monde de 1’Economie , 6.4.82 )

At all events, in the coming months, the problem of ‘financing the crisis’ will be posed still more acutely for the whole of world capital since:

1. the fall in production is necessarily accomp­anied by a proportional fall in state income, made worse by the tax reductions that the differ­ent states are obliged to make to maintain a min­imum level of production;

2) the increase in military spending is a consid­erable weight for all their budgets;

3) the increase in unemployment is itself a cause of deficits in the benefits system.

In all these budgets, only the benefits systems can be put in question, along with the so-called ‘social’ budgets ... education, health, transport, etc. Thus a fall in the social budgets brings about, not an increase in production, but a new fall in the social budgets; falling production brings about ... falling production.

“Having presented himself as the champion of the balanced budget, Mr. Reagan is beating all the records: a deficit of $100 billion is forecast for 1982, and more for the year after.” (Le Monde, 3.4.82)

In fact, capitalism it ‘stuck’: to avoid finan­cial collapse and disaster it provokes a collapse in production whose only advantage -- and even this is not certain -- is that of being controllable.

When economists interpret Reagan or Thatcher’s policies as being less ‘statified’, this is an absurdity. It is not a changed orientation that makes the state’s economic policy less ‘statist’. While the Keynesian aspect of state capitalism is dead, this does not mean that state capitalism is dead, nor that the economic system has been left to its fate. Although no longer able to stave off collapse by a forward flight, the state has not given up. It is resolved to follow the only economic policy open to it: to slow down, and unify throughout the planet, the collapse of capitalism.

Thus the world’s states are organizing the decline into generalized recession, on a worldwide scale. Such a historical situation holds a number of and implications:

and of further indebtedness (5). 1) With the end of the Keynesianism that main­tained an artificial level of capitalist activity, the possibility of polarizing ‘wealth’ in some nations and ‘poverty’ in others is wearing out. The situation in Belgium is, on a small scale perhaps, but in caricature, a striking illustration of this process:

“Belgium has become the sick man of' Europe. Its prosperity after the war, which its neighbors considered ‘insolent’, has progressively declined to the point where today its situation has become literally catastrophic. A budget deficit five times that of France, a more and more unstable balance of' payments, an incredibly high level of debt (both internal and external), unemployment reaching 12% of the active population and, above all, a growing deindustrialization: all risk mak­ing this nation, once one of Europe’s lynch-pins, an under-developed country. One thing is sure, and a worry for all Europeans: for Belgium, but also for the Ten, the hour of truth has struck.” (Le Monde, 23.2.82 )

2) During the 70s, state deficits and indebt­edness were the most effective weapons for holding off class struggle, and spreading illusions among the workers of the eastern bloc. The end of this situation, and the setting up in the developed countries of a ‘fortress state’, pol­iced and militarized to the utmost, which accomp­anies the collapse of capitalism, and makes the workers pay directly for the crisis because it can do nothing else, poses new objective conditions.

of deficits in the benefits system. Today, the objective conditions are changing qualitatively in relation to the 70s. But this is true not only in relation to the 70s, but also to the whole period of decadence. In relation to the 30s, the bourgeoisie no longer possesses the economic means to contain the working class. The 30s were years of a ‘great take-off’ of state capitalism, especially in its Keynesian aspects. If we take the example of the US in the 30s, we can see that:

“The gap between production and consumption was attacked on three fronts at once:

1) contracting a constantly growing mass of debts, the state carried out a series of vast public works …

2) the state increased the purchasing power of the working masses,

a) by introducing the principle of labor contr­acts guaranteeing minimum wages, and limiting the working day, while at the same time strengthening the overall position of workers’ organizations, and especially of unionism;

b) by creating a system of unemployment insurance, and through other social measures designed to prevent a new reduction in the living standards of the masses.

3) moreover, the state tried, through measures such as the limiting of agricultural production and subsidies for agricultural products, to incr­ease the income of the rural population, and to bring the majority of farmers up to the level of the urban middle classes.” (Sternberg, The Conflict of the Century)

During the 30s, the measures of the ‘New Deal’ were taken after the worst of the economic crisis. Today, not only is the ‘New Deal’ of the 70s behind us and the worst of the crisis ahead without any possibility of war offering a way out; we also have not seen in the developed countries such a wave of unionization and ideological enrol­ment as characterized the 30s. On the contrary, since the mid-70s, we have seen a generalized de-unionization, whereas during the 30s, as Sternberg reports:

“Due to the decisive modifications to the American social structure carried out under the aegis of the New Deal, the situation of the unions was totally changed. The New Deal in fact encouraged the unions by every means possible ... In the brief period between 1933 and 1939, the number of union members more than tripled. On the eve of World War II, there were twice as many paid-up members as in the best years before the crisis, many more than at any other moment of American union history.” (idem)

3) The present historical situation is a com­plete refutation of the theory of state capitalism as a ‘solution’ to the contradictions of capit­alism. Keynesianism has been the main smoke­screen hiding the reality of decadent capitalism. With its bankruptcy, and the fact that states can now do no more than accompany capital in its collapse, state capitalism appears clearly for what it has always been: an expression of capitalism’s decadence.

This observation does not have a merely theor­etical and polemical interest as against those who presented state capitalism as a ‘third road’. It is extremely important from the standpoint of the objective conditions and their links with the subjective conditions of the class struggle in relation to the question of the state.

It is not enough to consider state capitalism as an expression of capital’s decadence. Capitalism has only been able to ‘settle’ into decades of decadence after having broken the back of the rev­olutionary proletariat, and in this task state capitalism has been at the same time one of the greatest results of, and one of the most important methods of, the counter-revolution. Not only from a military, but above all from an ideological point of view.

In the revolutionary wave at the beginning of the century, in the 30s and in the reconstruction period, the question of the state has always been at the centre of the proletariat’s political illusions and of the bourgeoisie’s ideological mystifications. Whether it be the illusion that the state, even the transitional one, is the tool of social transformation and of the proletarian collectivity, as in the Russian revolution; whether it be the myth of the defense of the ‘democratic’ state against the ‘fascist’ state during the war and the 1930s; or whether it be the ‘social’ state of the reconstruction period, or again the ‘savior’ state of the left in the 70s -- throughout, the proletariat is led to think that everything depends on the ‘form’ of state, that it can only express itself through a partic­ular form of state; always, the bourgeoisie main­tains in the proletariat a spirit of delegation of power to a representative or to an organ of the state, as well as an attitude of ‘dependency’. It is these myths, widely diffused by the dominant mode of thought; these illusions constantly main­tained within the working class, that Marx was already fighting against when he declared: “Because, (the proletariat) thinks in political forms, it sees will as the reason for all abuses, and sees violence and the overthrow of a determ­ined form of state as the means to set them right.” (Marx’s emphasis: Critical Notes on the Artical, The King of Prussia and Social Reform, by a Prussian).

During the last few decades, the working class has lived through all the possible and imaginable forms of the last form of the bourgeois state, state capitalism -- Stalinist, fascist, ‘demo­cratic’ and Keynesian. Not much mystification is left as to the fascist or Stalinist states: the few illusions left as to the Stalinist state have been swept away by the struggle of the Polish workers. By contrast, the democratic Keynesian state has maintained the strongest illusions among the workers.

The end of the Keynesian state in the developed, and therefore key countries, does not mean that the question of the state has been dealt with. On the contrary, it is beginning to be posed in real­ity with the setting up of the state of open conflict, which throws the left into opposition, and prepares to confront the working class. But in these conflicts, the proletariat will have already experienced the various forms of state that dec­adent capitalism can take on, and the various ways it has been done down by these various forms.

The question of the destruction of the state is posed by the unity between the objective conditions where state capitalism appears not as a superior but as a decadent form, and the sub­jective conditions made up of the proletarian experience.

In this conflict, our task is: first, to remind the proletariat of its previous experience, and secondly, to put it on guard against the supp­osed ease of the struggle by showing, precisely through its experience, that if state capitalism is a decadent expression it is also an expression of the bourgeoisie’s ability to adapt itself, to react, and not to give up without a fight.

The fortress state

If we were to advance a first conclusion from analyzing the relation between the economic crisis, militarism, and state capitalism, with all the implications, objective as much as subjective that we have tried to draw from each of these points, we can say that:

1) The bourgeois state is not giving up the game; it is being transformed into a fortress-state, policed and militarized to the hilt.

2) No longer able to play on the economic and social aspects of state capitalism to put off the crisis and the class struggle, the fortress-state is not waiting hands in pockets for the proletariat to mount the attack, nor is it simply retreating into the ‘fortress’. On the contrary, it is taking the initiative in the battle outside the fortress, on the terrain where everything is decided: the social terrain. This is the funda­mental meaning of what we call the ‘left in opposition’, a movement which is clearly to be seen today in the major industrialized metropoles.

3) With the groundwork being prepared by the left in opposition, the state is developing two essential aspects of its policy:

-- repression and police control;

-- vast and ever more spectacular ideological campaigns (a real ideological terrorism) on all the questions posed by the world situation: war, the crisis, and class struggle.

This is the fundamental meaning of the campaigns for ‘peace’, for ‘solidarity’ with Poland, over El Salvador or the Falklands, and the incessant anti-terrorist campaigns.

4) The question of the state, of its relation to the class struggle, can only really be posed in the developed countries, where the state is strongest materially and ideologically.

Even if the anachronism of state structures in the under-developed countries, or even in the eastern bloc, forms born of the counter-revol­ution, makes them ill-adapted to face up to the class struggle, experience has shown how in Poland the bourgeoisie was able to turn this anachronism, weakness, into weapons of mystific­ation against the struggle as long as the workers in the developed countries did not themselves enter the fight. The struggle for ‘democracy’ in Poland is the best example of this.

In any case, the weakness or inadequacy of states in less-developed countries is largely compensated by the unity of the world bourgeoisie and its different states when confronted with the working class.

Similarly, it would be dangerous and wrong to say that the states in developed countries have been weakened in the face of class struggle because of the profound unity that the bourgeoisie has shown in these countries -- unlike the underdev­eloped countries where the bourgeoisie can play on its divisions to mislead the workers.

Faced with the stakes of the world situation and the class struggle, it is not so much ‘regional’ divisions, for example, that will be the axis of the bourgeoisie’s work against the proletariat.

The essential axis of the bourgeoisie’s work of undermining can only be a false division between right and left, and the ability to set up this false division depends precisely on the bourg­eoisie’s strength, on the strength of its unity.

We must therefore warn against the illusion that the fight against the bourgeois state will be easier in the advanced countries.

Overproduction and technical development

In the first part of this report, we tried to show how over-production is also destruction, waste, and implies for the proletariat an intens­ified exploitation and declining living conditions. This aspect of our critique of the economy is extremely important: firstly, of course, for understanding the evolution of the crisis, and secondly, for our propaganda. The bourgeoisie has not and will not miss an opportunity to explain (as it already has in Poland) that the workers’ struggle worsens the crisis, and is therefore “to everyone’s disadvantage”. To this, we must reply: so much the better if the proletariat accelerates the economic crisis and the collapse of capitalism without leaving the bourgeoisie and the crisis time to destroy a large part of the means of prod­uction and consumption, because the crisis of over-production is also destruction.

But in showing how the crisis of over-production is also destruction, we have only shown one aspect of capitalism’s historic and catastrophic crisis. In fact, the crisis of over-production produces not only destruction, but also an extensive tech­nical development (we shall see later that this is not at all contradictory). The development of the crisis of over-production shows us that over­production is accompanied not only by the destruc­tion or ‘freeze’ of commodities and productive forces, but also by a tendency to the development of the productivity of capital, to compensate for the general over-production and the falling rate of profit in a context of bitter competition. This is why, in recent years, alongside the de-industrialization of old sectors like steel, tex­tiles and shipbuilding, we have seen the devel­opment of other high-technology sectors mentioned above, the whole being accompanied by a concentr­ation of capital.

So, just as all the measures taken to confront the crisis of over-production, and Keynesianism in particular, have only provoked a still more gigantic crisis of over-production, so technical advance has only pushed the contradiction between the relations of production and the development of the forces of production to its utmost.

During the last decade in particular, we have seen a fantastic development of technology on all fronts:

1) - development and application to production of automation, robotics and biology;

- development and application of computers to management and organization;

- development of the means of communication: transportation (especially aeronautics); audio-visual communications, telecommunica­tions and distributed computer processing.

2) And, to support all this, ‘appropriate’ energy supplies, in particular nuclear energy.

For the bourgeoisie, ideologically, we are on the verge of a third ‘industrial revolution’. But for the bourgeoisie, this third ‘industrial revolution’ cannot avoid provoking great social upheavals, and moreover cannot take place without a world war, without a gigantic ‘clean-up’ and redivision of the world. The present economic and military policies of the capitalist world are being put into practice within this perspective, and not simply to confront the immediate situation of the economic crisis.

In an immediate sense, the bourgeoisie worldwide is trying to maintain production as far as it can, and to avoid a brutal economic collapse. But whether it be in the social, military, or economic domain, we must understand that the bourgeoisie is not acting from one day to another, but that it has a definite perspective, which we would be wrong not to take account of. It would be wrong, and we would pay for it dearly, to cry victory simply because the unemployment rates have soared, and to content ourselves with saying ‘how stupid the economists are’. We would be wrong not to take account of the present phenomena and ideologies, and to give them all the importance they deserve. Not only in order to criticize the bourgeoisie on the question of what they call ‘restructuring’ and unemployment, but still more to overthrow their arguments as to the future of this ‘third industrial revolution’ and to give our own vision of what is at stake in the present epoch of human history.

The development of certain techniques of the productivity of labor is in no way contradict­ory with the development of the economic crisis. This technical development is essentially invested in non-productive sectors:

a) Firstly, armaments: the ‘Falklands war’ and the ultra-modern techniques used there (electronics, satellites, etc) give us an idea of what this famous ‘third industrial revolution’ really means.

b) Secondly, in ‘service’ sectors: offices, banks, etc.

In this way, the growth in productivity (which in fact is mainly only potential) is accompanied by an overall deindustrialization, and is far from compensating for the vertiginous fall in production. This is the case for the world’s major power which alone accounts for 45% of world production -- the United States:

“Dividing the labor force into two categories -- those who produce means of consumption or produc­tion and those who produce services -- the weekly Business Week shows that the number of jobs is falling in the first category (43.4% in 1945, 33.3% in 1970, 28.4% in 1980, with 26.2% projected for 1990) and rising in inverse proportion in the second sector (56%, 66.7%, 71.6%, 73.8% respect­ively) .... American big business has for several years gone on a sort of productive investment strike.” (Le Monde Diplomatique, March 1982)

Moreover, when productivity does develop in prod­uction, it provokes gigantic unemployment, and subjects those who remain in work to a ‘deskill­ing’ of their labor, and to very difficult and highly policed working conditions. The ‘benefits’ are restricted to a tiny minority of highly qual­ified technicians.

As for the question of the ‘industrial revolution’ itself, the bourgeoisie is aware, because it is directly confronted with the problem, that the world market as it is today, already saturated by the old methods of production cannot provide a springboard for its development.

In its ideology, only a world war could ‘prepare the ground’ for a large-scale development and application of modern production techniques. Anyway the bourgeoisie has no choice.

This is why most of the preparation for this famous ‘industrial revolution’ takes place in the field of armaments, which is where all the best of humanity’s scientific technique is developed and applied.

The same is true for the development of product­ivity and over-production: both lie within the framework of the bourgeois system of destruction. This is what we have to say to the working class. And that, through the development of present-day technical methods and over-production, capitalism has pushed the antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production to its extreme limits.

“In the epoch when man needed a year to produce a stone axe, several months to make a bow, or made a fire by hours of rubbing two sticks to­gether, the most cunning and unscrupulous busi­nessman could not have extorted the least surplus labor. A certain level of labolr productivity is necessary for a man to be able to provide surplus labor.” (R. Luxemburg, Introduction to Political Economy)

For a relationship of exploitation to be installed and to divide society into classes, a certain level of productivity was necessary. Alongside the labor necessary to ensure the subsistence of the producers, there had to develop a surplus labor allowing the subsistence of the exploiters, and the accumulation of the productive forces.

The whole history of humanity from the dissolution of the primitive community to the present day is the history of the evolution of the relation between necessary and surplus labor -- this rela­tionship being itself determined by the level of labor productivity -- which determines particular class societies, particular relations of exploit­ation between producers and exploiters.

Our historical epoch, which starts at the begin­ning of this century, has totally reversed the relation between necessary and surplus labor. Through technical development, the share of necessary labor has become minute in relation to surplus labor.

Thus, if the appearance of surplus labor allowed, in certain conditions, the appearance of class society, its historical development in relation to necessary labor has completely reversed the problematic of societies of exploitation and poses the necessity and possibility of the communist revolution, the possibility of a society of abundance, without classes and without exploit­ation.

The historical crisis of capitalism, the crisis of over-production determined by the lack of solvent markets has pushed this situation to its extreme. To face up to over-production, the bourg­eoisie has developed the productivity of labor, which has in its turn worsened the crisis of over­production, all the more so since world war has not been possible.

Today, this revolt of the productive forces against bourgeois relations of production, expressed in over-production, the productivity of labor and their reciprocal relations, has reached a culmination, and has burst out into the open.

The conditions of the class struggle in the developed countries

“While the proletariat is not yet developed enough to constitute itself as a class, while, as a result, the proletariat’s struggle with the bourgeoisie has not yet a political character, and while the productive forces are not yet developed enough within the bourgeoisie itself to allow an appreciation of the material conditions necessary to the liberation of the proletariat and the formation of a new society, its theoreticians are only utopians .... and they see in misery nothing but misery, without seeing its subversive side, which will overthrow the old society.” (Marx, The poverty of Philosophy)

With the situation that we have just described as a starting-point, we can understand, that the economic crisis is not only necessary for the revol­ution because it exacerbates the misery of the working class, but also and above all because it reveals the necessity and the possibility of the revolution. For all these reasons, the economic crisis of capitalism is not a mere ‘economic crisis’ in the strict sense, but the crisis of a social relation of exploitation which contains the necessity and possibility of the abolition of all exploitation; in this sense, it is the crisis of the economy, full stop.

From this viewpoint, the objective and subjective conditions for the revolutionary initiative, for an international generalization of the class struggle, are posed only in the developed countries, and it is in these countries that the whole revolutionary dynamic essentially depends.

This is no different from what revolutionaries have always thought:

“When Marx and the socialists who followed him imagined the coming revolution, they always saw it as springing up in the industrial heart of the capitalist world, whence it would spread to the periphery. This is how F. Engels expressed it in a letter to Kautsky of 12 November 1882, where he deals with the different stages of transition, as well as the problem posed for socialist thought by the colonies of the imperialist powers: ‘Once Europe, along with North America, is reorganized, these regions will possess such colossal power, and will give such an example to the semi-civilized countries, that these will have to let themselves be drawn along, if only under the pressure of their economic needs.’”(Sternberg, The Conflict of the Century)

The process of the communist revolution being nothing other than the process of unification of the proletarian struggle on a world scale, we are not here rejecting from this process the struggle of workers in less developed counties, and in particular the struggle of the workers in the eastern bloc; we are simply affirming that from the standpoint of its objective and subjective conditions, the revolutionary dynamic can only receive its impulse from the developed countries. This understanding is vital for the unity of the world working class, and does not undermine this unity. On the contrary. The working class’ being has always been revolutionary, even when the objective conditions were not. It is this situation that has determined the great tragedies of the workers' movement. But the great revolutionary struggles have never been in vain, without historic consequences. The workers’ struggles of 1848 showed the necessity of workers’ autonomy; the struggle of the Commune in 1871, the necessity of the total destruction of the bourgeois state. As for the Russian revolution and the revolutionary wave of 1917-23, which took place in historic conditions that were ripe, but unfavorable (the war), these have been an inexhaustible source of lessons for the proletariat. The resur­gence of the class struggle in the heart of capitalism, the ending of the period of counter­revolution, has already begun to show, in the context of a generalized economic crisis, what the revolutionary dynamic of our epoch will be like.

Annex I:

Overproduction and the agricultural crisis

The agricultural crisis is a question we have seldom dealt with, and yet the development today of the general crisis of capitalism also implies a development of the agricultural crisis which cannot help having important consequences for the condition of the working class. Moreover, we can see in the agricultural crisis a striking illustration of two aspects of capitalism’s hist­oric crisis, firstly its generalized nature, and secondly over-production.

On the generalized aspect of the crisis, Sternberg writes in The Conflict of the Century:

“The 1929 crisis was characterized ... both its industrial and its agrarian nature ... This is another phenomenon specific to the crisis of 1929, and which had never appeared during the crises of the 19th Century. The disaster of 1929 struck the USA as violently as Europe and the colonial countries. Furthermore, it was not just a crisis of cereal production, but covered the whole range of agricultural production ... In such conditions, this latter could only aggravate the industrial crisis.”

And as for the agricultural crisis as an illustration of the overall nature of the crisis, we cannot be clearer than Sternberg:

“Nowhere, tin fact, did the particular character of the capitalist crisis appear as clearly as in the agricultural crisis. Under the forms of social organization preceding capitalism, crises were marked by a lack of production, and given the dominant role of agricultural production, by a lack of food production.

... But during the crisis of 1929, too much foodstuff was produced, and hundreds of thousands of farmers threatened with eviction ... while in the cities, people were often unable to buy the most essential supplies.”

We would be wrong to underestimate the question of the agricultural crisis of over-production, whether in our analyses, our interventions, or our propaganda.

In our analyses of the crisis, because its dev­elopment will become more and more important for the condition of the working class. Up till now, ie during the 70s, agricultural over-production was masked and soaked up by state subsidies which maintained agricultural prices, and therefore production. At present, this policy of subsidies, just as for industrial production, is drawing to an end or being seriously reduced. It’s enough to look at the agricultural over-production in Europe and the stir it has provoked in recent months to be convinced. This is true for Europe, but still more so for the US which is one of the world’s foremost agricultural producers: “American farmers are tearing their hair out. 1982 will, they say, be their worst year since the great depression ... The crisis is essent­ially due to over-production, as if the technical progress which has been so profitable for the Middle West was beginning to turn against it…. In 1980 they accounted for 24.3% of world rice sales, 44.9% of wheat, 70.1% of corn and 77.8% of peanuts. At present, one hectare out of every three cultivated ‘works’ for export. The Americans are thus very sensitive to the contraction of external markets provoked by the difficulties of the world economy.” (Le Monde)

From the standpoint of our propaganda, such a situation of over-production in agriculture couldn’t illustrate better the total anachronism of the continued existence of capital, and what humanity will be capable of achieving once rid of the commodity system, the armaments sector and other unproductive sectors. Humanity is in a position never known before now:

“Present cereal production alone could provide in the every man, woman and child with 3000 calories and 65 grams of' protein per day, which is largely superior to what is necessary, even when generously calculated. To eliminate malnutrition, it would be enough to redirect 2% of world cereal production to those who need it.” (World Bank: Report on World Development)

Annex II:

Unemployment and indebtedness

In the USA, unemployment has reached over 10 million. The rate of unemployment is the highest since the Second World War. It is 14% among workers in general and 18% among blacks.

These two graphs illustrate how indebtedness isn't just a characteristic of the under-developed countries, but of the whole of world capitalism. 

The indebtedness of the Federal Republic of Germany has nearly doubled since 1973, in proportion to the GDP, of which it now represents nearly 35%. It is approaching the levels reached after the monetary collapse of the Weimar Republic.

1 See International Review no 23 and no 27.

The two articles that follow are the product of discussion that has been animating the ICC: their main aim is to investigate the bourgeoisie's level of consciousness and capacity for maneuvering in the period of decadence. This is part of the debate on the Machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie, which was one of the issues which gave rise to the ‘tendency' which left the ICC about a year ago[1]. This somewhat informal tendency split into several groups on leaving the ICC: L'Ouvrier Internationaliste (France) and ‘News of War and Revolution' (Britain), which have since disappeared, who together with ‘The Bulletin' (Britain) all made the same critique of the ICC: we have a Machiavellian view of the bourgeoisie and a conspiratorial views of history. Other groups like ‘Volunte Communiste' or ‘Guerre de Classe' in France also accuse the ICC of overestimating the consciousness of the bourgeoisie[2].

But this discussion isn't simply about the concrete question of how the bourgeoisie maneuver in its decadent period: it is also poses the more general question of what the bourgeoisie is, and what this implies for the proletariat.

Why the bourgeoisie is Machiavellian

First let's recall who Machiavelli was: this will help us to understand what we mean when we talk about machiavellianism.

We don't intend here to make an exhaustive analysis of Machiavelli's work and the time he lived in. Our aim is to understand his contribution to the building of bourgeois ideology.

Machiavelli was a statesman in Florence at the time of the Renaissance. He is best known for his book The Prince. Obviously Machiavelli, like every man, was bound to the limits of his own period, and his under­standing was conditioned by the relations of production of that time, the decadent period of feudalism. But his time was also one in which a new class was rising towards power: the bourgeoisie, which was beginning to dominate the economy. The bourgeoisie was the revolutionary class of the period, and was soon aspiring towards political domina­tion over society. Machiavelli's The Prince was not only a faithful portrait of the time in which it was written, a reflection of the perversity and duplicity of governments in the 16th and 17th centuries, Machiavelli first of all understood the ‘effective truth' of the policies of states in his day: the means matter little, the essential thing is the end -- conquering and maintaining power. His concern was above all to teach the princes of that time how to hold on to what they'd acquired how to avoid being dispossessed by somebody. Machiavelli was the first to separate morality from politics, ie, religion from politics. He took up an entirely ‘tech­nical' standpoint. Of course, princes had never governed their subjects for their own good. But under feudalism, princes didn't understand reasons of state very well, and Machiavelli set out to teach them about it. Machiavelli said nothing new when he said that princes must lie if they are to win, or when he pointed out that they rarely kept their word: all this had been known since the days of Socrates. The life of princes -- their cynicism, their lack of faith -- was conditioned by the overwhelming power they already possessed. Having assimilated their cynicism, all that remained for Machiavelli to do was to put faith in question. This is what he did when he questioned morality and its underlying support: religion. In matters of state, means aren't important. Thus, by rejecting all moral prejudices in the exercise of power, Machiavelli justified the use of coercion and opted for the rejection of religion in order for a minority to rule over the majority.

This is why he was the first political ideo­logue of the bourgeoisie: he freed politics from religion. For him, as for the newly rising class, the mode of domination could be atheistic even while making use of religion. While the previous history of the Middle Ages hadn't known any ideological form other than religion, the bourgeoisie was gradually dev­eloping its own ideology which would rid itself of religion while still using it as an accessory. By destroying the link between politics and morality, between politics and religion, Machiavelli destroyed the feudal concept of the divine right to power: he made a bed for the bourgeoisie to lie on.

Actually, the princes Machiavelli was teaching were ‘the princes of the bour­geoisie', the future ruling class, because the feudal princes couldn't listen to his message without at the same time under­mining the bases of feudal power. Machiavelli expressed the revolutionary stand­point of the time: that of the bourgeoisie.

Even in its limitations, Machiavelli's thought didn't just express the limitations of the time, but of his class. When he presented ‘effective truth' as eternal truth, he wasn't so much expressing the illusion of the epoch but the illusion of the bourgeoisie, which like all previous ruling classes in history, was also an exploiting class. Machiavelli posed explicitly what had been implicit for all ruling, exploiting classes in history. Lies, terror, coercion, double-dealing, corruption, plots and political assassination weren't new methods of government: the whole history of the ancient world, as well as of feudalism, showed that quite clearly. Like the patricians of ancient Rome, like the feudal aristocracy, the bourgeoisie was no exception to the rule. The difference was that patricians and aristocrats ‘practiced machiavellianism without knowing it', whereas the bourgeoisie is machiavellian and knows it. It turns machiavellianism into an ‘eternal truth', because that's how it lives: it takes exploit­ation to be eternal.

Like all exploiting classes, the bourgeoisie is also an alienated class. Because its own historic path leads it towards nothingness, it cannot consciously admit its historic limits.

Contrary to the proletariat, which as an exploited class and a revolutionary class is pushed towards revolutionary objectivity, the bourgeoisie is a prisoner to its subjectivity as an exploiting class. The difference between the revolutionary class consciousness of the proletariat and the exploiters' class ‘consciousness' of the bourgeoisie is thus not a question of degree, of quantity: it is a difference in quality.

The bourgeoisie's view of the world inevit­ably bears with it the stigma of its sit­uation as an exploiting, ruling class, which today is no longer revolutionary in any way -- which, since capitalism entered into its dec­adent phase, has no progressive role to play for humanity. At the level of its ideology, it necessarily expresses the reality of the capitalist mode of production which is based on the frenetic search for profit, on the most vicious competition and the most savage exploitation.

Like every exploiting class, the bourgeoisie cannot, despite all its pretensions, help dis­playing in practice its absolute contempt for human life. The bourgeoisie was first of all a class of merchants for whom ‘business is business' and ‘money has no smell'. In his separation between ‘politics' and ‘morality', Machiavelli was simply translating the bour­geoisie's usual separation between ‘business' and morality. For the bourgeoisie human life has no value except as a commodity.

The bourgeoisie doesn't only express this reality in its general relationships with the exploited class, above all the most important one, the working class: it also expresses it within itself, in the very fibers of its being. As the expression of a mode of production based on competition, its whole vision can only be a competitive one, a vision of perpetual rivalry among all individuals, including within the bour­geoisie itself. Because it's an exploiting class, it can only have a hierarchical vision. In its own divisions, the bour­geoisie simply expresses the reality of a world divided into classes, a world of exploitation.

Since it has been the ruling class, the bourgeoisie has always buttressed its power with the lies of ideology. The watchword of the triumphant French republic in 1789 - ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' -- is the best illustration of this. The first democratic states, arising out of the struggle against feudalism in England, France or America, didn't hesitate to use the most repulsive, ruthless methods to extend their territorial and colonial conquests. And when it came to augmenting their profits they were prepared to impose the most brutal repression and exploitation on the working class.

Up to the 20th century the power of the bour­geoisie was based essentially on the strength of its all-conquering economy, on the tumult­uous expansion of the productive forces, on the fact that the working class could, through its struggle, win real improvements in its living conditions. But since capitalism entered into its decadent phase, into a period marked by the tendency towards econ­omic collapse, the bourgeoisie has seen the material basis of its rule undermined by the crisis of the economy. In these conditions, the ideological and repressive aspects of its class rule have become essential. Lies and terror have become the method of government for the bourgeoisie.

The machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie isn't the expression of an anachronism or a perversion of its ideals about ‘democracy'. It is in conformity with its being, its true nature. This isn't a ‘novelty' of history -- merely one of its more sinister banalities. Although all exploiting classes have expressed this at different levels, the bourgeoisie has taken it onto a qualitatively new stage. By shattering the ideological framework of feudal domination -- religion -- the bourgeoisie emancipated politics from religion, as well as law, science, and art. Now it could use all these things as conscious instruments of its rule. Here we can see both the tremendous advance made by the bourgeoisie, as well as its limits.

It's not the ICC which has a machiavellian view of the bourgeoisie, it's the bourgeoisie which, by definition, is machiavellian. It's not the ICC which has a conspiratorial, policeman's view of history, it's the bour­geoisie. This view is ceaselessly propounded in the pages of its history books, which spend their time exalting individuals, concentrating on plots, on rivalries between cliques and other superficial aspects without ever seeing the real moving forces, compared to which these epiphenomena are merely froth on a wave.

In the end, for revolutionaries to point out that the bourgeoisie is machiavellian is relatively secondary and banal. The most important thing is to draw out the implica­tions of this for the proletariat.

The whole history of the bourgeoisie demon­strates its intelligence, its capacity for maneuvering -- particularly in the period of decadence which has seen two world wars and in which the bourgeoisie has shown that no lies, no acts of barbarism are too great for it[3].

To believe that the bourgeoisie today is no longer capable of the same maneuverability the same lack of scruple which it shows in its internal rivalries, faced as it is by its historic class enemy, would lead to a pro­found under-estimation of the enemy that the proletariat is going to have to deal with.

The historic examples of the Paris Commune and the Russian revolution have already shown that, in the face of the proletariat, the bourgeoisie can set aside its most powerful antagonisms -‑ those which lead it towards war -- and unite against the class which threatens to destroy it.

The working class, the first exploited revol­utionary class in history, cannot rely on any economic strength to carry out its political revolution. Its real strength is its consciousness, and this the bourgeoisie has well understood. "Governing means putting your subjects in a state where they can't bother you or even think of bothering you", as Machiavelli put it. This is truer than ever today.

Because terror alone isn't enough, all the bourgeoisie's propaganda is used to keep the proletariat tied to the chains of exploita­tion, to mobilize it for interests which aren't its own, to hold back the develop­ment of a consciousness of the necessity and possibility of the communist revolution.

If the bourgeoisie spends so much money on maintaining a political apparatus for con­taining and mystifying the proletariat (parliament, parties, unions,) and keeps an absolute control over all the media (press, radio, TV) it's because propaganda -- the lie -- is an essential weapon of the bourgeoisie. And the bourgeoisie is quite capable of provoking events to feed this propaganda, if need be.

Not to see all this means joining the camp of the ideologues that Marx attacked when he wrote:

"Although in daily life every shopkeeper knows how to distinguish between what an individual claims to be and what he really is, our historiography hasn't yet attained this banal knowledge. It believes word for word what each epoch affirms and imagines about itself."

It actually means failing to see the bour­geoisie, being blind to all its maneuvers because you don't believe the bourgeoisie is capable of them.

Just to take two particularly illustrative examples:

• the international anti-terrorist campaigns to create a climate of insecurity in order to polarize the proletariat's attention and subject it to an ever-increasing police control. The bourgeoisie hasn't only used the desperate acts of the petty bourgeoisie to this end: it hasn't hesitated to foment and organize terrorist attacks in order to feed its propaganda campaigns.
• for a long time, the bourgeoisie has under­stood the essential role of the left for controlling the workers. One of the essential tasks of bourgeois propaganda is to uphold the idea that the Socialist Parties, the Communist Parties, the leftists and the unions really do defend the interests of the working class. It's this lie which weighs most heavily on the consciousness of the proletariat.

This is the machiavellianism of the bourgeoisie in the face of the proletariat. It's simply the bourgeoisie's way of being and acting: nothing new in that. To denounce the bourg­eoisie means above all to denounce its maneuvers, its lies; this is one of the most essential tasks for revolutionaries.

The question of effectiveness of the bourg­eoisie's maneuvers and propaganda towards the proletariat is another problem. In the secrecy of its inner cabinets, the bourgeoisie can prepare the most subtle plots and maneuvers, but their success depends on other factors, above all the consciousness of the proletariat. The best way to strengthen this consciousness is for the working class to break with any illusions it might have about its class enemy and its maneuvers.

The proletariat is faced with a class of gangsters without scruples which will stop at nothing of sustain its system of exploit­ation. This is something the proletariat has to understand.

JJ

Notes on the consciousness of the decadent bourgeoisie

1. The proletariat is the first revolutionary class in history with no economic power in the old society. Unlike all previous revolution­ary classes, the proletariat is not an expl­oiting class. Its consciousness, its self- awareness is therefore crucially important to the success of its revolution, whereas for previous revolutionary classes class consc­iousness was secondary or even inconsequential compared to their build-up of economic power prior to the wielding of political power.

For the bourgeoisie, the last exploiting class in history, the tendency towards the development of a class consciousness was taken far further than for its predecessors since it required a theoretical and ideo­logical victory to cement its triumph over the old social orders.

The consciousness of the bourgeoisie has been molded significantly by two key factors:

* by constantly revolutionizing the forces of production the capitalist system constantly extended itself and, by creat­ing the world market, brought the world to an unprecedented state of interconnection;

* from the early days of the capitalist system the bourgeoisie has had to deal with the threat posed by the class destined to be its gravedigger -- the proletariat.

The first factor propelled the bourgeoisie and its theoreticians to develop a general world view while its socio-economic system was in its phase of ascendance, ie, while it was still based on a progressive mode of production. The second factor provided a constant reminder to the bourgeoisie that, whatever the conflict of interest among its members, as a class it had to unite in the defense of its social order against the struggle of the proletariat.

Whatever advance in consciousness was made by the bourgeoisie over that of previous ruling classes, its world view was irrep­arably crippled by the very fact that its exploitative position in society masks from it the historical transiency of its system.

2. The basic unit of social organization within capitalism was the nation-state.

And within the confines of the nation-state the bourgeoisie organized its political life in a manner consistent with its economic life. Classically, political life was organized through parties which confronted each other in a parliamentary forum.

These political parties, in the first insta­nce, reflected the conflict of interests between different branches of capital within the nation-state. From the confrontation of the parties within this forum a means of government was created to control and steer the state apparatus which then orientated society towards the goals decided by the bourgeoisie. In this mode of functioning can be seen the capacity of the bourgeoisie to delegate political power to a minority of its number.

(It should be noted that this ‘classical' organization of bourgeois political life into a parliamentary framework was not a universal blueprint, but a tendency within capitalism's ascendant epoch. The actual forms varied in different countries depend­ing on such factors as: the speed of capital's development; the working-out of conflicts with the old ruling order; the adaptability of the new bourgeoisie; the actual organization of the state apparatus; the pressures imposed by the struggle of the proletariat, etc,)

3. The transition of the capitalist system into its epoch of decadence was swift, as the accelerating development of capitalist pro­duction came hard against the ability of the world market to absorb it. In other words, the relations of production abruptly imposed their fetters on the forces of production. The consequences were seen very quickly in the world events of the second decade of this century: in 1914 when the bourgeoisie demon­strated what its epoch of imperialism meant; in 1917 when the proletariat showed that it could pose its historic solution for humanity.

The lesson of 1917 has not been lost by the bourgeoisie. On a world scale the ruling class has come to appreciate that its first priority in this epoch is to defend its social system against the onslaught of the proletariat. It therefore tends to unite in the face of this threat.

4. Decadence is the epoch of historic crisis of the capitalist system. In a permanent way the bourgeoisie has to face up to the main characteristics of the epoch; to the cycle of crisis, war and reconstruction, and to the threat to the social order posed by the proletariat. In response to these, three developments have taken place inside the organization of the capitalist system:

* state capitalism

* totalitarianism

* the constitution of imperialist blocs

5. The development of state capitalism is the mechanism by which the bourgeoisie has organized its economy within each national framework to meet an ever-deepening crisis in decadence.

Whether by fusion with individual capitals, or by a more straightforward expropriation, the state has developed an overwhelming authority compared to any one unit of capit­al. This provides a coherence in economic organization through the subordination of the interests of each element to those of the national unit. And in the conditions imposed in the epoch of imperialism the basis of the economy has become a permanent war economy, a solid base on which state capit­alism develops.

But if state capitalism was a response in the first instance to crisis at the level of production, the process of statification did not stop there. More and more, institutions have been absorbed by a voracious state machine only to become its instruments, and where instruments were lacking they were created. Thus the apparatus of the state has reached into all aspects of social life. In this context, the integration of the trade unions into the state has been of the greatest necessity and significance. Not only do they exist in this period to keep the wheels of production running but, as the policemen for the proletariat, they become important agents for the militarization of society.

Differences and antagonisms among the bourgeoisie in any one national capital do not disappear in decadence, but undergo a considerable mutation because of the power of the state. In the main, the antagonisms inside the bourgeoisie on a national level are attenuated only to appear in a more intensified competition between nation states at the international level.

6. One of the consequences of state capit­alism is that power in bourgeois society tends to shift from the hands of the legis­lature to the executive apparatus of the state. This has a profound effect on the political life of the bourgeoisie since it takes place within the framework of the state. Consequently, within decadence the dominant tendency in bourgeois political life is towards totalitarianism, as in economic life it is towards statification.

Political parties of the bourgeoisie no longer remain as emanations of different interest groups as they were in the 19th century. They become expressions of state capital towards specific sections of society.

In a sense, one can say that the political parties of the bourgeoisie in any one country are merely factions of a state totalitarian party. In some countries the existence of the one-party state is always clear to see -- as in Russia. However, the effective existence of the one-party state in the ‘democracies' is shown starkly only at certain times. For example:

* the power of Roosevelt and the Democratic Party in the US in the late 1930s and during the Second World War;

* the ‘suspension of democracy' in Britain during the Second World War and the creation of the War Cabinet.

7. In the context of state capitalism, the differences between the bourgeois parties are nothing compared to what they have in common. All start from an over-riding premise that the interests of the national capital as a whole are paramount. This premise enables different factions to work together in a very close way -- especially behind the closed doors of parliamentary committees and in the higher echelons of the state apparatus. Indeed, only a very small fraction of the bourgeois­ie's debate takes place in the parliamentary arena. Members of bourgeois parliaments have in fact become state functionaries.

8. Nonetheless, the bourgeoisie in any nation-state always has disagreements. However, it is important to distinguish among them:

• Real differences of orientation. Different factions can see the national interest at a given moment lying in quite different directions as, for example, in the dispute between the Labor and Con­servative Parties in the 1940s and 1950s over what was to be done with the British Empire. (It is also possible, as can be seen time and again in the third world for differences between parties, especially over the issue of which bloc to join, to lead to war. In such instances, pronoun­ced schisms can develop in the state and even major breakdowns in its functioning).
• Differences which arise because of the pressures which are imposed on various factions of the bourgeoisie because of their functions in the bourgeois state. Consequently, there can be agreement about general orientations, yet disagreements over the manner of their implementation - as was seen, for example, in Britain over the efforts to strengthen the grip of the trade unions over the working class in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
• Differences which are false and diversionary charades for the mystific­ation of the population. For example, the whole ‘debate' over the SALT 2 rat­ification in the US Congress in the summer of 1979 was an ideological operation which covered over the fact that the bourgeoisie had taken several important decisions concerning preparations for the Third World War and the strategy by which they wanted that war pursued.

Often, however, there are strands of several of these present in the bourgeoisie's disagreements, especially during elections.

9. As the antagonisms between nation-states have intensified through the epoch, so world capital has attempted to take the development of state capitalism onto the international level through the formation of imperialist blocs. If the organization of the blocs has permitted a certain attenuation of the anta­gonisms among the member states of each bloc this has only led to a heightening of the rivalry between the blocs -- the final cleavage of the world capitalist system where all its economic contradictions find a focus.

In the formation of the blocs, previous allia­nces among groups of (more or less) equal capitalist states have been replaced by two groupings in each of which the lesser capitals are subordinate to one dominant capital. And just as in the development of state capital the apparatus of the state reaches into all aspects of economic and social life, so the organization of the bloc reaches into every nation-state in its member­ship. Two examples of this are;

• the creation of means to regulate the entire world economy since the Second World War (the Bretton Woods agreement, the World Bank, the IMF, etc.) and a theory to go with it (Keynesianism);
• the creation of a unified military command structure in each bloc (NATO, Warsaw Pact) .

10. Marx said that it was really only in times of crisis that the bourgeoisie became intelligent. This is true but, like many of Marx's insights, has to be considered in the light of the change in historical period. The overall vision of the bourgeoisie has narrowed considerably with its transformation from a revolutionary to a reactionary class in society. Today the bourgeoisie no longer has the world view it had last century and in this sense is far less intelligent. But, at the level of organizing to survive, to defend itself -- here, the bourgeoisie has shown an immense capacity to develop techniques for economic and social control way beyond the dreams of the rulers of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the bourgeoisie has become ‘intelligent' confronted with the historic crisis of its socio-economic system.

Despite the points just made about the three significant developments in decadence, it is possible to reaffirm the basic constraints on the consciousness of the bourgeoisie -- its incapacity to have a united consciousness or to fully understand the nature of its system.

But if the development of state capitalism and bloc-wide organizations has not given them the impossible it has provided them with highly-developed mechanisms for acting in concert. The bourgeoisie's ability to organize the functioning of the whole world economy since the Second World War in a way in which extended the period of reconstruction for decades and phased-in the reappearance of open crisis so that 1929-type crashes did not recur is testimony to this. And these actions were all based on the development of a theory about the mechanisms and ‘shortcomings' (as the bourgeoisie might call them) of the mode of production. In other words, these actions were performed consciously.

The capacity of the bourgeoisie to act in concert on diplomatic/military levels also has been shown time and again -- not least in the actions of both blocs in the Middle East over the past three decades.

However, the bourgeoisie has a relatively free hand in its activity on the purely economic or military levels -- that is to say, it is only dealing with itself. The functioning of the state is more complex where it has to deal with social questions -- for these involve the movements of other classes, particularly the proletariat.

11. In confronting the proletariat the state can employ many branches of its apparatus in a coherent division of labor; even in a single strike the workers may have to face an array of trade unions, press and television propaganda campaigns of different hues, campaigns by several political parties, the police, the ‘welfare' services and, at times, the army. But to see a concerted use made of all of these parts of the state does not imply that they each see the total framework in which they are each carrying out their function.

In the first place, it is unnecessary for the whole bourgeoisie to understand what is going on. The bourgeoisie is able to delegate this responsibility to a minority of its number. Hence the state is not hampered to any signif­icant degree by the fact that the entire ruling class does not see the whole picture. It is therefore possible to talk, say, about the ‘plans of the bourgeoisie' while in fact it is only a small proportion of the class actually making them.

This only works because of the way in which the different arms of the state interlock. Different arms of the state have different functions and as well as dealing with the section of society to which this function corresponds, they also communicate to the higher echelons of the state the pressures they are under, and therefore help determine what is possible and what is not.

At the heights of the state machine it is possible for those in command to have some kind of general picture of the situation and what options are realistically open to them to confront it. In saying this, however, it is important to note:

• that this picture is not a clear, unmystified view (of the kind that the proletariat can have) but a pragmatic one;
• that it is not a unified picture, but a divided one, ie. that it may be ‘shared' among several factions of the bourgeoisie;
• that the inevitable contradictions faced by the bourgeoisie make for considerable disharmonies.
• In appreciating how this whole apparatus works it is important to recognize that:
• a distinction must be made between a consciousness which permits an understanding of the capitalist social system (that of the proletariat) and a consciousness which is required only to permit a defense of that system (that of the bourgeoisie). Thus the army of social analysts used by the state can help it defend its system but never to understand it;
• the activity of the bourgeoisie is ini­tiated not by the subjective whims of ind­ividuals and factions among it, but in response to the dominant forces active in its system at the time.

12. Consequently, maneuvers of the bourgeoisie have a structure to them, whether they are aware of it or not, and are confined within and determined by a framework set by:

• the historic period (decadence);
• the conjunctural crisis (whether it has opened or not);
• the historic course (towards war or revolution);
• the momentary weight of class struggle (in upsurge or reflux).

According to the evolution of the actual period, the hand of particular key factions of the bourgeoisie is strengthened inside the state apparatus, as the importance of their role and orientation becomes clearer for the bourgeoisie. In most countries in the world this process automatically leads to the gover­ning team chosen -- as a result of the mech­anism of the one-party state.

However, in the ‘democracies' -- generally among the stronger countries -- the pro­cesses of strengthening certain factions in the state apparatus and of choosing the governing team are separated. For example, we have seen in Britain over several years a strengthening of the left in the unions, in the local apparatus of the state, etc while the Labor Party fell from political power. The totalitarian dictatorship of the bourgeoisie remains and by a dexterous legerdemain the population chooses, ‘freely', what the conjurer has already chosen for them. More often than not the trick works -- the ‘democracies' only retain these electoral mechanisms because they have learned how to manipulate them effectively.

The ‘free choice' of the governing team by the electorate is affected by:

• the programs on which the parties choose to stand;
• the propaganda of the TV and the press;
• the endorsements (or otherwise) of major institutions such as unions and employers' organizations for one or other party;
• the existence of third parties to act as ‘spoilers' or as coalition material;
• the re-emphasizing of different parts of the electoral programs according to their effects on the electorate, as indic­ated by poll samples;
• after the results of the election, maneuverings by different factions of the bourgeoisie to get what is required overall.

Without going into details, the following examples illustrate recent uses made of some of these mechanisms:

• Close to the 1976 US presidential election it became clear that a Carter victory was in the balance. Only then did the AFL-CIO apparatus decide to endorse Carter and mobilize the workers to register and vote. Carter's success was ensured only in the last fortnight of the campaign.
• In the 1980 US presidential election Reagan's victory was ensured by two devices: Kennedy made sure that Carter's nomination by the Democratic Party would not have a clear backing; Anderson was run as a ‘serious' third candidate to ‘spoil' the Carter vote, and to enable him to do this, state funding for his campaign was made available.
• ‘Fine tuning' of electoral platforms in response to opinion-poll results is openly acknowledged in the US by the media.
• Through the Lib-Lab pact it was possible for the minority Labor government to remain in power despite several parliament­ary crises.
• Through the minority parties coming to­gether with the Conservatives in a vote of no-confidence in the Labor government it was possible to put Labor in opposition in the face of the 1979 upsurge of class struggle.
• In February 1974, Heath called an election to try to get support to break the miners' strike. The result permitted him to form a government -- which he attempted to do with the Liberals. However, in rec­ognition of the need for Labor to come to power to get the workers' struggle under control the Liberals refused and opened the way to Wilson and the period of the ‘social contract'.

These instances demonstrate the mechanisms the bourgeoisie has at its disposal and which it knows how to use. However, the bourgeoisies of different countries have various degrees of flexibility in their apparatus. In this respect, Britain and the US probably have the most effective machinery in the ‘democracies'. An example of relatively inflexible machinery, and of the fallibility of the bourgeoisie, is to be seen in the results of the 1981 French presidential elections.

13. The question of the framework imposed by the period on the bourgeoisie's maneuvers has already been mentioned. In periods when the class struggle is relatively quiet the bourg­eoisie chooses its governing team according to criteria primarily concerning economic and foreign policies. In such instances, the objectives of the bourgeoisie can be seen relatively clearly in the actions of the government. Thus, through the 1950s the government in Britain -- the Eden faction of the Conservative Party -- corresponded to a decision by the bourgeoisie to hold onto the Empire against the onslaught of the US. The effort was wrecked on the reef of the Suez adventure in 1956. Yet, the British economy could function under the Conservatives (who, under the Macmillan faction, took on more of the Labor Party's orientations in this area) until 1964. In other words, in such periods there is not necessarily an absolute criterion against which to judge whether a given government is the best one for the bourgeoisie or not.

This is not the case at all in a period of class upsurge, as over the period since 1968. As the open crisis shows itself and the struggle intensifies, then so the framework imposed on the bourgeoisie becomes more defined and more binding, and the consequen­ces of their falling outside the framework more dangerous.

Through the 1970s the bourgeoisie sought to resolve its economic crises, palliate the class struggle and yet prepare for war -- all at the same time. In the 1980s it makes no attempt to resolve its economic crisis since it is generally appreciated that it cannot do so. The framework for the bourgeoisie is now determined by the class struggle and by pre­parations for war, the latter now being recognized as being dependant on its ability to deal with the former. In such a situation, the way in which the bourgeoisie presents its policies to the working class is crucial for in the absence of solutions its mystifications become enormously important.

The bourgeoisie has to confront the working class today:

• when its economic palliatives have been used up;
• when the working class has been through a whole period of ‘social contracts' and can no longer be mobilized on that terrain;
• when the bourgeoisie has to foist even further levels of austerity on an unde­feated working class.

Furthermore, the bourgeoisie is confronted with the immediate necessity of crushing the working class.

This is what makes the framework of the left in opposition a crucial factor in today's situation for the bourgeoisie. It becomes a criterion for evaluating the preparedness of the bourgeoisie to face the working class.

14. It has already been argued that in the face of the proletarian threat, the bourge­oisie tends to unite and its consciousness tends to become ‘more intelligent'. Expre­ssions of this process have been clear over the past decade and more:

* In the events of 1968 and its immediate aftermath each national capital tended to deal with its ‘own' proletariat, In this one could see the bourgeoisie organized as a state capital confronting a rising working class for the first time.

* As the wave of struggle developed yet further, the bourgeoisie was forced to confront the proletariat, organized as a bloc. This was seen first in Portugal, then in Spain and Italy, where only through the support of other nations in the bloc were the resources and mystifications found to palliate the workers' struggle.

* Over Poland in 1980-81, for the first time, the bourgeoisie has had to organize across the blocs to deal with the proleta­riat. In this we can identify the beginn­ings of the process where the bourgeoisie will have to set aside its imperialist rivalries in order to deal with the proletariat, a phenomenon not seen since 1918.

Thus we are in a period where the bourgeoisie is beginning to organize on a world scale to confront the proletariat, using mechanisms created for the most part in response to other necessities.

15. As the proletariat enters a period of decisive class confrontation, it becomes imperative to measure the strength and resources of the class enemy. To under­estimate these would be to disarm the proletariat which requires clarity of consciousness and not illusions if it is to meet its historic challenge.

As this text has attempted to show, the state apparatus of the bourgeoisie is strengthening all over the world to confront the proletariat. We can expect this process to continue -- for the state to become more sophisticated, and for the consciousness of the bourgeoisie to become more alert and to become an even more active factor in the situation. However, this does not mean that the proletariat's enemy is becoming ever-stronger. On the contrary, the strengthening of the state is taking place on foundations which are crumbling. The contradictions of the bourgeois order are causing society to come apart at the seams. However much the state is strengthened it will not be able to redress the decay of the system which has been brought about by historic factors. The state may be strong, but it is a brittle strength.

Because the social system is falling apart the proletariat will be able to confront the state at the social level, attacking its foundations by widening the breach caused by the social contradictions. The success of the proletariat's drive to further open the breach will hinge on its confrontation with the bourgeois state's first line of defense -- the trade unions.

Marlowe

[1] See ‘Crisis in the Revolutionary Milieu', IR 28.

[2] The Bulletin, Ingram, 580 George St, Aberdeen, UK.

Revolution Sociale, BP 30316, 74767 Paris, Cedex 16, France.

Guerre de Classe, c/o Paralleles, 47 Rue de St. Honore, 75001, Paris, France.

[3] The episodic scandals which come to the surface, like noxious marsh gas, are a good illustration of the repulsive state of decomposition reached by this machiavellain class, the bourgeoisie. The Lockheed affair which showed the real corruption of international commerce; the case of the Loge P2 in Italy which revealed the occult operation of the bourgeoisie within the state, miles away from its ‘democratic' principles, the De Broglie affair where a former influential minister appeared at the center of a whole network of counterfeit money, arms dealing and international financial fraud; the Matesa affair in Spain..... the list is endless, showing the complete lack of scruples of this class gangster. The international political scene of the bourgeoisie is rich in political assassinations (Sadat and Gemayel being recent examples) in plots, in coup d'états fomented with the aid of the secret services of one or the other of the dominant factions of the world bourgeoisie.  

The propaganda barrage about the killings tin the Palestinian camps of' Sabra and Chatila in West Beirut -- both the propaganda and the killings being the work of the western bourgeoisie -- is yet another reminder that the survival of the laws of capitalism is leading the world into barbarism. This deluge of' blood and iron (which descended on men, women and children for three days), highlighted for reasons of propaganda, is one more massacre in the death-throes of a system which daily piles up its victims through industrial accidents and ‘natural' disasters, through repression and war.

Since the beginning of this century the Middle East has been a battle-field for the major powers, a favorite war-zone for capitalism. Since the Second World War it has been fought over by the two great imperialist blocs of' America and Russia. Today the western bloc is pushing its rival out of the Middle East and strengthening its grip on the region. Its aim is to turn the region into a military bastion against the Russian bloc. The ‘Pax Americana' is a culmin­ating point in the strategy of eliminating any significant Russian presence and consolidating the position of the USA -- partly in order to compensate for and counteract the destabilization of' Iran, and respond to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. The Israeli invasion of the Lebanon in the summer of 1982, and the installation of American, French and Italian troops, is all part of this strategy. It's the local populations who pay the price of this bloody game.

Why has the western bourgeoisie made so much noise about the massacre in the Palestinian camps

In Lebanon itself', this kind of thing has often happened, and on both sides. Other, similar massacres in the world haven't been ‘favored' in the same way. The propaganda about this one has a dual aspect: on the one hand, it clearly demonstrates the impossibility of appealing to the other bloc for help and this sanctifies the victory of the west. On the other hand, it is a continuation of the bourgeoisie's ideological campaigns around themes which inculcate a feel­ing of' powerlessness and terror (such as pacif­ism, anti-terrorism, agitation about the danger of war) and which present military interventions as the only way of ensuring peace. The Falklands War was stage-managed principally with the aim of testing out the ideological impact of a military expedition in a big capitalist country[1]. With the sending of troops to Lebanon, bourgeois propaganda is pursuing the same goal by using an event with very different roots -- the confrontation between imperialist blocs.

In the face of an open crisis which offers a more and more catastrophic perspective, the bourgeoisie has no choice but to push towards its ‘solution' of generalized imperialist war. But the road to war is barred by the working class, which hasn't suffered a decisive defeat. Despite the relative quiescence of struggles, especially after the 1980-81 movements in Poland, the working class does not adhere en masse to any of the bourgeoisie's ideals. This is why the ruling class has to mount all its ideolog­ical campaigns -- to occupy the whole social terrain, to put a stop to the resurgence of struggle which took place in the advanced coun­tries in the late 70s, to prevent it from leading into a massive, international struggle of the working class, the only force which can offer an alternative to the barbarism of the capitalist system.

The barbarism of capital

The whole history of humanity is pitted with massacres, wars and genocides. Capitalism, the last society of exploitation of man by man, has in the last sixty years, since the defeat of the revolutionary wave of 1917-23 and the ensuing triumph of the counter-revolution, taken such barbarities to their extreme limit, to the point where it threatens the actual destruction of humanity in a third world war.

The wars of the 20th century have claimed many more victims than previous wars, from Antiquity to the Hundred Years War, from the feudal to the Napoleonic Wars. 20 million dead in 1914-18. 50 million in 1939-45. Tens of millions since then. And the ruling class now possesses weapons that could wipe out the planet several times over.

Millions have also fallen victim to the counter­revolutionary repression that has descended on the working class: in Germany in 1918-23 and under the Nazis; in Russia after the failure of the 1917 revolution and the advent of Stalinism; in China in 1927; in Spain in the ‘civil war' of 1936-39, etc. The number of victims is so huge that all the massacres from the Spartacus slave revolt to the repression of the Communards in 1871, only represent a small proportion of the bloodbaths that humanity has been through.

Capitalism, while taking humanity through a gigantic leap forward, has also developed exploitation to an unprecedented degree. It arose by throwing whole populations into misery, by dispossessing them of their former means of subsistence and turning them into proletarians who owned nothing but their labor power. In the ascendant period of capitalism, this situation was the heavy price paid for a real development of the productive forces. In the period of decadence, it is the consequence of the fact that capitalism can no longer develop towards the satisfaction of human needs. On the contrary, it can only survive through destruction.

The killings done by capitalism are only the tip of the iceberg. The submerged part is made up of the daily barbarity and absurdity of exploitation and oppression. When the bourgeoisie makes a campaign about a massacre, it does so in order to create a screen or an alibi[2] for other massacres, to justify a system which lives through an infernal cycle of crisis-war-reconstruction-crisis. This cycle has already mani­fested itself twice this century and will end up with the total destruction of humanity if the proletariat doesn't demolish world capital­ism once and for all.

The list is long of the high deeds of capitalist terror. When the bourgeoisie highlights a particular episode in this gloomy history, it's because it wants us to see the trees and miss the forest.

In Lebanon, the bourgeoisie is trying to kill two birds with one stone: to complete a ‘clean­up' operation through sowing terror, and to feign indignation for propaganda reasons. After several months of intensive bombardment, of imperialist pillage, the lamentations about the Lebanon are pure hypocrisy. The whole world bourgeoisie, east and west, but particularly the rulers of the ‘democratic countries' have blood on their hands.

All the capitalist states -- and all the states in the world today (including ‘potential' states like the PLO) are capitalist with all their parties and unions, the guarantors of bourgeois order and the defenders of the fatherland -- are responsible for these massacres. Reagan, Castro, Thatcher, Mitterand and Brezhnev -- all have shed their tears over a butchery carried out in a country where around eleven occupying armies are present. The theme of ‘there was nothing anyone could do' has been used to preach passivity and to introduce the idea that the ‘only thing to do' is to send back the armies of the USA, France and Italy -- for reasons of ‘safety'. And this, in effect, was the goal of the operation.

Imperialist conflicts and ideological campaigns

Because of its geographic situation as a passage-way between Europe, Africa and Asia, and because of its oil reserves, the Middle East has always figured at the heart of the war strategies of the 20th century. It has been a vital 'theatre of operation', to use the terms of the bourgeois strategists. World capitalism fashioned the Middle East into a constellation of states through international treaties and the armies of the main capitalist powers.

After being dominated by the Turks at the begin­ning of the century, by Anglo-French imperialism between the two world wars, the Middle East was placed under Anglo-American domination by the Tehran Conference and the Yalta agreements at the end of World War II. Today, after being disputed by the Russian bloc for over 20 years, the region is on the way to being completely under the hegemony of the western bloc.

Over the last ten years, we have seen a system­atic reversal of the positions Russia painfully acquired during the 1950s. First Egypt went back to the American camp after the Israel-Egypt war of 1973. From 1974 onwards, America's retreat from Vietnam, apart from being the result of a deal with China, also marked the accentuation of an American military and diplomatic offensive in the Middle East. This was Kissinger's ‘small steps' strategy, which opened up talks with everyone in the region; one of the results of this was the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt. Once the Egyptian front was neutralized, under American control, and Israel began to withdraw from the Sinai, the offensive was now directed towards the north (Syria, Iraq, Lebanon). This involved

-- disciplining Iraq

-- immobilizing Syria through manipulations on the internal level, particularly through the ‘Muslim Brotherhood', through military intimid­ation[3], and through considerable financial aid from Saudi Arabia

-- neutralizing any pro-Russian influences inside the PLO, by rallying it to western plans and dispersing the military apparatus to various countries.

This last development has been going on for several years: Arafat's speech at the UN in 1976 officially marked the beginning of the PLO's passage towards control by western diplomacy, a movement which has since gone much further. On the ground, Israel was the executor of this ‘clean-up'.

Today, the military phase of the operation is moving into a more ‘diplomatic' phase. This threatens to deprive Israel of its role as a privileged ally, as a unique military strong­hold, and it's not happening without friction. It's even possible that Israel has somewhat overshot the precise objectives fixed for it by the Reagan administration. Whatever the case, this in no way relieves America of responsibility for the massacres. On the contrary: it would only show the perfidy of the bourgeoisie, which is quite capable of liquidating the executors of its base deeds once the job is done, of using them as a scapegoat for its own crimes. The methods the bourgeoisie uses to defend its interests are the methods of gangsters.

In any case, the Israeli bourgeoisie will have to give way. It owes all its economic and military strength to its powerful allies. Like all states in the region, Israel is a pawn in the imperialist war, and it's population, like all those in the region, is a victim exploited, militarized and dragooned for interests that are not its own.

Feigning disapproval and indignation towards the state of Israel fulfills several objectives for American imperialism:

-- carrying through its strategic plan by relieving Israel of military and strategic privileges

-- moving from the ‘clean-up' phase of its operation to the diplomatic phase, which will push the imperialist front towards Iran and Afghanistan

-- trying to cover up its responsibilities in the massacres so that the mystifications of defending the ‘Palestinian cause' won't lose all credibility in the eyes of the Middle East populations as the PLO changes its shirt.

The ‘Palestinian cause' was the ideological justification for lining up behind the pro-Russian camp, promising a ‘return home' to the millions of refugees who for 40 years have served as a source of cannon-fodder and political maneuverings -- just as the ‘holocaust of the Jew' was the ‘grand alibi' for the anti-fascist war, then for the mobilizations in the Middle East.

The ‘civil war' in the Lebanon has never had the character of the oppressed against their oppress­ors, or of a war of liberation against imp­erialism, any more than other wars this century. Contrary to the proclamations of the left of capital and of the Bordigists, the workers have no camp to support in the Middle East war. The population there has been mobilized by various bourgeois militias armed by all the arms-dealers on the planet.

More than in Iran where workers' struggles have arisen, in Israel where there have been move­ments against price rises and wage freezes, or Egypt where the workers have on several occasions come out against hunger; Lebanon, where the proletariat is very weak, is a concentrated expression of the absurdity of imp­erialist war. In this sense, if these events represent a victory for the western bloc against the eastern bloc, a strengthening of the former thanks to a greater degree of coll­aboration within it, they also represent a victory for the bourgeoisie against the proletariat, which has nowhere reacted to them.

The key to the situation is in the advanced countries

The situation doesn't depend on what happens on a local level, but on what goes on in the capitalist metropoles. The balance of forces can only be established in favor of the prol­etariat at a world level. If the proletariat, where it is strongest and most concentrated, remains paralyzed and submits to the attacks of the bourgeoisie without reacting, then the way will be opened for the preparations for capitalist war to be pushed on to a higher level.

After more than ten years of open crisis, what has prevented war from generalizing is the revival of class struggle since the late sixties, in the advanced countries and the rest of the world. After a period of reflux, there was a new surge of the class struggle in the late seventies (USA, Germany, France, Britain). This culminated in Poland where the world working class launched the mass strike, posed the question of internationalizing its struggle[4], and highlighted the decisive importance of the development of the class struggle in the industrialized countries, especially Western Europe[5].

The bourgeoisie has already felt that the working class is an obstacle to the perpetuation of its system. It unified itself on a world level to face up to the movement in Poland. Its propaganda today is much more aimed at deafening the proletariat than at finding alibis (which it's more or less run out of) for a mobilization for war against the Russian bloc -- an imperialist bloc that is historically weaker and is weakened still further by the economic crisis and the combativity of the proletariat.

"The strengthening of the blocs, which is a prerequisite for war against the rival bloc, is now a direct and immediate preparation to confront the proletariat wherever it challenges the rule of. capital."[6]

With the events in the Lebanon, a wave of propaganda has been unleashed to inculcate feelings of terror and fatalism, and to reinforce the lie of a ‘democratic', ‘humane', ‘peace-keeping' capitalism. The aim, for imper­ialism, is to profit from one of its military victories by using it against the proletariat. The trick consists of focusing attention on a search for the ‘guilty' ones, when the only real criminal is capital and all its agents.

It's up to the world proletariat to respond to the offensive of the bourgeoisie by embark­ing on an international struggle. Only the working class can put an end to all forms of barbarism -- by putting an end to capitalism.

MG

[1] See IR 30 ‘The Falklands War'

[2] See the PCI pamphlet Auschwitz or the Grand Alibi, on the justification for anti-fascism.

[3] During the aerial combats, Syria lost 86 planes, and Israel none.

[4] See IR 23-29 on the lessons on the struggle of Poland.

[5] See, in this issue, ‘The Proletariat of Western Europe at the Heart of the Class Struggle'.

[6] ‘Report on the Crisis and Inter-Imperialist Conflicts' to the 4th Congress of the ICC, IR 26.

(Critique of the Theory of the ‘Weakest Link')

1. From the beginning, the workers' move­ment has insisted on the world-wide character of the communist revolution. Internationalism has always been a touchstone in the struggles of the working class and the program of its political organizations. Any deviation from this essential principle has always been syn­onymous with a break with the proletarian camp and a passing over to the bourgeois camp. However, while for over a century it has been clear to revolutionaries that the movement of the communist revolution is bound up with the process towards the world-wide generalization of workers' struggles, the characteristics of this process haven't been clearly understood in all phases of the history of the workers' movement. There have actually been regressions on this question: thus for over 60 years, the workers' movement has been tied down with two ideas:

• that world imperialist war creates the most favorable conditions for a revolutionary outbreak
• that it's in the countries where the bourgeoisie is weakest (the "weakest link in the capitalist chain") where such a movement will first arise, then extending to the most developed countries.

These two ideas do not belong to the classic heritage of marxism left us by Marx and Engels. They appeared during the course of the First World War and were part of the errors sanct­ified by the Communist International, trans­formed into a dogma by the defeat of the world revolution.

However, contrary to other false positions of the CI, which were energetically fought against by the communist left, these two ideas for a long time enjoyed the favor of authentic revolutionary currents[1], and today remain the alpha and omega of the perspective defended by the Bordigist groups. This is largely due to the fact that these errors -- as has often happened in the workers' movement -- derived from an intransigent defense of authentic class positions.

Thus:

• the first error came out of the defense of the correct slogan ‘turn the imperialist war into a civil war', adopted by the Stuttgart Congress of 1907 and taken up during the First World War by Lenin and the Bolsheviks against the pacifist currents who called for ‘arbitration' to put an end to the conflict, and against the ‘jusqu' au boutistes' who held that peace was only possible through the victory of their own country;
• the second error came out of the struggle waged by the revolutionaries, and not­ably the Bolsheviks, against the reformist and bourgeois currents (Mensheviks, Kautskyites, etc) who denied that there was any possibility of a proletarian revolution in Russia and who ass­igned the proletariat there the task of simply supporting bourgeois democracy.

The triumph of the proletarian revolution in Russia demonstrated the validity of the princi­pal positions defended by the Bolsheviks, notab­ly that the world war, a characteristic of the 20th century, showed that the capitalist system as a whole had entered its phase of hist­oric decline, posing the necessity for the socialist revolution as the only alternative.

On the other hand the international isolation of this first proletarian attempt tended to hide the partial character of these positions and the erroneous nature of some of the arguments used in their defense. The victory of the world counter-revolution finally led to these weaknesses being used to justify the bourgeois politics of the so-called ‘workers' parties. The denunciation of these bourgeois politics cannot therefore be limited to a simple reaff­irmation of the true positions of Lenin and the CI, as the Bordigists propose. It requires a critique of the errors of the past, a reject­ion of all formulations which are vulnerable to being taken up by the bourgeoisie.

2. The ICC has for some time now been engaged in a critique of the thesis which holds that the best conditions for the revolution, and for the generalization of the struggles which lead up to it, are provided by imperialist war[2]. On the other hand, while we have implicitly rejected it in our analyses, the theory of the ‘weakest link' has not yet been explicitly and specifically criticized. This is what we propose to do in the present text, since.

• the two theses are closely linked, both with regard to the historic conditions which gave rise to them, and to the view of the capitalist world and of the revolution which underlies them: any critique of one, if it is to be complete, must be a critique of the other;
• even more than the thesis of war as the condition for the revolution, the thesis of the weakest link opens the door to dangerous and even bourgeois analyses. It is based on a version of the theory of the ‘unequal development of capitalism', which contains the seeds both of the idea of ‘socialism in one country'[3] and of the third-worldism of the Maoists and Trotskyists, and which, even inside the proletarian camp, have led the Bordigists and someone like Mattick to say that the bourgeois democratic revolution is on the agenda in certain ‘geo­graphic areas', and to hail the ‘progressive' nature of Che Guevara or Ho Chi Minh[4]
• even groups who have unambiguously rejected all third-worldist temptations have had some difficulty in dispensing with the conception of the ‘weakest link' in their analysis of the situation in Poland after the summer of 1980, and have therefore shown tenden­cies to overestimate the level of the struggle (this was notably the case with the Communist Workers Organization with its slogan ‘Revolution Now'), and also to overestimate the importance of the defeat for the world proletariat const­ituted by the imposition of military law on 13 December 1981.

Although the ICC, as a fundamental part of its perspective, has on several occasions strongly reaffirmed the necessity for the world-wide generalization of the class struggle, it has not up to now made explicit the characteristics of this generalization. In particular, it has not up to now expressly replied to two questions:

• will this generalization take the form of a convergence of simultaneous movements touching all countries in the world?
• if this generalization takes the form of an earthquake with shockwaves irradiating towards all countries, where will the epicenter of the earthquake be? Can it be in any zone of capitalism, and more particularly can it be outside its main industrial concentrations, in the so-called ‘weak links'?

Behind this question of the ‘weakest link', the whole vision of the historic perspective of the revolution is at stake. Thus it is necessary to take another look at the general conditions for the proletarian revolution.

3. Following on from the classic view of marxism, as contained for example in the Communist Manifesto, the conditions for the comm­unist revolution, in a schematic way, are as follows:

• a sufficient development of the produc­tive forces, to the point where the relations of production which had formerly allowed them to expand have become fetters further growth, and where the material conditions exist for a process of overturning these relations of production (the material necessity and possibility of the revolution);
• the development of a revolutionary class charged with the task of "carrying out the sentence passed by history", "gravedigger" of the old society that is now moribund.

These conditions, which are valid for all the revolutions in history (notably the bourgeois revolution), take a particular form in the case of the proletarian revolution:

• the material premises for the revolu­tion are given (or not yet given) on a world level, and not on the level of a country or region of the world: the development of the productive forces, the historic crisis of the capitalist relations of production;
• this crisis of the relations of produc­tion takes the form of a crisis of overproduc­tion, of the saturation of solvable markets(and not of human needs obviously);
• for the first time in history, the rev­olutionary class is a class which is exploited in the old society; having no economic power of its own, this class, much more than any other historic class, draws its force from its num­bers, its concentration at the point of produc­tion, its education and its consciousness.

4. Since the First World War, the material conditions for the communist revolution have indeed existed on a world scale. On this point Lenin was quite right, deriving the proletarian nature of the revolution in Russia not from the specific conditions in that country (as the Mensheviks did, and later on, as the various councilist groups did and still do), but from the world situation. The fact that it's the whole of capitalism that has entered its dec­adent phase does not however mean that there are not enormous differences between various regions of the world at the level of the devel­opment of the productive forces, and of that principle productive force, the proletariat. Far from it.

The law of the unequal development of capitalism, on which Lenin and his epigones base their theory of the weakest link, was expressed in the asc­endant period of capitalism through a power­ful push by the backward countries towards cat­ching up with and even overtaking the most dev­eloped ones. But this tendency tends to reverse itself as the system as a whole reaches its objective historic limits and finds itself in­capable of extending the world market in relat­ion to the necessities imposed by the development of the productive forces. Having reached its historic limits, the system in decline no long­er offers any possibility of an equalization of development: on the contrary it entails the stagnation of all development through waste, unproductive labor and destruction. The only ‘catching up' that now takes place is the one that leads the most advanced countries towards the situation existing in the backward countries -- economic convulsions, poverty, state capital­ist measures. In the 19th century, it was the most advanced country, Britain, which showed the way forward for the rest: today it is the third world countries which, in a way, indicate the future in store for the advanced ones.

However, even in these conditions, there cannot be a real ‘equalization' of the situation of the different countries in the world. While it does not spare any country, the world crisis exerts its most devastating effects not on the most powerful, developed countries, but on the countries which arrived too late in the world economic arena and whose path towards develop­ment has been definitely barred by the older powers[5].

Thus the law of uneven development, which, at one time, allowed for a certain equalization of economic situations, now appears as a factor which aggravates inequalities between countries. While the solution to the contradictions of this society -- the world proletarian revolution -- is the same for all countries, it remains the case that the bourgeoisie as a whole enters its period of historic crisis with considerable differences between the various geo-economic zones.

It's the same for the proletariat, which con­fronts its historic tasks in a unitary fashion, while at the same time facing considerable differences from one country to the next. This second point derives from the first one, to the extent that the characteristics of the proletariat in one country, and notably those which determine its strength (number, concen­tration, education, experience) are closely dependent on the development of capitalism in that country.

5. Only by taking into account these differences bequeathed to us by capitalism, by integrating them into the general perspective of the revol­ution, can we establish the latter on a solid basis. We must avoid drawing false conclusions from correct premises, and above all avoid ex­pecting the revolution to begin in places where it cannot, as in the theory of the weakest link developed by the ‘Leninists'.

The argument of the latter is based on trans­posing an image from physics -- the chain subjected to tension breaks at its weakest point -- applying it to the social sphere. They thus totally ignore the difference between the in­organic world, and the living, organic world, above all the human world, which is a social sphere.

A social revolution is not simply the breaking of a chain, the breakdown of the old society. It is at the same time an action for the con­struction of a new society. It is not a mech­anical event but a social fact indissolubly linked to the antagonism of human interests, to the aspirations and struggle of social classes.

Imprisoned by a mechanistic vision, the theory of the weakest link looks for the geographical points where the social body is weakest, and bases its perspective on these points. This is the root of its theoretical error.

Marxism -- that of Marx and Engels -- never saw history in this way. For them, social revolut­ions did not take place where the old ruling class was weakest and its structures the least developed, but, on the contrary, where its structure had reached the highest point compatible with the productive forces, and where the class bearing the new relations of product­ion destined to replace the old ones was strong­est. Whereas Lenin banked on the points where the bourgeoisie was weakest, Marx and Engels looked for and based their perspective on the points where the proletariat was strongest, most concentrated and best placed to carry out the social transformation. Because, while the crisis hits the underdeveloped countries most brutally precisely as a result of their econ­omic weakness and their lack of a margin for maneuver, we must not forget that the source of the crisis lies in overproduction and thus in the main centers of capitalist development. This is another reason why the conditions for a re­sponse to this crisis and for going beyond it reside fundamentally in the main centers.

6. The unconditional defenders of the theory of the weakest link will reply that the October 1917 revolution confirms the validity of their conceptions, since we know from Marx that "man demonstrates the validity of his thought in practice". The question is how you read and interpret this "practice", how you distinguish the exception from the rule. And, from this point of view, we should not make the 1917 rev­olution any more than it meant. Just as it does not prove that the best conditions for the proletarian revolution are given by war, so it also does not prove the validity of the theory of the weakest link, for the following reasons:

a) despite its overall economic backward­ness, Russia in 1917 was the fifth industrial power in the world, with immense concentrations of workers in several towns, notably Petrograd. At that time, Putilov, with its 40,000 workers, was the biggest factory in the world;

b) the 1917 revolution took place in the middle of a world war, which limited the poss­ibility of the bourgeoisie of other countries coming to the aid of the Russian bourgeoisie;

c) the country concerned was the most extensive in the world, representing one sixth of the surface of the planet. This further obstructed the response of the world bourgeoisie, as could be seen during the civil war;

d) it was the first time the bourgeoisie had been confronted by a proletarian revolut­ion, and was surprised by it. Thus:

• in Russia itself, the bourgeoisie did not understand in time the need to withdraw from the imperialist war;
• on an international scale, the bourge­oisie took a major risk by continuing the war for another year.

On this last point, we must note that the bour­geoisie quickly drew the lessons of October 1917. As soon as the revolution began in Ger­many in November 1918, it stopped the war and collaborated closely to crush the working class (liberation of German prisoners by the countries of the Entente, derogation of the armist­ice and peace agreements which enabled the German army to retain a contingent of 5000 machine gunners).

The bourgeoisie's growing awareness about the proletarian danger was further confirmed before[6] and during[7] the Second World War. Thus, clear-sighted revolutionaries were not surprised to see the formidable collaboration between the various sectors of the world bourgeoisie in the face of the struggles in Poland in 1980-81.

If only because of this last point -- the bour­geoisie today won't be surprised as it was in the past -- it would be quite pointless to wait for a replay of the 1917 revolution.

As long as the important movements of the class only hit the countries on the peripheries of capitalism (as was the case with Poland) and even if the local bourgeoisie is completely outflanked, the Holy Alliance of all the bourgeois­ies of the world, led by the most powerful ones, will be able to set up an economic, political, ideological and even military cordon sanitaire around the sectors of the proletariat involved. It's not until the proletarian struggle hits the economic heart of capital,

• when it's no longer possible to set up an economic cordon sanitaire, since it will be the richest economies that will be effected;
• when the setting up of a political cor­don sanitaire will have no more effect because it will be the most developed proletariat con­fronting the most powerful bourgeoisie; only then will the struggle give the signal for the world revolutionary conflagration.

Thus it is not when the proletariat attacks a ‘weak link' of world capital that the latter is in danger of being overthrown. It's only when the class attacks the strongest links that the revolutionary process can get underway.

As we said before, the image of the chain to de­pict the reality of the capitalist world is a false one. A better image would be of a net­work, or rather of an organic tissue, a living body. Any wound that does not reach the vital functions heals up (and we can trust capital to secrete the antibodies it needs to eliminate the risk of infection). Only by attacking its heart and head will the proletariat be able to defeat the capitalist beast.

7. For centuries, history has placed the heart and head of the capitalist world in Western Europe. The world revolution will take its first steps where capitalism took its first steps. It's here that the conditions for the revolut­ion, enumerated above, can be found in the most developed form. The most developed productive forces, the most important working class concentrations, the most cultivated proletariat (because of the technological needs of modern production) are centered in three major zones of the world:

• Europe
• North America
• and Japan.

But these three zones are not equal in their revolutionary potential.

To begin with, central and eastern Europe are attached to the most backward imperialist bloc: the important working class concentrations that exist there (in Russia there are more industrial workers than in any other country) are working with a backward industrial potential and are faced with economic conditions (above all, scar­city) which are not the most favorable to a movement whose aim is to create a socialist society. Moreover, these countries still suffer most heavily from the weight of the counter­revolution in the form of a totalitarian regime which is certainly rigid and thus fragile, but in which democratic, unionist, trade unionist and even religious mystifications are much hard­er to overcome by the proletariat. These coun­tries, as has been the case up till now, will probably see more violent explosions, and each time that this proves necessary, these outbreaks will be accompanied by the appearance of forces for derailing the movement like Solidarity. In general they will not be the theatre for the dev­elopment of the most advanced class conscious­ness.

Secondly, areas like Japan and North America, while they contain most of the conditions necessary for the revolution, are not the most favorable for the unleashing of the revolutionary process, owing to the lack of experience and ideological backwardness of the proletariat.

This is particularly clear in the case of Japan, but it also applies to North America, where the workers' movement developed as an app­endage to the workers' movement in Europe and where, through specific elements such as the ‘frontier', and then through the highest work­ing class living standards in the world, the bourgeoisie has had a much firmer ideological grip over the workers than in Europe. One of the expressions of this phenomenon is the absence in North America of big bourgeois parties with a ‘working class' coloring. Not that these parties are expressions of proletarian conscious­ness, as the Trotskyists claim, but simply because the weaker level of experience, politicization and consciousness of the workers, their stronger adherence to the classic values of cap­italism, enables the bourgeoisie to do without more elaborate forms of mystification and control.

It is thus only in western Europe, where the proletariat has the longest experience of struggle, where it has already been confronted for decades with all the ‘working class' mystifications of the most elaborate kind, can there be a full development of the political consciousness which is indispensable in its struggle for revolution.

This is in no way a ‘Euro-centrist' view. It is the bourgeois world itself which began in Europe, which developed the oldest proletariat with the greatest amount of experience. It is the bourgeois world itself which has concentrat­ed in such a small part of the globe so many advanced nations, which greatly facilitates the growth of a practical internationalism, the joining up of proletarian struggles in the different countries. (It's no accident that the British proletariat was at the centre of the foundation of the 1st International, or that the German proletariat was so crucial to the foundation of the IInd International). Finally, it is bourgeois history itself which has placed the frontier between the two great imperialist blocs of the late 20th century in Europe (and more specifically in Germany, the ‘classic' country of the workers' movement).

This does not mean that the class struggle or the activity of revolutionaries has no sense in the other parts of the world. The working class is one class. The class strug­gle exists everywhere that labor and capital face each other. The lessons of the different manifestations of this struggle are valid for the whole class no matter where they are drawn from: in particular, the experience of the struggle in the peripheral countries will influ­ence the struggle in the central ones. The revolution will be worldwide and will involve all countries. The revolutionary currents of the class are precious wherever the proletariat takes on the bourgeoisie, ie, all over the world.

Neither does it mean that the proletariat will have won the war once it's overthrown the capitalist state in the main countries of Western Europe: the last great act of the revolution, the one that will probably be decisive, will be played out in the two huge imperialist monsters: the USSR and above all the USA.

What it does mean, basically, is:

• that the world-wide generalization of struggles won't take the form of a convergence of a series of simultaneous struggles in var­ious countries, all on the same level and all equally important, but will develop out of battles in the vital centers of society;
• that the epicenter of the coming revol­utionary earthquake will be in the industrial heart of western Europe, where the best condit­ions exist for the development of revolutionary consciousness and a revolutionary struggle. The proletariat of this zone will be in the vanguard of the world proletariat.

It also means that it's only when the proletariat of these countries detaches itself from the most sophisticated traps laid by the bourgeoisie, particularly the trap of the left in opposition that the chimes will ring for the world-wide generalization of proletarian struggles, for the revolutionary confrontation.

The road leading to this is long and difficult. The mass strike developed in Poland but then fell into the trade unionist impasse. It's when this impasse is overcome that the mass strike, and with it, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, the rev­olution, can come into their own, in western Europe as in the rest of the world.

The road is long, but there is no other road.

FM

[1] In May 1952, our direct ‘ancestor', Internationalisme, could still write: "The process that leads to the development of revolutionary consciousness in proletariat is directly linked to the return of the objective conditions which will enable this consciousness to arise. These conditions can be summarized in one general point: the proletariat is ejected from society, capitalism is no longer able to ensure the material conditions of its existence. This condition is provided by the culminating point of the crisis. And the culminating point of the crisis, in the era of state capitalism, is to be found in the war."

[2] See the texts in International Review n°26.

[3] The preface to the selected works of Lenin in French is enlightening: "In the articles, "The Slogans of the United States of Europe', and ‘The Military Program of the Proletarian Revolution' which are based on the law of the uneven development of capitalism, discovered by him, Lenin drew the brilliant conclusion that the victory of socialism was in the beginning possible in a few capitalist countries, or even just one." "Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. It therefore follows that the victory of socialism is at first possible in a small number of capitalist countries, or even in one capitalist country on its own." (p. 651, French Edition). "This was the greatest discovery of our era. It became the guiding principle for the whole activity of the Communist Party in its struggle for the victory of the socialist revolution and the construction of socialism in our country. Lenin's theory about the possibility of the victory of socialism in one country gave the proletariat a clear perspective for its struggle, giving free rein to the energy and initiative of the workers of each country to march against their national bourgeoisie, inspiring the party and the working class with a firm confidence in the possibility of victory." (Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1960).

[4] The Bordigists reached the heights of this aberration when they criticized the pusillanimity and lack of combativity of Allende and the democratic Chilean bourgeoisie, and when they sang about the ‘radicalism' of the massacres committed by the Khmer Rouge.

[5] The spectacular development of certain third world countries (Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, Brazil), owing to the very particular geo-economic conditions, should not be the tree that hides the forest. What's more, for most of these countries, the hour of truth has arrived - a collapse even more spectacular than their ascent.

[6] See the report on the historic course [31] to the 3rd Congress of the ICC (International Review n°18)

[7] See the text on the conditions for generalization for the 4th Congress of the ICC (International Review n°26)