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.

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[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.

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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."

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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

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[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.